Interracial Rape Epidemics: A Thought Experiment

There is a well-known and fairly uncontroversial figure out there about interracial rape. In a recent year, Blacks raped 37,000 White women. 10,000 of those were gang rapes. So, there are 100 Black rapes of White women per day and 30 Black gang rapes of White women per day. White nationalists like to say that this is a war on White women, but I crunched some figures and discovered that Black women are about 4-5 times more likely to raped by Blacks than White women are. Appallingly, White women actually get off easy in the Black Male Rape Epidemic. It is Black females who are truly devastated by this human cyclone. As such, I don’t buy the White nationalist argument that this is some kind of racist terrorist war on White women by Blacks, although at first glance it looks that way. Nevertheless, the figures are outrageous and are sure to play into White anger and even racism against Blacks. There’s enough of that as it is, so the media buries these figures. But! Let us do a little thought experiment here: A White nationalist commenter cited figures of 100 White women raped by Blacks for every Black woman raped by Whites. The rape rates are way worse than what he cited. 37,000 White women are raped by Blacks every year. That is over 100/day. However, basically zero (or between 0-10) Black women are raped by Whites every year. Instead of 100-1, it is more like 37,000-1, or at best, 3,700-1. Even the lower figure is utterly mindboggling. Just sit back and think if the situation were reversed: if White men raped 100 Black women every day, 1/3 of which were gang rapes, and there were basically zero rapes of Whites by Blacks. The Blacks and all the rest of the non-Whites, and all of the liberal and leftwing Whites, including probably me, would be up in arms about the “racist rape epidemic” being perpetrated on Blacks by White racists to keep them niggers in their place. Black women would take extreme measures to protect themselves from White men, and no one would condemn them. Black men would occasionally rise up and pledge to defend their women’s honor with violence if need be, and the non-Whites and Left would all cheer. White men would cower and make excuses. “Well…I certainly don’t rape any Black women…but be careful! There are a lot of bad White men out there!” Blacks might even start demanding separatist housing and even residential locations or cities in order to protect the honor of their women from the evil White rape epidemic. The Left and non-Whites would probably cheer this racial separatism on. “Black women have a right to live in peace!” I can see the headlines on my favorite leftwing websites now. Sage liberals would squirm in their chairs yet nod sagely. Every now and then a Black guy or Black woman would take vengeance on the rapists and go psycho and kill a (probably totally innocent) White guy, or a few White guys, and the media, the Left and the non-Whites would all but cheer it on. If it was a few Blacks who did it, the same crowd would quickly name them the “Oakland 8” or whatever, and rallies would be held in their name across the land. Intrepid reporters would grant anguished interviews to the murderers. The Black men, tearful yet defiant, would say that they just could not take the sexual terrorism against their women any more, and they just snapped. The reporters would not their heads sadly. The broadcasts would begin, “While I can’t condone what Tyrone did – let’s face it, murder is always wrong – there are two sides to every story.” Johnny Cochran types across the land would rush to defend the murderers of the innocent Whites. The trials would go forward, and heavily Black juries would acquit all the killers. Defiant Black female jurors would say, “I just could not send another Black man to prison. This prison-industrial complex is genocide against our men.” Whites across the land would seethe, but there would be little violence and no riots. After all, Whites have hardly rioted since the Civil War, while Black riots, so regular you wonder if they riot because they nicked themselves shaving, is routinely elided and mistranslated by the usual suspects as “rebellions” even when innocent Whites are murdered in cold blood. Nice thought experiment huh? I see you squirming already. Good.

Obama Vows to Keep Insipid Cuba Embargo In Place

Idiot. That’s because, as the Republicans, White nationalists and Far Right insist, the guy’s a fucking Communist! No, wait, a socialist. No, wait, any socialist worth his salt would have chucked this BS long ago. I’m having a hard time figuring what the game plan is here. The Embargo has always been about US politics. Do the Dems really still need Florida to win the Presidency? What happens if they lose Florida? Do they lose? The Cuban Lobby is one kickass ethnic lobby, kind of like the Jewish Lobby. As Cuban policy has been always held hostage to this fanatics, so US Middle East policy has always been held hostage the Jewish fanatics. With the Cubans, it’s always been about electoral votes. They have said that if we don’t back their nonsense, they have enough power in Florida to throw the vote to the other candidate. Americans are more sensible, but not by much. I haven’t read any recent figures, but polls taken in the past decade showed that 5 This is very much a White thing. The Cuban exiles are Whites, and it’s Whites who always backed the stupid embargo. Blacks and non-Cuban Hispanics are generally hostile to it, and your average Mexican is pro-Cuban. The Mexican and Cuban governments have had a long alliance, based on the fact that Mexico’s PRI was originally a revolutionary party. On similar grounds, the PRI was allied with the Salvadoran revolutionaries, the FMLN.

Revolution in the Land of the Savior

In 1989, I was helping to run guns for the FMLN, the Salvadoran revolutionaries, Commie scumbag that I am and all. I would drive to MacArthur Park in Los Angeles and meet the FMLN agent guy in the bar or whatever and hand him the cash with a conspiratorial smile. I guess it was legal then, but now it’s 10 years in the slammer thanks to George Bush. The War on Terror in so many ways is just a War on Justice. I remember when I was going to USC in Los Angeles in 1983 at the height of the Salvadoran Revolution, there was a Salvadoran professor in our department who would periodically take off work and go down to El Salvador to actually put on a uniform and fight for the revolutionaries! I was eating at a Salvadoran restaurant in San Mateo, California, in 2001, and I talked to the waiter. He said he left El Salvador in 1969. His parents went to the slums of San Salvador and said there were 12 year old boys walking around with AK-47’s. Sometimes revolution is just in the air you know? His parents saw the writing on the wall and put him on a plane to the US. Ten years later, full-scale civil war exploded, after a decade of small-scale actions, mostly kidnappings for ransom and bank robberies by the revolutionaries to raise cash, and endless forays to the villages and slums by death squads to kill the people. It was the twilight of the 1970’s, and the people had a choice. They could sit in their homes unarmed and wait for the government to come out and kill them, or they could at least take up arms to defend themselves when the government came out to kill them. Not much of a choice there. And so the war was on. The Commie Moscow – Cuba – Banana Republic ratline conspiracy be damned; this is how most revolutions in Latin America started. If you’re gonna get killed anyway, you may as well go down in a hail of bullets trying to take some enemies down with you.

Permanent Gangland America

I hate to be a pessimist here, but the US gang problem will never be solved in the foreseeable future. That is because Hispanic and to a lesser extent Black gang culture is for all intents and purposes permanent, as is probably their ghettos and possibly their dismal scholastic performance. I am speaking of the Hispanic and Black Underclasses here. I don’t like Thomas Chittum one bit, but the italicized  sentence above was one great thought that I took away from Civil War II. Chittum is a nasty White nationalist bastard, but he is very intelligent and has an excellent mind. Further, he has extensive military experience. If you just want to read Civil War II as a novel alone, it’s quite a kick. You can download it on my blog here. It’s entertaining reading (thriller) if you like this sort of thing. The conceit here is that we think that we are going to get a handle on these gangs. This conceit is based on the notion that the Hispanics and Blacks are capable of morphing into Jews, Italians and Irish and doing the the ghetto to success number. Forget it. They are not the same and they never will be. The gangs and never going to go away. When everyone of us is on their deathbed, we will be to look out the window and see an America as overrun with gangs as ever. As far as why this is true, I am not sure. IQ’s of US-born Hispanics are rising at a dramatic pace, far more than US Whites or even Blacks. US born Hispanics have now cut the IQ differential between US Whites and themselves in half from 1960 to 2009. Where there was a 15 pt gap between the two, now there is a 6 point gap. They achieved a 10 point absolute gain over 50 years. In US born Hispanics have an IQ of 95 now to US White IQ of 101 (or 94 to 100 by the old system). A 94 IQ would seem to be perfectly adequate to cut it in this modern world. Hispanic IQ all told is 89 because non-US citizen Hispanics (probably 8 I don’t know why US born Hispanics have such a dismal rate of high school dropouts (4 The brains are there; it’s something else that is missing. Culture anyone? I speak from Ground Zero. I live in an apartment complex in Mexifornia overrun by the Hispanic Underclass and especially illegals. Many of them are not necessarily objectionable people once you get to know them. It’s Norteno territory to the extent that I prominently wear my “N” tennis shoes a lot, and I just about claim Norteno myself. It’s not cool to root for the other side. I’ve known quite a few of these gangbanger characters personally, and though many of them are likable, their effect on society is not good. Forget Permanent Democratic Majority. Get ready for Permanent Gangland America.

Up With Blacks, Down With Illegals

Via a comment on the fascinating American Renaissance site:

Illegal immigration is Economic Genocide against low-skilled African Americans. Currently only about 1/2 of African-Americans finish high school, and relatively few graduate from college. This means that there are millions and millions of under-educated African Americans who can only find work in low-skilled, non-professional jobs. But these jobs do not pay a living wage, because there are millions of poor and desperate illegal aliens from Mexico, who will work for virtually nothing, and hence drive down salaries. Why would anyone hire an African-American at $15/hr, when they can hire an immigrant at $7/hr? The surest way to keep USA Blacks unemployed is to bring in an endless supply of Mexican wage slaves. Imagine if all the illegals were suddenly sent home. Agricultural, construction, meat-plants, carpet mills, restaurants, hotels, factories, custodial services, landscaping business, etc. by the thousands would now be desperate to hire people, and at nearly any cost. Salaries for low-skilled workers would skyrocket, allowing even high school dropouts to earn a good wage. The millions of Black kids who fail to graduate from high school are healthy, energetic, strong, and can work, if given a livable salary. However Obama would rather keep millions of African-Americans unemployed for life than protect our borders. Obama loves Mexicans more than American citizens. Obama’s change: JOBS FOR MEXICANS — UNEMPLOYMENT FOR AMERICANS!

This issue is as obvious as the nose on my face. The truth is powerful and sad. Blacks don’t have a very good reputation in the workplace, and illegals, no matter that they are criminal invaders, at least have the rep of being good, submissive, hard-working employees who show up on time and put in a full days’ work. I was outraged after Hurricane Katrina. NOLA is normally flooded with unemployed and underemployed Blacks. After the hurricane, just about every other Black in town was out of work, if not more. Yet the locals so hate to hire Blacks that the Bush Administration incredibly brought in 1000’s or maybe 10,000’s of fake “guest workers” on H-2B visas (the biggest scam around) from Mesoamerica to do the jobs the NOLA Blacks were perfectly capable of doing. They also unbelievably issued proclamations that gave anyone taking government grants freedom from worry about immigration violations of their workers. What the state said was, “Hire all the illegal aliens you want and we will look the other way.” It was stupefying. Illegal aliens from all over the US poured into NOLA to do the work that NOLA Blacks and even many NOLA Whites could easily have done. Sure NOLA Blacks have lots of problems, but surely lack of work must be high on the list of causes for the catastrophe of Black NOLA. Why should we lift one damned finger for these damned illegals? We can’t even help our own often-pitiful and suffering Blacks, who have been here since 1619, when the first Blacks came ashore with the first settlers in the Virginia colony. Soon after, Anthony Johnson, a freed indentured servant, led a Black community of 12 homesteads and 200 acres in Northampton County. You can’t get much more red-blooded American than that. Help Americans first. Help our Blacks first. Putting foreigners, especially illegal alien criminals who invaded our land, above our very own citizens is high treason to me. The Black political leadership has formed a marriage in Hell with the traitor Hispanic leadership, true dual loyalists who put their own people above America. Where the interests of their own people slam into the face of the interests of the US, Hispanic dual loyalists treasonously support their own and condemn their country to misery. I am flabbergasted that Obama says he is going to push for mass amnesty of 12 million+ illegals in the Fall, in the midst of the worst economy since the 1930’s. Outrage! In a meeting before Black political leaders, Black construction workers lined up one after the other to tell how their dry wall and carpenter careers had been ruined by illegal aliens. The Black Congressmen listening refused to be moved by their own people and all but told them to sit down and shut up. What’s sad is the only Blacks bitching about this are rightwing Blacks. The Black liberals and Left are silent or cheering full speed ahead for the illegal alien enemies of Black America.

Public Suicide Fad Hits Argentina

[wpvideo MC5yaPEo] Note: Repost from the old blog. I am looking for a translator to translate this post into Korean. Email me if you are interested. Warning! Graphic footage! Do not watch if you are easily upset! An 8.4 MB version of the video with better resolution can be downloaded on this site here. The public suicide fad has spread to Argentina. Above is the video of the live TV suicide of Mario “Malevo” Ferreyra, an Argentine former police official. He killed himself on live TV in Tucumán Province, Argentina. Malevo Ferreyra was Chief of the Brigade of Investigations of the State Tucumán in Argentina in the late 1970’s at the height of the Dirty War. In 1993, he was convicted for murdering three robbers in 1991. He escaped from the courthouse clutching a hand grenade in each hand (!) and later turned himself in after the former governor of the province reduced his sentence. He served seven years for the killings. He ruled Tucumán with an iron fist before, during and after the Dirty War. A warrant was issued by the National Guard yesterday for his arrest for kidnapping and torture during the Dirty War. The crimes were committed when he served at a secret weapons-depot-turned-detention center during the Dirty War. Just before the police were coming to arrest him, he committed suicide in front of his wife and kids on national TV. He had just finished an interview the TV station Cronica on top of a water tank at his rural home in Tucumán. His home was surrounded by police and he would be arrested shortly. He protested his innocence, then said, “Hasta siempre, Maria (I will love you forever, Maria),” pulled out a .45 caliber revolver from his boot and shot himself behind the ear. He died on his way to the hospital shortly afterward. After he shot himself in the head, his son embraced him and his daughter panicked. Families of the victims say that the suicide was part of a pact of silence that would ensure that Ferreyra would not have to testify against his former colleagues. Argentine politics is nasty, and sometimes deadly, business, with a lot of impunity, but that seems to be changing.

A typical image if “El Malevo” with his usual sombrero. Looks like a hard-living fellow. The name may come from a famous silent movie by the well-known Argentine director Here is another photo of El Malevo. I’m not sure what is going on here, or who the woman is. He looks like a pretty rough character. So do those guys around him. Argentine provincial politics is nasty, hardcore stuff. Sort of a cross between Sicily and Mexico. Lot of tough guys in power throwing their weight around, not much of a rule of law, political arrests and attacks, harassment of and attacks on journalists, corrupt and venal judges. The usual stuff.

Tucumán is a somewhat backwards, “provincial” province in the hinterlands of Argentina. It’s mostly agricultural back there, with a lot of sugar cane cultivation. The cops and politicians in this part of Argentina are some of the most brutal, venal, clannish and corrupt in the country. There are still Indians living in this part of Argentina, and people are much more Mestizo here than in the rest of the country. It isn’t gaucho country, and it’s not the Pampas. More like the foothills of the Andes. In the mid-70’s, this province was the scene of a little-known foco revolutionary movement led by the ERP (People’s Revolutionary Army). It failed, as all foco-inspired movements did. The ERP was then devastated by the Dirty War – they were history 1 1/2 years into the counterinsurgency. The ERP has long since abandoned armed struggle and now exists as a political movement. Budd Dwyer, anyone? Video of Budd Dwyer’s live TV suicide here (warning: graphic). Jesus Christ man, the blood runs out of his nose like a waterfall. I found the case of Christine Chubbuck, another public suicide, this time of a newscaster on live TV during her broadcast (!) to be particularly poignant. I don’t like to diagnose the dead, but it looks like she had traits of Avoidant Personality Disorder . It’s something like social phobia, but a lot more pervasive. What’s odd is that she had such an extroverted job and most avoidants are serious introverts. The symptoms are there: the lack of romantic relationships despite a tremendous desire for one and her beauty, good job, education and brains; the unrequited love for a colleague at work who would not reciprocate. And at the same time, whenever people at work made friendly gestures towards her, she would blow them off. This is the “get them before they get me” mentality. I will reject them before they reject me. It’s perverse, but like a lot of perverse stuff, has its own crazy logic. Good overview of APD. I don’t think I have ever known one. The primary symptom is extreme hypersensitivity to rejection. I’ve known people who have some of the hypersensitivity though. If you criticize them, they look like they are going to burst into tears. Then they often get really angry. These are grown “adults”, say 40 years old. I think they are babies, but maybe I should be kinder, since I’m not exactly normal myself. I had a therapist once and I asked him if I was an avoidant. One of my games is “Psychiatric Medical Patient Syndrome” – going through the DSM and worrying I have every illness in the book. He said, no, because he had criticized me and I took it well. He said he had had 7-8 avoidants, and as soon as you criticize them in therapy, they get up and walk out of the office and never come back. That’s about the size of it. Truth is, I really don’t care if people like me or not, as long as they hang around with me. I would be perfectly content to have beautiful women coming over here every day, screwing my brains out, pretending to like me, but actually hating my guts. As long as they pretend to like me, it’s all good. I don’t care what’s in someone’s deepest soul. I’m also not freaked out by rejection. After about the millionth time, you pretty much get used to it. I figure if I freaked out about every little rejecting encounter I get, I’d probably be continuously suicidally depressed. You have to make it through life somehow. No one has to like you anyway; it’s a free country. Plus I’ve rejected lots of people myself, so what comes around, goes around. Chubbuck also seemed to be awfully regressed into an almost childhood state when off work, despite being an uber-professional on the job. Strange case. I had never heard of Dwyer’s or Chubbuck’s case until the Internet. There are no available videos of the Chubbuck suicide, but there are five seconds of Chubbuck footage here on Youtube. There is also a Chubbuck segment on Network (1974) “I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”, the lead, a TV newscaster, threatens to commit suicide on live TV.

The Citibank Mafia

This article was written a year ago. How prophetic. And Citibank has been wallowing in the mud like this since 2001. The chickens are finally having a Homecoming party. As of today, Obama is seriously considering nationalizing this organized crime gang disguised as a corporation. Robert Rubin and Sandy Weill (photo) are more than anyone else responsible for destroying this bank and the collateral damage to the US and world economy. Anti-Semites may wish to note that they are both Jewish. As I noted earlier, I’m not into this Jewish Bankers Blew Up the World Economy thing, but the tribe is clearly not innocent, and they do have a role in the US banks, that, while not central, is less than trivial. We ought to distinguish here between investment banking and commercial banking. The Jewish role in US commercial banking is not prominent. However, they do play a significant role in US investment banking. With the insane destruction of Glass-Segall, investment banks and commercial banks can now be one and the same, the firewall having been torn down. I would like to ask you “Jewish bankers” critics just one thing. Sure, a lot of these Jewish bankers are a bunch of no-good crooked scumbags. But, honestly now, do you really think that Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, Joe Biden and Phil and Wendy Gramm are any better? The whole damn financial “industry” (a classic parasitical industry in the true sense of the word because they create no real wealth) is up to their necks in this mess. The Gentiles are just as wicked as the Jews; no way are they any better. Anti-Semites please prove to me that your average US top Gentile banker is a smidgen less black of a soul than the Jewish bankster criminals. One’s as bad as the other, admit it.

Contra: Capitalism Always Improves Our Lives

Let us examine for a moment the unexamined notion prevalent in the US that capitalism automatically improves our lives. We examined earlier how US capitalism seems to be predicating its growth on forced and unnecessary upgrades of technology. If you don’t want to upgrade to the latest TV, you won’t be able to watch TV at all. In a later post, we suggested that US capitalism, increasingly desperate to sell to increasingly savvy consumers, is resorting to the only way to fool an educated, savvy consumer – outright lying, fraud, trickery, scamming and frankly theft, exemplified by the subprime crisis. Hence, US capitalism is becoming increasingly parasitical on the consumers it relies on. The “coercion principle” so beloved by libertarians seems to be inoperative in US capitalism anymore. If I can’t watch TV without being forced to buy the latest and greatest, that’s coercion. A thieving, fraudulent con is always coercive, as coercive as a pickpocket. Libertarians talk a great game when they are pining away on their blogs, but I haven’t yet heard any libertarians, except maybe Left Libertarians, attack the parasitical, coercive and nearly thieving aspect of present day US capitalism. When it comes time to apply arid theory to meatspace, libertarians are no-shows, which implies to me that their moralistic theorizing is a bunch of hot air. Some capitalist inventions are definitely improvements. Take for example stain-free and shrink-free garments. This is actually a good product. Capitalists are manufacturing something that humans actually want to buy and use, not only that but a useful product that will improve our lives. But look at how capitalism deals with this improvements. Let’s get real. A whole lot of capitalists are going to get hurt by the new garments described above. The dry cleaners industry will go out. Not only that, but staining and shrinking is one of the annoying methods of planned obsolescence built into the garments we buy. It’s these destructive processes that force us into continual and usually unnecessary upgrades of our garments. If people are buying fewer garments because they last longer, that’s bad for the garment industry. So a lot of capitalists are going to hate these new developments. Fortunately for us, capitalists are greedy and lack solidarity, so there will always be renegade capitalists who would go ahead with shrink-free and stain-free clothing even though it’s going to be bad for a lot of other capitalists. But capitalism has a very creepy tendency at least here in the US. Huge corporations watch the patent offices like hawks. Whenever a new product is patented that could improve things for consumers and possibly compete negatively with their products, in particular something that might cut into the planned obsolescence of their products, and typically if the inventor is a small fry, the corporation will try to buy out the improved technology. Then they will shove into a drawer and try to bury it forever! This happens all the time in US capitalism, but we don’t talk about it all that much. There is a clause in US patent law that says you cannot sit on a highly useful patent and refuse to market it to the public. This is sometimes applied to small inventors. The courts have forced small inventors to make their highly useful patents available to the consuming public in cases where silly inventors chose instead to stick the patent in the drawer and forget about it. If the guy refuses to sell the patent, the court decides what it is worth and demands a sale of the patent for that price. Hardline freemarketeers decry this Commie-style intervention in the market, but I think it’s a great thing. Use it or lose it. I feel the same way about copyrights. You can’t just let your songs, movies and books go out of print. If you do and someone wants to republish them, the courts can and do force you to license out your artistic creation to someone who wants to publish it. The courts have fallen down on the law in terms of software though. There are all sorts of idiot software patents, and the whole concept is highly abusive. IBM has been one of the worst at this. You see those little windows that fly up in so many of your software programs? I believe that IBM has a license on that tech and anyone who makes a program with a window in it, has to pay off IBM. This is ridiculous. You can’t patent intellectual property – forget it. That’s like patenting intellectual ideas. Can I patent the intellectual notions that I come up with here on Robert Lindsay. Great idea! Let me patent all these ideas I come up with on this blog and sue everyone who tries to say anything even remotely similar for patent infringement. You can see right now how stupid patenting intellectual property is. There are also cases where corporations have written some really great programs that were offered for sale. Then they took the product off the market. Not only that, but they refuse to sell it. Sad thing is that there are computer users who really want to use those programs. Forget that. Sell it or give it away! If you won’t sell your product, then you need to give it away. If you won’t sell it or give it away and it’s useful, I figure we have a right to steal your product. I’m talking software programs here. The whole idea that you can write a killer app and shove it in your drawer forever is nuts. So what you have here in the US is that US capitalism buries great products all the time, and I think that when corporations do it, the courts don’t seem to do much. Does this benefit our lives? Of course not. It hampers our lives and deprives us of much-needed technology to improve our lives, while saddling us with inferior junk that wears out or breaks or doesn’t even work. Why? So the capitalist can continue to rake it by selling us crap. So let’s bury once and for all the all the notion that capitalist products automatically improve our lives. Suppose someone invents a car that runs for 500,000 miles, rarely breaks down and gets 100 miles to the gallon. My understanding is that prototypes are already available that get anywhere from 50-300 miles to the gallon. There is solar car technology with a solar roof that gets all its energy from the sun and goes up to 55 mph! Clearly, all these cars are really bad news for lots of capitalists, from car repair shops, to auto parts stores and plants, to gas stations and oil companies. There are all sorts of huge industries that want to kill these ideas before the even see the light of day. And it would be interesting to see why cars that get 50-300 mpg are not on the market. There have been issues with making these hypercars safe in crashes (they are often quite light) but one would think that at least a few prototypes could be made. Speaking of forced upgrades, you know that US capitalists must truly hate radio. I can go find a radio from the 1920’s and maybe with a few repairs here and there, it will pick up every local station around. The tech still works. Not only that, but horror of horrors, it’s actually free. It really isn’t free because it’s supported by advertisers and we “pay for it” by having to suffer through commercials,  but we definitely don’t have to pay $50/month to turn on the radio like we do with the damned TV. This sends capitalists up the wall. They hate free anything. If capitalists could figure out a way to charge us for breathing air, they would buy up oxygen and start charging us right away. They are already trying to buy up the water and charge us for choosing to inject H2O in order to stay alive. They haven’t figured out a way to charge us every time we pee or crap, but I’m sure that capitalists would love to charge me 2 cents a leak and a nickel a dump if they could get away with it. The fact that capitalists pine for a world where virtually nothing is free anymore shows that capitalists have a strong parasitical streak that is not related to producing quality useful products that improve our lives. In some ways, capitalists are just like blood-sucking vampires. Capitalists already tried the cable TV scam with radio. The scam was to set up an alternative radio called digital radio (radio is now analog), put all the good programs over on digital and leave analog with almost no programs and a crappy signal, and soon everyone who wanted to listen to anything decent on the radio would have to shell out $30/month to Vultureco or whoever. Digital radio, exemplified by Sirius Radio, has been a total failure. The industry has a mountain of debt has yet to make a nickel. In other ways, new capitalist tech takes old older tech that is still quite useful. Though I love the Internet, I must say that I am sad about newspapers and magazines being taken out. Net nerds say what the heck, let the newspapers and magazines all go on the web. There are problems with this. First of all, we need to know what is taking the print media out. It’s advertising. No way can a paper or magazine make it on subs alone. Even with a steep sub price, they need to fill it up with ads or run it at a loss. Rolling Stone is pretty nice, but probably a good 5 I think the reason that the Net ads are taking out the print ads is that print ad sellers actually sell their ad space (their product) for a fair price. Ads in newspapers and magazines are not exactly cheap. As someone who has delved into the world of Internet ads for a while (we used to carry them on Robert Lindsay), I must say that I have hardly met a tighter bunch of bastards. Compared to what you pay for print ads, advertisers or ripping off online publishers something awful. It’s a buyers market, and the sellers are being taken to the cleaners. Not only can online publishers barely survive, but the advertiser tightwads are cleaning out the print media too. Keep in mind that there are advantages to print tech and that if we lose newspapers and magazines, we lose a valuable consumer reading experience. Can I take my computer with me to the bathroom, the next room, across the street, or in my car to the next city? In general, no. I can thumb through Time Magazine quickly and get a feel for about every article and decide if it’s worth reading or not. Can I digitally thumb through the online Time edition? Forget it. It takes so long it’s not even worth it.

The Five Hearths of Urbanization

I never really knew much about this, but a friend of mine was taking a course in Human Geography (WTH?) and this was one of the things that they dealt with in the class. What this really means is that these five areas were the first parts of the world to experience urbanization. Urbanization is very important. You cannot even make cities until you develop surplus agriculture. Moving agriculture from subsistence to surplus usually involves a move to some sort of large farms, orchards or plantations. These large agricultural outposts can then produce enough to not only feed the rural population, but to provide food for the urban population. The urban population must be fed by the rural because as a good rule, people in cities just do not grow food, or, if they do, they do not grow enough to sustain the city. As long as the urban folks don’t need to worry about starving and don’t have to grow food, they can do other stuff besides growing food. This is the beginnings of civilization. The five Hearths are the Nile River Valley in Egypt, Mesopotamia in Iraq, the Indus River Valley in Pakistan, the Mayan in Central America and the Yellow River Valley in China. No one has any idea of what the IQ’s of the dwellers of these regions were at the time, but right now they are Guatemala 79, Egypt 82, Pakistan 82.5, Iraq 87 and China 105 (I don’t accept Richard Lynn’s phony 100 figure for China). All but China are in what is the lower half of the human IQ range. Since White nationalists are adamant that IQ has remained unchanged in all of these places, and everywhere else for that matter, in the past few thousand years, it behooves to ask how is it that these dummies showed up Homo Superiorus in Europe anyway? Of the five, Egypt was far and away the most advanced. The latest thinking is that the pyramids were not built by slaves, but instead were built by relatively well-paid, middle-class workers. Whole cities that housed these workers have been uncovered near the pyramids. Egyptian cities are the oldest of all. I am not sure of dates, but it looks like Egyptian cities go back 6,000 years or more (YBP = years before present). It’s odd that the earliest cities were the best of them all. The majestic pyramids were unsurpassed in the other Hearths. Although Mesopotamia had stone obelisks as tall as a man, Egypt had incredible obelisks of solid stone up to an unbelievable 100 feet tall. People to this day still wonder how the Egyptians did it, and no one quite knows. King Tut appointed what seems to be the first, or one of the first, queens of a large society, so this was a feminist breakthrough too, not that you would know it if you went to Islamic and misogynistic Egypt today. The next one along was Mesopotamia at 5,500 years ago. This is very, very early. They had art, aqueducts and organized religion, but no pyramids or major architectural accomplishments. There was a Great Wall of Babylon, a beautiful structure fashioned of blue bricks. They had obelisks and statues such as the Style of Hammurabi, but that was only as tall as a man. Compare to the 100 foot obelisks of the Egyptians – no contest. The Mesopotamians were already smelting metal – this was the Bronze Age. Smelting metal is a serious advance in civilization, and it’s amazing that anyone was smelting anything 4,900 years ago, when Mesopotamian smelting began. It appears that Mesopotamia was influenced by the earlier civilization of the Egyptians. The next is the great civilization of the Indus. This was in Pakistan, not in India as idiot Indian nationalists claim. Not quite as impressive as the first two, it did have very large cities with aqueducts for irrigation. However, they had no pyramids or other great architecture, no art and no writing. They had big cities and little else. The Indus Civilization vanished without a trace for unknown reasons. The Indus was very old, 4,200 YBP. The fourth Hearth was the Maya Civilization in Central America. This actually goes back a long ways, all the way to 3,100 YBP at least and possibly earlier. It was characterized by a writing system, mathematics, pyramids, art and advanced astronomy. The Mayan pyramids were excellent structures. I am not sure how they compare to the Egyptian pyramids, but it is fascinating that early peoples in two completely different parts of the world both decided to build pyramids (Why?). The Mayans also smelted metal and had a very early irrigation system. What is odd is that neither the Mayans nor the Aztecs who came much later never managed to invent the wheel or to put it to good use. The wheel is absolutely essential for advanced civilization, and discovering it is considered a profound breakthrough for any culture. What is even more strange is that the early Central Americans did invent the wheel, but they did not put it to good use. We have found children’s toys with wheels on them from these cultures. On the other hand, there were no pack animals to be domesticated in Central America, so it’s dubious what use you could put the wheel to, although I guess you could make a rickshaw, a bicycle or a wheelbarrow. The early Central Americans are derided, especially by White Nationalists, for being horribly, even evilly cruel, especially in their mad, seemingly insane addiction to human sacrifice. It’s true that the Central Americans did take human sacrifice to frightfully vicious extremes, at times making it nearly an assembly line operation. However, many early cultures engaged in human sacrifice, including Homo Superiorus over in Europe. Why, we ask? Well, these were pre-scientific folks. They did have their Gods, but as cruel and meaningless as fate often is, the Gods must have been crazy, to paraphrase a movie title. For instance, these nutty and semi-wicked Gods would kill the hottest babe in the village along with the handsomest, smartest guy to boot, for no darn reason at all, while leaving alive the village dirtbag, who barely even deserved to be kept alive one more minute. None of it made sense. Human life is a caprice, so cruel a caprice that it can almost seem like folly or the blackest of jokes. These Gods were clearly nuts, but they ruled our lives nevertheless. What to do? Appease the crazy bastards. This was the meaning of human sacrifice and the more humane later animal sacrifice, taken to insane lengths of folly by the Jews of the Temple Period, where an assembly line of animals stretched for up to a mile or so, and animals were killed all day in a 9-5 operation, such that blood flowed from the Temple like a river. This is the mad period that the most fanatical Zionists wish to recreate. Anyway, the way to appease a powerful, crazy person is to humor him, be nice to him or even bring him gifts. This was the idea behind the human sacrifices, to try to semi-rationalize the ferocious whimsy of the Gods. The fifth Hearth is the Yellow River Valley of China. Actually, yo can’t say that anymore, as the PC-idiots take offense. Guess why? Yellow River sounds like yellow skin. Chinese are said to have yellow skins, but that’s racist and you can’t say that. So forget the Yellow River. Instead, it’s the Huang He River, which I think means yellow in Chinese, but since mostly only Chinese know Chinese, there’s nothing to get offended about, since Chinese equating Chinese = yellow is not offensive, but if Caucasians do it, it’s mean and evil and racist. Whatever. Anyway, the Yellow River civilization was about 2,200 YBP. I don’t know much about it except that they did have large cities and irrigation. They also had writing. One might reasonably ask what these five Hearths had in common. We can say that they were near the Equator, but not too near. That seems crucial. They were all in the Northern Hemisphere, but I doubt if that is meaningful, except that there  seem to be more humans and more land mass in the north. And, with the exception of the Mayas, they were all in lush river valleys. The Mayas are odd man out in the jungle. The question of YBP comes up. I don’t mind the term. Originally we had B.C. (Before Christ), and as a Christian, that’s just fine for me. Well, some folks got rid of that a while back and replaced it with BCE, (Before Christian Era), which always struck me as a cheap anti-Christian shot. I figure Jews probably had a hand in this, since Jesus isn’t exactly their favorite guy, nor is Christianity exactly their favorite religion. The atheists and scientist types must have had a hand in it too. It surely so infuriated these poor atheist souls to have to say and write that horrible word “Christ” over and over. Non-Christians all over the world probably nodded in approval or chimed in. YBP seems a good compromise. Neither Christocentric nor a slap in the face of Christianity, it just avoids the whole issue of Jesus and religion altogether and goes by a nice secular calendar. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site.

The Recession and the Stimulus Bill

This is one nasty recession, the worst since the Great Depression. Truth is we are probably heading into a real Depression, not simply a recession. A Depression is when unemployment rises above 1 One thing we can do is what Hillary suggested earlier, an interest rate freeze. Why should we allow these criminal, fraudulent interest rate balloon payments to go on? It’s loan sharking. Loan sharking is illegal, or it ought to be. In the comments section, James Schipper suggests nationalizing the banks. This is an excellent idea, and even Alan Greenspan and prominent Republicans are advocating nationalizing some banks. Either that or do what FDR did, and declare a bank holiday with going to back to work only on certain conditions. It wasn’t really a holiday; FDR just shut down all the banks. Then he said if you want to re-open, you need to agree to the following regulations. As it is, we are shoveling something like $10 trillion at these banks (according to Katherine Austin Phipps and Greg Palast) and we are getting almost nothing in return. According to Palast, one bank was given $25 million of our money and almost immediately blew $15 billion of it on speculation. Would you give a gambling addict your life savings with no guarantees on how it would be spent? That’s what we are doing here. The stimulus bill is good, but it’s not nearly enough – it will only tide us over until October or November when things will really hit the fan. Commenter Iceman notes that tax cuts are no good in a deep recession, since people will probably sock the money away as savings instead of spending it. That’s probably a good analysis. On the other hand, taxes on the rich can surely be raised. The top end of the tax burden could be lifted from 3 Commenter David Kelsey notes that Republicans cut most of the mass transit money out of the bill, so some lines will probably just have to shut down. Great thing to do in the middle of a recession – shut down mass transit lines. I do know that something must be done soon. A friend of mine in Italy says his business is off by 7

Moronicans, Continued.

The evidence, no fossil record needed. I was hoping we were sort of evolving some more sense about this stuff, but I guess not. Particularly horrifying figures: Only 3 Unsurprising findings: The more you go to church, the dumber you are (the less likely you are to believe in evolution). Regular church-going seems to prolong life at the same time as it shrinks the brain. And the more education you have, the less stupid you are (the more likely you are to believe in evolution). It’s too bad that fundamentalist Protestantism in the US has drawn a line in the sand at evolutionary theory. The Catholic Church, more flexible than one might think, has said that belief in evolution is compatible with Catholic doctrine. This shows that Christianity and evolutionary theory are compatible. I don’t believe Jesus uttered a word on the subject of evolution, did he? Case closed. Hat tip to the Inductivist, an interesting, albeit rightwing blog.

A Look At Beavers

The other day, coming back from Fresno on Highway 41, about .6 mile south of the Bates Station Road turnout just below the 1000 foot elevation sign (photo of the terrain, it’s not exactly the place you would expect to find beavers. I’ve never seen a beaver up close before, and the size of it shocked me. These things are huge, and they are very fat. And the paddle is very large. I looked down and saw a small stream flowing under the highway (see the stream on the not even a wolverine, can get into them, and a wolverine can get into about anything less secure than a locked bank vault. And I’m not sure if this is urban legend, but water engineers supposedly marvel at beaver dams. They look at them and say, “I can’t believe they did that.” The beaver is an expert at his dam-building. Experiments have been done by poking tiny holes in the dams, holes that would be hard to find or even discover that they existed. By nightfall, the beavers quickly discover the hole and patch it up. Beavers are actually very beneficial, and ecosystems in North America and Europe probably evolved with them. It’s thought that much of the rich bottomland in the US was created in part by beavers over thousands of years. Beaver dams remove pollutants, clean the water, are good for flood control, and regulate the water cycle. Here in California, that’s important. So streams and rivers here with beaver dams on them have lessened high flows in the rainy seasons (fewer floods) and increased flows in the dry season (more likely to flow all year instead of being seasonal as so many streams are here). After a few years, beavers abandon their dams as they cut down most of the small trees in the area. After they leave, the dam breaks down and the area turns into a wetland. Then it turns into a meadow as grasses and forbs move in. Next it becomes a riverine riparian forest, by which time, the beavers are back and the cycle begins again. The result is a creation of a serious of rich bottomlands created by all of the decayed wood at the bottom of the beaver pond. Beavers in the US and Canada were decimated by the fur trade for beaver pelts. I guess they are pretty easy to trap. The beaver pelts had many uses, but many were made into beaverskin hats. In Europe, beavers were also trapped out, mostly for the camphor or camphorum, a medicine that comes from the beaver. This medicine comes from beaver testicles. The beaver is killed and the beaver balls are chopped off. Then the beaver nuts are dried and ground up into castoreum which is apparently consumed as a medicine. It ‘s used as an analgesic. The castoreum comes from the salicin in the beaver’s diet, which comes from the willow trees that it eats. Salicylic acid from willows is the source of aspirin. There are two species of beaver, the Canada Beaver in the US and Canada and the European Beaver in Europe. The paddle is used to slap the surface of the water to warn the other beavers of danger in the form of humans or predators. The beaver is not much active by day,  and it stays in the water if it is active. At night, it can leave water and wander. At this time it quite vulnerable to predators as it is slow-moving on land. Nevertheless, it is seldom taken by predators, and the beaver’s worst enemy is man. Beavers are now plentiful all over the US and Canada again after being nearly trapped to extinction in the 19th Century. They were transplanted to Tierra del Fuego, where they lacked predators and went invasive, devastating the landscape. The trees on the island do not coppice, so they can’t withstand the beavers’ depredations. Tierra del Fuego is now trying to get rid of its beavers. In Europe, wild beaver populations still exist in Northern Germany and in parts of Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. They survived only in Norway, but from there they were reintroduced to Sweden and Finland. The Danish population was reintroduced 10 years ago, 1000 years after their extinction. It is now being transplanted to various other places in Europe, including England (see here and here), 500 years after their extinction. There are plans to reintroduce beavers to Scotland this year, 400 years after going extinct. As an aside, traditionally Catholics were not supposed to eat the meat of land animals on Friday, so Catholics often ate fish instead. There was a big debate in the Catholic Church about beavers. This was resolved by the Church concluding that beavers were fish for the purposes of dietary law. Catholics are idiots, but they are not that stupid. They know full well that a beaver is not a fish. But for dietary law, a beaver was considered a “fish” because any land animal that spends most of its time in water was regarded as a fish. Hence, Catholics could eat beaver on Fridays. I can see the dirty jokes now, commenters. Beaver, like skunk actually tastes pretty good if you clean it very carefully to keep the skunk-like musk gland from contaminating the meat. While skunk tastes like (Guess what?) chicken, beaver tastes like lean beef, but I’ve yet to take the plunge. However, with Vatican II, I believe that Catholics no longer have to abstain from meat on Fridays? Good overview of the beaver in California, but the map is wrong (the beaver ranges further than indicated).

The Digital TV Scam

Soon we all have to upgrade to digital TV here in the US. This is one of the most evil scams ever perpetrated on the ever-suffering American consumer. There’s a real problem here in the US. Too many losers like me refuse to fork over $50 a month for TV that I hardly ever even watch. A while back, TV was free. It still should be free. TV was free for the same reason radio was and is free. It was supported by ads. Then something evil happened. The cable companies, some of the most diabolical capitalist monstrosities of our age, were born. TV was going to go cable. At the beginning, it was about $30/month and you got Showtime, HBO and all sorts of other goodies. After a while, I got tired of paying $30/month to some capitalist cable TV scum, so I turned into a “criminal”. My friends dug up the cable TV box and jerry-rigged it somehow (don’t ask me how) so I got the cable for free. I got free cable for years that way. I don’t consider it a crime because it ought to be legal for ordinary citizens to steal from criminals (cable companies). One day the cable TV repairmen came out and at some point they dug up that box. The worker looked at me and gave me a funny look like, “Boy, you sure are smart,” and then put the box back in. I kept on getting cable for free. Sometime in the 1990’s, the price went up. Now, if you want even the most very basic, sucky cable, you have to pay like $50/month. That’s got to be one of the biggest ripoffs around. I bought some rabbit ears instead and demanded some free TV, as one of my rights as a US citizen. Most stations come in poorly, but I don’t really care, as I hardly watch to idiot box anyway (I might watch more with clear signal). What particularly infuriating is that those are the public airwaves. We own them. I own them. Those are my airwaves, dammit! The government took my damned airwaves, auctioned them off for pennies on the dollar to the lowest capitalist garbage on Earth (the cable companies) and didn’t give me one nickel of the proceeds. My property was given away to criminals who then turned around and charged me out the wazoo to access my very own property again. It’s like a criminal steals your car and then forces you to lease it in order to drive it to work and back, and if you complain, the cops take you to jail. People need to know that the cable companies are all monopolies, legal monopolies. There is nothing worse than a legal, unregulated monopoly. The local phone companies and electric companies are also legal monopolies, but they are regulated, so in general, they behave halfway decently. If they were not regulated, they would quickly degenerate into rats too. It’s amazing that the Chicago School defends monopolies are economically rational. They are surely not rational for the consumer. It must be an economic maxim by now that as monopolization increases, the consumer is increasingly shafted. The only way out of that argument is through lying, which I assume must be the Friedmanite position on monopolies. Anyway, here it is in the year 2000’s, and it’s $50/month for the most basic, sucky array of cable channels. Keep in mind that when the government first auctioned off the cable spectrum, there were a lot of worries about screwing the consumer. The cable companies were adamant that they were going to charge bigtime for the service. Well, in return, consumer advocates asked, I assume we get few to no ads, right? If consumers are paying for cable, there’s not much reason anymore for ads, and if cable is full of ads, it may as well be free or nearly free like the only ad-supported TV. The cable company scum assured us that there would be few to no ads on cable. This was touted as one of the awesome benefits of the New Cable World. Hurrahs went up across the land. Here it is 2009. Turn on most cable channels, and you will quickly be hit by a nearly-fatal mudslide of ads. There’s at least as many ads on cable as there are on my free rabbit ears TV. Somebody’s making a Godddamn killing. Now comes the forced upgrade to digital TV. For the life of me, I cannot understand why we need to do this. The only thing that I can think of is that American capitalism has become so sick and evil that one of the only ways it can figure out how to continuously grow is through endless forced and unnecessary upgrades. Everything that worked just fine 30 or 40 years ago, or, Hell, 10 years ago, has to go, no matter how useful it was or still is. We have to force everyone to get rid of their working-fine “outdated” stuff and replace it with new technology that is frankly unnecessary. Hence, after we spent a fortune on LP’s and the finest turntables, we were told they were out and we needed to move on to CD’s. Our vast 8-track collections and 8-track players were useless, and we had to upgrade them to cassettes and fancy cassette players. Then our mountains of cassettes and top of the line cassette players became useless, and we needed to move on up to CD’s. I still haven’t bought a CD player. After the 8-track player, the turntable and the cassette player I threw up my hands, sold all my media and players to my friends and my brother and switched to FM radio. My videotapes are useless and so is my VCR. I did upgrade to a DVD player (bought from some Norteno gang members, probably stolen, for $45), but I don’t have any DVD’s to play on it. So now we all need to move on up to digital TV. Why? Too many idiots like me are still on rabbit ears. So the forced upgrade is coming. But lots of jerks like me are going to refuse to fork the $300 for the digital TV. Not that the digital TV itself would be good enough anyway. Ever noticed that so many of the movies now are coming out in HD-only format? Try to play that DVD on a non-HD digital TV and you have a funny picture with big black spaces at the top and bottom of the screen. Those big black spaces are US capitalism’s way of screaming at you, “You loser! Why can’t you afford $800 for an HD-TV?!” That must be painful. Well, the government will sell you a box for about nothing that enables you to get a digital signal on an analog TV. But here’s the catch! It won’t work very well. Wink wink. The analog signal would work way better. If for some reason, the signal is weak, on an old analog box it just comes in fuzzy. But it’s watchable. Remember all the fuzzy signals you watched as a kid? Well, with the analog box and digital signal, it won’t work that way. It will either gome in great or it won’t come in at all. If it doesn’t come in all the way, you get a blank screen and a message that says, “Poor signal.” Or you will get pixellated blocks of nothing on the screen, blowing out whatever was there, and leaving some signal intact. But that  signal will be frozen, so the people on the TV show will be frozen in whatever position they were in when the signal went fuzzy. And when the signal goes a little bit bad, you might still get a decent video, but the audio is going to go clean out. No sound. Frozen screen with no audio. Hell, that’s not watchable at all, not on any drug. That’s not even watchable on PCP. One of the advantages of the new digital BS is that there is going to be something like 1,600 channels. I can see it now. 1,600 channels and nothing good on any of them. Anyway, I own all those 1,600 channels, you, me and the rest of the schmucks (I mean ordinary citizens) in the US. Well, once again, the government kindly took my property and sold it to the highest bidder. Turns out that the cable companies, and only like 2 or 3 or them at that – I think Comcast, Verizon and ATT – bought almost all of those 1,600 channels. So don’t expect to be picking them up on your rabbit ears anytime soon. So if you want to watch anything decent on any of those new 1,600 channels, you need to shell out for cable at $50/month for the minimum crap, and lots more for anything more. Not only that, but if you stick with the rabbit ears TV, you will have a terminally screwed reception. Solution? Fork over $300 for a digital TV. Once you buy the digital TV, you will be endlessly frustrated trying to watch the HD-only DVD’s you keep renting. Solution? Buy the $800 HD TV. See how American capitalism grows the economy? One more evil via the cable companies. The cable companies now have a very interesting power. Monopoly consumer power, or monopoly distributor power. This is a very interesting power. In general, consumers simply do not have monopoly power. If I walk into a store and see an item priced at $50 and say, “Screw that! $50? I’ll give you $20, take it or leave it!” The store help will just wave and say goodbye. There will always be some guy after me who says, “$50? No problem! Give me three!” As long as that next guy exists, I have no monopoly power as a consumer. Monopoly power of consumers only exists in rare situations where there are a limited number of consumers, buyers or distributors for products. Hence the buyer is in the unusual position of dictating sales terms to the seller. The seller can’t really go elsewhere to find new consumers or buyers because there aren’t any. This is the position the cable scum are in. The cable scum buys its product from the producers of video content. So far, thank God, the producers and distributors are separate. God help us when they merge! So, the cable scum have been paying say Disney Channel, say $5/per time unit X for Disney Channel content. Well, just recently, all of the cable companies got together (Legal? Dubious.) and dictated terms to the content producers. Instead of paying Disney Channel $5/per time unit X, they would pay Disney Channel $2/per time unit X. They content producers could not say, “Fine, bye,” because there are only a tiny number of consumers or buyers for their product. A large number of buyers (free competition among buyers) is essential so that capitalists can get a fair price for their products and not be collectively driven out of business. This area of economics, buyer monopolies, seems little explored. Monopolies are just crap all around. Buyer monopolies, seller monopolies, distributor monopolies, they’re not good for anyone but the monopoly.

How To Drive In Rain, Snow and Sleet

I visit and used to live in a part of California that gets lots of all three. For the past several days up here, it has been raining (mostly), sleeting (a lot less) and snowing (just some). Go up the hill a bit, and it starts sleeting and then snowing a lot more. I have front wheel drive (really necessary for driving in that crap) but I hate putting on chains. Here, we don’t salt the roads and no one has snow tires. People put on snow chains or snow cables instead. I think that’s a royal PITA, so generally I refuse to do it. I’ll just stay home and wait until the snow melts. At this elevation, the snow never lasts long anyway. I had to drive a bit in the snow on Friday in order to get home. They had a sign saying “Chains Required” at around 1,900 feet, but there were no cops around, so I kept going. The snow was very wet and slushy, you could pretty much drive in it, and there were road tracks cleared in the snow by car tires. I drove very slowly though, and I was pretty scared. Later, driving into the housing development, you were driving on pure snow, and that was more of a mess. One thing I noticed was that 15 mph was about the proper speed for driving in pure snow with no chains. When I slowed down to 10 mph, I started to bog down in the snow. Heading up more towards 15 mph was better because then I could sort of smash through the stuff. So it looks like it is possible to drive too slow in the snow. A similar theory must hold for driving in mud, which I do as little of as possible, as it is very easy to get stuck in mud. Drive too slow, and you may just get mud-stuck. You may need to speed up a bit in the mud to smash right through it. I’ve already run my car off the road three times in the snow in Oakhurst over 15 years. You get hit with a sudden snowstorm out of the blue and you are just stuck in the mess. Or it starts snowing and you think you can make it to where you want to go but you can’t. Both times caused me some monetary damage to my vehicle. I meet folks down in the Central Valley who say, “Wow, you were up in the snow! That must be so cool!” The Hell it’s cool. I lived in the snow for 16 years. I’ve had enough of the snow for a lifetime. Snow means I can’t drive my car. Snow means I have to be careful walking around or I might slip and fall on my ass. And around here, snow usually means the power goes out, over and over. Snow has caused me $100’s in car repairs. Who needs the snow? What’s so good about it? Around here, sleet is nothing. You just drive slower than in the rain but not as slow as in the snow. I haven’t crashed yet in sleet. It’s scary, but it’s drivable. I also drove in some hail the other day. That was pretty weird. After it hails for a while, the road and scenery starts looking white like it just snowed. I slid on a hail-slicked road once, but I didn’t crash. I’ve never crashed in hail either. Hail means really slow down. On Monday, I was driving about 35-40 mph in that messy hail, and the speed limit was 55 mph. Still I got idiot after idiot piling up behind me. What about ice? Ice is truly horrible. I crashed once on ice, in January 1976 in Snoqualmie Pass in the state of Washington. You couldn’t even see it, and there wasn’t any snow along the road. I guess the road looked sort of shiny, but it wasn’t obvious. The car just turned into an amusement park ride, and next thing I knew, my buddy and I were in a ditch. We were really stoned on Thai weed, so we thought it was hilarious. Truthfully, it wasn’t all that funny. On the other side of the road, there wasn’t any ditch. There was a mountain slope. We would have headed down that thing and probably run into a tree. Ever run into a tree in a car? You don’t want to do that. No matter how fast you’re going, you’re going zero miles an hour after you hit that tree. No fun. Rain is interesting. A friend of mine said the other day, “It’s really not possible to drive too slow in the (hard) rain.” That was one of the smartest things I’ve heard in a while! How can you drive too slow in the rain? You can’t. If it’s raining, slow down, idiots! Here in California, no one knows how to drive in the rain. Californians always speed in the rain. If you drive slow and sensibly in the hard rain (that means driving about 35-40 mph), you get endless trains of clowns piling up behind you, and you have to keep pulling over to let them pass. I’ve never crashed a car in the rain, and I’ve been driving in the rain my whole life. How do you crash a car in the rain? By being an idiot. Almost everyone who crashes in the rain is driving too fast. That’s all there is to it. What if there is a puddle or a pool in the road? Shouldn’t you speed up to go through the water so you won’t get stuck in it? If it’s not that deep, probably not. Why not? Because if you drive fast through puddles, the water can splash all over your windshield,  blinding you. Much worse, it can splash all over your engine and get in your distributor cap, stalling your car. And if it’s not that deep, you won’t get stuck anyway. What if the pool is really deep? Hey, if it’s that deep, you probably shouldn’t even try to drive through it!

The Failure of White Nationalist Theory: The Case of California

White Nationalists (WNs’) like to throw around figures showing that nationwide, few Whites breed outside their race. But those figures are only for one generation. In addition, WN’s counter with various theories like Philippe Rushton’s Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Hispanics, Psychology, Race/Ethnicity, Racism, Regional, Sociology, USA, White Nationalism, Whites2 Comments on The Failure of White Nationalist Theory: The Case of California

Letter From Mexifornia

Well, the local wannabe Nortenos* just pulled a gun on the local wannabe Surenos* about 30 yards outside my front door, and someone called the cops. Now the complex is swarming with cops. I wish they would haul some of these idiots away. They’re all about 17-21 years old. When a town in California turns from White to non-White, things sure get a lot more exciting. Diversity is our strength! *They are wannabes because none of them have actually “earned their stripes.” There are a couple of levels of gangs here, the wannabe kids and the real hardcores, who are often older.

Interesting Piece on the Shining Path

Here from Al Jazeera. Includes a neat 11 minute minute. Here is Part 2 of the video. It’s basically a bunch of propaganda crap, exactly what you would suggest. I have some serious issues with Sendero Luminoso, to put it mildly (I always supported a group called the MRTA instead), but this time around, they claim to be doing it right. As usual, Sendero is portrayed as some kind of narco-traffickers. Barring the arrival of some sort of Chavez-type on the Peruvian scene, I can’t see why the vast majority of Peruvians have even one reason to support the Peruvian state. It’s a horribly racist society, with a completely evil socio-economic system. There’s only one way to get rid of it, I figure, and that’s through revolution. I don’t think the democratic road to power is going to work. The Peruvian economy has been growing like gangbusters for 10-15 years now, but it has hardly touched poverty one bit. The population in extreme poverty is still around 5 Easily preventable deaths by children from obvious malnutrition are easily around 120,000/yr, minimum. That’s why I yawn when they say that Sendero’s war killed 70,000 people. Hell, the system kills more than in half a year, year in and year out. Why focus on Sendero? Who’s the real killer? The Peruvian state! Sendero killed around 35,000 of those 70,000,  and supposedly the overwhelming majority were “civilians.” The “civilians” lie there is shown in the fact that almost all of those people were members of the rondas, press-ganged local militia that the state had directed to take up arms against Sendero. Sendero says it realizes how it screwed up, and this time they are going to do it right and not kill the people (they did kill the people a lot last time around). The US military is there, flying into poor villages and doing civic work, but that’s all counterinsurgency. The problems with the US military’s counterinsurgency civic ops is that they do some civic work here and there, but they never advocate the kind of deep structural changes that society really needs. It’s like a guy is starving, you have loaves of bread to give him but instead you tear off a few pieces and throw them to him so he will shut up and put away the gun for a while. As soon as he puts the gun down, you won’t even give him crumbs and he gets to die. That’s what civic ops is all about. Once the guys with the guns put them down, the counterinsurgency civic ops guys pack up and move on the next rathole threatened with armed socialism. The whole enterprise is just fake to the core. If the civic ops people were pressing the state to make deep structural changes to ward off revolution, that would be one thing. That might even make the guys with the guns put them down. But of course they never do it. That would be bad for business. If Sendero proposed to fight an NPA-style war and advocated a project similar to the Chinese state or the Nepalese Maoists,  I could go along with it. But they were always so radical and extreme!

A Look at California Street Gang Structure

According to the FBI, there are 1 million gang members in the US, an increase of 200,000, or 2 That 1 million figure must be far too low. Who is and who is not a gang member is very hard to determine. For instance, in this area, there are three levels of the gang. There are the real hardcore Nortenos – level 1. Those are older guys and they are actually allowed to have Norteno tattoos on them. They have all been jumped in, probably in prison. Then there are younger guys who have “wannabe” gangs, around here wannabe Norteno gangs – level 2. The one around here is called something like 601 Kings. They claim territory, spray a little graffiti and sometimes fight with the other young wannabe gangs. But I told my neighbors about this gang and they started laughing and said, “That’s so stupid!” They said that’s not “the real Nortenos” and if these kids went to jail or prison and tried to claim Norteno, they would get beat up just like that. Plus no way are they allowed to be caught dead in jail or prison with an unauthorized tattoo. I’m dubious if you even have to be jumped in to be a member of a level 2 gang. These level 2 gangs are best thought of as just the local neighborhood kids from wherever forming a set, calling themselves the whatevers, and then trying to “make a name for themselves” so to speak. But the real hardcore Nortenos will just ignore them, laugh at them and have nothing to do with them. Level 2 is like the upstarts. No way are they the real deal. I know a lot these characters around here, and some of these young guys are actually sort of ok in a gangsterish way, but others are no good. Mainly, no way can you openly insult their gang or support the opposing gang. Some of them, if you respect them, they respect you, pretty much. Even below level 2 is level 3, which probably represents most of the characters around here. They wear Norteno colors and gangster attire, sometimes spray graffiti, and sometimes they fight with opposing gangs, but they aren’t really even level 2 gang members as far as I can tell. I guess they are what you call associates. Truth is that just about all the young Hispanics around here “claim” or “represent” Norteno. That doesn’t mean they are in any gang. This is a Norteno hood, so everyone here pretty much claims Norteno by default. That is, they sort of root for them at least or if not, at least don’t support the Sureno enemies. It’s sort of like rooting for the Dodgers if you lived in Brooklyn. They support the home team. Heck, I practically claim Norteno on that basis! The level 3 group represents a vast number of people, and if you include them, the figure must be dramatically higher than 1 million. Furthermore, I believe that most of the graffiti crews around here are at most these level 3 kids. As far as what crime they are involved in, level 2 gangs sell dope sometimes, possibly deal in stolen property, spray graffiti, and sometimes fight with rival gangs. That’s about it from what I can tell. You can actually live in a place like this, as long as you don’t get involved in the gang crap yourself and avoid making friends with these characters. Just choose your friends very carefully. For the most part, they don’t bother people who are outside the gang thing. These levels of distinction are not represented very well outside of gang insider clique circles, certainly not in the media.

Does Israel Deliberately Target Civilians?

In the comments section, Dano points out some of the Israeli crimes in the Gaza attack, including targeting the UN building and the use of white phosphorus. I am convinced that Israel was directly targeting civilians in this Gaza incursion and that they do so regularly. The UN seems to agree with me. Why? The reason is to make the civilian population pay for supporting Hamas, the PLO, Hezbollah or whoever. Are they trying to kill every civilian in sight? No way. If they were even halfway trying that, there would be 13,000 dead in Gaza in 2 weeks and not 1,300. So it’s complicated. They shoot at civilians, ambulances, journalists, hospitals, UN buildings, etc. sometimes, but not all the time. The message for targeting the places where the refugees were huddled is that “no place is safe.” This is what will happen if you support Hamas, Hezbollah or whoever. This is what happens if you let Hamas, Hezbollah or whoever shoot rockets at us or attack our troops. The message, as Marty Peretz says in The New Republic, is “don’t fuck with the Jews.” Peretz’ comment set off a lot of criticism, even amongst progressive Jews. If you let these armed groups attack Israel, we are going to invade you. Don’t think you are get away by being a civilian and hiding in the UN building and letting the armed guys take the heat. Forget that. There will be no mercy for civilians. As a civilian, you will be attacked, in any place you hide, no matter how safe or secure. So keep these damned armed groups on a reign or this will be your punishment. It sort of works, as you can see – Hezbollah has engaged in few, if any, attacks on Israel since the Lebanon invasion. For a long time, I did not believe that Israel was deliberately targeting civilians. Their whole thing is we are White and Western and most civilized army on Earth, so we don’t do that shit. But if you dig around, you find that they definitely do, but it’s in pretty judicial amounts. Do a lot of digging into the attack on the Qana Base in Lebanon in 1996 and it’s obvious that Israel deliberately hit it. There were no Palestinian fighters shooting from the UN school, the UN relief agency, the Islamic University, or lots of other places. In the case of the UN school where 40 civilians were killed, there were fighters, but they were a couple of streets away, not firing from the building. So, did Israel target the UN school? I’m not sure, but I am starting to think that maybe they did. There was no firing whatsoever from the UN relief agency either. It’s well known that Israel and its supporters despise the UN as anti-Semitic. This is a tragic statement. The UN is nothing more than all of the nations on Earth. If these Jews really think that almost all the nations on Earth hate them, then that’s sad and it’s getting into psychopathology, notably paranoia. Is it true? Does nearly every nation on Earth hate Jews? That’s an incredibly dubious proposition. But keep in mind that the Israelis lie like maniacs, too. First we never used White Phosphorus, now we did use it, but only to light things up. I doubt it. They used it to terrorize the civilian population into knocking off the rockets. Amnesty International has accused Israel of a war crime in using white phosphorus in a heavily built-up area such as Gaza. Amnesty International is a pretty subdued organization, so if they accuse you of war crimes, that’s pretty hard-hitting stuff. As far as DIME and depleted uranium, Palestinian physicians are saying that they are finding it in victims. I think it’s quite possible that Israel is using DU in Gaza. After all, their munitions come from the US, and many US munitions now include DU, because it is one kickass weapon. We have a lot of reports that civilians were shot as they were waving white flags and fleeing, that IDF troops stood there and shot civilians over and over as they stood near them. The response of Israel is always, “These Arabs are lying.” But I’m quite sure that these stories are true. Once that argument is demolished, the Israelis always say that “they missed.” In general, that doesn’t seem to be the case either. It’s classic counterinsurgency doctrine that you always arrest, beat, torture, shoot and kill the civilian supporters of any insurgency. Just about every counterinsurgency in the last 100 years has been fought this way. It’s never enough to get just the armed guys. You go after their civilian support base too. It’s called “draining the sea to kill the fish,” and it’s taught at US military schools, for sure at the School of the Americas. What does a state have the right to do in a counterinsurgency? They can pass laws that outlaw supporting the guerrillas. You can arrest people, take them to court and try to prove that they are supporting the armed group in some way or another. But that never seems to be enough. States almost always end up committing mass murder of civilians in any counterinsurgency. An exception is Spain’s war against the ETA, but that was not a very hot war anyway. What can a state do with fighters? Well, try to arrest them, if you catch them in civilian clothes and you think they are a guerrilla. Take them to court, charge them with terrorism, rebellion or whatever, and try to convict them. Typically, states just kill anyone suspected of being a guerrilla. Or they arrest them, take them into custody, and kill them. Typically, they utilize “non-state actors” like death squads to do this sort of nasty business. Death squads are typically state security forces in civilian clothes. Problem is it’s often hard to prove in court that someone was a guerrilla. So the rule of law usually gets suspended in a counterinsurgency, and lots of folks just get socked away on “no charges” for God knows how long, or “disappeared.” Sometimes the disappeared turn up alive, but mostly they are killed. When states do go the legal route and try to convict guerrillas in court, it’s not helpful that insurgents often threaten judges and witnesses in the cases. Peru is a recent example of a state that somewhat went the legal route (at the same time they were committing mass murder against civilians) in its war against the Shining Path. The legal route was not working, so Fujimori came in, created a dictatorship, abolished the rule of law, and crushed the insurgency. He arrested an incredible 1 If you strike enough terror into the civilian population, they won’t support the insurgency anymore. Tragically, this does work. Terror works. Nevertheless, it’s terrorism. You can make just as good of an argument for Al Qaeda’s attacking British, Spanish, Australian and US civilians in the London bus bombings, the Spanish train bombings, the Bali bombings and 9-11. Al Qaeda, as bin Laden has made clear, is attacking the civilian support base of the enemy forces. This is just as moral or immoral as any counterinsurgency on Earth attacking and killing the civilian support base any non-state armed group. Supporters of counterinsurgency, prove me wrong here! Show me you’re not just as bad as any terrorists out there? I will point out that Hezbollah, Hamas and the rest are obviously committing war crimes too. They’re deliberately targeting Israeli civilians, right? I would also note that hardly any armies fight fair in war anymore. Show me an army that is fighting a war or fought a recent war which fought fair and did not commit war crimes? We include counteringencies here. Pretty hard to find, huh?

Why White Separatism Will Never Fly In Brazil

In the comments to the Statement On Radical Nationalism post, Mark (not a White nationalist) asks if I would support a movement by Whites in Brazil or South Africa to split away from the nation and for their own state. I said, extracted later to a post, that I would not necessarily oppose such a move, and that it could even be considered in the national liberationist stream of nationalism as opposed to the national consolidationist (fascist) stream. Goyta, a brilliant new Leftist commenter from Brazil, has chimed in. Although Brazil is regarded with shivers of terror by US White nationalists (The future is Brazil!) it turns out that down in Brazil itself, the White nationalist project could not be any less interesting. Brazilians, “White”, or whatever they may be, simply cannot be bothered. It turns out that in South Africa too, Orania, a White separatist community, has not been very successful. So far only 1,500 folks have signed up. Goyta’s comments on why White separatism will never fly in Brazil are illuminating and fascinating and more or less what I always thought. I guess there is a lesson in here somewhere for WN’s but I am not sure what it is. Maybe it is that once your country starts looking like Brazil, your WN project is history. It does seem that the most ferocious White nationalists are in mostly White countries and nations. The more non-Whites, the less appeal to WN. Which runs contrary to WN theory, which is that increased exposure to non-Whites will make Whites flock to their project. Turns out it just makes them want to act like wiggers, listen to rap music, smoke blunts, date, screw and marry non-White women. I plead guilty to all of these charges, (except the marriage part, thank God!), even in middle age. This begs an interesting question. Why is it that the more homogeneous folks are, the more racist and “separatist” they are? And the more diverse a community gets, the more racism and desire for separatism declines and the more folks, make friends outside their group, have sex with and marry outside their group? I don’t know the answer, but I suspect we are more human than we think we are. It’s easy to hate “niggers” when there are hardly any around to fight back. Once we encounter those outside our group, often our horror stories about them are found to be exaggerated, and we start to befriend, have sex with, and marry them. As we miscegenate more, racism becomes less and less palatable. I will let Goyta take it from here: Being Brazilian I think the idea of a White supremacist (or worse, secessionist) movement here is so laughable it’s hard to even decide where to begin explaining. Not that there haven’t been people who tried to launch the idea – in a country with 190 million people, there is certainly room for all kinds of weirdos you can think of and then more. But they were not even met with scorn – they were deemed so insignificant that nobody listened. South Africa and the U.S. are countries with historic racial segregation. Brazil is exactly the opposite: a country where interracial miscegenation and social intermingling is the norm, not the exception. It all started because instead of real “colonists” or “pioneers” looking for a new land to call their own, the Portuguese who colonized us were really adventurers. They were overwhelmingly males who left their wives and kids back in Lisbon and came to Brazil intending to stay a few years, make a fortune, then go back to spend it at home in Europe. Many never returned in the end, but whether they did or not, they still had the urges of the flesh while here. So they satisfied their urges first with Amerindian women, later with African slave ones. That mixed offspring bred with other mixed offspring. And again and again, over 500 years, in complex fractal patterns. Add to that a big wave of European, Middle Eastern and Japanese immigration from the late 19th century to the mid-20th, and the result is that Brazilians probably have the most complex gene pool in the world. At first, such immigrants even tried to establish ghettos as in other countries, but they disappeared after a generation with complete assimilation into Brazilian society and the usual pattern of intermixing and intermarriage. Here you can see people with Caucasian features but dark skin, and vice versa, with all shades in between. You can even see mulattoes (or blue-eyed blondes) with Asian eyes. When we travel abroad, we are told to be extremely careful with our passports, because Brazilian passports are highly valued in the black market. Why? Because *any* physical type in the world can pass for a Brazilian. I have very light skin and look deceptively Caucasian myself, but I have a hard wiry beard to evidence my African genes – as if I didn’t know that my grandfather was the “white sheep” in his family… I have a friend here with dark skin and Arab features who could easily be taken for a Malian or Sudanese. Another one is of Italian and Japanese ancestry and is an almost obscenely hairy man with a dense beard coupled with almond eyes. We are the anti-Iceland – huge, tropical, and with the United Nations put in a blender and thrown into our genes. Few Brazilians (other than in the Southern states, but I’ll come back to this later) can say they are 1/4 this or 1/8 that. It’s more likely that we are some weird fraction like 29.87365 I’ve said it above, but it’s important, so I’ll repeat it: Brazil was never racially segregated. We have the same shameful record of poverty, low social indicators, high unemployment and crime among persons who are *visibly* black as in the U.S. and South Africa, mostly because of our no less shameful very late abolition of slavery (1888), but there is no such thing as a “black” or “white” neighbo(u)rhood in our cities. Racism exists, but in the end the divide is much more economical than racial. A poor neighbo(u)rhood is more likely to have a large proportion of blacks, but it will also have a lot of poor whites living next door to blacks (and still intermarrying with them). São Paulo and the Southern states are somewhat different, in that they have received the bulk of European immigration, and that was just a few generations ago, so there *are* people who can claim and trace pure European ethnicity. But even they live, work, socialize and intermarry with people with all sorts of ethnic backgrounds, more often than not with two, three or four of them at once in the same person. Some people in São Paulo – which produces 3 There are also a bunch of separatist advocates in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state. It is Brazil’s richest state in proportional terms (per capita) and it has a very characteristic regional culture they are staunchly proud of. It was the last part of Brazil to join the country, and the Portuguese they speak there still has a very strong Spanish influence in pronunciation and vocabulary. It is also one of the “whitest” states due to heavy recent European immigration (Germans and Italians in particular) – Gisele Bündchen is from there. But most “gaúchos” (as they are called) are also heavily mixed with Guarani Amerindians (that scene in The Mission where they raid a Jesuit mission among the natives and destroy it portrays a real event that happened there in the 18th century). Still, not even the “gaúcho” separatists say they want to secede because they are “white” – first because they are not so as a whole, and second because their neighbo(u)r to the north, Santa Catarina state, is even “whiter” and has its own German dialect (based on Thuringian and Pomeranian), still widely spoken several generations after immigration. Yet RGS separatists don’t want to include Santa Catarina. Anyway, separatists are a tiny minority: most people from RGS shun secession and are as proud of being Brazilian as of being “gaúchos”. And thank God, RGS separatists are not violent or extremist (in addition to being very, very few). Apartheid and domination by a white minority were possible in South Africa chiefly because the white newcomers had an overwhelmingly superior technology, especially regarding weapons and agriculture, and segregation ensured that things would remain so. But Brazil is an established country with an unsegregated population of multiracial individuals, now chiefly urban and technological, even if with shocking extremes of wealth distribution. White supremacists don’t have a chance here, let alone white separatists. And we have lots of empty land here. If they want to take it, we’ll be glad to get rid of that scum.

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