Here in California (Ground Zero of America's Mass/Illegal Immigration Nightmare) there is getting to be a serious split between some California liberals and the PC California Leftists over the issues of illegal immigration, Sanctuary Cities and other symptoms of major mental illness.
Take San Fransisco. You can't get much more insane than Sanctuary Cities, but SF did just that. Not only do they hide illegal alien criminals from the law, they used to hide illegal alien felons, so long as they were underage! Turns out almost all of them ran away from the silly group homes they were dumped in, as we might expect.
Turns out some of them afterward went out and murdered people, as we might expect. Turns out a lot of others were really adults who lied and said they were minors, as we might expect. With blood on the sidewalk, three Italian native San Fransiscans, a father and two sons, dead, the mayor and his Leftist colleagues are incredibly holding their ground.
If you go to the comments on the SF Chronicle page dealing with these issues, you will see that there is an emerging split between SF liberals and SF Leftists. Probably 90% of San Fransiscans are Democrats, and probably 80% of the City are liberals.
Well, over and over on those pages, you see these SF liberals saying, "Hey! I'm a liberal San Franciscan, but this Sanctuary City crap has gone too far! Count me out! Up with liberals, down with PC Leftists!" And a lot of them are also saying, "And by the way, down with illegal aliens! Get the Hell out of my country!"
Keep in mind California is Ground Zero for Mass/Illegal Immigration madness. If that reality doesn't turn any native Californian sensible on this issue, nothing will.
Being liberal was never supposed to be about being nuts or being stupid. From any logical point of view, a pro-illegal immigration (defending an invading army of lawbreakers), Sanctuary City (shielding the invader army from the law trying to arrest the criminals), viewpoint is both dumb and nuts.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Cannabis, Teens and Schizophrenia
I received a mail today from someone who attended an interesting conference in the Midwest.
At a Mental Illness and Criminal Justice Conference today in Omaha, Nebraska, Dr. Frederick Frese, who is the Coordinator of the Summit County Recovery Project and Assistant Prof of Psychology in Clinical Psychology at NEOUCOM and Case Western Reserve U, and on the Board of Trustees for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, gave a session on teenage cannabis use and schizophrenia.
He has been a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic for 40 years.
Frese stated that use of cannabis between the ages of 15 and 18 in persons who have a variant allele of the COMT gene will lead to an almost certain psychotic break by the age of 25. He said it's because of the formative time that the brain is in during those years, in combination with that certain allele, together with cannabis use.
He said that if you have do not have the variant allele, no problem. Frese is so concerned about this that he and his team are going to start setting up genetic testing booths for kids at rock concerts because of the very real danger that the studies show exist.
I applaud Dr. Frese for the very real efforts he is taking to try to prevent schizophrenia in vulnerable youth.
I am dubious about how many kids this will save. The rate of schizophrenia has not gone up since the cannabis era began. This suggests that use of cannabis if anything will cause schizophrenia to occur sooner than it would otherwise occur, and it would occur anyway, just later.
The number of folks with this variant allele is high in absolute numbers, and many of them use MJ and don't get schizophrenia. But it does cause a 10 times elevated risk. I think that Frese is wrong to say that it's almost certain that these kids will get schizophrenia by 25 after smoking one jay between ages 15-18.
As I've said before on this blog, I have known 1000's of cannabis users over my lifetime, many heavy users. The number who went on develop schizophrenia? Zero. This is why this whole subject makes me yawn.
I wish Frese good luck with his experiment though. Ideally, we could construct a good experiment this way. We could follow kids with the variant allele who wait til 19 to start MJ (Is this protective?) or avoid it period, with another group who did not avoid cannabis and see how many of each develop schiz and at what ages.
Tell the truth, I am quite concerned about use of cannabis by minors. I wish they would not do it. Period. Wait til you're an adult!
I have OCD (another, though vastly less devastating, mental illness) and I have found that cannabis is actually a superb psychiatric drug for this illness. It works better than almost any med I have ever taken for this (The drugs work great at high doses, but nuke my sex drive, so what good are they?), and I have suffered for 26 yrs.
No clinician believes me when I tell them this, all insist that pot makes you mentally ill or worsens all mental illness or caused my problem in the first place (The gall of them!?), and all try to steer me to drug treatment or drug counseling when I tell them I use. I'm really getting tired of this shit. I'm 50 years old and I'm being treated like a child.
I have some opinions about the mental health profession, but in general they are extremely low. For such a bunch of super-smart people, there sure is a lot of bullshit groupthink, scaredy-cat thinking and just general lack of an empirical outlook.
At a Mental Illness and Criminal Justice Conference today in Omaha, Nebraska, Dr. Frederick Frese, who is the Coordinator of the Summit County Recovery Project and Assistant Prof of Psychology in Clinical Psychology at NEOUCOM and Case Western Reserve U, and on the Board of Trustees for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, gave a session on teenage cannabis use and schizophrenia.
He has been a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic for 40 years.
Frese stated that use of cannabis between the ages of 15 and 18 in persons who have a variant allele of the COMT gene will lead to an almost certain psychotic break by the age of 25. He said it's because of the formative time that the brain is in during those years, in combination with that certain allele, together with cannabis use.
He said that if you have do not have the variant allele, no problem. Frese is so concerned about this that he and his team are going to start setting up genetic testing booths for kids at rock concerts because of the very real danger that the studies show exist.
I applaud Dr. Frese for the very real efforts he is taking to try to prevent schizophrenia in vulnerable youth.
I am dubious about how many kids this will save. The rate of schizophrenia has not gone up since the cannabis era began. This suggests that use of cannabis if anything will cause schizophrenia to occur sooner than it would otherwise occur, and it would occur anyway, just later.
The number of folks with this variant allele is high in absolute numbers, and many of them use MJ and don't get schizophrenia. But it does cause a 10 times elevated risk. I think that Frese is wrong to say that it's almost certain that these kids will get schizophrenia by 25 after smoking one jay between ages 15-18.
As I've said before on this blog, I have known 1000's of cannabis users over my lifetime, many heavy users. The number who went on develop schizophrenia? Zero. This is why this whole subject makes me yawn.
I wish Frese good luck with his experiment though. Ideally, we could construct a good experiment this way. We could follow kids with the variant allele who wait til 19 to start MJ (Is this protective?) or avoid it period, with another group who did not avoid cannabis and see how many of each develop schiz and at what ages.
Tell the truth, I am quite concerned about use of cannabis by minors. I wish they would not do it. Period. Wait til you're an adult!
I have OCD (another, though vastly less devastating, mental illness) and I have found that cannabis is actually a superb psychiatric drug for this illness. It works better than almost any med I have ever taken for this (The drugs work great at high doses, but nuke my sex drive, so what good are they?), and I have suffered for 26 yrs.
No clinician believes me when I tell them this, all insist that pot makes you mentally ill or worsens all mental illness or caused my problem in the first place (The gall of them!?), and all try to steer me to drug treatment or drug counseling when I tell them I use. I'm really getting tired of this shit. I'm 50 years old and I'm being treated like a child.
I have some opinions about the mental health profession, but in general they are extremely low. For such a bunch of super-smart people, there sure is a lot of bullshit groupthink, scaredy-cat thinking and just general lack of an empirical outlook.
The Children of Low Wage Immigrants are Criminals
The male children, at least.
This has been true at least in the past 150 years or so. We went through Hell for decades already with the Sicilians, the Irish and the Jews. After some time, they've all comfortably made it to middle class America and beyond. The Irish, Jewish and Sicilian ghettos of yore are nowhere to be found.
We are seeing it again with Hispanic illegal immigrants from Mesoamerica and the Dominican Republic and with unscreened immigrants from US colonies in Puerto Rico and Western Samoa. The first generation of illegal or unscreened immigrants produces criminal children, which then produces a criminal culture.
In some cases, it ends right there and the newer generations assimilate well. In other cases, as with the White ethnics above, you end up with decades of Underclass Hell before they finally climb aboard. In other cases, the criminal children of the first generation may produce a permanent Underclass. Look at the Gypsies in Europe. They've been there since 1100. They're still as Underclass as the day they showed up.
White racists hate to hear this, but legal immigrants to the US seem to cause relatively few problems.
We screen them very well, it takes years to even get in in the first place, they have to jump through endless hurdles and pay lots of money, and once they get in, they have to be on good behavior, or the first arrest and they get tossed back to wherever. In general, I think their children do well too.
What it boils down to is that the overwhelming majority of immigrant problems in the US are caused by illegal and unscreened and to a lesser extent, low-wage immigrants and their multiple lines of descendants.
This also seems to be the case in Australia, New Zealand and Europe.
The importation of Pacific Islander low wage immigrants to Australia and New Zealand has been bad news. Many are not fitting in at all and are just forming Underclasses, which at this point seem interminable. Pacific Islander immigration to these lands must be stopped altogether or urgent research must be done to figure out which PI's are most likely to thrive and only allow those in.
Importation of low-wage Arab, North African, Jamaican and Pakistani immigrants to Europe has been disastrous. In large part this is due to Islam, except for the Jamaicans, but the end result is the same. Due to Islam, one wonders not when assimilation to European society will occur with these immigrants but whether it is even possible.
The reproduction of the gang - barrio - vato idiot Underclass among US Hispanics is urgently in need of study. Studies are concluding that this pathological culture is now going on five generations here in the US.
What's causing this? What are the factors behind it? What are the characteristics of Hispanics in the Underclass and those assimilating? Forget ending it; it's probably permanent. How do we keep it from growing, and how do we quit importing more nightmares?
As I have mentioned before, US Hispanics are split into two vast groups - an assimilated group doing well and a nightmarish Underclass, with a lot of movement in between.
We grew up with Hispanics in Orange County in the 1960's, 70's and 80's. The ones we knew were all completely assimilated to US culture and were for all intents and purposes just Americans like anyone else. They were like White people with some interesting ancestry.
As a native Californian, I recognize that Hispanics are part of the neighborhood here in my state. Many of them have just as much or more right to be here as the rest of us. I grew up with them, befriended them and had Mexican girlfriends. I was taking Spanish lessons at age 6. I asked my Mom why and she peered into her crystal ball and said, "This is the future." I'm not kidding, exact words.
For fun, we slummed it up in Mexico on a regular basis, but we were always happy to make to the other side of the border at the end. I had six years of Spanish in school. I've eaten great Mexican food my whole life. Hell, I even go to a Catholic Mass now, and I go to the Spanish language session, because the music is better and the crowd is more relaxed.
The Mexican-American friends I grew up with absolutely despised the nascent barrio - vato - gangster culture at the time. There was some of it in the 1970's - mostly in East LA. My friends were blistering in their contempt for these people, who they called garbage, maggots and other endearing terms. They had nothing to do with them, would not even talk to them, and hated being associated with them.
What's odd now is the metasticization of this shit barrio - vato - gangster Hispanic culture all across California. What was once a pretty minor element in Hispanic life in California in the 1970's (at the time most Hispanics here seemed well-assimilated like the ones I knew) has burgeoned across the state like a rampaging cancer.
And my assimilated Hispanic friends, who once regarded the barrio crowd as worms (Rightly so!) now defend them to me in conversation. Sadly, my once-perfectly assimilated Hispanic friends have now adopted Hispanic Identity Politics like everyone else.
Given what we now know about the children of low-wage immigrants becoming criminals, often multi-generational, in more advanced societies, the obvious, sane, bipartisan, non-racist solution is to simply stop importing low-wage immigrants period. If we do need to import them, we can always import some real guest workers like via the Bracero Program.
The Hispanic activists (illegal alien lovers) get all upset when anyone mentions the Bracero Program. Apparently the workers were treated like shit back in the day, in the 1950's. Well, here it is, 2008, and what do you know, illegal alien workers are often treated like shit too.
The more things change, the more things stay the same. That's not a problem with guest worker programs. The problem is that it's the American way to treat workers like shit.
Anyway, whatever it's faults, a Bracero Program 2008 would seem better than the current nightmare of turning the US Southwest into Northern Tijuana.
A commenter, James Schipper, noted on an earlier post that illegal immigrants who have been in the US for 10 years or so have shown significant duty to country such that they can be amnestied in. This was my position up until 1½ years ago. As long as I always lived in White areas in California, I could afford to be liberal on immigration.
Now that I live the barrio, I've lost all my illusions. Getting hit on the head with the reality stick can be a tough beating. I want all the illegals gone, not now, yesterday, and I don't give a damn how long they've been here, I don't care about breaking up their damned families, I don't care about anything.
I would also like to point out that the very qualities that make low-wage immigrants, in particular illegal immigrants, such problem immigrants in Western nations will not magically vanish as soon as you grant them amnesty.
My impression is that the children of the illegals who were amnestied in in 1986 are just as bad, if not worse, than the children of the illegals themselves. Legalizing them via amnesty does not magically transform low-quality illegal immigrants in fine, upstanding citizens. I doubt it if does much good at all except to legalize more problem residents of our nation.
This has been true at least in the past 150 years or so. We went through Hell for decades already with the Sicilians, the Irish and the Jews. After some time, they've all comfortably made it to middle class America and beyond. The Irish, Jewish and Sicilian ghettos of yore are nowhere to be found.
We are seeing it again with Hispanic illegal immigrants from Mesoamerica and the Dominican Republic and with unscreened immigrants from US colonies in Puerto Rico and Western Samoa. The first generation of illegal or unscreened immigrants produces criminal children, which then produces a criminal culture.
In some cases, it ends right there and the newer generations assimilate well. In other cases, as with the White ethnics above, you end up with decades of Underclass Hell before they finally climb aboard. In other cases, the criminal children of the first generation may produce a permanent Underclass. Look at the Gypsies in Europe. They've been there since 1100. They're still as Underclass as the day they showed up.
White racists hate to hear this, but legal immigrants to the US seem to cause relatively few problems.
We screen them very well, it takes years to even get in in the first place, they have to jump through endless hurdles and pay lots of money, and once they get in, they have to be on good behavior, or the first arrest and they get tossed back to wherever. In general, I think their children do well too.
What it boils down to is that the overwhelming majority of immigrant problems in the US are caused by illegal and unscreened and to a lesser extent, low-wage immigrants and their multiple lines of descendants.
This also seems to be the case in Australia, New Zealand and Europe.
The importation of Pacific Islander low wage immigrants to Australia and New Zealand has been bad news. Many are not fitting in at all and are just forming Underclasses, which at this point seem interminable. Pacific Islander immigration to these lands must be stopped altogether or urgent research must be done to figure out which PI's are most likely to thrive and only allow those in.
Importation of low-wage Arab, North African, Jamaican and Pakistani immigrants to Europe has been disastrous. In large part this is due to Islam, except for the Jamaicans, but the end result is the same. Due to Islam, one wonders not when assimilation to European society will occur with these immigrants but whether it is even possible.
The reproduction of the gang - barrio - vato idiot Underclass among US Hispanics is urgently in need of study. Studies are concluding that this pathological culture is now going on five generations here in the US.
What's causing this? What are the factors behind it? What are the characteristics of Hispanics in the Underclass and those assimilating? Forget ending it; it's probably permanent. How do we keep it from growing, and how do we quit importing more nightmares?
As I have mentioned before, US Hispanics are split into two vast groups - an assimilated group doing well and a nightmarish Underclass, with a lot of movement in between.
We grew up with Hispanics in Orange County in the 1960's, 70's and 80's. The ones we knew were all completely assimilated to US culture and were for all intents and purposes just Americans like anyone else. They were like White people with some interesting ancestry.
As a native Californian, I recognize that Hispanics are part of the neighborhood here in my state. Many of them have just as much or more right to be here as the rest of us. I grew up with them, befriended them and had Mexican girlfriends. I was taking Spanish lessons at age 6. I asked my Mom why and she peered into her crystal ball and said, "This is the future." I'm not kidding, exact words.
For fun, we slummed it up in Mexico on a regular basis, but we were always happy to make to the other side of the border at the end. I had six years of Spanish in school. I've eaten great Mexican food my whole life. Hell, I even go to a Catholic Mass now, and I go to the Spanish language session, because the music is better and the crowd is more relaxed.
The Mexican-American friends I grew up with absolutely despised the nascent barrio - vato - gangster culture at the time. There was some of it in the 1970's - mostly in East LA. My friends were blistering in their contempt for these people, who they called garbage, maggots and other endearing terms. They had nothing to do with them, would not even talk to them, and hated being associated with them.
What's odd now is the metasticization of this shit barrio - vato - gangster Hispanic culture all across California. What was once a pretty minor element in Hispanic life in California in the 1970's (at the time most Hispanics here seemed well-assimilated like the ones I knew) has burgeoned across the state like a rampaging cancer.
And my assimilated Hispanic friends, who once regarded the barrio crowd as worms (Rightly so!) now defend them to me in conversation. Sadly, my once-perfectly assimilated Hispanic friends have now adopted Hispanic Identity Politics like everyone else.
Given what we now know about the children of low-wage immigrants becoming criminals, often multi-generational, in more advanced societies, the obvious, sane, bipartisan, non-racist solution is to simply stop importing low-wage immigrants period. If we do need to import them, we can always import some real guest workers like via the Bracero Program.
The Hispanic activists (illegal alien lovers) get all upset when anyone mentions the Bracero Program. Apparently the workers were treated like shit back in the day, in the 1950's. Well, here it is, 2008, and what do you know, illegal alien workers are often treated like shit too.
The more things change, the more things stay the same. That's not a problem with guest worker programs. The problem is that it's the American way to treat workers like shit.
Anyway, whatever it's faults, a Bracero Program 2008 would seem better than the current nightmare of turning the US Southwest into Northern Tijuana.
A commenter, James Schipper, noted on an earlier post that illegal immigrants who have been in the US for 10 years or so have shown significant duty to country such that they can be amnestied in. This was my position up until 1½ years ago. As long as I always lived in White areas in California, I could afford to be liberal on immigration.
Now that I live the barrio, I've lost all my illusions. Getting hit on the head with the reality stick can be a tough beating. I want all the illegals gone, not now, yesterday, and I don't give a damn how long they've been here, I don't care about breaking up their damned families, I don't care about anything.
I would also like to point out that the very qualities that make low-wage immigrants, in particular illegal immigrants, such problem immigrants in Western nations will not magically vanish as soon as you grant them amnesty.
My impression is that the children of the illegals who were amnestied in in 1986 are just as bad, if not worse, than the children of the illegals themselves. Legalizing them via amnesty does not magically transform low-quality illegal immigrants in fine, upstanding citizens. I doubt it if does much good at all except to legalize more problem residents of our nation.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Many Political Parties, One Illegal Alien Flavor
In California, we have several political parties. On the Right, we have the California Illegal Alien Libertarian Party and the California Illegal Alien Republican Party. On the Left, we have the California Illegal Alien Green Party, the the California Illegal Alien Peace and Freedom Party and the California Illegal Alien Democratic Party.
The parties differ in some ways. Although they all love illegal alien criminal invaders who are destroying this state much more than American citizens, they do seem to differ in their love for the criminal aliens and bristling hatred for the citizens of our nation. The California Illegal Alien Republican Party probably loves the illegals and hates the citizens the least, though it's hard to say.
There's no difference for all intents and purposes between the wackjobs in the local Democratic Party and the flat-out idiots in the parties of the Left. All anti-illegal alien legislation has ended in this idiot state. We have stupid sanctuary cities all up and down our blighted Golden State. Raids against illegal aliens are few and far between.
I frequently see illegals working at workplaces, even large corporate stores, but I never bother to call ICE. San Fransisco is reeling from crimes committed by illegal alien criminals, including a high profile recent set of murders.
That these criminals were all minor illegal aliens, convicted of felonies, whom the lunatic city of San Fransisco then shipped out to group homes in order to keep the punk garbage from being deported back to whatever Banana Republic they invaded from, was the telling point. The city was shipping the felons to group homes at vast expense.
The punks would escape from the group homes in 2-3 weeks. Then they would come back to the city to prey on American citizens. Vast numbers of them are in gangs.
Los Angeles has been destroyed; a wasteland of gangs, graffiti, crime and foreigners where the English language is seldom heard and signs in English are hard to find. About 50% of the workers in Los Angeles County are illegal aliens, according to the City Council. The city mayor is a La Raza traitor.
California is not necessarily the land of the fruits and the nuts. One of my best friends is a Communist who is so furious about illegal aliens that I am a bit worried about him. That's not so unusual out here. The Hispanics here are hopeless, and most of the legal immigrants and Hispanic citizens are out and out traitors, supporting the armies of locust-like invaders.
It seems that an awful lot of Whites here have swallowed the Koolaid and gone over to illegal alien lover. There's a lot of pressure in that direction. If you speak out against the criminal invader army in public, people will jab you with their elbow and order you to shut up. Voices get raised, even White voices.
If there are any Hispanics around, you are going to get some sharp looks. It's downright dangerous to diss the illegals in most parts of this state, so a lot of Whites just wimp out, go native or wigger or the Hispanic equivalent, and just run up the White flag. We're outnumbered as it is, our existence is precarious, the Hispanic majority is rather dangerous, so why piss em off?
On the other hand, check out the San Fransisco Chronicle's recent articles on the City's raving nutball Sanctuary City bullshit policy. Probably 90% of the population of San Fransisco are Democrats and most are pretty liberal. What really struck me reading through the comments was how many apparently liberal Democrat San Fransiscans were frothing at the mouth over this Sanctuary City madness and illegal aliens in general.
A couple of decades ago, San Fransisco was home to some fine Democratic politicians, generally liberal, often ethnic. One thing they were, unlike this latest Leftwing cancer, was patriotic. They had names like Sam Alioto. I don't think for a second that Alioto would have stood for this Sanctuary City bullshit.
On the national level, things are the same. We have the Illegal Alien Republican Party and the Libertarian Party on the Right. The position of the Libertarian Party is variable. Talking to hardcore Libertarians on the ground, it seems almost 100% of them are pro-Open Borders. However, Ron Paul seemed to be running on some sort of an anti-illegal alien platform, although this goes against standard Libertarian philosophy.
On the Left, we have the usual gang of traitors and idiots.
There's the Illegal Alien Democratic Party, of which I am a reluctant member, which has as its unofficial policy the utter insanity of an end to workplace raids, an end to fines and an end to jail terms for criminals who hire invaders instead of real Americans, and complete amnesty for all of the criminals who invaded our land and displaced real Americans from their jobs, and spread crime, gangs, graffiti, massive dropout rates, ghettos, decay, squalor, degeneration, lowering of the quality of life, and devastation all over our fair land.
That is basically the same stance as the the Illegal Alien Green Party, of which I am also a reluctant member. On the far Left, we have the Illegal Alien Communist Party USA, of which I am once again a reluctant member.
The two parties are running two traitors for President. Barack Obama, whom I otherwise support, was the co-sponsor of the Kennedy-McCain Amnesty Insanity bill that was thankfully shot down last summer. John McCain, as the name of the bill implies, was sponsor, along with Ted Kennedy, an otherwise fine liberal politician.
McCain now says he would vote against his own bill. He goes around the country speaking to Hispanic groups, telling them in public meetings that he opposes amnesty and in private meetings that he still supports his Kennedy-McCain Amnesty Psychosis Bill.
Other than that, Obama is actually even worse. He wants to end all of the otherwise meager workplace raids. Even Bush still carries out one of those once in a blue moon.
I kind of like to go to liberal and Left websites. I have lots of choices. I can got to the Daily Kos Illegal Alien site or I can go to the Counterpunch Illegal Alien site. Can someone show me a liberal or Left website doesn't love criminal invaders and despise real Americans?
I can and used to subscribe to liberal and Left magazines. I had some choices. Mother Jones Illegal Alien magazine, The Nation Illegal Alien magazine and Utne Reader Illegal Alien magazine. On the Right, I have some more choices. I can subscribe to Time Illegal Alien magazine or Newsweek Illegal Alien magazine.
So many choices! Plenty of parties, websites and mags for the illegals, and almost none for the real Americans.
When it comes to a bunch of invader criminals tearing up our land and devastating our wages, just about 100% of our political and media class supports them. When it comes to workers who are real American citizens, most all of the parties on the Right and Left and all of the media on the Left and Right are out to screw them by empowering their enemies, the illegals. For the illegals, everything. For American citizens, nothing.
What a bunch of crap!
The parties differ in some ways. Although they all love illegal alien criminal invaders who are destroying this state much more than American citizens, they do seem to differ in their love for the criminal aliens and bristling hatred for the citizens of our nation. The California Illegal Alien Republican Party probably loves the illegals and hates the citizens the least, though it's hard to say.
There's no difference for all intents and purposes between the wackjobs in the local Democratic Party and the flat-out idiots in the parties of the Left. All anti-illegal alien legislation has ended in this idiot state. We have stupid sanctuary cities all up and down our blighted Golden State. Raids against illegal aliens are few and far between.
I frequently see illegals working at workplaces, even large corporate stores, but I never bother to call ICE. San Fransisco is reeling from crimes committed by illegal alien criminals, including a high profile recent set of murders.
That these criminals were all minor illegal aliens, convicted of felonies, whom the lunatic city of San Fransisco then shipped out to group homes in order to keep the punk garbage from being deported back to whatever Banana Republic they invaded from, was the telling point. The city was shipping the felons to group homes at vast expense.
The punks would escape from the group homes in 2-3 weeks. Then they would come back to the city to prey on American citizens. Vast numbers of them are in gangs.
Los Angeles has been destroyed; a wasteland of gangs, graffiti, crime and foreigners where the English language is seldom heard and signs in English are hard to find. About 50% of the workers in Los Angeles County are illegal aliens, according to the City Council. The city mayor is a La Raza traitor.
California is not necessarily the land of the fruits and the nuts. One of my best friends is a Communist who is so furious about illegal aliens that I am a bit worried about him. That's not so unusual out here. The Hispanics here are hopeless, and most of the legal immigrants and Hispanic citizens are out and out traitors, supporting the armies of locust-like invaders.
It seems that an awful lot of Whites here have swallowed the Koolaid and gone over to illegal alien lover. There's a lot of pressure in that direction. If you speak out against the criminal invader army in public, people will jab you with their elbow and order you to shut up. Voices get raised, even White voices.
If there are any Hispanics around, you are going to get some sharp looks. It's downright dangerous to diss the illegals in most parts of this state, so a lot of Whites just wimp out, go native or wigger or the Hispanic equivalent, and just run up the White flag. We're outnumbered as it is, our existence is precarious, the Hispanic majority is rather dangerous, so why piss em off?
On the other hand, check out the San Fransisco Chronicle's recent articles on the City's raving nutball Sanctuary City bullshit policy. Probably 90% of the population of San Fransisco are Democrats and most are pretty liberal. What really struck me reading through the comments was how many apparently liberal Democrat San Fransiscans were frothing at the mouth over this Sanctuary City madness and illegal aliens in general.
A couple of decades ago, San Fransisco was home to some fine Democratic politicians, generally liberal, often ethnic. One thing they were, unlike this latest Leftwing cancer, was patriotic. They had names like Sam Alioto. I don't think for a second that Alioto would have stood for this Sanctuary City bullshit.
On the national level, things are the same. We have the Illegal Alien Republican Party and the Libertarian Party on the Right. The position of the Libertarian Party is variable. Talking to hardcore Libertarians on the ground, it seems almost 100% of them are pro-Open Borders. However, Ron Paul seemed to be running on some sort of an anti-illegal alien platform, although this goes against standard Libertarian philosophy.
On the Left, we have the usual gang of traitors and idiots.
There's the Illegal Alien Democratic Party, of which I am a reluctant member, which has as its unofficial policy the utter insanity of an end to workplace raids, an end to fines and an end to jail terms for criminals who hire invaders instead of real Americans, and complete amnesty for all of the criminals who invaded our land and displaced real Americans from their jobs, and spread crime, gangs, graffiti, massive dropout rates, ghettos, decay, squalor, degeneration, lowering of the quality of life, and devastation all over our fair land.
That is basically the same stance as the the Illegal Alien Green Party, of which I am also a reluctant member. On the far Left, we have the Illegal Alien Communist Party USA, of which I am once again a reluctant member.
The two parties are running two traitors for President. Barack Obama, whom I otherwise support, was the co-sponsor of the Kennedy-McCain Amnesty Insanity bill that was thankfully shot down last summer. John McCain, as the name of the bill implies, was sponsor, along with Ted Kennedy, an otherwise fine liberal politician.
McCain now says he would vote against his own bill. He goes around the country speaking to Hispanic groups, telling them in public meetings that he opposes amnesty and in private meetings that he still supports his Kennedy-McCain Amnesty Psychosis Bill.
Other than that, Obama is actually even worse. He wants to end all of the otherwise meager workplace raids. Even Bush still carries out one of those once in a blue moon.
I kind of like to go to liberal and Left websites. I have lots of choices. I can got to the Daily Kos Illegal Alien site or I can go to the Counterpunch Illegal Alien site. Can someone show me a liberal or Left website doesn't love criminal invaders and despise real Americans?
I can and used to subscribe to liberal and Left magazines. I had some choices. Mother Jones Illegal Alien magazine, The Nation Illegal Alien magazine and Utne Reader Illegal Alien magazine. On the Right, I have some more choices. I can subscribe to Time Illegal Alien magazine or Newsweek Illegal Alien magazine.
So many choices! Plenty of parties, websites and mags for the illegals, and almost none for the real Americans.
When it comes to a bunch of invader criminals tearing up our land and devastating our wages, just about 100% of our political and media class supports them. When it comes to workers who are real American citizens, most all of the parties on the Right and Left and all of the media on the Left and Right are out to screw them by empowering their enemies, the illegals. For the illegals, everything. For American citizens, nothing.
What a bunch of crap!
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Obama's Momma
John McCain is getting an astounding 4% of the Black vote in the US. Go John go! This hilarious Black preacher is one of them. He's anti-Obama and pro-McCain, but he's so damn funny, I thought you might enjoy this video. I just love the way some of these Black guys talk sometimes; cracks me up.
This fellow is named James Manning, pastor of the Atlah World Missionary Church in Atlah, New York. From his bio:
The Hon. James David Manning, PhDHmm, smart guy. PhD in Philosophy.
James David Manning is the energetic and visionary pastor of the ATLAH World Missionary Church located in Atlah, New York. He has founded three schools and developed a national church ministry. He holds a PhD in philosophy, the author of The Oblation Hour, a former Marketing Executive with Proctor and Gamble and the Ford Motor Company.
Have fun watching.
Niggers* and Beaners* Wrecked the Economy Redux
White nationalists have advanced the extremely racist argument that Blacks and Hispanics are responsible for blowing up the economy with the latest subprime mortgage meltdown, which has taken out titans in the insurance and brokerage industry. Lehman Brothers, the 3rd largest brokerage firm on Earth, was allowed to implode.
AIG, one of the world's largest insurance companies, was about to go bankrupt until socialism stepped in, as the Bush Administration bought an 80% stake in the firm. I do support nationalizing huge industrial titans like this that have proven too irresponsible to run a modern company.
AIG went down because they insured the subprime securities that investors bought against going bad. Yes, you can buy insurance on your stocks, bonds, derivatives and other financial crap. Amazing, huh?
It remains to be seen whether an $85 billion bailout of AIG is a good bargain for taxpayers. It seems that we are investing public money in this mountain of AIG's losses, no? How is the public supposed to benefit from this?
AIG investors are now scrambling around trying to figure out a way to pay back that debt in order to ward off a government socialist buyout of 80% of the stock. I do not think that they can do it. AIG is, in my opinion, insolvent. Nor do I think they will have much luck borrowing money from anyone else. Would you loan these losers any money? Get real.
Meanwhile, even after the bailout, AIG's stock is still being pounded into the dirt. I guess that bailout didn't make anyone happier about AIG stock. Everyone exposed to AIG stock in the form of pensions and other funds is scrambling to get out from under the avalanche. Pension funds are suing AIG for wiping out their holdings.
Do you own an AIG insurance policy? That's not worth much, if you ask me. States are now "reassuring" policyholders. I'd be canceling that toxic policy in a New York minute.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I do not agree with the White Nationalist racist argument that niggers* and beaners* blew up the economy.
They apparently got this argument for articles like this Village Voice piece. However, if you read the piece carefully, it does not support the WN argument at all.
Under the cover of anti-racism, Andrew Cuomo and the rest of the Clinton criminals gave the industry what it wanted - loosened regulations on whom they could loan to. "It is also worth remembering that the motive for this bipartisan ownership expansion probably had more to do with the legion of lobbyists working for lenders, brokers, and Wall Street than an effort to walk in MLK's footsteps", as the article notes.
Note that the Bush Republicans did not overturn a single one of Cuomo's "anti-racist" loosening of standards. Furthermore, as I read the article, there was no federal "mandate to loan to more Black and Brown poor people."
This argument makes it seem like Evil Big Government liberals forced prudent bankers to make loans to non-White deadbeats that they knew would go bad, loans that they themselves did not want to make. This is not the case.
The debt was already being sold and resold all over the place, and, as the article notes, even if the borrower defaulted, that was no big deal either, as they would just resell the home. Lots of money to be made all around on every step of the chain, even if the borrower defaults.
The latest insanity, where Joe Public gets to bail out a bunch of gambler criminals, is truly horrible. Basically, you and me will be forced to buy up all this bad debt from a bunch of white collar crooks, debt that is nearly worthless. For this worthless debt, we will fork over $1 trillion for a pile of stinking garbage.
Further, the crooks are absolved of all of their losses at the Mortgage Casino and free to go gamble away again. This means we are setting ourselves for this situation to recur over and over, and as long as the public bails out all losses and guarantees all gains, there is zero motivation to be prudent. Wow, isn't neoliberal capitalism a great system!
Incredibly, both parties, from the most liberal of Democrats to the most conservative of Republicans, got in on this bullshit. A particularly horrible feature of the plan that the "liberals" went along with is that there are to be no new regulations whatsoever on the financial industry. Gotta love those liberal Dems!
In this way, corporate criminals get to make all of the money they can with this sort of gambling, but then when they start losing money, you and me have to bail them out. What a bunch of fucking shit!
That's like giving me a credit card to go to the casino and I get to keep all of my winnings and any time I lose money, you all get to pay me back so I can go to the casino tomorrow. I like that deal! Let's set it up now!
*Used sardonically
AIG, one of the world's largest insurance companies, was about to go bankrupt until socialism stepped in, as the Bush Administration bought an 80% stake in the firm. I do support nationalizing huge industrial titans like this that have proven too irresponsible to run a modern company.
AIG went down because they insured the subprime securities that investors bought against going bad. Yes, you can buy insurance on your stocks, bonds, derivatives and other financial crap. Amazing, huh?
It remains to be seen whether an $85 billion bailout of AIG is a good bargain for taxpayers. It seems that we are investing public money in this mountain of AIG's losses, no? How is the public supposed to benefit from this?
AIG investors are now scrambling around trying to figure out a way to pay back that debt in order to ward off a government socialist buyout of 80% of the stock. I do not think that they can do it. AIG is, in my opinion, insolvent. Nor do I think they will have much luck borrowing money from anyone else. Would you loan these losers any money? Get real.
Meanwhile, even after the bailout, AIG's stock is still being pounded into the dirt. I guess that bailout didn't make anyone happier about AIG stock. Everyone exposed to AIG stock in the form of pensions and other funds is scrambling to get out from under the avalanche. Pension funds are suing AIG for wiping out their holdings.
Do you own an AIG insurance policy? That's not worth much, if you ask me. States are now "reassuring" policyholders. I'd be canceling that toxic policy in a New York minute.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I do not agree with the White Nationalist racist argument that niggers* and beaners* blew up the economy.
They apparently got this argument for articles like this Village Voice piece. However, if you read the piece carefully, it does not support the WN argument at all.
Under the cover of anti-racism, Andrew Cuomo and the rest of the Clinton criminals gave the industry what it wanted - loosened regulations on whom they could loan to. "It is also worth remembering that the motive for this bipartisan ownership expansion probably had more to do with the legion of lobbyists working for lenders, brokers, and Wall Street than an effort to walk in MLK's footsteps", as the article notes.
Note that the Bush Republicans did not overturn a single one of Cuomo's "anti-racist" loosening of standards. Furthermore, as I read the article, there was no federal "mandate to loan to more Black and Brown poor people."
This argument makes it seem like Evil Big Government liberals forced prudent bankers to make loans to non-White deadbeats that they knew would go bad, loans that they themselves did not want to make. This is not the case.
The debt was already being sold and resold all over the place, and, as the article notes, even if the borrower defaulted, that was no big deal either, as they would just resell the home. Lots of money to be made all around on every step of the chain, even if the borrower defaults.
The latest insanity, where Joe Public gets to bail out a bunch of gambler criminals, is truly horrible. Basically, you and me will be forced to buy up all this bad debt from a bunch of white collar crooks, debt that is nearly worthless. For this worthless debt, we will fork over $1 trillion for a pile of stinking garbage.
Further, the crooks are absolved of all of their losses at the Mortgage Casino and free to go gamble away again. This means we are setting ourselves for this situation to recur over and over, and as long as the public bails out all losses and guarantees all gains, there is zero motivation to be prudent. Wow, isn't neoliberal capitalism a great system!
Incredibly, both parties, from the most liberal of Democrats to the most conservative of Republicans, got in on this bullshit. A particularly horrible feature of the plan that the "liberals" went along with is that there are to be no new regulations whatsoever on the financial industry. Gotta love those liberal Dems!
In this way, corporate criminals get to make all of the money they can with this sort of gambling, but then when they start losing money, you and me have to bail them out. What a bunch of fucking shit!
That's like giving me a credit card to go to the casino and I get to keep all of my winnings and any time I lose money, you all get to pay me back so I can go to the casino tomorrow. I like that deal! Let's set it up now!
*Used sardonically
Friday, September 19, 2008
How Learning One Language Well Helps You Learn Others
In the comments, the ever-perceptive dano notes:
It helps to learn Greek and Latin roots in English. That way you can pick up more English words that you don't even know just by figuring out roots. Also it helps a lot with Romance languages.
Let's try a little experiment. I know English very well, including many obscure terms, and I am familiar with many Latin roots. I know Spanish fairly well. I know a tiny bit of French and know a few words in Indo-European. With that knowledge, let us see how far that will get me in Venetian, a language I had never heard of before, and Italian, a language I have never been able to make heads or tails of.
Comparison of Venetian and Italian with English, Spanish, French and Indo-European
Venetian gato, Spanish "gato", English "cat"
Venetian grasa, Spanish "grasa", English "gross" fat, corpulent
Venetian qua, Indo-European "kuon", French "chien", English "canine", "hound", dog
Venetian çena, Spanish "cena", dinner
Venetian scóła, Spanish "escuela", English "school"
Venetian bała, Spanish "bala", English "ball"
Venetian pena, English "pen"
Venetian bìsi, English "peas"
Venetian diałeto, Spanish "dialecto ", English "dialect"
Venetian sgnape, English "schnapps"
Venetian scóndar, Spanish "esconder", English, "abscond", to hide, to depart rapidly to avoid persecution
Venetian baxar, Spanish "besar", English "buss", to kiss, kiss
Venetian dormir, Spanish "dormir", English "dormitory", to sleep
Venetian pàre, Spanish "padre", English "patrilineal", father, in the father's family line
Venetian parlar, French "parler", English "parlance", to speak, way of speaking
Venetian scusàr, Spanish "excusar", English "to excuse", to forgive, to excuse
Venetian aver, Spanish "haber", to have, to possess
Venetian essar, Spanish "estar", to be
Venetian sentir, Spanish "sentir", English, "sentiments", to feel, feelings
Venetian venir, Spanish "venir", to come
Venetian cantar, Spanish "cantar", English "cantata", to sing, song
Venetian vaca, Spanish "vaca", cow
Venetian vardar, Spanish "guardar", English "to guard", to look, to guard
Venetian sghiràt, English "squirrel"
Venetian récia, Spanish "orecha"
Venetian plàstega, Spanish "plastica", English "plastic"
Italian forchetta, English "fork"
Italian ratto, Spanish "raton", English "rat"
Italian pipistrello, English "pipistrelle", bat, a type of bat
Italian asino, English "ass", donkey
Venetian mustaci, English "mustache"
Italian io, Spanish "yo", English "I"
Venetian mare, Spanish "madre", mother, English "matriarchal", rule by women
Italian uscita, English, "exit"
Venetian fiól, English "filial", son, relating to a son or daughter
Italian quando, Spanish "cuando", when
Venetian cascàr, English "cascade", to fall, waterfall
Venetian trón, English "throne" chair, king's chair
Venetian bèver, Spanish "beber", English "to imbibe", to drink
Venetian trincàr, English "to drink"
Venetian òcio, Spanish "ojo", English "ocular", eye, of the eye
Venetian morsegàr, English "morsel", to bite, a bite
Venetian nome, Spanish "nombre", English "name"
Venetian solo Spanish "solo", English "solo", only, alone
Venetian grande, Spanish "grande", English "grand" big, great
Italian piccante, Spanish "picante", English "piquant", spicy hot
Venetian calle, Spanish "calle," street
Venetian łéngua, Spanish "lengua", English "language"
Venetian senpre, Spanish "siempre", always
Venetian mar, Spanish "mar", English "maritime", sea, of the sea
Venetian nostre, Spanish "nuestro", our
Venetian vite, Spanish "vida", English, "vital", life, living
Venetian virtuosi, Spanish "virtuoso", English "virtuous"
Venetian serae, Spanish "seria", would be
Venetian spirito, Spanish "espiritu", English "spirit", ghost, spirit
Venetian segura, Spanish "seguro", English "secure", safety, safe
Venetian robar, Spanish "robar", English "to rob", to loot, to steal
Venetian mal, Spanish "mal", English "malevolent", bad, evil-minded
As we can see, there is a huge amount of similarity between Venetian, an obscure language I had never heard of, and Spanish and English. Even the frightening Italian has quite a few Spanish and English cognates. Learning one foreign language, or even learning your own language very well, really does help you to learn even more languages so much more easily. Go ahead and give it a shot!
dano: The thing is, I've found that once you learn to speak a European language, and particularly a Latin-based one, you see similarities in many words across the board and a rough kind of pattern emerges, making it easier to learn more languages.dano is correct - once you learn one Romance language, you can learn many others. Also, the better you know English, the more easily you can learn a Romance language because so many English words have Latin roots. I also know some Proto Indo European knowledge, so I can see roots that go back even farther back than Latin.
It helps to learn Greek and Latin roots in English. That way you can pick up more English words that you don't even know just by figuring out roots. Also it helps a lot with Romance languages.
Let's try a little experiment. I know English very well, including many obscure terms, and I am familiar with many Latin roots. I know Spanish fairly well. I know a tiny bit of French and know a few words in Indo-European. With that knowledge, let us see how far that will get me in Venetian, a language I had never heard of before, and Italian, a language I have never been able to make heads or tails of.
Comparison of Venetian and Italian with English, Spanish, French and Indo-European
Venetian gato, Spanish "gato", English "cat"
Venetian grasa, Spanish "grasa", English "gross" fat, corpulent
Venetian qua, Indo-European "kuon", French "chien", English "canine", "hound", dog
Venetian çena, Spanish "cena", dinner
Venetian scóła, Spanish "escuela", English "school"
Venetian bała, Spanish "bala", English "ball"
Venetian pena, English "pen"
Venetian bìsi, English "peas"
Venetian diałeto, Spanish "dialecto ", English "dialect"
Venetian sgnape, English "schnapps"
Venetian scóndar, Spanish "esconder", English, "abscond", to hide, to depart rapidly to avoid persecution
Venetian baxar, Spanish "besar", English "buss", to kiss, kiss
Venetian dormir, Spanish "dormir", English "dormitory", to sleep
Venetian pàre, Spanish "padre", English "patrilineal", father, in the father's family line
Venetian parlar, French "parler", English "parlance", to speak, way of speaking
Venetian scusàr, Spanish "excusar", English "to excuse", to forgive, to excuse
Venetian aver, Spanish "haber", to have, to possess
Venetian essar, Spanish "estar", to be
Venetian sentir, Spanish "sentir", English, "sentiments", to feel, feelings
Venetian venir, Spanish "venir", to come
Venetian cantar, Spanish "cantar", English "cantata", to sing, song
Venetian vaca, Spanish "vaca", cow
Venetian vardar, Spanish "guardar", English "to guard", to look, to guard
Venetian sghiràt, English "squirrel"
Venetian récia, Spanish "orecha"
Venetian plàstega, Spanish "plastica", English "plastic"
Italian forchetta, English "fork"
Italian ratto, Spanish "raton", English "rat"
Italian pipistrello, English "pipistrelle", bat, a type of bat
Italian asino, English "ass", donkey
Venetian mustaci, English "mustache"
Italian io, Spanish "yo", English "I"
Venetian mare, Spanish "madre", mother, English "matriarchal", rule by women
Italian uscita, English, "exit"
Venetian fiól, English "filial", son, relating to a son or daughter
Italian quando, Spanish "cuando", when
Venetian cascàr, English "cascade", to fall, waterfall
Venetian trón, English "throne" chair, king's chair
Venetian bèver, Spanish "beber", English "to imbibe", to drink
Venetian trincàr, English "to drink"
Venetian òcio, Spanish "ojo", English "ocular", eye, of the eye
Venetian morsegàr, English "morsel", to bite, a bite
Venetian nome, Spanish "nombre", English "name"
Venetian solo Spanish "solo", English "solo", only, alone
Venetian grande, Spanish "grande", English "grand" big, great
Italian piccante, Spanish "picante", English "piquant", spicy hot
Venetian calle, Spanish "calle," street
Venetian łéngua, Spanish "lengua", English "language"
Venetian senpre, Spanish "siempre", always
Venetian mar, Spanish "mar", English "maritime", sea, of the sea
Venetian nostre, Spanish "nuestro", our
Venetian vite, Spanish "vida", English, "vital", life, living
Venetian virtuosi, Spanish "virtuoso", English "virtuous"
Venetian serae, Spanish "seria", would be
Venetian spirito, Spanish "espiritu", English "spirit", ghost, spirit
Venetian segura, Spanish "seguro", English "secure", safety, safe
Venetian robar, Spanish "robar", English "to rob", to loot, to steal
Venetian mal, Spanish "mal", English "malevolent", bad, evil-minded
As we can see, there is a huge amount of similarity between Venetian, an obscure language I had never heard of, and Spanish and English. Even the frightening Italian has quite a few Spanish and English cognates. Learning one foreign language, or even learning your own language very well, really does help you to learn even more languages so much more easily. Go ahead and give it a shot!
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Niggers* and Beaners* Wrecked the Economy and Other BS
It's not just White nationalists who are making this racist argument. The business class has also taken it up. Turns out Bill Clinton blew up the economy by forcing fine upstanding loan sharks to loan to stupid, low IQ, morally depraved, irresponsible Blacks and Hispanics.
I do not agree with this argument, "Blacks and Browns ruined our economy" one bit. For one thing, there is not the tiniest bit of evidence that this is true. Social scientists and journalists, liberal or not, often tell the truth. If Blacks and Hispanics ruined our economy, that's unpleasant to hear to most liberals, but it's going to come out sooner or later, because a lot liberals (like me) would write about it whether it's PC or not.
First of all, the "pressure to loan to Blacks and Browns" thing came in under Clinton around 1992 or so. There was a problem, because entire Black and Brown neighborhoods were redlined as bad credit risk. There were all sorts of creditworthy folks living there, but they could not get a loan because of where they lived.
This was back in the American Middle Ages, 15 years ago, when lenders actually cared whether or not you could repay a loan.
The economy blew up due to subprimes in 2008. There is a horrible time lag there that just does not make sense.
This argument portrays lenders as the good guys who were forced to loan to scummy non-White ghetto types who never intended to pay back their loans.
First of all, the banks were never really involved in any of this from what I can tell. One of the drivers of this whole crazy mess was the farming out of home loans to home loan institutions like Countrywide which were basically run by criminals. The banks washed their hands of the debt because it wasn't getting paid back to them anyway.
The Countrywide folks deliberately made bad debts to noncreditworthy folks because the debt wasn't going to be paid back to them either. Why? They were going to package it and fraudulently sell it to a bunch of sucker victims. Criminal accounting agencies gave the crap mortgage securities AAA ratings so they sold better.
Suckers all over bought the stuff, including I guess a bunch of banks?! Surely, brokerages went up to their necks in buying crap mortgage securities. Then insurance companies like AIG insured the buyers of this crap debt in case it went bad. The whole fraudulent mess blew up, as anyone with any sense knew it would. But when to scammers and fraudsters ever care about the damage they do?
This argument attempts to portray the Countrywide criminals as fine upstanding citizens, forced by Evil Big Government into making loans to deadbeat niggers* and beaners* who anyone knew would never pay back the loans.
That's not true. These guys were deliberately making shit loans because they make like ~$5,000 commission on each one. They sold the debt so they didn't give a damn if it went bad. The more loans the better. Standards were lowered and subprime bullshit was invented to get noncreditworthy folks in the door and put their John Hancock on the loan they could never pay back.
Suckers were fooled about their real ability to pay back the loans - they were told that they would be able to pay back the loans easily, and they fell for it. Hey, scammers and fraudsters are good. They fool all sorts of people, even smart people, all the time. It's not the victim's fault when he's taken by a sociopathic con artist.
Furthermore, it is not up to me to decide whether or not I can pay back a loan.
Me? I'm basically insolvent.
I'd love to have a loan for $20,000, $50K, $100K or however much your fool ass is willing to loan to me.
Of course I can't pay it back.
My credit rating will get wrecked, but if I need the cash, I won't care, and anyway, you will be left holding the bag, and out for $100K or whatever. It's up to you, the lender, to decide if I am a good credit risk or not. One look at my bottom line should send any lender into paroxysms of laughter.
Anyone who makes an extravagant loan to me is an idiot, deserves what they get, and odds are they are going to lose big. Lending institutions used to be sane. Borrowers were examined with a fine tooth comb and run through the gauntlet. Few loans went bad.
When the loan isn't coming back to you anyway, there's zero motive to care about repayability.
That's a recipe for disaster.
Here a smart commenter, turkey, offers a modified theory that offers bits of both theories and seems to make sense. Clintonite neoliberal hucksters used anti-racism as a ruse to allow (Not force, since they wanted to do it anyway!) lenders to lower standards. They tossed in the clincher of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac backing of the crap loans.
This was an era in which both Republicans and Democrats were in on the increasing privatization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Some Clintonite Dem criminals like Franklin Raines made millions off this fraud. Republicans were basically along for the ride. Black and Brown proles were used as suckers and conned into credit-wrecking loans that they could not pay back so huckster-criminals could make a fast buck.
I do not agree with this argument, "Blacks and Browns ruined our economy" one bit. For one thing, there is not the tiniest bit of evidence that this is true. Social scientists and journalists, liberal or not, often tell the truth. If Blacks and Hispanics ruined our economy, that's unpleasant to hear to most liberals, but it's going to come out sooner or later, because a lot liberals (like me) would write about it whether it's PC or not.
First of all, the "pressure to loan to Blacks and Browns" thing came in under Clinton around 1992 or so. There was a problem, because entire Black and Brown neighborhoods were redlined as bad credit risk. There were all sorts of creditworthy folks living there, but they could not get a loan because of where they lived.
This was back in the American Middle Ages, 15 years ago, when lenders actually cared whether or not you could repay a loan.
The economy blew up due to subprimes in 2008. There is a horrible time lag there that just does not make sense.
This argument portrays lenders as the good guys who were forced to loan to scummy non-White ghetto types who never intended to pay back their loans.
First of all, the banks were never really involved in any of this from what I can tell. One of the drivers of this whole crazy mess was the farming out of home loans to home loan institutions like Countrywide which were basically run by criminals. The banks washed their hands of the debt because it wasn't getting paid back to them anyway.
The Countrywide folks deliberately made bad debts to noncreditworthy folks because the debt wasn't going to be paid back to them either. Why? They were going to package it and fraudulently sell it to a bunch of sucker victims. Criminal accounting agencies gave the crap mortgage securities AAA ratings so they sold better.
Suckers all over bought the stuff, including I guess a bunch of banks?! Surely, brokerages went up to their necks in buying crap mortgage securities. Then insurance companies like AIG insured the buyers of this crap debt in case it went bad. The whole fraudulent mess blew up, as anyone with any sense knew it would. But when to scammers and fraudsters ever care about the damage they do?
This argument attempts to portray the Countrywide criminals as fine upstanding citizens, forced by Evil Big Government into making loans to deadbeat niggers* and beaners* who anyone knew would never pay back the loans.
That's not true. These guys were deliberately making shit loans because they make like ~$5,000 commission on each one. They sold the debt so they didn't give a damn if it went bad. The more loans the better. Standards were lowered and subprime bullshit was invented to get noncreditworthy folks in the door and put their John Hancock on the loan they could never pay back.
Suckers were fooled about their real ability to pay back the loans - they were told that they would be able to pay back the loans easily, and they fell for it. Hey, scammers and fraudsters are good. They fool all sorts of people, even smart people, all the time. It's not the victim's fault when he's taken by a sociopathic con artist.
Furthermore, it is not up to me to decide whether or not I can pay back a loan.
Me? I'm basically insolvent.
I'd love to have a loan for $20,000, $50K, $100K or however much your fool ass is willing to loan to me.
Of course I can't pay it back.
My credit rating will get wrecked, but if I need the cash, I won't care, and anyway, you will be left holding the bag, and out for $100K or whatever. It's up to you, the lender, to decide if I am a good credit risk or not. One look at my bottom line should send any lender into paroxysms of laughter.
Anyone who makes an extravagant loan to me is an idiot, deserves what they get, and odds are they are going to lose big. Lending institutions used to be sane. Borrowers were examined with a fine tooth comb and run through the gauntlet. Few loans went bad.
When the loan isn't coming back to you anyway, there's zero motive to care about repayability.
That's a recipe for disaster.
Here a smart commenter, turkey, offers a modified theory that offers bits of both theories and seems to make sense. Clintonite neoliberal hucksters used anti-racism as a ruse to allow (Not force, since they wanted to do it anyway!) lenders to lower standards. They tossed in the clincher of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac backing of the crap loans.
This was an era in which both Republicans and Democrats were in on the increasing privatization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Some Clintonite Dem criminals like Franklin Raines made millions off this fraud. Republicans were basically along for the ride. Black and Brown proles were used as suckers and conned into credit-wrecking loans that they could not pay back so huckster-criminals could make a fast buck.
RL: "There appears to be little evidence to back this up. For many years, banks had different standards for Whites versus non-Whites and many Blacks found it almost impossible to get a home loan no matter how good their credit was."*Used sardonically
turkey: Actually, the VDare top guy (Brimelow) pointed out in a '93 Forbes article that the default rate in the early '90s was the same for blacks and whites, i.e. the mortgage lenders were using correct terms and the market was sane. If blacks were held to unreasonably high standards they'd have had lower default rates than whites.
Instead during the '90s the neoliberal Democrats used race crusading as a ruse to let lenders make quick money off marginal loans often implicitly backed by the government (which they were all champing at the bit to do - this does not excuse them), while seeming to stay on the side of the angels, and Republicans saw the angle and got down in the trough, too.
The default rate differential between whites and black ballooned under the irrational regime. I'm not familiar with the "Hispanic" analogs but there's been so much immigration that it's probably hard to follow.
There's actually a PDF on the net of a response from Fannie Mae propagandists in the early '90s trying to get Brimelow to shut up about their gravy train that you can download. The bullshitting is obvious in hindsight.
So the higher quality of white nationalists are laying some blame on the exploitation of the religion of anti-racism, not on lumpen whites and blacks and mestizos and Amerinds themselves, who shouldn't be blamed for trusting a smiling fixer that said they could have a nice house.
A Look At the Venetian and Friulian Languages
Here we will compare Friulian and Venetian with Italian. The Friulian language is spoken in northeastern Italy. Among Friulian speakers, the language is affectionately known as Marilenghe and is best known from the Udine, the main town of the Friulian zone. It has 794,000 speakers and is in pretty good shape.
Friulian is probably closer to Latin itself than most other Romance languages. There is a close relationship with Ladin and Romansch. Most speakers also speak Standard Italian. In regions of Slovenia bordering Friuli, almost everyone speaks Friulian as a second or third language. Friulian is closer to French than to Italian. Friulian language edition of Wikipedia.
Friulian is in decline. It has lost 18% of its speakers since 1989 and since 1981, there has been a 20% decline in people speaking it to the children. There is one FM station that broadcasts only in Friulian and another station that broadcasts partly. There is only 15 minutes a week on TV in Friulian. There is one monthly magazine. All of these initiatives are private.
This is in contrast to Switzerland, where minority languages are promoted. Since Mussolini, Italy has had a policy to get rid of minority languages in favor of Italian. Only 20 schools have started teaching Friulian, and Italian is used as the vernacular. In Udine, about 40% of street signs are bilingual Friulian and Italian.
This paper analyzes the legal status of Friulian and feels that it is lacking, although a landmark law was passed in Italy in 1999. This law was very controversial, and public opinion in Italy continues to be that regional languages should all give way to Italian.
Venetian is said to be a dialect of the Italian language, but it is actually a completely separate language related more to French than Italian. It is spoken mostly in northeastern Italy in Venice, Trieste and other areas by 2,280,387 people, but the number may actually be up to 3 million. Venetian Wikipedia is here. There is television, radio and magazines in Venetian.
Venetian still lacks a unified orthography, so people just write it however they pronounce their local dialect. That Venetian is closer to French, Catalan, Portuguese and Spanish than to Italian seems outrageous to many people, but apparently it is based on structural similarities. Much of the Italian similarity is probably due to borrowing.
The Venetian cause has been taken up by Northern Italian separatists and has unfortunately become associated with fascist movements. This is ironic since Mussolini tried to stamp out Venetian. Various idiotic ethnic nationalist myths have arisen - that Northern Italians are Celtic (more White) and that Venetian is some kind of Celtic language.
There was a Celtic language spoken in the area some 1,800 years ago, but it has not left much trace on the languages of today. North Italians are not Celtic and Venetian has no relation to Celtic. Venetian is close to the northern Italian languages Piedmontese, Ligurian, Western Lombard , Eastern Lombard and Emiliano-Romagnolo.
The debate over regional languages being "dialects of Italian" was cemented by Mussolini's fascism, which tried to wipe out all regional languages. This feeling is still widespread in Italy today. However, speakers of regional languages refer to such a mindset as "that of the Roman Empire" and those who promote it as fascists.
My English translation is a free literary translation and is not literal or word for word at all. It translates the text into the best possible literary English.
Central (Udine) Friulian
Copiis
Il puar biāt al ą copiāt il Siōr
par dīj: "O soi come tč":
ma il Siōr nol ą copiāt.
Magari chel biāt j ą vuadagnāt,
ma i fīs, daspņ, cetant ąno pajāt
no savint jéssi sé?
Il lōr destin al č, savéso quāl?
Copie de brute copie origjnāl!
Eastern/Coastal (Triestino) Venetian
Copie
Il sempio il gą copią il Sior
par dir "Mi son come ti"
ma il Sior no'l gą copią.
Forsi quel sempio xč divegnudo sior,
ma i fioi, dopo, quanto i gą pagą par
non saver come xe stado?
Savč vł qual xč il loro destin?
copie dela bruta copia original!
Notes: Both Friulian and Venetian are structurally separate languages. It's very difficult to write in Friulian, and very few people know how to do it properly. Venetian is easier to write, and more speakers are able to write it.
Friulian ā is a long a.
Venetian x is the same as English z
Venetian ł resembles the "lh" sound. This sound does not occur in English.
Standard Italian
Il poveretto voleva copiare il Signore
per dire: "Io sono come te',
ma il Signore non ha copiato.
Forse quel poveretto ha guadagnato
ma i figli, dopo, quanto hanno pagato
non sapendo cosa ?
Sapete qual'č il loro destino?
Essere copia dell'originale brutta copia!
Notes: Poveretto: povero di mente: simpleminded fellow
Signore: educated, gentleman
Guadagnato: learned something, got wiser
Pagato: to pay in a moral, education way, to "learn your lesson"
English
The simple man tried to copy the gentleman,
so he could say, "I'm just like you",
but the gentleman could not be copied.
Now, maybe that simple man learned a thing or two,
but how much would his sons, later on, have
to pay for not knowing a thing?
The sons' destiny?
To be a copy of the original rude copy.
Friulian is probably closer to Latin itself than most other Romance languages. There is a close relationship with Ladin and Romansch. Most speakers also speak Standard Italian. In regions of Slovenia bordering Friuli, almost everyone speaks Friulian as a second or third language. Friulian is closer to French than to Italian. Friulian language edition of Wikipedia.
Friulian is in decline. It has lost 18% of its speakers since 1989 and since 1981, there has been a 20% decline in people speaking it to the children. There is one FM station that broadcasts only in Friulian and another station that broadcasts partly. There is only 15 minutes a week on TV in Friulian. There is one monthly magazine. All of these initiatives are private.
This is in contrast to Switzerland, where minority languages are promoted. Since Mussolini, Italy has had a policy to get rid of minority languages in favor of Italian. Only 20 schools have started teaching Friulian, and Italian is used as the vernacular. In Udine, about 40% of street signs are bilingual Friulian and Italian.
This paper analyzes the legal status of Friulian and feels that it is lacking, although a landmark law was passed in Italy in 1999. This law was very controversial, and public opinion in Italy continues to be that regional languages should all give way to Italian.
Venetian is said to be a dialect of the Italian language, but it is actually a completely separate language related more to French than Italian. It is spoken mostly in northeastern Italy in Venice, Trieste and other areas by 2,280,387 people, but the number may actually be up to 3 million. Venetian Wikipedia is here. There is television, radio and magazines in Venetian.
Venetian still lacks a unified orthography, so people just write it however they pronounce their local dialect. That Venetian is closer to French, Catalan, Portuguese and Spanish than to Italian seems outrageous to many people, but apparently it is based on structural similarities. Much of the Italian similarity is probably due to borrowing.
The Venetian cause has been taken up by Northern Italian separatists and has unfortunately become associated with fascist movements. This is ironic since Mussolini tried to stamp out Venetian. Various idiotic ethnic nationalist myths have arisen - that Northern Italians are Celtic (more White) and that Venetian is some kind of Celtic language.
There was a Celtic language spoken in the area some 1,800 years ago, but it has not left much trace on the languages of today. North Italians are not Celtic and Venetian has no relation to Celtic. Venetian is close to the northern Italian languages Piedmontese, Ligurian, Western Lombard , Eastern Lombard and Emiliano-Romagnolo.
The debate over regional languages being "dialects of Italian" was cemented by Mussolini's fascism, which tried to wipe out all regional languages. This feeling is still widespread in Italy today. However, speakers of regional languages refer to such a mindset as "that of the Roman Empire" and those who promote it as fascists.
My English translation is a free literary translation and is not literal or word for word at all. It translates the text into the best possible literary English.
Central (Udine) Friulian
Copiis
Il puar biāt al ą copiāt il Siōr
par dīj: "O soi come tč":
ma il Siōr nol ą copiāt.
Magari chel biāt j ą vuadagnāt,
ma i fīs, daspņ, cetant ąno pajāt
no savint jéssi sé?
Il lōr destin al č, savéso quāl?
Copie de brute copie origjnāl!
Eastern/Coastal (Triestino) Venetian
Copie
Il sempio il gą copią il Sior
par dir "Mi son come ti"
ma il Sior no'l gą copią.
Forsi quel sempio xč divegnudo sior,
ma i fioi, dopo, quanto i gą pagą par
non saver come xe stado?
Savč vł qual xč il loro destin?
copie dela bruta copia original!
Notes: Both Friulian and Venetian are structurally separate languages. It's very difficult to write in Friulian, and very few people know how to do it properly. Venetian is easier to write, and more speakers are able to write it.
Friulian ā is a long a.
Venetian x is the same as English z
Venetian ł resembles the "lh" sound. This sound does not occur in English.
Standard Italian
Il poveretto voleva copiare il Signore
per dire: "Io sono come te',
ma il Signore non ha copiato.
Forse quel poveretto ha guadagnato
ma i figli, dopo, quanto hanno pagato
non sapendo cosa ?
Sapete qual'č il loro destino?
Essere copia dell'originale brutta copia!
Notes: Poveretto: povero di mente: simpleminded fellow
Signore: educated, gentleman
Guadagnato: learned something, got wiser
Pagato: to pay in a moral, education way, to "learn your lesson"
English
The simple man tried to copy the gentleman,
so he could say, "I'm just like you",
but the gentleman could not be copied.
Now, maybe that simple man learned a thing or two,
but how much would his sons, later on, have
to pay for not knowing a thing?
The sons' destiny?
To be a copy of the original rude copy.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Worst Day in a Century For US Financial Markets
Well, Merrill Lynch, one of the biggest, if not the biggest stock brokerages in the US, has gone under. Bank of America bought them out for $50 billion, but if they would not have, Merrill Lynch would have had to file for bankruptcy. At the same time, the huge, 158 year old Lehman Brothers financial firm, the fourth largest in America, has filed for bankruptcy. This venerable firm is apparently history.
30,000 have been laid off around the world and the company has $600 billion (WTH!?) in outstanding debt. There were negotiations between Lehman and Barclays and Bank of America to buy out Lehman, but without guarantees of the US government (taxpayers) taking responsibility for the soaring peaks of bad debt on Lehman's books, no one wants to touch this bad apple with a ten foot pole and an eleven foot extension.
Some are calling the crash of Lehman Brothers the worst day in a century for global financial markets. That was what Alan Greenspan called it.
At the same time, AIG, one of the nation's largest insurance firms and at one point the largest insurance company in the world, is in serious trouble, and its stock is being pounded into the ground. I am not sure what it is up, but apparently they are caught up in the subprime bad housing loans catastrophe.
The Bank of England injected $5 billion into markets to keep them going, and the EU Central Bank pitched in $30 billion for its share.
Some call AIG, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch thetop three names on Wall Street.
If these three go under, billions in pension funds will be zeroed out and banks and financial firms all over the world will be hammered. Washington Mutual, one of the US' largest banks, is also seeing its stock beat up badly, and it is in danger of going under.
Wall Street hemorrhaged an unbelievable 500 points on Monday, September 15. I'm amazed they didn't stop trading. I'm terrified at what tomorrow holds.
The Bush Administration seems to be taking a hands off approach and saying to let these huge firms go under. This is the classic free market evangelical fundamentalist approach and it is one that John McCain is advocating.
McCain is taking the apparently completely insane position that the cure to this chaos and Hell caused by deregulation is even less government. He proposes more tax cuts for wealthy persons and corporations, and this is going to fix the mess up just fine. Even Ayn Randist objectivist and ultra-reactionary Alan Greenspan says that's nuts. Obama promises more socialist regulatory measures as a nostrum, which is what this crisis needs.
McCain also seems to edge towards calling for privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He and Palin wrote an editorial a week ago that called for "downsizing" the two institutions. That's probably a completely disastrous notion. It was wild privatization of everything in sight, including oversight, that caused this whole mess. The Bush Administration's takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was a socialist move, but it was right and proper.
It arguably should have been done long ago. The reason the two institutions got into too much trouble was because it was too private and not public enough, and in the process of becoming more and more private and less and less public.
Both Obama and McCain oppose a bailout of Lehman Brothers. I don't know enough to comment on that. However, Paul Krugman, whom I deeply respect, says that the US government is playing Russian roulette with the financial system.
After Bear Stearns went down six months ago, socialist regulations should have been put in immediately to try to stem the hemorrhage. Instead, the Bush Administration did nothing at all. At the time, Krugman called that move foolhardy. He is looking more and more right, and I don't want him to be.
McCain opposed the Bush Administration's socialist bailout of Bear Stearns. It was painful, but arguably necessary, and inaction would have been much worse. It certainly slowed this crisis down and bought it some time.
At the time, McCain called for less regulation of financial institutions, not more. McCain and Palin both seem to be resolutely and reflexively opposed to more regulation of the financial sector, or even of regulation period. In this way, they are even further to the right of ultra-reactionary George Bush.
McCain-Palin's economic plan, what little we learn of it, sounds really frightening. They would continue the insanity and idiocy of Bush economics and have vowed to actually make things even worse.
I'm no economist, but I'm not sure that's such a good idea. Government bailouts are nasty, but the alternative may well be worse. Anyway, I'm a socialist, and bailouts can be seen as a kind of socialist intervention.
The Bush Administration, and frankly, Republicans for the past 30 years, have created this whole mess. I must admit sadly that "free market Democrats" like Jimmy "Atari Democrat" Carter and Bill "Eisenhower Republican" Clinton had their mitts in this mess too. This is because Democrats have increasingly been adopting radical neoliberalism over the past 30 years, with the predictable results.
But the biggest players have always been Republicans and one of the biggest culprits of all is one of George Bush's and John McCain's best buddies, Phil Gramm of Texas.
Now retired, Gramm is probably responsible more than anyone else for dismantling regulations set up in the wake of the Stock Market Crash of 1929 in order to prevent it from happening again. Many reforms were enacted during the Depression and afterward. It's best to call these socialist reforms because that is what they were.
These socialist reforms tamper the insanities of the free market like lithium smooths the moods of a psychotic bipolar patient. Or another analogy could be a fog layer and an ocean along a seacoast that moderates the weather and produces a nice Mediterranean climate for much of the year.
True, if you love wild swings, you can go inland to the deserts where there is no moderating weather and it's 120 in the daytime and 30 at night.
This is what the capitalists want. Capitalists are basically sick people - they behave like the mentally ill or sex or drug addicts. They are like untreated psychotic bipolar patients who live for the wild manic rides. Capitalists are like a pathological gambler in a casino with a no-limit credit card blazed on coke and downing cocktails. There's no limit to the runs.
The capitalist wants the ability to run up huge profits in crash and burn, live fast die young, boom and bust economics. Neoliberal free market economics is just great for the boom and bust crazies. Like the wasted gambler with the stolen credit card in the casino, the capitalist thinks there's no limits to the run-ups. He keeps going to new tables and doubling down.
You tell him his manic episode is going to crash hard at some point and he turns around to punch you in the face and charges at you like a buffalo as you race out of the building for your life.
With capitalism, as with boys on a playground, adult supervision is necessary. Capitalists need to be supervised by adults called government and socialism. Even Adam Smith himself acknowledged that the unregulated free market was one of the worst evils known to man. He said the free market had to be regulated by the state to prevent total economic chaos. The heirs to Smith's throne seem to have forgotten his books.
They got rid of almost all of the progressive socialist legislation we put in that prevents wild run-ups and Gold Rush style booms but at the same time also dampens down the inevitable free-fall busts that always follow the booms, like day follows night.
It used to be, you went to get a mortgage and if your income was about 1/3 of the mortgage and your credit was good, you got the loan. The bank wanted to make dead sure you were going to pay back the loan so they vetted you carefully. Those days are gone.
In recent years you could get a loan for 7 times your income, and the lenders assumed you would not be able to pay it back. But they didn't care anymore because you weren't even going to pay it back to them.
They took your bullshit loans and packaged them into some bullshit thingies called CDO's, which were some weird investment vehicles made up of thousands of home mortgages, many of which were known to be bad loans. Then they got crooked accountants to mark these crap securities with AAA ratings when all they were were turds with fancy paint all over them.
They then hocked this ripoff fraudulent packages to suckers in the financial world, while claiming they were worth their weight in gold. The deregulations had gotten rid of the notion that investment banks should be separated from consumer banks. There was supposed to be a solid wall between the two, so if one went down, it would not take down the other.
If a financial bank went down, it would not take down consumer banks. When banks were allowed to be both financial and consumer banks, they failed in 1929, causing the Great Depression. This wall, called Glass-Steagall, has been progressively whittled away for many years now to the point where it is about gone.
Republicans, especially Mr. Gramm and his diabolical Dragon Lady Korean wife, were the worst offenders. The destruction of Glass-Steagall is an important reason why we are seeing these financial meltdowns right now. Another reason was the whittling away of standards for home loans. The lending industry has always hated regulations making it so that those who took out loans to buy homes could pay back their loans.
By the 1960's, regulations were in pace that enabled banks to make vast numbers of home loans, very few of which went bad. As the banks itself ate it when the loan went bad, applicants were vetted religiously. This was progressively gutted over the years to the point where loans were given out gleefully to folks who in no sane world should have gotten a loan.
White nationalists have posited a theory (and now pro-business freemarketeers havejumped in) that the subprimes and other bad loans were ordered by the US government eager to get Hispanics and Blacks into home ownership, hence the niggers* and the Mexicans are responsible for the devastation of our economy! Wow, what a breathtakingly audacious theory.
There appears to be little evidence to back this up. For many years, banks had different standards for Whites versus non-Whites and many Blacks found it almost impossible to get a home loan no matter how good their credit was. The Feds started cracking down on this under Clinton 10-15 years ago, and there was no housing crisis then.
The notion that PC Feds pushed poor, innocent, mortgage banker criminals into making bogus loans to irresponsible non-Whites appears false.
The mortgage bankers made lots of money on every loan, so they would practically sign up a German shepherd if one walked in and asked for a loan. The criminals quickly sold the loans in fraudulent packages to poor suckers in financial institutions, so it was out of their hands they didn't care whether it was paid back or not.
True, people took out loans they could not afford, but in a sane society, those loans never get made in the first place. Loan officers criminals were con artists who slickly pitched the loans to ignorant people who had no business being there. They got them in at very low teaser rates and didn't really explain well that the rate was going to go up later on.
The lenders were as low as Nigerian email scammers.
But it's not up to the borrower to determine if he qualifies for a loan, and a borrower is not irresponsible for taking out any loan.
The burden of responsibility in a sane society lies on lenders. If lenders eat it when loans go bad, then they are unlikely to loan to the undeserving, who are shown the door. Blaming Blacks and Browns for this housing collapse is an appalling exercise in White racism.
When the loans went bad, as any idiot knew they would, they pounded financial institutions all over who had bought huge quantities of these crazy things without really knowing what they were getting into. Financial houses poured billions into fools gold securities that disintegrated in front of their eyes to pennies on the dollar.
Soon they were out billions with bills coming in continuously and frankly no money in the drawer to pay any of them. You can only go on for a while like that.
John McCain has had his mitts in this bullshit for about 30 years. He's supported just about every crazy deregulation package that came down the pike. If he ever opposed one, let me know.
Furthermore, McCain was in very, very deep in the same horrible Savings and Loan collapse. He spent much of the 1980's, while prophets were screaming in the wilderness about the doomsday looming S&L mess, barking about the need for fewer and fewer regulations on S&L's. Look what happened.
McCain hasn't learned a Goddamned thing. Here it is, 20 years later, and he's back doing it all over again. He's like a sociopath impervious to punishment.
McCain, the Bush Administration and Republicans in general are overwhelmingly responsible for the collapse of the housing market and the resulting failures and collapses in the financial market, banks and insurance companies. Democrats are also responsible, but much less so, and hardcore liberals like Obama probably have little dirt on them.
John McCain now says he's coming in as a "maverick" and he's going to flip and change 30 years of deregulation mania as he becomes some kind of born-again reformer. Just as Bush ran as a "compassionate conservative in 2000, when he had many years in office proving the opposite, McCain's record speaks for itself. McCain the socialist big government regulator? Get real.
*used sardonically
30,000 have been laid off around the world and the company has $600 billion (WTH!?) in outstanding debt. There were negotiations between Lehman and Barclays and Bank of America to buy out Lehman, but without guarantees of the US government (taxpayers) taking responsibility for the soaring peaks of bad debt on Lehman's books, no one wants to touch this bad apple with a ten foot pole and an eleven foot extension.
Some are calling the crash of Lehman Brothers the worst day in a century for global financial markets. That was what Alan Greenspan called it.
At the same time, AIG, one of the nation's largest insurance firms and at one point the largest insurance company in the world, is in serious trouble, and its stock is being pounded into the ground. I am not sure what it is up, but apparently they are caught up in the subprime bad housing loans catastrophe.
The Bank of England injected $5 billion into markets to keep them going, and the EU Central Bank pitched in $30 billion for its share.
Some call AIG, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch thetop three names on Wall Street.
If these three go under, billions in pension funds will be zeroed out and banks and financial firms all over the world will be hammered. Washington Mutual, one of the US' largest banks, is also seeing its stock beat up badly, and it is in danger of going under.
Wall Street hemorrhaged an unbelievable 500 points on Monday, September 15. I'm amazed they didn't stop trading. I'm terrified at what tomorrow holds.
The Bush Administration seems to be taking a hands off approach and saying to let these huge firms go under. This is the classic free market evangelical fundamentalist approach and it is one that John McCain is advocating.
McCain is taking the apparently completely insane position that the cure to this chaos and Hell caused by deregulation is even less government. He proposes more tax cuts for wealthy persons and corporations, and this is going to fix the mess up just fine. Even Ayn Randist objectivist and ultra-reactionary Alan Greenspan says that's nuts. Obama promises more socialist regulatory measures as a nostrum, which is what this crisis needs.
McCain also seems to edge towards calling for privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He and Palin wrote an editorial a week ago that called for "downsizing" the two institutions. That's probably a completely disastrous notion. It was wild privatization of everything in sight, including oversight, that caused this whole mess. The Bush Administration's takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was a socialist move, but it was right and proper.
It arguably should have been done long ago. The reason the two institutions got into too much trouble was because it was too private and not public enough, and in the process of becoming more and more private and less and less public.
Both Obama and McCain oppose a bailout of Lehman Brothers. I don't know enough to comment on that. However, Paul Krugman, whom I deeply respect, says that the US government is playing Russian roulette with the financial system.
After Bear Stearns went down six months ago, socialist regulations should have been put in immediately to try to stem the hemorrhage. Instead, the Bush Administration did nothing at all. At the time, Krugman called that move foolhardy. He is looking more and more right, and I don't want him to be.
McCain opposed the Bush Administration's socialist bailout of Bear Stearns. It was painful, but arguably necessary, and inaction would have been much worse. It certainly slowed this crisis down and bought it some time.
At the time, McCain called for less regulation of financial institutions, not more. McCain and Palin both seem to be resolutely and reflexively opposed to more regulation of the financial sector, or even of regulation period. In this way, they are even further to the right of ultra-reactionary George Bush.
McCain-Palin's economic plan, what little we learn of it, sounds really frightening. They would continue the insanity and idiocy of Bush economics and have vowed to actually make things even worse.
I'm no economist, but I'm not sure that's such a good idea. Government bailouts are nasty, but the alternative may well be worse. Anyway, I'm a socialist, and bailouts can be seen as a kind of socialist intervention.
The Bush Administration, and frankly, Republicans for the past 30 years, have created this whole mess. I must admit sadly that "free market Democrats" like Jimmy "Atari Democrat" Carter and Bill "Eisenhower Republican" Clinton had their mitts in this mess too. This is because Democrats have increasingly been adopting radical neoliberalism over the past 30 years, with the predictable results.
But the biggest players have always been Republicans and one of the biggest culprits of all is one of George Bush's and John McCain's best buddies, Phil Gramm of Texas.
Now retired, Gramm is probably responsible more than anyone else for dismantling regulations set up in the wake of the Stock Market Crash of 1929 in order to prevent it from happening again. Many reforms were enacted during the Depression and afterward. It's best to call these socialist reforms because that is what they were.
These socialist reforms tamper the insanities of the free market like lithium smooths the moods of a psychotic bipolar patient. Or another analogy could be a fog layer and an ocean along a seacoast that moderates the weather and produces a nice Mediterranean climate for much of the year.
True, if you love wild swings, you can go inland to the deserts where there is no moderating weather and it's 120 in the daytime and 30 at night.
This is what the capitalists want. Capitalists are basically sick people - they behave like the mentally ill or sex or drug addicts. They are like untreated psychotic bipolar patients who live for the wild manic rides. Capitalists are like a pathological gambler in a casino with a no-limit credit card blazed on coke and downing cocktails. There's no limit to the runs.
The capitalist wants the ability to run up huge profits in crash and burn, live fast die young, boom and bust economics. Neoliberal free market economics is just great for the boom and bust crazies. Like the wasted gambler with the stolen credit card in the casino, the capitalist thinks there's no limits to the run-ups. He keeps going to new tables and doubling down.
You tell him his manic episode is going to crash hard at some point and he turns around to punch you in the face and charges at you like a buffalo as you race out of the building for your life.
With capitalism, as with boys on a playground, adult supervision is necessary. Capitalists need to be supervised by adults called government and socialism. Even Adam Smith himself acknowledged that the unregulated free market was one of the worst evils known to man. He said the free market had to be regulated by the state to prevent total economic chaos. The heirs to Smith's throne seem to have forgotten his books.
They got rid of almost all of the progressive socialist legislation we put in that prevents wild run-ups and Gold Rush style booms but at the same time also dampens down the inevitable free-fall busts that always follow the booms, like day follows night.
It used to be, you went to get a mortgage and if your income was about 1/3 of the mortgage and your credit was good, you got the loan. The bank wanted to make dead sure you were going to pay back the loan so they vetted you carefully. Those days are gone.
In recent years you could get a loan for 7 times your income, and the lenders assumed you would not be able to pay it back. But they didn't care anymore because you weren't even going to pay it back to them.
They took your bullshit loans and packaged them into some bullshit thingies called CDO's, which were some weird investment vehicles made up of thousands of home mortgages, many of which were known to be bad loans. Then they got crooked accountants to mark these crap securities with AAA ratings when all they were were turds with fancy paint all over them.
They then hocked this ripoff fraudulent packages to suckers in the financial world, while claiming they were worth their weight in gold. The deregulations had gotten rid of the notion that investment banks should be separated from consumer banks. There was supposed to be a solid wall between the two, so if one went down, it would not take down the other.
If a financial bank went down, it would not take down consumer banks. When banks were allowed to be both financial and consumer banks, they failed in 1929, causing the Great Depression. This wall, called Glass-Steagall, has been progressively whittled away for many years now to the point where it is about gone.
Republicans, especially Mr. Gramm and his diabolical Dragon Lady Korean wife, were the worst offenders. The destruction of Glass-Steagall is an important reason why we are seeing these financial meltdowns right now. Another reason was the whittling away of standards for home loans. The lending industry has always hated regulations making it so that those who took out loans to buy homes could pay back their loans.
By the 1960's, regulations were in pace that enabled banks to make vast numbers of home loans, very few of which went bad. As the banks itself ate it when the loan went bad, applicants were vetted religiously. This was progressively gutted over the years to the point where loans were given out gleefully to folks who in no sane world should have gotten a loan.
White nationalists have posited a theory (and now pro-business freemarketeers havejumped in) that the subprimes and other bad loans were ordered by the US government eager to get Hispanics and Blacks into home ownership, hence the niggers* and the Mexicans are responsible for the devastation of our economy! Wow, what a breathtakingly audacious theory.
There appears to be little evidence to back this up. For many years, banks had different standards for Whites versus non-Whites and many Blacks found it almost impossible to get a home loan no matter how good their credit was. The Feds started cracking down on this under Clinton 10-15 years ago, and there was no housing crisis then.
The notion that PC Feds pushed poor, innocent, mortgage banker criminals into making bogus loans to irresponsible non-Whites appears false.
The mortgage bankers made lots of money on every loan, so they would practically sign up a German shepherd if one walked in and asked for a loan. The criminals quickly sold the loans in fraudulent packages to poor suckers in financial institutions, so it was out of their hands they didn't care whether it was paid back or not.
True, people took out loans they could not afford, but in a sane society, those loans never get made in the first place. Loan officers criminals were con artists who slickly pitched the loans to ignorant people who had no business being there. They got them in at very low teaser rates and didn't really explain well that the rate was going to go up later on.
The lenders were as low as Nigerian email scammers.
But it's not up to the borrower to determine if he qualifies for a loan, and a borrower is not irresponsible for taking out any loan.
The burden of responsibility in a sane society lies on lenders. If lenders eat it when loans go bad, then they are unlikely to loan to the undeserving, who are shown the door. Blaming Blacks and Browns for this housing collapse is an appalling exercise in White racism.
When the loans went bad, as any idiot knew they would, they pounded financial institutions all over who had bought huge quantities of these crazy things without really knowing what they were getting into. Financial houses poured billions into fools gold securities that disintegrated in front of their eyes to pennies on the dollar.
Soon they were out billions with bills coming in continuously and frankly no money in the drawer to pay any of them. You can only go on for a while like that.
John McCain has had his mitts in this bullshit for about 30 years. He's supported just about every crazy deregulation package that came down the pike. If he ever opposed one, let me know.
Furthermore, McCain was in very, very deep in the same horrible Savings and Loan collapse. He spent much of the 1980's, while prophets were screaming in the wilderness about the doomsday looming S&L mess, barking about the need for fewer and fewer regulations on S&L's. Look what happened.
McCain hasn't learned a Goddamned thing. Here it is, 20 years later, and he's back doing it all over again. He's like a sociopath impervious to punishment.
McCain, the Bush Administration and Republicans in general are overwhelmingly responsible for the collapse of the housing market and the resulting failures and collapses in the financial market, banks and insurance companies. Democrats are also responsible, but much less so, and hardcore liberals like Obama probably have little dirt on them.
John McCain now says he's coming in as a "maverick" and he's going to flip and change 30 years of deregulation mania as he becomes some kind of born-again reformer. Just as Bush ran as a "compassionate conservative in 2000, when he had many years in office proving the opposite, McCain's record speaks for itself. McCain the socialist big government regulator? Get real.
*used sardonically
Monday, September 15, 2008
An Antiwar Polemic Against America's Wars
Commenter James Schipper makes the following comments, first about the US war against Japan in World War 2, and then about all US wars since the War of 1812, which he regards as a necessary war of self-defense. Schipper is a Canadian.
My perspective is different. I did support the war against the Axis in World War 2. My feelings are much more mixed on World War 1. The Spanish-American War and the Mexican War were obviously wars of imperialism. The Civil War may have been justified, if only to free the slaves. My relatives fought on both sides of the War Between the States. Of course, I supported the Union in that war.
I'm agnostic on the Revolutionary War, though cynically I would argue that we have been an imperial power ever since, and seem to have opposed every single anti-colonial war since our own Revolution! Disgusting!
The interventions in Central America and the Caribbean were sheer imperialism. The Wars on Panama and Grenada were preposterous. Iraq War 1 may have been justified to get rid of Saddam. I supported the war against the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosova. The intervention in Somalia was well-intentioned.
The latest Iraq War was one of the most criminal undertakings since the Spanish-American War. The war in Afghanistan may have been justified. Even though I'm a Marxist, the Korean War may have been justified since North Korea did invade South Korea. The Vietnam War and resulting wars in Laos and Cambodia were unnecessary.
Anyway, I thought I would give some space to an anti-war and anti-imperialist point of view. I do support the anti-imperialist argument. Pace Frantz Fanon, imperial powers never relinquish empire until they spill a lot of blood. Sad but true.
James Schipper:
First, Pearl Harbor didn't come as a bolt from the blue. It followed American economic sanctions against Japan and failed attempts at negotiations. The Roosevelt government had put the knife at Japan's throat. The Japanese had two options left: go to war or renounce their emperor. Predictably, they chose the first.
What is amazing in all this is how important American leaders considered access to the pitifully small Chinese market to be. From 1949 to 1975, the Chinese market was hermetically closed to the US, without noticeable ill effects on the American economy.
Second, Japan behaved in exactly the same way with Russia in 1905. After negotiations had broken down, Japan carried out a surprise attack on the Russian fleet in Vladivostok and sank it. Somehow it is not remembered as the Day of Infamy.
Third, American wars since the War of Secession have not been very bloody because they were fought far away from American territory. In the War of Secession, about 2% of the American population perished. Proportionally, that would be 6 million today.
Fourth, every war which the US fought since 1812 was a war of choice. There was no immediate threat to the US and certainly no attack on American territory. It wasn't as if the US had its back to the wall and had to choose between fighting or being overrun.
Fifth, when the aim of war becomes unconditional surrender, the Clausewitzian dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means is inverted and politics becomes the continuation of war by other means.
Sixth, the aim of war should not be victory but a better peace. Victory in war is rather ambiguous. It is much more useful to think in terms of costs and benefits. The expected benefits of war should exceed the probable costs. If the costs of war exceed the benefits, victory is pointless. It is like recovering a debt of $2000 through a lawsuit that costs $5000.
Seventh, one of my pet distinctions is between a national defeat and an imperial defeat. A national defeat involves having to accept undesirable terms from the enemy. An imperial defeat means a failure to impose one's will on the enemy without having to accept his terms. For instance, in 1940 the French suffered a national defeat. In 1954 they suffered an imperial defeat in Vietnam. Which was worse?
Imperial defeat is a blessing in disguise. It means that the imperial power, whose security is not threatened by the enemy, can go home. What harm did the Americans suffer from their imperial defeat in Vietnam, the French from their imperial in Vietnam or Algeria, the Dutch from theirs in Indonesia, the Portuguese from theirs in Angola in Mozambique?
In all those cases, the imperial power only benefited from the end of the war. It meant the end of loss of life and waste of money.
Down with imperialism.
My perspective is different. I did support the war against the Axis in World War 2. My feelings are much more mixed on World War 1. The Spanish-American War and the Mexican War were obviously wars of imperialism. The Civil War may have been justified, if only to free the slaves. My relatives fought on both sides of the War Between the States. Of course, I supported the Union in that war.
I'm agnostic on the Revolutionary War, though cynically I would argue that we have been an imperial power ever since, and seem to have opposed every single anti-colonial war since our own Revolution! Disgusting!
The interventions in Central America and the Caribbean were sheer imperialism. The Wars on Panama and Grenada were preposterous. Iraq War 1 may have been justified to get rid of Saddam. I supported the war against the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosova. The intervention in Somalia was well-intentioned.
The latest Iraq War was one of the most criminal undertakings since the Spanish-American War. The war in Afghanistan may have been justified. Even though I'm a Marxist, the Korean War may have been justified since North Korea did invade South Korea. The Vietnam War and resulting wars in Laos and Cambodia were unnecessary.
Anyway, I thought I would give some space to an anti-war and anti-imperialist point of view. I do support the anti-imperialist argument. Pace Frantz Fanon, imperial powers never relinquish empire until they spill a lot of blood. Sad but true.
James Schipper:
First, Pearl Harbor didn't come as a bolt from the blue. It followed American economic sanctions against Japan and failed attempts at negotiations. The Roosevelt government had put the knife at Japan's throat. The Japanese had two options left: go to war or renounce their emperor. Predictably, they chose the first.
What is amazing in all this is how important American leaders considered access to the pitifully small Chinese market to be. From 1949 to 1975, the Chinese market was hermetically closed to the US, without noticeable ill effects on the American economy.
Second, Japan behaved in exactly the same way with Russia in 1905. After negotiations had broken down, Japan carried out a surprise attack on the Russian fleet in Vladivostok and sank it. Somehow it is not remembered as the Day of Infamy.
Third, American wars since the War of Secession have not been very bloody because they were fought far away from American territory. In the War of Secession, about 2% of the American population perished. Proportionally, that would be 6 million today.
Fourth, every war which the US fought since 1812 was a war of choice. There was no immediate threat to the US and certainly no attack on American territory. It wasn't as if the US had its back to the wall and had to choose between fighting or being overrun.
Fifth, when the aim of war becomes unconditional surrender, the Clausewitzian dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means is inverted and politics becomes the continuation of war by other means.
Sixth, the aim of war should not be victory but a better peace. Victory in war is rather ambiguous. It is much more useful to think in terms of costs and benefits. The expected benefits of war should exceed the probable costs. If the costs of war exceed the benefits, victory is pointless. It is like recovering a debt of $2000 through a lawsuit that costs $5000.
Seventh, one of my pet distinctions is between a national defeat and an imperial defeat. A national defeat involves having to accept undesirable terms from the enemy. An imperial defeat means a failure to impose one's will on the enemy without having to accept his terms. For instance, in 1940 the French suffered a national defeat. In 1954 they suffered an imperial defeat in Vietnam. Which was worse?
Imperial defeat is a blessing in disguise. It means that the imperial power, whose security is not threatened by the enemy, can go home. What harm did the Americans suffer from their imperial defeat in Vietnam, the French from their imperial in Vietnam or Algeria, the Dutch from theirs in Indonesia, the Portuguese from theirs in Angola in Mozambique?
In all those cases, the imperial power only benefited from the end of the war. It meant the end of loss of life and waste of money.
Down with imperialism.
The Deadly Cure For US War Hubris and Jingoism
James Schipper, in the comments threads, notes that before the planned invasion of Japan, the island nation was surrounded by US mines and submarines and could not import anything. I note that civilians were down to rations of 800 calories or so a day, and the military on little more. The nation as a fighting force was through.
Schipper also feels that the US war with the Japan was ridiculous. Problem is that here in the US, those are practically fighting words. Almost all Americans think we had to fight Japan, if only because of Pearl Harbor. This even includes most White nationalists, almost zero of whom supported fighting Hitler.
Foreigners underestimate the ferocious patriotism or even jingoism of the American people. Europeans seem to be far less patriotic or jingoistic than Americans. This is one of the defining features of the American, or I should say, of the White American. Black Americans are much less into this wild blind patriotism stuff. I'm not sure about Hispanics. I would suspect that they are less jingoistic than US Whites.
Schipper also notes that it was preposterous of the US to demand unconditional surrender. But this is part of the US game. We always demand unconditional surrender. The only times we don't is when we are stuck in some quagmire, and the war is unwinnable.
In addition, after a war, we often don't pay to fix up the country. For instance, we have not given one red cent to Vietnam for all the horrible environmental damage we have caused that poor nation. It's due to sour grapes because we were not able to defeat them in that war. Nor to Laos, Cambodia or North Korea.
True, we rebuilt Germany and Japan, but that's because they were soundly defeated. In addition, that was a much more reasonable era to be an American. Americans in 1948 were a much more decent lot than these nasty, creepy beasts we have morphed into in 2008.
I don't think Americans in their current nastiness would rebuild any country they wrecked with a war.
We spent tens of millions of dollars "rebuilding" Iraq, and it was a complete failure. It was a cynical Third World style corruption gravy train that sucked money from US taxpayers to pour into the pockets of US corporate criminals on no-bid joke contracts.
The crooks either stole the money outright and did no work at all, or did shitty work, walked away from their collapsing buildings and laughed all the way to the bank. That Americans are so lame that they are going to elect someone who was in on this scam from the start, John McCain, is outrageous.
Do you think we will spend one nickel cleaning up all this horrible depleted uranium pollution we have spewed all over Iraq? We haven't even cleaned up our DU mess in Serbia.
American hubris is so horrible that we go completely nuts whenever we "lose" or at least do not completely win a war. That is why it is so hard to pull out of Iraq. Americans simply can't hack the idea. Americans will literally stay in that stupid country for 5-10+ more years, our young men getting hacked up every single day, just so we don't "lose", or "not win", or however they see it.
Some friends of mine just got back from a patriotic concert put on by the US Armed Forces in Fresno. Even though I'm supposed to be an America-hater, I love going to these things. The local army unit in Iraq is there and you get to talk to them. They have all the vets in the audience stand up for each service and my Dad wobbles to his feet.
At this one, I am told that they had a screen presentation of all of the local soldiers (not sure of the area covered) who got killed - not just wounded, but killed - in Iraq. My friend said it was heartbreaking. It seemed to go on and on forever, and as she said, "It seemed like there were hundreds of them, and they were all so young." So much for "the surge is working, let's stay in Iraq for 100 years, God is calling us to Iraq" triumphalist crap.
The reason we are still in Iraq is because not enough Americans have been killed and wounded there. Americans are so self-centered that they only care about wars when lots of soldiers start getting killed or coming back wounded.
When questioned about war crimes in World War 2, my older friends and relatives get very defensive. They say that during WW2, there were these star designs you hung in your window if you had someone in the services overseas or if you lost someone in the war.
Blue star for someone in the service; gold star for someone dead in the war. You would drive around Chicago and see these blue stars everywhere. And on nearly every single street, one or more gold stars.
Get that? On every street, someone had lost a male family member in the war.
Every single day in the paper, they would list the casualties. Every day there were 70-80 new ones. The whole nation was in mourning all the time. It never seemed to end. People were sick and tired of all the dying and were getting very angry. They wanted it over and right now.
So you saw firebombing in Germany and Japan and atom bombs on Japan. I'm not trying to defend this stuff - just showing you the tremendous pain that drove these crimes. I don't think we did because we were a bunch of sadists.
Korea was a similar deal. There were ~32,00 Americans dead in only three years. That's worse than Vietnam on a per year basis.
In Vietnam too, the pain was obvious. There were 30 or so guys dying every single day at the peak. There were wounded coming back all the time, limping around or in wheelchairs. You could not avoid them - they were shoved into your face on the streets you walked.
I remember at the height of the war, Time Magazine ran a whole issue with about 200-250 guys who got killed that week, and it freaked out the whole damn country. There were two or three guys on every page with a little something about them. It put faces and lives on the names and numbers.
Unless Americans sustain heavy duty casualties, their pride will keep them in the most idiotic and insane wars almost forever. This Iraq War won't end until Americans really start feeling some real pain over it, as in the pain of death and injuries.
It's sad but true.
Schipper also feels that the US war with the Japan was ridiculous. Problem is that here in the US, those are practically fighting words. Almost all Americans think we had to fight Japan, if only because of Pearl Harbor. This even includes most White nationalists, almost zero of whom supported fighting Hitler.
Foreigners underestimate the ferocious patriotism or even jingoism of the American people. Europeans seem to be far less patriotic or jingoistic than Americans. This is one of the defining features of the American, or I should say, of the White American. Black Americans are much less into this wild blind patriotism stuff. I'm not sure about Hispanics. I would suspect that they are less jingoistic than US Whites.
Schipper also notes that it was preposterous of the US to demand unconditional surrender. But this is part of the US game. We always demand unconditional surrender. The only times we don't is when we are stuck in some quagmire, and the war is unwinnable.
In addition, after a war, we often don't pay to fix up the country. For instance, we have not given one red cent to Vietnam for all the horrible environmental damage we have caused that poor nation. It's due to sour grapes because we were not able to defeat them in that war. Nor to Laos, Cambodia or North Korea.
True, we rebuilt Germany and Japan, but that's because they were soundly defeated. In addition, that was a much more reasonable era to be an American. Americans in 1948 were a much more decent lot than these nasty, creepy beasts we have morphed into in 2008.
I don't think Americans in their current nastiness would rebuild any country they wrecked with a war.
We spent tens of millions of dollars "rebuilding" Iraq, and it was a complete failure. It was a cynical Third World style corruption gravy train that sucked money from US taxpayers to pour into the pockets of US corporate criminals on no-bid joke contracts.
The crooks either stole the money outright and did no work at all, or did shitty work, walked away from their collapsing buildings and laughed all the way to the bank. That Americans are so lame that they are going to elect someone who was in on this scam from the start, John McCain, is outrageous.
Do you think we will spend one nickel cleaning up all this horrible depleted uranium pollution we have spewed all over Iraq? We haven't even cleaned up our DU mess in Serbia.
American hubris is so horrible that we go completely nuts whenever we "lose" or at least do not completely win a war. That is why it is so hard to pull out of Iraq. Americans simply can't hack the idea. Americans will literally stay in that stupid country for 5-10+ more years, our young men getting hacked up every single day, just so we don't "lose", or "not win", or however they see it.
Some friends of mine just got back from a patriotic concert put on by the US Armed Forces in Fresno. Even though I'm supposed to be an America-hater, I love going to these things. The local army unit in Iraq is there and you get to talk to them. They have all the vets in the audience stand up for each service and my Dad wobbles to his feet.
At this one, I am told that they had a screen presentation of all of the local soldiers (not sure of the area covered) who got killed - not just wounded, but killed - in Iraq. My friend said it was heartbreaking. It seemed to go on and on forever, and as she said, "It seemed like there were hundreds of them, and they were all so young." So much for "the surge is working, let's stay in Iraq for 100 years, God is calling us to Iraq" triumphalist crap.
The reason we are still in Iraq is because not enough Americans have been killed and wounded there. Americans are so self-centered that they only care about wars when lots of soldiers start getting killed or coming back wounded.
When questioned about war crimes in World War 2, my older friends and relatives get very defensive. They say that during WW2, there were these star designs you hung in your window if you had someone in the services overseas or if you lost someone in the war.
Blue star for someone in the service; gold star for someone dead in the war. You would drive around Chicago and see these blue stars everywhere. And on nearly every single street, one or more gold stars.
Get that? On every street, someone had lost a male family member in the war.
Every single day in the paper, they would list the casualties. Every day there were 70-80 new ones. The whole nation was in mourning all the time. It never seemed to end. People were sick and tired of all the dying and were getting very angry. They wanted it over and right now.
So you saw firebombing in Germany and Japan and atom bombs on Japan. I'm not trying to defend this stuff - just showing you the tremendous pain that drove these crimes. I don't think we did because we were a bunch of sadists.
Korea was a similar deal. There were ~32,00 Americans dead in only three years. That's worse than Vietnam on a per year basis.
In Vietnam too, the pain was obvious. There were 30 or so guys dying every single day at the peak. There were wounded coming back all the time, limping around or in wheelchairs. You could not avoid them - they were shoved into your face on the streets you walked.
I remember at the height of the war, Time Magazine ran a whole issue with about 200-250 guys who got killed that week, and it freaked out the whole damn country. There were two or three guys on every page with a little something about them. It put faces and lives on the names and numbers.
Unless Americans sustain heavy duty casualties, their pride will keep them in the most idiotic and insane wars almost forever. This Iraq War won't end until Americans really start feeling some real pain over it, as in the pain of death and injuries.
It's sad but true.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Drill, Drill, Drill!
This is the classic Republican campaign. Gas prices are very high, probably to a great deal due to George Bush's reckless militarism in invading Iraq and then threatening Iran, and so the Republicans hope to turn this into...even more of a windfall for the oil companies.
Apologists for the oil companies love to point out that the oil companies are not behind the skyrocketing prices. Fair enough, but the oil companies are indeed generating record profits in the midst of skyrocketing prices! Skyrocketing oil prices = skyrocketing oil company profits! Nice equation, huh?
It is so despicable and cynical for the Republicans to play politics with this bullshit. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and many other top Bush Administration officials are all oil company hacks going way back. John McCain is in deep with oil companies and Sarah Palin is more or less married to oil companies.
Listen up fools. Do you get it? Record gas prices = record oil company profits. What's not to love. The Republican Party is the party of the oil companies, so massive run-ups in gas prices are good times! Got it? Bush, Cheney, Condi, Palin and McCain are digging these high oil prices! Their babies, the oil companies, are swimming in money. And they're all so rich, they don't care about price at the pump anyway. The higher the better.
So, while the Republican Party obviously swoons over high gasoline prices, at the same time, the morons who support them are hopping mad about these same skyrocketing prices at the pump. The idiots can't figure out that their beloved Republican Party loves gas price run-ups and is laughing all the way to the bank. They're mad about gas prices, and they're voting Republican! They're typical retarded American White people!
So the Republican Party decides to play to the idiots. They pretend to be all concerned about the gas price run-ups. The way to lower the pump price (Which is bad for oil companies, so it's bad for the Republican Party) is to drill, drill, drill!
Wait a minute. Gas prices anymore have nothing to do with supply and demand. It's all just crazy market-driven speculation. The price at the pump just dropped dramatically in the past two months. What happened? Changes in supply and demand fundamentals? Course not! Nothing has changed. What changed? The mood of the speculators on the world's two oil bourses, one in New York and the other in London.
Lately, Republican phony liars like Newt Gingrich have come out against the evil speculators! They don't care anything about speculators, and most Republicans got rich through some speculative bullshit anyway. But hey, it plays good to the White idiots!
If we drill, drill, drill, drill, all over the US, it's going to...? Whoa! So flood the market with crude, it's going to, like, force the evil speculators to lower oil prices! Oh yeah! Never mind that you can't force a speculator to do anything. Never mind that declining gas prices are bad for oil companies and bad for Republican oil plutocrats. It's time to play politics with moronic Americans!
The latest thing is to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Palin and all of Alaska wants this because their oil checks will increase. By the year 2022, the oil from ANWR will finally come onto the market. And...it's possible...that all that oil...could lower the price of gas by, like, 4-5 cents a gallon. Wow! Or maybe it won't. No one knows, because oil prices have nothing to do with supply-demand fundamentals.
But it sounds so simple, huh? Wallet-killing prices at the pump? Solution? Drill, drill, drill. That will lower the prices, right? Not necessarily. Maybe not by even one penny. But it sounds so logical to your average fool.
What will drill, drill, drill do? Make beau-coup bucks for oil companies and their sleazy Republican agents. Great. Let's all line up behind that. I'm White! I'm dumb! I'm voting Republican! Oh yeah!
Here's all the land that is open to the oil companies that they are refusing to drill on for some insipid reason. Why are they refusing to drill on this land? I have no idea! Maybe someone who can figure out what's going on can explain this nonsense. There's tons of land open to oil companies, but they are refusing to drill on it. Instead, they want to open up lands that are forbidden to them. Doesn't make sense. Someone explain this one to me?
Apologists for the oil companies love to point out that the oil companies are not behind the skyrocketing prices. Fair enough, but the oil companies are indeed generating record profits in the midst of skyrocketing prices! Skyrocketing oil prices = skyrocketing oil company profits! Nice equation, huh?
It is so despicable and cynical for the Republicans to play politics with this bullshit. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and many other top Bush Administration officials are all oil company hacks going way back. John McCain is in deep with oil companies and Sarah Palin is more or less married to oil companies.
Listen up fools. Do you get it? Record gas prices = record oil company profits. What's not to love. The Republican Party is the party of the oil companies, so massive run-ups in gas prices are good times! Got it? Bush, Cheney, Condi, Palin and McCain are digging these high oil prices! Their babies, the oil companies, are swimming in money. And they're all so rich, they don't care about price at the pump anyway. The higher the better.
So, while the Republican Party obviously swoons over high gasoline prices, at the same time, the morons who support them are hopping mad about these same skyrocketing prices at the pump. The idiots can't figure out that their beloved Republican Party loves gas price run-ups and is laughing all the way to the bank. They're mad about gas prices, and they're voting Republican! They're typical retarded American White people!
So the Republican Party decides to play to the idiots. They pretend to be all concerned about the gas price run-ups. The way to lower the pump price (Which is bad for oil companies, so it's bad for the Republican Party) is to drill, drill, drill!
Wait a minute. Gas prices anymore have nothing to do with supply and demand. It's all just crazy market-driven speculation. The price at the pump just dropped dramatically in the past two months. What happened? Changes in supply and demand fundamentals? Course not! Nothing has changed. What changed? The mood of the speculators on the world's two oil bourses, one in New York and the other in London.
Lately, Republican phony liars like Newt Gingrich have come out against the evil speculators! They don't care anything about speculators, and most Republicans got rich through some speculative bullshit anyway. But hey, it plays good to the White idiots!
If we drill, drill, drill, drill, all over the US, it's going to...? Whoa! So flood the market with crude, it's going to, like, force the evil speculators to lower oil prices! Oh yeah! Never mind that you can't force a speculator to do anything. Never mind that declining gas prices are bad for oil companies and bad for Republican oil plutocrats. It's time to play politics with moronic Americans!
The latest thing is to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Palin and all of Alaska wants this because their oil checks will increase. By the year 2022, the oil from ANWR will finally come onto the market. And...it's possible...that all that oil...could lower the price of gas by, like, 4-5 cents a gallon. Wow! Or maybe it won't. No one knows, because oil prices have nothing to do with supply-demand fundamentals.
But it sounds so simple, huh? Wallet-killing prices at the pump? Solution? Drill, drill, drill. That will lower the prices, right? Not necessarily. Maybe not by even one penny. But it sounds so logical to your average fool.
What will drill, drill, drill do? Make beau-coup bucks for oil companies and their sleazy Republican agents. Great. Let's all line up behind that. I'm White! I'm dumb! I'm voting Republican! Oh yeah!
Here's all the land that is open to the oil companies that they are refusing to drill on for some insipid reason. Why are they refusing to drill on this land? I have no idea! Maybe someone who can figure out what's going on can explain this nonsense. There's tons of land open to oil companies, but they are refusing to drill on it. Instead, they want to open up lands that are forbidden to them. Doesn't make sense. Someone explain this one to me?Albanians Are Neither White Nor Europeans?
A lot of White Nationalist idiots insist that Albanians are either not White (Whatever the Hell that means!), or, more particularly, that they are not Europeans (!). The reason that "Albanians are not Europeans", despite the fact that they live in Europe (!) is apparently because "Albanians are Muslims". So White folks, who live in Europe, but are Muslims, are automagically transformed into "non-Whites". Nice magic!
First of all, that is not entirely true. It's true that the Kosovars were mostly Muslims, but in Albania proper, the population was originally about 50% Muslim, 30% Catholic and 20% Orthodox Christian. Albanian Orthodox, apparently. I never even knew that existed.
Pretty interesting phenotype. I like those girls. Love the way they look. I'm not sure quite what they look like; I'm thinking they have a phenotype all their own? They look a lot like Italians. Looking at the guys, I think they look like Greeks. They have a very interesting nose. I'm not sure if it's a Greek nose or an Italian nose. It's prominent, but still attractive.
I assume they are just some type of Meds. I'm not down with all those old anthropological types. Notice that there are a fair number of blonds. Nordicist retards say this is because "Nordics" went down to the Mediterranean, civilized the backwards Meds, become their ruling class, did all those great Italian and Greek civilizational Med things we swoon about, then took off back to Germany or wherever to run around in bear skins with rude tribes of White gangbangers called Vandals and such.
Dumb, huh? Truth is, Meds went up north and actually helped to form those great Nordics. Nordics are part Med. I got my hands on this great proto-Nazi Nordicist book once out of Germany from around 1920. Everything was race, race, race. It was kind of cool the way he split Caucasians up into all these groups. But it seems that the ruling classes of all of the great empires - Indian, Persian, Armenian, Roman, Greek, you name it - were all Nordics!
Germanic proto-Nazi dudes were running all over Europe and West Asia forming ruling classes and creating great civilizations and lording it over the the untermenschen darkie types, then high-tailing it back to Germany as soon as civilization collapsed. Back to Germany, one of the least civilized places on Earth, except it was exporting Platos and Caesars to the world. Yeah right! Supremacists are so funny sometimes.
More Albanians! All blonds, pretty much. You see any particular phenotype there? I don't. They just look like White people. No wait! They're not White! Only Nordics are! Snark. These people don't look like Muslims either. They look like young folks who like to have unmarried sex. Have fun kids!
First of all, that is not entirely true. It's true that the Kosovars were mostly Muslims, but in Albania proper, the population was originally about 50% Muslim, 30% Catholic and 20% Orthodox Christian. Albanian Orthodox, apparently. I never even knew that existed.
Pretty interesting phenotype. I like those girls. Love the way they look. I'm not sure quite what they look like; I'm thinking they have a phenotype all their own? They look a lot like Italians. Looking at the guys, I think they look like Greeks. They have a very interesting nose. I'm not sure if it's a Greek nose or an Italian nose. It's prominent, but still attractive.I assume they are just some type of Meds. I'm not down with all those old anthropological types. Notice that there are a fair number of blonds. Nordicist retards say this is because "Nordics" went down to the Mediterranean, civilized the backwards Meds, become their ruling class, did all those great Italian and Greek civilizational Med things we swoon about, then took off back to Germany or wherever to run around in bear skins with rude tribes of White gangbangers called Vandals and such.
Dumb, huh? Truth is, Meds went up north and actually helped to form those great Nordics. Nordics are part Med. I got my hands on this great proto-Nazi Nordicist book once out of Germany from around 1920. Everything was race, race, race. It was kind of cool the way he split Caucasians up into all these groups. But it seems that the ruling classes of all of the great empires - Indian, Persian, Armenian, Roman, Greek, you name it - were all Nordics!
Germanic proto-Nazi dudes were running all over Europe and West Asia forming ruling classes and creating great civilizations and lording it over the the untermenschen darkie types, then high-tailing it back to Germany as soon as civilization collapsed. Back to Germany, one of the least civilized places on Earth, except it was exporting Platos and Caesars to the world. Yeah right! Supremacists are so funny sometimes.
More Albanians! All blonds, pretty much. You see any particular phenotype there? I don't. They just look like White people. No wait! They're not White! Only Nordics are! Snark. These people don't look like Muslims either. They look like young folks who like to have unmarried sex. Have fun kids!Americans Are Pro-life!
Yeah. Like Hell they are.
That's why fully 80% of Americans who learn during the pregnancy that their child has Down's Syndrome choose to abort the fetus.
This is where all those silly abortion polls mess up. No way are 80% of Americans pro-choice, forget it. But the Americans who have DS pregnancies are surely a randomly selected lot, no?
And when it comes right down to brass tacks, a severely retarded fetus that will become a human child in months, that you will have to raise, painfully, for not just 18 years, but for its whole life, most Americans just swallow the bullet, pull the lever and say bye-bye.
This is why those polls can't be trusted. A lot of supposed pro-life folks will have an abortion when all the chips are down and there's everything to lose.
That's why fully 80% of Americans who learn during the pregnancy that their child has Down's Syndrome choose to abort the fetus.
This is where all those silly abortion polls mess up. No way are 80% of Americans pro-choice, forget it. But the Americans who have DS pregnancies are surely a randomly selected lot, no?
And when it comes right down to brass tacks, a severely retarded fetus that will become a human child in months, that you will have to raise, painfully, for not just 18 years, but for its whole life, most Americans just swallow the bullet, pull the lever and say bye-bye.
This is why those polls can't be trusted. A lot of supposed pro-life folks will have an abortion when all the chips are down and there's everything to lose.
100% of Hardcore US Racists Vote Republican
If you go to White nationalist sites, you will be damned if you ever find even one Democrat on those boards. You will find some ex-Democrats. Nor will you even find one person who votes Democrat, except some now voting Obama for racist reasons*.
I've made the rounds of many of these sites. The truth is that 100% of US hardcore White racists vote Republican! Year in and year out. Are there any hardcore White racists in the US who vote Democrat? I do not think so. I've never met one, and I've never seen one anywhere on the Net.
The White racists are simply a subset of US Whites. On the White racist sites, they make it completely clear that the Republican Party is the party to vote for if you are White, and especially if you are a racist White.
In looking at how White racists in the US vote overwhelmingly Republican, we can begin to understand why US Whites vote so overwhelmingly Republican. I suggest that the hardcore racists and the rest of the Whites are voting Republican for some pretty similar reasons.
James Schipper in the comments points out that the Republican Party has hardly given US Whites a damned thing for their racist votes. At the very least, he argues, it could have come down hard on illegal immigration, reduced legal immigration and ended affirmative action.
Instead, the Republican Party is 100% Open Borders and can't get enough millions of legal immigrants to satisfy their needs. It's true that they have made some movements on affirmative action, and it's being outlawed by many states anyway. But private firms can still have diversity goals and whatnot, and that's apparently legal.
The Republican Party has been winking at White racism for decades now. In 1981, Reagan went to the site in the South where the bodies of the two murdered civil rights workers were found and spoke before a crowd of hollering, hooting White peckerwood crackers, saying that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been a horrible mistake. Bush's appointees to the Supreme Court apparently oppose civil rights, but little has come of that.
The Republicans, a plutocratic political party, have used the racist Whites in the same way they used the culture warriors, the Christian Right and the rest. Your average plutocrat is probably not very racist, not very religious and cares nothing about holy roller Christians.
Wealthy young women have abortions in very high numbers. The wealthy drink, use drugs, have promiscuous sex, have homosexual sex, and do all sorts of depraved things at a greater rate than the middle classes - they always have in most every society. At the same time, they cynically use the culture wars stuff to get the fools and suckers to vote for the plutocratic party.
Like the rich who supported the Nazis, they hope to use them for the ride and hopefully never implement any of the projects of the racists or holy rollers. When it finally gets to the point where the rich need to implement racist or holy roller policies in order to stay in power, things get awfully dicey. It's a dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty game the rich play.
*There is a fascinating movement within White nationalism called White Nationalists For Obama. The idea here is to "heighten the contradictions" in Marxist terms. Electing a Black president will be so horrible that it will "wake up the sleeping Whites" to the White racist cause.
The resulting tumult will be so great that a vast race war will break in the US. In the course of this race war, the Whites will win. The upshot will be either the removal of all non-Whites from the US, or their sequestration to a few states of their own.
I used to think that the race war thing was only a dream of the real hardcore White power types, but even if you go to the more moderate sites, you will find huge numbers of commenters who are all for race war in the US to "shake things out". I was appalled. I really don't think it's ever going to happen, but in analyzing White nationalism, we ought to conclude that many, perhaps most, of them long for a race war in the US.
I've made the rounds of many of these sites. The truth is that 100% of US hardcore White racists vote Republican! Year in and year out. Are there any hardcore White racists in the US who vote Democrat? I do not think so. I've never met one, and I've never seen one anywhere on the Net.
The White racists are simply a subset of US Whites. On the White racist sites, they make it completely clear that the Republican Party is the party to vote for if you are White, and especially if you are a racist White.
In looking at how White racists in the US vote overwhelmingly Republican, we can begin to understand why US Whites vote so overwhelmingly Republican. I suggest that the hardcore racists and the rest of the Whites are voting Republican for some pretty similar reasons.
James Schipper in the comments points out that the Republican Party has hardly given US Whites a damned thing for their racist votes. At the very least, he argues, it could have come down hard on illegal immigration, reduced legal immigration and ended affirmative action.
Instead, the Republican Party is 100% Open Borders and can't get enough millions of legal immigrants to satisfy their needs. It's true that they have made some movements on affirmative action, and it's being outlawed by many states anyway. But private firms can still have diversity goals and whatnot, and that's apparently legal.
The Republican Party has been winking at White racism for decades now. In 1981, Reagan went to the site in the South where the bodies of the two murdered civil rights workers were found and spoke before a crowd of hollering, hooting White peckerwood crackers, saying that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been a horrible mistake. Bush's appointees to the Supreme Court apparently oppose civil rights, but little has come of that.
The Republicans, a plutocratic political party, have used the racist Whites in the same way they used the culture warriors, the Christian Right and the rest. Your average plutocrat is probably not very racist, not very religious and cares nothing about holy roller Christians.
Wealthy young women have abortions in very high numbers. The wealthy drink, use drugs, have promiscuous sex, have homosexual sex, and do all sorts of depraved things at a greater rate than the middle classes - they always have in most every society. At the same time, they cynically use the culture wars stuff to get the fools and suckers to vote for the plutocratic party.
Like the rich who supported the Nazis, they hope to use them for the ride and hopefully never implement any of the projects of the racists or holy rollers. When it finally gets to the point where the rich need to implement racist or holy roller policies in order to stay in power, things get awfully dicey. It's a dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty game the rich play.
*There is a fascinating movement within White nationalism called White Nationalists For Obama. The idea here is to "heighten the contradictions" in Marxist terms. Electing a Black president will be so horrible that it will "wake up the sleeping Whites" to the White racist cause.
The resulting tumult will be so great that a vast race war will break in the US. In the course of this race war, the Whites will win. The upshot will be either the removal of all non-Whites from the US, or their sequestration to a few states of their own.
I used to think that the race war thing was only a dream of the real hardcore White power types, but even if you go to the more moderate sites, you will find huge numbers of commenters who are all for race war in the US to "shake things out". I was appalled. I really don't think it's ever going to happen, but in analyzing White nationalism, we ought to conclude that many, perhaps most, of them long for a race war in the US.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Reports of the FARC's Death Are Greatly Exaggerated
Following up on an earlier post, it appears that reports of the FARC's death have been greatly exaggerated. For example, in the very short period between when the media learned of the death of FARC commander Manuel Marulanda in late May 2006 until the accession of Alfonso Cano, an anthropologist, in late June, to the top leadership position, many attacks were waged by the FARC.
I count 23 attacks over a 27 day period, and those are only the attacks that were covered by the press. Many others are not even reported.
The FARC bombed the Caño Limón-Coveñas oil pipeline in Norte de Santander, shutting it down.
On May 27, the FARC's 50th Front bombed a train carrying coal in La Guajira department, derailing it.
From May 30 to June 3, there was heavy fighting between the FARC's 21st Front and the Colombian Army in Zaragoza, Antioquia, which caused the displacement of 500 civilians.
Around May 31, the FARC's 59th Front blew up power pylons and burned trucks at roadblocks in La Guajira department.
On June 4, the FARC's 50th Front used a roadside bomb to attack a police convoy with three trucks and 30 policemen near Génova, on the border between Valle del Cauca and Quindío departments. Three police were killed and three more were wounded in this attack.
On June 4, the FARC detonated a land mine on an army patrol in Quebrada Seca, near the city of Peque e Ituango, in northwestern Antioquia. 1 soldier was killed and seven more were wounded.
On June 4, a member of the paramilitary death squad The Heroes of Granada was assassinated in the middle of Medellin in the district of Manrique-Las Granjas. The FARC may have been responsible.
Between June 7-11, the FARC carried out five attacks on military personnel in Buenaventura, Valle del Cauca.
On June 9, the FARC shot down a Colombian Air Force UH-60 helicopter in Mayoyoque, near Puerto Guzmán in Putumayo. The helicopter was destroyed and three soldiers were wounded.
On June 9, the FARC's 8th Front destroyed three power pylons in Patía, Cauca.
On July 14 and 15, the FARC bombed a police station in Tarazá, Antioquia, wounding four policemen.
On July 14 and 15, the FARC's 9th Front bombed a hotel in Granada where army intelligence was staying and bombed a police station in the same city. There were no casualties.
On June 15, the FARC's 50th Front detonated a land mine on an army patrol in Quindío, killing two soldiers.
On June 16, the FARC bombed four targets in the heart of Bogotá, including a police station in the Suba district in northwestern Bogotá.
On June 22, a FARC detachment attacked a police patrol near a police station in Caguán, Huila, killing one policeman and wounding one more.
I count 23 attacks over a 27 day period, and those are only the attacks that were covered by the press. Many others are not even reported.
The FARC bombed the Caño Limón-Coveñas oil pipeline in Norte de Santander, shutting it down.
On May 27, the FARC's 50th Front bombed a train carrying coal in La Guajira department, derailing it.
From May 30 to June 3, there was heavy fighting between the FARC's 21st Front and the Colombian Army in Zaragoza, Antioquia, which caused the displacement of 500 civilians.
Around May 31, the FARC's 59th Front blew up power pylons and burned trucks at roadblocks in La Guajira department.
On June 4, the FARC's 50th Front used a roadside bomb to attack a police convoy with three trucks and 30 policemen near Génova, on the border between Valle del Cauca and Quindío departments. Three police were killed and three more were wounded in this attack.
On June 4, the FARC detonated a land mine on an army patrol in Quebrada Seca, near the city of Peque e Ituango, in northwestern Antioquia. 1 soldier was killed and seven more were wounded.
On June 4, a member of the paramilitary death squad The Heroes of Granada was assassinated in the middle of Medellin in the district of Manrique-Las Granjas. The FARC may have been responsible.
Between June 7-11, the FARC carried out five attacks on military personnel in Buenaventura, Valle del Cauca.
On June 9, the FARC shot down a Colombian Air Force UH-60 helicopter in Mayoyoque, near Puerto Guzmán in Putumayo. The helicopter was destroyed and three soldiers were wounded.
On June 9, the FARC's 8th Front destroyed three power pylons in Patía, Cauca.
On July 14 and 15, the FARC bombed a police station in Tarazá, Antioquia, wounding four policemen.
On July 14 and 15, the FARC's 9th Front bombed a hotel in Granada where army intelligence was staying and bombed a police station in the same city. There were no casualties.
On June 15, the FARC's 50th Front detonated a land mine on an army patrol in Quindío, killing two soldiers.
On June 16, the FARC bombed four targets in the heart of Bogotá, including a police station in the Suba district in northwestern Bogotá.
On June 22, a FARC detachment attacked a police patrol near a police station in Caguán, Huila, killing one policeman and wounding one more.
Berber Genes in Europeans
It seems reasonable that Southern Europeans especially would have a considerable amount of Berber genes in them. This has been disputed by certain Southern European White racist bloggers like Dienekes Pontikos and Racial Reality. These bloggers are vociferously opposed to the notion that Southern Europeans are anything but pretty near pure White.
For instance, here Dienekes states gives Berber percentages in Europeans as follows:
During the Moorish invasion, they conquered all the way up to the southern mountains of Cantabria, a province in the far north of Spain on the coast next to the Basque region. Perhaps this is where the Moorish (Berber) genes came in.
Looking at the figures above, most Berber genes appear to have gone into Iberia in tandem with the Moorish conquest. Strangely, they are concentrated in the North of Spain. This doesn't make much sense to me.
The Cantabrian language is still spoken here. Some say it is a dialect of the Asturian language, and others say it is a full language altogether. It looks pretty strange to me (samples at the link). It is said to be related to the Leonese language and also has influence straight up from Common Latin. Cantabrian has no official status, while Asturian has official status in Asturias.
Related languages are Leonese, spoken in Leon and Castile, and Extremaduran, spoken in Spain on the Portuguese border in Extremadura. Extremaduran is endangered, has no official status, and but has 500,000 speakers, including monolinguals (!).
Leonese has only 50,000 speakers, is considered very endangered, but does have special status in Castile and Leon. It's often treated as a dialect of Asturian, but I think it is a separate language.
A related language is Mirandese, spoken in Portugal. This language looks a lot like Portuguese. It has only 15,000 speakers, but it seems to be recovering. It is spoken in Miranda do Douro state, and this is another name for the language. This blog is written entirely in Mirandese. As you can see, it looks a lot like Portuguese. Mirandese is said to be very close to Leonese.
Asturian has 550,000 speakers, but is considered endangered.
About the Berbers, I consider them to be one of the most ancient, if not the most ancient, Caucasian groups in existence. Berbers go back at least 20,000 years, and possibly up to 50,000 years, in North Africa. Much of the Berber group may have come from the Middle East in the past 10,000 years. There is a huge split between Berbers and Sub-Saharan Africans.
The Mozabites, the Tuaregs and the Chenini-Douiret are quite different from the rest of the Berbers. Why? Probably genetic drift.
Mozabites, possibly some of the most ancient Caucasians on Earth, with a genetic line going back up to 50,000 years. Though White nationalists probably freak out if you say these people are White, they are most definitely Caucasians. Look closely at the features of the second man on the right - he could be a Greek. The fellow in the right forefront also looks Caucasian - he looks somewhat East Indian.
The two men standing at the top could be East Indians or some strange Mediterranean types. Given that East Indians are also one of the most ancient Caucasian groups on Earth, it figures that these Berbers resemble Indians. Both groups came out of the Middle East - the Berbers probably 42,000 years ago, and the East Indians about 17,000 years ago.
There are few genetic differences between Berbers and North African Arabs, which means that North African Arabs are simply Arabized Berbers. There are lots of great photos of Berbers at this link.
The origin of the Berbers is nevertheless quite obscure. This article suggests that both Berbers and Europeans came out of the Levant about 40-45,000 years ago. Obviously, prior to that, they came out of Africa, but I have my own ideas about that. A date of 40-45,000 years is about right for the genesis of the Caucasian race. The homeland of the Caucasians is often said to be located in the Caucasus itself.
This line rose in Southwest Asia (the Caucasus) and then moved to Africa along the Mediterranean, not via Somalia - Yemen as the Out of Africans went. They moved first into the Levant, and from there went to Europe and to North Africa, both at the same time. This line went to the Cro-Magnon as well as the Berber, and both came out of the Levant about 40-45,000 years ago.
Another very interesting looking Mozabite fellow. There are some Mediterranean types who look something like this, but I have a hard time pinning this phenotype down. Clearly, they are Caucasians, but other than that, they look pretty sui generis. A recent genetics study, though poorly done, seemed to show the Mozabites as one of the most ancient ethnic groups on Earth and a source population for many other groups outside of Africa.
The Uighurs in Central Asia were also a source population for many diverse groups all over the place. The Uighurs may be the remains of ancient Caucasian-Asian hybrids that go back up to 40,000 years.
The first Caucasians were probably a mixture of 1/3 Africans (possibly Maasai and Tutsi types from Central Africa) mixed with ancient proto-Asians from China (who may have resembled the Ainu). From this strange mixture arose the original Caucasians, probably in the Caucasus and southern Russia, but maybe also in Iran. I hope to go into greater detail in a future post.
There is good evidence that the first Caucasians, including the Cro-Magnons, looked a lot like Black Africans, in particular the Caucasoid-appearing Africans such as the Maasai and the Tutsi, but I a detailed analysis of that will have to wait for another post.
For instance, here Dienekes states gives Berber percentages in Europeans as follows:
I am going to disagree with this assessment, though I admit I am not an expert on the subject. Looking at this journal article (table here). we come up with something a lot different. From Cruciani et al 2004:
Nation Berber %
Spain 1%
Italy 1.75%
France 2%
The Berber genes seem to have come to Europe for the most part in the past 3,000 yrs. Cantabria is an interesting place. The Cantabrians, in particular the Pasiegos, are said to be quite distinct genetically, almost like the Basques. No one really knows what this is all about.
Ethnic Group Berber %
Spain (Cantabrian Pasiegos) 30%
Spain (Cantabria) 17%
Southern Portugal 12.2%
Northern Portugal 4%
Spain (Basques) 3.6%
France 3.5%
Spain (Asturias) 2.2%
Southern Spain 1.6%
Northern Italy 1.5%
Central Italy 1.2%
Italy (Sicily) .7%
Sardinia .5%
During the Moorish invasion, they conquered all the way up to the southern mountains of Cantabria, a province in the far north of Spain on the coast next to the Basque region. Perhaps this is where the Moorish (Berber) genes came in.
Looking at the figures above, most Berber genes appear to have gone into Iberia in tandem with the Moorish conquest. Strangely, they are concentrated in the North of Spain. This doesn't make much sense to me.
The Cantabrian language is still spoken here. Some say it is a dialect of the Asturian language, and others say it is a full language altogether. It looks pretty strange to me (samples at the link). It is said to be related to the Leonese language and also has influence straight up from Common Latin. Cantabrian has no official status, while Asturian has official status in Asturias.
Related languages are Leonese, spoken in Leon and Castile, and Extremaduran, spoken in Spain on the Portuguese border in Extremadura. Extremaduran is endangered, has no official status, and but has 500,000 speakers, including monolinguals (!).
Leonese has only 50,000 speakers, is considered very endangered, but does have special status in Castile and Leon. It's often treated as a dialect of Asturian, but I think it is a separate language.
A related language is Mirandese, spoken in Portugal. This language looks a lot like Portuguese. It has only 15,000 speakers, but it seems to be recovering. It is spoken in Miranda do Douro state, and this is another name for the language. This blog is written entirely in Mirandese. As you can see, it looks a lot like Portuguese. Mirandese is said to be very close to Leonese.
Asturian has 550,000 speakers, but is considered endangered.
About the Berbers, I consider them to be one of the most ancient, if not the most ancient, Caucasian groups in existence. Berbers go back at least 20,000 years, and possibly up to 50,000 years, in North Africa. Much of the Berber group may have come from the Middle East in the past 10,000 years. There is a huge split between Berbers and Sub-Saharan Africans.
The Mozabites, the Tuaregs and the Chenini-Douiret are quite different from the rest of the Berbers. Why? Probably genetic drift.
Mozabites, possibly some of the most ancient Caucasians on Earth, with a genetic line going back up to 50,000 years. Though White nationalists probably freak out if you say these people are White, they are most definitely Caucasians. Look closely at the features of the second man on the right - he could be a Greek. The fellow in the right forefront also looks Caucasian - he looks somewhat East Indian.The two men standing at the top could be East Indians or some strange Mediterranean types. Given that East Indians are also one of the most ancient Caucasian groups on Earth, it figures that these Berbers resemble Indians. Both groups came out of the Middle East - the Berbers probably 42,000 years ago, and the East Indians about 17,000 years ago.
There are few genetic differences between Berbers and North African Arabs, which means that North African Arabs are simply Arabized Berbers. There are lots of great photos of Berbers at this link.
The origin of the Berbers is nevertheless quite obscure. This article suggests that both Berbers and Europeans came out of the Levant about 40-45,000 years ago. Obviously, prior to that, they came out of Africa, but I have my own ideas about that. A date of 40-45,000 years is about right for the genesis of the Caucasian race. The homeland of the Caucasians is often said to be located in the Caucasus itself.
This line rose in Southwest Asia (the Caucasus) and then moved to Africa along the Mediterranean, not via Somalia - Yemen as the Out of Africans went. They moved first into the Levant, and from there went to Europe and to North Africa, both at the same time. This line went to the Cro-Magnon as well as the Berber, and both came out of the Levant about 40-45,000 years ago.
Another very interesting looking Mozabite fellow. There are some Mediterranean types who look something like this, but I have a hard time pinning this phenotype down. Clearly, they are Caucasians, but other than that, they look pretty sui generis. A recent genetics study, though poorly done, seemed to show the Mozabites as one of the most ancient ethnic groups on Earth and a source population for many other groups outside of Africa.The Uighurs in Central Asia were also a source population for many diverse groups all over the place. The Uighurs may be the remains of ancient Caucasian-Asian hybrids that go back up to 40,000 years.
The first Caucasians were probably a mixture of 1/3 Africans (possibly Maasai and Tutsi types from Central Africa) mixed with ancient proto-Asians from China (who may have resembled the Ainu). From this strange mixture arose the original Caucasians, probably in the Caucasus and southern Russia, but maybe also in Iran. I hope to go into greater detail in a future post.
There is good evidence that the first Caucasians, including the Cro-Magnons, looked a lot like Black Africans, in particular the Caucasoid-appearing Africans such as the Maasai and the Tutsi, but I a detailed analysis of that will have to wait for another post.
References
- Cruciani F, La Fratta R, Santolamazza P, Sellitto D, Pascone R, Moral P, Watson E, Guida V, Colomb EB, Zaharova B, Lavinha J, Vona G, Aman R, Cali F, Akar N, Richards M, Torroni A, Novelletto A, Scozzari R. 2004. Phylogeographic Analysis Of Haplogroup E3b (E-M215) Y Chromosomes Reveals Multiple Migratory Events Within And Out Of Africa. American Journal of Human Genetics 74:1014-1022