The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here.
Updated January 31, 2008:
This blog recently surpassed 100,000 visitors. That is over almost 2 years in existence. It's not the greatest record in the world but I think it is something to be proud of. Since I started this blog, blogs have become vastly more popular, and as they have, it has become increasingly difficult to build up high traffic due to competition.
I never thought that the day would come when I hit 100,000 visitors. Perhaps it is not much but we look on it with pride.
In this year, we also obtained our first advertiser. We continue to sell ads on the site at very competitive rates compared to advertising in print media. In fact, the ads are ludicrously cheap - $20 a month for a basic text ad. Inquire at the email address in the upper right hand corner if you are interested in advertising on the site.
It's hard to say what this blog is really all about, as we have written about so many different things. We have had some guest authors, including Wendy Campbell, Simon Jones and Stojgniev O'Donnell. Lately, of course, the focus is on Afghanistan. The blog has received particular controversy for dealing with the Jewish Question and the Israel/Palestine conflict. We continue to uphold a strong anti-Zionist line in the finest Leftist tradition.
After all, Zionism is simply neo-colonialism, no? And the Palestinians defending their lands are no different from the anti-colonial fighters in the Algerian FLN; the American revolutionary war fighters; Tupac Amaru, the Inca rebel in Peru; Simon Bolivar; Desallines in Haiti; Pontiac and Sitting Bull in the USA; Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam; the Mau Maus in Kenya and so many more.
For the crime of defending anti-colonial revolutionaries fighting the colonization of their land by racist settler-colonial invaders, this anti-racist blog has been predictably condemned as racist and anti-Semitic by the usual suspects, who are either mentally disordered (paranoid and hypersensitive) or calculatedly dishonest and criminal-minded, or both.
In cases where anti-Semitism means opposition to Israeli Apartheid and nothing else, while avoiding the true Jew-hatred of traditional anti-Semitism, then anti-Semitism of that sort should be a badge to be worn with pride and honor. Jimmy Carter, Ward Churchill, John Walt and Stephen Mearshimer, Gilad Atzmon, Jeff Blankfort, Mary Rizzo and Norman Finkelstein should don such an anti-Semite label with pride.
There is so much more to write. About Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, India, Hezbollah, Islam, Stalin and Mao and more. It's all in my notes. Only my chronic writer's block prevents it from moving to the blog.
This is an occasion for a rendition of the Greatest Hits of this humble blog. The first article that ever appeared on this blog, The Catastrophe of the Iraqi Resistance, is little-known, but was widely praised, read and linked at the time. It is, sadly, as relevant now as it was then.
Iraqi Resistance Takes Out a Bradley discusses the US Bradley fighting vehicle and its vulnerability to roadside bombs.
I Don't Hate the Jews, I Hate Everyone is one of the most controversial and widely read pieces to have appeared on this blog. It describes a Jewish-led and dominated group I called the British Pro-War Left, a British analogue to the US neoconservatives. So far, this PWL grouping has only been discussed on this blog and nowhere else in the media.
Answering the Libertarians and Their Lies demonstrates how this increasingly popular philosophy leads inexorably to the ruined Third World states that litter our globe, while explicitly confronting this faddish group's increasingly brazen lies.
The popular Racial Holy Wars, Real and Phantom contrasts 1.6 million dead Iraqis, killed by racist US imperialism, with the US media's obsession with a few racist neo-Nazi boneheads, most of whom are less dangerous than a 3-year old girl.
The sad story of Ted Westhusing, the highest ranking soldier to die in the Iraq War, was chronicled in Ted Westhusing An Apparent Suicide, a very widely read and linked article. The article took quite a bit of heat from some of Ted's rightwing friends and a couple of his relatives, but most of his relatives were quite supportive of the piece.
At the time it was written, it was not apparent at all that Ted was a suicide, and the military was mum on the subject. About 6 months later, an LA Times article revealed that he had committed suicide and described the details surrounding the incident. My article accurately predicted that Ted had killed himself 6 months before it was revealed to the public.
Some of Ted's rightwing friends and a few of his relatives continue to insist that Ted did not commit suicide and offer an interesting scenario whereby he was murdered by people connected with mercenary companies.
Despite repeated efforts by me and other journalists for more information on their tantalizing story, these strange, often-anonymous sources have refused to meet with anyone to flesh out the details. As such, the story presently stands that Ted is, sadly, a suicide, until proven otherwise. Ted was a leading ethicist in the US military. When your military ethicists start killing themselves, your military might have some problems, no?
National Guard Troops Shoot Dead Worshiper in New Orleans Church showcased a photo by Marvi Lacar, an excellent New York-based photojournalist. This photo is one of the strangest pics to come out of Hurricane Katrina. At the height of the storm, an alligator sought refuge in a church in Gulfport, Mississippi and was shot dead by National Guard troops.
Did Zionism Cause the Holocaust? Part 1 and Did Zionism Cause the Holocaust? Part 2, features a debate between me and a former contributor to this site, Wendy Campbell. I take the line that Zionism did not cause the Holocaust.
These two articles continue to be quite popular and get visits almost every day. The articles are wide-ranging discussions of the Holocaust itself and events leading up to it that may or may not have caused it.
The Worst Katrina Photo Sequence of All is one of the most widely read pieces on this site. It features exclusive photos by Allen Frederickson, a freelance photographer out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, of dogs actually feeding on human corpses in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, while the government dithered and New Orleans residents screamed for help.
This sequence is an excellent summation of the Bush Administration's failure to deal with this crisis.
Those Darned Mohammad Cartoons is probably the most widely linked, and possibly the most widely read, piece on this site. At the height of the controversy, this piece was getting 2,500 visitors a day.
The article reprints all 12 of the infamous Danish Mohammad cartoons and exhaustively reports on the story of the cartoons and the aftermath of their publication. This is one of the ultimate articles on the cartoon crisis available anywhere.
A follow-up to that piece, You Thought the Danish Cartoons Were Bad? was also quite popular. That piece reprinted another dozen or so notorious Mohammad cartoons, though not the original 12. The post noted that the publication of the original dozen, plus the idiotic Muslim overreaction, had set off a wild frenzy of copy-cots saturating the Internet and press with derogatory cartoons about Mohammad.
The protests had had the opposite effect - instead of inhibiting the production of blasphemous images, they had created a cottage industry. The article reprinted a variety of blasphemous and insulting cartoons of Mohammad, from the Middle Ages to this year, while still trying to address the issue in a way that was sensitive to Muslim sensibilities.
For those who wish to know, I received at least one, and maybe two, death threats from Muslim throwbacks for publishing these cartoons.
Cartoon Wars a Disaster for the Left and Islam continued with this story, while noting that the Left had completely blown it by lining up with the worst Islamic reactionaries on this issue, while the reaction of far too many Muslims seemed to merely further blacken the religion's reputation.
The post offered some constructive ways for Muslims to deal with the cartoon issue and reprinted a couple of more cartoons for good measure, including one showing Mohammad with a testicle protruding from his shorts.
Wikipedia, Ziopedia, or Judeopedia is another highly controversial piece on this blog. It has been widely read and linked.
The piece deals with my experience in editing articles on Wikipedia dealing with Jews, anti-Semitism and the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and running up against an amoral gang of largely, though not exclusively, militant Jewish Zionists who, with a the ethics of prison gang members, simply destroyed every contribution I made for no reason other than sheer thuggery.
After a while, I reluctantly concluded that there is a militant Judeophilic/Zionist cabal active on Wikipedia that has been allowed to rise to the highest levels of the organization - a cabal which is allowed to run amok like some kind of criminal gang on the site, and one that has reduced many of the articles in the areas involved to a sickening joke.
I would like to point out that there are many similar ethnic and political lobbies who have conspired to manipulate Wikipedia in the same way as this cabal but most of those have been, commendably, halted in their tracks. The Judeophilic/Zionist Conspiracy on Wikipedia is distinguishable from these similar thwarted conspiracies only in that it has been given free reign to flourish.
The article goes on to note how the Wikipedia Jewish/Judeophilic Cabal is an example of how Jewish conspiracies, or for that matter any conspiracies, actually work in our world. Conspiracies exist, and many of us, if we have any cleverness, social skills, or drive at all, are actively conspiring to do this or that at any given time.
Those in power have always utilized the most convoluted and amoral conspiracies in order to obtain, increase and retain power and money. Yes, the history of aristocracies is one of conspiracies as tangled and twisted as the roots on the floor of a rain forest. That power elites are as amoral as your typical street gang member should surprise no one who has studied them at length.
That many Jews, members of the most ethnocentric tribe on Earth, blessed with high intelligence, aggression and psychological intensity, should combine these four qualities to produce some of the world's finest conspirators and propagandists is not necessarily Nazism, racism or even hatred - it is potentially only the obvious, empirical conclusion of any honest, fearless person who has studied this fascinating ethnic group.
Danish Cartoonist Burnt Alive, sadly, is a post that never should have been written. It was written to shed light on a fraudulent story making the rounds in the world Muslim community that the "cartoonist who drew the Mohammad cartoons" was "burned alive", apparently in a case of spontaneous combustion, presumably initiated by God as punishment for "drawing the cartoons".
The urban legend is traced back to a Saudi newspaper that apparently, despicably, made the story up out of whole cloth. To their credit, most of the Muslims reading and linking to the post seem to accept that the incident never happened. Perhaps Muslims are less credulous than our stereotypes say they are?
Lord Macaulay's Speech to British Parliament 1835 - another article dealing with an urban legend - has been a surprisingly popular piece. This piece deals with a purported speech to British Parliament made by this man about India. The speech talks about how the British need to destroy Indian culture in order to colonize India because Indian culture is so great and wonderful. The speech never occurred.
This speech was completely made up by Machiavellian Hindu ultranationalist fascist sociopaths, and has since been distributed all around the gutter known as the Internet, where it has been quite popular in telling lots of Indian ruling-class types precisely the lie that they wish to hear.
The article noted that I originally believed that the quote was accurate, but then determined, amidst rage, that I had been conned by a crafty lie perpetrated by Hindu fascists.
For some paradoxical reason, this article has been very popular in India and in the US, presumably with Indian expats, often working at large computer firms. The Indians flocking to the post would be just those who would be inclined to fall for this clever fraud. As far as what these Indian visitors are getting out of the article, I really have no idea.
Fix For a Nasty Firefox CPU Bug has been an unlikely popular piece, one that will be of interest mostly to computer nerds. Clearly, many Firefox (an Internet browser and competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer that is based on the Mozilla project) installs continue to have problems with hogging of the CPU, or processor, the brain of your computer.
It's a mysterious problem and no one really knows why Firefox is so bad about this, especially as compared to other browsers, but I am happy to report that the browser has been improving dramatically in CPU use in recent months. The article offers theories about why Firefox uses so much CPU in certain cases, and offers some possible solutions and/or workarounds for the problem.
I continue to recommend to Firefox to all of my readers, if only because my hatred for the Microsoft Corporation is almost fathomless. As far as why I hate Microsoft, that goes beyond the subject of this post, but suffice to say that it is an illegal monopoly, the corporate equivalent of the Medellin Crime Cartel. For more, just Google "Microsoft illegal monopoly" and do some research of your own.
If you think that illegal business monopolies are not a problem, you are either ignorant, an ideologue, or philosophically in bed with the crooks. You are hopeless and there is nothing I can do for you. A huge body of research and case law has been amassed in the past century that proves to any honest person how criminal monopolies harm consumers, the business community and society as a whole.
Despite their best efforts, the intellectually dishonest super-liar acolytes of Milton Friedman have not challenged this clear-as-air conclusion. If you are still confused, please do some basic research on business monopolies.
Believe it or not, the posts that have gotten the most hits on this blog (and continue to get the most hits) are those dealing the the death toll for Hurricane Katrina. I started writing about the hurricane early and wrote some popular pieces about it (see New Orleans is Gone for an example). At some point, I decided that the death toll for the hurricane was not being reported accurately, so I set about to tally up the totals myself.
Early on, this blog was widely regarded as having the most accurate death toll for the hurricane, and for a long time, Wikipedia was using this blog as the final source for the hurricane death toll, until an utterly arbitrary and insane Wikipedia rule called "no quoting personal blogs" kicked in. See the Wikipedia article above for the profoundly flawed and crooked nature of this online encyclopedia.
Not to claim any laurels here - honestly - I really wish that the mainstream media had picked up the ball on this story instead of leaving it to an unpaid journo like myself. What does it say about our media that the mainstream media cannot even seem to sit down and figure out how many were killed by this hurricane, and the job falls to measly bloggers like me?
It is now over a year past landfall for Katrina, and while the subject of the death count for Katrina is quite convoluted, my death count is still often regarded as the most accurate out there, and the big newspapers, newsmagazines and TV news stations cannot even seem to come up with a proper figure, much to their discredit.
A discussion of the morally fallen and professionally inept nature of the US media goes beyond the scope of this post, but the Katrina death toll anecdote is sobering evidence for the frightening failure of the US corporate media to even begin to do a basic job.
The most recent Katrina death toll article was Katrina Death Toll Plummets to 1,723, and this is my most recent figure on this morbid accounting. The count will continue to be updated as it changes, as no doubt it will, in the future.
A surprisingly popular recent piece on this blog has been The Jews of Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Lebanon. While it is difficult to briefly summarize this wide-ranging piece, one of the most notable aspects of it is its astounding claim that there may be thousands of crypto-Jews living quiet lives in the supposedly homicidally anti-Semitic Wahhabi state of Saudi Arabia.
To conclude, I would like to thank all my readers all over the world (and they DO come here from the world over) especially my loyal, regular readers and commenters. Here's to hoping another 100,000 visitors comes even sooner.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
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