When Is It Going to Start Working Anyway?

A commenter asks:

I know there’s probably a lot of info on the web about the various armed conflict/s in Latin America, but do you have any good websites (in English) that are specifically about the rhetoric of the Latin American Rich? And about their actual policies that lead to so many people trying to revolt against them?

I know you’ve mentioned them in your posts, but not all that much. It would be great if you had links to a detailed, extensive database of such information.

Hi, Upside Down World  in the blogroll is an excellent resource, just off the top of my head. You know, 100 years ago, 50 years ago, 30 years ago, 10 years ago, yesterday, Latin America was mired in the most horrific poverty amid the most wild wealth. I’m not sure what the rich were saying then. Now here it is, up to 100 years later, and nothing much has changed.

I think in the past it was just “Kill the Commies!” The rich ran the show, had pro-rich military dictatorships for years to decades, when that didn’t work stole elections, and controlled all the media. The masses were utterly downtrodden, but what could you do?

Every now and then the peons would get restless, and the Marines would be sent down there to repress the overwhelming majority of the people and reinstate rich rule. In Haiti, the US stayed for decades. Cuba was nearly a US colony. We invaded the Dominican Republic. Sometimes people fought back. You had the anti-US Sandino rebellion against the Marines in Nicaragua.

Anytime the people got the least bit uppity, there would be a coup or a US invasion, followed by mass death squad terror. This happened in Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Dominican Republic in 1965, Bolivia in 1970, Chile in 1973, Argentina in 1978, and Peru in 1992. This would often be followed by years to decades of state terror, the purpose of which apparently was to say, “Don’t even think of trying this again!”

In 1932 in El Salvador there was a peasant uprising led by Farabundo Marti. It was crushed, and

The Western provinces, where the Matanza took place, were still very conservative even during the Civil War 50 years later. Mass terror works.

But things have changed now. Now they say that neoliberal capitalism (the rule of the rich) is the way to prosperity for everyone. Socialism or rule of the poor is a dictatorship and leads to mass poverty.

Now the rich say that the way of the rich will “lift all the boats.” A rising tide lifts all boats and all of that. It’s supply side economics. Problem is that Latin America has been engaging in supply side economics and the politics and economics of the rich since Day One. Who is it lifting out of poverty, anyway?

Main thing is that they don’t want to spend one dime to help the poor the in any way whatsoever. Doing so will ruin the economy, and we can’t have that. You can’t raise taxes, tax the rich or the corporations, raise the minimum wage or engage in any state spending. All of this is Communism, and it will “ruin the economy.”

They also engage in a lot of capital strikes now. With the election of Humala in Peru the other day, the stock market lost 2

But the economics of the rich isn’t working down there. They’ve been doing it for 200 years.

When is it supposed to start working anyway?

US Politics in a Nutshell

Via a link from Ian Welsh’s indispensable blog. If you read nothing else political on the Net, do read Welsh. The comments are just as good as the author. Here a commenter sums up US politics in a nutshell:

The current mode is for the Republicans to go extreme right and the Democrats to go bipartisan and compromise by giving away 7

There are no progressives of note anymore. Obama and the Democrats and not liberals or progressives, much less socialists or God forbid Communists. A “Democrat” is someone who reacts to the extreme rightwing of the Republican nutcases by going 7

This is the politics of the 3rd World, in particular, the politics of coup and death squad ridden Latin America.

Down there, if you are a feminist, a gay, an environmentalist, an anti-mining or anti-oil activist, a peasant leader, a labor union member, a community leader, a human rights organization member, an organizer against free trade agreements or a supporter of land reform, you are automatically a Communist and there is a murder warrant out for you. You can be murdered at any time. If you’re lucky and you’re a leader, you get overthrown in a coup and get to survive, like Zelaya in Honduras and Aristide in Haiti.

This calling anyone who is not a rightwing fanatic a Communist is peculiar to Latin America, the Philippines, Pakistan and Indonesia. In other words, it’s the ideology of a stinking 3rd World shithole. Down there, you have two parties, a Conservative Party that is insanely rightwing, and a Liberal Party that is about 7

In most of the world, countries where the politics is as insanely rightwing as the US are the lands of reactionary coups and death squads. At some point, the Left finally has enough of sitting around waiting to be murdered, and they pick up guns and decide that if the state is going to come out and kill them, they will at least fight back with a gun. That’s called a Left insurgency, or “trying to seize power via the gun.” It’s not, really. Mostly it’s just fighting back.

This makes me wonder. Is the current US politics nutty enough that we could have a rightwing military coup? The US rightwing is already openly stealing elections, see Bush in 2000 and 2004. This is a typical 3rd World elite pattern.When they can no longer steal elections and the Left gets elected, then come the coups. After the coups, or in between them, roam the death squads.

I already asked if you if death squads might be coming to America. I will say that the reactionaries are very nice here since at least they don’t murder us like they usually do. They also don’t do military coups. Thank you very much for that! Muah! The rich are so nice here!

But how about coups? The rightwing is already stealing elections, how about a military coup? Is it possible? What would it look like?

How about a state of emergency? We already sort of have that with the Patriotard Act. But what about a real state of emergency?

Typically, extreme rightwing 3rd World hellholes tend to create, due to their very nature, not only mass public protests and riots, but at some point, actual armed Left insurgencies. Are popular protests or even riots on the horizon in the Land of the Fat and Lazy Apathetic Whites? What about an armed Left? Possible or not?

Is the FARC Near Defeat?

This is not really the case.

The Western media would have you believe that the FARC are narcoterrorists with no support even among the peasants. This is not the case. The FARC have deep and vast support among the peasantry in the countryside. In the cities, it is more complicated.

It is true that the FARC has lost support lately. This is probably due to tactics.

The taking of prisoners was a tough one. Yes, the FARC took prisoners. Those were in general not hostages but POW’s. Colombian soldiers and police were taken as POW’s when captured. Does the FARC not have a right to take POW’s? The state does. The state arrests guerrilla suspects and imprisons them all the time. Why can’t the FARC imprison state combatants in the same way?

It’s also true that they took some Colombian legistlators prisoner. But why should they not have done this? Those legislators were voting for prosecuting the war against the FARC. By the same token, does the state not prosecute those who fund the FARC?

Several Americans, apparently spying on the FARC for the CIA or Pentagon, were also taken hostage. Many tears have been shed over this in the US. They were treated well by the FARC. If they didn’t want to be taken prisoner, why were they spying for the CIA?

In addition, the FARC has imprisoned some wealthy Colombians for tax evasion. It’s not true that these people were kidnapped for hostage money.

The FARC levies a tax on all Colombians worth more than $1 million. That is a lot of Colombians, as the Colombian elite is fabulously rich. The FARC is waging a revolution, and the rich must pay war taxes to fund the revolution. Simple, right?

Most rich Colombians have figured out that you have to pay your FARC taxes every years. They meet FARC operatives outside major cities and fork it over. It’s a very small amount of money, and they can easily pay. Some have chosen to evade their war taxes. So the FARC imprisoned them until their taxes were paid. Is this not right and proper?

We must understand that the Western line about the FARC is 10

It’s true that the Colombian guerrilla has been hit very hard lately. The guerrillas have suffered some serious losses, but they immediately replaced them. They still probably number ~18,000 fulltime guerrillas. Militia is probably many more. They are facing the heaviest offensive ever waged against a Latin American guerrilla outfit. This new offensive is all coming via US dollars and aid. The US has 7 new military bases in Colombia. The 10

Question: If the FARC is near collapse, why is it that the FARC killed more Colombian soldiers last year than 2002, which was at the very height of the war when the FARC was close to seizing power? Yes, the FARC has killed more Colombian troops than at any time in recent memory. Granted, most of that was in defensive action, but do those sky high enemy KIA counts sound like a losing army?

In addition, last year, the FARC waged about 5 offensive actions every single day. I get FARC military reports. The FARC kills Colombian troops just about every single day in Colombia. This is one kick-ass guerrilla army.

Everyone in the US seems to want the FARC to lose. But why should the Colombian regime win?

This is a regime that has decimated all of Colombian civil society.

Labor unionists, community leaders, peasant leaders and peasants, Indian leaders and Indians, women’s organizations, gay rights organizations, environmental groups, anti-free trade agreement groups, human rights groups, journalists, students, professors, anti-mining and anti-oil groups, really anyone who is anyone in Colombian civil society, has been subjected to a terror and extermination campaign.

Typically the charge is that these civilians are “members of the FARC” or “FARC sympathizers.” Usually, there is no evidence whatsoever that they are FARC members. If they are FARC sympathizers, how do you prove such a thing, and since when is such a thought crime illegal? Does the FARC have a right to slaughter anyone who is a government sympathizer?

Why should we in the West support such a vicious, venal and genocidal regime? If the FARC goes, will anything get better?  What makes anyone think that the regime is going to stop killing the people just because the FARC is gone?

The FARC, if anything, defends the people.

Here is what happens.

The state wages on “offensive against the guerrilla.” The army and death squads move into a region and start killing the local civilian leaders right away. The FARC quickly appears on the scene and starts attacking the army and death squads, trying to dive them out of the area. So you can see the FARC are really trying to protect the people from the state, to give the people a means of defense. What’s so bad about that?

The FARC want some sort of guarantees that the state will not massacre them if they lay down their arms. In the 1980’s, a faction of the FARC, the Patriotic Union, broke away, laid down arms, and tried to seek power by peaceful means. They were decimated by state terror – 5,000 of them were slaughtered like flies. Given that record, is the FARC not correct to be wary about laying down their arms?

As part of a negotiated settlement, the FARC wants a land reform. As in El Salvador, land is the key issue. A tiny fraction of the population owns almost all the farmland in Colombia. The vast majority of rural people own little or no land.

The rich are constantly stealing, with armed force, what little land the peasants have left.

This is how it works.

The army and the death squads will show up and tell the peasants to leave their land. You leave or you die. Most folks pack up. After the land is vacated, the rich move in and steal the vacated peasants’ land. This process goes on all over Latin America, especially in Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras and Brazil. It is source of much of the death squad run murders in the region. The same process goes on in Pakistan, India and I believe in the Philippines. Before the Salvadoran War ended, it was common in El Salvador.

A huge land reform was enacted in El Salvador as a consequence of the peace settlement. It did not solve the problems of the rural areas, but at least the peasants have their own land and can feed themselves. The major cause of the war was ended, at a cost of 70,000 lives.

As I understand it, the Colombian elite refuses to budge on land reform and demands that the FARC disarm for peace talks to start. This will not work. The Salvadoran state dropped their demand for rebel disarmament, and this enabled a peace settlement. Unilateral disarmament never makes sense.

Capitalism is Murder: The Evidence

The American people are further to the Right on economic issues than just about any peoples on Earth. They resemble Third World death squad populations like the Philippines, Guatemala and Colombia that always elect extreme right candidates of a vicious, callous, corrupt and venal elite that have never done one damned thing for the peoples of those countries.

The only difference, and I will give the American Right this, is that the American Right does not murder the people.

Murder, especially mass murder and genocide, is what the Right is all about. When confronted with a threat from the Left, the Far Right usually resorts to mass terror to stall the threat. We see it to this very day in the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala where the Right literally rapes, beats, burns down the homes, tortures and murders anyone who stands in their way.

The US has been supporting this mass murder for ages now, in fact, it’s the American way. Most US corporations in Latin America pay death squads to kill people getting in the way of their profits, or they used to in the past. I recall an interview with a US businessman in Guatemala in the 1970’s. He said openly that his business supported the death squads and in fact, all US businesses in Guatemala were hiring the death squads to keep the people at bay.

The usual targets of these corporate-run death squads are union officials and members, people protesting dams or mining operations, peasants protesting the theft of their lands, environmental groups, women’s groups, community organizers and leaders, left journalists, students, professors, gay/lesbian activists, etc. The corporations themselves usually target groups that are opposing their rapacious activities in the nation, along with trade unionists.

The rest of the Left is targeted by the death squads that are run by the state itself. Yes, India, Pakistan, El Salvador, Brazil, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala and Peru all either run death squads or allow them to operate and do nothing, which is more or less the same thing.

I am wondering why the rightwing fanatics, who seem so similar to the death squad crazies in the Third World, haven’t started running death squads and killing us yet. Do you think the US rich and corporations will ever start running death squads against the Left, as is done in the Third World?

I Thought the FARC Was “Near Defeat”?

Repost from the old site. A bit dated, but good nonetheless.Here on Robert Lindsay, we do support the FARC and the ELN unequivocally.

This is one hardass rebel army. The US corporate media says they still have 7,000 men under arms, down from 17,000, and in my opinion, their militia numbers in the 100,000’s. I strongly disagree with the 7,000 number, and I think the actual number of FARC troops is probably at least 18,000. They have a presence all over the nation and in several surrounding countries too.

It’s true that they have been dealing with the most intensive military offensive against any rebel group in the history of Latin America, and in recent days, suffered the loss of some top commanders. But they will weather these changes. As soon as a top commander dies or is killed or captured, there is someone else waiting to take his place.

James Brittain notes that the FARC has recently waged some of its most impressive attacks in a long time.

A reporter noted in 2004 that there is an unstated fear that the guerrillas could overrun Colombia’s major cities at any time. As a way of dealing with this, the venal and murderous Colombian ruling class periodically issues proclamations touting the weakness of the FARC, how they are near defeat, how they are suffering from massive defections, etc.

During Plan Colombia and Plan Patriota from 2000-2006, the Colombian regime repeatedly said that the FARC was near defeat. Analysis indicates that instead, attacks have grown over time. During 2008, the US media got into the act, crowing that the FARC was “near defeat”. But this year, the FARC attacked Colombia’s most important oil infrastructure facility and wiped out entire Colombian military battalions.

Between the 29th of April and the 6th of May, 2008, the FARC carried out repeated attacks on Colombia’s largest oil pipeline and halted the export of up to 3 million barrels of oil. At the same time, the FARC attacked various transportation routes crucial to the flow of military supplies and the movement of oil in Colombia’s north.

An essential bridge was destroyed in Cesar Province, preventing the movement of troops and paramilitaries. In Norte de Santander, the FARC attacked forces guarding the Caño-Limón Pipeline.

These last attacks were just hours after the US Ambassador visited the region and crowed about the near-defeat of the FARC. On May 3, 2008, Colombia deployed a battalion to the region to resume the flow of oil. The battalion was quickly destroyed by the FARC, which kept attacking the pipeline for another 2 days.

On May 27, 2008, the FARC attacked Colombia’s largest coal mine, derailing 40 wagons out of a 110 wagon train carrying 110 tons of coal. Further attacks hampered Colombia’s ability to engage in foreign trade by shutting down many export routes.

The North was thought to be relatively free of the FARC in recent years, as their center of operation was said to be in the South, but these attacks proved that wrong. In 2007, when the FARC was “near defeated”, somehow the number of internal refugees grew by 3

The FARC has auxiliaries in all neighboring countries, the FARE in Ecuador, the FARV in Venezuela (demobilized but ready to fight if need be), the FARB in the Dog’s Head of Brazil, and the FARP in Peru.

The FARP has expanded all the way down to central Peru lately, where they have had great success forming base communities with peasants who hate the state but are disgusted by Sendero’s brutality. Many former Senderistas in Peru, up to 1,000, have signed on with the FARP. FARP has linked up with the devastated remains of the MRTA in San Martin Province and sent the MRTA leftovers back to Colombia for armed training.

They have also linked up with what is left of Sendero, a considerably less radicalized organization. A column of Senderistas from the Huallaga Valley was also seen marching off to Colombia. In Peru, the FARC troops are uniformed, healthy, well-armed and supplied, with modern communications equipment and brimming with confidence.

They come into the villages and offer basic necessities and health care to peasants who are pleased to see them and find them impressive compared to the ragtag guerrillas they are used to. Just because Sendero has been badly hammered does not mean that the people of Peru are not in a revolutionary mood.

The FARC also operates R & R bases in Panama and operates all across northern Brazil to southern Guyana, where they tax gold mining operations. This is one way the FARC has reacted to the largest offensive ever launched against any Latin American guerrilla group – they have expanded to all of the surrounding countries.

8

When members of the FARC put down their arms to run for office in the 1980’s and formed the Patriotic Union, they were massacred like flies. Years later, 5,000 UP activists lay dead, and the party was disbanded. This is how the Colombian regime responds to challenges from the Left, even unarmed. With bullets. Until that changes, war will go on.

Colombia is currently one of the US’ top allies in the world, and the US’ top ally in Latin America. It’s unfortunate that US’ best friend in the region is such a murderous and fascist state, but it speaks volumes about the nature of the US state itself.

Ian Welsh, “The Depression and the Future”

From Ian Welsh’s glorious blog:

Ok, everyone’s talking about the oncoming recession. What it is is the second downleg of the depression we’ve been in since the financial crisis.

All of this has been baked in since 2009. Since January 2009, when Barack Obama announced his stimulus, which was not just too small, but put together so badly that it was evident it would not kick the economy out of the doldrums.

The stimulus would be seen to fail (it doesn’t matter how many jobs it “saved” what matters if it created a good economy.) Meanwhile Obama made it clear he had no intention of restructuring the economy, shutting down any of the major banks or of disrupting the paper for oil securitization game.

So, anyway, what’s happened since 2009 was baked into the cake. What is happening is what anyone halfway competent should have expected to happen and that includes the massive wave of austerity in the developed world, the high commodity prices, and the continued liquidation of public assets to feed private greed.

If anything it’s slightly worse than I expected. I would have hoped that some nation other than Iceland would prove to have enough guts to tell the vultures to fuck themselves, but apparently we’re all eunuchs or morons these days, and the Greeks still aren’t rioting amongst the mansions of the rich, I notice. So who cares what they think, anyway?

I suppose it’s tiresome to keep saying “I told you so”. Certainly I’m tired of it, but the point is that this could all be predicted, was all predicted (well, not all, I didn’t get the revolutions in Arab countries, though I know someone who did and the clues were there.)

Assume that what is happening is, essentially, what your lords and masters are at least ok with having happen. If they weren’t, it wouldn’t be happening. This isn’t a case of incompetence, they didn’t even try to make this stuff not happen.

The future you’ve got coming from you is a future of unconventional oil extraction: aka fracking. The play is to get back to cheapish oil and make that run for as long as it can. That is what WILL happen. That is baked into the cake. The only economy these people want to run is an petro economy.

They will do whatever it takes to run one and continue to use their position in control of legacy capital to extract rent and tax the future. There will be more controls on so-called intellectual property (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one). There will be more security theater. There will be more austerity, which means taking public assets and turning them into what appear to be revenue producing private assets.

This will go on until the last drop of cheapish conventional oil has been pumped and the last suburb built. Americans, and apparently the developed world, will do whatever is required to see this happen. They will kill whoever they have to kill. That’s what the developed world is, now. This is only compounded by stupidity like Germany going off nuclear without a clear plan of how to replace the energy. Remember, boys and girls, yes, there is blood mixed in with that oil. A lot of it.

This the future, the next goodish economy will come from unconventional extraction. Not sure how long that will last. It will come at great environmental and health costs, but Americans will give up anything to keep the petro-economy going, so, so be it.

What’s this gonna mean for you? The good jobs are going to keep getting scarcer, and if you aren’t willing to do evil (work for any insurance company, anything defense related, most good paying education jobs, most good paying healthcare jobs, virtually all financial industry jobs, etc…) then they will essentially non-existent.

Real wages after real inflation will continue to trundle down. Even inflation adjusted wages as measured by the BLS may show declines. Employment WILL NOT recover in your lifetime if you are over 40. That doesn’t mean there won’t be ups and down, but it won’t have a long sustained up. Financial markets will continue to be a rigged game, and if you want to play, realize you need to play as if the game is rigged, not as if you’re in a free market.

Unless you can pay premium, the quality of everything you buy will continue to go downhill. Want a good burger? Closing in on $8. Want a shitty fastfood burger?  $2 or less. Public transportation will get worse, more libraries will close. The cops will make less calls and be less helpful. The schools will be worse in most places and keep getting worse. Eventually Medicare will be slashed to the bone, and so will SS. Not necessarily destroyed, but so weakened they might as well be.

It’s gonna be a long 20 to 30 years folks. Does this have to be the future? In theory, no. In practice, well, yes, apparently it does.

I keep running Ian Welsh’s pieces because he is one of the finest writers currently writing. He needs to be on TV, in the newspapers or in the newsmagazines, but no wait. That will never happen. They are all owned by the rich. I have decided that I am going to limit my intake of the newspapers of the rich, the newsmagazines of the rich, the radio stations of the rich and the TV stations of the rich.

The rich are my deadly enemies. It’s a war to the death – us and them. I will fight them to the death and then I will dance on their graves forever and a day.

I really don’t understand the rich. They want to rip up the safety net? Got it, they don’t need it.

Destroy public education? Sure, their kids all go to private schools.

Close the libraries? I don’t get it. The rich don’t go to libraries?

Close all the parks? I don’t get it. The rich don’t go to parks? They have private parks and country clubs to go to?

Shut down the state and national parks and national forests? I don’t get it. The rich don’t go on vacation? They don’t go to national forests, national parks, or state parks? Someone clue me in here.

Shut down public transit? Sure, the rich don’t use it.

Destroy all funding for infrastructure? I don’t get it. The rich don’t drive on highways? They don’t drive over bridges?

The model here is Latin America. Latin America, a continent that has been wrecked by the rich from Day One. All of Latin America’s problems are due to rich rule. The public schools are wrecked – the rich won’t pay for them. The highways and infrastructure are a joke. I never understood this until I heard that the Latin American rich simply buy 4-wheel drives to drive over their shit roads. They would rather do this than pay for a road.

Libraries in ruins? No problem, the Latin American rich don’t care about libraries. So where do they get their books?

Medical care in ruins? Who cares, the Latin American rich go to private clinics.

Parks decrepit, falling apart, or closed? In Latin America, this is the case. National parks are horribly underfunded, decrepit or closed. I guess the rich just don’t care?

Even housing standards. After the glorious Pinochet (Tulio’s hero) came into Chile and afterwards, the housing standards put in by Allende were rolled back. That more buildings did not fall down in the Chilean earthquake is largely due to the housing standards that were put in by Allende.

After Pinochet, new governments rolled back these standards or mostly just looked the other way while typical Latin American capitalist criminals violated building codes. As a result, many more buildings were damaged in the earthquake than would have been otherwise. This I don’t get at all. The Latin American rich are such skinflints that they would rather skirt a building code to save a few bucks, and then risk having the building fall down or getting hurt or killed? All the personal risk is worth it to save a buck or two? What scumbags!

The Latin American rich don’t believe in hooking up their countries with electricity. Much of the country lacks power, but they don’t care. They all have generators!

Horrible pollution runs in the public water supply, but they don’t give a fuck. A cholera epidemic rages through Peru, but the rich don’t care. Why not? They all drink bottled water?

The part about the cops I get. Here in California, even the police are cutting back. They often won’t even come out. This is the case in Latin America. In Peru, the cops are so poorly paid that they often stage holdups on the road to get money. I don’t get this. Don’t the Latin American rich worry about crime. I have heard that many of them hire private bodyguards. They’d rather hire private bodyguards than pay for cops?

The Latin American rich won’t even pay for a decent military. During the Civil War in Peru, the soldiers didn’t even have proper boots or uniforms. The rich could not be bothered to pay for them. Now that’s a callous ruling class! So cheap that they won’t even fund the army that keeps them in power. “Oh well,” they figure, “The revolution will always be defeated somehow. We won’t need to pay for an army.”

An Apologetics For Zionism

Repost from the old site. This comment was left on my site by a fellow who called himself “Apologist for Zionism”. He makes some very interesting points on here. We have dealt with his notion that every ethnic group deserves a state on this blog previously. Non-territorial nations certainly do not deserve a state at all, unless someone wants to donate one to them. These comments are interesting because in many ways they are straight of out of Theodor Herzl himself. Herzl has been accused by anti-Zionists of being a Jewish anti-Semite, and he was a serious critic of the Jews. He felt that Jews and Gentiles could not live together and he felt that the fault was equally divided between the two groups. He originally favored Jewish assimilation, but after the Dreyfus Affair in France in the late 1800’s (this shocked many people because they thought that anti-Semitism in France was history by this time) he changed his mind and figured that the only way forward was for Jews and Gentiles to live in permanent separation. He noted that when Jews did well, they become very successful businessmen and aroused the envy and wrath of the Gentiles, and when they sank into poverty, they bred radicals like rabbits.

When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of all revolutionary parties; and at the same time, when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse. Herzl, Der Judenstaat, 1896, p.91.

The commenter points out that many early Zionists were socialists who felt that one of the problems of the Jew was that he had gotten out of touch with the land itself (however, Jews were forbidden to own land for most of their stay in Europe). To cure this defect, these socialist Zionists supported a sort of back to the land thing that would get Jews’ hands dirty and make them into salt of the Earth again. The question of whether or not nations have carrying capacities for Jews is most interesting, but I don’t even want to go there. The author suggests that the US is presently reaching such a capacity. Another very successful minority similar to Jews is the Overseas Chinese. There have been some pogroms against the Overseas Chinese, but it’s nothing compared to what Jews have been through. Only about Now, no group of people, no matter how kind-hearted or progressive, is going to put up with that kind of bullshit for long, and there is no way that the Overseas Chinese work 23 times harder or are 23 times smarter than Indonesians or Filipinos. At the outside, perhaps they are 3.5 times more intelligent than Indonesians or Filipinos. This would entitle them, with The problem with capitalism is that in amasses such insane fortunes in the hands of small groups who frankly have not earned it due to either their genes or their harder work. In so doing, capitalism virtually guarantees endless racial conflict. There are differences between Jews and Overseas Chinese. The Overseas Chinese tend to keep their heads down, keep out of politics, and are not endlessly meddling in the cultural and political affairs of the nation – they just focus on making money. Jews focus on making money too, but they can’t seem to help trying to change society, a habit that arouses mountains of anti-Semitism. This is an interesting comment:

In fact, some theorists and historians even believe that it was the general emancipation of the Jews in the early-to-mid 19th Century that led to the Industrial Revolution in The West and the consequent rise of modern industrial-capitalism, which Jews also played and still played a large part in.The countries in Europe where Jews had the most political and economic freedom, especially England and Germany, were also the first to industrialize on a large scale…coincidence?

That paragraph is most interesting, and led another commenter to rebut that Jews were never a part of industrialization in Germany and Britain; instead they were associated in Britain anyway with finance capital. The commenter then said he was reading a book by a guy named William Engdahl, A Century of War. Engdahl is no anti-Semite, but he felt that the predominance of finance capital in Britain led to colonial adventures instead of building up domestic industry, to the eventual detriment of Britain. He then noted that in the 1920’s and 1930’s, German products were said to be better than British products. I don’t know about Jewish emancipation leading to the Industrial Revolution in Britain and Germany, but I believe that Jews played an essential role in the development of capitalism itself. I also don’t agree with the “German socialist” viewpoint that Hitler later picked up – along with Israel Shamir – that the Jews are a virus-like people, a race of rootless cosmopolitans without ties to the blood and soil and without loyalty to the nation, as the German capitalists supposedly had. It’s my understanding that in the 1920’s, many top German capitalists, including factory owners, were Jews. Jews are now heavily involved in industry here in the US. Jews do not limit themselves anymore to finance capital, and they are not very big players in it anymore anyway, as it all seems to be taken over by multinational banks in the US, Europe and Asia with few to no Jewish connections. The role of the Jews in finance capital in the past was quite large (they almost controlled European banking from ~1850-1930 or so). The big players in the UK 110 years ago were not Jews but a couple of cabals, one centered around a man named Cecil Rhodes. This cabal also had ties to top UK universities like Oxford and Cambridge. They went to the top boys schools like Eaton. They were active in colonialism and in groups such as the Oriental Society. They actually formed secret societies. It’s true that Lord Rothschild was a member (at the periphery) of one of these secret societies, but he seems to have been the only Jew. I really doubt that the dominance of finance capital (= Jewish money) in the UK 110 years ago is what led to colonial adventures. This group centered around Rhodes was very much into colonialism, and Britain was a huge industrial power in those days, mostly due to her Navy and her colonies. Britain ruled the world from 1588 (the defeat of the Spanish Armada – and also the first stirrings of English nationalism – one of the first manifestations of classic European nationalism) all the way up until about 1935, when air power, notably German, successfully challenged British sea and colonial power. German products have always been better than British products, especially fine machinery. I doubt the superiority of German fine machined products over such British products has much to do with Jewish money. There was plenty of Jewish money floating around Germany around that time too. This cabal around Rhodes, I believe, continues to run The London Times to this very day, or at least they did in the mid 1960’s. At this point, the Jews are in Israel and they are not leaving. Radical Palestinians want to throw out every Jew who came after 1916 (The Balfour Declaration was in 1917). As a settler-colonist myself whose ancestors were still stealing Indian land for our settler-colonial project as late as 1873 in California (see Modoc Wars), this sort of thing makes me really uneasy. Any settlement to the conflict in the Holy Land must take into account the safety of the Jews already there. I would hate to see a situation similar to Iraq where maniacal insurgents are running around slaughtering Jews at will and setting off car bombs and killing 100-200 Jews at a time. Arabs are Arabs, and I don’t think Palestinians and Iraqis are all that different, except one comes from the Levant and the other from Mesopotamia. I’m also not sure that Jewish-led industrialization in Germany (assuming it is a fact) led to the alienation and impoverishment of the rural people and the rise of Nazi blood and soil German ethnic nationalism, but it’s a complicated question to be sure. The followers of the Nazis were mostly petit bourgeois, lower middle class office workers and the like. Rural dwellers were not so supportive. Zionist Apologist writes:

Every ethnic group has a right to a state. It’s a shame that the Jews had to steal Israel, but at least they have a place to call home now. Imperialism is unfortunately a part of humanity’s dark history – and we now have to deal with the dark consequences. A homeland for Jews (whether in Israel or wherever else) is the ONLY WAY to ‘heal’ the Jews, and it’ll take many generations. I’m sure you’ve heard the oft-repeated phrase [paraphrasing]: “Diaspora is the disease, and Israel is the cure.” The Zionists were considering places like Uganda or Argentina early on, and places like those would have been a better choice than Israel in the long run since the Jews would have then been able to develop an agricultural base economy, which is the root of a settled and stable nation-state. However, those places were very rural and undeveloped and hence probably wouldn’t have been successful (as the Jews saw many of their ‘agricultural colony’ experiments in Argentina and Africa and the USA and Canada collapse in dismal failure). I have noticed that Ashkenazi Jews have a definite inability to settle anywhere in any substantial numbers that hasn’t already been fairly heavily settled or where they don’t have access to a nearby network of fellow Jews. It is telling as well that the early Zionist ideals of hard work, agricultural and manual labor, and other mainstays of key Zionist doctrines are now being filled by imported (!) labor (often Asian or Arab) since so many Israelis ‘dislike’ that kind of work and all want to be lawyers and doctors and professors and journalists and bankers (surprise, surprise) rather than just another cog in Israeli society. Israel is even having problems with their military draft now. But, you see, THE WHOLE POINT of the Zionist experiment was for Jews to become cogs in a stable Jewish society instead of always being the perpetual Jewish ‘Other’ in the societies of foreign peoples. The Zionists also noticed that sometimes Jews tended to take advantage of often-times gullible non-Jewish peoples because of their general intelligence and capacity to facilitate commerce, and they wanted to fix that too. In fact, some theorists and historians even believe that it was the general emancipation of the Jews in the early-to-mid 19th Century that led to the Industrial Revolution in The West and the consequent rise of modern industrial-capitalism, which Jews also played and still played a large part in. The countries in Europe where Jews had the most political and economic freedom, especially England and Germany, were also the first to industrialize on a large scale…coincidence? The problem with this, though, is that this Jewish-inspired industrialization tended to slowly choke the lifestyle and economic systems of the rural/agrarian people of those countries who obviously weren’t Jews, thus leading to resentment (antisemitism) – hence the Nazi doctrine of “blood and soil” and their desire to eventually resurrect the German peasantry in the Slavic lands of Eastern Europe. I have also noticed that every nation has a sort of Jewish ‘carrying capacity,’ i.e. it is unable to manage, hold, or absorb Jews in very large numbers until antisemitism starts to break out (for instance, history shows that antisemitism in Germany grew very quickly as more and more Jews from Eastern Europe fled to Germany and Western Europe trying to escape poverty or antisemitism or whatever). And in some ways I think that the saturation point may be close to being reached in North America.I must say that an island nation might actually be best for Jews, as long as it could be mostly self sufficient. As Ezra Pound once said in one of his infamous WWII radio broadcasts: “Sell ’em Australia.”

References

Herzl, Theodore. 1896. The Jewish State. New York: Dover Publications reprint in 1988. Originally published, 1946, New York: American Zionist Emergency Council, edited, original translation by Slyvie d’Avigdor revised by Jacob M. Alkow.

White Men Can't Bang

Repost from the old site. The title is a take-off on the movie, White Men Can’t Jump. It appears that, in addition to deficient basketball skills, White men, at least in the California, are also deficient in gangbanging skills. Whites have a very low rate of street gang membership, at least in California. Sadly, that is not true of other ethnic groups. I am not writing this post to stir up racism, but only to explain such phenomena as White flight, especially noticeable in California. It is worth noting that once you get to high-income cities in the state like Walnut Creek, these cities are often pretty diverse ethnically these days. There are good numbers of Hispanics and Asians in that town, and Blacks on the streets are not rare. At a certain income level, better-behaved, more integrated members of all ethnic groups will be present in a town and ethnicity per se will probably have little effect on crime or gang membership – the rates will be pretty low for all groups. The problem seems to occur at lower income levels, especially poor or low-income areas, and there crime and gangs are correlated with race. In those areas of California, low-income Whites are often fairly well-behaved, while low-income Blacks and Hispanics are simply a catastrophe. I recently moved from a mostly-White small town in California in which many of the White residents were poor or low income. There were no gangs and there was no graffiti. Crime rates were so low that I often left my car or home unlocked. Pathology existed, but it tended to be more mild or inner-directed (drug and alcohol abuse, minor drunken fights, domestic disturbances) rather than more virulent or directed outwards. I moved to a city about three times as large that is 7 Pimping, open prostitution, open drug sales, open fistfighting, public drunkenness, graffiti everywhere, high crime rates – the place is a train wreck. Welcome to the “hood”, as locals proudly describe it. I have already suffered a theft from my apartment, while I suffered no thefts in 16 years in the poor White town. The young people often seem overtly menacing, predatory and amoral. Gangs are omnipresent, and there may be as many as 6,000 gang members in a town of 50,000. Whereas the poor Whites directed their aggression inwards with drug and alcohol abuse, the poor Hispanics direct it outwards, threatening and harming others. I finally realize what White flight is all about. Most Whites don’t really care what your race is or what your skin color is. Based on grotesquely elevated Black and Hispanic crime and gang membership rates in California, for Whites to flee large Black and Hispanic populations is not necessarily an act of racism at all – it is an act of sheer logic and self-protection. Not only is it rational for Whites to flee large groups of Blacks and Hispanics, it is also rational for well-behaved Blacks and Hispanics (and there are many millions in California alone) to flee these areas too. And we are already starting to see this in the state. I had already calculated differential crime rates among ethnic groups and plotted them to IQ in a previous post in an attempt to try to understand crime, ethnicity and intelligence. Unfortunately, IQ did not explain differential ethnic crime rates well. I recently got ahold of data on gang membership in California and decided to use it to calculate rates of gang membership per ethnicity and then compare the groups. I have included the crime and IQ charts from the previous post for comparative purposes. It turns out that gang membership is a vastly worse problem than crime per se, and the ethnic dimensions of it have not been adequately explored. In order to do that, let us look at the figures for California, from a 1996 document that is already 11 years out of date. This is the way things were 11 years ago. I lacked figures for the nation as a whole.

Gang membership rates1:
Amerindians: None Known, minimal
Whites:      Baseline
Polynesians: High, figures unknown2
(SE) Asians: 18 X higher than Whites (!)
Hispanics:   54 X higher than Whites (!!)
Blacks:      140 X higher than Whites(!!!)

Now compare to crime rates themselves, this time for the nation as a whole. Asian crime rates are low, but gang membership is high, a seeming paradox. If the increase in crimes committed by certain ethnic groups compared to Whites seems shocking, the increased rate of gang membership is truly out of this world and surreal.

Crime rates (based on The Color of Crime):
Asians:      7
Whites:      Baseline
Amerindians: 2X higher than Whites
Polynesians: 2X higher than Whites
Hispanics:   3.3X higher than Whites
Blacks:      8.2X higher than Whites (!)

Now let us look at IQ scores.

IQ scores:
Whites:          103 (link)
SE Asians:       93.53
Hispanics:       89
American Indians 87 (link)
Blacks           85 (link)
Polynesians      85 (link, link)

The rates of gang membership are vastly more than would be expected by IQ; nevertheless there is indeed a linear relationship which is surprising, except in the cases of Polynesians and Amerindians. With In particular, the rates of Black crime and gang membership are vastly more than would be predicted by IQ. Furthermore, these figures do not take into account the Flynn Effect (FE), whereby the average Black and Polynesian today has the same IQ as Whites of 1957, the average Hispanic today has the same IQ as Whites of 1970 and the average SE Asian today has the same IQ as Whites of 1985. As IQ’s have gone through the roof over the last 40-50 years, paradoxically, crime and gang membership rates in the ethnic groups above have similarly skyrocketed. Since no one proposes a theory whereby rising IQ leads to increased crime, rising IQ has nothing to do with differential ethnic crime and gang ratios. Nevertheless, there is still a disturbing White – SE Asian – Hispanic – Black ranking in IQ and gang membership (leaving aside Amerindians). IQ may still be relevant to crime and gang ratios if the FE has not effected some aspect of IQ that is tied into crime. It is true that the FE has not led to an across the board, broad increase in general intelligence. For more on the FE and controversies about what it is measuring, see my post here. Whites from 1957-1970 (whose IQ’s ethnic IQ’s now compare to) were even less likely to join gangs than Whites are today, in fact, their gang membership was about zero, and even their crime rates were relatively low. However, by 1970, there were already noticeable Black and Hispanic gang problems in the US. It seems, based on comparisons of ethnic IQ’s to those of Whites from 1957-1970, that there is absolutely no way whatsoever to explain high ethnic crime rates based on intelligence. When attempting to explain rates of ethnic street gang membership, we need to look elsewhere than IQ. Let us look at Philippe Rushton’s R/K Selection Theory. I am not a fan of his and the theory has some major issues, but at least warrior gene” that effects MAO in the brain in greater numbers than other groups. This results in impulsiveness, risk-taking, aggression, violence and elevated elevated levels of smoking and drinking. They probably selected for it on their long, risky trips across the seas. But there is no evidence that any other group above has such a gene in such high numbers. I confess that the relative frequencies of gang memberships and ethnic groups bothers me, because I can’t figure out why some groups are more prone to this than others. Then again, if you can come up with a rational theory that even partly explains any kind of crime, you are practically eligible for a Nobel Prize. Criminology is the ultimate Black hole of theory and scholarship. More and more, it seems that culture, possibly poverty (at least in some groups anyway), and not genes or IQ is what drives gang membership and crime rates. Yet different races are more or less prone to crime and gang membership even when they live in poverty. Poor Whites commit relatively few crimes and are much less likely to join gangs than the poor of many other groups. As yet, we lack a good explanation for this. As a beginning theory, and because I honestly cannot come up with anything else, I might offer that there is still something protective in White culture in California right now that is keeping Whites from joining gangs at high rates. What that protective factor is, I have no idea, but I do not think that this has anything to do with it. As far as what is causing such high rates of gang membership in the other groups, a depraved gang, drug and gun culture has developed among certain groups for complex reasons. It has then spread outwards to other groups, while expanding in the core groups. The protective factor that insulates White culture is apparently lacking to various degrees in the other groups discussed. If and when any considerable sector of young US Whites begins to adopt the Underclass gangbanging criminal culture of other ethnics, the US is going to be in for some very serious problems. It is only the relative resistance (so far) of US Whites to gangsta culture that is keeping the nation from a Goyaesque crime, gun and gang Hell.

Notes

1. Rates were calculated based on 1996 street gang numbers per race computed against the ethnic group’s IQ of 96.5, a Vietnamese IQ of 99.5 (link, link, link) and a Lao/Khmer IQ of 89 . A rough average of these gives a SE Asian IQ of 93.5, which is not low at all. The Vietnamese IQ is from two major studies in Vietnam. One in 2001 found an IQ of 101 and one in 2006 found an IQ of 98.

1825: When the US South Was Not Yet White

Repost from the old site. Most people take it as a given that the USA as a nation and society is and always has been basically White, even mostly British or Northern European White. We have only to look at the authors of the Constitution and signers of the Declaration of Independence to see that all of them where White. And as the Christian fundamentalists love to remind us, they were all “Christians” too. Too bad most of them were actually Deists. It’s true since 1830 or so (see 1830 census figures Excel, pdf ), this has been a majority-White land, and that is the picture most people’s memory and cultural knowledge of this country gives them. But Whites have only been here a short while, and we were immigrants, or actually invaders at first, ourselves. Previously, this land was inhabited 10 In California and the Southwest, we have even had Hispanics (almost all Mexicans) living here before those states were even a part of the US. A Filipino was part of the party that founded Los Angeles before California was even a state. He got sick in Baja and ended up staying there, but he was still present on the voyage. See below where many more Filipinos were already in this country even before 1781. On the eve of the Gold Rush, there were a mere 1,000 Chinese in the US. Only seven of them were in California. But within a year of becoming a state, California was full of East Indians (Hindoos), Samoans/Hawaiians, Mexicans and other Pacific Islanders (Kanakas) and Chinese, all come for the Gold Rush. By 1852, there were 25,000 Chinese alone in California. All of these groups stayed on through the whole decades-long Gold Rush and afterwards remained here as residents in the US. So are West Africans, as this is where many of the American slaves came from. There was a Filipino settlement in St. Malo, Louisiana, in 1763, before the US was even formed. The first Chinese immigrants came to the US in 1820, but before the Gold Rush, only 1,000 or so had arrived. Japanese and Filipinos have been present in Hawaii in large numbers since 1890, and Koreans have been present in much smaller numbers there from 1896. Hawaii was only made into a state in 1959. Cubans have also been here a very long time. Hundreds of Cubans came to St. Augustine, Florida in 1565, over 200 years before there was a USA. Similarly, the first Jamaicans (a party of 20) in America were already in Jamestown, the first White British colony in the US, by 1619. Further, many Jamaicans were included in slave shipments to the US since Jamaica was a way station along the way between Africa and the US. Significant numbers – two large ships full of Chilean and Peruvian miners were in California for the Gold Rush as early as 1848. A couple of thousand Brazilian and Caribbean Blacks also came for the Gold Rush. Note that California did not become a state until 1850. Pakistanis (people from what later became Pakistan) were in the US since the 1700’s and continuing into the 1800’s in Oregon and Washington, working in agriculture, logging and mining in California. The first known East Indian Hindu came to the US in 1790, soon after the Declaration of Independence, as a maritime worker. Mexicans, Samoans, Blacks, Cubans, East Indians, Pakistanis, Chileans, Peruvians, Filipinos, American Indians, Canadians, Japanese, West Africans, Hawaiians, Japanese, Koreans and Chinese have been here in significant, not trivial, numbers, from the very start. They are not, as groups, wholly immigrants or foreigners to this land. They are not foreign to American culture – they are part of the very building blocks of it. Perhaps Germany, Russia, Sweden, France and most of Europe can lay claim to being predominantly White countries for centuries or millenia, but the US cannot. On the inside back cover of a recent issue of American Heritage Magazine was a painting of the Antediluvian American South with some text below. The text took me aback. I shook my head and read it again and again and it’s stuck in my head ever since. It said that in 1825, the US South1 was estimated to be 3 Both the US South, and the nation as a whole, were already White-minority as early as 35 years after signing of the Constitution. Take that, “White America” fools! The White America of movies, TV, magazines, books and memories was just a temporary mirage, a ship passing in the night. Now, as the USA moves back to becoming a White-minority land, we are not changing the basic nature, culture and essence of this nation. We just reverting to our roots. I am not arguing for unlimited immigration to this land (In fact, I want to seriously limit it) and I am a staunch opponent of illegal immigration. Nevertheless, it angers me when White Nationalists act like this is some kind of a “White country”. Nothing could be further from the truth. 1I misremembered the text in the issue – it referred to the US South only, not the US as a whole. A look at the US Census Bureau information (Excel file here, pdf here) clears up the mystery. A 3 The 2 Figures for the whole of the US reveal a White majority, however, if we include the Amerindians living in the Louisiana Purchase at that time (recently part of the US in 1825), we can still make a case for a non-White majority in the US. See note 3 below for more on that. 2There were numerically small numbers of Filipinos, Chinese, Mexicans, pre-Pakistanis (people from the land that would later become Pakistan), East Indians and Cubans here in 1825, but they probably added up to less than 3The American Heritage figures quoted have now been called into question (see comments at the end of this post and the comments at the end of the frankly White racist American Renaissance article that linked this piece); the suggestion is that Blacks made up 1 The mystery is cleared up in note 1, where the magazine text referred to only the US South, not the US as a whole. Indians were not counted in either the 1820 or 1830 censuses, and may have numbered 8 million in the US at the time (recall that the Louisiana Purchase had just been added to the nation). Figure 12 million Indians in the US and Canada pre-contact, with 9 This leaves us with 7 million Indians in the US in 1825. Further, runaway slaves were clearly not counted, probably 1

Who Were the First Residents of Los Angeles?

Repost from the old site. In our never-ending attempt to fight ignorance and stupidity everywhere it shows its ugly head, we will examine the question of the racial makeup of the Californios, the original Mexican settlers in California. Later on, we will look at the racial makeup of the first settlers of LA, along the same lines. First of all, let us demolish a particularly obnoxious form of Chicano nationalist crap: the Aztlan lie, perpetuated by radical racist Chicano nationalist idiots like this, this and this. According to this mountain of leftwing ultranationalist racist manure, Mexicans, otherwise known as Aztecs, are the true owners of a place called Aztlan, encompassing much of the southwestern United States. These folks are upset because we fought a nasty war in which we invaded Mexico and stole part of their country. However, most of the Mexicans in California at the time (the 7,000 Californios) hated Mexico so much that they welcomed the Americans who started this immoral war. After all, the Californios had waged their own unsuccessful secessionist war not long before, a war savagely put down by the Mexican government. However, the Aztlan BS lies on a steaming heap of lies of its own. For the Mexicans themselves stole “Aztlan” from the very Native Americans who they claim to represent! Holy hypocrisies, Batman! Yes, the Native Americans, not the Native Mexicans, were the original owners of this land. I have worked extensively with Native Californians and their opinion of Mexicans and Mexico is not extremely high. I am sure they would be furious with the notion that this land really belongs to Mexico. They are still smarting over being taken over by the Americans. So let us see now. Spain conquered Anahuac (the stupid name Chicano nationalists give to their fake country) in the 1500’s. Spain also conquered “Aztlan” right around this time, though they pretty much left “Aztlan” alone. In 1821, Mexico won its independence from Spain in an anti-colonial war. Mexico then assumed imperialist domination over the Native Californians, herding them into missions which frankly resulted in the genocide (in terms of destruction of a people) of many Native California tribes, especially those on the coast. The Indians were captured by force by these “charming Mexicans”, herded into missions against their will (a process that had really reached its peak under Colonized Mexico), where they were worked very hard and mixed in with so many other tribes that their languages and cultures were wiped out in the attempt at Catholic conversion. Running away from the mission was punished by whippings, beatings and imprisonments. The death rate was high in the missions, mostly due to diseases. There were repeated Indian uprisings at these missions against their wonderful Mexican overlords. These usually ended unsuccessfully, but in a few cases, some priests were killed. Leaders of uprisings were typically executed by priests. The Indians on the coast of California were particularly devastated by missionization. In many cases, we have few or no records of some of these languages since they disappeared as early as the early 1800’s. So in all their endless bitching about White invaders coming from Europe and genociding the Indians (largely true to some extent) Mexicans themselves, both colonized and independent, invaded “Aztlan”, stole the land from Native Americans, and committed a variety of crimes against the natives. So, Aztlan doesn’t really belong to Mexico – it belongs to Native Americans. But since they have been integrated into the US peacefully, it goes by default to the US. As if the notion of Aztlan were not lunatic enough, not to mention the BS called Anahuac . Anahuac is the name given to the Valley of Mexico, where Mexico City is now located, by the arriving Aztecs. The conflation of the Aztec Mexico City place-name of Anahuac by Chicano nationalists into the name for the whole continent of the Americas is extremely ethnocentric and is likely to fly well with few, if any, other (non-Aztec) Native Americans. Further, it is a frankly racist notion in and of itself. Chicano nationalists, being partly of Mexican Indian blood, claim Aztlan in the US for (partly) Mexican Indians, of all people! Outrageous or what? And on what do they base this claim of sovereignty of (part) Mexican Indians over Native Americans? Because, supposedly, according to some crazy Aztec myths, the Aztecs came from a land far to the north before they settled down by Mexico City. However, this is actually a misreading or deliberate propagandistic distortion of those myths, which actually refer to Aztlan as a land to East of Mexico, across a great sea, an island, to be precise. Clearly, this story is just that, a crazy myth with no basis in reality. Yet Raza propagandists have either ignorantly or malevolently twisted this myth of an island across a sea into a myth of a “homeland to the north”. This silliness rests on still more nonsense, mostly that all (part) Mexican Indians are actually Aztecs! In fact, the Aztecs were simply one large tribe (at this point a large collection of tribes who can no longer be considered one people) who had conquered, in Genghis Khan viciousness, many of the surrounding tribes. They were hated by almost all tribes that were familiar with them as basically a Mexican version of Nazis, they were savage, vicious, cruel and brutal, they practiced horrible human sacrifices, and they either tried to Final-Solution or actually Final-Solutioned many other tribes. In short, they were a bunch of bastards, and their principal pastime was Final-Solutioning surrounding “Mexicas”. Somehow, radical Chicano nationalists have decided that all Chicanos are really Aztecs! How the Hell do they know? Check out this page: there are 289 living Indian languages in Mexico. Granted, 28 of those languages are varieties of Aztec. But that makes 28 different tribes of Aztecs. That’s 261 separate non-Aztec tribes if you will. Add in another (at least) five non-Aztec tongues that have gone extinct since Cortes landed in 1519 to get 265. Out of 289 separate tribes, how do these idiots assume that all Mexicans are really members of the 28 Aztec groupings amongst the 289? Based on what evidence?! It’s as stupid as saying that all Native Americans are really Navajos. Now, maybe the Aztecs really did have a homeland to the north and maybe they did not. Linguists and historians are unsure about this, and this “highly advanced tribe” called Aztecs, had not yet figured out, by the late date of 1519, a coherent way of writing stuff down, when Europeans, Middle Easterners and Asians had been doing so for centuries. This same tribe of super-people had also not figured out bronze age metallurgy, which many cultures around the world had accomplished centuries or millenia before. According to legend, Aztecs came from somewhere to the north around the year 830. Various suggestions for this Aztec homeland have been put forward, all the way from Wisconsin to the middle of Mexico. The idiot Chicano nationalist claim to Aztlan is based on a misreading of the homeland of all of the Uto-Aztecan people (the Aztec tongues are all part of a large language family called Uto-Aztecan, which contains many non-Aztec tongues). But Uto-Aztecan is a huge language family that may be 5,000 years old . The homeland of the Uto-Aztecans was probably in southern Arizona. But that does not mean that that is where the homeland of the Aztecs was, anymore than saying the homeland of the Germans (Germany) is the same as the homeland of the Indo-Europeans (Southern Ukraine). Somewhere around southern Arizona about 5,000 years ago, the proto-Uto-Aztecan split into Northern and Southern groupings. But after that, there were a variety of splits inside of Southern Uto-Aztecan. As you can see, this theory just gets dumber and dumber. Proto-Aztecan itself did not even come into being until 600 AD, before which where was no such thing as the Aztecs. Furthermore, the builders of Tenochtitlan built the city between 2100 and 1400 years ago. In 600 AD, it was destroyed. It appears that the builders of Tenochtitlan, then, were not even Aztecs, but instead were some other group. Since the beginnings of the Aztec languages coincide with the appearance of a new group, described as Aztecan, and the destruction of the Tenochtitlan civilization, it appears that the Aztecs were not the builders of those pyramids but the destroyers of them! And so what if Aztecs used to live in Arizona or wherever centuries before 1519? We now accept that virtually no Indian tribe in the US was always in the spot where they were contacted, from the time of settlement from Asia to contact. We have been able to plot many migrations of Indian tribes pre-contact. It’s clear that they moved around, conquered, enslaved and genocided each other, practiced cannibalism on their enemies, (and were victims of all the above) and did all the things that tribes normally do. Point is, giving “Aztecs” a bunch of Native American land in the Southwest because they “used to live there centuries ago but left” makes about as much sense as the Zionism that these La Raza morons despise so much, often to outrageously anti-Semitic degrees (see here for a sample, or, really, most anything on La Voz de Aztlan). Now that we have demolished a few of these La Raza ethnic nationalist dung piles, let us move on to one of another of their cherished myths – that the original Californios were Mexican Indians. Shall we start with a fascinating tidbit about the very first residents of Los Angeles ? Los Angeles was founded by a group of settlers from a place called New Spain on September 4, 1781, soon after the US Declaration of Independence. Here is a map of New Spain. Does New Spain (its jarring yet powerful flag is here ) mean the same thing as “Mexico”, not to mention “Aztec”? Of course not. It included the entire Western US, a good part of the Midwest, all of Florida, Louisiana, the Gulf Coast, (yes) Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad, Cayman Islands, the Mariana Islands and even the Philippines. The best evidence is that the original settlers to LA came overland from Mexico. For a long time the Spanish government had been trying to get Spaniards to go to California, but hardly any of them wanted to go. The first settlers were regarded by a local priest as “the dregs”, similar to the first settlers of Australia. It seems they were escaping something. Quite a few were criminals or fugitives. 2/3 of them were Mestizo or Mulatto. So much for “Aztlan”! Some even came from the Philippines (via Mexico). Do Blacks, Mulattos and Filipinos all get to carve out a chunk of “Aztlan” for themselves? Here is the actual rundown, incredibly, from a Chicano nationalist website: Jose de Lara, 50, a Spaniard from Spain (evil White man), with an Indian wife and three (1/2 White, 1/2 Indian) mestizo children Basilio Rosas, 68, an Indian from Durango, Mexico, with a mulattress wife and six (1/2 Indian, 1/4 Black, 1/4 White) children Antonio Mesa, 38, a Negro from Sinaloa, Mexico, with a mulattress wife and five mulatto (3/4 Black, 1/4 White) children Antonio F. Felix Villavicencio, 30, a Spaniard (evil White man) from Chihuahua, Mexico, born in Mexico with an Indian wife and one (1/2 White, 1/2 Indian) mestizo child Jose Vanegas, 28, an Indian from Jalisco, Mexico, [Los Angeles’ first ‘alcalde’ or mayor], with an Indian wife and one pure Indian child Alejandro Rosas, 25, an Indian from Sinaloa, Mexico, with an Indian wife Pablo Rodriguez, 25, an Indian from Sinaloa, Mexico,, with an Indian wife and a pure Indian child Manuel Camero, 30, a mulatto from Nayarit, Mexico, with a mulattress wife Luis Quintero, 55, a Negro from Jalisco, Mexico, with a mulattress wife and five (3/4 Black, 1/4 White) mulatto children Jose Moreno, 22, a mulatto from Sinaloa, Mexico, with a mulattress wife Jose Rosas , 67, an Indian from Durango, Mexico and his mulattress wife and six (1/2 Indian, 1/4 White, 1/4 Black) or Coyota children *A Filipino, Antonio Rodriguez, from were not Aztecs. Look at the above – one could hardly find a more mixed group of people. It’s Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition 200 years in the past. Does that look like a bunch of Aztecs from “Anahuac” to you? Of course not. Idiots. Let’s look at something else. Exactly what percentage of Mexicans were living in Alta California, which Mexican invaders, recall, stole from Native Californians? A whopping . White Americans made up 1,300 of the population and Europeans (both evil Whiteys, who La Raza claims has no right to be in Aztlan) were 500. Going by adult males, the Whites and Europeans, who were concentrated from about Monterey to Sacramento, were about equal in population to the Californios. Here is a photo of a famous Mexican officer who led a war against local California Indians in 1828-1829. He looks about as “Indian” as I do. So much for the “Aztecs” of “Aztlan”. Also, if the evil White European conquerors were so diabolical and all, why does the Raza not only speak the language of these evil White conquerors, but why also have they adopted much of the culture and religion of these hated genocidal folks? Not only do they speak this “evil language”, they champion it to the point of demanding that it be an official language alongside English. Along the same lines, see here for an excellent demolition of an apparent radical La Raza professor, Manuel Servin’s, allegation that the Californios,

as the study of California’s settlement shows, were not Spanish, but overwhelmingly mixed-bloods from Indian, Spanish, and also Negro stock.

Attacking the notion that “Hispanic” or “Chicano” (whatever those words mean) culture or people were largely or even partly “Spaniard” is one of the favorite pastimes of the La Raza ethnic nationalists. Why the obsession? Probably because they hate Whitey and European culture so much, while glorifying Mexican Indian (But only Aztec!) culture so much, that the notion that “Spaniard” forms a large part of “Hispanic”, “Latino” and “Chicano” culture and/or DNA really ticks them off. It’s self-hatred plus denial, pure and simple. Ralph Vigil does a good job of demolishing this nonsense. First of all, “Spaniard” itself is not any kind of pure White race; instead, for 700 years or so before 1519, Spain had undergone an incredible amount of race mixture. In the New World, a mestizo born in wedlock was “criollo”, or Spaniard; one born out of wedlock was “Creole”. There was a lack of White women at first, so 1/8 Indian and 1/16 Black still qualified one as “White” or “Spaniard”. So much for race! So much for race indeed, even to the present day. A Mexican Indian leaves behind Indian ways and magically transforms into “mestizo”. A Guatemalan Indian drops Indian ways and starts dressing like a mestizo and automagically becomes “Ladino”. Neither without a drop of White Blood. Back to Vigil:

In order to arrive at a better knowledge of the Hispanic heritage of the borderlands, one should perhaps always keep in mind that this heritage consists of a Spanish, Mexican, and regional Southwestern past, and that an extreme emphasis on any part of the Hispanic heritage, whether it be the “Spanish cult” or the “Mexican-Indian” past, makes for a distortion of borderlands history.

So neither “they were Spaniards” nor the La Raza fetishization of Mexican Indians explains the matter well. Vigil concludes that the matter, like so many things, is complicated. It does not lend itself to simple explanations or La Raza propaganda soundbites:

In conclusion, the student of the history of the Spanish-speaking people of the Southwest encounters a civilization that in varying proportions has elements of Spanish, Indian, Mexican, and Anglo origin today. Although these background influences are important for the analysis and evaluation of the formation of the people variously called Mexican, Mexican-American, Spanish, Spanish-American, Chicano, and other names, the difference between that which was Spanish, Mexican, and Southwestern or New Mexican in the colonial period can only be a matter of regional distinction within a similar general culture. To claim, as Servín does, that Hispanos in New Mexico are not of Spanish stock or language or culture because of some race mixture over the centuries is to miss the importance of miscegenation completely. Vertical mobility existed socially and by the early nineteenth century, all those colonists in New Mexico not obviously Indian were Spaniards. To claim otherwise is almost the same as stating that Spain ceased to be Spanish because of the Berber invasions, or that “Anglo-Americans” today are Indians because they eat corn, potatoes, and use tobacco.

Why Ron Paul is Not Ok

fpy says:

What do people here think of Ron Paul? He’s the only Republican who seems to NOT be an evil, plutocratic, warmongering fuck.

Libertarian. No to Libertarians! Libertarianism will ensure that the plutocrats have complete, total and absolute power. Libertarianism is more or less what holds in the 3rd World. It’s just ultra-capitalism with a minimal to nonexistent state to protect the people from the capitalists. Thing is, real Libertarianism has not only never existed, but it never will exist, and it never can exist. Capitalists need a state like a baby needs its mother. Without a state, the capitalists are nowhere. In particular, they need a very strong army and police to safeguard their wealth. And nowadays, US capitalism anyway is utterly tied in with imperialism to the extent that it can’t exist without it. Have you noticed that most advanced capitalist states are also imperialists? People keep telling me how modern capitalist states can avoid imperialism, but it’s just not possible. A large modern capitalist state must be imperialist. It’s mandatory. If you can’t understand that, then you don’t understand the nature of capitalism at all. Start with Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest State of Capitalism. Lenin is right! There is a group out there on the Internet who are associated with the pure Objectivists of the Ayn Rand school. I forget their name right now. I went over to their website, and it was the usual Libertarian crap. Plus, almost all the writers were Jews. Libertarianism is stacked floor to ceiling with Jews. To my shock, there was article after article supporting US imperialism, especially in defense of Israel and also towards socialist states. They identified Hugo Chavez and Cuba as enemy states and more or less advocated going to war against them. They get it. Modern US capitalism must be imperialist. There is no other way. Imperialism is part of the project. The Project for a New American Century crowd are US imperialists on steroids. They’re also a bunch of Jews too, but forget that for now. Read their papers carefully. The US has no allies, according to them. None, except Israel. All other countries are identified as enemy states (capitalist competitors). Europe is identified as an enemy region and steps are advocated to screw over Europe. Russia is a strong enemy state and is identified as such. Numerous projects are advocated to fuck over Russia. In particular, China is labeled as the worst enemy of the US. Due to capitalist and geopolitical competition, the PNAC crowd figures that the US will have to go to war with China at some point in the next 20 years. Under capitalism, you cannot have any allies. None, zero. An advanced capitalist state is competing with all other capitalist states. There is only so much money on Earth. As one state gets richer, it has to come from someone else. Probably you. Capitalist economic competition frequently results in open warfare, typically over markets. This is what geopolitics, Realpolitik, the Great Game, etc. are all about. And it’s one of the strongest arguments ever against capitalism. Capitalism virtually necessitates war, and war has deep ties to capitalism. Most Americans like capitalism, but few understand that war and imperialism are its essential handmaidens.

An Interesting NE Asian Phenotype

Repost from the old site. White Nationalists like to go on and on and on about the glorious color of their skin: white. For some odd reason, this white skin is superior to darker-colored skins of folks who evolved in hotter zones. Truth is, darker skin color is a perfectly rational evolutionary response to high rates of UV radiation in areas where it is very hot. And in some areas of the globe, people can have fairly light skins if they stay out of the sun, but they get dark quite easily if they go out in the sun. Italians and Greeks come to mind. Here are photos of Italians, Greeks and Spaniards who have stayed out of sun, and then the same folks after they got tanned. The same page also shows identical phenotypes commonly seen as European-only, like Nordics, Mediterraneans and Alpines, in both their European and extra-European forms from Arabia, North Africa and Central Asia. Often the darker skin you see in a lot of Southern Europeans is nothing but a tan. On the other hand, Northern Europeans, and possibly other Northern types, don’t tan very well (they often burn) and even when they do, they don’t get all that dark. The very dark skin of Blacks, Papuans, Melanesians, some Aborigines and some South Indians is simply a result of evolving in those parts of the Earth where the sun shines brightest of all. But Whites ought to give up the fantasy of about their white skin being best of all – because other races have some very white skin too. See the Korean woman in the photo below for example.

A Korean woman. She has a shade of White on her skin that is lacking in almost all Caucasians – it is probably only seen in Ireland and Scotland and it’s probably even lacking in Sweden and Norway. But this very White phenotype seen in some Koreans and Northern Chinese differs from that of European Whites in that it is more glossy. European White skin looks more chalky or powdery. This phenotype also has skin that looks more like porcelain and is reflective of light. The very light European skin tends to be less light-reflective.

Here’s a pretty cool chart showing degrees of skin lightness versus darkness around the world.

UV radiation chart along with zones of skin color. Zone 1 has the darkest skin of all . Zone 2, which includes Italians and Spaniards, has skin that tans easily. Zone 3 contains light skin that enables residents to absorb as much Vitamin D as possible from the sun due to lack of sunlight at higher latitudes. Note that there is also pretty high UV radiation in parts of South America (Peru), in the heart of Mexico, in Southwest Arabia (especially Yemen), in Southern India and Sri Lanka and in Indonesia, Malaysia, Southern Philippines and New Guinea. Indonesians and Malaysians are known for being darker than many other SE Asian groups. According to this chart, the darkest people of all are Blacks from Mozambique and Cameroon in Africa and Aborigines from Darwin in North Australia. A look at the same chart, much expanded, in the original paper, shows that the next darkest are Blacks, the Okavango in Namibia and the Sara in Chad (Table 6, p. 19). The chart shows that the lightest people are in Netherlands, followed by Germany and then the northern parts of the UK. Note on the map that Tibet and parts of the Amazon should have some very dark-skinned people, but those who live there are lighter than you would expect based on UV. The paper suggests that the Tibetans are lighter because it is so cold there that most of their body is covered up all the time and only the face is uncovered. The face is lighter to collect what Vitamin D it can as so much of the body cannot collect Vitamin D due to clothing. The Amazonian Indians are known to be shade-seeking and the paper suggests that this may account for their lighter skin.

Most Whites don’t really have White skin anyway. I am looking at my own skin here as I type, and it looks more pink than White.

References

Jablonski, N. and Chaplin, G. (2000) The Evolution of Human Skin Coloration. Journal of Human Evolution. Available on this blog here.

"Joys of Muslim Women," by Nonie Darwish

Some of this stuff is a bit over to the top, and I edited out about 1 Some of the stuff I removed: that Muslims are preparing a jihad against the West, apparently to convert us to Islam? I don’t agree with that. They think some of us are attacking Islam, so they are counterattacking. Another line said that in 20 years, there will be enough Muslims in North America to elect the President and Prime Minister of the US and Canada. No way is that true. It isn’t really true that non-Muslims are supposed to be killed or subjugated by Muslims, though there is a bit of truth to that. Under Muslim rule, non-Muslims are clearly subordinate. But where Muslims are the minority, that is not the case. Muslims are supposed to try to convert and increase their numbers so they can be a majority. Apparently conquest in the name of Islam – aggressive jihad – we have not seen that much in recent years. One exception is Southern Sudan. There have been some genocides of non-Muslims too – Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians in Anatolia, Catholics in East Timor. In areas with a Muslim majority trying to secede from the state, it’s typically “kill the non-Muslims.” This is the case in the Southern Philippines, Thailand, the Moluccas, Chechnya and Kashmir. There have been localized massacres of non-Muslims in India, Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Muslim jihad is a complicated subject, and saying they want to kill us or convert us is a bit ridiculous, though that was more or less what was going on South Sudan, and there have been some cases of that in Iraq and Pakistan recently.

Joys of Muslim Women

by Nonie Darwish

In the Muslim faith a Muslim man can marry a child as young as 7 year old, consummating the marriage by 9. The dowry is given to the family in exchange for the woman (who becomes his slave) and for the purchase of the private parts of the woman, to use her as a toy. To prove rape, the woman must have (4) male witnesses. Often after a woman has been raped, the family has the right to execute her (an honor killing) to restore the honor of the family. Husbands can beat their wives ‘at will, and the man does not have to say why he has beaten her. The husband is permitted to have 4 wives and a temporary wife for an hour (prostitute) at his discretion. The Shariah Muslim law controls the private as well as the public life of the woman. In the Western World (America), Muslim men are starting to demand Shariah Law so the wife can not obtain a divorce and he can have full and complete control of her. It is amazing and alarming how many of our sisters and daughters attending US and Canadian Universities are now marrying Muslim men and submitting themselves and their children unsuspectingly to Shariah law. Ripping the West in Two. Author and lecturer Nonie Darwish says the goal of radical Islamists is to impose Shariah law on the world, ripping Western law and liberty in two.

Ripping the West in Two

Nonie Darwish recently authored the book, Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law. Darwish was born in Cairo and spent her childhood in Egypt and Gaza before immigrating to the US in 1978, when she was eight years old. Her father died while leading covert attacks on Israel. He was a high-ranking Egyptian military officer stationed with his family in Gaza. When he died, he was considered a “shahid,” a martyr for jihad. His posthumous status earned Nonie and her family an elevated position in Muslim society. But Darwish developed a skeptical eye at an early age. She questioned her own Muslim culture and upbringing. She converted to Christianity after hearing a Christian preacher on television. In her latest book, Darwish warns about creeping sharia law – what it is, what it means, and how it is manifested in Islamic countries. Westerners generally assume all religions encourage a respect for the dignity of each individual. Islamic law (Sharia) teaches that non-Muslims should be subjugated or killed in this world. Peace and prosperity for one’s children is not as important as assuring that Islamic law rules everywhere in the Middle East and eventually in the world. While Westerners tend to think that all religions encourage some form of the golden rule, Sharia teaches two systems of ethics – one for Muslims and another for non-Muslims. Building on tribal practices of the seventh century, Sharia encourages the side of humanity that wants to take from and subjugate others. While Westerners tend to think in terms of religious people developing a personal understanding of and relationship with God, Sharia advocates executing people who ask difficult questions that could be interpreted as criticism. It’s hard to imagine, that in this day and age, Islamic scholars agree that those who criticize Islam or choose to stop being Muslim should be executed. Sadly, while talk of an Islamic reformation is common and even assumed by many in the West, such murmurings in the Middle East are silenced through intimidation. While Westerners are accustomed to an increase in religious tolerance over time, Darwish explains how petro dollars are being used to grow an extremely intolerant form of political Islam in her native Egypt and elsewhere. It is too bad that so many are disillusioned with life and Christianity to accept Muslims as peaceful…some may be but they have an army that is willing to shed blood in the name of Islam…the peaceful support the warriors with their finances and own kind of patriotism to their religion.

I See Race-Denying Idiots

Repost from the old site. I see idiots. I see race-denying idiots. I see them everywhere. I see them on the Egyptology Forum, in particular, linking to one of my posts, The Major and Minor Races of Mankind. That post is a massive work undergoing continuous revision that is based largely on Cavalli-Sforza’s groundbreaking work in genetics. It divides humanity into 3 macro races, 8 major races and 90 minor races. Hey! There is a race for everyone! Don’t despair, folks, there is probably a race out there waiting just for you, lonesome you. It seems that post is upsetting everyone. White Nationalists hate it, and now, over on the Egyptology Forum, Black Nationalists or Afrocentrists or whatever those morons are called hate it too. If White Nationalism is dumb, Black Nationalism is dumber still. Many of the things supposedly invented by Blacks have turned out on analysis to not to have been invented by Blacks. I don’t blame Blacks for reacting this way in the face of incessant propaganda from White Supremacists and various other racists, backed up by “science”, that repeats with hammer-like insistence that Blacks are idiots, evil sociopaths and losers who have never amounted to a thing and never will, as is the destiny of their genes. Hence the pitiful migration of Blacks into Egyptology, in a sad and sorry effort to claim the heritage of ancient Egypt for themselves. It’s bizarre that Black Nationalists, while promoting the Black race, also love to claim that race does not exist. They somehow hold both of these opinions simultaneously. Don’t ask me how. In that forum, I am described as a racialist (!) misrepresenting Cavalli-Sforza’s findings. But I did no such thing. I just used his data (and others) to divide humanity into races, based, almost exclusively, on genetic distance. In a few cases, I had to go outside genetics. In North Africa, there were two cases where mostly-White folks were clustering with mostly-Black folks into single races. Instead of lumping Whites and Blacks together into single subraces, which seemed too weird, I had to (arbitrarily) send Whiter folks to Caucasian and darker ones to Black. The cases involved Algerians and the Beja in one case and Nubians and Berbers in the other. Curiously, these cases do add weight to the race-denier’s arguments that race is a slippery concept. When you have Blacks and Whites lumping with each other genetically into singular small groups, what does it all mean? For the record, Berbers are about 1 Photos of Berbers of various types, North African Arabs and dark-skinned Egyptians from the Aswan Dam area (possibly Nubians) are found on this blog in a recent post here. Later on on the Egyptology thread I get called a racist (!) and White Supremacist (!). But my post makes no such claims at all to White Supremacy. It merely chops up humanity into groups based on genetic distance – nothing more, nothing less. These guys are serious idiots. The reason I am called a White Supremacist racist is because I am supposedly saying that their precious Black Nubians were actually White Berbers. But I said no such thing. I merely noted that two disparate groups, one mostly-White (Berbers – though Black Berbers exist) and another 50-50 Black-White (Nubians) cannot be distinguished racially, on even a minor level, in terms of genetics. Berbers are actually somewhat variable – the Moroccan Berbers are That’s it. The reason Black Egyptology idiots hate the notion of race in Egypt so much is because the ancient Egyptians were about On an anarchist blog recently, I was thrown off and banned for making a simple proposal: that Whites should be free to feel pride. I hedged that White pride is ok, as long as you can feel that way without becoming a racist asshole. I base this on my experience with people from various different races, ethnic groups and nations all over the world. Virtually all of them were ethnocentric about their ethnic group or race, and that clearly went beyond mere patriotism for their state and flag in almost all cases. It is only Whites in the US, Europe, Australia, Canada and New Zealand who are ordered to take no pride in themselves whatsoever, and worse, who are ordered to abase themselves as some sort of racial criminals for all of our nefarious acts down through the ages. At the same time, White countries only are ordered to open their borders to anyone and everyone from the rest of the world (in particular, the non-White world) who wishes to flood in here. It interesting that China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are not also ordered to open their borders. Nor are the Gulf Arabs. In fact, many, or even all, of these states have ferociously racist immigration policies, but the Western Cultural Left has nothing to say about this. It is almost as if only Whites can be racist. I realize that unfortunately this sounds like a White Nationalist rant, but it is sad that only the WN’s are making this perfectly reasonable argument, and on this argument, the WN’s at least are right on the mark. There are some negative effects from this. I had a light-skinned Black girlfriend once for about a year. Once I told her I was not attracted to darker Black women, and she got all upset. I was racist! A White guy dating a Black woman, of all things, and he still can’t escape the racism charge . White men have told me that they told people, when asked, that they were not interested in dating Black women because they were not attracted to them, and they were immediately denounced as racists. As might be expected, hyperaggressive young Black males are mass-targeting White females for sex in mixed-race high schools across our land. I don’t really mind, but it is a bit sickening, let’s face it. Are Black women really so horrible or ugly that these guys must mass-pester White girls? In many cases, the White girls say no, and when they do, they are immediately hammered with the racism charge, which typically leads to White guilt, which I guess in some cases leads to the Black kid getting some White pussy. I really need to say something here. Your house, your state, your attractions and your sex life are yours and yours alone. You don’t have to let anyone into your home. You don’t have to make friends with anyone. You don’t have to let any immigrants into your country, or you can let any immigrants in that you want to. You can be attracted to anyone you want to. And certainly, you can have sex with anyone you want to. You may be racist about who you let into your home, who you make friends with, and who you let immigrate into your land. After all, your borders are like the locked door on your home – you’re not really obligated to let a soul in. You can be attracted to anyone you want to – your own race or any combination of others. You can obviously date, have sex with, and marry anyone you want to and you can limit your partners to your own race or any others. There’s nothing racist about these intensely personal decisions, and the implicit demand that Whites are racist unless they are turned on Black booty or big Black guys, invite whole blocks of Black folks into their homes, invite 2 billion mostly Third World people to flood into their lands, or, most offensive of all, have sex with non-Whites, is utterly outrageous. The demand that Whites self-abnegate all positive feelings about themselves and their heritage has had some nasty side effects. 12-20 million illegal Hispanic immigrants have flooded into the US, many into my home state. Immigration are like seasoning on a dish. A little bit of it is nice, but in California it feels like someone dumped the salt shaker and some spice jars into the pan and ruined the casserole. There is a very real and creepy feeling of living in a foreign land here, or of having been invaded, even invaded by a foreign army. Parts of California have reverted, in all intents and purposes, to provinces of Mexico. This is jarring to Native Californians. Our cities and streets have Mexican names. I was taking Spanish lessons at age six, as my mother, in 1963, had already seen the writing on the wall. Growing up, our friends, best friends and girlfriends were Mexican-Americans. We didn’t hate Mexican-Americans then and we don’t hate them now. We went on wild trips to Mexico to fish, chase women or just rampage around blasted out of minds on alcohol, marijuana and LSD. We always returned stunned at the horrible and cruel poverty we saw, and were always glad to drive through the border back to the US. The illegal alien millions are essentially re-creating Mexico here in the US. If you have ever been to Mexico, you won’t think that is a good idea. My point is that the destruction of White ethnic identity in even its most mild form is what allowed this lunatic invasion and de facto annexation of my state to a foreign Third World country to take place. Whites were neutered, so they sat by passively while this outrage occurred, or, even more perversely, cheered it on.

Time to Take Back “Nigger”

Repost from the old site.

Some Black folks been busy lately trying to bury the word nigger once and for all – recent months have seen symbolic funerals and burials of the n-word by mainstream Black organizations. This movement probably stems from the OJ Simpson trial in the mid-1990’s, when n-word was substituted for nigger.

Nowadays, nigger is as taboo as can be.

Can you say, “That racist jerk called a Black man, ‘Nigger!’?”

Nope.

Can we use the word nigger to describe the word widely used amongst Blacks themselves?

Nope.

One may not use the word nigger under any circumstances.

This is strange.

First, it implies that nigger is either an obscenity or like one’s private parts, ok to be spoken or revealed in privacy but certainly not in public. But nigger is neither obscenity in word nor flesh.

Second, banning the word nigger implies that it is so horrible, and that Blacks are so sensitive, that even the sight or sound of the word will drive these oversensitive Black souls either to tears or to rage. Now, Blacks have never struck me as a cringing, hypersensitive race of inhibited crybabies.

The Black man can take an insult. Why not – we kept him in a cage for centuries, only let him out to be policed like an animal in an open air zoo for another 100 years, finally liberated him via bullets and water hoses 40 years ago, and oppression and discrimination yet linger.

Through it all, the Black man has stood up and taken it like a man. By implying that Black men can’t bear to see the word nigger without dissolving into wimpy tearfulness, we insult their masculinity and fortitudinous nature.

Now that we have settled the absurdity of killing, let alone burying, a word, let us see how we may resurrect the comatose patient.

Who should be allowed to use the word?

Obviously, Blacks will keep on using the word themselves, as is their right. Further, Blacks can decide how, where and why they use the word, if at all. It’s only fair to give Blacks ownership over this word, which is really their word.

Blacks are perfectly correct that Whites should not use this word, and don’t give us that phony, “Well, Blacks use it, so why can’t we?” nonsense.

Semantics is a subfield of Linguistics. In Semantics, we say that words mean whatever people who use them say they mean. End of story. Nigger has one set of meanings when Blacks use it and another set when Whites use it. That’s not Black hypocrisy; it’s the way humans use language. Should racists be granted the right to use the word? No, they use it as a weapon to attack others.

I would like to request that we resurrect the word for journalistic and historical writing integrity. If a non-Black calls Blacks niggers, let’s write out the word. Forget this weasel-word n-word. We should have the right to say, “In the South 50 years ago, most Whites referred to Blacks as niggers.”

What are we accomplishing by refusing the write the evil word? Are we preventing its spread in society, sort of like a disease control agency? Let’s let non-racist creative writers, journalists, social scientists, historians feel free to use the word, sparingly, like seasoning on food, as needed. How about one more case? Why can’t we put the word nigger in the mouths of racists? Why can’t we refer to David “Send the niggers back to Africa” Duke? Or Newt “Cut the niggers off welfare” Gingrich? Or Philippe “I like to measure nigger penises” Rushton?

Let’s boil down some of these racist arguments just a bit and give them some nigger-seasoning.

Why do the same racists who love to rant about supposed Black genetic stupidity love to rave on about Black basketball skills? What’s the real message here? How about, “Niggers sure are good at basketball! They better be, cuz they sure ain’t got no brains!”

What’s the real message of the scientific racism that says that Blacks are genetically stupid, that this stupidity is irremediable by any environmental means, and that attacks any signs of Black intellectual progress (Like, for instance, this vile and wicked blog, recently referred in an New York Times piece by Amy Harmon as a “popular science blog”)? Isn’t it really, “God-damn, niggers are dumb!”

Why don’t we call the Murrays, Rushtons and Lynns the “Niggers sure are stupid!” academics? After all, that’s what they are selling, right?

Have you noticed that endless obsession that the media has with Zimbabwe? Zimbabwe – formerly Rhodesia – used to be run by virulently racist White criminals who were then evicted by a Black liberation movement.

Zimbabwe did all right for quite some time – in fact, throughout the 1980’s, it was regarded as a model of democracy, good governance, and multiracial harmony, and it weathered the African famines of the 1980’s quite well – until it started seizing the land of White farmers in the 1990’s. And why did it seize the land of the White farmers?

Because land reform was a necessity, but Britain had quit funding the “willing buyer, willing seller” fake land reform that never really worked well anyway since so few White farmers were willing to sell land. 5,000 White farmers, a tiny percentage of the population, had almost all the good land, all stolen at gunpoint from Blacks decades earlier.

Meanwhile, Blacks had the worst land and only tiny plots of it anyway, such that they barely had rocks to eat.

They were overcrowded onto this crappy land, so it naturally started to erode. The racist Whites then derided the Blacks for “poor nigger farming methods.” The racists then blamed the livestock of the Blacks for the erosion, and stole 1 million head of “the niggers‘ (ill-disciplined) cattle”. The real cause of the land erosion was the racist feudal farming system.

After the willing seller, willing buyer game ended, it was replaced by a project whereby Zimbabwe tried to come up with money to buy out willing Whites. But an economic crisis occurred (caused by an IMF structural adjustment and the free marketization of the economy) during the 1990’s, and Zimbabwe lacked the cash to purchase White farms.

Whites weren’t selling anyway, and the Brits were backing them to the hilt. Angry Blacks who had fought in the liberation war began clamoring for the land to which they were entitled.

Mugabe, suffering a crisis of legitimacy at the time, gave into them. Hence, the “land invasions” began. The media rails about how “all of the land went to Mugabe’s cronies” – the message here: “Niggers are lying, cheating thieves”.

To some extent, this is true (that land went to cronies). Initially, the land reform was decentralized and handed over to local party officials, which was actually a good idea. Unfortunately, the local officials promptly turned it into a spoils system, just like the corrupt cronyism we see in every African country!

For some reason, the cronyism of Mugabe’s party was worse than that of the rest of Africa, which is ignored by the imperialist media. The important point here is that Mugabe was not really involved in this corruption. After a while of this, Mugabe got a hold of the process, and now most of the land is just going to poor Black farmers.

The next part of the media lie is that since all the land went to Mugabe’s buddies, the poor Black farmers crowded into the cities, where Mugabe promptly took them on in a fake urban renewal campaign called “Drive Out Trash,” which was really just a campaign to destroy the homes of his political opponents and render them homeless.

First of all, most of the land is now going to small Black farmers, so there is no need for landless Black farmers to crowd into the cities. This is why small rural farmers are one of Mugabe’s main support bases, the other being the Shona tribe, the largest tribe in the country.

Second of all, the unfortunately named “Drive Out Trash” campaign was really just an urban renewal campaign where horrible Black slums were destroyed to make way for 120,000 much better government housing units. The urban renewal campaign is going on right now and much nicer government homes are replacing squalid hovels. The urban renewal has been hampered by sanctions, though.

True, the land reform has been chaotic, as land reforms often are in the beginning, especially when too much land reform is done too quickly. The old system has been crushed, and the new one often has not yet gotten going yet. The result is sometimes one or more years of famine harvests. But all this BS could have been prevented if Britain and the White farmers had gone along with a sane land reform program in the beginning.

At the same time, after Zimbabwe had been devastated by a decade of IMF-led imperialist looting combined with terrible droughts of the 1990’s, Mugabe logically told the IMF to go to Hell and refused to pay off his debts.

With the land invasions and the IMF nose-thumbing, all Hell broke loose in US and UK imperialist circles, especially in the former colonist, Britain, where the press went nuts and has never recovered. Devastating sanctions were quickly slammed on Zimbabwe. Foreign investment plummeted by 9

Even UNICEF is in on the brutal punishment – whereas in other African lands, AIDS sufferers get $74 per sufferer per year, Zimbabwe only gets $4 per sufferer per year from UNICEF. Then Mugabe, as AIDS devastated the land – the “dumb, murderous nigger Mugabe” – morphs into “genocidal nigger Communist Mugabe”. Really it’s just an AIDS epidemic devastating the country, as it is wrecking surrounding nations.

The land invasions were a predictable mess, and a few Whites were killed. These deaths have been insanely blown out of proportion by a leering media. In Britain, the media fairly screams “White genocide!” You can imagine the clamor on White Nationalist sites. In truth, a whole nine White farmers have been killed over an eight-year period. The death of one White farmer yields vastly more breathless Western prose than the deaths of 30 Zimbabwean Blacks might.

Another media obsession is “Mugabe the dictator.” Mugabe is authoritarian, but as such folks go, he is pretty lightweight. The opposition leaders regularly give interviews in which they call for armed struggle against Mugabe’s regime or invasion by imperialist countries. It is amazing how this “evil dictator” allows those who call for his very head to speak out and run free.

The West has funded the opposition, which has little support, for years now. The opposition is totally tied to imperialism and pushes an extreme free market program that is not only the last thing that Zimbabwe needs right now but is the very thing that caused so many problems for the nation in the 1990’s.

The opposition has led a number of violent campaigns, and some of their leadership has been arrested and beaten. The Western media has gone nuts over these minor transgressions.

The opposition has also historically allied at various with the White farmers in Zimbabwe, White apartheid supporters in South Africa, and the vicious, apartheid-supported RENAMO guerrillas in Mozambique. Obviously, they are rejected by the vast majority of Zimbabweans.

The main opposition party was clearly involved in a coup attempt that tried to kill Mugabe in alliance with UK imperialism, but a court of the Mugabe “dictatorship” somehow refused to convict the plotters.

Truth is that the opposition is essentially run and funded by UK and US imperialism. Zimbabwe sees the UK and US as enemy nations, and in fact they are. As such, I would argue that the opposition are in effect traitors and spies for openly working the enemies of the nation. Mugabe is too kind. I am amazed he even lets the opposition walk around free at all. Mugabe the “dictator” has held several elections, which are now monitored by international monitors, and monitors have upheld all of the results. At the same time, opposition protests caused the “dictator” Mugabe to cancel several proposed Constitutional amendments.

The sanctions are the cause of almost all of the economic decline and ruin that the country has suffered since 1999. There is no a priori reason to suggest that Zimbabwe should be the most devastated country in Africa. The nasty racist suggestion is: “Niggers can’t run a country.”

In particular, the suggestion is worse: “Niggers are so stupid and childlike that they are incapable of running a country and quickly destroy any country given to them. Look at Zimbabwe. It was doing great when the nigger children had White grown-ups to take care of them. Then they threw Whitey out and tried to run it by themselves, and look what happened.”

The sneaky riff: “Niggers destroy any country they run. The only way that nigger countries can succeed is if the niggers are colonized by superior Whites.” The particularly nasty aspect of this vicious line is that it both supports White colonialism and White apartheid at the same time.

Another line is taken by many “race realists” such as the noxious crowd over at GNXP.

It is interesting that these “race realists” are almost always from the more “superior” races and rarely from the more “inferior” races.

Anyway, these folks take the objectively racist line that the chaos in Zimbabwe is because…”niggers are too stupid to run a country!” IQ scores in Africa are then used to prove that idiocy is what is killing Zimbabwean Blacks.

It is true that, as James Watson noted, IQ scores in Africa are markedly low. These IQ scores are valid. However, IQ scores in Zimbabwe are about 67, which is precisely the African average.

The other African nations, despite their low IQ’s, seem to muddle along, and at least are not experiencing Zimbabwean disaster. Minus crippling sanctions, Zimbabwe would be expected to muddle along about as well as any African nation.

Another problem is that much of the chaos in Zimbabwe is being caused by one of the worst AIDS problems on Earth. This is conflated by imperialism’s media to mean “socialist Mugabe is slaughtering his people.” Truth is it’s mostly AIDS that is killing them, not Mugabe, and there is not much Mugabe can do about AIDS anyway.

Blacks did not destroy Zimbabwe – sanctions did. Zimbabwe was doing fine on its own for 19 years until it started grabbing the White farms. De facto White Supremacist countries like the US and UK then went nuts, slammed devastating sanctions on Zimbabwe, and it’s been screaming in the ruins ever since.

Viewed in this light, cheat sheet version of the destruction of Zimbabwe ends up as a (deliberate or not) White racist plot-scam to make Blacks look like genocidal incompetent children that need White adults to take care of them. I do not think imperialism intended the message to come out that way, but that’s how it came across.

Even worse, the line is: “Look! Niggers are so stupid and incompetent they can’t even grow food!” Black people grow food all over Africa and have been growing food for centuries. They don’t necessarily grown enough of it to feed their countries, but they do ok.

Africans are resourceful and hardy folks; humans have been there for 120,000 years, and they haven’t gone extinct yet. Fire and tools came out of Africa, and 73,000 years ago, when a volcano killed almost all humans on Earth, only a small band of 600 or so survived and kept the human race going.

Guess where the holdouts were? Africa, near Mount Kilimanjaro. Afterward, these Africans underwent extreme evolutionary changes called the Great Leap Forward, probably invented art and language, and exploded out of Africa to colonize the entire planet.

Yet these same folks are so stupid they can’t even grow food! Come on. There is yet one more snarky and wicked riff running through this whole imperialist aggression. It’s a lesson to the niggers in South Africa. It says, “Listen up, South African niggers! Look at Zimbabwe! This is what will happen to you if you try to do a land reform with those White farmers in your country! We will destroy you just like we did Zimbabwe! Don’t even think about it, niggers!”

Now, South Africa, which we will deal with below, desperately needs a land reform. 50,000 White farmers occupy 8

In the end, there is no reason why Zimbabwe should not at least be able to do just as well as the rest of the Africa. Zimbabwe is a disaster not because it is run by Blacks but because economic warfare has been declared on it.

Now let’s look at South Africa. Yes, the crime rate is very high. But it is in general much higher than the rest of Black Africa. Now why is that?

The racist line is: “Niggers are animals and criminals. They murder, rape and steal anything in their path, and their innate criminality destroys any country. They especially like to prey on White people because they are so hateful and racist towards Whites. And they love to rape White women because their own nigger women are so damn ugly. Look at South Africa, and peer into the heart of the nigger criminal beast.”

But South Africa is anomalous. Decades of criminal White apartheid against Blacks built up mountains of hate and resentment amongst impoverished Blacks who seethed with rage as the Whites lived in luxury while Blacks wallowed in miserable slums.

The insane gap between the rich and the poor in South Africa and the Black face of the poor combined with the White face of the rich insures racial-based redistributionist crime, often violent crime, for the foreseeable future. Barring South Africa’s unusual circumstances, we should not expect its crime rate to be much worse than the rest of Black Africa’s.

Once again, the nasty subtext: “Niggers need apartheid. The nigger can’t make it on his own. He’s an animal and he needs the White man’s paternalistic boot on his neck in order to survive and not destroy himself and his land.” As in Zimbabwe, it’s yet another argument to bring back settler-colonial apartheid and White rule.

Let’s take a look at another “race realist” obsession: Haiti. Haiti is said to be “the only Black country in the Americas,” and it is rightly described as a devastated place. The subtext: “There is only one nigger country in the Americas, and they have of course destroyed it.” But this is not the case. First of all, most of the Caribbean islands are primarily Black or mulatto, including Cuba. A number of these islands are still colonies, but others are not. And while Dominica, Jamaica, and Grenada have plenty of problems, they are not Haiti by a long shot.

The reasons Haiti is a wreck is due to its ultra-reactionary mulatto ruling class that has confiscated almost all of the wealth of the land since independence, in cooperation with frankly White racist White countries like France, the US, and Canada.

The elite have the army and cops, and they have been slaughtering the people to keep their feudal stranglehold over the place for 100 years now. France is still furious about independence in 1804, when Black slaves, under Desallines, rose up and killed all 25,000 White French slavers and their families on the islands. To this day, 200 years later, White racist France demands reparations for this admittedly bloody episode.

Unfortunately, as so often happens, the revolution was quickly usurped by a bunch of fake revolutionaries, who ended up turning it on its head and putting a version of the old system back in.

There were a group of light-skinned Blacks who were often freed slaves and had allied with the White slaveowners. These Blacks quickly wormed their way into power, installed feudal brutality over the wretched masses, and it’s been that way ever since. One more stolen revolution. Now this Haitian ruling class, in collaboration with imperialism, continues to keep Haiti under the boot.

Aristide was elected with 9

He tried to raise the abysmal minimum wage, gave a million kids a lunch a day (probably their only meal) and built more schools in eight years than had been built in the previous 200. The people experienced real, tangible gains under Aristide, the best they had seen in two centuries.

For these crimes, imperialism (the US, France, and Canada) destroyed Aristide and forced him to leave with a gun at his head. The imperialist operation may as well have been called Operation Enduring Sweatshop.

The only solution for Haiti is armed revolution. The army of the ruling class needs to be overthrown. Then the ruling class themselves need to be informed of the new program and encouraged to go along.

Those that do not need to be arrested, and then either thrown in prison or re-education camps, kicked out of the country, or as a last resort for some of the most bloodthirsty and criminal Duvalierists and Tonton Macoutes, shot. Their hands are dripping with blood anyway, so it’s not like innocent people would be persecuted or killed.

A dictatorship of the proletariat may be necessary for a while, or at least a democracy with a well-armed revolutionary army, police and citizenry. This is one thing Hugo Chavez has right – arm the people and revolutionize the military.

Until that happens, Haiti will continue to be Hell on Earth.

When racists use arguments like these against Blacks and Black nations, they are not really talking of Blacks or Black countries. We give them too much credit when we say they are talking about Black people or nations – they are not – they are talking about niggers and nigger countries. Let’s shove the n-word in their mouth, leave it there for all to see, force them to eat it, and make them tell us what it tastes like.

Admittedly, we are taking some risks with this approach, namely the risk of legitimizing the term nigger. But most sane people already understand the difference between Blacks’ use of the word and Whites’ use of it. I don’t see why we can’t extend things a bit.

Note: Inspiration for this post came in part from a Michael Eric Dyson show on the radio. Dyson is a brilliant and gifted Black academic (though a bit too lenient on rap culture). Check out this great book, will get your brain moving! A bit hard to read, but a lot of my readers can handle him, I think. Awesome stuff. I wish all these racist and White nationalist idiots who rant on about how stupid Black people are could read this most challenging Black scholar.

Thanks also to the outrageous Black blog Look at This Nigger for additional humor and inspiration along the same theme.

References

Elich, Gregory. Zimbabwe and Pan-African Liberation. Elich, Gregory. The Battle over Zimbabwe’s Future. Elich, Gregory. Zimbabwe’s Fight for Justice. Gowans, Stephen. Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and the “Politics of Naming”. Gowans, Stephen. Zimbabwe’s Lonely Fight for Justice.

Do Capitalists Support Pubic Health and Education?

Repost from the old site. In a response to my post, The Paradox of Capitalist Regulation, brilliant British commenter huy suggests that capitalists nowadays are enlightened enough to see that public health and education are needed for the workforce. I argue otherwise below. Huy:

I would say that history has taught capitalism that free education and law and order run by the state is essential for capitalism to work, as without those things capitalism fails.It looks like capitalism is learning across the globe that free and equal health provided by the state is also essential for capitalism to run (from a free market economic point of view). Socialism wants national health and education for the benefit of the people, while capitalism wants national health and education for the benefit of the market and growth of the economy, An economy with higher-skilled, more versatile workers who are in good health is a more productive one. I consider myself vey leftwing and technocratic, and I’m deeply in favour of the free market, but only if the state provides good free education and health for all, minimum wage, poverty benefits, unemployment benefits and the chance for adults to get apprenticeships and qualifications for free when ever they need to or want to (within reason) so as to allow the lower-skilled workers to keep up with the fast pace of the free market and all the job cuts and creations that come with it. The free market is humanity’s best hope for destroying poverty, but only if it is galvanized by the state properly, whereby social mobility and equal opportunity and social justice and lack of social deprivation is followed through. This makes both moral and economic sense.

I respond: If you look at the 3rd World, the capitalist classes there do not want public education and they certainly do not want state health care. Even here in the US, the capitalist class has waged all-out war on public education and national health care through the Republican Party, although the Democratic Party also now seems to oppose national health care. In parts of the world where national health care has been put in, the capitalists and their rightwing parties quickly wage ideological warfare to get rid of it. Europe is an unusual case, probably due to circumstances discussed in my earlier post, For Justice, A River of Blood. Europe was a very rightwing place in the 1930’s. WW2 completely destroyed most of the European Right, defeated all rightwing governments, killed, wounded or imprisoned many of the rightwingers themselves, destroyed or made illegal their organizations and dissolved much of their wealth and power, and more importantly, humiliated them and completely discredited rightwing ideology. As a consequence, the Right was in disarray for decades after WW2 in Europe, and they have not yet regained their power. After the war, there was a Cold War threat from the USSR and from Left groups all over the rest of Europe. In order to co-opt the Soviet model and the West European Left, the ruling classes in Europe cut deals with workers, consumers and society in which a Social Contract was erected in the form of a socialism called variously the social market or social democracy. Due to the decimation and discrediting of the European Right, even European elites and media bought into social democratic ideology. Hence we see in France large Leftwing papers like Liberation, huge Euro-Communist parties getting 10-3 Elites in Scandinavia formed collegial relations with Communist and Leftist states and Leftist guerrillas on the basis that they were all socialists. For instance, Scandinavian governments had friendly relations with Sandinista Nicaragua, Cuba and Vietnam, along with the FMLN and FARC guerrillas in El Salvador and Colombia. Scandinavian governments gave generous aid to the Third World, often in pro-people forms with no capitalist or reactionary strings attached. This had the effect of taking the wind out of the sails of West European Communists. In a relatively just social democratic society, most saw little need for revolution. In Europe, even the capitalists have gone along with national health care, although in the UK they have been whittling away at it since Thatcher. European executives love their free national health care and paid six week vacations. However, in much of the rest of the world, capitalists have rolled back national health and education. In China, national health care is apparently gone as a right. In Russia, too, it scarcely exists anymore, while education has been decimated along with educated persons and professions. In some East European states like Bulgaria, health care has been devastated. The first thing the hero of both US parties, Nicaraguan President Violeta Chamorro, did when the Sandinistas were voted out was to get rid of free public education and free national health care. In Canada right now, the rightwing party and the business class have declared war on the national health care system (an ongoing project for a good 15 years or so now), but it is popular, so they have to tread lightly. If the business classes in the US supported public education and national health care, we would not have a decades-long war against both of them waged by the party of business, the Republican Party, and supported by the business class in its entirety. It is true that some more enlightened US capitalists (especially big businesses) do support public education and even national health care, but they are an exception. In this sense, the US small business class is even more reactionary than US big businesses. The US small business class supported Ross Perot and Ron Paul and are often far to the Right of the corporate guys. This rightwing populism can and does lead to fascism. Small business and the petit bourgeois were the army behind fascism in Nazi Germany and have led many far-right movements in the US too. The petit bourgeois resents the plutocratic elites for screwing them, but on the other hand also resents the working classes for being unionized and making good money via union wages. They feel oppressed by both groups. Also, many petit bourgeois did not go to college, so they resent those white collar workers (seen as intellectuals and professionals) who got degrees and the resulting higher-paying jobs. The petit bourgeois work in offices, banks and stores as clerks, tellers, low-ranking managers, etc. This class sector is often equated with something like the lower middle class. They often have no class consciousness at all, which is why they are often fodder for the Far Right. What you are advocating above, huy, is not the free market at all, since the free market advocates getting rid of most to all government spending and regulation. Instead, you are advocating for socialism in one of its many forms. This form being the social market or social democracy. I am a strong supporter of social democracy along the lines of the European model. The social market is a regulated capitalism with many government programs as a safety net and considerable government involvement in and even ownership of parts of the economy. In Sweden, 9 Government involvement in the economy takes the form of industry guidance as a corporatist element. Ownership of aspects of the economy takes the form of ownership of large industries like aircraft and ship building, national airlines, vehicle manufacturing, national rail, etc. It’s worked quite well. Keep in mind that capitalists are loath to invest in industries like ship building in which it may take 100 years to make your first profit. These industries need to be state-run for a long time. Further, passenger rail is almost never profitable for the private sector, so they just don’t run passenger trains. Since it operates at a loss as its nature, it must be run by the state. This is what is so sick about the endless demands on Amtrak to make a profit – it is almost impossible for Amtrak to make a profit, because large passenger rail networks almost never do. In order to profit, they would have to charge so much money that they would hardly get any passengers. In the same way, city buses never run at a profit either, hence we never see the private sector running passenger buses inside cities. Do you see any private rail lines running passenger rail in any areas of the US? Of course not. Why? Because it’s not profitable. Passenger rail must be run by the state for it to exist at all. Demands for Amtrak to run a profit are perverse, dishonest and wrong. How many Americans think Amtrak needs to run a profit? Of those with an opinion, possibly most. This is what rightwing propaganda will do to you.

What Being Canadian is All About

Repost from the old site. This is part 2 of our series on Canada, the place we liberals and leftwingers keep talking about moving to since Bush came in, but can’t seem to get up the nerve to do it (I know plenty of libs who talk about it, and not one that did it). Canadians are just like us, except far less fundamentalist and way more liberal. Other than that, they are white, rich, good-looking, materialistic capitalists just like us Americans. Since these Canadian posts seem to cause rightwing outbursts telling me, “America, love it or leave it”, I think I need to address that silly issue. Excuse me, but I was born here; I didn’t willingly immigrate here from someplace else. I came of age in the 1970’s, the pinnacle of progressive achievement in the US. It was the era of Roe v Wade; recreational drugs; casual sex; decriminalization of marijuana; Jerry Moonbeam Brown governing my California, and George McGovern – one of the most leftwing candidates to run for US President in the past century – garnering an incredible 3 Only nerds and dorks and guys who seemed like they couldn’t get laid or women you wouldn’t want to touch were conservatives. Zealous Christians were regarded as weirdos, lamers, party-poopers and fuddy-duddies who never got laid and didn’t know how to party. After that…came…backlash. I could see it already forming in early 1978 with the embryonic Christian Right, on the bus coming back from Aspen with the ski club, while the fun-hating, dour-faced, never-smiling Christians hassled me about the beloved bong in my hand. Then came Ronald Raygun, a far rightwinger who blindsided America and took us full speed down Reaction Street 100 miles an hour. The Reagan Democrats, a group of suicidal members of the US working class, became a phenomenon to be dealt with. At the end of the Reagan-Bush years, a massive wealth transfer had taken place – the middle and lower classes had been robbed blind and they didn’t have a clue; in fact, they were in love with the robber who bled them white and hung them out to dry. An entire society had Stockholm Syndrome, where the hostages revere and identify with their abusive captors. Between 1980-1992, the top 2 We liberals armed ourselves with these figures and went around telling the robbery victims how they got ripped off. We (at least I) were met with disbelief. The heist victims stubbornly told me that they intended to keep on voting for the thieves who were cleaning them out. They told me this while sputtering angrily at poor people, who didn’t have the slightest thing to do with their plight. The reason they were couldn’t make ends meet, they told me straight-faced, was not because of a devious ruling-class plot to drain their bank accounts, it was all because of some pitiful poor people who were barely even surviving and hadn’t even see the victims’ checkbooks, much less lifted them to kite checks. By 1992, people started to figure things out. People are not dumb – they knew they were getting ripped off. But the people ripping them off – the Republican Party – fooled the ignorant US working and middle classes into voting for the very cat burglars who were robbing them blind. Financial sanity, formerly a bipartisan project, was thrown in the trash bin as Reagan deliberately ran up record deficits in the 1980’s. Reagan’s supporters decided that deficits did not matter, or believed malevolent Republican lies that Democrats caused the deficits, not Republicans. Then when Bill Clinton came in, suddenly deficits and the debt were the crowning issues of the day, while under Reagan they were greeted with a shoulder shrug. Now Bush is in – the most financially reckless President we have ever had – and suddenly deficits don’t matter anymore all over again. It’s stuff like that that makes us think conservatives are either wicked, or brain-dead, or both. Under Raygun, spending on mindless defense skyrocketed, we fought one of the stupidest wars we have ever fought (Grenada), we attacked the Nicaraguan people and slaughtered 50,000 of them because the Nicaraguan government thought kids should go to school and poor peasants should get a bit of food to eat and see a doctor now and then. We funded genocidal, sadistic, diabolical death squads all over the world (mostly Latin America) while we waged full-blown assault on the environment and on science itself as the government and society at large cultivated ignorance into a cherished fetish. And all the while, white racism, Christian fundamentalism, class resentment, and general stupidity and ignorance became US government policy and societal memes. Every four years, tens of millions of American voter-lemmings went into the voting booth and ran right off the cliff, voting directly against their economic self interests. The reactionary nightmare is now 30 years old, with a brief sort-of respite under Bill Clinton the Triangulator. When I say Canada sits up there, smug and happy, a symbol of “America Done Right”, that doesn’t mean I need to move to Canada, dammit. It means I think America needs to be more like Canada. Now that may be a vain hope, but it springs from patriotism – a desire to make one’s country a better place – not treason, the desire to harm the homeland.

Canadian Propaganda

Repost from the old site. Since so much of America, and the American public, are depressingly, frighteningly reactionary, and are sadly reaping what they have sowed by their extremist views, this blog tends to wistfully look north at what America could have been. Yes, Canada. This blog is a strong supporter of most things Canadian, except the new Bush-loving Prime Minister and Canada’s terrible imperialism in Haiti. Nevertheless, Canada still sits up there, happy and warm by the fire, a reminder of what America woulda, coulda, shoulda, but probably will never be. Why? Because far too many Americans are far too dumb and reactionary to create a decent country, so they will have to wallow in the militaristic banana republic mudhole they seem to want so much. Let them wallow, with all the deaths, injuries, outrages, wars, and disasters that go with the fascist program, and see how the American pigs like it. Let us drink a toast to Canada! And down with George Bush’s America! Update: I just deleted a couple of rightwing posts telling me basically, “America, love it or leave it!” That is one thing I will not tolerate from anyone; all comments along those lines will be immediately deleted and every rightwing baboon who posts that will be banned. “Love it or leave it” has to be one of the stupidest things anyone could say to anyone. How come it is only rightwingers who say, “Love it or leave it?” How come rightwingers only say that to US liberals? How come US rightwingers never tell people living in any of the countless countries they hate to “love it or leave it”? Why do you have to like where you live anyway? A cursory glance at most of the nations on Earth, and I can understand why any sane person would not like those societies very much. Let’s face it, most societies are deeply reactionary, and from a progressive POV, they are objectionable. On that basis alone, I would be dissatisfied with the reactionary nature of the societies of the vast majority of countries. In other words, I wouldn’t be all that happy with many other societies either. Allow me to clarify: I do hate one thing about America, and that the deeply conservative nature of our society. On the other hand, aside from that and everything that springs from that, I like most everything about this place. It’s better than most countries on Earth in that we live extremely well here, the populated areas look nice, the roads are nicely kept up, and the cars, buildings and residences look nice and are kept up. There are plenty of nice stores with lots of stuff to buy and the water, sewage, electricity, heating, air conditioning, trash collection, and local governments all function well. People dress well, women look nice, infectious diseases are at a low level and many places have little crime. It’s sanitary and clean. Much of it is not paved over yet and those areas are often beautiful. The cops are fairly honest and so is government at most levels, compared to most of the world. As long as you have a job, a decent income and health insurance and you ignore the politics, you can live quite well here, and beyond that, it’s actually a pleasant place to live. So, saying Robert Lindsay “hates America” is quite misleading. Any self-respecting progressive would surely dislike the reactionary, quasi-fascist nightmare that George Bush’s America has become. But a society’s politics is only one small aspect of a nation. If all dissatisfied Americans had up and left the country, nothing progressive ever would have occurred in this nation and we would be stuck in backwardness.

Black IQ Gains in Britain, Kenya and Dominica

Repost from the old site.

A recent post of mine noted that the Black IQ in the US has shown gains of about 5.5 points against Whites in both children and adults. At age 12, the Black IQ is now 90.5, as opposed to 85 30 years ago. Black adult IQ’s have risen from 79 to 84.5 during the same period.

At the same time, Blacks have shown major gains in achievement test results relative to Whites. They narrowed the achievement gap by about 3

Rising IQ’s over time are referred to as the Flynn Effect (FE). In Britain, the results are even better. West Indian Blacks in the UK now have an IQ of about 93.5 at age 11. Scores for adult Caribbeans in the UK are not known. Studies from 1960’s-70’s showed an IQ of 85 for these same children, but now it has moved up by 8.5 points. Young Caribbean Blacks in the UK have closed the IQ gap by more than half.

Interestingly, this IQ increase has coincided with a spectacular increase in crime among these British-born Jamaicans. The first generation that came in the 1950’s and 60’s were mostly hard-working and law-abiding. But their offspring in many ways have been a disaster.

Here we see once again the phenomenon discussed on this blog before, that the male children of low-wage immigrants to the West are often criminals. This even held for the offspring of Irish, Italian and some Jewish Whites to the US over 100 years ago. With a rising IQ coinciding with a skyrocketing crime rate, again we see the disconnect between the simplistic game that White Nationalists play called “low IQ = high crime”.

Most Caribbean Blacks in the UK are Jamaicaans. In Jamaica, the Black IQ is about 71.5.

A counterargument to these rising Jamaican IQ gains is that these Jamaicans are heavily intermarrying with Whites. In the first generation, up to 2

But let us look at the argument. If base Jamaican IQ is 71.5, then a 2

A good analysis of the UK Jamaican data is that, if assuming the benefit of increased White genes, the more complex modern environment in the UK is raising Jamaican IQ by 5-10 points. In another score 92 at that age, both scores in comparison to a White score of 100. The Black US score then declines to 85 (a 10 point drop) and the African Black score drops to 67 (an incredible 25 point drop). Black scores decline as children age, and this recent post suggests that an initial high score followed by sharply declining scores are indicative of earlier maturation among Blacks. I do not know to what extent early Black maturation (Blacks do mature earlier, and this has a genetic basis) explains the strange phenomenon of high Black IQ’s in small children which rapidly decline into adulthood.

But it is interesting that Tizard’s group raised together in an institutional setting, the young Black kids had even higher IQ’s than the Whites.

In the Caribbean nation of Dominica, there has been a stunning rise in IQ over a 36 year period from 1965-2001. There was an 18 point rise during this period, which rose their IQ’s from 61 to 73 (the IQ’s did not rise by 18 points because other groups’ IQ’s were also rising during this period). This represents a gain against UK Whites of 12 IQ points.

The test used was Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a test that is said to be the best available for measuring pure “g” intelligence.

A schematic of the g, or general intelligence, factor. The ovals represent subtests on an intelligence test. G is a correlation coefficient of various tests. It measures the tendency of superior test takers (and someone who has a brain that works a bit better), where if they do well on one test, they also tend to do well on all other tests. The
FE is generally not on g because some tests have risen dramatically, others moderately, and still others little or not at all. Therefore, intelligence has not risen in a general, across-the-board kind of way. However, certain aspects of intelligence have definitely risen, and those aspects would seem to me to have quantifiable benefits in modern society occupationally, academically, and in other ways.

 

It also predicts success in life in various ways pretty well and is not culturally biased in any way. The researchers gave a vocabulary test to the group and found a similar rise of about 18 IQ points on that test.

Researchers tried to tease out which factors were most related to the IQ rise. The only factor that explained the rise fairly well was schooling, so it appeared that improved schooling was a major cause of the IQ rise. The IQ rise occurred at the time of a major expansion of the school system in Dominica.

Socioeconomic status of parents explained about 1

These findings are interesting for many reasons. This post suggests that most of the FE is due to increased caloric intake among children, resulting in earlier maturation. Improved nutrition has often been suggested as a reason for the FE but did not seem to be a factor here.

Those who favor a genetic explanation for racial variations in IQ (nearly all of whom are White racists) disparage all societal interventions to increase IQ as worthless. In particular, they oppose spending any more money on educating “inferior” Blacks and Browns, as it is just throwing good money after bad. This study indicates that increased educational spending can indeed have IQ benefits for Blacks.

Some other findings in this study are of interest. One is that the rise is on the Raven’s test, which is the most heavily g -loaded test in existence. Critics of the FE claim that the rise is not on g, or general intelligence, and hence it is worthless. The Dominican rise was definitely on g.

In the West, while there have been major rises in tests of problem-solving, visual analysis, visual intelligence, and verbal analysis, there have been little to no gains in general knowledge, vocabulary, arithmetic, and mathematical analysis.

Some interpret this to mean that there has been no rise in general intelligence – only a rise in “factors subject to environmental bias.” Such an analysis is false – but it is interesting that in Dominica such huge gains are being seen in vocabulary, while in the West, vocabulary gains have only been 4.4 points over 80 years.

A study out of Kenya in 2003 looking at 7 year old children found an incredible 26 point gain over 14 years from 1984-1998 in rural Kenya, leaving them with an IQ of 89 (Daley et al 2003). This apparently represented a 21 point IQ gain over British Whites from the previous IQ of 68.

The rise was correlated with schooling, family structure, nutrition, and the health of the children. Schooling seemed to be the major factor and once again coincided with a major educational expansion by the government. The test used was the children’s version of Raven’s, the Children’s Progressive Matrices, once again a very g-loaded test, so the Kenyan rise was also on g.

The Kenyan, UK, and Dominican studies are important because they show Blacks reducing the Black-White IQ gap by 10-15 points in a few decades. Hereditarians argue that the Black-White gap is permanent in all areas of the world, and that Blacks are a hopelessly stupid race – a drain on humanity. All money spent on raising Black IQ’s is wasted for this reason.

The three studies above show purely environmental factors causing major reductions in the Black-White IQ gap.

Another study found massive gains, that I have not been able to quantify, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, over a 72-74 year period. The gains were probably at least on the order of 20 points. Researchers suggested that increased cognitive stimulation in the form of a more complex world was responsible for the rise.

A common complaint of all of these studies showing rising Black IQ’s, both in tandem with Whites and in closing the Black-White gap, is that the studies are done only on children. But most IQ tests are done on kids. Taking African studies as an example, we can see here that 6

In my opinion, testing kids is probably a better way to measure pure neurological efficiency without throwing in all sorts of potentially confounding extraneous variables.

Adults are much more likely than kids to have physical and mental diseases (schizophrenia and depression lower IQ), to be in jail, prison, or homeless, to abuse alcohol and drugs, or to have suffered serious head injuries. All of these factors throw a monkey wrench into tests that should be trying to show us real differences between races.

Just today, the White Nationalist blog Majority Rights posted a well-done article by Richard D. Fuerle, A Possible Explanation for the Flynn Effect. The article’s interesting premise is that the FE is due to increased caloric intake and even increasing obesity in our modern world. This increased food intake would result in earlier maturation and higher IQ’s among children, which would then level off in adulthood.

The author suggests that the FE is not really an IQ increase but an effect of this early maturation, and that people are getting less intelligent, not more so.

I believe this theory is wrong, though it has an interesting premise. James Flynn also disagrees with Fuerle’s article, saying that the author was led astray, as he did not have good knowledge of the literature. Flynn also disagreed with the notion that the FE was only in children and that it leveled off in adulthood, saying that he had refuted this in an article his famous article published in JEM: The Journal of Educational Measurement, in 1984 (Flynn 2008).

Some of the comments following Fuerle’s article are also not correct.

First of all, IQ’s have been rising among all age groups, not just kids. It’s really a cohort effect. James Flynn agreed with me (Flynn 2007) that Black adults of today have the same IQ scores (100) as the Whites of 1957. Blacks of today have somewhat higher scores than the Whites of WW2.

This brings up a conundrum as one wonders if today’s US Blacks would have been able to beat the Japanese in WW2, since they can’t even seem to run Detroit (Taylor 2007). This long and rather involved post of mine deals with a lot of the arguments around the FE, including some of the misconceptions about it. My post theorizing that Blacks of today equal the Whites of 1957 is here.

Here, I show that Black children and adults have indeed made about a 5.5 IQ point gain on Whites over the past 30 years, coinciding with the liberation of Blacks via Civil Rights laws. The notion that IQ has risen due to increased caloric intake is interesting but probably invalid. Flynn himself says that after 1950, gains due to nutrition were minimal to nil in the West.

Furthermore, the gains should have been across the board, not just in the certain areas that the FE is in. As we see above, the FE is also occurring in 3rd World countries like Kenya and Dominica where excess nutrition is certainly not an issue. In those countries, it is related to better education, if anything. Much of the FE remains mysterious.

The notion that gains are occurring only in certain areas that are “subject to environmental bias” is not correct. First of all, in Dominica, huge gains were seen in vocabulary, one of the areas that is not seeing much gain in the West.

Vocabulary, general knowledge, basic math, and mathematical analysis are all subject to environmental influence too, but Western society has not been promoting these areas so much.

The areas that the FE is occurring in – verbal analysis, analytical reasoning, visual analysis, visuospatial reasoning, on-the-spot problem solving for which no previous method was known, etc. – are areas that our increasingly sophisticated society has been promoting.

We have promoted this in terms of an increasingly complex society and the mass promotion of scientific thinking. The visuospatial aspect may be due to video games, cell phones, computers, and many things that need programming – boom boxes, car radios, microwaves, answering machines, thermostats, on and on.

My personal opinion is that TV has a lot to do with it. TV shows are increasingly complex, and kids sit in front of TVs with clickers clicking through 50 different channels one after the other. The camera usually only focuses on something for a short time, then moves on. Even jokes and dialog on TV come at a rapid pace. Movies seem to have gotten a lot more complex in recent decades too.

Lastly, the FE is only ending or reversing in Scandinavia. It is still going full blast in the US and in the 3rd world.

The notion that IQ is rising while “real intelligence” – general knowledge, math and vocabulary – is not cannot be supported. Those three things are no more “real intelligence” than the stuff that is going up in the FE.

Another argument advanced later in the discussion has to do with Malcolm Gladwell’s misreading of the FE. Gladwell says that the gains have been almost exclusively on a subtest of the WISC called Similarities. Although gains on Similarities reflect increased use of scientific thinking in our society, these gains are disparaged in the comments section as showing a phony effect of increased intelligence when there has been none.

First of all, the commenters are wrong in that gains on Similarities are a meaningless artifact. Similarities tests for the ability to solve problems on-the-spot without a previously learned method. Raven’s tests for the same thing – it is said to test for the “ability to make sense of the buzzing confusion of life.” Second, Gladwell is wrong. Major gains have occurred on many tests, not just Similarities:

Look at the gains:

Similarities         23.45
Picture Arrangement  21.5
Coding               18
Object Assembly      17.35
Block Design         15.9
Picture Completion   11.7
Comprehension        11
Vocabulary           4.4
Arithmetic           2.3
Information          2.1

A nice photo of James Flynn, along with Richard Lynn and Philippe Rushton, from an obscure document reporting on a conference on intelligence in Amsterdam last year, is here. The link also features a short, interesting interview with Flynn along with some interesting abstracts on intelligence.

Some abstracts I found interesting were those showing that the more intelligent people are, the less likely they are to believe in God. Also, among believers, the more intelligent people were, the more liberal and less literal they were in their beliefs. These findings also applied at a national and ethnic level.

Other abstracts showed that the more intelligent people are, they longer they live and the healthier they are. A recent finding not in the document was that in the West, the smarter you are, the more likely you are to be a vegetarian.

References

Daley, Y. C.; Whaley, S. E.; Sigman, M. D.; Espinosa, M. P.; and Neuman, C. (2003). “IQ On the Rise: The Flynn effect in Rural Kenyan Children.” Psychological Science 14, 215-219.
Flynn, James R. (November 2007). Personal communication.
Flynn, James R. (January 2008). Personal communication.
Keita, Lamin. (December 2007). Personal communication.
Nisbett, R. E. (1998). “ Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Africa, Americas, Asia, Blacks, Brazil, Britain, Caribbean, China, Civil Rights, Crime, Culture, Dominica, East Africa, Europe, Europeans, Flynn Effect, Genetics, Health, History, Immigration, Intelligence, Jamaicans, Kenya, Latin America, Nutrition, Psychology, Race/Ethnicity, Racism, Regional, Religion, Reposts From The Old Site, South America, White Nationalism, White Racism, Whites27 Comments on Black IQ Gains in Britain, Kenya and Dominica

Stupid White Nationalist Tricks

Repost from the old site. If you have a pet White Nationalist, you can actually teach him to do some silly tricks for you. Just ask him to open up his mouth and he will start saying silly things, just like that. He probably can’t help it. I was over at American Renaissance the other day hanging out and trolling, and now and then venting spleen on illegal aliens. I am getting tired of these White racist websites, and I do not think it is healthy to go to them very often if you’re not a White racist. It seems like it’s not good for your soul, and it seems like after a while, the sites start turning you racist yourself. YMMV. Anyway, there was a thread about high dropout rates at various US urban school districts. The highest rates seemed to coincide the having a high percentage of Blacks in the district and being back east. Indianapolis, Cleveland and Detroit were singled out. The comments led to much thrashing of WN tongues about how stupid Black people are, and how it is impossible to educate Black kids because their IQ’s are so low. It is also quite common for WN’s to say that the frequently difficult behavior of many Black kids in schools is due to the fact that they are stupid. Let us consider this, for perhaps they are correct. First of all, IQ’s for US Black children are quite a bit higher than for Black adults. No one quite knows why this is, but I doubt if it is genetic.

Black Children
Age   Grade         IQ
5     Kindergarten  95
6     1st           94.4*
7     2nd           93.8*
8     3rd           93.2*
9     4th           92.6*
10    5th           91.9*
11    6th           91.2*
12    7th           90.5
13    8th           89.9*
14    9th           89.4*
15    10th          88.8
18    12th          87.5
24    ----          84.5

All scores are from here. * means the scores are extrapolated, as only scores for 5 and 12 yr olds were given. Now let us compare these IQ scores to various White groups. Let us note that no one has ever said that these White groups were impossible to educate due to their stupidity. Also, these White groups seem to be pretty well-behaved from all we can tell.

US Blacks 14 yrs 89.4      
US Blacks 13 yrs 89.9      
Croatia          90
Bosnia           90
Albania          90
US Blacks 12 yrs 90.5      
Serbia           91
US Blacks 11 yrs 91.2      
Cyprus           91.5
Chile            91.5
US Blacks 10 yrs 91.9      
Greece           92
Macedonia        92.5
US Blacks 9 yrs  92.6
Ireland          93
Bulgaria         93
US Blacks 8 yrs  93.2      
Armenia          93.5
Georgia          93.5
US Blacks 7 yrs  93.8     
Israel           94
Romania          94
US Blacks 6 yrs  94.4      
Argentina        94.5
Portugal         95
US Blacks 5 yrs  95      

As you can see from the above, US Black children are not deficient in IQ, at least as compared to many White groups around the globe who are not known for being stupid. Up to age 15, US Blacks are equivalent to many White groups around the world who seem to do well in school. However, by age 15, US Blacks may begin to experience difficulties in school due to IQ, if it is true that an IQ below 89 makes for an individual that has a hard time for modern secondary school curricula. However, this remains to be demonstrated, as we will see in the Cuban example below. It is true that in my opinion, Black children are very difficult to teach. I taught them for many years in Los Angeles, and I do not want to do it again. Many of them are rambunctious, wild, crazy, violent, loud, and have no interest in learning anything whatsoever. At the lower grades, the fighting is not so bad, and often involves boys versus girls. Up to junior high school, things truly get horrible to the point where I simply refuse to teach Black students ever again. Maybe it’s my fault. Perhaps I just never figured out how to deal with them. Admittedly, the very worst ones of all are in the ghetto, but among middle class Blacks, it was not much better. There is often a very serious problem keeping them in their chairs. They are always up, bouncing around, walking around the room, talking very loudly, chatting, this and that. You spend most of your time yelling at them to stay in their seats. I’m starting to think it might be better to educated Black kids standing up. I actually liked quite a few of them, even some of the ones that acted bad. You got the impression that they just could not control themselves at all. One thing that seems to characterize Black kids at all grade levels is an utter indifference to learning. By high school, some are interested, especially the girls. I once had a Chemistry class in Compton that was chock full of Black girls. My father taught in the ghetto, and said that the honor rolls used to be all girls and no boys. It is true that Black females do have IQ’s somewhat above Black males. BF = 87.5, BM = 83.5. I have no idea why that is, but I doubt it is genetic, as males outscore females in most other human groups. The only logical conclusion we can draw here is that a “low IQ” is certainly not the reason for problems in educating Black kids, at least at the K-7 level. Furthermore, the above chart seems to indicate that the behavioral problems in school that seem to be so vastly overrepresented have absolutely nothing to with “low IQ” either. There must be other reasons for these often-difficult behaviors. Those reasons may be some combination of genetics and culture, but being stupid doesn’t seem to have that much to do with it. Even if Black students had IQ’s of 85 (which they do not, as it appears that the Black IQ even at age 18 is around ~87) that would not mean that they cannot be educated. Cuba educates all of its students and has one of the lowest dropout rates in the Hemisphere. With They are considered to be the best educated people in Latin America. They have more agronomists per capita anywhere on Earth. They also have the lowest doctor-patient ratio (fewest patients per doctor) anywhere on Earth. Somehow, I think that these are not characteristics of a society full of idiots. The Cuban IQ is 85. Clearly, even an IQ of 85 should not be so low as to prevent one from creating a decent society in most ways and from educating your population to high levels. Furthermore, the obvious failures and problems of major Black-run cities in the US are attributed by WN’s to “an IQ of 85!”. Judging by the Cuban example, an IQ of 85 should not prevent a group from doing a great job of running a society. There are obviously reasons why, as one prominent WN told me, “Blacks can’t even run Detroit!” However, I do not think that the Black IQ of 85 is high up on the list of those reasons. There must be something else going on; the problem is not one of stupidity.

Imad Mughniyeh is Dead

Repost from the old site. A bit dated, but should be useful nevertheless.

One of the only known photos of the super-elusive and ultra-mysterious Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah mastermind. He was so slippery he was dubbed Hezbollah’s Carlos, after the famous terrorist Carlos from the 1970’s. This is a great picture of him, suspicious, haunted, looking over his shoulder, as a man on the run should. And he was a man on the run for most of his life. A more recent photo of Mughniyeh in military fatigues, against a camouflage background, issued by Iran after his death. Between the earlier photo and the later, it looks like he hasn’t missed a meal. Some are also saying that the two plastic surgery operations did not alter his appearance much, but I am not at capable of judging that.

I can’t stress the importance of this news. Imad Mughniyeh, Supreme Commander of Hezbollah for the past 25 years, has been killed in a car bomb in Damascus last night, February 12, at 10:45 PM. He was on the CIA’s Most Wanted List with a $25 million bounty on his head. He was the only person killed when a silver Mitsubishi Pajero vehicle (apparently Mughniyeh’s car) exploded in the upscale Kafar Soussa District in the vicinity of a Iranian school that teaches religion to Iranian pupils. Several other cars were damaged and windows of surrounding buildings were blown out. Residents gathered in their pajamas to look at the scene. A single body lay in the street, covered by a white sheet. Kafar Soussa has many apartment buildings constructed in recent years, along with a large shopping center and the main offices of the formidable Syrian Intelligence Services. Mughniyeh was wanted for a number of attacks during the US invasion of Lebanon in 1982, said to be to keep the peace, but actually ending up as usual, supporting the Israelis. Mughniyeh orchestrated the bombing of the US Marine Barracks and French Headquarters in Beirut in 1982 that killed 227 Marines and 58 French troops. He also supervised the bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut in 1983 that killed 63 and wiped out the entire top tier of US CIA Middle East agents. He also pulled off the bombing of the Israeli command center in Tyre that killed scores of Israeli troops. He was involved in the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the execution of US Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem in 1985. He was involved in the kidnappings of many Americans in Beirut during the 1980’s, including Terry Anderson and CIA officer and US Army Colonel William Buckley, who Hezbollah executed. In 1988, the top US CIA agent in Lebanon, Colonel William Higgins, was kidnapped by Hezbollah and tortured to death. He was also involved in the truck bomb attack on the US military residence facilities at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, targeting US servicemen who were guarding Saudi oil fields. 19 Americans were killed in that blast and 200 more were wounded. There are suggestions that he was involved along with Hezbollah and/or Iran in the dual bombings in Buenos Aires, one at the Israeli Embassy 1992 that killed 29 people, and another at the Jewish Cultural Center in 1994 that killed 95 people. Three Israeli soldiers, Benny Avraham, Adi Avitan and Omar Souad were captured along the Lebanon border in 1999, taken POW, and possibly later executed. The border incident that set off the 2006 Lebanon War led to the capture of two more Israeli POW’s, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser. Mughniyeh was believed to be behind both of these abductions of Israeli soldiers. Debka has long claimed that Mughniyeh was on very close terms with both bin Laden and Al Qaeda and the Iranian leadership. This seems bizarre. Al Qaeda’s project is nothing less than Hitlerian extermination of every Shia Muslim on Earth. Mughniyeh has been described as Hezbollah’s Head of External Operations and it is believed that he stays in contact with cells that Hezbollah has all over the world. He is also described as a senior Hezbollah intelligence official, head of the group’s security wing and the founder of the group. In the event of a US or Israeli attack on Iran, Mughniyeh would have been relied upon to be in charge of any response. Angry Arab feels that Mughniyeh’s role and feat were largely exaggerated, but I am not so sure about that; he also feels that Robert Fisk could not possibly have interviewed the actual Imad Mughniyeh in Lebanon in 1991, but I think he did. The interview is worth reading: Fisk in yet another superb, incisive piece. When it comes to Middle East, few are better than Robert Fisk. I guess that is why International Zionism is on a crusade to crucify him. Mughniyeh was Lebanese, born in Tyre in South Lebanon, not Palestinian as many people are saying. He joined Arafat’s Force 17 elite bodyguard unit in Lebanon at a young age. He joined Amal, and then went to Iran for training, where he excelled. He then conducted daring behind enemy lines operations in the Iran-Iraq War. Most of the operations in Lebanon that he is most famous for were actually conducted by a group called Islamic Jihad. This group later was folded into Hezbollah, which was not formed at any rate until 1988 anyway. Mughniyeh personally executed Stethem during the hijacking in 1985. In 1990, he had plastic surgery done in Iran to change his facial features. Then he went back to Beirut, where he lived underground using a variety of fake passports. At some point, his cover got blown and he returned to Iran again for a second plastic surgery operation that completely changed his appearance. He was said to have been in Basra in early 2006 helping Mahdi Army fighters go to Iran for military training. He then returned to Lebanon, where he took part in the Lebanon War. Lately, he was still living in Beirut, but traveling to the Damascus neighborhood where he was killed for meetings on a brains behind Hezbollah’s military wing.” Hezbollah’s casualties in the 2006 War are not known. Israel claims that 1/3 of its fighters were killed, but that seems excessive. It seems clear that Hezbollah has now completely restocked its missile supplies and has tripled them from 15,000 in the 2006 War to 45,000 now. Further, it now has missiles that can reach Tel Aviv. In recent days, Hezbollah teams disguised as reporters were said to be photographing the area on the Israel-Lebanon border. Mughniyeh definitely committed some acts of terrorism – notably the bombing of the Jewish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires – but most of his so-called crimes were simply acts of war, legitimate acts of war I might add. Guerrilla armies lack spy satellites, $500 billion/year defense budgets, smart bombs, cruise missiles, F-16’s and all of the other expensive military hardware that enables advanced states to carry out precision states during war. Guerrilla groups have to make do with what they have. I do consider embassies, especially those swarming with espionage agents, to be legitimate targets for guerrillas in wartime. Surely spies may be executed, but I don’t think enemy troops should be. None of the attacks on US, French or Israeli bases in Lebanon were terrorist attacks. The killings of the three Israelis and the US servicemen were war crimes, but the US and Israel have certainly executed plenty of POW’s and the Israelis continue to do so. The attack that set off the Lebanon War was hardly an act of terrorism. Hence, Mughniyeh’s mantle as the king of terrorism is largely nonsense. Most of his acts were simply very well planned and executed attacks on the enemy in wartime, and within what I consider to be the rules of war. Mughniyeh was one of the most underground people on Earth and no one seemed to know where he was most of the time, and Hezbollah was not talking. He was probably one of the world’s most highly protected and most secretive guerrilla fighters. Whoever killed him by penetrating his multiple circles of Syrian and Iranian intelligence officers and bodyguards surely pulled off a coup de etat. All fingers are pointing to the Israeli Mossad, which is expert at these kind of attacks. However, the Israeli government is matches closely the MO of the Mossad assassination of top Hamas operative Izz El-Deen Sheikh Khalil. In fact, a book written as fiction by a former Mossad agent, though set in the Shia suburbs of South Beirut, appears to describe the MO used in the killing of Mughniyeh closely. If the book had been translated into Arabic and Mughniyeh had read it, perhaps he could have avoided this. Khalil was a founding member of Hamas and a senior member of the Hamas military wing. Actually, there are probably two Hamases. One is the Hamas that runs the Gaza government. The other Hamas is based out of Syria and could be called Hamas-Khaled Meshal. This could be seen as an arm of Hamas run out of Syria, and probably a more militant one at that. Sheikh Khalil was close to Meshal. However, note that Israel “neither confirmed nor denied” that killing of Khalil. Has there ever been a case of an Israeli assassination that they did not take credit for, indeed that they even said explicitly that they did not do? Also note that retired CIA officers are saying that Israel did it. Other theories suggest that either supporters of the pro-government faction in Lebanon, at odds with Hezbollah and Syria, or Iran themselves, killed Mughniyeh. The Syria and Iran theories hinge on those countries giving up Mughniyeh to the US or Israel in order to get the heat off of them and deliver a wanted militant that had a $5 million US price tag on his head in return for an unspecified US quid pro quo. This theory is called into question because Bush placed new sanctions on Syria the day after the bombing. If this was a quid pro quo to get the US to back off Syria, that would not have happened. Mughniyeh was also wanted by some of the Lebanese Christian factions and the saying that they have settled their account with Mughniyeh. Further analysis of Israel’s denial shows that it may not even be a denial at all – Israel rejects terrorist groups blaming Israel for the killing, but does not deny that Israel committed the act. If Israel indeed killed Mughniyeh, which seems likely, that looks very bad for Syria. It means that Mossad has been able to penetrate into the heart of Hezbollah, and it means that the Mossad can operate apparently with impunity deep in the most secure parts of Damascus. Their next target is surely Nasrallah himself. It also implies that Israel has penetrated Syrian intelligence itself, a tough nut to crack. Hezbollah will now probably undergo purges looking for the Israeli agents in Hezbollah. People will be arrested and executed. Mughniyeh is said to have replaced Hassan Nasrallah as head of the Hezbollah after the 2006 war and he was rumored to have enemies in Lebanon, maybe even inside Hezbollah. Hezbollah TV is reporting his death and blaming Israel. Nasrallah will speak at his funeral in Beirut, which will be very heavily guarded. This does not look good for Damascus. They were supposed to protect this guy, who is after all one of their main assets, but they failed. His death is huge news in the roiling stew pot called the Middle East, and there will surely be counter-responses by Hezbollah, probably against Israel. Nasrallah is already thundering threats in the direction of Israel. The wild conspiracy stories are already spreading like vines. This is the Middle East, where intrigues are as normal as sand and hummus and anything that can happen, probably does happen. We have not see the end of this.

Response to Zionist Apologist

Repost from the old site. Always-excellent commenter James Schipper responds to Zionist Apologist from a previous post. Pretty good stuff here. The notion that the problem with Jews is Judaism itself is similar to the arguments of Gilad Atzmon and Israel Shamir. However, Kevin MacDonald points out that Jewish ethnocentrism does not go away in the absence of Judaism. A good document that makes that clear is his book review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century. I disagree with a lot in that review, but all you have to do is look around at a lot of Jewish radicals, and it’s clear that they have not yet, and never will, make a complete break with their Jewish identity. So pulling the Judaism out of the Jew does not solve the problem. As my physician noted when I told him that according to Jewish law, you never quit being a Jew, “So they get a piece of you, eh?” In an unpublished interview with me, I asked Kevin MacDonald if the Jews would ever become less ethnocentric with time. He said emphatically, “No. The Jews will always be ethnocentric..” Incidentally, I found MacDonald to be a warm, friendly, sane, intelligent and gracious man. I also did not think he was the slightest bit anti-Semitic, but maybe I am mistaken. He seemed to be a Judeophile in a sense; he was totally fascinated with Jews. Jewish dual loyalty has been a problem everywhere there are Jews and is a direct consequence of their extreme ethnocentrism and nothing else, although James’ suggests that Judaism also plays a role. James’ comments: Giving Uganda to the Zionists would have been just as unjust as giving Palestine to them. Uganda wasn’t empty territory either. As to Argentina, it was a sovereign country and at the time of Herzl it had just learned to develop the pampas. Why on earth would they give some of their pampas to outsiders from Europe? The best territory to cede to the Zionists would have been Western Australia. At the time it was sparsely populated — it still is — and unlike Palestine, it could easily have accommodated all the Jews of the world. Granted, Western Australia is mainly arid or semi-arid, but so is Palestine, with the difference that WA is huge. Unfortunately, the stinking British imperialists preferred to be generous with Arab land. A diaspora is simply the result of emigration. Since 1880, there has been an Italian diaspora. Are these diaspora Italians sick? No, and their diaspora will soon disappear through assimilation because Italians do not have a tribal religion which tells them that Italians are God’s chosen people and that Italy is their sacred homeland, to which they should one day return. The problem of Jews can be summed up in one word: Judaism. It is because of their religion that Jews can’t be fully assimilated and will always remain a foreign or semi-foreign body in Gentile societies. Judaism tells Jews that they are a people, not a religious community. Nobody refers to Lutherans. Orthodox, Sikhs, Mormons as a people because those religions are non-tribal. Consider the difference between Presbyterians and Jews. Most Presbyterians in the world have at least some Scottish ancestry, but Presbyterianism is not at all about Scots or Scotland. Nearly all Sikhs are Punjabis or descend from Punjabis, but the Sikh religion is not in the least about Punjabis. By contrast, Judaism is all about Jews and their promised land. If people sincerely believe in Judaism, one can have some sympathy for them, in the way that one can sympathize with a Jehovah’s Witness who sincerely believes that a blood transfusion is against God’s will. It is much harder to have sympathy for atheists who remain proudly Jewish and become Zionists. To stop believing in Judaism while continuing to believe that Jews are a people and that Israel is their sacred soil is like stopping to believe in Catholicism but continue to obey the Pope. In one way, Israel made life more difficult for Jews in Gentile countries because the existence of Israel makes Jews vulnerable to the charge of dual loyalty. This charge is more than a figment of anti-Semitic imagination.

References

MacDonald, Kevin. 2005. Stalin’s Willing Executioners: Jews as a Hostile Elite in the USSR – Review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century. The Occidental Quarterly: 5(3), 65-100.

Free Market Starvation

Repost from the old site. The power of capitalist propaganda is immense. According to the ruling class media, the only system that starves anyone anymore is Communism. One hears this platitude over and over – Communism = starvation. It is true that 600,000 have starved to death in North Korea since the 1990’s. However, 14 million starve to death every year in the world – mostly in South Asia but also 1 million in Latin America – almost all under capitalist regimes. Not one word of this from the ruling class mouthpieces. This has been going since at least 1986 (when the figure was calculated) with no end in sight. The Soviet Union and China are now synonymous with starvation. There was a famine in the Ukraine in 1932 that killed 1.5 million people. Previously, during the Russian Civil War, there was a famine in 1921 that killed 9 million people. It is a simple truth that under Czardom, the peasant never had enough to eat. His life expectancy was a mere 32 years and lack of food played a role here. Under Communism, the peasant had plenty of food to eat for the first time in centuries. In the early 1930’s, the Soviet Union saw the largest harvests in its history, big harvests that continued for decades. All of this is forgotten, and all we know is famine, famine, famine. One wonders how Stalin doubled life expectancy in the USSR while the people starved. In China again, we hear that Communism starved the people. In 1958, it is true, there was a terrible famine, the worst in modern history, mostly caused by the stupidity of over-procurement by the state, that killed an astounding 15 million people. Yet year and year out, millions of lives were being saved every year in China. Under Communism, with the exception of 1958, the Chinese peasants finally had enough food to eat. Like the Russian peasants, starvation and lack of food had stalked the Chinese peasant for centuries. By the early 1970’s, the problem of food in China was finally solved for the first time in centuries. As with the USSR, China also doubled life expectancy under Mao. Once again, one wonders how this was achieved if the people were “starving” as the anti-Communists claim. In Vietnam in 1944-45, 2 million died during deliberate starvation by French and Japanese capitalist forces when they seized the rice crop. One never hears of this famine. Only Communists starve people. Cuba has recently lowered malnutrition to Here is a Cuban newspaper about how, in Cuba, the right to eat is elevated above the right to shoot off one’s mouth. In fact, the paper suggests intriguingly that the limits on free speech in Cuba are directly attributable to the government’s ability to feed everyone. The suggestion is that if you let everyone shoot off their mouth, food will be snatched from the mouths of babes:

Ironically, the country that supposedly limits the freedom of its citizens is the only one in Latin America where there is not malnutrition,” wrote Periodico 26, an official publication in backwater Las Tunas province, on Feb. 6, alluding to a recent United Nations report stating that only two percent of Cuban children had some kind of nutrient deficit. “What is portrayed in the U.S. media as an aggression against an individual’s free will, is in fact a synonym for nutritional security for most Cubans.” The newspaper goes on to say that free meals provided at work centers and schools add another crucial component to Cubans’ diets.

In Vietnam, the malnutrition rate of 1 In Pakistan, 6 Let us focus our attention on the capitalist showcase of Niger, in northern Africa, where the human-hunting industry, the most profitable enterprise capitalism has ever developed, yet festers. Here capitalism has blessed this blighted and unstable land with the worst human development indicators on Earth, where 4 What is killing the children of Niger, or for that matter, kids across the Sahel? None other than the free market. Recently, free market fundamentalists convinced the government to deregulate the grain market, leading to major fluctuations in grain prices. When prices are high, they are so high that families could not even afford to buy food for their kids. Worse, money that should have gone to education and health care, such as it exists, goes for food. The wonders of the invisible hand of starvation! Incredibly, while the people starved, Niger exported food according to capitalist market “logic”. One is reminded of Czarist Russia, which exported wheat every year while the peasants went hungry. Going the free market route was one of the dumbest things Niger ever did. It increased poverty, hunger and starvation. Yet the media tells us that this free market project is the only thing that works, and everything else is “failed”. I think if the successful project were starving me, I might give one of those “failures” a shot.

Support For the Uighurs

Repost from the old site. Since it seems like virtually no one outside Muslims supports the Uighur battle for independence, I will support it. I realize that this is a tough time for China and that imperialism, particularly US imperialism, would love to use a new Uighur state to plant bases in it and surround China, but still I believe that something can be worked out. A major stumbling block for the self-determination of nations, long a Left hallmark for which we Leftists can all be proud, is the cynical abuse of this right by hypocritical imperialist and Realpolitik-dealing large states. Imperialist states, as I argued in a previous post, have no consistent values at all. They will support secessionism to further imperial goals or weaken enemies and oppose it everywhere else. An imperialist nation has the morals of a hardened criminal -> no legitimate morals at all. If you follow this article, it seems like the vast majority Uighurs support the armed groups, which is how they are able to function at all in the locked-down police state of China. China has seeded East Turkestan with settler-colonists, as it has despicably done in Tibet. It treats the Uighurs like shit. Almost no one seems to support Uighur secessionism. I’m sure that Muslims do, but Muslims do not have a very consistent basis for supporting secessionism. Most Muslims I have run into only support secessionism when it involves Muslims separating from non-Muslim states. In all other cases, I guess they don’t support it! In particular, most oppose the liberation struggle of the Kurds, who have as good a case for a state of their own as anyone does. In the comments section, Dragon Horse, a very smart commenter, made the case for the territorial integrity of borders. He made several arguments: First, why should we be creating brand new mono-ethnic states? Second , that what I was arguing for was radical devolution. Third, that when the OAS was formed, the member states agreed on the territorial integrity of even colonial borders that made little sense in order to avoid endless secessionist wars. Hence, that in Africa, the principle of territorial integrity had a good record. Fourth, that I was arguing for a world full of 100’s to 1000’s of Luxemborgs or Leichtensteins. Fifth, that in an integrating globalized world, the last thing we needed was to move in the opposite direction. My response is as follows: The truth is that most nations on Earth simply do not wish to break away from the states of which they are a part of. Legitimate secessionist movements are actual nations embedded with states that have a valid case for secession. I may evaluate that case in a later post. In Latin America, I can think of no legitimate secessionist movement. There are not many secessionist movements even in Africa, which you mention as the horrorshow of secessionist theory. The rebels in Darfur and South Sudan can leave Sudan for all I care. Sudan has forfeited its right to exist as a state. They can break it up into pieces for all I care. Somalia has no right to exist either. When a state is so failed that it cannot even govern its own citizens, it’s time to say goodbye. In the Arab World, we have only the Kurds and that is all. Who have a most powerful case for independence. I do not think that independence movements are trying to make monoethnic states, but even if they were, it would be more logical than multicultural states, which do not seem to work very well in praxis. Your logic, in opposing all secessionist movements, leads to endless bloody wars for the bullshit cause of “territorial integrity of states”. Tell me, why did Georgia, instantly birthed as a state in 1991, suddenly have any territorial integrity at all? Let us note that this territorial integrity became immediately sacrosanct the very hour that Georgia became a new state! Brand new states with no history behind them at least have to ask their citizens if they want to be part of this baby state. Those who wish to leave are certainly entitled to do so. The world is not going to break up into hundreds or thousands of Luxembourgs because tiny states are not viable in the modern era either economically or militarily. There are advantages to being part of a large state in terms of both economics and military. Even a world of small states could function well. Europe has an increasingly integrated military and economy in the OECD and NATO despite being made up of numerous mostly not very large states. Self-determination and regional integration are not contradictions.

Gun Deaths Comparison

Gun deaths per 100000 pop. in comparison to US
Country    Year  Homicide        Suicide
US         2001  3.98            5.92
Canada     2002  0.40 10x lower  2.00 3x lower
Australia  2001  0.24 17x lower  1.34 5x lower
UK         2002  0.15 27x lower  0.20 30x lower

The UK has the strictest gun laws. The gun nuts have no argument. They just want to keep their guns, because the guns make them feel safer. But the gun is about 30 X more likely to be used in the home in a suicide or homicide than to defend the person. It’s not worth it to keep those things around. Personally, I do not want one of those blasted things anywhere near me.

The Waterworld of the Delta Yokuts

Repost from the old site. One of the more thrilling passages I have ever read was an account of the first Spanish contacts with the Indians of the California Delta. In expeditions around 1800-1810, Spanish ships sailed into the Delta and first contacted these tribes, who have since vanished with almost no trace left except for their names and a handful of word lists. There were around 5-10 tribes in the Delta, all Yokuts. Yokuts is just a White word for a group of about 60 tribes who all spoke related languages. Yokuts just means “man” in the Yokuts languages so we stuck that name on them as a way to characterize them. The Yokuts came to California along with the ancestors of the Ohlone (Costanoan) and Miwok around 4000-5000 years ago. The Ohlone then took off towards the San Fransisco Bay Area, the Miwok towards the Central Sierra Nevada and the Yokuts to the Delta, San Joaquin Valley and Central and Southern Sierra Nevada. Prior to migrating to the Delta, this conglomeration of groups (Yok-Utian) were located in southeastern Oregon, now a desert but at that time a series of marshlands. They moved down the spine of the California-Oregon border and settled in the Delta. The Yok-Utians are surely related linguistically to some other Penutian language groups, in particular Klamath, Sahaptian and Wintu. The Klamath are in northeastern California, the Wintu around Shasta Lake, and the Sahaptians towards northeastern Oregon and Idaho. Penutian studies by Scott Delancey available on the net make this connection quite clear to me. The Delta Yokuts were part of a group called Northern Valley Yokuts. They had only come to the Delta continuously fleeing the missions, so there was a continuous need to repopulate them with new Indians. With demissionization, Indians dispersed from the missions and formed haphazard groupings other demissionized Indians of varying linguistic and cultural backgrounds, enhancing the linguistic and cultural genocidal processes described above. Many others married Spaniards, mestizos or Californios and adopted those cultures, losing their own. That this should happen to such a loving and warm people is especially poignant. Some of the best records we have of these tribes is recorded in the notes of these early Spanish explorers. Some Delta Yokuts (or Far Northern Valley Yokuts – sample words here) languages still had speakers until the early 1900s’s. One language for which decent records exist is called Chalostaca. Other languages are Yachikumne (Chulamni), Cholvons [drawing of nearly naked Cholvons warriors here], Lower San Joaquin, Lakisamni and Tawalimni. The Lakisamni were a warlike tribe along the Stanislaus River who waged a number of famous battles against Mexican forces during 1828-1829. Their leader in these struggles, Estanislao, also waged continuous horse and cattle-stealing raids against local ranchos. He died of smallpox in 1839. The last known Indian who recalled ancestry linking him to the Delta Yokuts was a Tawalimni Yokuts Indian named Gomez who was living in Jamestown, California when interviewed by the famous S.A. Barrett in 1906. He was apparently the last surviving member (or at least the last who knew of his ancestry) of the Delta Yokuts, hammered first by missionization, massacres and epidemics, until the Gold Rush delivered the finishing touch. History Detective resolves the controversy over which tribes inhabited the California Delta and makes clear the entire Delta was inhabited exclusively by Yokuts and not by Miwok Indians. Much of this material is from the superb Handbook of the Yokuts Indians by Frank Latta (1949). It’s been out of print for many years and only 7,000 copies were published, but the book has recently been reissued by Coyote Press in a limited run. If you are interested in the Yokuts, you may want to snap it up. Latta was an amateur anthropologist and linguist from Bakersfield who spent years studying the Yokuts and interviewing some of the last surviving members who still remembered aboriginal ways and spoke the languages fluently.

No One Is In Charge

Repost from the old site. I don’t like to discuss religion here since so many of my readers seem to be atheists or agnostics, and I don’t want to antagonize the highly militant atheist faction on the Internet. Some of my friends and relatives are religious. A couple are Muslim, a few are Jewish, and some are Christians. I myself am a Christian, but I am a funny kind of Christian. The New Testament is fine, but let us limit it to only those words that the Jewish rabbi Jesus himself said. In that way, I can be a “Jesusist”, in the manner of the early Jewish Christian sects such as the Essenes. We may pick and choose from the words of the apostles, who after all, were just fallible men. So some of the things they said are correct and others may not be. We can toss the Old Testament, although it reportedly did contain a number of revelations that came true with Jesus’ coming. For the rest of the OT, let us call it myth or history. We can also posit a Replacement Theology, whereby the Jews and the Old Testament were replaced with the coming of Jesus and the NT. Jesus came and said that we were no longer required to live by the Law. The new Law, and the new Israel, was the Church. The Jews were no longer the Chosen People – that baton passed to the Christians. Sure, the Jews hate Replacement Theology and call it anti-Semitic, but too many Jews have a tendency to hallucinate anti-Semitism where it does not exist. For those who doubt the Resurrection, one can always just be a Christian by “following Jesus and his example”. There are many ways to be a Christian, and many Christians, especially Catholic males in Europe and Latin America, are rather lax in what they really believe deep down inside. What’s wrong with following the Christian doctrine of “walking in Jesus’ shoes?” This is where practical Christianity collides with the fundamentalists. The fundamentalists actually believe that what you feel in your heart is most important. One’s deeds? Well, we are all sinners, you know, so men will sin and that is that. But the practical Christian believes in good works – that is, how one lives one’s life, not necessarily the depth of spiritual intensity in one’s heart, is the most important part of being a Christian. Walking in Jesus’ shoes, living life the way Jesus would have lived his…who can argue that this is such a terrible thing? Do the atheists wish to argue that this is some sort of insanity? Why? What of the Resurrection? Does it not invalidate science? Sure it does. But if one is in touch with God Himself, as Jesus may have been, perhaps that power can be used to transcend the laws of science? If anyone can transcend such things, cannot the Spirit do so? At the same time, paradoxical as it may seem, we may posit a God that isn’t doing much of anything these days, since that is clear. Was he doing anything back in Jesus’ time? Possibly we may argue that Jesus had some sort of a line in with the spiritual world. A famous Hindu yogi argues that men like Jesus, Buddha, etc, are messengers from the spiritual world who float down from the spiritual world somehow from time to time to stay here and give us lessons. That’s not completely beyond the realm of science -it’s simply unknowable one way or another. Looking around the world today, the only rational conclusion regarding God is that no one is in charge. Otherwise, we must argue senselessly that God does bad things to punish us, or to test us, or for some obscure, unfathomable reason. Either that or we must take the irreligious view that God must be a wicked practical joker, or a bad person, or perhaps he suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder. This needn’t be the Deism of our founding fathers – the God who created the universe, then sat back on his haunches and hasn’t done a damn thing since. In a conversation with linguist and anthropologist Sylvia Broadbent, the author of a grammar of Central Sierra Miwok (old pic here [on right], newer pic here [blond hair, wheelchair and cane], homepage here), we discussed the spiritual beliefs of the local California Indians. Most are fundamentalist Christians of some type or another now, so they vociferously argue that they have always believed in some sort of an omnipotent God. But searching through early anthropological texts and the conversation with Broadbent revealed something different. Broadbent felt that the Indians here believed in what she called the concept of Deus Obtusa, or a Lazy God. If you think about it, the Lazy God is a form of Deism. It’s not that He hasn’t done a thing since creation, it’s that He doesn’t do much of anything now. And I think a Lazy God is perfectly in accord with a “Jesusist” or replacement theology version of Christianity, and a total belief in science, including of course evolution and modern biology. So call me a hypocrite who wants it both ways – as independent free agents, we humans may fashion our heterodox spiritual beliefs the same way we style our lives and wardrobes. There are no rules here; we may make it up as we go along.

Aztlan and Zionism: Dueling Idiocies

Repost from the old site. In this post, we will take a look at two nationalisms, Zionism, the movement to (re)create the ancient Jewish homeland in Palestine, and Aztlan, the Mexican and Chicano movement that says that part of the Western US is actually part of Mexico, and more importantly, was the homeland of the Aztec people. As with most forms of ultra-nationalism, both movements are exercises in lying and nonsense. And both are similar in other ways, too. Both propose that, because the area in question (Western US, Palestine) was the ancient homeland of the people some 2,000-5,000 years ago, that they have a right to move en mass into the region and even to annex it or possibly make their state there (the Aztlan movement is divided on whether Aztlan should be annexed to Mexico or whether it should be its own state). Both are based on some highly questionable claims of ownership. There is serious question whether or not Aztlan (an area covering part of the Western US – map here) is actually the ancient homeland of the Aztecs, as this article claims, supposedly with authoritative sources. Let us examine the article, by Patrisia Gonzales and Roberto Rodriguez, a writing team that somehow got UPI to syndicate their ultra-radical Chicano nationalist nonsense for many years. The authors found a map in the National Archives in Washington from 1847 with a notation near the Four Corners Area in the US referring to The Ancient Homeland of the Aztecs. This scribbling on a map somewhere by God knows who purportedly “proves incontrovertibly” that all Mexicans and all Central Americans have a right to move to the USA tomorrow, because the US Four Corners is their “ancient homeland”. The authors also note a tradition of the US Pueblo, Hopi, and Lakota (!?) Indian tribes that Nahuatl speakers were their former relatives. There are major problems with this. How would these tribes describe these “Nahuatl” speaking people, since back then, there is no way that they called their language or themselves by that name? Since they called themselves and their language something else, how did these tribes know that they were “Nahuatl”-speakers? And why the Lakota? They are located far from this fake homeland, way up in South Dakota. Further, as one who worked with an Indian tribe on a government grant doing linguistic and anthropological field work, I assure you that Indian legends and oral history need to be taken with a gigantic grain of salt, to say the least! The authors quote Cecelio Orozco, an education professor at my alma mater, California State University Fresno as saying this lines up with his research also putting the Aztec homeland in southern Utah. Professor Orozco has published two books of apparent pseudoarcheology on this subject. Here is how Orozco discovered this homeland (try not to laugh when reading this):

Orozco said he came upon the site through a process called “archeo-astronomy.” He saw a photograph of four rivers in Utah in 1980, and based on previous research, recognized a mathematical formula in the photo that led him to believe that this was the place of origin of the Mexicas’ ancestors. Subsequent trips and research has confirmed his thesis… 

After reading this fascinating article on archaeoastronomy, I still do not see how that science relates to a photograph of four rivers in Utah. Does anyone have any idea how a photograph of four rivers anywhere on Earth contains some hidden mathematical formula? He also found a painting on a wall in Utah from 500 BC that he says he claims corresponds to the the codec containing the Aztec calendar. Those of us familiar with the field realize that finds all over the world look like other finds, or resemble other peoples, or bear this or that passing resemblance to whatever. None of that usually proves anything; much more work needs to be done. According to the article, because Aztecs have a homeland in Utah dating back 2500 BC, Mexicans and Central Americans are no longer foreigners or aliens or even immigrants in the US, but they are simply in their homeland. By that lunatic thinking, all White Americans get emigrate back to Europe and live there, since that was our homeland at some point in the past. The Europeans have no right to stop us, and we can even call it Euroamland or whatever and carve out our own damn country out of several European countries, make English the official language and even sideline the several non-English European tongues spoken there. Then we can demand to be united with the US across the sea or just up and make our own country, dissolving several European countries in the process. It is this sort of nonsense that makes me wonder just how smart your average Mexican Reconquista type really is. On reflection, they are obviously bright people, it is just that ultranationalism, or even often just nationalism, damages people’s brains and makes them incapable of rational thought. It does this across the board to any ethnic group – there is no reason to single out Mexicans or Chicanos. Let us examine some of the other insane suppositions of the Aztlan crowd. We have already delved into this a bit on this on an earlier post. First of all, the Aztecs (Mexicas) had only taken over the Mexico City area about 200 years previous to the Spanish Conquest. The empire reached its peak only about 40 years before Cortes landed. Further, the Mexicas only lived in the area around Mexico City! That’s it. All of the rest of Mexico was not Mexica territory and the tribes (even those colonized by Mexicas) who lived there cannot be said to be Mexicas! As an analogy, let us consider the Roman Empire. Its headquarters were in Rome. The rest of the empire were just colonies, conquered areas paying tribute to Rome. Can we say that everyone in the Roman Empire was a “Roman” or an “Italian”? By the same logic, do those residing in Rome today have a right to claim all of the former Roman Empire as their land? This is what would happen if we applied “Aztlan”-logic to that situation. Do you see how stupid this Aztlan nonsense-lie is? The Aztecs did conquer quite a bit of land in the center of Mexico (map here), killing lots of folks and enslaving others. As noted below, the homeland of the Nahua, according to prominent Mexican archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma was probably somewhere around Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Michoacán* . From this area, 2,000 years ago, various waves of Nahua speakers radiated out through Mexico and even Central America. This is why we have 28 living Aztec (or Nahuatl) languages today. By the way, Wikipedia is wrong that these languages are almost dead. Most are quite vigorously used, and there are 1.5 million speakers of all Nahuatl languages. 27 of these 28 tribes are not, and were not, Mexicas, anymore than everyone speaking a Romance language today is a “Roman”. Follow? A somewhat more rational take on the Aztlan lie can be found on the Reconquista site here. Apparently real anthropologists put the Aztec homeland somewhere around Nayarit on the west coast of Mexico. That’s a lot more reasonable, but it’s probably not true either. This comes from Mexican anthropologist Alfredo Chavero’s theory in 1887. Moctezuma’s locale is probably better. The piece also argues that since Nahuatl is an Uto-Aztecan language and many Uto-Aztecans either lived in or traveled through “Aztlan”, that there is something to the Aztlan notion in that sense. Fair enough. In fact, the homeland of the Uto-Aztecans in my opinion is in southern Arizona or northern Mexico. But all Native Americans traveled through Siberia on their way to the Americas. Does everyone with Indian blood in the Americas get to go back to Russia and take over the place because their ancestors strolled through it sometime in the past 20,000 years? Looking at the linguistic contacts of pre-Nahuatl would be a good way of trying to find an Aztec homeland. We can see that they had contacts with languages spoken around Veracruz, on the east coast of Mexico. As you can see, the situation is complicated. The authors in the first article make an even more ludicrous point. First, as usual, they conflate the “Aztecs” a single tribe called the Mexica, amongst Mexico’s over 200 tribes, that only lived around Mexico City, with all Mexicans. According to idiot Chicano nationalists, all Mexicans with Indian blood are Mexica or part Mexica! That’s nuts. As noted, there were tribes all over the land, and the Mexica were only one of 200 or so. It’s as if one said that every Italian comes from Rome. Next, they say that all of the tribes related to the Mexicas were “Mexicas” because they spoke Nahuatl languages. They certainly were not! It’s nonsense. Are all speakers of Indo-European languages the one and same group because they all came out the Indo-European homeland in Southern Ukraine 8,000 years ago? Even worse, these fools claim that all Central Americans were Aztecs and get to go invade the USA because it’s home sweet home. Ridiculous. There is only one tribe, the Pipil in El Salvador, that still speaks a Nahuatl language, and there are only 20 speakers left. There were a few other Nahuatl languages in Honduras, Panama and Guatemala, but these are long since extinct. They were not “Aztecs” anymore than English-speakers in the US are “Germans”. However, the Pipil did come from the area around Mexico City around 1000 years ago; they were related to Olmecs, but also to the Nahuatl. In general, they were an Olmec grouping. Anyway, at that time, there were no such thing as Mexicas or Aztecs – that group came later. Another group of Pipil had come to Central America 5000 years ago and came under the influence of the Maya. This is around the time when Proto-Uto-Aztecan itself was born in the southwest US. Both of these groups, by 1000 AD, became the Pipil, who came under even more Maya influence. The Pipil are almost extinct culturally and linguistically today, an end result of the Matanza, when 10,000-30,000 Indians were slaughtered in only a few weeks in El Salvador in 1932, while US warships patrolled off the coast in case the victims of the genocide tried to fight back. After that, most Salvadoran Indians took off their Indian clothes and quit speaking Indian languages, especially since Pipil was outlawed. They also intermarried heavily with non-Indians, so that to this day, only The leader of the rebellion that set off the Matanza was Farabundo Marti, head of the Salvadoran Communist Party. The rebels that fought in the Civil War later on took their name, Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, from him. The cult surrounding Zionism is much the same as the Aztlan nonsense. True, Jews ruled the area long ago, but only for a brief time, similar to the Aztecs. Further, similar conflations are made about the Judean Empire and the Aztlan Empire, Judean language and religion and actual Jews and Jewish religion and the relevance of ancient Judean religion to the Jewish religion today. Also similar is the outrageous notion that some group has a right to go back to its ancient homeland of 2000-5000 years ago, settle there at will, and even make a state there. Some of the radical Atzlanistas, similar to Zionists, also suggest throwing out the natives (in the case of the Aztlanistas the Whites, who came starting 400 years ago) since they are “invaders squatting on the true homeland”. In this same nonsensical way, Zionists project their own invasion of Palestine and squatting on Palestinian land off onto the victim. The Arabs, who came 1450 years ago, are the “invaders”, who have been squatting on “Jewish land” since then. Never mind that the Jews left 2000 years ago. They owned Palestine in their hearts in the intervening 1900 years, and Zionism claims that that trumps a property deed! Zionism’s proponents are Jews, the smartest folks on Earth, who ought to know better. But ultra-nationalism can easily make a fool of the finest man. See Joachim Martillo’s site, Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel, for more. In particular, his superb Issues and Questions In the Historiography of Pre-State Zionism (90 pp.!), is a piece which deserves much wider reading. Martillo has some tendency towards fanaticism (but this also drives him to produce), can be an ideologue, and is sometimes guilty of trying to make facts fit theory as opposed to otherwise. However, these (especially making the facts fit theory) are chronic problems with most all social scientists, as Kevin MacDonald has observed. At the least, the brilliant Martillo should be more widely read, if only to subject his interesting theories to the critical light of peer review to separate wheat from chaff. And the 90 page link above is just sublime, in particular in the way that it takes apart the primordial nonsense of Zionism in the same way we attacked the similar primordialism of the Atzlanistas in this post. *Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, The Great Temple of the Aztecs: Treasures of Tenochtitlan, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988) 38.

Cultural Anthropology and Physics Envy

Repost from the old site. A Christmas Day New York Times article by George Johnson, A Question of Blame When Societies Fall, has elicited quite a bit of comment in the blogosphere. The article concerns Jared Diamond, anthropologist and popular author of two recent books on cultures, Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The first deals with why societies succeed, and the second deals with why societies fail. First of all, I have read neither book, but I did read parts of Collapse, specifically the chapter on the Rwanda genocide. Diamond placed the blame for the genocide on a logical Malthusian theory that population had outstripped food supply which resulted in massacre to reduce the human population so there would once again be enough food and land to go around. It seemed reasonable at the time, and it still does now. Other than that, I have not read a lot of Diamond. He did some good work on the Proto Indo-European homeland though, which he logically places in the Southern Ukraine. The article discusses how the politically correct have rendered cultural anthropology into something pretty silly these days. This state of affairs was a culmination of a series of events in the history of anthropological theory over the past century. In the first half of the 1900’s, there was still a trend in anthropology, the Great Chain of Being, to see European culture as the pinnacle and to judge all cultures in relation to how far they had climbed up the European ladder. At the same time, Franz Boas and Margaret Mead were working at cross-purposes to the implied White Supremacism of the Great Chain of Being. racist voodoo doll for the PC crowd to stick pins in. Sigh. Steve Sailer weighs in, defending Diamond, and GNXP tosses out a nearly incomprehensible post about Johnson’s piece. In GNXP‘s post and in the long and equally difficult comments section, GNXP authors and commenters thrash away at cultural anthropology. For examples of the sort of stuff that gets their goat, see these links here, here , GNXP comments thread Robert F. G. Spier, who had done his PhD dissertation on the tribe wanted to know what the tribe had thought of his work. I told him they had not even read it, and to tell the truth, many tribal members were hostile to him, as they were to all anthropologists. He was crushed, but he said, cynically, that he understood. Just to show you what we are up against. Now, with all the hostility these Indians have towards the well-meaning anthros of the past, you can see how we need to tread carefully around our informants. Our rep is bad enough as it is. It’s painfully important to show love and compassion towards the people that we study. In the course of my work, I read through all of the anthropological data assembled by the anthros of the past. There was a ton of great info in there. When I presented my findings to to top Indians in order to turn the work into a book – an ethnography of the tribe, the whole project was cruelly shot down. The elders had created a myth whereby they had outsmarted the evil White anthros by telling them a pack of lies, thereby getting back at them and thwarting their whole wicked Whitey project. All the anthropological work was contaminated. Even if it were not all lies, we could not tell where the lies began and the truth ended. Not one word could be written. The project was shelved; I was crushed, angry, embittered and cynical, yet with my background in psychology, I sadly understood the defenses working behind the Indians’ views. At this point, my project became a scientific one. Was it actually true that the Indians had told the anthros a pack of lies to get one over on the evil White man? I worked on this question for months (while doing many other things). I read a lot more material and talked to anthropologists all over the country. I read and re-read the materials and compared them to each other. My hypothesis was: No, the Indians had not lied to the anthros. This hypothesis had to be rejected. There were clearly cases of lying, but they were easily spotted and isolated. I fleshed out most of them and just accepted the rest as the best truth we could find. The various ethnologies by anthros trotting through every couple decades lined up extremely well. The few questions that the Indians questioned so ferociously – “Did the Indians eat rattlesnakes, gopher snakes and skunks?” was one – were identified as painfully obvious cases of psychological defenses. Nowadays, the Indians think eating skunks is terrible, as skunks stink. The meat doesn’t stink, but it is oily yet edible. The aboriginal Indians may well have eaten skunks, but probably not often. We need to consider that aboriginal Indians probably readily ate any decent-tasting small animal that they could easily capture and kill. Skunks are easy to kill, and the meat is ok enough to eat if you are hungry. Modern Indians recoil at the idea of eating gopher snakes and rattlesnakes, as one lives in the dirt and “tastes dirty”, and the other is poisonous. I concluded that both snakes were eaten, and that gopher snakes do not taste dirty, as this is illogical thinking based on the notion that if something lives in the dirt it must taste like the dirt. There were other empirical questions: What was the religion of the Indians? Nowadays, the local Indians were passionate Christians, and believed in something called the Great Spirit, the Great Creator, or the Creator. But was that an aboriginal belief? Once again, the question lingered over months of intensive research, hypothesis-testing and scientific back and forths. I finally concluded that the aboriginal Indians were animists for whom the world, and everything in it, was alive with electric energy. The rocks, the trees, everything…a life force flowed through it all. The Indians used various magical items to tap into this magical world of spirits. Curiously, animism is not incompatible with modern science. As particle physics says that we are all part of everything else, and any two particles in contact will tend to spin together for the rest of their existence, there is a spinning and buzzing subatomic tapestry that links us all together as one. My body does not end where yours begins, and I am still connected to my ex-girlfriend Tracy from 1978, if she is still alive, as our particles continue to spin in tandem. When an Indian died, a ceremony was held to see the spirit off to the Land of the Dead, which lay to the West. This ceremony was observed by Edward Curtis in 1878, 28 years after major contact, so it was probably aboriginal. The aboriginal Indian God was described to me by a fellow anthropologist, Sylvia Broadbent, as a Deus Obtusa, or Lazy God . It was not important at all in their lives, but it did create the world, after which it did not do much of anything, except perhaps every once in a while when it got off its ass to yawn and intervene trivially in our affairs a bit before heading back to the cosmic bong hits. I believe that the Great Creator belief of the Plains diffused out as a general “Indian” belief in God, and rapidly Christianizing Indians all over the US picked up on it and adapted it for their own. The reason for this diffusion was the Christianization of the Indians and their exposure to the omniscient and omnipresent God of Christianity. In order to adopt this new Christian God to the Indian World, the Great Creator concept was adopted via cultural diffusion from Plains tribes. At this point, most US Indians are passionate Christians, and most will insist that they always believed in a “Great Creator”. If you dispute this, you ask for a fight. The truth, I believe, is as described above. Along the same lines, some of the Indian stories I was working with were the characteristic myths of the California Indians, dealing with various animal Gods. These myths explained how various things came to be, how the Earth was created, how fire was discovered, etc. The myths date back to a time before there were people, when various animals, in the form of “Animal Gods”, and not the animals themselves as we now know them, roamed the Earth. This was the time of Stinkbug, Turtle, Coyote, Mountain Lion, Bear, Bobcat, Duck, and many other “Animal Gods”. I talked to a high-ranking Karuk Indian and asked him whether he actually believed all this stuff. He got very angry (as Indians often do when you challenge their beliefs) and insisted it was all literally true. Then I set off on a quest to see to what extent the California Indians had actually believed in these animal myths aboriginally. After a while, the best response I found came from a brilliant linguist named Sydney Lamb at Rice University, who told me that the aboriginal Indians didn’t really believe any of that stuff. Instead, those stories were more like the Saturday morning cartoons, or fairy tales you tell to little kids. What is curious is how stories that were aboriginally seen as “Saturday cartoons” have now been adopted as literal truth by much more scientific-minded modern Indians, and that these modern Indians also insist that this literal belief was also held aboriginally. There were other questions. The existence of a Yokuts tribe called the Dalinchi. The local elders passionately insisted that this was not a tribe, but was merely the name of a village, and got angry when I suggested otherwise. Looking through old mission records, a linguist friend of mine found Yokuts Indians who gave their tribe as Dalinchi. They probably would not have done so if that was only a village name. The existence of a Yokuts tribe called Dumna was questioned, and locals stated that it did not exist, in part because cynically, the locals wished to claim Dumna land as their own, mostly so they could build a casino on it. There was a lot of anthropological work on the Dumna, especially a great book by Frank Latta, but most crucially once again, my linguist professor friend found old mission records where Indians gave their tribe as Dumna. The local Indians asked me to draw a map of tribal boundaries. Between other work, I spent a few months on this, poring over all sorts of maps, new and old, and old ethnologies and reports. I eventually mapped out a tentative boundary for the tribe. As with most California tribes in this area, it didn’t go very far, and it didn’t go down to the San Joaquin River where they wanted me to draw the line. Close? Yes, but not to the river. Why did they want me to draw the line to the river? So they could build a casino there! The tribe got angry at my conclusions as I had discovered the “wrong facts”, and for a bit it seemed my job was on the line. I insisted that I was a scientist, and scientifically, I could not compromise by scientific ethics for a political agenda. They seemed to accept the basic morality of my stubborn stand, and backed down. The various empirical questions that I dealt with in the course of my work as a cultural anthropologist are bolded above. I do resent GNXP and to a much lesser extent Sailer (who is mostly just guilty of ignorance and thinking in the same way one “skims” a book) saying that cultural anthropology is not a science, that the scientific method is not used, that we make no hypotheses, nor do we test them, nor we do we make tentative conclusions that we continually readjust in the face of new evidence. I defy any of the arrogant hard science types in Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Africa, Americas, Amerindians, Anthropology, Anti-Racism, Blacks, California, Christianity, Civil Rights, Crime, Cultural, Culture, Europe, Europeans, Genetics, History, Intelligence, Left, Linguistics, North America, Pacific, Polynesia, Psychology, Race Realism, Race/Ethnicity, Racism, Regional, Religion, Reposts From The Old Site, Scholarship, Science, Ukraine, USA, Useless Western Left, West, Whites3 Comments on Cultural Anthropology and Physics Envy

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.
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