There Be Cannibals!

Repost from the old site. My understanding of cannibalism is not good. It’s well-known that starving people in just about any society will eat their own dead. Clearly, the Anasazi Indians of Arizona and New Mexico, ancestors of today’s Pueblo Indians, engaged in cannibalism during the 1300’s. I don’t care what the Indians say. Indian tribes are notorious liars when it comes to denying anything that makes them look bad. The cannibals and head-hunters of New Guinea are well-known, and some were said to continue to engage in the practice until the mid-1960’s. Cannibalism was well-known in other parts of the world, especially Polynesia and Fiji. It was legendary in New Guinea and widely practiced in Australia too. The cannibals of the Congo below were not the only ones in Africa, just some of the more notorious. There were also cannibals in the Brazilian Amazon and a few in North America here and there. But Polynesia, especially New Zealand, had some of the worst cannibals of all. A Maori wife of a chief killed in combat would offer herself to be killed and eaten by her enemies, becoming dinner to show her love for her husband. A Fijian husband’s power over his wife was such that he could kill her and eat her at any time for any or no reason at all. In some societies, people were eaten if they were loved. In Australia, people ate the corpses of their relatives and friends in order to pay tribute to their lives. In New Guinea, old folks, having a hard time straggling through life, were hanged from trees or killed in other ways, often by their own kids, in a big party with the whole village gathered around. After they were dead, they were chopped up and eaten. Beats mortgaging your house for Mom’s nursing home, eh? Smoking a fish is a good way of making it more flavorful, and logically it follows that it adds a little zest to roast human. Humans waiting to be eaten were “tenderized” in water or other liquids to make the flesh less beef jerky-like. Tribes from Africa to Polynesia went out on hunting parties, like armies of Jeffrey Dahmers, looking for human prey to kill and cook up. Although women definitely are better looking then men, some cannibals insist that we guys are more delectable. Others prized female flesh most of all and went to great woman-chasing lengths to obtain it. Dying in battle is bad enough if you are to be a meal afterwards, but being wounded and then hauled away to be served on the dinner table must have been a particular horror. Slaves were captured, kept in chains and horribly mistreated for long periods, knowing all the while that one day that would serve as a main course. What is interesting is that so many cannibal societies insist that Roast Human tastes great, even better than many or most domesticated or wild animals. One wonders why we taste so great. Did we evolve to be good eatin’? In many places, White explorers were told, “Of course we eat people! Don’t you?” One New Guinea tribe had a legend about how they became cannibals. One day the men went out hunting. They came back with some wild pigs and whatnot. The women berated them, “Is that all you can give us – that lousy stuff? The humiliated men, their masculinity at risk, figured that the women wanted people to eat, not some dirty animals. So they took off to a neighboring village and came back. They came back with humans to eat, the women danced all around and their manliness was intact. Biting off the nose of a corpse is pretty horrible, and cannibals deny that they do this. They only bite off the noses of those others kill, not those they kill themselves! They do have some class. If boiling a dead man’s heart is too much for you, just get your daughter to do it, and then drink the delicious juice. A rack of rib sounds pretty good, but would you eat it if it came from a seven year old girl? Now, I like pork myself, but “long pig” is said to be more delicate, and it never makes you so full you feel ill. We all like to get together with the family for Thanksgiving, but how about the New Guineans, a woman and her two daughters, who dug up the corpse of one of the daughter’s baby and consumed it? Gives a new meaning to three generations at the table for dinner, eh? The Dobudura in New Guinea liked to keep a fresh supply of meat on hand. So they would capture a man and keep him alive for up to a week, cutting off bits of his flesh any time they felt hungry. They used a plant medicine to keep the food supply from bleeding to death. When he is nearly dead, they would poke a hole in his skull and scoop the brains out with a spoon, brains being a major delicacy and all. One way to ensure a delicious meal is to roast a man while still alive, for the meat tastes better when prepared this way. Deboning a chicken makes for better eating, and humans may be similarly deboned. What to do with the giblets? Well, with human giblets, just give them to the kids, who roast them in the fire and eat them up. With the coming of “evil Western colonialist missionaries” all of this quaint “indigenous” cultural behavior was laid to rest once and for all, or so we thought (but see below). Many cultures became ashamed of their former cannibalism and refused to discuss it. The Aborigines were puzzled at why it had been outlawed. Why were we not allowed to eat our friends anymore, to have a party and say what a great guy he was? None of it made sense. I suppose the Cultural Leftists, in love with all cultures, wicked, sublime and in between, as long as they are not White and Christian or Jewish, want to resurrect all this delectable human-chomping. As the Congo War devolves, we are receiving reports that Congolese militias are once again reverting to old habits of cannibalism. In particular, they are killing the Pygmies (the Bantus have waged a long genocidal campaign against both Bushmen and Pygmies) and cooking them up for chow. Almost all roads in the Congo built by those evil colonialists are now in disrepair – not due to weather or abuse, that is normal. It is that in the Congo now, when a road falls apart, no one ever fixes it. Never. Ever. Hence, roads just pretty much do not exist. The apartheid Whites of Southern Africa, of paternalistic mind, always said that when the White man left Africa, Africans would “go back to the bush”, in every conceivable way. That’s not necessarily the case in all Africa. See an optimistic post about a disaster zone called Nigeria, and note the good economic growth the continent has been experiencing, with the sole exception of Zimbabwe, which is disgustingly tossed out by White racists as an exemplar of all of Africa. Yet in Congo, it appears that this depressing forecast is being borne out. Delicious quotes follow, from Troubled Heart of Africa: A History of the Congo. Check out the title – I suppose the anti-racists assume it must be “racist”, no? Dark continent, heart of darkness, the horror, the horror, and all that? Racists salivating over this post as an exemplar of “nigger innate savagery” be warned: cannibalism was not generalized over all of Africa. It was a cultural phenomenon primarily confined to the Congo, which then grew, strangely, in the 1800’s, to encompass more of the colony via cultural transmission.

For their part, the Malela were delighted by their diet of human flesh, describing it as “saltish in flavour, and requiring little condiment.” Unfortunately for their neighbors, their search for human flesh led to widespread slaughter. Edgerton, 85 But the Basongye, or Zappo Zaps as they were often known, sold slaves to their neighbors knowing that they would be eaten; they also ate their own dead. Soon after the end of the Arab War, they would work for the Free State and spread cannibalistic terror across the Congo. Other societies such as the Baluba, for example, ate the hearts of virtuous or brave people to gain their strength, but they also ate the bodies of criminals and slaves to prevent them from doing evil to their masters or haunting them. Ibid, 86 In some Congolese societies, people ate human flesh only occasionally to mark a particularly significant ritual occasion, but in other societies in the Congo, perhaps even a majority by the late nineteenth century, people ate human flesh whenever they could, saying it was far tastier than other meat and, perhaps surprisingly, that male human flesh tasted better than female. Persons to be eaten often had both of their arms and legs broken and were made to sit up to their necks in a stream for three days, a practice said to make their flesh more tender, before they were killed and cooked. Teeth filed to sharp points were widely thought by Europeans to be the mark of cannibals, but in some societies whose people actually were cannibals, teeth were not filed at all, and in others that did not practice cannibalism, people nevertheless filed their teeth to sharp points. As Sydney L. Hinde noted during the Arab War, the Batetela were such devoted cannibals that children actually killed and ate their parents “at the first sign of their decrepitude,” but they did not file their teeth. Ibid. In 1907, the Bankutu people were seen by a European traveler to hunt people for food as other Congolese hunted animals. They served human flesh in “little rolls like bacon.” As late as 1923, American traveler Hermann Norden reported that cannibalism was commonplace. One Congolese man reprovingly scolded him for not eating some human flesh when he was offered it: “You know the flesh of man tastes better than the flesh of a goat.” A Belgian companion of Norden’s admitted that he had probably been served human flesh and had eaten it unknowingly. In 1925, Hungarian anthropologist Emil Torday reported an encounter with a Muyanzi man who boasted about cooking human brains with a pinch of salt and red peppers, then dipping his bread in it. “Then he would smack his lips and run away like an imp.” Missionary and explorer A.L. Lloyd reported that when a European told a Bangwa tribesperson that eating human flesh was a “degrading habit,” the man answered, “Why degraded? You people eat sheep and cows and fowls, which are all animals of a far lower order, and we eat man, who is great and above all; it is you who are degraded.” Ibid, 86 While in the Congo, Livingstone saw human parts being cooked with bananas, and many other Europeans reported seeing cooked human remains lying around abandoned fires. British captain and medical officer Sydney L. Hinde, who would take part in the Free State’s war with the Arabs in 1892-93, reported an incident in which a Basongo chief asked a Belgian officer’s tent to cut the throat of a little slave girl he owned. He was cooking her when soldiers seized him. British adventurer Herbert E. Ward once asked a group of Congo tribespeople whether they ate human flesh. Their immediate answer was “Yes, don’t you?” Later, Ward witnessed cannibalism on numerous occasions and was often offered human flesh to eat. He recalled an occasion when a young Bangala slave was killed. Soon after, the chief’s son, a boy of sixteen or so, “nonchalantly” said, “That slave boy was very good eating – he was nice and fat.” Ibid, 88 Several European officers in the Force noted with a mixture of horror and approval that because Congolese on both sides of such battles cooked and ate all of the dead and wounded, burial parties were unnecessary and diseases were kept under control. Cannibalism had become so routine that one Force Publique officer admitted he had become quite “bland” about it.” Ibid, 100 At least a thousand Arabs were killed – then smoked and eaten. Ibid, 102 While some Free State officials were exploiting Congolese and others tried to care for them, a constant concern of these Europeans was cannibalism. It was not simply the eating of human flesh that repelled them, but that so many people were murdered expressly so that others might feast upon their bodies. Early in the 1660s, Englishmen Andrew Battell escaped the Portuguese who had enslaved him, to spend sixteen months among the Jaga people near the Congo’s Atlantic coast. He reported that they preferred human flesh to their own cattle. Later, as we have seen, healthy children were stabbed to death to provide a feast for their owners, and men were known to help sick coworkers “die,” then smoke their body parts for later consumption. Six Bangala men on the Stanley, a thirty-ton, stern-wheel steamer, were suspected by the ship’s captain of killing two crewmen who fell ill. They pleaded innocence, but smoked human body parts were found hidden in their lockers. Some men showed no restraint in their appetite for human flesh. When one of Gongo Lutete’s wives was killed in battle, his own men ate her. Enraged, Lutete ordered these men killed the next day and eaten. None of the Europeans were surprised that Africans on both sides of the war with the Arabs routinely cooked and ate not only the dead they found on the battlefield, but the wounded as well.” Ibid, 108

References

Edgerton, Robert B., The Troubled Heart of Africa: A History of the Congo. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002.  Harris, Marvin, Cannibals and Kings: The Origin of Cultures. Glasgow, 1978, p. 69. Hogg, Garry, Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice, quoting The Rev. James Chalmers, Life and Work in New Guinea. RTS, 1895. Lange, Algot, In the Amazon Jungle. Putnam, New York, 1912. MacGregor, Sir William, Foreword to Murray, Papua, or British New Guinea. Faber Unwin, 1912. Maynard, Dr. Felix & Dumas, Alexandre, The Whalers. Hutchinson, 1937. Métraux, Alfred, Easter Island. André Deutsch, 1957. Murray, J. H. P., Lieutenant-Governor and Chief Judicial Officer, “Papua”, Papua, or British New Guinea. Faber Unwin, 1912. Rice, A. P., in The American Antiquarian vol. XXXII, 1910. Seligmann, C. G., “South-eastern New Guinea”, in The Melanesians of British New Guinea. Cambridge University Press, 1910. Simpson, Colin, Adam in Ochre . Angus & Robertson, 1938. St Johnston, Alfred, Traveller, Fiji Islands, Camping Among Cannibals. Macmillan, 1883. Walker, H. W., FRGS, Wanderings among South Sea Savages. Witherby, 1909. Wallace, A. Russel, Travels on the Amazon. Ward Lock, 1853. Williams, F. E., Orikaiva Society. Clarendon Press, 1930.

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.

New Sex Poll

Repost from the old site. A sex poll came out 2 1/2 years ago, but I am only just now hearing about it. Oh, well, it seems like sex is always leaving me standing at the station these days. The articles on the poll deal with teenagers having lots of oral sex, apparently instead of intercourse. The article all act like this is horrible, but I actually think it is good. Despite my feast or famine bachelor life, I actually do love sex, and I am a sexual liberationist. The articles mostly fuss on and on about all of the diseases one can acquire from oral sex. First of all, this is part of an insane national neurosis we have long had in this nation about sex. Europeans have long commented on it. We are Puritans, yet we demand that Americans be having sex continuously. Even if they are not married. Even if they are not 18. Yes, it is true. There’s a $6 billion dollar a year porn industry, and we are in the midst of a Mass Hysteria called Child Molester Hysteria. Although there are reasons to worry about adult sex abuse of children, I really fear that this is part of our neurosis about teenagers, especially teenage girls, having sex. Child Molester Hysteria, the way I understand it, pretty much makes it illegal for teenage girls to get laid. If she does it, the guy’s a molester, no matter what his age is. It is understandable that conservatives, Christians, married men and vaginized males of all types would be behind this Protect Our Teenage Girls! bullshit. What doesn’t add up is that the feminists are behind it too. Yep, feminists, the very women who ought to supporting teenage girls who choose to have sex, who ought to even be urging girls to learn to have an orgasm by age 15 since science shows waiting longer increases the odds she will never get one, are leading the charge of this preposterously chivalrous, putting girls on a pedestal, nonsense. Anyway, on the article. Article says, teenagers not screwing so much, good. Having oral sex instead, bad. Why is it bad? Because, the article worries, you can get VD. What sorts of VD can you get? Well, syphilis, warts (HPV), gonorrhea and herpes. Well, let us look at this notion. As far as cunnilingus goes, it would be quite hard to catch much of anything from doing that. You would be better off to worry about getting hit by a meteor. So go ahead and do it! To your heart’s content! She’ll love ya for it, guys! Now, onto fellatio. It is true that one can get gonorrhea of the throat from doing this, but it’s not a common problem, except maybe in the gay community. Syphilis is quite rare outside the gay community, and you always just very noticeable symptoms. So it’s not much to worry about. About herpes, well, one out of every six adults has it anyway, and it won’t kill you. It comes on strong at first, then it fades to an annoyance, and there are drugs that take out the flareups. So no worries. HPV is much more troubling here since research shows that you can catch it in your throat, and it apparently can lead to throat cancer. I’m at a loss for words about this, but I don’t think it’s the worry of the century. Lesbianism got a lot of writeup in the study. Apparently 14. What’s interesting is that whenever they go out and do these face to face surveys about sex and dope, they come with some very low figures for both gay sex and dope. No one wants to fess up to being a fag or a doper, even if they were only gay for a day or they didn’t inhale. But recently a new study allowed persons to answer questions about sex and dope anonymously via computer in a locked room. They were assured repeatedly that there would be no way to link up their computer answers with their actual selves, since the testers themselves were not grading the tests. As one might expect, scores for sex and drug use for young Canadians were much higher when the answers were submitted via computer privacy than via face to face. The authors considered that maybe people were making stuff up on the tests, but rejected that. Testers had been closely questioned before about the importance of being honest on their answers. If they were inclined to make stuff up, they were asked not to take the test. The numbers for current homosexual behavior among this group of young Canadian males were about 13-1 This was in Southern California in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Other studies have shown some fairly high levels of males experimenting with homosexuality. Kinsey got 3 The same computer surveys above also found remarkably higher drug use among respondents than face to face surveys found, especially of hard drugs like PCP or heroin. One of the major findings of the study was that more and more straight folks are getting into anal sex. 4 Porn has made anal sex very popular, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea. As a sexual liberationist, I really don’t care how people do it. I think people ought to consider that there may be a health downside to this type of sex. I have seen reports on bulletin boards of women aged 30 or so who had lots of anal sex in their 20’s who now have to wear a type of diaper because they have lost some control over their bowels. That’s called anal incontinence. I don’t know how much anal sex you have to have before something terrible like this happens to you, but it’s something people might want to think about before they jump into anal sex too much. There are all sorts of gay rights types and sex educators that say there is no way this can happen to you if you practice anal sex the right way, but I wish they would spell out their theory in clear science so it’s something more than a crap shoot.

Cavewomen and Wormboys

Repost from the old site. A fellow named Zsidozas comments on the Race, Gender and Masculinity/Femininity post. My comments follow:

Zsidozas comments: A personal story – as a White American male I’ve encountered much hostility from White females because I am not an effete and feminized White American male like so many of the others are these days. I am more aggressive, dominant, and masculine than the majority of White males for sure, but I try to temper this by my strong orientation toward reason, rationality, and learning. So yeah, I’ve encountered problems with White women because many view me as an overly aggressive, pushy, and angry asshole/jerk/brute/prick/Viking/Neanderthal, of which I am not at all, but they only view me that way because I am quite a bit more masculine than most White men (who I agree are, on the whole, far too wimpy and resigned for their own good). I am not a bodybuilder or football player or anything like that, so it’s not like I am afflicted by the ‘macho male complex’ that men like that suffer from. So I’ve noticed that many White women think of me as something a bit unnatural or strange and view me with some contempt and suspicion because I am not easily dominated and controlled like the rest of White men. In fact, I’ll argue and bicker with women (of whatever ethnicity) until we are all blue in the face if I believe something strongly as I’m not afraid to back down like so many modern men are — and I usually win those arguments. And when I do win those arguments, believe it or not I’ve had women get violent with me either playfully or for real, like they are trying to get back at me physically for ‘beating them’ mentally and emotionally in an argument when they are just so used to lording over modern men. It seems as if many White women, if they date or marry White men as most do, actually sort-of want or prefer a push-over who they can easily control, manipulate, and dominate in many ways (though they still want the man to bring them home some money, of course). I think this is a rather recent development and a major reason why gender relations are so screwed up in the modern Western White world, particularly in America. A quick story: I was at a party with my girlfriend the other night that was mostly populated by a bunch of drunken lesbians and overly masculine (but straight) White females, along with their feminized male lackeys. And one of them, in a drunken and pilled-up stupor actually said to me and me girlfriend as we were talking to her [paraphrasing]: “I love to emasculate men. I just like it. It’s fun. I do it all the time at work.” And she said it sort-of at me and my girlfriend, like almost a veiled insult toward me or something. I continued to laugh with her and joked around and such, but still I think it was like a veiled insult toward me because she recognized in me a man who refused to be emasculated and feminized like so many modern men. So I laughed and joked (but was secretly disgusted toward her that she would actually take pleasure in mentally emasculating men and fucking with their egos). Lame story, but I think it illustrates a decent point about the attitude of most modern White women. Also, you didn’t mention Semitic peoples here like Jews and Arabs. But just a thought: Jewish males are certainly very effeminate (as effeminate as many Asian men, often more), and Jewish females very masculine (maybe even as masculine as Black women). Ditto with Arabs — and maybe this is why Arab men are so severe toward their women, like they want to keep them in check or something? Most Jewish and Arab females have, I’ve noticed, many masculine physical traits like deep/husky voices and hairy bodies, while many Jewish/Arab men have many feminine traits like higher pitched voices and moodiness/high emotionality. Many men in Arab countries also engage in some behaviors that are considered effeminate or even gayish here in The West like holding hands as they walk together and kissing each other a lot, but they don’t think anything of it over there. However, there is still something that is just intrinsically aggressive about both Jews and Arabs that I can’t pin down yet, though I’m looking for reasons — maybe it’s their rather fanatical ethnocentrism? So, if possible, I’d like your thoughts on Semitics (however brief) as well if you don’t mind.

Ok, first of all, I do not understand why women would hate an overly aggressive or masculine man, even in the feminized US. But I won’t deny you the reality of your experiences. Around here, most of the White guys are pretty machoed out. Now if you go over to San Francisco, it is a totally different story. The Northern California male is said to be so feminized that many people think that they are gay. Conversely, the women are often said to be quite masculinized. I never heard this too much when I was in Southern California. I do not know why this is, but for instance, my brother knows this older guy was paints his toenails like a woman. I heard that and freaked out. I said, “Is he gay?!” Because I think it sucks for a guy to paint his toenails. My brother answered, “No, he is just a Northern California male.” There are some others like that, including a guy well-known to both of us. I will note: “Sometime he acts like a total fag! What the Hell is the matter with him anyway?!” And then I will imitate his ridiculously faggy behavior. My brother responds that this guy is a Northern California male. Now this guy hooked up with and later lived with a woman for a while who was quite masculine, and I’m not sure what kind of a relationship they had, but they did seem to be happy, so I was very, very happy for them and especially for him, as I have known him forever. At one point, the relationship started ending, and I heard she was bi or lesbian or something and she had moved her girlfriend into the house with our friend. Now, this could be fun if they guy got into the sex, but I do not think so. Last I heard she has living with her lez girlfriend. There is another older guy close to us who has many extremely faggy characteristics: walks like a fag, talks like a fag, etc. I will say: “That guy acts gay!!” and someone will chide me, responding that he’s been married five times. He has some kind of weird relationship with his wife now where he acts all feminine or like a little boy or something, and she thinks it’s really cute, and I guess afterwards they fuck like crazy. Whatever. I am happy for both of them though, because she has made a lifetime project out of being miserable, and the guy is at least getting laid, and I cheer that on in all males. There is another one living in San Francisco married to someone close to us. Everyone (all my close relatives) insists that he acts gay but I do not think he does at all. I just think he acts like me. Hmmmm. But they are very happy together also, so I am happy for them too. I do not know about Arabs. I dated an Arab woman once, a woman from Egypt who was part Black. She was quite submissive, not bossy or aggressive or anything like that. She was Muslim, but that never got in the way of sex. In fact, she was so incredible that I think I want another one of those Arab women! I do not think that Arab women are bossy or domineering in their relationships with men, though some are. Saddam’s Hussein’s Dad was supposedly horribly pussy-whipped by his Mom. I suspect it is probably more common that one might think. The Philippines has a reputation for being a very sexist place where the males are very macho and do not really treat women all that well. Like Arabs, they frequently beat their women. However, a Filipina I know told me that there is a saying called, “under the saya“, which means that a Filipino man is basically pussy-whipped. Saya is skirt. So he’s under his wife’s skirt, and she controls him. I asked if this was common, and she said it was very common. Keep in mind that in the Philippines, the Arab World and Asia, the woman rules the home. The man just needs to keep out of there. I read an interview with an Egyptian man and his sons living at home in Cairo. The living room was decorated in frilly pink feminine stuff and the interviewer asked this macho Arab husband if he liked it this way, and he said basically, “Well, it’s her house and she can decorate it any way she wants to.” I assume the males have some control over the way they want their particular inhabited spaces decorated. In these places, often the woman controls all the money for the couple, and makes all decisions about household expenditures. My Mom told me a story about a Japanese couple who came to look at a house a friend of hers was selling. The seller asked the Japanese man if he was interested, and he said something like, “That decision is left up to her.” In other words, this poor oppressed Japanese woman actually gets to decide what house they buy! It seems to me that these women are not as oppressed as we think that they are, and many Japanese and Arab women resent Westerners and feminists sticking their noses in Japanese or Arab culture and telling them that they are oppressed. You’re often going to get people’s patriotic backs up when you do that. Better to let some folks negotiate their way to liberation by themselves. Jews and Arabs are both highly emotional probably because that is a “Mediterraneanism”. In other words, most of the folks in that part of the world tend to act that way. Arab guys put their arms around each other because this is common in many parts of the world. I had a friend from China who was always trying to put his arm around me in public. I see Mexican Indian farm workers in town who often walk around with their arms around each other, especially when drunk. I think it is an “Indianism”, as you don’t see the other Mexicans doing that. This male buddiness does not seem associated with homosexuality in these Indians and it is not in the Chinese. The Arab World is quite complex. In the Levant and Mesopotamia, homosexuality is despised and treated very harshly, not uncommonly with death. In the Gulf, especially in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, opportunistic or even preferential bisexuality is very common and in fact, the religious police often look the other way, as they are more concerned about men and women together! Stupid or what?! In Egypt, there is fairly free and easy bisexuality among unmarried males, which they may continue after marriage. This is a lot more common in Nubia in Southern Egypt, where people are a lot Blacker, and there is actually a long tradition of that stuff. In Cairo and in Morocco, many males will play the male role in homosexual sex with a “gay” male, who plays the female role. In many cultures, it’s not considered gay to play the male role in gay sex. Most guys who do this are young unmarried males. This is what happens when you forbid young males with a stratospheric sex drive female outlets: they screw each other. I don’t find Arab males feminine at all. In fact, I find them ultra-macho. The commenter asks about Jewish men and women. Well, I don’t think Jewish guys have a reputation for being feminine so much as wimpy. Wimpy and oversexed at the same time! So that is not quite the same thing. And there is the stereotype of the Jewish woman as neurotic, insecure (she hates her looks and longs to be a blond), controlling, addicted to cheap, tacky and gaudy clothing and jewelry, domineering, histrionic (drama queen), and in particular constantly badgering him to make more money. There were horror stories by Jewish men about Jewish women dating all the way back 100 years ago to the early Jewish press on the East Coast of the US. In many ways, this stereotype has not changed. The Jewish guy is supposed to marry a Jewish girl, but he often resents their domineering nature, and the stereotype is he wants a blonde shiska. Jewish women, like Black women, complain that their men don’t want them. But most Jews do still marry their own. On the plus side, Jewish women can be very nurturing, and in my opinion, they can be real Stand By Your Man types. I had a Jewish girlfriend who everyone thought was a bitch. People thought she treated me like crap in public and would say, “I hate the way she talks to you!” Well, in the relationship, she started out as a bitch sometimes, but I turned the tables on that pretty quickly! I forgot her birthday, forgot our anniversary, got in a big fight with her on her birthday (The most evil, cruel, mean, horrible and insensitive thing I could have done!), calmly laughed in her face at her horrible insults, made her cry repeatedly, called her a bitch and a cunt and all sorts of other horrible names I have never called any woman, and this was one of the best relationships of my life. She hated me at times, but she hated me for being a man. She called me cruel, mean, asshole, jerk, evil and wicked, and at the end she called me Hitler. She would horribly insult me to my face. I would respond, “Shut the fuck up, you stupid fucking cunt. Shut up, you dumb bitch, etc., etc,” real calm and assured-like. After a few minutes of that, she would be blubbering like a little girl, “Oh, I adore you so much. Oh, I love you so much. I love you baby. Let’s get married, etc. etc.” Oh man! Isn’t love grand! It’s a horrible cliche, but a lot of these real bitchy types are really looking for a hard, masculine man to put them in their place and turn them into a feminine, blubbering little schoolgirl in love again. These bitches always go after wimpy guys, because they love to dominate them, or they think they love to dominate them, but that just doesn’t seem to work, as it violates nature. I don’t like to be Mr. Advice Column on here, but at 50, it has occurred to me someone is going to wear the pants in a heterosexual relationship. If you don’t, she will. If she suspects you have taken off the pants for a while, she will try to make a power grab to put the pants on herself. This must be stopped, often harshly, with profanities, harsh words, meanness, threats to leave, etc. Usually she will back down completely and start bubbering and even whimpering apologetically and asking, “Are you mad? You’re not mad, are you?” Assure you that you are not but issue an order that she is not to speak to you like that anymore, as you really, really hate it. Women want to take control, but really a lot of times they hate it, because at the same time, I think that even masculinized Western women are disgusted by their vaginized metrosexual wormboy partners. You can wage cultural revolution and gender bend til the cows come home, but at the end of the day, I am convinced that you can’t fool Mother Nature.

Genocide in Australia

Repost from the old site. Looks like it was way worse than the genocide of the Amerindians in the US. The wiping out of the Amerindians was done mostly by disease. The much-repeated story of blankets poisoned with smallpox apparently occurred in once, back East. There was a large poisoning of maybe 200-300 Amerindians in the Shasta area of California in the 1800’s, and there was a massacre of 200-300 Amerindians near Eureka at the same time. California was actually one of the worst places of all. There was an all-out war against the Amerindians here. I spent months going over old newspaper archives in a library as part of work I did for an Indian tribe here in the Sierras (now doing great with a casino). In the 1850’s and 1860’s, the California Indians were fighting back. The governor himself was making wild proclamations about how this war a war of one race against another, a war that had to lead to the extinction of one or the other. For 15-20 years or so, it was more or less legal to kill any Indian you wanted in the Sierras and Northern California and for any reason. You could rape an Indian woman too if you want to, and take an Indian child captive. All of this was more or less legal. Of course this was taking place against the backdrop of the utterly insane mass criminality and homicide of the California Gold Rush, a crime wave the likes of which the state has never even come close to seeing since. Too many young unmarried men, hardly any women, few to no families, lots of money in the form of gold, little law enforcement, all the ingredients were there. The law that existed was a brutal one, and men were hanged right and left in the Gold Rush for all sorts of things, but preying on Indians was not one of them. On Sundays, the men would all go to church, then they would head back to the camps to drink, take drugs, steal, fight, kill and just in general act like animals. There were regular hangings at the camps, and these were well-attended. Folks would go watch the hangings, then head back to camp to commit more crimes later that evening. Sometimes, even capital punishment just doesn’t cut it. Recall the stories of the pickpockets that roamed through the crowds in England at the hangings. This was when pickpocketing was a capital offense. Until 1870 or so, an Indian in this part of the state kept his head down and his mouth shut and hoped to stay alive. Epidemics and disease took their toll. By 1890, 9 That’s interesting to folks who insist that genetic change in humans takes a long time. Not necessarily, when something happens that kills 9 Those who tally such things say that ultimately, Whites killed 7,000 Indians and Indians killed about 11,000 Whites. It’s true, the Indians were could be brutal and women and children were at times killed, but they also often kidnapped them and made them members of the tribe. There are a couple of stories in my family about encounters with Indians. These all stem from one line of my family, who actually came over with the first invaders on the Second Ship of the Mayflower. Sometime in the 1640’s in Massachusetts, Indians attacked the village where all the men were off hunting. They rounded up the women and children and prepared to set fire to them. Some of the women started singing a pretty song, and the Indians stopped to listen. Well, this was long enough for the menfolk to return, chase off the Indians and save the day. Two of my ancestors were in that group, a woman and her young child. Later, in late 1700’s Virginia, one of my relatives was taken captive by Indians with his friend. They made them run the gauntlet, a popular thing that Indians liked to do with captured Whites. As you ran the gauntlet, the Indians beat on you. Well, the friend was apparently killed in this process. My ancestor, though, when prodded to run the gauntlet, started jumping around and squawking like a chicken. The Indians all started laughing and decided he did not have to run the gauntlet. I’m not sure if it’s the same story, but one of my ancestors at one point was either captured by Indians or joined them. This in late 1700’s Virginia again. His family just gave him up for dead. Well, 10 years later, the son returns home, about 30 years old, and he’s walking up to his father’s house all dressed like an Indian. His father got out his gun and was ready to shoot his own son until he recognized him. Back in those days, if an Indian was coming onto your property, you shot him. My family goes back to 1600’s Virginia and it’s said that if you can trace your line back that far, you have a 5 The first two stories are probably apocryphal. If you notice the themes: clever Whites use their ingenuity (and common human nature) to fool the Indians by disarming them and appealing to their sensibilities for comedy and appreciation of music. As the Indian is a barbarian savage in both tales, at the same time, he is a fellow human, revealed by his ability to appreciate a clever joke or a beautiful song. At the end of the day, there is really no way to figure out if such stories are true or not. But they got passed down through the family for years for a reason that is at once egotistical and at the same time a warning: our line is a clever line, able to cheat death by our wits. Remember this, and use this lesson in the close calls you may experience in your own dangerous times. The treatment of the Aborigines looks like a real genocide. There were sterilization attempts, deliberate attempts at “breeding them out”, mass imprisonments for minor infractions, infantilization throughout life by being confined to child-care like institutions where even their shit had to pass muster. In these homes, both sexes experienced mass sex abuse, and this went on for decades. Single women were not allowed to have sex, and males were punished for being a “menace to White women”. Half-breeds were taken away to be raised by Whites, and many Aboriginal children were stolen from their families. There was a conscious attempt to make this race fade into history. There are not many full-blooded Aboriginals left. There are not that many in cities, and most are in remote areas. They still have very serious problems, but they are hardly any kind of threat to the rest of Australians in any way. At the moment, alcohol and drugs are the worst problems, and fetal alcohol syndrome is epidemic among them. The damaged children are petty criminals and find it hard to function on their own. When the Whites first showed up, Aboriginals were waging their own war of extinction on the Negritos of Australia, who may have been there even before the Aborigines showed. The Negritos are the first people out of Africa 70,000 years ago, who moved along the Indian Ocean to SE Asia, leaving trace populations (or relatives) behind (possibly) in Yemen, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Andaman Islands, Malaysia, the Philippines and New Guinea.

The journey taken by early man out of Africa 70,000 years ago. As you can see, one line goes to Australia. Negritos, not Aborigines, were probably the first people in Australia.

The first Whites witnessed Aborigines hunting Negritos the way man would hunt wild animals. They were killed just for the pleasure of it, and because they were small. Early investigations A photo of Australian Negritos from the Cairns rainforest, taken in 1890, found by Tindale in 1937. He went looking for some Negritos in the area and found a few of them. I haven’t seen any genetic studies on these people, since there are few if any of them left, but studies did seem to show that like most Negritos, they are most closely related genetically to the people around them, in this case, the Aborigines.

Native Tasmanians are now apparently extinct. They were also hunted like animals for decades. The people that we commonly know as Aborigines (or at least one group called Carpentarians named for the Gulf of Carpentaria in Northern Australia) seem to have come much later from Southern India (and seem related to the Veddoids) and largely replaced the Negritos, a genocide that was in its final phases when the Whites showed up.

Indo-Melanid Yanadi boys in Southern India. Note the resemblance with Aborigines. Unfortunately, cranial studies do not show a relationship with Veddoid types and Aborigines. However, genes did seem to show a link a while back. Nevertheless, cranially and surely genetically, these Yanadis are Caucasians. They may be some of the most ancient Caucasians of them all. It’s fascinating to think that the Aborigines as we know them are the original people, but were actually later arrivals from India and the Pacific Rim respectively.

The Carpentarians showed up about 15,000 years ago, were darker and had little body hair. A classic Aborigine, probably a cross between an Ainu type and an early South Indian type. These types were generalized across India and SE Asia about 24,000 years ago. Another group, called Murrayians, are apparently related to the Ainu, and arrived 20,000 years ago. The Ainu are thought to be the remnants of the original people of Northern Asia. They were stocky, wavy-haired, hairy, and fairly light-skinned.

A photo of Ainu Yasli Adam in traditional garb. I love this photo. Note that he could be mistaken for an Aborigine or a Caucasian. Anthropological studies suggest that Ainu types showed up in Australia about 20,000 years ago. There seems to be evidence of them in Thailand around 16,000 years ago, and about this time they went to Japan to form a very early Japanese culture called the Jomonese. There is a suggestion that proto-Jomonese people were also in Thailand around this time. At the same time, the Americas were being populated by types that best resemble the Ainu. These are the Paleoindians, and the Amerindians today are no relation, no matter how much they scream. The famous Kennewick Man is also a Paleoindian most closely related to an Ainu or a Maori. He only appears Caucasian because the Ainu types do look Caucasian. However, in facial structure, they are Australoid, and genetically, they are Asians. Complete moron White nationalists claim that Kennewick Man is a White Man, and this proves that Whites were here before Amerindians, and therefore the whole continent is ours. Stupid or what? I’m going to do a whole post taking these clowns to task over this. In traditional early anthropology of the Philippines, a group called the proto-Malay is postulated. They arrived after the Negritos and after an Australoid group called Sakais, who seem to resemble Veddoids or the Senoi of Malaysia. The proto-Malay are described as short and very hairy. A hairy Asian sounds like an Ainu, and indeed, there were Jomon types in Thailand, and Ainu types may have settled Australia 20,000 years ago, and the Americas 12,000 years ago. In short, Ainu types were on the move around the Pacific Rim from 12-20,000 years ago, and may even have settled in the Philippines. This is real cutting-edge stuff here and I am totally going out on a limb. Feel free to dive in.

An Australian fossil called Kow Swamp from 20,000 YBP curiously looks more like Homo Erectus than Homo Sapiens. The Negritos were least advanced, then the Murrayians, then the Carpentarians. Tindale and Birdsell did the best work on the peopling of Australia long ago and much of it stands to this day. In between the 1960’s saw such idiocies as pan-Aboriginalism, which mandated that all Aborigines had to come from a single source. Ridiculous theories postulated Negritos not as ancient remnants of the first modern humans in their regions, but as the result of microevolution (in particular, to living in a rain forest) and evolutionary drift. This same scenario plays out in Africa, where Bantus kill Pygmies just for the fun of it, and take special pleasure in eating them. This old habit has come back with the horrible civil war in Zaire that has killed 5 million people. In the Philippines, Negritos have been murdered by settlers for their land for decades now, with few legal consequences. The remainder are a defeated people, their lands stolen by Filipinos, working for Filipinos on their former lands as agricultural labor, living in squatter villages, families falling apart, riven by alcohol, dope and even pornography.

A full-grown Ati woman. The Ati, a Philippines Negrito group, live on Panay Island, where they number about 1,500. The Filipinos have been stealing their land and killing them when they resist for decades now, and the government could care less. The Negritos of the Philippines are starting to look like a defeated race.

On the Andaman Islands, most of the Negritos have gone extinct due to disease. The few remainders, for some odd reason, are afflicted with very low fertility, that is, the women seem to be unable to bear children. Is this nature’s way of marking the extinction of a race?

Andaman Islands Negritos. Contact with advanced civilization is fatal to them. They have some immunity to malaria, but none to Hepatitis, venereal diseases or even the common cold or the flu. They quickly succumb to venereal disease, violent crime, beggary, and sloth upon contact with modern civilization. There is a group on the Sentinel Islands that attacks all researchers who come near. Indian nationalist fuckheads keep sending expeditions to “bring them into civilization” but every Andamans group that has come to the modern world has been destroyed. Long may the Sentinelese prosper in the Paleolithic glory. I actually think these Stone Age chicks are kinda cute. Hell with modern woman anyway. Every one I meet wants to know my net worth. Think these babes care? Hell with Late Capitalism, how do I get me one of these Negrito chicks anyway?

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.

Sex Pistols, "Here We Go Again"

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZWmA92ySYU] Ultrarare track from 1977. Steve Jones on vocals! He’s also on Lonely Boy, Black Leather and Silly Thing. It’s written by Steve Jones and Paul Cook. It’s included on a couple of obscure albums like We Have Cum for Your Children and Sex Pack. Listen to the anthem-like quality. This is truly music for a revolution! This is sort of a typical British anthem-type song. The British have been making anthem-type music for a long time now. Ultimately, these anthems probably go back to British Dance Hall Music, which also goes back to French Dance Hall Music. Both nation’s Dance Hall music developed in tandem at around the same time and influenced each other. In addition, the very early roots music from Appalachia also has partial roots in Dance Hall music from France and the UK. Punk for life! I’m 53 years old, and I’m as punk as I was in 1978. I’ll be a punk when I’m 80! Punk for life! Punk for life!

Rightwing Crap About Education in the US

Harpo Marx writes:

RL: They are trying to destroy public education and affordable college education, once again along the lines of a Third World model where public schools are underfunded, ruined and lousy and the only way to get a good education is to send your kid to private school. There will be moves in the coming year to make huge cuts in Pell Grants for college students. This project is very much ongoing and has been for a good 30 years or so. It is very much accelerating lately in the wake of budget troubles.As for public education, Asian Americans place second in the world after Shanghai Chinese kids, White Americans place second (for Whites) after Finns… Hispanic Americans blow away every Latin American country and African Americans… well there is no competition since sub Saharan Africa doesn’t administer the PISA test but they do beat their closest competition in Trinidad Tobago (which is 4 Yes I know Buchanan… but the facts check out. He claims that the US spends (per capita..) the second highest amount in the world per student for k-12 education (after Luxembourg..) however I was not able to independently verify this. As for public education, Asian Americans place second in the world after Shanghai Chinese kids, White Americans place second (for Whites) after Finns… Hispanic Americans blow away every Latin American country and African Americans… well there is no competition since sub Saharan Africa doesn’t administer the PISA test but they do beat their closest competition in Trinidad Tobago (which is 4

Harpo is a rightwing deficit hawk whose philosophy can be briefly summed up as “The government spends too damn much money (and needs to cut back on the excessive spending)!”. There is a serious problem with his analysis. If the US really spends so much on public education, then why are so many schools broke? Here in California, teachers are being fired left and right, and those teachers with a job often have to provide their own supplies. 25 years ago, I taught in ghetto schools that were for all intents and purposes destroyed. They had ripped up textbooks that there many years out of date, and not even enough of those to go around. Much of the furniture was falling apart or destroyed. We hear reports of leaking roofs and all sorts of structural damage. Proposition 13 in 1978, led by White California, began the destruction of public infrastructure in the state, and with it, the California schools. The Whites who voted for Prop. 13 were destroying their own White schools, but I guess California Whites don’t even care if they destroy their own schools? I went to school in California from 1962-1975, the Golden Age. We had PE, music, art, clubs, the whole nine yards. Since 1978, extracurricular activities have been whittled away. Foreign languages, art, music, band, PE, sports, everything, you name it, they are destroying it all. All that’s left is core curriculum, and even that has been whittled away down through the years. Maybe I’m a romantic, but I think that something sucks when schools get rid of art, music, band, PE, sports and extracurricular stuff. Something’s missing from education. It’s like all the fun has been sucked out of school. Are California Whites such pigs that they really want to whittle education down to the bare bones just to save a few bucks on taxes? It’s hard to believe, but apparently it’s true. I went to university here from 1978-1981, and then again from 1991-1994. It was much more expensive the second time around, but the education was still very good. Now the tuition has gone through the roof, and I guess only rich people can afford to go to college, which is more or less the way it’s always been in this craphole country anyway. Now there are massive cuts at the university level, and droves of students who want to go to college are being turned away every year because there is not enough room for them. You’ve got about one day to get into your classes, and it’s a huge race. Most of it is done online. If you don’t get into your classes in the first day, you’re screwed. In many other countries in the world, university education is either very cheap or even completely free. And it’s often high quality too. It’s very hard to believe, considering the high tuition prices, lack of vacancies and huge cuts in university education, that the US has some overspending problem in college education. It’s also hard to believe considering the gutting of extracurricular activities, art, music, PE, sports, clubs, etc, the decrepit and destroyed infrastructure, the mass firings of teachers, teachers having to supply their own materials, etc. that the US has some overspending problem in terms of K-12 education. Rightwing rhetoric is interesting and often seems to be intense arguments, but a lot of seems to fly right in the face of reality.

Strange Case Out of California's Emerald Triangle

Here. Interesting. A gang of young men tried to raid a marijuana garden in the Emerald Triangle of California last year. They were met by other young men defending their crop. Some of the raiders were taken prisoner. The raiders attacked with sticks and chunks of concrete to try to free their prisoners. All prisoners escaped but one, who was badly beaten with sticks and was in a coma. Police arrived, took the beaten man to the hospital where he soon came out of his coma. The people who assaulted him were not arrested! The police decided that the many marijuana plants were “in violation of local ordinances” and confiscated them. None of the growers were arrested! Wow. Only in California, eh? The comments below are interesting. The Triangle is experiencing its worst spell of ripoffs since 1979. Thefts go down all the time, and everyone is paranoid. Much of the growing is sadly now being done by Organized Crime gangs. Reading between the lines, the Organized Crime growing in the region appears to be Nuestra Familia (locally Nortenos) and La Eme (The Mexican Mafia or Surenos). Nuestra Familia and the Mexican Mafia are the real hardcores, and the Surenos and Nortenos are mostly just the local sets on the streets. Sort of like the Mafia and little local Italian street gangs loosely associated with them. Apparently most of the grows are being done by Nuestra Familia, since this is Northern California after all. Grows are as large as 100,000 plants. These large grows are widely resented as sucking streams dry, mix fertilizer in the bottoms of wells and bury their trash in holes in the ground. It looks like cops only get a very small amount of the crop. A friend of mine used to grow up there in the mid 1980’s, around 1984-1985. He worked construction about 1/2 the year and made a bundle back when unionized White construction workers could make excellent money. The other half of the year he was up in the Triangle growing marijuana. There were three guys in on the grow, and I think they made $150,000 between them, or $50,000 apiece. Pretty nice for 6 months work. He did it for a few years and never got caught. He would bring it back down to Orange County and sell it. Even back then, this was very strong pot – skunk, sinsemilla, whatever you want to call it. It went for ~$2000-2400 a pound and the price per ounce was pretty high too. I have no idea how that compares to prices nowadays. He said that the main problems were deer and spider mites. Spider mites are tiny insects that infest the undersides of the leaves of marijuana and other plants. I’ve seen them before. The deer are mostly a problem in the fall when most of the vegetation has dried up but of course the pot plants are still very green, so the deer just hone right in on them. He said busts were a worry also around harvest time for the same reason. Everything is brown and dry but the pot, which is still bright green and can be spotted from the air by helicopters. He said that you can’t really walk around out there. He said “everyone is growing,” it’s all private property, fenced in various ways, and no one dares trespass on anyone else’s property. If you do, as soon as you are on anyone’s property for 5-10 minutes, people will be right there onto you asking you what you are doing. Back then, people regularly got short prison terms up there for growing pot, but in recent years, I understand that law enforcement is having a hard time finding juries willing to convict. In up 8 I have been in and around this region exploring extensively once. I went to Cloverdale, Ukiah and Dos Rios. I fished in the Russian River and Eel River. I caught a Steelie looking trout in the Russian River and another trout in the Eel. While fishing the Eel, a water snake took off across the river right next to where I was fishing – an Aquatic Garter Snake. There was a large bird making a huge racket across the river the whole time I was there. I finally figured out that I was fishing across the river from an Osprey’s nest and the bird was trying to tell me to get away from its nest. I was there in the Spring, and there was water everywhere. It’s basically a gigantic forest and there is a stream or rivulet pouring down off the slope every few hundred yards or so, with many much larger streams and even rivers, mostly unnamed, pouring down at less frequent intervals. It’s a mountain forest that’s basically leaking water like a full sponge. There are hippie looking mountain man characters roaming around all over the place. If you ever get a chance, you might want to go check this area out.

Letter from My Neck of the Woods

Out Here in the Sticks, by Bill Hatch. Hatch, who I have never heard of before, lives in Merced, California. He gives you a pretty good feel of this part of California, the severe poverty, the rural nature of the landscape, the severe ignorance of the population, the huge Mexican illegal alien population, the Punjabis who run the local stores and gas stations, the working class Whites barely struggling to get by, the failed real estate boom, and last, the fundamentalist Christian nature of the local White population. If you want to know what it’s like where I live, this gives you a nice little feel.

Why Cuba Is a Democracy and the U.S. Is Not

Repost from the old site. Interesting article at a neat website called Double Standards. Most of my media consumption is this sickening garbage called US media. One of the major annoying this about this US media addiction habit of mine is that the media is lying to me all the time. I don’t mind being lied to if I can figure out that I am being lied to. This is where I object. I can’t often tell that the US media is lying to me. One thing that is clear is that the joke of a liberal media, not to mention a Communist media, in the US is some kind of a cruel. But head on over to American Renaissance (the racist right) or, really, any standard US conservative sites and you will find that many conservatives, in addition to being soulless pricks, are also stark raving bats insane. They actually believe that there is a liberal media somewhere in the US, and many believe that the US media is actually socialist or Communist. There is not one speck of truth to this nonsense. There are five main US news stations – ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN. Not one of these could be said to be liberal in any way. No major US newspaper is liberal and none of the three major US newsmagazines – Time, Newsweek or US News and World Report – is liberal at all. There is but one liberal radio station and one liberal-Left radio station on my dial, and both are partly paid for by public funds. One of them has to go on continuous fund drives because it does not accept advertisements. There are some liberal – Left magazines out there, but not many, and most are not large circulation. With the increased Gramscian hegemony of conservative ideas lately, more and more magazines have moved to the Right – The New Republic starting in 1980, The Atlantic sometime in the 1990’s, Esquire at some unknown point. Any true liberal media, first and foremost, would support the rights of ordinary persons and workers over that of the rich and capital. By that yardstick, there is not a single major liberal media outlet anywhere in the US. All US newspapers, newsmagazines, TV stations and large radio stations are hostile to everyone but business, the upper middle class and the wealthy. They use their media monopoly to flood America with propaganda in favor of the class interests of the rich and the upper middle classes and capital. This propaganda is objectively and demonstrably hostile to the interests of the majorities of the following groups: middle class, the working class, low-income persons, consumers, the environment, minority groups, the elderly, the disabled, women and small children. Yet almost no one in these groups is able to ascertain the agenda they are being fed. Instead, the vast majority of members of the above groups actually believe the propaganda of the US media – the propaganda that is directed by their class enemies at them and their class. This was what Gramsci was talking about, and in this way, the media under most capitalist systems is de facto controlled. Chomsky has also written a lot on this. In Europe, at least there are leftwing papers like Liberacion in France. I assume that the continental media may be supportive of European social democracy, a form of capitalism is attempts to redistribute capitalist profits via government to all classes and groups. Can any of my continental readers help me on this one? In Argentina, there is a large leftwing daily, and the Sandinista press continues in Nicaragua. The situation in India and Venezuela are typical for the media under capitalism. When Chavez took power, there were perhaps 5-10 large dailies in the state. There were also 5-10 major TV stations and some large newsmagazines. Every single one of these major media outlets was owned by the upper For this reason, I supported Chavez shutting down the worst offender; but really, he ought to shut down any and every reactionary outlet that supported the coup. On the other hand, this would bring him widespread approbation that might make his situation even worse. In India, almost all of the media is of course owned by the top Not only is Indian media owned by a tiny elite that continues to live in palaces like Rajas while tens of millions of Indians live on the street, and the system kills at least 4 million people every year, but the overwhelming majority of owners and top editors are members of the higher castes. Here in the US, almost all reporting on India is done by Indian-American reporters. Dalit (untouchable) activists say that the overwhelming majority of Indian-American reporters for the US media are members of higher castes. Hence you almost never read anything in the US press about the horrible and wicked caste system in India. I have only touched on the question of whether or not media can be said to be democratic in the US, or for that matter in any capitalist state. There are many more questions raised about the impoverished state of US democracy in the linked article – I would emphasize the money-based elections that characterize not only the US, but most capitalist states. I don’t necessarily agree with all of his points, but it sure is great to read articles like this somewhere! God bless the Internet.

In the Shining Path of Ann Dunham

Repost from the old site. It’s a lie that Sendero Luminoso never had much support. Simon Strong’s 1992 book gives the lie to that quite well. In the 18 months following Fujimori’s seizure of power, an unbelievable 1.5 million Peruvians were arrested on charges of being members of or collaborating with the Shining Path. Surveys done at the height of their power indicated that they had the passive support of about 5 In the American Revolution, few Americans know that only 1/3 of Americans support George Washington’s bands, another 1/3 were basically traitors supporting the English crown and another 1/3 were pragmatic fence-sitters waiting to see which side was going to win before they decided who to support. Most people don’t realize that in most civil wars you have a huge percentage of fence-sitters who are mostly just trying to stay alive. Sendero had support even in the churches and in the military. They completely blew it in a lot of ways though, and though they still operate, they are a shadow of what they formerly were. In my post, Sendero Fades and FARC Rises in Peru, I elaborate how Sendero has faded in Peru only to be replaced by the FARC of Colombia, who have been moving far down into Peru for some time now, and have been doing well with peasants fed up with Sendero’s mad violence. The remains of the MRTA (yes, they still exist also) are up in the far north of Peru in This article from La Rouche Publications (no, I do not endorse them) while a bit over the top, has an excellent roundup and analysis of the Sendero phenomenon. Particularly interesting is the huge support they had in the Peruvian diaspora in Europe, the US and Mexico, with a mind-numbing array of organizations. In the US, the support was run by the Maoists in the RCP, a large US Maoist group. RCP’s homepage is here, and they actually run some decent articles, though I don’t support Communism in the US or anywhere else in the First World at the moment – I support some variety of socialism instead, and that can even mean social democracy. El Diario International is the international paper of Sendero, or at least what remains of it. What is amazing is that this Belgium-based paper still prints a lot of issues, at least on the Net. It’s chock full of brand-new raving articles all the time. I don’t read Spanish very well, but maybe someone who does could check it out and come back and report to us in the comments. El Diario del Hoy was Sendero’s paper in Peru, but it’s long been shut down. I think it reappears clandestinely from time to time. I have read tons of Sendero propaganda and position statements. These people are completely off the deep end. All existing Communist states are “revisionist” (not real Communists but instead reformist traitors to the movement), and that includes North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos and of course China. They despise both Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia. Chavez is pegged as some sort of “corporatist fascist”. Sendero does support other armed Maoists like the revolutionaries in the Philippines, Nepal and India (but their most recent editorial condemns the Nepalese Maoists for “capitulation”). The Nepalese revolutionaries have done very well, the NPA in the Philippines is a vast organization, and the Indian Maoists are expanding like mad in the east. I don’t have a problem with any of these three movements. Their position statements, and regular publications of their Red Sun Magazine (both here) are some of the rantingest, ravingest Commie stuff out there (Red Sun (Sol Rojo) 29 in Spanish, Red Sun 29 English supplement). As Peruvian society is evil and the system is a pile of garbage, Peruvian reality drove Senderistas insane. The crazier and more wicked the society, the crazier and more wicked the guerrilla reaction. The La Rouche link (forget the nonsense about how Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch support Sendero, and forget anything about the UK – LaRouchies have always been insane on the subject of the Crown) makes clear the link between Sendero and radical anthropologists and academics, in particular psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, historians, teachers and agronomists. The role of anthropologists , both Peruvian and even foreign, as essentially the brainchildren of Sendero is especially glaring. Just for the record, this blog supports the ELN and FARC in Colombia, and supported the MRTA in Peru, but cannot support the project of Sendero. The link with anthropologists is especially interesting in that Obama’s mother was an anthro, and she has been decried as an America-hater, and this America-hatred of hers can be seen supposedly in both Obama and his wife. Though I do not care about whether or not Obama and his wife hate America, I think these latest America-hating charges may well be fatal for his campaign, especially with White ethnic working class types (Reagan Democrats), independents and Republicans who were voting for Obama for some bizarre reason. This Asia Times piece by Spengler is worth reading along those lines. Though I am not a big fan of Spengler, he is definitely worth reading. He tells it like it is all right. I’m for whichever Dem, the Black or the woman, can beat the Republican clown. At this point it’s starting to look like the lady. Women all over the country are fired up and hopping mad about the sexist BS directed at Hillary all through this whole campaign. A bunch of yahoo alpha male dogs showed up at one of Hilary’s appearances in New Hampshire and yelped, “Iron my shirts!” Jeez. Good for American women for standing up to this sexist crap. Everyone should stand up for their rights, and I applaud my sisters. This blog will never attack Hilary on sexist grounds.

The Socialist International

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxRfsBwou5g&feature=related] The Internationale is one of my favorite songs of all time. This is the Billy Bragg version. The Internationale is the international anthem of:

  1. The international Communist movement in all its varieties
  2. The international Left anarchist movement (not the right-anarchist movement)
  3. The international socialist movement
  4. The international social-democratic movement

Unfortunately, the song is associated with Commies, so it’s widely hated, particularly in the US. However, it’s a fact that it’s also the anthem of socialists and social democrats all over the world. The video lists the parties in the Socialist International. Some of those parties have badly sold out – the Labor Party in the UK is a catastrophe. The Australian Labor Party has sold out in the worst way, and the New Zealand Labor Party is the same. Accion Democratica is a horrible anti-Chavez party in Venezuela. I don’t think they ever belonged in the SI. The MSZP in Hungary is not a socialist party. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Germany has serious problems, and many would say they don’t belong in the SI. As you can see (obviously) the US Democratic Party is not a member of the Socialist International. I’m honestly sick and tired of hearing how Barack Obama is a socialist. 5 He’s a neoliberal capitalist politician slightly to the left of the reactionary sociopaths in the Republican Party. To be fair and honest, I think he is on the center-right of US politics. You see the US Right is so insane that they think center-right pols like Obama are socialists! The fist clenching a rose is the symbol of the Socialist International. People think that greeting people with “comrade” is an exclusively Communist type greeting. Hence, it is widely disparaged in the US. However, it is perfectly acceptable for socialists to call each other “comrade” also. “Comrade” is not an exclusively Commie term.

Hard Right Finance Blog Praises Bernie Sanders

Great stuff! We may have more allies than we think we do on the “Right.” Most people on the Right don’t even know what it means. A friend of mine lives in an all-White town in the California Sierra Nevada foothills. Almost every White person there is a Republican, often a very far rightwing type. Fundamentalist Protestantism is really big. Tea Partiers are throwing the biggest political rallies lately. It could be a rural town anywhere in the US Midwest. You would have no idea you’re in California. He tells me the most common political question he hears from any of these White working class fools is, “What the difference between rightwing and leftwing?” They honestly do not know. He tries to explain it to them, but they seem like they still don’t get it. There’s a lot of anger and alienation, but everyone deals with it by watching Glen Beck. There’s quite a bit of lunatic rightwing populism around – Libertarianism, Federal Reserve fearmongering, One World Order, Black Helicopters and UN rule, anti-freemasonry, on and on. It’s ridiculous. Drinking and drug use are heavy, especially meth and pot. The heavy users/drinkers are typically fanatical Christian fundamentalists. It’s a great big heap of stupid out in the middle of the woods. I agree with everything this guy says except for this:

A free market – or capitalist society – isn’t one where you use the government to enact laws that promote and protect your looting of the people. Those who claim to be “for free markets” and “for the rule of law” are supposed to use the law to put a stop to that crap by prosecuting and locking up the crooks, clawing back the illicit profits and returning them to the people they were stolen from instead of passing more laws and regulations that enable further looting of the people.

Wrong. Free market capitalism is always crony capitalism. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. It goes with the package. You don’t want the crooked, thieving oligarchic crony capitalism, get rid of the free market crap. The only thing that has ever constrained capitalism is a healthy degree of socialist regulation in the state and society. Nothing else has ever worked. If you hate socialism and love the free market, then you get the nightmarish, criminal, looting, oligarchic plutocrats and a state that’s part and parcel of them. The plutocrat-run Washington Post recently ran a poll on Bernie Sanders filibuster. The poll was rigged. 2 out of three questions were snarky hits on Sanders. Nevertheless, responders saw through the rigged poll and voted 8 Bernie Sanders is increasingly looking like one of the last honest men in Congress.

"Latin America’s Twenty First Century Capitalism and the US Empire," by Dr. James Petras

An excellent analysis of the current scene in Latin America by Marxist James Petras. We often wonder what exactly is going on here or there in the world. For the answer in Latin America, Petras answers a number of important questions. What’s amazing is I can’t find one single area in which he’s wrong in his analysis below. Hence, this analysis is immaculate. If any of you can find anywhere below where he is wrong, let us know. A good tutorial on the Latin American politico-economic scene. Warning: Runs 45 pages.

Political Power and the World Market

The twin nemesis of Latin America’s quest for more equitable and dynamic development, US imperial and local oligarchic power have been subject to profound changes over the past decade. New capitalist classes both at home and abroad have redefined Latin America’s relation to world markets, seized opportunities to stimulate growth and forged cross class coalitions linking overseas investors, agro-mineral exporters, national industrialists with a broad array of trade unions, and in some countries peasant and Indian social movements. Parallel to these changes in Latin America, a new militarist and financial political configuration engaged in prolonged wars, colonial occupations and widespread speculation has weakened the structural economic links – dominance – between US imperial economic interests and Latin America’s dynamic socio-economic classes. In the present conjuncture, these basic changes in the respective class structures – in the US and Latin America – define the contours, constraints and ‘reach’ of the imperial classes as well as the potential autonomy of action of Latin America’s leading socio-economic classes. Notions which freeze Latin America in a time warp such as “500 years of exploitation” or which conflate earlier decades of US political-economic dominance with the present, have failed to take account of recent class dynamics, including popular insurrections, mass electoral mobilizations and failed imperial-centered economic models which have redefined the power equation between the US and Latin America. Equally important, fundamental changes in market relations and market competition has lessened US influence in the world market and opened major growth opportunities for new and established sectors of Latin America’s capitalist class, especially its dynamic export sectors. Understanding imperialism, especially the US variant, requires focusing on class relations, within and between countries and regions, the changing balance of power as well as the impact of fundamental changes in world market relations. Equally important the private economic institutions of imperialism (banks, multi-national corporations, investors) are contingent on the composition and policies of the imperial state. Insofar as the state defines its priorities in military and ideological terms and acts accordingly, by channeling resources in prolonged wars, the imperial policymakers weakens their capacity to sustain, finance and promote overseas private economic interests. As we shall analyze and discuss in the following sections, the US has suffered a relative loss of political and economic power over key Latin American regimes and markets as its military commitments have widened and deepened over time. The result is a Latin American political configuration which has changed dramatically over the past two decades.

Latin American Political-Economic Configurations and US Imperialism

The upsurge of social movements, the subsequent ascent of center-left political regimes,the dynamic economic growth of Asian economies and the consequent sharp increase in prices of commodities in the world market has changed the configuration of political power in Latin America and between the latter and the US between 2000-2010. While the US exercised almost absolute hegemony during the period 1980-1999, the rise of a militarist caste promoting prolonged imperial wars in the Middle East and South Asia and the rise of relatively independent national-popular and social-liberal regimes in Latin America has produced a broad spectrum of governments with greater autonomy of action. Depending on the criteria we use, Latin American countries have moved beyond the orbit of US hegemony. For example, if we examine trade and investment, all the major countries, independent of ideology, have to a greater or lesser degree diversified their markets, trading and investment partners. If we examine political alignments, we find that all the major countries have joined UNASUR, a regional political organization that excludes the US. If we examine policy divergences from the US on major regional issues, such as the US embargo on Cuba, its efforts to isolate Venezuela, its proposed military bases in Colombia, Washington remains in splendid isolation, to the point that the new Colombian President Santos, chooses to “postpone” implementation in favor of maximizing billion dollar trade and diplomatic ties with Venezuela. If we focus on ideological divergence between the US and Latin America, particularly on global issues of free trade, military coups and intervention, we find a variety of positions. For example, Brazil opposes US sanctions against Iran and supports the latter’s program of uranium enrichment for peaceful uses. If we focus on joint US-Latin American military exercises and support for the Haitian occupation, most Latin countries – with the exception of Venezuela – participate. If we examine the issue of bilateral trade and regional trade agreements, the US proposals on the latter were voted down, while several countries pursue (so far with little success) the former. On a rather fluid measure of ‘affinity for neo-liberal’ ideology, in which a mixture of elements of statism, deregulated markets and social welfare co-exist in varying degrees, we can draw up a tentative 4 fold division between “left”, “center left”, “center right” and “right”. On the “left” we can include Venezuela and Bolivia which have expanded the public sector, economic regulations and social spending.   On the “center-left” we can include Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador which have increased social spending, public investment and increased employment, wages and reduced poverty, while vastly increasing private national and foreign investment in agro-mineral export sectors. On the center-right we can include Uruguay, Chile and Paraguay, which embrace free market doctrines, with mild poverty programs and an open door to foreign investment. On the right we find Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, Honduras, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, all of whom line up with Washington on most ideological issues, even as they may be diversifying trade ties with Asia and Venezuela. Internal shifts in class power within Latin America and the US have spurred divergences. Latin America has witnessed greater policy influence by a more ‘globalist elite’ less tied to the US, and an emerging ‘nationalist bourgeoisie’, and greater pressure from reformist working class and public employees trade union. In contrast within the US industrial capital has lost influence to the financial sector and exerts little influence in shaping economic policy toward Latin America, beyond rearguard ‘protectionist’ measures and state subsidies. The US ruling political elite, highly militarized and Zionized, shows little capacity to engage in launching any major new initiatives toward recapturing markets in Latin America, preferring massive military expenditures on wars and paying tribute to their Israeli mentors. As a result of major socio-political shifts within the US and Latin America and the singular importance of dynamic changes in the world market, there are four axis of power operating in the Western Hemisphere. The emerging economic power of Brazil and the growth of intra-regional trade within and between Latin American economies. The dynamic expansion of Asian trade, investment and markets leading to a long term, large scale shift toward greater economic diversification. The substantial financial flows from the US to Latin America in the form of “hot money” with destabilizing effects, as well as continued substantial investment, trade and military ties. The European Union, Russia and the Middle East as real and potential influences in particular settings, depending on the countries and time frame. Of these 4 ‘vectors of power’, the most significant in recent times in reshaping Latin America’s relation to the US and more importantly in opening up prospects for 21st century capitalist growth, is the boom in commodity prices and demand – the dynamic of the world market. On the ‘negative side’, the prolonged US-EU economic crises has limited trade and investment growth and encouraged greater Latin American integration and expansion of regional markets. A serious threat to Latin America’s growth, autonomy and stability is found in the US currency devaluation and subsequent overvaluing of Latin currencies (especially Brazil) imposing constraints on industrial exports and prejudicing the manufacturing sector. Equally important US and EU manipulation of interest rates – downward – has driven speculative capital toward higher interest rates in Latin America, creating destabilizing “bubbles” which can derail the economies.

US Empire Strikes Back: Protectionism, Devaluation and Unilateralism

By the middle of 2010 it was clear that the US economy was losing the competitive battle for markets around the world and was unable to reduce its trade and fiscal deficit within the existing global free trade regime. The Obama regime, led by Federal Reserve head Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Geithner unilaterally launched a thinly disguised trade war, effectively devaluing the dollar and lowering interest rates on bonds in order to increase exports and in effect ‘overvalue’ the currency of their competitors. In other words the Obama regime resorted to a virile “bugger your neighbor policies”, which outraged world economic leaders, provoking Brazilian economic leaders to speak of a “currency war”. Contrary to Washington’s rhetoric of “greater co-operation”, the Obama regime was resorting to protectionist policies designed to alienate the leading economic powers in the region. No longer in a position to impose non-reciprocal trade agreements to US advantage, Washington is engaged in currency manipulation in order to increase market shares at the expense of the highly competitive emerging economies of Latin America and Asia, as well as Germany. Equally prejudicial to Latin America, the Federal Reserve’s lowering of interest rates leads to heavy borrowing in the US in order to speculate in high interest countries like Brazil. The consequences are disastrous, as a flood of “hot money”, speculative funds flow into Latin America, especially Brazil, overvaluing the currency and provoking a speculative bubble in bonds and real estate, while encouraging excess liquidity and public and private consumer debt. Equally damaging the overvalued currencies price industrial and manufacturing out of world market competition, threatening to “de-industrialize” the economies and further their dependency on agro-mineral exports. US resort to unilateral protectionism tells us that the decline in US economic power has reached a point where it struggles to compete with Latin America rather than to reassert its former dominant position. Protectionism is a defense mechanism of an empire in decline. While Washington can pretend otherwise, the weapons it chooses to arrest its loss of competitiveness in the short run, sets in motion a process of growing Latin America integration and increased trade with Asian economies, which will deepen Latin America’s economic independence from US control.

Latin America’s Center-Left and the US: Economic Ties Trump Geopolitical Strategies

The consolidation of Latin America’s center-left regimes has had major consequences for US policy, namely a reconciliation between arch-adversary Venezuela and Washington’s foremost ally, Colombia. The power of the market, in this case over $4 billion in Colombian exports to Venezuela, has trumped the dubious advantage (if any) of being Washington’s military launching pad in Latin America. The election of Lula’s chosen candidate Dilma Rousseff as President of Brazil, the likely re-election of Chavez in Venezuela and Cristina Fernandez in Argentina, means that Washington has little leverage to reverse the dynamic diversification and greater autonomy of Latin America’s leading economies. Moreover, as the political rapprochement between Venezuela and Colombia, including the mutual extradition of Colombian guerrillas and drug traffickers demonstrates, closer economic relations are accompanied by warmer political relations, including a tacit pact in which Colombia abjures from supporting the rightwing opposition in Venezuela, while the latter does likewise toward the Left opposition to Santos. The larger meaning of this obscuring of ideological boundaries is that Latin America’s economic integration advances at the expense of US prompted ideological divisions. The net result will be the further exclusion and diminution of the US as the dominant actor in the Southern Hemisphere. At the same time it should be remembered that we are writing about greater capitalist integration, which means the continued marginalization of class based trade unions and social movements from strategic economic policy making positions. In other words, the decline of US hegemony is not matched by an increase in working class or popular power. As both decline, the big winner is the rising business class, mostly, but not exclusively the agro-mineral, financial and manufacturing elites linked to the Latin American and Asian markets. The prime destabilization danger now includes US currency wars, the growing potentially volatile extractive exports and the high levels of dependence on China’s (and Asian) appetite for raw materials. Imperial Wars, Free Trade and the Lumpen Legacy of 1990’s One of the paradoxes leading to the current eclipse of US hegemony in Latin America is found in the very military and economic successes in the 1990’s. A broad swathe of North and Central American and the Andean countries has witnessed the rise of what we call “lumpen political-economic power” which has devastated the formal economy and legitimate political authority. The concept of “lumpen” is derived from ‘lupus’ or Latin for ‘wolf’ a metaphor for a ‘predatory’ actor, or in our context, the rise of a political and economic class which preys upon the public and private resources and institutions of an economy and society. The lumpen power elites are based on the creation of a dual system of legitimate and illegitimate political authority backed by the instruments of coercion and violence. The emergence and formation of a powerful lumpen class of predatory capitalists and their accompanying military entourage is what we refer to in writing of the “process of lumpenization”. Today “lumpenization” no longer merely entails the overt violent organizers of illicit production, processing and distribution of drugs but an entire array of ‘offspring’ economic activity (kidnapping, immigrant smugglers, etc.) as well as large scale long term interaction with ‘legitimate’ economic institutions and sectors, including banking, real estate, agriculture, retail shopping centers, tourist complexes, to name a few. Money laundering of illicit funds is an important growth sector, especially providing important flows of capital to and from major US and Latin American financial institutions. Today over three-quarters of Mexico’s territory and governance is contested by over 30,000 organized armed lumpen led by centralized political-economic formations. Central America is a major transit point, production center and terrain for bloody lumpen struggles for power and revenue collection. Colombia is the major center for ‘raw material production’of drugs, marketing,and import and export center under the leadership of powerful lumpen capitalists with long standing ties to the governing political, military and economic elite. The lumpen economy has supply chains further south in Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay and distribution networks through Venezuela and Brazil as well as multi-billion dollar money laundering and financial links in the Caribbean, the US, Uruguay and Argentina. Several important issues to keep in mind in discussing the lumpen political economy.These include: (1)the growth in size, scope and significance over the past 20 years (2) the increasing economic importance as the ‘legitimate’ economy goes into crises (both cause and consequence) (3) the increasing public cynicism as previously thought of “legitimate” economic and political actors (capitalists) engage in multi-billion dollar financial swindles and are “bailed” out by political leaders. The ‘boom’ in lumpen political-economic growth can be dated to the end of the 1980’s and early 1990’s, coinciding with several major historical events in the region. These include: the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement; the US-oligarchy defeat of the revolutionary movements in Central America and the demobilization but not disarmament of the paramilitary and armed militia; the total militarization and paramilitarization of Colombia especially with the advent of Plan Colombia (2001) and the end of peace negotiations; the deregulation of the US financial system in the mid 1990’s and the growth of a financial bubble economy. What is striking about all the countries and regions experiencing ‘deep lumpenization’, is the profound disarticulation of their economies and smashing of their social fabric due to free trade agreements with the US (Mexico and Central America) and the large scale US military intervention during their civil wars (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia). The US politico-military intervention left millions without work and worse, destroyed the possibility of reformist or revolutionary political alliances coming to power and carrying out meaningful structural changes. The restoration of US backed neo-liberal-militarist collaborator regimes left the young unemployed peasants and workers with three choices: (1)submit to degradation and poverty (2) emigrate to North America or Europe (3) join one or another of the narco-trafficking organizations, as a risky but lucrative route out of poverty. The timing of the rise and dynamic growth of lumpen power coincides with the imposition of US free trade and political victories in the aforementioned regions. From the early 1990’s forward lumpen power spreads across the region fueled by NAFTA decimating the Mexican small producers and the US imposed Central American “peace accords” which effectively destroyed the chances of socio-economic change and dismantled but did not disarm the militias and paramilitary gunmen.

Case Studies of Lumpen Dual Power: Mexico

Mexico, unlike the other major economies of Latin America did not experience any popular upheavals or center-left electoral outcomes during the late 1990’s or early 2000. Unlike Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador, in which new center-left regimes came to power imposing regulatory controls on financial speculation, Mexico witnessed electoral fraud and signed off on NAFTA, deepening its ties to Wall Street. As a result it experienced a series of financial shocks, undermining its capacity to launch a more diversified trading and investment model. Unlike Argentina which launched state directed employment generating investment policies, Mexico, under US tutelage, relied on emigration and overseas remittances to compensate for the loss of millions of jobs in agriculture , small and medium manufacturing activity and retail sales. While popular uprisings and mobilization in Latin America led to the rise of center-left regimes capable of securing greater independence in economic policy from the US and the IMF, the Mexican elite literally stole elections in 1988 and 2006, blocking the possibility of an alternative model. It successfully repressed alternative peasant movements in Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero unlike the successes in Bolivia and Ecuador. While the center-left regimes captured the economic surplus from the agro-mineral sectors and increased public and private investment in production and social spending, Mexico witnessed massive illegal and legal outflows of investments into speculative ventures in the US: an outflow of over $55 billion between 2006-2010. Regional migration within Latin America fueled by high growth, led to rising income; overseas immigration depleted Mexico of skilled and unskilled labor; in some cases ‘return migration’ from the US of deported gang members, with arms and drug networks fueled the growth of lumpen power . With the severe recession, US immigration policy led to the closing of the border, the massive deportation of Mexican immigrants and the decline of the major source of foreign earnings: remittances. Pervasive and deep corruption throughout the cupula of the Mexican political and economic system, combined with the decline of the legitimate economy, the absence of channels for popular redress and Washington’s insistence that militarization and not social investments was the solution to rising crime, led to the huge influx of young recruits to the growing network of lumpen-capitalist directed narco enterprises. With almost all US and Mexican financial institutions and arms vendors as willing partners and an unlimited pool of young recruits with a ‘lean and hungry look’, Mexico evolved into a fiercely contested terrain between a half dozen rival lumpen organizations,and the Mexican military, with nearly 30,000 deaths between 2006-2010.

Lumpenization: Central America

Drug gangs dominate the streets of the major cities and countryside of all the countries which were militarized during the US backed counter-revolutionary wars between the 1960’s to early 1990’s. US proxy military dictators and their civilian clients, in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras decimated civil society and particularly the mass popular organizations. In El Salvador over 75,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands were uprooted, driven across borders or into urban shanty towns. In Guatemala over 200,000 mostly Mayan Indians were murdered by the US trained “special forces” and over 450 villages were obliterated in the course of a scorched earth policy. In Nicaragua, the Somoza dictatorship and the subsequent US financed and trained counter-revolutionary (“contra”) mercenary army killed and maimed close to 100,000 people and devastated the economy. In Honduras, the US embassy promoted and financed in-country and cross-border counter-insurgency operations which killed, uprooted and forced thousands of Honduran peasants into exile. Highly militarized Central American societies, in which US funded and armed death squads murdered with impunity, in which the economy of small producers was shattered and ‘normal’ market activity was subject to military assaults, led to the growth of illegal crops, drug and people smuggling. With the so-called “peace agreements”, the leaders of the insurgents became “institutionalized”in elite electoral politics,while large numbers of unemployed ex-guerrillas and demobilized death squad militia members found no place in the status quo. The neo-liberal order imposed by the US client rulers with its free market ideology built “fortress neighborhoods”, hired an army of private “security” guards, while the productive bases of small scale agriculture was destroyed. Millions of Central Americans faced the familiar “routes out of poverty”: outmigration, forming or joining criminal gangs, or attempting to find an economic niche in an unpromising environment. Outmigration for semi-educated former members of armed bands led to their early entrée into armed groups, deportation back to Central America, swelling the ranks of narco traffickers in their “home country”. Highly repressive immigration policies implemented in the new millennium closed the escape valve for most Central Americans fleeing violence and poverty. Former guerrilla fighters and their families, abandoned by their former leaders embedded in electoral parties, turned their military experience toward carving a new living, as security guards for the rich, or as armed traffickers competing for ‘market shares’ with and against the discharged deathsquad militia members. Between 2000-2010, the annual number of homicides exceeded the number of deaths suffered during the worst period of the civil wars of the 1980s. US imposed peace agreements and the neo-liberal order which resulted, led to the total lumpenization of the economy and polity throughout the region, the practice of electoral politics and even the election of “center-left” politicos in El Salvador and Nicaragua notwithstanding. Lumpenization was a direct consequence of the ‘scorched earth’ and ‘mass uprooting’ counter-insurgency policies which were central to US re-establishing dominance in the region. Economic and personal insecurity and social misery were the price paid by imperial Washington to prevent a popular revolution.

Case Study: Colombia

The ties between the world centers of finance and the most degenerate and blood curdling ruler in the Western Hemisphere were most evident in the slavishly laudatory puff-pieces published in the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal in praise of President Alvaro Uribe, while over 3 million Colombians were driven off their lands, several thousands were murdered, over a thousand trade unionists, journalists and human rights activists were killed. Two thirds of his Congressional backers were financed by narco-traffickers. Incarcerated deathsquad leaders identified top military officials as their primary supporters. All of Colombia’s Presidents collaborated closely with US military missions and all were financed and associated with the multi-billion dollar drug cartels, even as the Pentagon claimed to be engaged in a “war against drug trafficking”. Landlords and their financial and real estate backers organized private militias, which terrorized, uprooted and killed hundreds of thousands of peasants, others fled to the urban slums, or across the border to neighboring countries. Others joined the guerrillas, and still others were recruited by the death squads and military. With the advance of the guerrilla armies and then President Pastrana’s opening to peace negotiations, President Clinton launched a $5 billion dollar military scheme, “Plan Colombia” to quadruple Colombia’s air and ground forces and deathsquads. With Washington’s backing, Alvaro Uribe, a notorious narco-deathsquad politico, so identified by US officials, took power and launched a massive scorched earth policy, murdering and displacing millions of peasants and urban slum dwellers in an effort to undermine the vast network of community organizations sympathetic to the agrarian reform, public investment and anti-military program of the guerrilla movements. Mass terror and population flight emptied whole swathes of the countryside; livelihoods were destroyed and landlords in alliance with drug cartel bosses and Generals seized millions of acres of land. For the financial and respectable mass media, the massification of terror mattered not: the insurgents were ‘contained’, driven back, put on the defensive. They trumpeted the killing of key guerrilla leaders: foreign corporate property was secure. Rule by Uribe, the military and the narco-death squads secured US power and influence and created an ideal “jumping off” location for destabilizing the democratically elected Venezuelan President Chavez. The latter was especially important by the mid 2000’s when Washington’s internal assets attempted coup and lockout were resoundingly defeated in 2002-03. Having gained strategic territorial advantage over the guerrillas, Washington in collaboration with Uribe moved to shift the balance of power between the narco-deathsquads and the state: a disarmament and demobilization and amnesty was proclaimed. The result was detailed revelations of the deep structural links between narco-deathsquads and the Uribe police state regime, up to and including family members and cabinet ministers. While ‘nominally’ the cartels are in retreat, in fact, they have become decentralized .Equally important top politicos and military officials continue to collaborate in the production, processing and shipping of billion dollar cocaine exports … with major US banks laundering illicit funds.

Rule of Lumpen-Capitalism in the Imperial System

Drug trafficking has deep roots in the economies of North and South America and has profound ramifications throughout their societies. One cannot understand the tremendous growth of US banking and financial centers if not for the $25 to $50 billion dollar yearly income and transfers from laundering drug funds and double that amount from illegal money transfers by business and political leaders directly and indirectly benefiting from the drug trade. Lumpen capitalists, their collaborators, facilitators paramilitary mercenaries and military partners play a major political role in sustaining the imperial system. Washington’s major influence and principle area of dominance resides in those countries where lumpen power and deathsquad operations are most prevalent, namely Central America, Colombia and Mexico. Both phenomena are derived from US designed ‘scorched earth’ counter-insurgency strategies that prevented alterations, modifications or reforms of the neo-liberal order and blocked the successful emergence of social movements and center-left regimes as took place in most of Latin America. The contemporary imperial system relies on lumpen capitalists, their economic networks and military formations in practically every major area of conflict even as these collaborators are constant areas of friction. As in Afghanistan and Iraq today and in Central America in the recent past and in Latin America under the military dictatorships, the US relies on drug traffickers, military gangsters engaged in extortion, kidnapping, property seizures and the pillage of public property and treasury to destroy popular movements, to divide and conquer communities and above all to terrorize the general public and civil society. The singular growth of the financial sector especially in the US is in part the result of its being the massive recipient of large scale sustained flows of ‘plunder capital’ by lumpen rulers and their economic partners via ‘political crony’ privatizations, foreign loans which never entered the local economy and other such forms of pillage characteristic of ‘predator’ classes. The deep structural affinities between Wall Street speculators and Latin lumpen-capitalists provided the backdrop for the ascendancy of a new class of lumpen financiers in the imperial financial centers: bogus bonds, mortgage swindles, falsified assessments by stock ratings agencies, trillion dollar raids on state treasuries define the heart and soul of contemporary imperialism. If it is true that the promotion and financing of lumpen warlord capitalists was an essential defense mechanism at the periphery of the empire to contain popular insurgencies, it is also true that the growth of lumpen capitalism severely weakened the very core of the imperial economy, namely its productive and export sectors leading to uncontrollable deficits, out of control speculative bubbles and massive and sustained reductions of living standards and incomes. Lumpen classes were both the agencies for consolidating the empire and its undoing: tactical gains at the periphery led to strategic losses in the imperial centers. Imperial policymakers resort to terrorist formations resulted from their incapacity to resolve internal contradictions within a legal, electoral framework. The high domestic political cost of long term warfare led inevitably to the recruitment of mercenary lumpen armies who extracted an economic tribute for questionable loyalty. Lacking any popular constituency, mercenary armies rely on terror to secure circumstantial submission. Having secured control, local warlords preside over the rapid and massive growth of drugs and other lumpen economic practices. The alliance of empire and lumpen capitalists against modern secular and traditional insurgencies, brings together high technology weaponry and primitive clan based religious-ethnic racists in Iraq and Afghanistan and deracinated psychopaths in the case of Colombia, Mexico and Central America. For Washington military and political supremacy and territorial conquests take priority over economic gain. In the case of Colombia the scorched earth policy undermined production and lucrative trade with Venezuela. Imperial ascendancy had similar consequences in Asia, the Middle East and Central America.

When Lumpen Power becomes a Problem for the Imperial State

Lumpen capitalism develops a dynamic of its own, independent of its role as an imperial instrument for destroying popular insurgency. It challenges imperial collaborator regimes. It displaces, threatens, or cajoles foreign and domestic capitalists. In the extreme, it establishes a private army, seizes territorial control, recruits and trains networks of intelligence agents within the armed forces and police, undermining imperial influence. In a word lumpen organized military capitalism threatens the security of imperial hegemony: newly emerging predators threaten the established collaborators. The imperial attempts to use and dispose of lumpen counterinsurgency forces has failed; the demobilized paras become the professional gunmen of a “third force” – neither imperial nor insurgent. The decimation of the reformist center-left option, which took hold in Latin America, precludes a socio-economic alternative capable of integrating the young combative unemployed, stimulating the productive economy, diversifying markets and escaping the pitfalls of a US centered neo-liberal order. The divergence of priorities and strategies between Latin America’s center-left and Washington has as much to do with economic and class interests as it has with ideological agendas. For the US security means defeating the rising power of lumpen military economic formations in their remaining ‘power bases’. For Latin America, security concerns are secondary to diversifying and boosting market shares within Latin America and overseas. Lumpen power is currently under the political control of domestic rulers in Latin America; it is out of control in US clients. The US solution is military; the Latin approach is greater growth; social expenditures and police repression especially in Brazil. The Latin solution has greater attraction, evident in Colombia’s break with the US military base and encirclement strategy toward Venezuela. Colombia’s new President opted for $8 billion dollar trade deals with Venezuela’s Chavez over and against costly million dollar military base agreements with the US. Clearly the US economic decline in Latin America as a direct result of its reliance on military and lumpen power, is in full force. The driving force of accelerated decline is not popular insurgency but the attraction and lucrative opportunities of the economic marketplace within Latin America and beyond for the local ruling classes. Insofar as militarism defines the policies and strategies of the US Empire there is no remedy for the challenges of lumpen power in its ‘backyard’. And Washington has nothing on offer to recapture a dominant presence in Latin America. The world market is defeating the empire. Latin America’s twenty-first century capitalists are leading the way to further decline in imperial power.

Jews, European, Americans, National Difference, and Accomplishment

A very interesting comment by Wade From MO. I happen to agree with him, but feel free to discuss. I get so tired of IQ reductionism. Nature provides the clay, cultures the sculptor! It’s so true, I don’t even see why we bother debating except for all these ideologues with axes to grind.

I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on the impact of national characteristics in types and ‘flavor’ of accomplishment?I think it is quite an interesting question. Look for example at Germany/Austria. German philosophy is widely know as being highbrow and almost impenetrable (read Kant). It is traditionally more idealistic in outlook. In Germany/Austria, at least early in the 20th century, there was the tradition of the philosopher-scientist. Men like David Hilbert, Albert Einstein, and Gottlieb Frege made great breakthroughs in science that also had a huge philosophical significance. Of particular interest is the relationship between Albert Einstein and the great logician Kurt Godel. Both were extremely interested and inspired by Kant. Their work has almost mystical overtones, at least when it first came out. Godel was a well known Platonist and this is said to have been a large influence on his philosophic views. England, however, is quite different. The English have always been a more practical people. Metaphysics has been looked down upon at times there. Originally Isaac Newton only wanted to talk about experiments. He thought the ideas of atoms and other unseen things was unscientific. England has had a lot of physicists and engineers who were great, but a considerably lower, but still significant, number of pure mathematicians. The United States has gone to the extreme. Americans, at least until a few decades ago, were probably the most practical of scientifically advanced peoples. Americans abound in the annuls of technology and engineering from about 1850-1950 but have almost a total dearth of significant mathematicians. While America did have some significant theoretical physicists, it seems most of out most important ones at this time were experimental physicists. America has gotten better on theoretical things in this past half century though. If you want an idea of the people in this era look at Charles Murray’s “Human Accomplishment.” Some people don’t like the methodology, but the figures closely resemble things I’ve read about. What does this have to do with Jews? It just seems to me that, while they may have higher IQ’s, Jews can’t overcome their host societies. Something I thought was interesting in Murray’s book was that he points out that while Jews may have disproportionately high amounts of influential people, they all existed in societies that were already producing influential people. Jews were great physicists and mathematicians in Germany and Hungary, but those entire societies were known for physicists and mathematicians. Jews became important figures in the United States, but they begin to come out after the civil war when all of America began exploding with scientists, especially inventors and engineers. I’ve never heard of Jews making great contributions to science or culture where the rest of society is not. How many great Jews scientists have come from Latin America? Historically there were some Jews down there and there are today, but they don’t put out geniuses like they do in the US. Even Israel doesn’t seem to produce smarter Jews like the US. Maybe it’s because the US has a higher proportion of Ashkenazi Jews and Israel has more Arab Jews. I don’t think this can account for it all though. I don’t think even Jewish intelligence can break out of a fundamentally dumb culture. There has to be something more than just IQ in the air to make a society that will contribute fundamentally to the intellectual and cultural life of mankind.

Rumors of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

Savvas Tzionis, one of my favorite commenters, writes in, expressing some concern:

Robert,I thought YOU were dead…. post wise, you were (relatively) quiet! LOL

Boo! I’m here! Scared you, huh? Sorry folks, it’s Thanksgiving, I’ve been depressed for some reason, and I’ve been extremely tired. This is a very bad time of year for me. I tend to get depressed from around Thanksgiving to around Christmas and maybe through January too. This coincides with the two months in which the days are the shortest of the whole year. Not only that, but even when the sun bothers to come out, it might as well not even be there. It gives off little heat and the light it gives off is pitiful. You look up at the sun and think, “Damn, is that all you can do? You’re sorry!” Sometimes the sun is so shitty and dim, I figure the moon might as well come out in the day instead and it’d be a wash. I think I may have Seasonal Affective Disorder – SAD. This time of year is so damned dreary for me! I used to have it a lot worse, but I’m on Lexapro fulltime now, and ever since then, I don’t have it as long. I used to have it all winter until the start of true spring! I remember once I was in therapy for OCD and Depression. It was March or so and we were making no progress with the depression. I was apologetic, but when you’re down, you’re down, and there doesn’t seem to be much you can do about it! I had a girlfriend at the time and she was getting pissed too, because she wasn’t really subject to depression. Finally, Spring came, and I brightened up just like that! Nothing had changed; my life still more or less sucked just as bad as before. Next therapy session, I announced that my depression had lifted. The therapist was joyful and wanted to take credit. I shot him down real quick. It was nothing he had done, it was only that the seasons had changed! He looked a little downcast, but he was still happy that I was better. Often, it’s Spring, Summer or Fall, and I’m happy as a clam. Every now and then I look around and notice that my life frankly sucks to high heaven, but I’m happy as a pig in shit anyway. Then I look outside, it’s 90 degrees outside, and it’s like no matter what’s going on, how could you possibly be depressed in this? I’m told that most humans in non-tropical climates get happier and more active in hotter weather and longer days and gloomier and less active in the depths of the dark and cold days, but it’s only clinical depression in a minority. I’ve also heard of folks in Minnesota or places like that who had bad Winter Depression moving to tropical places like the Philippines and suddenly they were happy year-round. By the way, there are high suicide, depression and alcoholism rates in Siberia, Russia, Scandinavia, Canada and Alaska. Obviously, it’s related to latitude and little else. I wonder if any of my readers have the same experiences?

An Examination of the Frog Extinction Epidemic

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

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

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

References

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

Adventures in Owling

Repost from the old site. For the last few weeks here in Coarsegold, California (elevation 2000′ in the Sierra Nevada Mountains), I have been hearing strange “Screech! Screech!” noises at night, often very late at night. I’m hearing them right now, as a matter of fact. I’m an experienced bird watcher, and I assumed they were birds, so I grabbed a strong flashlight (you need a strong flashlight to look at any night birds) and went outside. Most birds are simply not active at nighttime. Day-active birds will usually just go up into a tree and sleep there at night. I had a rare bird on my property in 1990 in Southern California and I had bird-watchers coming every day to come see it. It was a Brown Thrasher, common in the Eastern US but very rare in the West. The bird stayed on my property for about three days. At nighttime, I went out looking for it and found it in a bunch of trees on the side of the house. We think that they just go up into a tree and probably sleep up there. I guess they need to sleep too, like everything else. The only birds active at nighttime are generally owls. There are also some birds like nightjars and whippoorwills that become active at dusk. I’m not sure if they stay active at night or not. So if you hear a bird at night, it’s an owl. Well, I went outside and the strange screeches kept coming from a huge tree nearby. I shone my light up there and there were some good-sized owls up there. I couldn’t figure out what kind they were because it was night and they weren’t fitting into any known categories. One flew away and I noticed how huge it was in flight. I went back in and did some research on the Net. At first I was thinking “Screech owl” because we do have Western Screech Owls here. But they are quite small and have a distinctive call. They make this call on hot summer nights, often very late at night, but it’s not a screech, in spite of the name. It’s more of a “bouncing ball” call. It’s hard to describe unless you have heard it. On the Net I learned that baby Great Horned Owls do make a “Screech!” call. That fit in with my perceptions about the birds’ size. A horned owl is a very large bird. They are so large that they are known to prey on house cats. They are also very common in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. So these were baby Great Horned Owls. I guess they fledge here in July and August. What was interesting was there were around 5-10 of them in a small area, all calling to each other. The size also ruled out Screech Owls , because they are quite small. You need to understand that “baby birds”, once fledged, are about the size of adult birds and are often indistinguishable from them. Some smaller birds have juvenile plumage, but among larger birds, it’s not common. In Orange County in the late 1980’s, I saw two crows of about the same size, one feeding the other one with its beak. This is how birds feed each other. I did some research and learned that that is a baby crow. Baby crows are about the same size as adults. Adults will feed them for a while after they fledge and leave the nest, but then they need to take off. I also had some acorn woodpeckers living in a huge oak tree on my property in the mountains. They live in communal units of multiple adults and even raise the young communally. They may raise more than one clutch in a good year. I noticed that after the young were fledged, they stuck around for a while, and the adults continued to feed them. Then I guess they took off. This myth, so beloved by American parents with adult kids still at home long past the time to leave, about adult birds “throwing the young out of the nest” as soon as they fledge, is just not true. First of all, baby birds can’t fly very well as soon as they fledge. Sometimes if you are lucky in Spring you can see baby birds scuttling along the ground trying to fly. I’ve seen this in House Sparrows in Fresno, California. I think they scuttle along the ground and half-fly for a few days or so, then they get it. They fly for a short distance, then they land. They must be extremely vulnerable to predation in this stage. Keeping baby birds around after they fledge is a positive adaptation in evolutionary terms. Larger birds such as woodpeckers and surely crows are thought to be more evolved, so they seem to keep the young at home for a while after fledging. Tossing the babies out of the nest is evolutionarily stupid, since if they can’t fly well, they will be very vulnerable to predation. Trust me, they are vulnerable enough in the nesting phase! I had an Ash-Throated Flycatcher nesting on my Oakhurst property one year. My cats figured out the story after a while, and kept trying to climb up to the nest. I’m sure predators like raccoons are even worse. I even understand that snakes can climb trees and raid nests. I’ve never seen so many owls as I’ve seen up here in the mountains. Twice I saw Northern Saw-Whet Owls on the road in Oakhurst, once at dusk and once at 9:30 PM on a sleety night in winter – this one had a mouse in its talons! Saw-Whet Owls descend to the Oakhurst area in winter. Another time, also in Oakhurst at dusk, I saw small birds “mobbing” something just before dusk. When you see that, it’s generally a predatory bird like a hawk or an owl. It was dusk. I ran inside, got my binoculars, and went back. After a while, I saw that they were mobbing a Northern Pygmy-Owl . It’s a pretty cool little bird, with fake eyes in the back of it’s head! Nice evolutionary trick to fool you into thinking it’s looking at you when it’s not. I think that this trick evolved to help this small owl avoid predators, because there I’m not sure there is an advantage for a predator to seem like it has eyes in the back of its head. A couple of years ago, in Oakhurst near some apartments at dusk, I saw a huge bird swoop down on some bare ground in front of some apartments, grab something and take off back up to a Ponderosa Pine tree, where it was promptly mobbed by a bunch of small birds. I stopped and looked long enough to see that it was a Great Horned Owl with a mouse (probably a deer mouse) in its talons. Mobbing is an interesting tactic. Small birds with fly in large numbers at a hawk or an owl. Often these hawks or owls are the same ones that kill and eat these same small birds. Accipter hawks such as Goshawks are mobbed, but I have never seen a Buteo such as a Red-tailed Hawk mobbed. Buteos typically subsist solely on small mammals and reptiles and seldom if ever eat other birds. But accipters are bird hawks. They prey on other birds. I once saw a Goshawk being mobbed by small birds, fly out of some underbrush, and over to a post where it sat for a bit while the others continued to mob it. The idea of mobbing is strength in numbers. Although they attack predators known to prey on them, if you have enough small birds, it will confuse and upset the predator enough to so it won’t attack them. It’s also an early warning system for any other small birds in the area that a predator is in the area. In addition, by mobbing, the small birds try to drive the predator away from them and off to somewhere else.

On Spotted Owls

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

Problems of Leftwing Democracy

Repost from the old site. In the comments section, astute commenter huy remarks on the conundrum of socialist democracy when capitalists retain control over the media and culture::

The only problem is that a socialist revolution would probably require a dictatorship and repression. This is because without dictatorship and repression, rich capitalists would be able to prevent significant social services and state planning in a democracy via their control of the media and peoples’ thoughts. I’m not for socialism as a long term thing, but only as a way to quickly develop a country’s infrastructure and economy, before gradual privatization of suitable sectors.

I respond: huy is are correct as far as his first two sentences go. I will deal with the third sentence at the end. This conundrum is why Communists opted for the dictatorship of the proletariat, not because they are lovers of repression and haters of freedom. The rich capitalists, through their media control and also their cultural construction and fertilization creating Gramscian cultural hegemonies (what huy referred to as “control over people’s thoughts”), are typically able to prevent social services and state planning in a democracy. This is why Communists say that you never really have a democracy in capitalism. You always have a dictatorship of capital. Be that as it may, most folks nowadays do not seem to want to live under a dictatorship of the proletariat. Nevertheless, the roadblocks in the way of socialist democracy present a a serious problem. Not only are the capitalists able to thwart significant progressive change via media and cultural control, but the same capitalists, via control over the economy, are able to stage lockouts and capital strikes, to send their capital out of the country, to artificially create shortages, and to send wealthy housewives out into the streets beating pots and pans in a middle and upper class strike, etc. These housewife pot-banging strikes occurred in Chile under Allende, Venezuela under Chavez, and just recently occurred again in Argentina when President Kirchner tried to tax booming agricultural exports. The big ag producers in Argentina responded by trying to starve the cities by staging ag strikes and refusing to ship produce to the cities so the people would have nothing to eat. What is ominous about this is that these same rich housewife pot-banging demos and a latifundista (large landowner elite) strike presaged the coup that brought the death squads into power in Argentina in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. The generals stayed in power for several years, during which they murdered 30,000 leftwing Argentines, the vast majority of whom were just idealistic young people working with the poor and had not taken up arms at all. The capitalists will usually try to stage a coup through their control over the military too. That is why Hugo Chavez is correct in cleansing the corrupt bosses’ oil workers’ union, in cleansing the officer corps of the military of reactionary elements, and putting in some state media. The corrupt state oil workers union was a white collar union of well to do managers who had been operating the state oil company as a personal ATM for decades. They were behind the owners’ lockout strike that followed the coup, and after Chavez fired those who had been behind the lockout and sabotage, they destroyed much of the records and paperwork of the oil company before they left. Clearly they had to go. In the previous coup attempt, the middle and upper-class officer corps supported the coup, but the enlisted men, who came from the poor, did not. The poor rank and file military refused their officers’ orders, and the officers backed down. Hence, cleansing the officer corps of coup supporters was a must. Getting a foot in the door of the Right’s media monopoly was also important. Previously, the rich had all of the papers, magazines and especially TV stations and they used these to wage continuous lying propaganda war against Chavez. Furthermore, the entire rightwing media not only supported the coup attempt against Chavez but was actively complicit in it. For that treason, Chavez is perfectly within his rights to shut down the entire rightwing media. He only does not do this because of the international outcry it would arouse. The Right did the same thing with their media control during the Allende regime in Chile, printing wild lies about Cuban armies offshore and hiding in Chilean bases ready to invade Chile and impose Communism at gunpoint. Middle class and upper class capital strikes can be devastating to the economy, and most folks, no matter how revolutionary, just get tired of the economic pain after a while and vote to put the reactionaries back in power. Sanctions work the same way. The US and UK and sometimes France and Canada (when those two latter states are in an imperialist mood) usually slap sanctions on democratic Left states as soon as possible. Recent examples are Nicaragua, Haiti and Zimbabwe (at first democratic, now increasingly dictatorial), and this alone is enough to devastate the economy and cause the people to vote out the Left and put reactionaries back in power. What happens is that in an effort to get some control of the country back and fight back against all of this US plots, the Left regime often starts becoming more authoritarian and less democratic. Then the US says it’s a dictatorship and needs to be overthrown on that basis. If that doesn’t work, the US forms a reactionary contra counterrevolutionary army that goes around killing any civilian that is pro-Left, murdering teachers and health care workers, burning down schools, ag cooperatives and health care facilities and just making the place ungovernable. In order to fend off contras and coups, Chavez has built up his military and even armed the population. One more thing the US does is to flood money into the democratic Left country to buy the election of the reactionaries via all sorts of fake civil society groups. A good way to stop this is to ban all money coming to political groups from outside the country, but that is easier said than done. The money seems to find its way in anyway. The US and its reactionary allies also stage bombings, shootings, riots, etc, against democratic Left states, and then often blames them on the Left. This is what they did in Chavez’ Venezuela, Aristide’s Haiti and Mossadegh’s Iran. If worse comes to worse and none of the above works, the Left regime is overthrown by a coup and replaced by a reactionary dictatorship. This dictatorship typically then institutes a reign of terror in which anywhere from 100’s to 1 million progressives are killed all over the land. This is what happened in Indonesia in 1965, when 1 million Leftists were killed in a CIA coup. What is even creepier is that while the Left is in power, the CIA is usually running around the country making up lists of leftwingers. As soon as the coup comes, the CIA hands over the lists to the death squad Right now in power, and they use these lists to hunt down progressives and murder them. So if a Left regime is in power, there is always the terror of a future coup followed by a murder spree against anyone politically active in the regime. This is enough to make people afraid to get politically active. The reign of terror itself so so terrorizes the population that most people are afraid to get involved in progressive politics for years or even decades afterwards. Why get involved? Who is to say when the death squads will come back in power and try to kill you for being politically active in Left politics? All of this makes socialist democracy or even social democracy in backwards states almost impossible to achieve. On the other hand, lots of leftwingers are trying to figure out a way to have some sort of socialist or even Marxist democracy, despite all the challenges. The Sandinistas had a democratic socialist revolution, and Hugo Chavez is having one too. The Nepalese Maoists support 10 When I look at Cuba and I think about a few dissidents getting thrown in prison, is that really worse than masses of people dying early from preventable death or not having enough food to eat, or living in shantytown hovels, or prostituting themselves, or homeless kids sniffing glue, turning into criminals and getting killed by cops as happens all over Latin America? Third World capitalist nightmare states punish an awful lot of innocent people too. Doesn’t Cuba punish a lot fewer innocent people by clapping a few dissidents in prison than are harmed in these failing 3rd world capitalist states? In India, capitalism is killing 4 million people a year. That’s a five-alarm fire right there. If we had a socialist revolution there even with a dictatorship and saved 4 million lives a year, would it be worth it for a few folks slapped in prison? I do think that the new way of Chavez, the Sandinistas, the FMLN of El Salvador and the Nepalese Maoists is the better way to go. Nothing wrong with democracy. If the people reject socialism at the polls and go back to capitalism and lots of them go hungry, go homeless, drink sewage water, get sick, get crippled and start dying, I guess we can say that they made a choice to have that happen to themselves. Most socialist countries did go socialist for a while (usually decades) to develop the economy and then go towards capitalism after they were pretty well developed. People have no idea how much of China’s economic growth is based on the foundations laid by decades of Maoism. At any rate, most do not realize China is still a very socialist country in many ways. The Communists in Russia built that place up from nothing. Without the USSR, Russia would probably be like India or Afghanistan. The Vietnamese and Laotian Communists are also putting in a lot of capitalism, and North Korea now has joint partnerships for foreign investors. I support Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela in their experiments at mixed economy. I also really like social market of Belarus. Really what we ought to look at is does the system give us the outcomes that we want? If it does, it doesn’t matter what mixtures of socialist, collective and private ownership it has. There are also all sorts of ways of enterprise ownership. We can have nonprofits, labor collectives, family-run businesses, single owners and ownership by neighborhoods, towns, cities, states and nations. All of these forms of ownership are operating all over the world as you read this. The cooperative sector in particular is a great way to go, and most do not realize it is a non-capitalist economic system. Worker-owned firms compete with each other, and there is no exploitation of labor as in capitalism. One of the best examples of that is the Mondragon cooperatives in the Basque Country. Most Cuban agriculture is now run by cooperatives. In the cooperative model, you get away from the management-labor conflict you see in capitalism.

Cool Page On Social Democracy

Repost from the old site. This is a really cool page on the Social Democratic Party of America. There are several social democratic parties in the US, and no, rightwing fuckwads, they are not much like the Democratic Party at all. A lot of them don’t even like the Democratic Party. Social democracy means a lot of things all over the world. There is a Socialist International of socialist parties all over the world, and I support that organization. Even a lot of Communists don’t necessarily hate it. A lot of us on the Left support all sorts of socialist models, from Communism to social democracy even all the way to the US Democratic Party. Your average US rightwing shithead can’t seem to figure that out, but then, they subscribe to a philosophy that is narrow-minded and stupid in both intent and praxis. Truth is, as you can see by this page, there is not a lot of love lost between at least this social democratic party and Communists. To say that they are one and the same just shows that you are a stupid rightwing asshole. No serious political scientist would make such a statement. I don’t necessarily agree with this party in their critique of Cuba, Belarus and other countries ruled by Communist-type regimes, but hey, it’s a big tent here on the Left. There are all sorts of social democratic parties all over the world. As you can see, they are major parties in Slovenia, Japan, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Romania, Ukraine, Iceland, Austria, Serbia, Poland , Paraguay, Portugal, Finland, Cameroon, Guatemala, Tajikistan, Macedonia, France, Italy, Sweden, Belarus, Denmark and all sorts of other places. I have varying opinions on how well they are doing; I think that the ones in Europe have done a pretty good job. But I have a pretty low opinion of Lula’s PT in Brazil, Bachelet’s Socialist Party in Chile, the UK Labor Party (An imperialist socialist party?), and I doubt if this new Guatemalan party is going to get much done. The Peruvian social democrats have a particularly horrible record. The Sandinistas in Nicaragua will not be able to get much done either. Cristina Merkel is having a hard time getting a lot of her agenda through in Argentina. Social democracy seems to work best in highly developed and wealthy countries, as you can see above. In the poor Third World, they haven’t been able to do much to change the reactionary and backwards nature of society, nor to alleviate poverty, nor to do much of anything. I think in a lot of cases there may be a necessity for revolutionary change, either via the way of the gun, or possibly peacefully in a more civilized society via the Hugo Chavez model. In Europe, the ruling classes and the Right were completely destroyed in World War 2, which left millions of rightists and fascists dead and left the whole rightwing movement scattered and discredited. Hence social democracy was able to make a lot of headway with a defeated and more or less rendered-civilized and neutered Right. Further, society itself changed in that even the wealthy, the upper middle classes, the middle classes, and corporate executives began to support social democracy. In part this social pact was due to massive pressure from the Left which caused the European Right and business classes to sue for peace via a Social Compact. Also, society itself changed and social democracy became the dominant model for all classes. Something similar occurred in Japan. The Right was destroyed by the war, and those that were not dead were discredited and humiliated. In Eastern Europe, decades of Communism may have left a distaste for Communism but not for social democracy. Once again, most of the rightists were simply slaughtered, the rest were in jail or discredited, and society itself was well-molded along socialist lines for decades. In Latin America, faced with a much more backwards, venal, dishonest, amoral, criminal, corrupt, and murderous upper class and upper middle class intent on staying in power at all costs, social democracy has had a really hard time getting much done. It’s fascinating that the US has allowed social democracy to flower in Europe, but has smashed every glimmer of it in Latin America as “Communism” or “dictatorship”. Socialist parties in India (the Congress Party) have failed for similar reasons as the ones in Latin America. Social democracy in Sri Lanka has a good record. In most of the Arab World, there is a more or less socialist model in place, no matter what the governments call themselves. Radical free market capitalism is contrary to Arab society and to Islam itself, hence it is not likely to succeed in any Arab or Islamic society. Cambodia is run by a socialist party. So is Burma, but most socialists want nothing to do with them. Contrary to rightwing bullshit, socialism in the form of social democracy has not failed at all. It is not a failed or discredited model or any of that. Social democratic parties have sadly had a really hard time getting off the ground in the United States. For the most part, this is because America is extremely rightwing for a developed country. It is no exaggeration to say that the US is the most reactionary developed country on Earth, in both its leadership and in its citizens. This is 10 There’s been a decades-long propaganda war against socialism in which the word “socialism” was deviously married to word “Communism”. Americans being a bunch of morons, and basically very rightwing in their natures, swallowed the whole thing. But in the mid-1970’s, things were different. We had had over a decade of fairly progressive politics, even under Republicans, and leaders of major US corporations got together, agitated and worried. They said that if something is not done now, we are going to have a European-style social democracy in the US. This began a years-long project to set up and fund a series rightwing foundations and think tanks in the US. They are still going strong, and have tremendous influence on US politics due to their ability to churn out papers, speakers and conferences on issues almost immediately. They have deep ties to the reactionary corporate media and quickly popped onto TV and the front page and kept there as long as the Right wants or needs any issue to be spotlighted. It is true that there is a tradition of radical individualism in the US, but that’s only among White people. This may have been slightly reasonable at some point if you were Davey Crockett building a cabin in the woods, but those days are long gone. One great thing about the loss of a White majority in the US (which will be both good and bad) is that US non-Whites, in particular Hispanics and Blacks, are much more sympathetic to at least Democratic Party politics and possibly social democracy. On the other hand, reactionary politics have such a deep hold on this country that even some younger Blacks and Hispanics, once they start making some money, adopt some form of reactionary politics, typically nowadays along the lines of the faddish but ultra-rightwing libertarianism. This is discouraging, and shows that a non-Whites in the US are not necessarily a progressive bloc. Another thing to note is that despite the hostile rhetoric some US social democratic parties take towards the Democratic Party, we already have a lot of social democracy here in the US, brought to us actually by both political parties. The Right, meaning White America, has been savagely slashing away at this social democracy for decades now, but even so, it’s a Hell of a lot better record than the social democratic parties in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Guatemala, Jamaica and Brazil, which in my opinion have failed to varying degrees. If Americans were anything like Europeans, social democracy ought to be an easy play here in the US. But for one thing, White Americans’ opposition to high taxation is going to make this a difficult project. White Americans’ opposition to socialism and social democracy is rooted in a lot of things, but one of the main things is race. It’s all about taking the hard-earned tax dollars of White Americans and giving them to worthless gangbanging, welfare-addicted, drug-abusing Hispanics and Black criminals, scumbags and lowlifes. Truth is that this simple-minded mindset has devastated a lot of hardworking working-class lower to mid-income Whites, but White America just can’t see that. White Americans don’t have much in the way of racial solidarity. If there is anything, there is solidarity based on class and that’s it. Whites in the suburbs think that low-income and working class Whites, whom they refer to as White trash, can fuck off. While White American politics are indeed often rooted in race, they are also rooted in class too, and the two can be contradictory. Life is complicated.

Debate With an Aztlanista Traitor

Frederic, apparently an Aztlanista reconquista traitor who has listened to one too many Latrino Studies lectures, comments. His comments are in the blockquotes.

But I guess if Mexico gets it shit together and becomes a first world, thriving country somewhen in the future, then a political reconquista will probably be the inevitable.

This will never happen. Mexico will always be Mexico because it is full of Mexicans. Nothing can change this reality. Anyway, if it did happen, the US would hopefully attack Mexico. Any sane US government would send in the army and secure the area. We should also probably start deporting the Chicano traitors who sided with the enemy if this ever came up. As you can see, I am not an America-hating traitor at all. In fact, I am a patriot and these Reconquista weenies really bring out the flagwaver in me. This is why I say that Aztlan theory is dangerous, and Aztlanistas are worse than assholes. They are traitorous assholes. And if Aztlan theory ever catches fire and gains mass support, we will be in a world of shit and God help us. Luckily, there is no sign of that occurring.

This would especially happen if Mexican Americans educated themselves and found out the shit Mexican Americans went through and the broken promises for those Mexicans who stayed in US gained lands after the U.S.-Mexican war.

I assume they have all been brainwashed about this stuff in classes, but almost none of them seem to care. Honestly. I know these people very well.

They’d probably feel alien and disillusioned with the country of the US (especially if they remain unassimilated).

Won’t happen. Once Latinos get to be a majority anywhere, they are happier than pigs in shit, except for professional radicals and complainers. And after 2-3 generations, 10

As a matter of fact Robert, your city is an example of reconquista.

Not really. Whites still run this town. I think the Latinos like it that way. We know how to run municipalities. They don’t. Once a city goes all Latino, it’s government goes all Latino, and the place basically falls apart turns into “Little Mexico.” The Mexicans with any brains and sense take note of when the last White person packed up and start packing their bags themselves. If you ask them why they left, they will say the place went to Hell when all the Whites left.

Most Hispanics will probably be united by the same idiocy that plagues the common American mind: the notion of a “Hispanic” race.

They already are, and they’re some of the stupidest humans I have ever met when it comes to race. They have no understanding of biological race whatsoever. Anyway, they’re already all united under “Latino,” and the loony Aztlan notion has no support.

“Serial Killer Frontiersmen,” by Alpha Unit

As Founding Fathers like Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin were getting old and dying, “Big” Harpe and “Little” Harpe were just getting started. Micajah “Big” Harpe and Wiley “Little” Harpe were cousins. Heaven help you if you crossed their path. They would just as soon kill you as look at you. Big’s father and Little’s father were brothers who had immigrated from Scotland and settled in North Carolina. The two boys grew up near each other and apparently were close enough to earn their nicknames. Evidently the elder Harpes were pro-British during the Revolutionary War. After the war, those who had fought for the King were ostracized; many of them moved west. Others joined with some of the King’s still-faithful allies, the Creek and Cherokee Indians, and continued to fight their old enemies. Big and Little Harpe belonged to Tory gangs that looted and raped their patriot neighbors. By 1796 the Creeks and Cherokees had been defeated by Kentucky and Tennessee militias. But nothing stopped Big and Little Harpe. They settled near Knoxville, Tennessee, and took wives. Big Harpe took two wives, the sisters Susannah and Betsy Roberts. It wasn’t long before locals began missing livestock. One man tracked some missing horses to the Harpe place. He and his companions caught up with the Harpes and the stolen horses, but Big and Little Harpe knew they had to get away, and they did. Horse stealing got you killed in those days. The Harpes – and their wives – were now on the run. And their career as cold-blooded killers began in earnest. They started out by kidnapping and killing this man named Johnson near Knoxville. A few days later the body was found in a river. The Harpes had cut the man open and filled him with rocks to keep him submerged. This became their trademark. They were now Kentucky-bound on the Old Wilderness Trail, where they robbed and killed a peddler. Continuing on their way they came across two travelers from Maryland. The Harpes persuaded the men to join forces – safety in numbers, you see. The unsuspecting travelers agreed. The two men were shot. One died instantly. But the other one was killed as he was trying to get up. Big Harpe finished him with a tomahawk, splitting the guy’s head open. Their next victim was a young Virginian named Langford who was on his way to Kentucky. The Harpes got into a quarrel with Langford, over the bill at a tavern. His fate was sealed once the Harpes found out he had a lot of money on him. He got a tomahawk blow to the head. A posse went after the Harpes and caught them on Christmas Day 1798. They were put in jail, along with their pregnant wives. But they broke out of jail, leaving the women behind. Their next victim was 13-year-old Johnny Trabue, the son of Colonel Daniel Trabue, a Revolutionary War veteran. The boy had been sent on an errand to a local mill. The Harpes killed and dismembered the boy – for a sack of flour. More victims turned up. Big and Little Harpe’s trademark method of body disposal was a big help to the posse on their trail. The Governor of Kentucky put a bounty on their heads and authorized the posse to pursue them beyond Kentucky. The Harpe women, who had been acquitted of Langford’s murder, knew their men’s whereabouts. But they pretended to be done with the killers, taking advantage of the sympathy they had garnered from the locals. The Harpes were chased to Cave-in-Rock, Illinois, just across the Ohio River. They fell in with outlaws there who liked attacking flatboats heading downriver. After one such attack, the Harpes decided to amuse their fellow pirates by killing the lone survivor. So they pushed the guy – and his horse – off a bluff to their deaths. This act of sadism by Big and Little Harpe was too much even for the pirates. They ran the Harpes off. They headed back to Tennessee, where their murder spree continued. Their victims just seemed to be anybody they came across. They killed men named Hardin and Bradbury. They killed 15-year-old Isaac Coffey. William Ballard. The Brasel brothers. Across the Kentucky line they killed John Tully. Then John Graves and his young son, who had their skulls axed. All along a posse was after them. Big and Little Harpe weren’t done killing, but now they had a target in mind: Silas McBee, the local justice of the peace. They got to McBee’s place, but his well-trained dogs kept them at bay, and they retreated. But their blood lust hadn’t dissipated. Not far from McBee’s home they came upon the home of Moses Stegall. Stegall was supposedly a frontiersman who rode on both sides of the law, as James Prichard puts it. He wasn’t home the day the Harpes showed up. Present, however, were Mrs. Stegall, her child, and Major William Love, who was there on business. Mrs. Stegall was acquainted with the Harpes and agreed to put them up for the night. Neither Mrs. Stegall, Major Love, nor the child survived the encounter, though. After killing all three, the Harpes set fire to the cabin. Big and Little Harpe decided to lie low, figuring that McBee would soon see the smoke and come to investigate. Then they would kill him. But first they kidnapped two men, Hudgens and Gilmore, whom they accused of the murders and falsely arrested. That was the end of Hudgens and Gilmore. It was McBee they really wanted dead, so they continued to lie in wait for him. Word got out about the fire at the Stegall home, and a posse was organized. It included Moses Stegall. The killing spree of Big and Little Harpe was about to come to an end. The posse soon made it to the Harpes’ camp. One of the wives was there, and she gave them up, telling the men where the Harpes and the other women had gone. They caught up with Big Harpe and demanded his surrender. It wasn’t going to happen. Big Harpe took off, without the women. The posse was in pursuit. Four of the men shot at Big Harpe. One shot entered Harpe’s backbone. Big Harpe kept riding but was soon pulled from his horse and informed that his time was up. It was Moses Stegall who held a knife to Big Harpe and told him that he, Stegall, was going to cut off Harpe’s head. But before he did it, he took his rifle and shot Harpe through the heart. They took the head to a cross-roads and placed it on a tree. As a notice to other outlaws. But what about Little Harpe? He escaped, and ended up re-joining the gang of river pirates he had known in Illinois. Several years later, Little Harpe and a fellow pirate named May killed Captain Mason, their leader, and cut off his head, took it in for the reward money. After giving the authorities a story about how they managed this feat, they started to leave, when someone recognized the two men as outlaws. Harpe and May were arrested. But they escaped. A posse did catch up with them, though, and they were tried in Greenville, Mississippi, in January of 1804. Found guilty of robbery, they were sentenced to death. Their heads were placed on poles, of course, as a warning to the criminally inclined.

References

Musgrave, Jon. October 23, 1998. “Frontier Serial Killers: The Harpes.” American Weekend.  Prichard, James M. April 2005. “Blood Trail: Mass Murder on the Kentucky Frontier.” Lexington, KY: Kentucky Humanities.

Prophets Howling in the Wilderness

Repost from the old site. From some responses to a post of mine: More Illegal Immigration Madness. I’m amazed at how apathetic the rest of the country is about this Mesoamerican mass illegal immigration that has swamped us in the Southwest. Some of us, like me, are angry at those who say, “No big deal, let them all in,” while they live in places in which few illegals have yet swarmed. So we do take a bit of schadenfreude enjoyment out of the near future that you all will be experiencing in the next 20 years or sooner, assuming you live that long and still live in the Lower 48. What’s truly sick is that to remark on this idiocy of mass invasion by what amounts to an occupying army of enemy soldiers in any way is considered to be grotesque racism, and an example of White Power, Nazi or White Supremacist tendencies (!). The Mexicans run the show around here and they police things very well. If they think you are a White Power, excuse me, an opponent of illegal Mexican mass invasion, then they will shun you, glare at you, spit at you, threaten you, bang things and make loud noises until you move away, threaten to beat you up, try to ban you from their establishments, on and on. If you mention illegals in public, the Hispanics all start glaring at you and your friends start kicking you and ordering you threateningly to shut up. People are actually scared of the illegals here. They are like a teeming Latin American Underclass in a revolutionary situation south of the border, and one gets the feeling that they could take up guerrilla warfare of some sort of another at any time, just like in a non-US banana republic. In some ways, maybe they already have. Funny thing is Mexicans are pretty damn racist themselves and they are incredibly ethnocentric. You know, those handy little caveman weapons that come in handy during the sort of Hispanic-non-Hispanic ethnic warfare that we currently live under. On the contrary, if one hates being invaded like this, it’s a sign that they still have a bit of sanity left and haven’t drunken too much of the multicultural Koolaid yet. There’s no space at all on the Left or in the Democratic Party for views like those below, and that has to be the biggest tragedy of them all. Way to go, concede more space to the Right. Neither of these posters is the slightest bit racist, I am convinced. Or if they are, I don’t care anymore. There’s really no other sane way to react in this situation. Real America, from Winnetka, California shouts in the wilderness: Wait until you people in states other than California see what it is really like to live in a Mexican city in the former United States. Your co-workers will be speaking Spanish, not English, and receiving food stamps even though they earn as much as you, while you will be called racist for speaking your mind on anything that offends anyone Hispanic. Your children will be sidetracked in school, and the little gang-mentality foreigners will cause you and your children grief and money. When you have a fender bender, you will find that the person that hit you has no insurance and does not speak English (conveniently) and the court will refuse to do anything about it. California is now a horrible place to live, and it won’t be long until all of America is like California. Transplanted Texan, Sun City, CA, howls back, coyote-like: Gee, I believe they are starting to get the picture. The best is yet to come, sorry to say. They will grow accustomed to living in a 3rd World culture. Gangs, Mexican graffiti on all the fences, walls, schools, etc. Oh, and the daily drive-by shootings, murders, thefts and threats to their children at school. Just to name a few treats to come. Whatever it takes, Mexico’s chief export, narcotics, will play a part in their lives. Murdered police officers, drug dealers, wars. Our country is in such trouble, we all need to pray for what is still our county and the generations of Americans to come.

Race in a 1970's California Beach Town

Repost from the old site. When I grew up on the California beach in the 1970’s, we had no White parts of town and Black parts of town. The whole place was White, with ethnics, Jews, NE Asians, Filipinos, Hispanics and mixed race folks scattered all about in fairly small numbers. It was a White culture in a White beach town, Huntington Beach. All of the non-Whites pretty much just assimilated to the White, or American, or White American culture of the city. There was one Black kid in the school and I was his friend! There was a small group of Hispanics (Chicanoized) with gangs, and the Chicano barrio mindset at the school and I was friends with them! I’m such a racist! From the early days yet! Snark. What I am trying to say is that for all intents and purposes, in Huntington Beach, race just did not exist at all. The non-Whites associated with Whites and vice versa. The non-Whites were all pretty much assimilated to the White culture, so they were White for all intents and purposes. Their non-Whiteness was simply an accident of their ancestry and had no relevance on anything. In every important way, the Chinese, Hispanics, Japanese, Filipinos, Cubans, Puerto Ricans and whatnot were just Whites with a little different ancestry, which may as well have been Czech or Greek or Italian. For the most part, they were deracinated and fully assimilated to American society. None of them spoke their ethnic mother tongues. Most of the Hispanics had been in this country a long time – I never knew one recent immigrant from anywhere. If mass immigration was going on, it wasn’t coming to my town. The general attitude was that racism was a nasty thing. If you made an ethnic joke, either my brother who dated a Mexican girl or one of my best friends – the 1/2 Mexican guy or the 1/4 Chinese guy, or the Puerto Rican guy who objected to anti-Black jokes by noting that he was part-Black, or my Cuban girlfriend, would just shoot you right down angrily with an attitude like don’t bring that up anymore. The whole loony anti-racist notion (I’m sure that Whiteness Studies sees 1970’s Huntington Beach that way) that the White suburbs of 1970’s California were a place of vicious White racism is an insipid fantasy. Race was just not important. The other races didn’t behave any differently from Whites, as they all assimilated and left their cultures long behind. If they don’t act any different, you have to be a real idiot just to hate someone who is different – who looks a little different, is different racially, has a different skin color, or whose ancestors came from a different land. For the most part, it simply did not occur. We did have some Chicano-type Hispanics who lived in a place called Motown in downtown Huntington Beach. It was a mini-barrio full of graffiti and small gangs and Chicano culture. My friends and I were the only Whites who would befriend these real Chicanos. I was a racist from childhood! Snark. They were all into the gang thing, the guys were into the stereotypical Chicano machismo male psychological cultural set, and the girls were all into the stereotypical barrio Latina psychological cultural set. We made friends with them, but no one ever wanted to, say, go hang out with them on the weekends. They just lived in another world. Well, Chicano culture hasn’t changed one bit since then, at least the barrio kind. There’s still a vast Hispanic set in the US who are more or less assimilating to whatever American culture means in 2008, though less so than the ones I grew up with. And Motown has come to my town. It’s taken it over. I live now in an entire city full of Huntington Beach Motown 1975. It’s 33 years later, and nothing has changed. I’m convinced that young barrio Hispanics really do love gang culture. They love it all, the fights, the tattoos, the colors, the sets, the hardass mentality, the gangsta rap, the crime, the money, the knives, the guns, the jail, the prison the probation and yes, even the funerals. They’re in thrall to it. How do I know this? I live with these people, and they are in my home and car night and day. Older Hispanics love fights too. I hang out in Mexican bars full of drunken illegal aliens, blasting Norteno music, with strippers grinding in the background. It’s kind of a seedy, somewhat dangerous place, but I can usually handle myself in these places. There are all sorts of really scary looking guys in there, guys who glare at you with menace, older hardcore Norteno gangsters, and guys who just look like criminals. Drunken brawls break out, and the owner won’t even break it up. The chairs and tables fly and all the guys just lap it up. Even the owner loves it his furniture flies. I guess macho Mexican males love a fight. Same way macho young Hispanic males love gangs. Most importantly, that’s why Hispanic gang culture ain’t going away. All the gang task forces, the social programs, the anti-gang programs, years and what, decades now, and where are we? Worse than ever. And the more we import barrio-prone and gang-prone (that is, those who will go gang/barrio rather than avoiding that) Mesoamericans via immigration, legal or illegal, the more this phenomenon will grow and grow. In my town when I grew up, White culture and American culture were synonymous. That may be wrong, but that’s just the way it was. For a lot of us, that’s the way it’s always been. Motown and South Central LA were always peripheral to mainstream US culture growing up, and they surely were in my town. I don’t like it that Motown has come to my town. I like my Hispanics assimilated, thank you very much. Mexican and Hispanic barrio culture is good and bad, like all the rest, but the bad repels me like a face slap. If that makes me a racist, then I will stand up and say I’m a racist, loud and proud. No problem at all. The Mestizo future is rising behind the hills of America, a jealous, angry, resentful, demanding and haughty yet peculiarly unthinking God, glaring in our faces. American culture and White culture are no longer the same. Motown has come to America and scribbled graffiti over about half of it, and East LA is California. At some point in the not too distant future, the US will become just another Latin American country. The process of Mestizization, the murderous marriage that wove its tragic yet beautiful tapestry over our continent, yet somehow passed us by, will overtake us yet. We thought we could avoid it, that we were not a part of the mestizo and mulatto Americas after all, but we were only buying time. America left the United States of, and the Americas walked right in. Why not, with the back door unlocked and swinging wide? At this point, there is not much to do about it but learn Spanish and plan for the future. Will we be Peru, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Brazil or Colombia? Or Chile, Costa Rica, Dominica or Argentina? The future is not way off in never never land, out of our minds and our petty little worlds. The future is now. Get active. If you don’t die beforehand, either you come to the future, or it comes to you. Stride forward to greet your new world, smiling or not. At least you will be ready.

Child Molester Mass Hysteria

Repost from the old site. Due to the fallout from the Groene case, Steve Groene is pushing a One Strike Law in Washington State, where he now resides. I don’t blame him, and a lot of crime victims lash out like this. As you can see on the page explaining the law, the law is constructed so Joseph Duncan would never have been freed to kill Steve’s ex-wife and two kids and rape his daughter. So the tragic past would never have occurred. California’s 3 Strikes Law was written by Mike Reynolds in such a way that the 2-bit thugs who killed his daughter (who merely had lengthy records for petty crime) would have been imprisoned and would have been able to kill his daughter. In this way, surviving crime victims, or usually relatives of crime victims, are able to time travel. They can go back in time, and in their imaginations, wipe out the past. The problem is that this is all an illusion. Mike Reynolds’ crazy 3 Strikes Law didn’t bring back his daughter, and the guys who did it are going down bigtime anyway. Steve’s One Strike Law won’t bring back Dylan or Slade, or wipe out what was done to Shasta. Sure, it might prevent it from happening to others, but to be completely frank, I don’t think that’s the purpose of these laws. The purpose of these laws is to enable their enraged and vengeful authors-relatives of victims to imaginarily go back in time and prevent the past from occurring by passing a new law in the future. It’s the stuff of science fiction. It’s magical thinking, but magical thinking is not just for kids and crazies. Adults do it all the time too, especially traumatized adults. Like relatives of murder victims. First of all, I will say that this law is not as nuts as I assumed it would be. Some of my friends know Steve, and they did not think he would write a law as stupid as California’s 3 Strikes Law, especially since his own son has a record as a 2-bit petty criminal. I’m not even sure about Steve’s own history, but my friends say he ran with a rough crowd. The proposed One-Strike law says that anyone guilty of child molestation (wisely put at under 12) and anyone guilty of forcible rape through the use of violence needs to go away for life. Now, most people would sit back and cheer. To the authors’ credit, the law seems to exclude the “date rape” bullshit by requiring that the rape be forcible and violent. It also rules out the “statutory rape” bullshit by requiring ruling out sex with minors aged 12 and up. So where does that leave us? With a bunch of pedos and rapists. So why is this not a good idea? Because right here in my town, we have 133 people on the sex offender list. Fresno, a city of 440,000, probably has 1,000 people on the list. They’re either all or almost all men. Nationally, with the ever-expanding definitions of sex offenders, there are now 2 million people on sex offender lists! Surely they are almost all males. This is starting to look less like a war on “sex offenders” and more like just a war on males. Here in my town, most of the guys on the list are guilty of rape, child molesting under the age of 14 or even rape of a child under the age of 14. That’s probably 100 out of 133. You’re going to throw all 100 of these guys away for life? In Fresno, I bet 800 out of the 1000 are on for rape or molesting a child under the age of 14. You’re going to throw 800 guys away for life? How many of the 2 million on the sex offender lists nationwide would be covered under this One Strike Law? That’s an interesting bit of research. This law isn’t going to work. Implemented nationally, it will easily result in life sentences for hundreds of thousands, and possibly over 1 million, people, almost all men. Even if it’s a good idea, it’s not doable.

Socialism Rules the Planet

Uncle Milton, as typical of his contrary nature, disputes my contention that most nations on Earth are run by social democratic parties or are social democracies.

The US, the Baltics, Colombia, the Philippines, the UK and Chile are exceptions. May I ask how do you define Social Democracy…? Almost every Latin America country (Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela for example..) has a higher (worse – less egalitarian) Gini index than not only the US and UK but also the Philippines. Nicaragua (43.1) is the exception but is quite close to the PI (44.5). The UK’s Gini index is better than New Zealand’s and matches Italy while it only a smidgen about Australia and Ireland. As for the Baltics, Latvia and Estonia are at the same level as Italy. (By the way I do understand these figures are subject to question..in the examples above I am using the UN’s estimates.. the CIA estimates place the UK at the same level as Switzerland) I would think that income equality would be a pretty important (but not the solely import…) measure of a Social Democracy.

I said most countries on Earth are run by socialist or populist parties. I only list those countries – The US, the Baltics, the UK, Colombia, Chile, the Philippines and Somalia – that are run by parties that are explicitly hostile to socialism and are open advocates of neoclassical economics. If you can find anymore, let me know. Liberal, socialist, Communist, progressive and populist parties run the planet! Rightwing parties hostile to socialism which promote neoclassical economics are a tiny minority. Socialism rules the Earth! Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua are run by socialist parties. They have made efforts to reduce the Gini coefficient of course, but their efforts are attacked in the US, and there are usually assassination attempts and coup attempts against them in their countries. I don’t give a fuck about Gini coefficient. The US’ social democracy is anemic compared to that of the New Zealand and Italy. What matters are the benefits afforded to the people. They are excellent in New Zealand and Italy and anemic in the US. Income distribution ain’t everything. Gini coefficient is not that important in a state that provides no benefits. The Baltic states are some of the few states on Earth run by conservatives that are openly hostile to all forms of socialism and are open advocates of neoclassical economics.

In This World, Socialism is the Norm

Fred is a new rightwing ruling class commenter with an excellent class consciousness, which is intelligent and appropriate for his class. Nevertheless, Fred represents the class enemy that must be fought:

I’m not a socialist because socialism doesn’t work. If it did then I’d be all over it.

But Fred. Various forms of socialism, including forms of social democracy, are the norm in almost every state on Earth. Even the US has quite a bit of socialism – not enough though. Every state on Earth has quite a few socialist or social democratic programs and institutions. The pure capitalist state does not exist. Of the 13 wealthiest states, 12 are clear social democracies. I left the US out because we can’t really be called a social democracy even though we have some socialist programs. Most states on Earth are run by socialist or social democratic parties. The US, the Baltics, Colombia, the Philippines, the UK and Chile are exceptions. Socialism is the norm! Guys like Fred don’t get it. Fred opposes socialism because he’s always looking for a way to lower his taxes, and he doesn’t gets his money worth from the government for the taxes he pays.

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