An Examination of the Frog Extinction Epidemic

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

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

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

References

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

Adventures in Owling

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

On Spotted Owls

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

Problems of Leftwing Democracy

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

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

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

Pancho Villa, Presente!

Repost from the old site. In the comments section, Uncle Milton comments that Mexican history shows that Mexican revolutions have quickly turned into kleptocracies. He also says that the Mexican electorate has more sense than we think they do. He also makes a lot of good points about Mexico and decides that it is neither a capitalist nor socialist state, but some sort of a kleptocratic oligarchic state. I argue, first, that the Mexican electorate is ignorant and does not vote in its best interests. Second, that we Americans owe the Mexican revolution a tremendous debt and that the achievements of the revolution are deliberately ignored and downplayed by the US ruling class. Third, that while the revolution did degenerate into a corrupt, fat, lazy, greedy and fake-revolutionary PRI mess, it did make very real and substantial achievements. Fourth, that no socialist on Earth would claim Mexico, one of the most unequal states on Earth. Fifth, that Mexico is actually a fairly wealthy country. If you’re a poor Mexican, like most of them are, you have to vote for the Left and against the oligarchy. It’s the only rational thing to do. Mexicans haven’t voted for the Left and won since Cardenas in the 1930’s. The Rightwing parties, including the fake revolutionary PRI, haven’t done fuck-all for the poor Mexicans since 1920. The PRI was originally a revolutionary party that went corrupt and bad with time, stasis, greed and inertia. It’s true that the Mexicans voted for Cardenas and the Left in 1988 and had the votes stolen from them. In the last election, they voted Left again, for AMLO, and it was stolen again. I think you have to agree that the Left is the party that is going to benefit poor Mexicans the most. They may well be bad to neutral for middle class and rich Mexicans, but they will be good for the poor. As for the rightwing parties, what have they done for Mexicans in the last 80 years? US conservative apologists need to explain why conservative politics has failed the Mexican poor so horribly for most of the last century and all of this one. When is rightwing politics going to start working down there, anyway? I say they had their chance. Milton: Historically rebellions and revolution in Mexico have led to the same old kleptocrats running the show. This is not really completely true if you are arguing that all Mexican revolutions have failed. The Mexican revolution was a great thing. 10-20 million people died, but it had to be done, just like World War 2. You must understand that prior to Pancho Villa, Mexicans lived in a state of feudalism. I am not kidding. Read descriptions of Mexicans in 1910. The revolution broke up the big feudal estates and destroyed the power of the Catholic Church who supported the feudal lords. The reason Americans don’t know this is because we were not taught this. At the time, our government hated the Mexican revolution and supported the feudal lords, and it probably still hates the Mexican revolution, because the American government hates all populist rebellions. They don’t want us to know about a successful populist revolution in Mexico, or anywhere. One thing the revolution did was give land to the average Mexican. It is the case to this day. Most Mexicans have access to land if they wish to farm it, often collectively. These collective farms have been very successful for the last 90 years, at least in terms of warding off starvation and putting food in stomachs. Our government never teaches us this either because they don’t want us to know about a successful experiment in collective agriculture. At least the average Mexican can eat; he need not go hungry. To this day, Mexico has one of the lowest rates of malnutrition in Latin America. The revolution also created public schools and public health care. Most Mexicans do have access to free and public health care. The health care is not the greatest, and you may have to wait ages, but it’s there. In the rural areas, many kids are pulled out of schools to work on farms, but the schools do exist. The US should be indebted to the Mexican revolution. When Central America was in flames in the 1980’s, did you notice that Mexico was quiet? At the time, I asked my Mother why Mexico was not in flames and she shrugged her shoulders and said, “They already had their revolution.” We should throw a shout out to Pancho Villa that he kept Tijuana from becoming San Salvador in 1989. It’s clear that this venal Mexican elite uses the US border as a safety valve to send their poor to the US so the rich don’t have to share with them. I think that rightwingers in the US ought to admit that conservatism in Mexico has failed in that it has caused the illegal immigrant crisis in the US. To call Mexico a socialist country is an insult to socialists everywhere. If it were a decent social democracy, I do not think we would be having all these Mexicans flooding up here. Mexico is not a poor country. It has a PCI of almost $13,000/yr, and that is not bad. Mexico has Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Americas, Capitalism, Catholicism, Christianity, Conservatism, Economics, Education, Health, Hispanics, History, Illegal, Immigration, Latin America, Left, Mexicans, Mexico, Nutrition, Political Science, Politics, Public Health, Regional, Religion, Reposts From The Old Site, Socialism, South America, The Americas, VenezuelaLeave a comment on Pancho Villa, Presente!

Cool Page On Social Democracy

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

Socialism Wastes Money, Capitalism Wastes Humans

Repost from the old site. There has been a lot of talk, even by socialists, of the profound “wastefulness” inherent in various Communist economic systems. As I’m not an economist, I don’t really understand what they are talking about. However, I can give you a few ideas. In recent years, Cuba has revolutionized organic agriculture to where they probably have one of the most highly developed organic ag systems on Earth. For starters, Cuba has more agronomists per capita than anywhere else on Earth. During the Special Period, they were put to work devising organic solutions to problems that were previously solved by industrialized agriculture. Right now, in the intensive organic farming collectives all over Havana, crop yield has reached some of the highest levels on Earth per unit of land. And that’s with a 10 However, interviews with collective farmers reveal that the system could not be replicated on a capitalist model. It is “wasteful”, that is, it has to either spend too much money to get that yield, or it pays too many farmers as workers to get the yield. It’s pretty much the same argument. A similar complaint has been leveled at Cuban enterprises. In some office jobs, it seems as if there are four or five workers for every real job. They rest are screwing off or shuffling papers or engaging in make-work. I suppose all of these examples are of “waste”, right? Waste of money! Well, Cuba is a poor country dedicated to 10 In most of the Third World, college grads just don’t have any jobs. The state has no jobs for them and the private sector doesn’t either. So there are vastly more applicants than positions. A lot of these places have much more wealth than Cuba. Cuba’s not going to go that route. It has enough money to hire workers even for jobs that barely even exist, and it wants everyone to have a job, figuring that’s better than sitting on your ass. 3rd World capitalism creates armies of over-educated young unemployed men with no income to start a family. In the Muslim World, lots of them are going in for radical Islam and blowing themselves up. I suppose that Cuba has a similar problem, but they just dealt with it by creating make-work jobs and at least giving folks an income and something to do with their time. There’s waste of humans in one case (3rd World capitalism) by lack of jobs for them, and waste of money in the other case (Cuba) for creating make-work jobs. I would point out that the Cuban organic collectives are run by the workers themselves. They hire other workers to join on. If you don’t pull your weight and slack off, you’re fired. They have to sell some of their produce to the state, but there’s plenty left over for farmers’ markets. There are many people clamoring to get into these collectives, as it’s seen as a good job with a good income. As a collective economic form, it’s also non-capitalist. Right now, only Here in the US, a lot of very smart people are just completely wasted by capitalism. I’m not talking about myself here, because I’m not healthy enough to work in a regular job, so I just live off a meager trust fund. But I know two people with IQ’s over 140 who are not doing much productive. One works at low-level jobs and the other is on disability, but could work if they wanted to. What puzzles me is why this wonderful market is not beating their doors down trying to hire our most valuable citizens (cognitive elite)? If the stupid market can’t utilize their brains in any way, why doesn’t the state? The very same thing happens in 3rd World capitalism. Very bright people, with degrees and advanced degrees, have nothing to do. If aliens landed on the Earth and saw a bunch of the smartest people around being wasted by society, wouldn’t they say that was insane? The capitalists would explain to the aliens that these folks are useless for making money, so they are a waste of air, and that capitalists don’t give a damn about talent or brains or anything. I guess that’s what it boils down to? Capitalism is good for creating wealth, that’s it. Hell, even Marx said that. Read The Communist Manifesto. He praises this greatest wealth-creating engine to the skies. What else is capitalism good for? Nothing. It ain’t good for fuck-all else. I assure you that Cuba would find something to do with everyone in the land who had a 140-150 IQ. I guess the market feels it can’t use the smartest people in society to help it make cash , so it has no use for them. Capitalism and the market is just a fucking money-generating machine. It’s in business to make money, nothing else. That’s what all this crap the market-fetishists go on about in terms of “generating wealth” is all about. Making money. “Generating wealth” means making money. Big deal. Since when is that a value worth anything of importance? I hate capitalism and the damned market. Looking at the failure of socialist models (For example, when Albanian leader Hoxha died in 1985, there were shortages of even the most basic foodstuffs.) I’m willing to acknowledge that it may be necessary, but it sure sucks. Have you ever noticed the contempt that capitalists have for professors in universities, our finest minds at work in various sciences and fields, advancing the knowledge of our species? They sneer and call them eggheads and talk about how their tax dollars are wasted on these guys. They brag about how they never went to college. There’s no money in a lot of these fields of study at the university (probably, or at least at the moment, or from what we can tell), so capitalists figure it’s all a total waste. If there’s no money in it, it’s worthless. That’s your glorious market. Fuck the market.

Debate With an Aztlanista Traitor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Serial Killer Frontiersmen,” by Alpha Unit

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

References

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

Racism Against Blacks in Cuba

There is an article posted on American Renaissance by a Black Cuban complaining about anti-Black racism in Cuba. The article is correct, but the Cuban exiles (gusanos) make too much of this. Things were much worse when the gusanos ran things. Many comments followed. As a socialist and liberal race realist, I must say there was a lot of nonsense written in these comments. Amren comments are italicized, and my comments follow.

I guess racial relations as well as government took a big backward step with Fidel. Not so unless you are a segregationist. Cuba had legal Jim Crow segregation and hardcore discrimination against Blacks pre-Castro. That’s all been swept aside now, maybe forever. The Blacks complain, but it’s better now than it  was then. There is more democracy than under Batista, and Castro has mass popular support while Batista never did. Pre-revolution, there was nearly a one-drop rule, and there was little intermarriage, or those that did were lost to the Whites as in the South. Since the Revolution, there has been mass intermarriage. I can imagine that Cuba became a much darker and more violent country after these folks left. Darker, sure. More violent? No way. Certainly far less violent. For whatever reason, Cuba has less violent crime than any other state in the Americas, and Havana is the safest large city in the Americas. And they are both full of Blacks. I’ve long said that Blacks do well under socialism. In Mozambique under Samora Machel, you could walk across Maputo in the middle of the night and not fear a thing. You are welcome to speculate why there is little crime. The Cuban justice system is hardcore, and they don’t put up with any BS at all. Cuba has the 6th highest imprisonment rate in the world, and the prisons are of course full of Blacks. The typical rejoinder is that those are all political prisoners. I have no recent figures, but there are probably no more than 400 political prisoners on the island. The overwhelming majority of the prison population are common criminals. Perhaps the crime rate is due because of a “lock em up” philosophy? Yes, the Black intellectual class (is that an oxymoron?) have long claimed Cuba was a race less Utopia. Well, there is probably less racism against Blacks there than anywhere else in the Americas, FWIW. What’s their IQ? If it’s above 80… Good question. No one seems to know, but in the rest of the Caribbean, it is ~70-75. Now that we have another proof that extreme Leftist policies do nothing to improve life for Blacks can we please stop affirmative action, integration, Third World immigration, and diversity quotas? Surely not the case in Cuba, as the revolution has dramatically improved life there. Sure Blacks bitch, but Blacks complain everywhere. These are the people that Castro drove out; now he has a population similar to Haiti. His human capital is a negative! Not so. Cuba’s population looks nothing like Haiti’s. In the Americas, Cubans have the longest life expectancy in the Americas, the lowest rate of malnutrition, the lowest infant mortality rate, the most scientists per capita, are the best educated and are the healthiest people. With They have hooked up the whole place to running water, electricity and sewage. Everyone has access to transportation and culture and wears nice clothes. Latin America has failed to do these things for some reason. Compared to the planet, Cuba has the lowest doctor patient and more agronomists per capita than anywhere else. It hardly sounds like a place with garbage human capital. And do you think these White Cuban exiles would return to Cuba given a chance to do so? No way. One thing that infuriates these Cuban Whites is that they had a lot of money in Cuba, but they took off really fast and left things behind, like their homes. Castro quickly confiscated their homes and businesses when they left. The gusanos go back to Cuba and see their fine stately homes filled with Cuban Blacks crammed into their old home, lounging on the porch, etc. The Cuban Whites are filled with rage, but do you think there is any way in Hell those Cuban Blacks are going to give those nice homes they are living in back to the Cuban White gusanos who left? Not on your life. This is partly how Castro stays in power. No one in Cuba wants those gusanos back. Cuba could implode one day and we could have a Mariel boatlift X10, or X20. Won’t happen. Those Blacks have it good, and implosion would bring back the White gusanos with vengeance on their minds. Every Cuban knows this. See bolded part above. Slums are the products of the people who live in them. Inferior people create inferior environments, despite governmental efforts to help them. Superior people create superior environments, despite persecution. It is true that the Cuban government has recently built some very nice apartment complexes for poor Blacks in Havana. Within 6 months, the Blacks had dismantled and destroyed them. There is a big debate in the Cuban sociology community right now about why the Blacks did this. Fortunately there is an alternative. Just 80km across the Windward Passage sits the black paradise known as Haiti. Cuba could easily deport all of its blacks there, where they would be among their own kind and by definition no longer oppressed. Actually, Eastern Cuba is now full up with Haitians and Jamaicans fleeing the capitalist paradises of Haiti and Jamaica. Cuba just lets them and tries to integrate them into society. Say what you will about Cuba, but Cuba looks great to your average poor Haitian or Jamaican. These Blacks think Cuba is paradise compared to the places they come from. The notion that no one ever flees to a Communist country is false.

All Politicians are Sociopaths, and All States Are Sociopathic By Nature

AJ asks about the rebellions in the Northeast of India, which have been going on nonstop since the birth of the state.

The imperialist state of India has no right to any of those lands. All of those places refused to join India in 1947. They only joined after India attacked them militarily or threatened to. Most of those states have been in armed rebellion ever since. How come we never hear about it? Do you think it is because they are brown, so journalists don’t want to paint them as imperialists?

They have no right to Kashmir either. The imperialist state of the USA, along with almost all other (objectively fascist) states on Earth, is generally opposed to separatism. Only Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and a few other places give support to any separatists. It’s because all states stick together, and the enemy of all states is the separatists. On this line, I am with the anarchists. Most of these separatist rebellions are justified, and I support them. But no state wants to break up. Mostly the various imperialist states of the world at best cynically support the separatism of their enemies and the often brutal of separatism of their allies. There are no good people in politics. Most politicians are sociopathic, and most states are sociopathic by nature. The only reasonable position is a principled one. Either separatism is generally justified or it is never justified. To support the separatism of your enemies on moral grounds while promoting the brutal suppression of separatists by your allies is the most cynical and disgusting politics. Of course a Jew gave a name to it: Realpolitik. But before Kissinger there was Machiavelli. I will say that one great thing about Whites is that we are the only race civilized enough to break up our states on civil grounds without committing mass genocides like all the other barbarian races do. Only Whites could have broken up the USSR (one of the greatest acts of emancipation and liberation of the 20th Century), only Whites could have broken up Czechoslovakia, and only Whites are willing to break up the UK and Canada. Only Whites!

The Chinese Pro-capitalist Reforms Are Crap

Regular reader AJ writes in:

What are your thoughts on all the people who say that the only reason China is getting stronger and richer is because they are Communist in name only, and have been moving closer and closer to capitalism?

They have nothing like capitalism at all. It’s a very mixed system that is what I call socialism. You really need to study the Chinese system. It’s not capitalism or anything like that. Anyone knows that capitalism potentially creates tremendous wealth and it beats socialism at creating wealth. But at what cost. Capitalism in China, especially the foreign firms (which are definitely capitalist!) is killing 600,000 Chinese a year through overwork alone. Corruption and mass abuse of workers and citizens is rampant, all due to the reforms. There was little to no abuse of workers before. Health care and education have been decimated by the reforms. The reforms are crap. All so they can get rich? Fuck that! I am convinced it does not have to be this way. Belarus is a good example of a country without much wealth that shows how you can protect the rights of workers, citizens and society and at the same time develop your economy. Venezuela is another good model.

Manuel Marulanda

Repost from the old site.

Great photo of Manuel Marulanda (seated) from the early days. The more classic view that people are a lot more familiar with – the veteran revolutionary and guerrilla. In the background are uniformed FARC troops.

I’ve already been over on this blog why the Colombian revolutionaries really have no alternative but to fight. When they tried to lay down their weapons, they were slaughtered like flies. As long as there is no open space for peaceful dissent in Colombia, armed struggle will be a sensible option. Via a couple of articles out of People’s Movement Support Group, we now learn a lot more about Sure Shot – Manuel Marulanda. The essential moment in the Colombian struggle and the one that actually gave rise to the FARC 16 years later was the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the presidential candidate that the people had pinned their hopes on. Colombia has always been ruled by two ruling class parties – the Liberals and the Conservatives. Although they hated each other, there was never much difference between the two. Gaitán was a new kind of Liberal – a leftwing populist that was actually going to work for the people and not the oligarchy for once. Even his own Liberal party condemned him, and he was quickly assassinated by unknown parties. The killing set off La Violencia, a conflict between the Conservatives and Liberals that killed 200,000 people in a small country over the next 16 years. The peasants in the countryside split off to form militias to slaughter each other. The Conservatives represented the older oligarchy, and the Liberals represented some nouveau riche up and coming members of the oligarchy who wanted in. However, the Liberals were joined by many peasants and Communists. The two parties finally signed a peace treaty in 1963 and decided to declare war on the Communists. Pedro Antonio Marín Marín, later Manuel Marulanda, was born into a poor peasant family around 1930. At age 13, he was forced to leave home to find work. Great system! At some time after 1948, Marín was attacked in his home by a Conservative militia. This led him to join the Liberals. He took the name Manuel Marulanda after an Afro-Colombian union leader who was tortured to death in 1953. In the late 1950’s, he joined forces with Jacobo Arenas to form a Marxist guerrilla group modeled on the Fidelistas fighting in the mountains of Cuba. It was as a guerrilla that he earned the name Tiro Fijo or Sure Shot. The Colombian ruling class and US imperialism are overjoyed that Marulanda died. He died at age 77 in the arms of his lover, surrounded by his guerrilla comrades. The imperialists and their lackeys have made up a lie that he was killed by a bomb from a Colombian jet. This is not true. It is little known that there is a fierce guerrilla war raging in Colombia. You don’t read about much in the news, but the FARC, while conducting an orderly retreat under a severe offensive, is counterattacking against the Colombian military, and there are many small battles taking place every week. The FARC is quite popular in Colombia, especially amongst the rural poor. If you go out into some areas of the countryside, all adults that you see will be members of the FARC. The peasant farmer in the countryside with his cows will have a sidearm. The woman cooking in her kitchen cooks food for guerrillas. This is the FARC’s rural militia, and it numbers up to 200,000-300,000. This is much more than the 15-20,000 full-time soldiers of the FARC. These peasants have been part of the FARC’s support base for decades. That’s just the way it is in a lot of places. FARC has had a much harder time organizing in the cities, but they do have urban militias. The kidnappings that the US media screams about all the time are usually just arrests for not paying revolutionary taxes. Every Colombian with an income of over $1 million/year (that’s a lot of people) has to pay revolutionary taxes every year (usually 1 Some wealthy Colombians have not been paying taxes lately, so they have been arrested by the FARC for tax evasion. They will be released when they pay their taxes. So it’s not really the “kidnapping and ransom payments” scenario that the media wants you to believe. The FARC is even very popular across the border in Ecuador, especially in the rural areas. The notion that this group has no support is a lie propagated by its enemies. Another lie is that these guerrillas live in luxury because they are narco-traffickers. They do tax drug crops in their regions of control, including cocaine. However, all of the money goes towards the war. No FARC guerrillas or leaders live in luxury.

World O' Crap, Meet World O' Lies

Repost from the old site. Super-commenter James Schipper responds to the Problems of Democracy Under Capitalism post with this insightful comment. My comments follow:

James Schipper: There are two serious restraint on capitalism: competition and the need to make a profit. Competition between capitalists insures that the power of capital over consumers and labor is limited. Capitalists have a common interests in the preservation of the capitalist system, but at the same time, capitalists compete against other for the favors of the consumer and to get the best employees. Always remember that what makes capitalism work is not so much private property but competition. Private property without competition combines the worst of socialism and capitalism. The need to make a profit sets a limit on what the corporate media can do. Newspapers have to find readers and radio and TV stations have to find listeners and viewers. This implies that they can’t be too overtly propagandistic, otherwise the readers, listeners and viewers will stay away. Commentators like Rush Limbaugh have a large following but only because they primarily discuss non-economic issues. If they spent most of their time defending business, their popularity would quickly plummet. Imagine the reaction of Limbaugh’s fan’s if he started to extol CEO’s who make stratospheric incomes while their companies lay off workers. It is far safer to extol the uniformed heroes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Plutocracy is a cause that can’t be truthful about its aims. That’s why the Republicans want ordinary working Americans to worry about college professors who have an elitist lifestyle rather than about executives and capitalists who have an elitist income. It is ridiculous to suppose that latte-drinking, opera-watching, Volvo-driving eggheads who read foreign novels and watch foreign films are somehow a danger to working stiffs. A party that represents the rich has to be deceitful or else condemn itself to insignificance. The Republicans are such a party.

Robert Lindsay: James makes some excellent points above, especially about how “pointy-headed intellectuals who can’t even park their bicycles straight”, as George Wallace famously put it, into a sort of populist enemy by the Republican Party, and also about how conservatism is always, by its very nature and necessarily, dishonest. Here the Republican Party is playing into the anti-intellectual nature of US populism. We have never been a European-style cafe society, and probably never will be. Also Republicans are taking an increasingly popular critique of their own sure elitism into a critique of fake elitists called “limousine liberals”. Problem with limousine liberals being, I guess, that they are hypocrites. Similar diatribes have been launched against something similar called the “Hollywood Left”. This point is superbly made by Philip Agre in a seminal 2004 essay, What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It? As Agre succinctly and immaculately:

Q: What is conservatism? A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy. Q: What is wrong with conservatism? A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

Increasingly here we have what are more or less monopolies, James. We have cable and telephone monopolies that were supposed to be regulated, but the government has basically given up regulating them. We have computer monopolies in the form of Intel on chips and Microsoft in apps and OS’s. Starbucks comes into a town, sells at a loss to drive all competition out of town and then jacks up prices. Walmart comes into town, sells at a loss to drive everyone out of business, and then keeps on selling at low cost. However, Walmart mostly sells crap. Here Walmart is violating the monopoly principle of driving up prices while adhering to the monopoly principle of selling crap. We are now having higher-end stores opening up that charge a lot more than Walmart but at least do not sell crap. As long as there is competition in a market, prices and quality are typically relatively good. However, the government now operates in the interest of monopoly capital, and, insanely, “free market” economics is opposed to all antitrust regulation. Traditionally, there was bipartisan support for antitrust legislation. The new bipartisan opposition to antitrust legislation is one of the legacies of Milton Friedman’s “Chicago School of Lies” free market fundamentalism snake oil that has created a Gramscian cultural hegemony in US economic thought in the past 35 years. The Friedmanites published all sorts of nonsense, lies and BS. They went down to Chile, used it as a testing ground for their insane theories, blew up the economy, and then covered their tracks and lie about it to this very day. They published papers and books on antitrust that overturned nearly 3/4 of a century of perfectly valid economic and legal scholarship that showed unequivocally that prices rise and the quality of services and goods nosedives as markets become more consolidated. These works made up a bunch of fancy-sounding crap that made a dishonest case that all of this proven science was not true. Monopolies do not produce high prices and crap service and goods. Everything we know is wrong. Instead, reality is inverted and monopolies cause low prices, great products and superb services. What we are seeing in the US is the move to more and more consolidated markets and more and more monopoly-type markets. The moves by Yahoo and Google and Microsoft on the Internet foretell an Internet that is increasingly monopolistic. The one good thing about capitalism is competition. Capitalists love to talk about how much they love competition, but the truth is that they hate it. Competition only benefits the consumer. All businessmen secretly want to be monopolists. All of those businesses dishonestly taking Microsoft to court for being a monopoly actually want to be monopolies themselves. There are natural monopolies. In the US, those include phone, cable, power, water and some others. Those natural monopolies must be regulated by the state, other wise they will turn into natural unregulated monopolies, which are disastrous for consumers and society. It’s highly dubious that corporations compete for the best workers anymore in the US, except at the highest levels. Corporations and business are perfectly happy to replace good workers with illegal aliens and H-1B and H-2B guest workers from other lands. Both types of workers are usually much inferior to native US workers, but business no longer cares about quality in the US. Computer companies and homebuilders are perfectly happy to produce crap code and homes that fall apart in a few years. No one really cares about quality anymore in the US, and no one cares about workers either. The whole culture is centered around getting rich, and that usually means being an employer and hiring labor. To be a worker is to be a schmuck, soon to be taken out by illegal aliens, machinery, a computer program or guest workers from India or Ecuador. Fordism is progressive type of capitalism named after Henry Ford. Ford found out his own workers could not even afford to buy his cars, and he was outraged. He resolved to pay his workers enough to buy his cars. This became a progressive strain in capitalism – to pay workers enough so that they would be well-heeled consumers able to buy plenty of products, while at the same time preserving high profits for business. Fordism is done and gone; it’s history. Everything is now globalized, and no one worries about whether or not people can afford to buy your stuff. If labor in one place costs too much, just outsource, move the plant overseas, hire illegals or bring guest worker scabs from India. If workers in one land can’t afford your stuff, ship it to some rich people overseas. As long as enough people somewhere can afford your stuff, there’s no need to pay workers enough to buy your stuff. Furthermore, James misinterprets the degree to which Rush Limbaugh is a reactionary. I believe he does extol high corporate salaries. You now have the phenomenon of the low income, working class or middle class, White, usually younger, male, who will defend plutocracy and the politics of the rich to the hilt, despite the fact that it is against his interest. In this way, the plutocrats have actually been honest about their project and have created a Gramscian cultural hegemony of “plutocracy is good” whereby tens of millions of suckers swallow this crap whole and spout it right back at you without thinking. They did this by saturating the media with pro-plutocrat messages and making it seem reasonable. They also did it by creating a Lottery mindset, which was unfortunately always a part of US culture (see the Horatio Alger books). Your average White male working stiff will tell you that he too is going to become rich one day. Anywhere from 25-5 The problem with James’ media model – that media outlets must compete for readers – is that there is no competition. There is no Left alternative to Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report. On TV, there is the ultraright Fox News and MSNBC and the rightwing CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC. All of these are corporate-owned and spout one pro-corporate line. It is true that CNN now has Lou Dobbs, who spouts a sort-of progressive populist line. It really is against CNN’s interests to keep Dobbs on there, but I guess he is there because enough folks want to hear the message. What you get instead is a pro-corporate message increasingly draped in fake populist clothing. On Fox News today, they went on and on with a fake populist message about lowering gas prices. Incredibly, they denounced speculation in oil prices, but of course, they did not offer the reasonable thing to do to remedy this – regulation of commodity markets. Instead, they argued for massively increasing domestic oil production – in the ANWR, in the oil shale of the US Rockies and in offshore deposits. They said that the increased production would so glut the oil market (!) with new supply that this would force the commodity market to drive oil prices downwards, and this would “beat the speculators”. What is interesting is that Fox News was forced to admit that the problem in oil prices is almost entirely due to speculation. What they left out is that increased oil supply probably would not do anything to drive down prices, because the price is not being set by supply-demand anyway. So here you see the fake populism of the Republican Party – sell a fake populist but actually wildly pro-corporate message – “Open up the oil fields!” Even if this project passed and we able to drill in all these new deposits, it would not put a dent in oil prices. But the US public is so stupid that they would have forgotten about that long ago. If a bunch of Republicans got into office on this fake promise, this is all that matters. The US public is like a kid with ADD – no attention span. Politicians are never held accountable to promises or projects because no one ever follows promises through for years to see if they come through or not. Politicians get elected on a pile of bull, and then no one is ever there to call them on it later on. Bush has substantially caused these oil prices by failing to regulate commodity markets (and they will never regulate those markets), but the Repubs are going to stick Obama with it. Bush caused the Iraq mess, but Obama will be stuck with that too. And both of those things are catch-22’s with few non-painful ways out.

Prophets Howling in the Wilderness

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

Why US Business Loves Mass Immigration

Repost from the old site. …And why every American who is not a businessmen should not. This post will show how immigration is great for US business, but it’s bad for everyone else in the country. That includes everyone who doesn’t run a business, all of you, “What’s good for my boss is good for” worker-fools. James Schipper has been laying out some excellent reasons in the comments threads about why immigration does not appear to make much sense for economics or society as a whole. In fact, mass immigration seems to be detrimental to your average person. His arguments seemed logical, but I had hardly heard them before. But then I wondered, if it’s so obvious that mass immigration is bad for society and even for average income, why would business and the elites support it? Turns out that business has no interest at all in the average income of workers. In the Third World, they are perfectly content to have millions starving or living in the streets every year, as in India. Or to have 9 As long as the rich stay rich and business stays profitable, they don’t really give a flying fuck about anyone else and whether they are in poverty or not. In Haiti, the elite has a monopoly on food sales, which they mostly import and mark up at very high rates. Since the poor have to eat or starve, they have no choice but to pay the high prices. So even a 9 Let’s let James show us just how supporting mass immigration is logical for businessmen:

The reason why the business community tends to support immigration is that more immigrants means more workers, more customers and more real estate users. The essential question is not whether immigrants work for less than natives but whether the presence of immigrants makes labor cheaper than it otherwise would be. I think that mass immigration has a depressing effect on wages, or else its prevents wages from rising as fast as they would rise without immigration. Lower wages do not necessarily translate into fatter profits because, by lowering production costs, immigration may lead to lower prices. Slavery also lowered production costs, so the ultimate beneficiaries of slavery may have been the consumers of goods produced with slave labor. More immigrants likely means that there will be economic growth, and that can mean increased sales. What matters to business is not per capita sales but total sales. Let’s illustrate this. We have a town with 500 people and a restaurant. Let’s assume that on average each town resident consumes 6 restaurant meals per month, so the restaurant sells 3000 meals per month. Now 200 immigrants enter the town. They lower average income, so that each town resident now consumes 5 meals instead of 6. The restaurant still benefits from the population increase because it now can sell 3500 meals per month instead of 3000. if you are in the business of selling widgets, you are better-off selling 1200 widgets to 150 people than 1000 widgets to 100 people. Suppose that no immigrants had entered the US in the last 50 years, would average real estate prices be as high today as they are? I doubt it. The more people you put in a given space, the more property is likely to be worth in that space. Immigrants have to live somewhere. Since business owns a lot of real estate, they benefit from population growth. For business, the important thing is usually total economic growth, not per capita economic growth, let alone per capita consumption. For ordinary people, the important thing is per capita income growth and its distribution. Let me illustrate demographic investment once more. We have a country with 400,000 high school students and there are 400 high schools. Schools last 100 years, so each year the country has to build 4 schools. Let’s assume that a school costs 50 million dollars. That means 200 million in building costs per year. In addition, the country spends 5,000 per year on each student. Adding the building costs to that amount, the cost of each high school student is 5,500 per year if the student population remains the same. Now we make the assumption that the student population increases by 4000 each year. Since there are 1000 students per school, the country has to build 4 more schools to accommodate the new arrivals. Instead of building 4 schools, the country now has to build 8. In the first year after the growth in the student population, the costs per student are (404,000 x 5,000) + 8 x 50 million = 2,420,000,000/404,000 = 5,990. In other words, the cost per student has increased from 5,500 to 5,990. The increment of 490 can’t be used for consumption. That is the effect of demographic investments. It reduces consumption. Education is an investment. The establishment can also believe in a lot nonsense. Many members of the elite may believe in immigration because it makes them look cosmopolitan, tolerant and sophisticated, so unlike the unwashed who don’t like immigrants because they are unenlightened and bigoted. It is a coalition of plutocrats and political correcties that keep the flow of immigrants going in Canada and the US.

Fun With Race-Denier Idiots

Repost from the old site. It’s completely clear that no matter how wrong racism itself is (and the position of this blog is that racism is both immoral and sinful in the Christian sense), modern anti-racism (de facto race denial) of the PC, Cultural Marxist variety has gone completely out of control. Allow me to share with you some examples of some of the trouble I have gotten into with the anti-racist lunacy that stalks our land. We’re going to avoid one case completely because some of the idiots involved in this case keep coming back to the blog trying to engage in character assassination of me. I have some hangouts where I like to go to, buy coffee, read a paper, whatever. One is up in the mountains. The town is all White for the most part and extremely conservative, but lunatic anti-racism has penetrated to the core nevertheless. I had some posts on my blog called “Spot the Language”. It’s a little game where I posted a snippet of a widely-spoken foreign language, gave a bunch of oblique, strange and obscure clues about the country dealing with history, religion, culture, the language itself, sociology, psychology, history, famous people, cuisine, geography, native plants, animals and ecosystems, etc. I quit showing them to people because either no one can understand it, or no one gives a shit about it, or they don’t want to read it because they hate me, or some combination, I’m not sure which. Mostly it seems like nobody can make heads or tails of it, and most people I gave it to act really disturbed and upset by it for some weird reason. I think they can’t understand it, so they think it’s evil and dangerous. Well, I made the mistake of showing it to this guy at this place in the mountains. He’s White in an all-White town, but he loves Hispanics and illegal aliens, probably because he never had to live with lots of them. He’s a pretty typical White person in this part of California. There was another post interspersed with the language stuff dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and he got all caught up in that. He kept flipping the pages, looking through the stuff and getting more and more confused, baffled, agitated and freaked out. He started saying, “What is this? Jews? Arabs?” He was saying that over and over. He acted like I was showing him child porn. That’s the way most people react to my writing, which is why I never show anyone my stuff anymore. I answered, jokingly, “Jews? Arabs? Oh, those are just excitable Semites.” He didn’t get it, of course. A lot of the time, no one ever gets my jokes. “What’s a Semite?” He’s baffled. He acts like it must be something evil, or a disease. “Oh, it’s a branch of the Caucasian Race.” I smile. Now he’s really upset. The guy goes nuts. “What? What?! What’s that?! What’s Caucasian? What’s the Caucasian RACE?! What’s that? What do you mean RACE?!” “Caucasian is a race. It’s one of the three main races. The Caucasian race. The White race.” I’m still smiling because this whole incident is starting to get amusing. Now he’s visibly agitated. “White race!? What?! What’s the White race!? What’s that!? Do you believe in that stuff!?” He’s angry now. I decide to speak up in favor of my blighted and abused people: “Well, I think White people have a right to be proud. I think White people should be proud. Everyone else is. Only Whites are supposed to hate themselves. I don’t think we should hate ourselves or deny our existence. We are not bad people.” “You believe in that?!” Now he looks like he’s going to hit me. I look up and there’s two White girls working in the shop, frozen, staring, mouths open. I try to backtrack my way out of the conversation and get the handout back. A few days later, I come in and apologize for making him mad. The high school girl behind the counter says, “Well, in the future if you could avoid discussing that. You know. Discussing people’s races.” I will note that everyone involved in this idiotic event is a White person. Another time I was in another hangout. I was talking to a woman there who used to work in a coffee shop in town that I used to hang out at all the time. We were talking about the people who had taken it over, a mother and her daughter. I was describing them. “They’re Spaniards,” I said noncommittally. She gave me this look like, “I’m shutting this conversation down.” I guess it’s not ok to discuss the heritage of White folks anymore? Wait a minute. I like Spaniards. I was in a dentist’s office and unfortunately the conversation somehow wormed around to our heritage. I’m French, British and German. The hygienist was Hispanic from back before California was a state, back in the days of the Californios. We have a lot of those around these parts and it’s always interesting to meet them. The dentist, well, I forget, but I think he didn’t want to discuss it. “Let’s not talk about anymore of this racist stuff,” the hygienist said, like we were talking about grubby worms or something. The dentist agreed. One time a guy gave me his business card. I looked at it said, “Oh, you’re Italian,” with a big smile. It’s the name of a famous family of winemakers. The guy acted like I had challenged him to a fight. Why? I’m not supposed to say that anymore? Actually, I love Italians. Tell you what. I’ll trade you 10,000 illegal Mexicans from my city for 10,000 glorious, civilized, hard-working, law-abiding, patriotic Italian-Americans. Deal? Seemed like when I was younger, Whites always talked about their heritage. It was, “I’m Italian,” “I’m Irish,” “I’m half Greek and half Mexican.” Everyone was always proud of their heritage. I guess that’s all banned now. It’s racist. On and on it goes. There’s a Russian neo-Nazi video on this site. It’s clearly labeled that it’s up there for anti-fascist and anti-racist purposes. The local Hispanics have all seen it. According to them, having this video on my site means I’m a Nazi. I’ve explained to them over and over why it’s up there, but it’s like they don’t get it. At another hangout, there was a Black guy and an Hispanic guy who I used to sit with, drink coffee and talk. The Black guy never did tell me his name in all the time I knew him. That was one of his weird things: he wouldn’t tell you his name. Anyway, when I first met the guy, we were talking about the Jena 6 case. I was writing it up on the blog. I said I thought the whole thing was a fake White-racism hoax a la Tawana Brawley, that race had little or nothing to do with the case, that the Jena 6 were a bunch of thugs, and that Mychal Bell had dislocated his girlfriend’s eye socket. Well, this was evidence that I was a racist. The guy had long Black dreadlocks and loved to go on and on about the Evil White Man. There are Blacks like this everywhere here, and American Indians, and Hispanics too. They just open right up on us and start ranting away about all the evil shit we did or still do or whatever. I always just sit there and listen to them and nod my head and more or less agree that I’m evil. Funny thing is, if a White person ever unloads on any American Indian, Black or Hispanic about all the evil stuff they did or still do, that’s like Capital Offense Racism of the First Degree. So we Whites just have to sit there and grovel masochistically and admit how evil we were, and probably still are. Of course non-Whites never admit to any such thing. I lived in a White town for 16 years and hardly got ripped off at all. I move to an Hispanic city and there have been little ripoffs all the time. Little “loans” that of course never get paid back. Young Hispanics invite their way into your home, you turn your back on them, and they steal from you. That’s happened five times now. The “loans” go out to the Hispanics and Blacks, and they never come back. So I complain to Dreadlocks. “I wonder if they are ripping me off because I’m White,” I offer dubiously, since I’ve run out of theories. The guy jumps out of his seat, “Racist! Racist! Racist!” He’s almost yelling. His Hispanic Tonto is on on it too. I can’t use the words “Black” and “White”. Dreadlocks corrects me. That’s racist. I have to use the words “African” and “European” instead. And never forget that the Europeans are the most evil race that ever set foot on this planet. I was in a specialist’s office, on the phone with a friend. I’m into race and ethnicity, I eat it for breakfast. I was telling her about how I was in my town, in a doctor’s office, looking at a man and his daughter. Were they Mestizos? Were they Mediterranean of Middle Eastern Whites? You can never tell in this town, they all blur together. Finally, the little girl was walking out the door and she had a t-shirt that said “Greece”. The Med Whites in this town are really ethnocentric. They’re always walking around with shirts saying “Italy” or “Portugal”. It’s kind of neat, ethnocentric ethnic Whites, the way our country used to be. “Greeks are White,” I note to my friend on the phone. My mulatto specialist starts waving his hand like a traffic cop. There’s such thing as Whites. There’s no such thing as a White race. There’s no such thing as race. Plus, Whites all got a little Black in em anyway. Especially those swarthy Meds. Hispanics are the craziest of all about this stuff. Most Hispanics don’t seem to understand that they are part White and part Indian. I don’t know what they think they are. They are especially pissed off by the notion that they may have a drop of White in them, and most don’t have the slightest idea of what a mestizo is. White’s the enemy, after all, right? It’s like the opposite of Latin America, where the mestizo crabs are all climbing to the top of the White barrel, pulling each other down as they near the top. Some Hispanics have told me that people think that they are Asian due to their eyes. I point out that that was because, being part-Mexican, they were part-Indian, and Indians came from Asia. They never seem to understand, and then they get upset and act like they’re shutting down the conversation. It’s like I’m speaking Greek. I’m not saying Hispanics are stupid, because my opinion, having been around a lot of them, is that they are way smarter than you might think in terms of sheer brain speed, but it’s like there is not much in their brains most of time other than the latest rap songs and the usual quotidian stuff.

Race in a 1970's California Beach Town

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

Child Molester Mass Hysteria

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

Mexicans Are Mostly Indian

A graph showing Mexican genes. As you can see, Mexicans are predominantly Amerindian.
This photo is being linked to on the web with the argument that most Mexicans don’t look like Italians or Spaniards. Instead, they look like Indians. They say this because the photo shows that Mexicans are majority-Indian on genes. The problem is that that photo only applies to Mexicans in Mexico. Mexicans in Mexico itself have long been more Indian than Mexicans in the US, who have long been more White. This is changing lately as more Mexicans pour in here from deep inside Mexico, particularly Jalisco, Michoacan, Guerrero and Oaxaca. Mexicans in the US have traditionally come from the north of Mexico – Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas. These areas are the Whitest parts of Mexico. Monterrey is the Whitest city in Mexico. So, sure, most Mexicans don’t look like Italians or Spaniards. But a Hell of a lot of them do. Anyone who says that hasn’t been around many Mexicans. Local Mexicans (the Whiter-looking ones) are constantly telling me how people always think they are White. Many Mexicans have fairly dark skins, but if you look closely at their faces, their features could only be said to be Caucasian. That is, Amerindian features are scant to nonexistent. Many others are predominantly Caucasian, yet they do have a bit of Amerindian features, often in the eyes. If you look White, you’re White. If you look Caucasian and have no obvious features of any other race, you’re Caucasian. I imagine some of these folks must have some Amerindian in them, but for some reason, it’s not showing through. Among the lower, predominantly Spanish speaking classes here in the US, a good 80-9 Gene charts only tell you so much. A photo of a forest is a nice thing to look at, but it doesn’t tell you everything about every tree in the forest. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site.

The Problems of Media Ownership Under Capitalism

Savvas Tzionis is an excellent new progressive commenter from Australia. He comments on how US style Republican Party conservatism is attempting to colonize a progressive country, Australia:

You may be interested to know that the Chief Editor of The Australian newspaper (or as we on the left call it ”The American”) is a virulent Right Winger whose mother is from one of the Baltic states.  The Australian (owned by Murdoch) likes to think of itself as the most high-brow newspaper in Australia. But since 2001, and especially since the election of the ALP (nominally left wing) in 2007, it has lurched to the right (so much for left wing bias in the media). Also in the past, it never bothered with Latin America, but now with Leftist’s taking over this region, it has decided to print articles from a right wing Latin POV. Shameless.

Yes, this is important news. The rightwingers are making a play to take over Australian media and thereby use the rightwing media to brainwash Australians into making it the new USA, or Colombia or Latvia, or whatever. This is how capitalism works. That’s why it’s important to make the media democratic under capitalism. Under capitalism, the top There is almost no way to keep the Far Right ultrazillionaires from taking over say 9 It’s also important to note that the Baltic bastards (some of the most reactionary people on Earth at the moment) are leading the charge to replicate the cancer of US conservatism across the globe. The only real rightwing governments in Europe, the Baltics implemented radical neoclassical economics and were rewarded with horrible economic depressions that have ruined their countries and caused 2 I talked to a woman from Estonia recently. She said that she and her family where without any money and without any food. She has two small kids. I asked her if there weren’t any social problems to help with such matters and she started laughing. Since when do we hear of such things in Europe? This is the US model that the Baltics are trying to implement. I suppose mass homelessness is also on the agenda. The Baltics is a sorry case. They were not treated well by the USSR and did not have a good experience under Communism. They overreacted and become fanatical anti-Communists and as a result, radical rightwingers, since all hardline anti-Communists become rightwingers. Now they are paying for that delusion dearly. Tough shit. Chew on it hard and good. Let me know how it tastes.

Socialism Rules the Planet

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

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

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

In This World, Socialism is the Norm

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

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

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

Arabs or Hispanics, Which Do You Pick?

I pick Hispanics any day. FG writes:

Many are concerned about the demographic and cultural Hispanicization of the US. It’s a big change that surely carries major costs and benefits. Who knows what the future holds? But I have to say that the future of the US seems brighter than that of Europe.

Most Latinos do not fit the traditional American definition of White, but they are a quasi-Western people. From my perspective, that’s preferable to being demographically swamped by Muslims with their affinity for Shariah Law, as is happening with France, Holland, and other Western European states.

I don’t lose a lot of sleep over Hispanicization, but keep in mind that I’m a native Californian who grew up with Mexicans, took Spanish lessons at age 6, was raised on Mexican food, had Mexican-American friends and girlfriends in high school and spent many vacations down in Old Mexico.

If you spend a lot of time around these 2nd generation and up Hispanics (especially the 3rd generation ones), you realize that they are so much like us Whites. For instance, just about every White teen cult has been replicated by Hispanics. There are Mexican bikers, hippies, punks, heavy metalers, skaters, emos, Goths – you name it, they have replicated it.

On the other hand, Blacks have not replicated our cults like this. You don’t see a lot of Black bikers, hippies, punks, heavy metalers, skaters, emos, Goths, etc. It’s like Black people have this totally different culture that’s not like White culture at all.

The only reason that I can think of why these Hispanics are replicating our movements is because they are like us culturally and possibly genetically. Blacks may not be so much like us culturally, and they are not like us genetically.

Last night I spent some time at the local market discussing honor killings with the local Yemeni (born in the US by the way). He defended them, and said that if a married woman cheated on her husband, she had to be put to death! He then said that Islam mandated this. It’s not true, and I argued with him about this, but he didn’t buy it. He also said that if an unmarried woman had sex, 1

He and his brother also told me that there was no such thing as Al Qaeda and no such thing as terrorism, and added that Jews did 9-11, not Arabs. I like these guys a lot (Arabs are great people), but it was quite a discouraging conversation.

Europe is experiencing this mindset in spades. I don’t envy them.

Another Neoclassical Lie: Neoliberal Economics is the Best Way To Help the Poor

Also, the poor are poor for a reason. If you follow your liberation theology and gather resources for the poor through redistribution you’re shrinking the area of the pie from which everyone draws resources. Capitalists lose, some of the poor who become powerful in the new redistribution (i.e. community organizers and feminists) gain power, the majority of the masses lose as well because they aren’t smart enough to create jobs for themselves or make their own way without someone providing a job and capital for them to work with. You want egalitarianism, but that comes at the expense of quality of life. So that everyone is equal you are willing to accept that everyone is equally poor. This becomes an epistemological battle in that we are pitting the idea of socialism or social democracy against a relatively free economic model. People can choose for themselves what they want, and it seems that they usually choose economic freedom over egalitarianism.

In many social democracies, people are certainly not equally poor, and most Communist countries wiped out poverty, even if they only were able to provide a relatively low standard of living and the model bogs down and collapses over a period of some decades. Surveys the world over show that most people want some kind of socialism. There are few exceptions, though the US may be one of them. Socialist, populist, progressive or Left parties rule almost the entire globe. Rightwing parties are in the minority or out of power in most places. The few places where they have power (the US, Chile, Colombia, Philippines, Thailand, the Baltics) they are busy destroying the country, just like they always do. That’s one of your neoclassical lies. I just showed earlier how 12 of the 13 richest countries on Earth are all social democracies. Also many wealthy countries have low to very low Gini coefficients. Go to a place like Sweden, and you will be amazed at how many small businesses there are. Literally one on every corner. The masses don’t lose. When you redistribute wealth, as long as you do not do so too radically, the masses gain tremendously in wealth, power, resources, benefits and rights. All neoclassical economics ever does is shift wealth from the bottom 70-8 The economies that are really kicking ass now are heavily socialist economies like Russia and China (state capitalist, corporatist or mixed economies). The economies that weathered the latest Capitalist Depression best used stimulus spending to come out of it and had heavy state intervention in the banking system. The ones that got fucked worst of all had followed neoclassical economics in their banks to the greatest extent (Iceland) or following neoclassical economics, used austerity instead of stimulus to deal with the slump (Baltics and Ireland) got fucked worst of all. Laissez faire is refuted. Neoclassical economics doesn’t work. It causes wild booms and busts and leads to regular economic recessions and depressions. It’s only good for rich people because the purpose of it is class war and wealth transfer.

The Polls Are All Wrong

First of all, AP is a hard rightwing organization run by millionaire fundamentalist Christian Texans, some of whom are Christian Reconstructionists, with deep ties to corporate America. AP has a deep Republican bias, and based on their articles, especially by Liz Sidotti, they are pulling out all the stops for the Republicans with their biased reporting. Much is being made of a New York Times – CBS TV poll on October 27. It showed Republicans with a 6 point lead in the generic Congress race. Other recent polls come up with similar numbers. However, as I noted earlier, all of these polls leave out “cell phone only” voters. Many of these are young people. So far, the two polls that included cell phone only voters gave Democrats a 6 point lead in the generic Congress poll. That means that the recent NYT-CBS poll is wrong by a margin of 12 points. I’d like some more information on the cell phone only voters polls. Did they poll registered voters or likely voters? All projections of huge Republican gains in the House and Senate are based on these flawed polls, which are off by a full 12 points. Now, it’s possible that even with a 6 point lead in the generic poll, Democrats will lose the House. I don’t understand the polling well enough to comment on that. But they won’t lose the Senate. At the very least, I am quite certain this is not going to be the wipeout everyone says it will be. Many races are very close: Democrat Barbara Boxer is beating Republican zillionaire Carly Fiorina by 5 points. Boxer will win in a close race. Democrat Harry Reid is tied with Republican Sharron Angle. Toss up! Democrat Joe Sestak and Republican Pat Toomey are tied in Pennsylvania. Toomey should have been walking away with this one. Toss up! Democrat Patty Murphy is up by 2 points over Republican Dino Rossi in Washington. She’s going to win, but it will be very close. In early voting, more Democrats have voted than Republicans in North Carolina! This means super-nut Republican Richard Burr may lose to Democrat Elaine Marshall! Republican Ron Johnson is up by 2 points over Democrat Russ Feingold in Wisconsin. He may well win a cliffhanger race. Democrat Scott McAdams is now leading the crazy 3-way race in Alaska with Republican Joe Miller and Libertarian Lisa Murkowski! The Democrat may win, but it will be close and crazy! Republican Rob Portman will probably defeat Democrat Lee Fisher in Ohio but it will be a close race. In a 3-way race in crazy Florida, Republican mental patient Marco Rubio will defeat both closet gay Independent Charlie Christ and Democrat Kendrick Meek. Republican Mike Lee will surely defeat Democrat Sam Granato in Utah. Republican Don Hoeven faces Democrat Tracy Potter in North Dakota. I haven’t the faintest idea who will win. Team Crazy Republican Ken Buck ought to be walking away with the race in Colorado. Instead, he’s tied with Democrat Micheal Bennet! Republican lunatic Cristine O’Donnell will lose badly to Democrat Chris Coons in Delaware. Democrat Ron Wyden will easily defeat Republican Jim Huffman in Oregon. Democrat Barbara Mikulski will easily defeat zillionarie Republican Eric Wargotz in Maryland. Republican Tom Coburn will handily beat Democrat Jim Rogers in Oklahoma. Democrats Kristin Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer will destroy the Republicans in New York. Democrat Daniel Inouye will destroy Republican Cam Cavasso in Hawaii. Republican Johnny Isakson will defeat Democrat Mike Thurmond in Georgia. Democrat Pat Leahy will easily defeat Republican Len Britton in Vermont. Republican Jim DeMint, lunatic, will handily defeat Democrat Alvin Greene in South Carolina. Republican Jerry Moran will easily beat Democrat Lisa Johnston in Kansas. Republican nut Rand Paul is tied with Democrat Jack Conway in Kentucky. Toss-up! Democrat Richard Blumenthal will beat wrestling mogul Republican Linda McMahon in Connecticut. Republican kook Roy Blunt will defeat Democrat Robin Carnahan in Missouri, but it will be a close race. Democrat Blanche Lincoln will lose to Republican John Boozman in Arkansas in a close race. Republican Mike Crapo will easily defeat Democrat Tom Sullivan in Idaho. Republican Chuck Grassley will defeat Democrat Roxanne Conlin in Iowa. Democrat Alexi Giannoulias is beating Republican Mark Kirk in Illinois. He will win, but it will be close. Republican Kelly Ayotte will defeat Democrat Paul Hode in New Hampshire in a close race. Democrat Joe Manchin is starting to pull away from Republican John Raese in West Virginia. Republican Dan Coats will easily defeat Democrat Brad Ellsworth in Indiana. Republican John McCain will easily defeat Democrat Rodney Glassman in Arizona. Republican David Vitter will defeat Democrat Charlie Melancon in Louisiana, but incredibly enough, it will be very close.

Capitalism is Bad for Your Health

Libertarian Chuck pontificates (incorrectly) about Cuban health care:

RL:The health care is so great that the rich of Latin America, usually very rightwing people, fly to Cuba from all over the continent to have specialty work done that’s not available in their country. Chuck: That’s a facade. Cuba saves their best medical resources for foreigners who pay good money to receive health care. They reserve the shit health care for their own citizens. For instance, here is a story of 26 Cubans freezing to death in a Cuban mental hospital. The government vowed to prosecute those responsible even though the responsibility lies with the nationalized health care system and the totalitarian regime. But Castro can’t flog himself I guess.

1. Cuba has the lowest or almost the lowest infant mortality in Latin America. Cuba’s infant mortality is below the US. 2. Cuba has the highest or nearly the highest life expectancy in Latin America. Americans live only 8 months longer than Cubans, and the US is 4.7 times richer. Given the above, the notion that Cubans get “shit health care” is seriously dubious. Even if they do get shit health care, it’s better than what anyone else in the region gets, and it’s better than our capitalist health care here in the US. 4. Cuban exiles and other gusano types like neoclassicals love to parrot the notion that Cuba lies about her figures. There is zero, I mean zero, evidence for this. The UN has investigated Cuba and found that their figures were accurate. This is the worms’ worst rejoinder of all to Cuba’s great figures: they are lying. The story of the deaths of 26 people in a Cuban hospital is most unfortunate, but we have to look at the overall figures. They live longer than we do and they have lower infant mortality, end of story. Cubans get better health care than we do. That’s all there is to it.

Some Recent Failures of Neoclassical Economics

Have you noticed that practically all these neoclassical types do is lie? There’s a reason for that. Their theory is good for the rich and the upper middle class only, and it’s crap for everyone else. They can’t come out and say that, so they have to lie to the 8 This is similar to the modus operandi of conservatism. As conservatism is always and everywhere a philosophy of the plutocrats that benefits them and some upper middle class folks and hurts everyone else, they can’t very well be honest about the nature of their class war project. This is why conservatives, everywhere and Earth and all down through the past, have always lied. Conservatism is dishonest because it must be. A philosophy that benefits the top 2 Analyses of neoliberalism in the past few decades around the world showed that it tended to benefit about the top 2 Even major ruling class organs like Time Magazine admitted that decades of neoliberalism in recent years in Latin America had largely failed. Neoclassical economics killed 15 million people in Russia alone in the 1990’s. Neoclassical economics has failed to lift people out of poverty. Peru and India have implemented neoliberal policies in recent years. After years of high growth in Peru, the poverty rate remained flat at 5 The neoclassicals caused the recent financial crisis that took out the US economy and nearly took down the world’s economy with it. Neoclassical economics destroyed Latvia, leading to a 2 Hoover’s neoclassical economics only deepened and worsened the Great Depression in the US. Neoclassical economics caused a depression in Ireland with 1 The top neoclassical economists, including Hayek and Friedman, went down to Chile and advised Pinochet on how to run his economy. They implemented the most radical experiment in neoclassical economics that has ever been tried. The result was one of the worst economic depressions in modern history. However, at the end of Pinochet’s term, workers had lost 1/3 of their wages, and there was a massive wealth transfer from the bottom 2/3 to the top 1/3. Hayek and Friedman both said that neoclassical economics was so bad for workers and ordinary people that the only way to put it in was via a dictatorship. This is why both Hayek and Friedman were huge cheerleaders for the murderous Pinochet. The countries that got creamed worst in the financial crisis were those that had followed neoclassical theories in their financial system. Iceland underwent possibly one of the most radical experiments in neoclassical restructuring of its financial sector. The result was that when Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Americas, Asia, Capitalism, Chile, Conservatism, Economics, Education, Eurasia, Europe, Health, History, India, Ireland, Latin America, Modern, Neoliberalism, North America, Peru, Political Science, Public Health, Regional, Russia, South America, South Asia, The Americas, US, USALeave a comment on Some Recent Failures of Neoclassical Economics

The Failure of Neoclassical Economics in Latin America

Chuck the Libertarian continues:

For all your railing against capitalism and in favor of socialism/Communism, the best controlled experiment we’ve had for that is East versus West Germany. Remember, it was the East German government who had to build a wall to keep their people from spilling out of the country. The only difference was the communist totalitarian regime and the lack of economic and personal freedom that entails.

That Berlin Wall was put up due to brain drain. The East Germans were fleeing a Communist East Germany for a socialist West Germany. It was mostly the smartest who were leaving, mostly to make more money. People like money. And many West German Leftists moved to East Germany in the early days. I’m not so big on Communism. It’s got a ton of problems, but it was able to do some things well. For instance, in Latin America, Cuba has provided electricity, plumbing, decent housing, access to transportation, good clothing, plenty of food, work for everyone. Cuban medical care is better than the medical care in capitalist Latin America. Cubans live longer and have lower infant mortality rates than other Latin Americans. The health care is so great that the rich of Latin America, usually very rightwing people, fly to Cuba from all over the continent to have specialty work done that’s not available in their country. Cuban education beats education in the rest of Latin America. With Capitalism in Latin America in general has utterly failed to do any of these things. They have not been able to:

  1. Provide electricity for all of their people. Even Argentina has not wired up the whole country. The Indian areas of the northeast lack electricity.
  2. Provide plumbing and sewage treatment for all their people. Even Mexico does not provide it for 2
  3. Provide decent housing for all their people. Horrible shantytowns are everywhere.
  4. Provide access to transportation for everyone. For many, the only transportation is on foot.
  5. Provide good clothing for their people. Many people are barefoot or practically dressed in rags. In videos of Cuba, one thing you notice is that everyone is dressed in nice, modern clothing.
  6. Provide food for all their people. Cuba has a malnutrition rate of
  7. Provide jobs for everyone. Cuba has full employment. Mass unemployment is typical in Latin America.

If neoclassical economics works so great, why can’t it provide food, jobs, electricity, plumbing, decent clothing and housing and transportation for the people of this land? Why has neoclassical economics failed so badly compared to Cuba in terms of health care and education? If you go to the rural areas of Cuba, you will see an interesting thing. Everywhere you go, you will see happy, healthy, well-fed, well-clothed children. In general, you will not see this in the rural areas of most other Latin American countries. Why can’t neoclassical economics provide for children the way the Cubans do? In Latin America, it looks like neoliberalism is nothing but a massive fail.

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