Why Mayor Nagin Fired 3,000 Employees

On October 4, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin announced that the city of NOLA was going to lay off up to 3,000 employees. This announcement has been reverberating across the malignancy known as Rightwing America ever since. Usually it goes something like this:

"Ray Nagin left the city during the flood, and went to Texas! Then when he came back, he callously fired 3,000 employees!" This is typically said with the quivering lips and bugged eyes of your normal, everyday raving Bush cultist-dittohead.

This nugget comes as part of a much larger package apparently titled, "Rightwing Talking Points Against Nagin and [Louisiana governor] Kathleen Blanco".

I assume this garbage was cooked up in the usual sewers associated Karl Rove, dittohead talk radio and the criminal gang called the Republican Party. The package seems devastating towards Nagin and Blanco, but apparently a lot of is just crap or sophistry of one type or another, as we expect from the Liars Brigades.

Now, when I first heard this, I was mystified. I still can't answer a lot of the charges, you can go here to see a lot of the tidal wave of BS Rush Limbaugh has been defecating lately.

Meanwhile, how about the troubling issue of why Nagin fired 3,000 employees. In a previous post, I suggested that this was because the city was flat broke. My theory has been confirmed in an excellent letter I just received, which I will republish below. The author shall remain anonymous.

Mr. Lindsay, in your post on October 19, you state:

Apparently, these unfortunate layoffs are being done because Hurricane Katrina caused a financial hurricane in the the NOLA city government - the city's finances are simply devastated. In such dire financial straights, perhaps mass layoffs are understandable.

"Apparently"? "Perhaps"? Look, the city of New Orleans, like almost all cities, gets its income from taxes. It taxes the port authority. It taxes the hotel rooms. It taxes liquor. It taxes property. It taxes sales of nearly everything. It taxes for violations of various laws (we call them tickets and fines).

It is the sole provider of garbage and sewer and water, and it gets paid for that. New Orleans also gets money from gambling, unlike some other cities and states. Surprisingly, this is also how Louisiana gets its income. Taxes and gambling. It gets the vast majority of its sales tax from (surprise) the largest city in the state--New Orleans. It gets most of its gambling revenue from (shock) New Orleans.

It also taxes the port of New Orleans, and gets a cut of the import taxes, I imagine. The only thing it doesn't get that New Orleans gets is utility income (and it probably got a cut of NOLA's).

Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, that tax base was completely wiped out. Not just one section of it. All the sections simultaneously. No more ticket revenue (which is substantial for any city). No more sales tax. No more gambling, or liquor taxes, or topless bars to "regulate" with taxes.

No more guests staying in hotel rooms (although apparently FEMA is taking care of that at $90 a night in a city with zero other guests, can you imagine?). No more utilities. No more anything . For the next five years.

Now you may say that all of that income is still occurring, and most of it is. On a tiny scale. But the infrastructure of the city is set up for a huge scale. It's like a family of four, that has a two earner income of $300,000/yr, and both of them get laid off.

They still have a mortgage and two car payments, and tuition, and a living standard consistent with a $300,000/yr income, but their income is bupkis. Or $200/wk unemployment.

Only, it's actually worse than that.

Not only have they lost their jobs, not only do they have to continue making payments on a $300,000/yr lifestyle, but that lifestyle has disappeared (the house has blown over, the cars are wrecked, the pool is underwater) and they have to pay for a new lifestyle elsewhere in addition to making payments on the old lifestyle, all with no income.

So not only is New Orleans still trying to pay for a $300,000/yr lifestyle on a $200/wk budget (so to speak), but they've actually picked up additional expenses, on a massive scale.

Even downsizing all non-essential personnel, they still can't make it. What do you need a municipal court staff for if no one drives a car there, and the cops are far too busy to write a ticket for running a non-existent stop sign? Even downsizing, their expenses far, far outstrip their income.And Bush isn't going to pick up the slack either.

Not only that, but they can't look to their own state government for help, because it is in trouble. Because its cash cow, the jewel in its crown, its primary revenue source, New Orleans, has been slaughtered.

The state, and all the southern cities, not just New Orleans, and not just Louisiana, really, are hemorrhaging money. These entities are actually bleeding out faster than money can possibly be pumped through.

They have run through all their resources, all their reserves, and are now stealing or "borrowing" from the resources of their employees, many of whom are working for free (or on a very reduced schedule while their own bills pile up), on Bush's empty promise that someday in the future, he'll make them whole. While big fat government contractors (including the Red Cross) soak up all the available cash.

So yeah. I'd say that there's nothing "apparent" about it, and there is no "perhaps." The city of New Orleans, the surrounding parishes and cities, and almost certainly Louisiana, are bankrupt.

They have no asset base, no income source of any moment, huge past debts that they cannot service, and more current expenses than you or I can even imagine. I can't even begin to understand that people couldn't see this would be true from the instant the levees broke.

I would like to point that the media has not shed any light at all on this apparently obvious truth about why the city and state are broke. This exemplifies the extreme rightwing corporate nature of what is really the US controlled propaganda (read: totalitarian-like) media.

The Counselor Project

Well, had my first therapist appointment in quite a while the other day. I didn't even want it, and I was totally paranoid about it. Why had I been given this appointment, anyway? How the Hell did that happen? 

I went back inside a doctor's the other day and a secretary said wearily, "What is it now, Robert?" like I'm some miserable idiot who can't stop worrying, which is true.

All this fueled the old paranoid thoughts, and I restarted the Get It Together Project again.

So I went in. Middle aged Hispanic female, and I hate female therapists. In fact, I typically refuse to ever be seen by one. I got sent to counselor due to being on meds and admitting to smoking weed a few times last fall. Real easy.

I'm convinced that I am insane.

"So, do you think that I act strange, weird, bizarre, odd?" I actually believe that all of this is true.

"No, not at all, you seem quite normal. Why do you ask?"

"Do I seem really nervous, anxious, wiry, like I can't settle down?" I actually believe that I am way too nervous and non-relaxed.

"Actually, no. You really do seem quite relaxed here." Points to my relaxed posture.

"Hmm, so do I seem hostile?" I actually believe that I am totally hostile, cruel, evil, mean, and low down, like a bipedal 6-foot rattlesnake with a permanent bad hair day and an immortal resting bitch face.

"No, not at all. Actually, you seem friendly, and if you were hostile, I would simply order you out of the room."

"So, do I seem unfriendly and not warm?" I am convinced that this is the main problem these days.

"No, not at all. You actually do seem like a friendly person."

Therapy goes on.

I tell her I am worried about checking out hot young chickies because I am afraid they will think I am a dirty old man and they will file a public complaint against me.

"Go ahead and look all you want! You are a single man, of course you want to look at all of the pretty women!"

You know, sometimes I just love Hispanics. They are so backwards on all this sex stuff, and they just assume that all males are total pigs when it comes to sex, but they figure that it is hopeless and we are incurable, so they just chalk it up to nature.

She then informs me that I may be lacking in social skills.

"So, do you think that I am lacking in social skills in here in right now?" I am convinced that I am one of the biggest social idiots on the globe.

"No, no, not at all, your social skills are excellent. Why do you ask? But perhaps elsewhere, there are problems in the social skills."

Ok, now my head is really spinning. 

I need to stop doing weed. 

I need to stop drinking. 

"Why do you have two glasses of wine a night?"

"Why do you go to the bar?"

Well, I quit? 

"Oh, the bar, the bar, why do you go to the bar?"

I don't anymore, but I am broke.

On and on it goes.

She points out that I'm hardly even trying to meet anyone. I think I'm busting butt night and day on the Woman Project. Really, where are you going, she asks? I tell her I am going to the Catholic Church Project to work on the Woman Project.

She almost starts laughing. "You expect to get laid in church?" I think she says.

"Sure." I say, lying as usual. "I just tell em I am God, and that they will worship at my cross because God wants them to. Works every time."

"Plus, most women who go to Catholic Church are in religious ecstasy, and that usually means they are also horny," I offer pitifully. 

"They want to have sex with God. Just tell them you are God to them, and you're in like Flynn," I suggest dubiously.

She's laughing. "You expect to get laid at a church? What are you, a fucking idiot? No ever meets anyone in church. Church is one thing, fucking is another. Two different planets," I hallucinate, hearing voices.

It's very nice to meet a woman who is aggressive about sex and has a man's best interest at heart, which is getting laid of course, as nothing else in a man's life matters at all. Most female therapists are totally insane about sex, which is why I never want to deal with them.

Doctor wrote I was depressed. Was I depressed? 

Course not, I scoff. 

She looks surprised.

Have I ever been arrested? Twice for pot, possession. 

Have I ever been in prison, as if this is the most normal thing to do? No, thank God. 

Have I ever been charged with child molesting? No, I have not, nor have I ever been investigated for it by the police. 

Have you ever attacked anyone? No, not really. I mean I did, but they all deserved it, you know?

Have you ever attempted suicide? No, we don't do that. 

Have I ever been suicidal? Not for 23 years! I say proudly. She looks dubious.

Have I ever been hospitalized? No, we don't get hospitalized, and I will never be hospitalized, unless I get about 20 times crazier than I am now and I just can't function at all.

The Hospital Project is never going to happen. Nor is the Kill Myself Project. The Kill Others Project has, sadly, been put on indefinite hold for the time being. The Molest Kids Project never even got going, thank the  Lord above. The Criminal Project is way back in the hippie dope-dealing past.

My whole life, nothing really grievous or monumental or devastating or audacious has occurred. Truth is, I have been a bit of a bore, the guy who lives in town 15 years and the cops yawn when someone asks them about him.

The Counselor Project is over. I'm fine, nothing is wrong. The Counselor Project will be continued into the future, with uncertain results.

And they don't believe in chemical good times, because they only see the bad end that I have almost never seen in my entire life.

The Counselor Project is just something to be played, like everything else in life. You play the Counselor Project or it plays you, one or the other. It's nothing, really. Anyone can do it.

Katrina Death Toll Lowered to 1,356

Updated December 19, 2008:

The unofficial death toll for Hurricane Katrina fell by six to 1,356 on Thursday, October 26. The total number of bodies received in Louisiana mortuaries from the storm is now at 1,062, however, it has been determined that 12 of those people were not killed by the storm, but instead died from other causes.

Louisiana is continuing to discover about one new body every day on average, but they body recovery rate is clearly declining rapidly. My previous posting noted that relatives of some supposed Katrina victims, including a fellow named Jason Zito, were upset because their loved ones were included in the death count, while the protestors said that in fact, the so-called hurricane victims had died from other unrelated causes.

Just under 50% of the bodies have been identified, a sorry figure, but quite a bit higher than previous tolls. It looks like major progress is finally being made in identifying bodies. Also, the cost of Hurricane Katrina, a little-reported story, is now estimated at an incredible $200 billion.

Furthermore, the city of NOLA seems destined to be devastated far into the future, as I noted in a previous post recently. Estimates are that the future population of NOLA will be reduced by an astounding 50% and the city's budget will be hammered by a 2/3 reduction. 250,000 homes are uninhabitable, a surreal figure.

Republican talking heads continue to hammer on the issue of the initial death toll being inflated. But as the "Numbers Guy" column in the Wall Street Journal notes, such overestimates are commonplace in the early days after a disaster and also occurred after 9-11.

An earlier column by the same author deals with the whole array of issues surrounding of death tolls and tolls of the missing after wars and disasters.

Topics include how accurate they are, counts of the missing, why tolls vary, how long it takes to get a real count and how they determine if someone actually died in the storm. The first column notes that the inflated dead, missing and evacuee totals after the storm were reported by various outlets ranging across the political spectrum.

It is simply not appropriate to use the excessive initial death estimate of Katrina as a liberals-are-evil-liars talking point, and it's vaguely disrespectful to the victims and their loved ones anyway as the suggestion is,"Hey, Katrina wasn't so bad after all." Recommended reading.

The roundup:

Louisiana:   Thur., October 27:  1,050
Mississippi: Wed., October 19:   228
Florida:     Wed., October 19:   14
Alabama:     Wed., October 19:   2
Georgia:     Wed., October 19:   2
Ohio1:       Fri., September 23: 2
Kentucky2:   Fri., September 23: 1
Evacuees3:  Tues. October 4:     57
Total:                           1,356

Footnoted totals are controversial. Explanations for controversial totals follows:

¹The Ohio victims are Cassondra Ground, 19, of Monroeville, Ohio and Thelma Niedzinski, 84, of Norwalk, Ohio. Both were killed in a car accident near Monroeville, Ohio on August 30, 2005. The Ohio State Highway Patrol felt that a wet road caused by Hurricane Katrina caused the car accident. See Ohioans Focus on Helping Katrina Victims, by Jay Cohen, Associated Press , August 31, 2005

²The Kentucky victim was Deanna Petsch, 10, of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. On August 29, 2005, she fell into a Hurricane Katrina-swollen ditch in Hopkinsville and drowned. See Storm Surge: State Gets Soaked, City Avoids Major Flooding, Homes, Life Lost in Hopkinsville , Sheldon S. Shafer and James Malone, The Louisville (Kentucky) Courier-Journal, August 31, 2005

³53 of the 57 hurricane evacuee deaths occurred in Texas after evacuating the storm; the total includes two suicides in Texas. Two more evacuees died in Tennessee. Two other evacuees died in an unknown location.

I consider all of these deaths to be storm-related, and it is my understanding that authorities felt they were hurricane-related also. The evacuees section is particularly controversial.

Critics have suggested that the evacuee death toll of 57 deaths is simply a normal death toll for the huge number of evacuees. Yet the figure of 57 dead is far lower than the number of evacuees who died after the storm - a very large number of evacuees died post-Katrina, but the vast majority of them are not included in this tally.

For example, this tally mostly includes evacuees in Texas, omitting the huge number of evacuees from Louisiana, for whom a dubious zero deaths are recorded. Furthermore, evacuees in very poor health or on the verge of death post-Katrina never even made it to Texas; they were evacuated to hospitals, often via airplane.

It is my understanding that officials consider the 57 deaths (mostly in Texas) that occurred very soon after the hurricane to be hurricane-related. Apparently most of the deaths were exacerbated by the stress of the hurricane. The two suicides in Texas have also been questioned.

However, they both occurred very rapidly after the storm and I understand that they are considered to be hurricane-related. There have been many more suicides post-Katrina that are not yet included in this tally.

This section needs further research. Critics with valid data helping to clarify the evacuee death toll are encouraged to email me at the email address at the top right of this page. See 57 Evacuees Reported Dead; At Least 2 Committed Suicide, Steve Quinn, Associated Press, September 15, 2005.

Rightwing talking point 1: Sure, Cuba can evacuate people well in a hurricane, but that's because they don't have a free society. In a free society such as ours, the Cuban evacuation model cannot be emulated.

A commenter named "flick100785" on the Usenet newsgroup alt.terrorism.world-trade-center answered this challenge better than I ever could on October 3. I quote (edited):

You see, the Cubans have stocks of emergency supplies for all because they have no class of redneck Yuppies who refuse to pay taxes.

And it happens to be progress for a state to grow from commanding people to leave land they've farmed to "forcing" them to accept help in fleeing a hurricane.

The very American idea that one is "free" sitting on a rooftop with your dawg and a cooler of rapidly warming beer is a redneck fantasy.

By definition, people in this group who post here to the effect that that is anything else other than a redneck fantasy are NOT in the situation which they seem to define as "freedom", because none of the people actually up s---'s creek in Nawlins owned laptops themselves, or, if they did, were able to connect to the Internet.

Indeed, we can more or less reconstruct the mental processes of clowns who here believe this crap. Basically, "government", to them, means the contemplation of their own wasted and degenerated super-ego, which, under the haze of their defective character, represents the super-ego's dreary commands to be a f-----g human being, like that of their long departed ex-wife.

In their fantasy life, they find it erotically charged to think of themselves partying on a roof like the "Cullud" people, but only in fantasy, and they defend therefore the freedom of shadows.

It is a uniquely American savagery to replace compassion by this content-less form of freedom.

I believe it was Baudrillard who shows how Disneyland has trained Americans to think in virtualized forms about real issues.

Or as T. S. Eliot, who happened to be an American poet after all, wrote:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed in white and brown
Til human voices wake us and we drown.

Rightwing talking point 2: Nagin's NOLA government failed to get the NOLA population evacuated in a timely manner.

I would like to request that someone please show me a single evacuation plan for any major US city that even claims that it is humanly *possible* to get 100% of the city's population out in only three days.

Because this is an impossibility, a potent federal response - in particular, a large federal search and rescue team that is on the ground and moving within 12 hours of the disaster -is necessary. If the National Guard or Coast Guard has a comprehensive plan ultimately supplied by the Commander in Chief, it is surely possible to get our men in uniform there and have them setting up basic operations within 12 hours.

Furthermore, attacks on Nagin's response need to note that the NOLA government did far better than any previous disaster run had predicted.

Rightwing talking point 3: Because Nagin failed to evacuate his city, the federal government is absolved of all responsibility for any Katrina deaths. And anyway, it's the residents' fault for not being prepared for disasters.

Is it really ok for NOLA citizens to have to wait for four whole days for any reasonable federal response to a disaster that the Feds knew about at least three days before it occurred?

What sense does it make to demand that residents all keep "survival kits," or a three-day supply of water or a generator to keep their insulin cold? Just how long should we have to wait for a federal response to a disaster or terrorist attack, anyway?

Rightwing talking point 4: The examples of the city of Houston during Hurricane Rita and the states of Alabama and Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina show that large US cities and whole regions of states can indeed by evacuated very quickly.

Houston, Mississippi and Alabama prove nothing of the kind. In Houston, literally thousands of motorists ran out of gas on the clogged freeways, frozen to a near-halt, trying to get out. Many who were running out of gas decided to turn around and go back home before their gas tanks did run empty.

On the day before Rita hit, officials finally rounded up some gas tankers and sent them to the crawling highways to try to refuel all the stalled motorists. On the same day, Houston emergency officials told these same stranded motorists to please turn around and go back home (into the wrath of Rita).

Officials indicated it was too late for them to make it out of Rita's path to safety. Officials finally implemented contra-flow on the highways (both directions on a 2-way highway going the same day), but this was done much too late.

Regarding Alabama, residents of Mobile have informed us that most of Mobile was not evacuated; the vast majority simply refused to leave.

And if Mississippi did such a great job of getting 100% of its population out of the way, how did 228 Mississippians die in the storm? In fact, the available evidence indicates that NOLA did a much better job of evacuating people than Mississippi did.

This post was written with the assistance of valuable posts from "Robin" on the alt.politics.democrats Usenet group.

Halloween costume of the year for 2005

With this unique do-it-yourself costume that recreates an indelible image from the prisoner-abuse scandal at the US Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, your child will be the hit of the neighborhood this Halloween.

It's easy! Instructions:

Take a sheet of 24"x38" black cardstock paper. Next, fashion a cone from the cardstock. Cut a hole in the cone big enough for the face of your youngster. The cone with the face hole will go over your child's head. Now take two yards of black felt and drape it over your child.

For the finishing touch, see if you can round up some leftover wires you may have lying around the house somewhere and place one long wire in each hand. For an extra touch of reality, you can attach the wires to a box and have your child stand on the box. Done! Simple, quick and impressive! Who ever thought torture could be so much fun?

Total cost: Under $20.
Total time: Under two hours.

Image from The Stranger, a very interesting alternative paper from Seattle.

Ted Westhusing An Apparent Suicide

Updated February 7, 2008: An update to this piece, discussing conspiracy theories on whether or not Ted Westhusing was murdered by contractors, is here.

Having followed the story of the death of Col. Ted S. Westhusing, the highest-ranking US officer killed so far in the Iraq, since June 5, the date he died, it is with a heavy heart and much trepidation that I have finally arrived at the conclusion you read in the headline, that Ted's death was a suicide. Westhusing was a professor in the English Department at the US Military Academy at West Point who volunteered to go to Iraq.

Officially, Ted died of a non-combat injury at Camp Dublin near the Baghdad Airport. As of June 16, the date of Westhusing's funeral at West Point, the military was still conducting an investigation into the death, which could have been caused by accident, homicide or suicide. A blog posting on the No More Apples blog on Wednesday, June 8, along with many other clues, leads me the suicide theory.

The posting stated that the blogger, Motherlode, had heard on CNN's American Morning show that morning that Westhusing died of a single gunshot wound.

Photo of Motherlode here. She is the Director of Communications at a Fortune 250 construction company in Dallas, Texas. The implication is that he may have committed suicide, which seems odd given his basic character and the lack of reports that he was depressed.

In a later post, On Col. Westhusing's Death, Motherlode attempted to explain why she felt that Barbara Starr's reports from the Pentagon on June 8 made her feel that Westhusing may have been a suicide. Motherlode apparently received several letters from irate people accusing her of maligning the memory of this fine officer.

I managed to find a transcript (no longer available online) of Barbara Starr speaking to Soledad O'Brien and Bill Hemmer on CNN's Morning Show on June 8. If you read it you can see why the CNN show got Motherlode thinking. Starr says:

"If it comes to it, they will conduct what they call a psychological autopsy. That will be conducted by Army medical personnel. That is the standard procedure in all of these cases. They will try and determine what factors were at play and what did happen here."

My comment on Motherlode's later post is on her site, followed by her response. An irate comment by a poster telling those of us reporting on his death to butt out follows. The irate poster makes some interesting points about the possibility of Westhusing dying of an accident, but unfortunately, if you read his post, he actually ends up also suggesting Westhusing may have been a suicide.

The next comment was just posted the other day by one of Westhusing's cousins, whom I am not going to name. Part of his (edited) comment is reproduced below (my comments are in brackets; the bolding of certain words was done by me):

Was it an accident? There is pure danger, as Anonymous mentioned, everywhere, yet that wasn’t what I think caused his death. Motherlode, you mention "accusations that you had maligned Col. Westhusing's reputation".

Seeking the truth is admirable, and we all can only sort through what we believe are true facts and come to a hypothesis, as Robert clarified. In all the press I have been searching, it is here in these blogs that I think the truth is closest to the honest answer that I am searching for. Thank you all.

In a letter my mother (RL: Possibly Westhusing's sister?) sent to me over a month ago regarding Ted, it mentioned that he was frustrated with all the distrust, lying and killing by the contractors and also by the Iraqi police amongst each other and in police cases where they were supposed to be protecting people.

He felt it was unsolvable. He had asked for prayers, saying they were "really needed now". The letter mentions that he was fed up with the Army and was getting out. I read this and then put more facts together …one bullet, non-combat, closed casket, no info from military to the public and it seems like the worst may have happened.

In a further (edited) comment (no longer available online) this morning by the same cousin on The Fulcrum blog, he elaborates further on his theory:

I am sad, too, that I think...and I am thinking out loud, to be frank and honest, and striving for the truth in this crazy war where facts are hard to get. I say it looks like he may have committed suicide, by piecing facts and emails and Internet news and blogs together.

I don’t want to cause problems by claiming this. I just want to know what happened. If it did happen, as I suspect, I would like to know why. Actually, I think the world might need to know the effects of what is going on. Thanks, Robert, for your well-covered blog.

A story on June 16 about Westhusing's funeral contained quoted Army spokeswoman Martha Rudd about the investigation into Ted's death:

"It's ongoing. When someone dies in Iraq or Kuwait that's not a combat death, the death is investigated. It doesn't mean there is anything criminally suspected here," she added.

Take note of that last comment, which definitely seems to rule out homicide. That leaves us with accident or suicide. And why conduct a "psychological autopsy" (see Barbara Starr's comments above) in the case of an accident? Rudd's comment rules out homicide, while Starr's seems to rule out accidental death. By process of elimination, that leaves us with only suicide as the sole remaining cause of death.

I recently found a nice, but odd, obituary for Ted on a site for the West Point Class of 1983 (Ted graduated from West Point that year), with a great picture of a young Ted. This obit has very nice eulogies of Ted. His obituary is on the same page as a classmate, Lori Good Loucks. Sadly, Loucks seems to be an obvious suicide.

Lori was bipolar (manic-depressive), and in the midst of an episode of psychotic depression when she died of an unstated cause in a mental hospital. Although Dr. David A. Nash (West Point '83), administrator of the website, has assured me in an email that Ted's obit was next to Lori's purely by accident, the site does have sort of a Twilight Zone feel to it due to the speculation about the cause of Ted's death.

On the morning of June 8, I started getting search engine hits for "Ted Westhusing suicide", some from military sites like Centcom. That's what first got me thinking along those lines. I have now received many more search engine hits like that, including some more from the military. I didn't get my first "Ted Westhusing homicide" until today.

At this point, after spending hours investigating this story, we can rule out everything except accidental death and suicide. After adding up the clues, including the excessive silence typical and suggestive of shame and the strange silence of the investigative team, my best theory is that Ted committed suicide. But we really need to wait for the full investigation to have a final say on the matter.

For a long time, I thought the suicide theory didn't make sense due to Ted's superior character and life, which seemed to be the ultimate negation of the death instinct. At first glance, Ted seemed one of the people least likely to commit suicide.

Charles, the author of the fine blog The Fulcrum and a former classmate of Ted's, echoed my sentiments on comments on his site (no longer online). But Charles had not seen Ted since West Point (Ted and Charles were students at West Point in the early 80's). But the comments of Ted's cousin, quoted above, show that Ted Westhusing, the man who seemed like Superman, was really just as human as measly you and me.

In a way, Ted's suicide is terribly disturbing. For if a man like Ted, a warrior who stood tall as the tallest of men, the last man in the world you would think of as a suicide, can kill himself, then the world is a stranger and scarier place. Suicide, always mysterious, is more baffling than ever. And far more, maybe even all of us, are capable of killing ourselves, even if we don't think we are, a thought that strikes terror deep to the bone.

When he died, Ted was near the end of his deployment in Iraq, and was due to return to West Point this summer. Before he left, he was said to be very enthusiastic about going to Iraq to train Iraqi troops. Ted was also one of the nation's top experts on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which he apparently felt was over-diagnosed. Sounds like Ted was a real suck-it-up type.

Camp Dublin, where Ted died, is a very poorly-known US base that is probably located just outside Baghdad Airport. Dublin is apparently located adjacent to Camp Sather, a large US Air Force base inside Baghdad Airport on the west side. Camp Dublin may be located somewhere just west of the airport.

An overhead photo of Baghdad Airport is here; Camp Dublin is possibly located to the left of the area sketched in red on the photo, near the solid white line that represents the large runway on the west side of the airport. An overhead photo of the airport in comparison with the rest of Baghdad is here.

Many on the ground photos of Baghdad Airport are here. Photos of Camp Sather. Here airmen at Camp Sather walk amidst blackout conditions - the camp went to blackout as a force protection measure - after a major guerrilla attack in Baghdad.

Here Air Force Staff Sgt. Kristina Baker and her dog Rex are seen searching a car carrying equipment to set up a coffee shop on Camp Sather. The airmen at Camp Sather live in a relative luxury that would make most US forces in Iraq jealous. See here for details on the "luxurious" Air Force accommodations at Sather.

There is another reason that Camp Dublin is not widely-known. The camp was apparently set up to train the emergency-response unit (ERU) of the Iraqi police, an elite force. The ERU's duties are to carry out high-risk missions like hostage rescues and searches and arrests of high-value targets. The program is very rigorous, with a dropout rate of 70%. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld visited Dublin recently.

Here is a rare photo of Camp Dublin. At Dublin, Westhusing was serving as Senior Advisor for the Counter Terrorism Special Operations training program under the U.S. military’s Civilian Police Assistance Training Team (CPATT). That title apparently means he was in charge of training the ERU unit at Camp Dublin.

Here is the only photo I could find of Westhusing at Camp Dublin; in the photo, he is praising ERU forces for storming a training building and shooting targets of hostage takers without shooting the targets of the hostages or shooting each other. A hostage taker target peppered full of holes by Westhusing's ERU is here.

He had taught English at West Point since 2003. In his extremely distinguished career, he held a variety of staff and command positions in Army airborne units and in Army's 2nd Infantry Division in South Korea.

Westhusing was very highly educated, holding an incredible three separate doctorate degrees. His degrees were in philosophy, Russian language and military strategy. I do not think I have ever heard of any American getting three doctorates before!

Articles about Ted's unbelievable achievements, transcripts of his talks and presentations, and articles about him in general are here. Ted served as a consultant for the Discovery Channel's program on the Greek Trojan Horse. He also consulted on the movie Troy.

I realize I oppose this war, but Westhusing sounds like a fascinating guy, and I would have been honored to meet him. Great minds, great men, great souls and great spirits like Ted don't come along too often.

As noted above, Ted was buried at his beloved West Point, where he graduated, an incredible third in his class, in 1983. Ted leaves behind a wife, Michelle, of West Point, and the couple's three children, apparently two boys and one girl, all under age 12.

Anyway, tip of the hat and a toast to Colonel Ted S. Westhusing, an inspiration for all, and a prayer for his worldly soul, wherever it may be. As they say in Latin America when a great person, especially a fighter, dies, "Ted Westhusing, Presente!" Note: This idiom is not easily translated. It means something like, "Three cheers"; except it's said after the death of a hero, and it's often said in a tone of spirited defiance.

Those who are unconvinced and prefer conspiracy theories, there are theories out there on the Net (no longer archived) that Ted was double-crossed and shot dead by one of the Iraqi police he was training.

The shame of a top officer being killed inside a US base was so great that the military is covering it up. Lauren Westhusing, Ted's niece and a fine soul, doesn't believe Ted was a suicide in her comment here, but she may have her reasons for believing that.

Me? I am about done with this story. Surely, as Ted's death continues to percolate through the media, we will hear more moving eulogies, theories and counter-theories about his death, and accusations of tarnishing Ted's character. A lot more back and forth, in other words. Unless there is something really newsworthy that adds to this piece, I will not be covering all of that.

I may add some more about Ted's life and achievements, and will add the findings of the military investigation, assuming they eventually wrap it up and publicize the findings.

Let us now close with some eulogies for Ted. From Eric Alterman's column, look for comments by Joseph Alferio, Dr. James R. Goetsch Jr., Charles Perez, Bruce Henke and finally, Major Bob Bateman from Iraq. From The Fulcrum blog, a neat little eulogy.

The Yezidis - A Mysterious Kurdish Religious Sect

Update February 7, 2008. About two years after the publication of this post, I wrote an update to this article, Do the Yezidis Worship the Devil? which goes into much more detail about the religion.

Saturday, June 25:

2 German soldiers went missing in Afghanistan and are presumed dead.

Afternoon: An explosion at a NATO munitions store near an airbase in Rustaq, the capital of Takhar Province, left 2 German soldiers missing and presumed dead. 1 soldier and 7 Afghan civilians were wounded. Rustaq is 190 miles north of Kabul and close to the border with Tajikistan.

Madrid - 7 PM: A car bomb went off shortly after a phoned warning by the ETA Basque nationalist guerrillas. Photo of the blast here. For background on the armed Basque movement, which this blog supports, see my post here.

*****
Kurdistan: Since hardly anyone has any idea about who or what the Yezidis are, an introduction is in order. The Yezidis are a minority religious group that lives in Northern Iraq, Eastern Turkey, Eastern Syria, Armenia, Northwestern Iran, Georgia, Russia and Germany.

Some estimates put the number of Yezidis at 100,000. However, Yezidi spokesmen say there are 600,000 Yezidis, mostly in Iraq. Other estimates put the number of Yezidis as high as 2 million. There are 10,000 Yezidi refugees in Germany. German Yezidis have created a home page to help introduce others to their religion, but unfortunately it is all in German.

The Yezidis are more of a religious than an ethnic grouping. All Yezidis are Kurds and they all speak Kurdish. In Iraq, most of them live north of Mosul and in the Sinjar Mountains near the Syrian border. There are also Yezidis in Tel Afar, Mosul and the city of Sinjar. Iraq's Yezidis are seizing Iraq's democratic moment to press for their rights for the first time.

Yezidis, who actually admit to "worshiping the devil", have long been persecuted by Muslims as heathens and devil-worshipers. Although it's true that the Yezidis worship a peacock angel they call Lucifer, they are basically good, upstanding, moral people. They are not in any way analogous to the actual devil-worshipers who exist in the West, like Anton Levay's Church of Satan (COS), etc.

Note:This blog received a letter from a COS member who claimed that I was defaming the Church of Satan. I honestly did not think such a thing was possible! Upon review, the COS does not exactly promote the doctrine of the "evil Satanists" of popular conception.

Instead, they are some sort of ultra-selfish, hedonistic, Ayn Rand objectivist-libertarians. Although that's not an objectively evil philosophy, it's pretty noxious from my point of view.

My conclusion is that the COS are just a bunch of Republicans without the crazy fundamentalist Christian nonsense. Bush and all of his reactionary supporters should join the COS, but they are too uptight and puritanical to do it. Aside from the hedonism aspect, all forms of far right and ultraright politics would fit right in with the COS.

My German Communist friend tells me that the COS also has a fascist aspect that they try to hide and is not obvious on first glance. I think he is onto something. Apologists from the reactionary COS are invited to respond via email, or politely, via comments. Until then, I urge all progressives to approach the reactionary COS with utmost caution.

I know the orgies and dope parties sound like a blast, but there is nothing progressive about objectivism! A good progressive statement is (fist in the air): "Down with the COS!" If you like dope and orgies, there are plenty of fine progressive folks to party with, so there is no need to lie down with reactionary dogs like the COS.

Yezidis do not believe in Heaven or Hell, and they do not regard Satan, who they regard as the Chief of the Angels, as evil. Instead, he is sacred. The Yezidis feel the devil created the world and is de facto in charge right now. From the perspective of my life at the moment, those scenarios seem distinctly possible.

Yezidis are allowed to eat pork, unlike Muslims. But bizarrely, they cannot eat lettuce (because the Kurdish word for lettuce rhymes with their word for devil) or wear yellow (!).

Like the Zoroastrians, Yezidis do not accept converts - a tendency which may result in the end of Yezidism with time. Yezidism shares many things with Zoroastrianism, and some commenters regard it as either a Zoroastrian sect or a religion with roots in Zoroastrianism.

My opinion is that a synthesis between Zoroastrianism, Islam, Judaism (!) and pre-religious paganism is more accurate. It is likely the Yezidism predates all of these - Zoroastrianism, Islam and Judaism - in fact, it may be one of the oldest extant human religions.

Somewhat similar to the caste system of Hinduism, another ancient religion, Yezidis have seven levels of initiation, or classes. The classes are princes, sheiks, senators, seers, ascetics and the community of the faithful. The large faith community class makes up 70% of the community.

This split, with a small elite sect who retain most of the (oral) knowledge of the religion and a large majority of mere followers who are kept in the dark about most of the religion, is also similar to other "secret" religions in the area, including the Sabeans, the Druze and Alawi.

The Alawi of Syria and Lebanon are a highly divergent Shia sect, a split-off from the extremist Nusairi split early in the history of Shiism. Although the Druze call themselves Muslims, it is probable that they are not Muslims at all since their religion is so divergent. Instead, like Bahaism, the Druze religion is more properly considered to be related to Islam rather than part of Islam proper.

The Druze date back to the 1100's and also seem to be the result of a Shia split, similar to the split that birthed Alawism. Both sects persisted via extreme tribalism, refusing intermarriage, accepting no converts, keeping their religion secret, pretending to be Muslims to avoid persecution while still practicing the religion in secret, and especially, seeking shelter in the difficult, mountainous terrain of the Levant.

The Sabeans or Mandeans of Iraq are probably the last remains of the ancient Gnostic religion; they may also be former Diasporic Sephardic Jews (!) who split off from Judaism in Iraq around the year 600. The Mandeans also worship the North Star, revere John the Baptist and consider Jesus Christ as the font of all evil on Earth!

In Yezidism, marriage across classes is strictly forbidden, again reminiscent of Hinduism. Although the new Iraqi regime is basically a puppet regime of US colonialism, at least the Yezidis do have three members of the new Iraqi Parliament, all elected on the Kurdish list.

Saddam's regime persecuted the Yezidis first for being Kurds, and second for their religion, as they were viewed as heathens. Yes, Saddam's regime was not completely secular. Under Saddam's extremely racist, fascist-like, Sunni Arab Nationalist regime, Yezidis, Kurds, Assyrians, Shia and Turkomen were all persecuted by the Ba'ath Party.

For instance, Assyrian Christians were denied an identity by the Baath and referred to as "Kurdish Christians". The Baath forbade the use of the Assyrian or Turkoman languages in the schools. Yezidi religious studies have been banned in Iraq since 1963, the year of the Baathist coup.

In its censuses, Baathist Arab nationalist racists called the Yezidis "an Arabic people", clearly a falsehood. Saddam's racist Arab regime engaged in ethnic cleansing of the Yezidis on several occasions. Usually, the Yezidis were driven off their land onto other lands, and their land was given to nearby Arabs.

In 1978, 126 Yezidi villages in Sinjar were "collectivized" into 10 villages, while 10 villages near Dahuk were destroyed and the villagers were forced into another village. The new villages created for the Yezidis lacked even basic health care, and it was hard to earn a living. Arab invaders who colonized Yezidi lands forbade the Yezidi from herding animals, and the new villages the Yezidis were pushed into lacked decent pasture.

In 1997, two Yezidi teachers from Elqush were arrested by Saddam's sadistic intelligence services and tortured until they agreed to stop teaching the Yezidi religion, an act of naked fascism.

In the same year, in Ayn Sufna, Baathist racist fascists stole 1,500 Yezidi properties and gave them to racist Arab and Kurdish tribes in the region. Saddam's army surrounded a Yezidi village in 2000, but left after the Yezidis staged a defiant demonstration.

In the no-fly zones formed by the allies in the Kurdish Regional Government area of Iraq instituted after the Gulf War, the Yezidis have fared much better than they did under Saddam.

They liberated many villages that were seized by Arab colonists, and now school classes in the Yezidi religion are even taught in areas where there are good numbers of Yezidi pupils. However, since the US invasion, the Yezidi situation in some ways has worsened.

The entire north of Iraq has come under the control of Kurdish racist fascist parties, the KDP and PUK. These parties are lately promoting a sort of Kurdish Sunni racism which attacks Sunni and Shia Arabs, Shia, Christian and Yezidi Kurds and Assyrian Christians - in short, everyone who is not a Sunni Kurd.

The racist Sunni Kurds succeeded in preventing large numbers of all of these groups from voting in the election in February.

In the case of the Yezidis, Kurdish racists never even allowed polling stations to open in a number of Yezidi zones. Racist Sunni Kurds have been attacking and ethnically cleansing Assyrian Christian villages in the north for decades now, a process which accelerated when the Allies granted the Kurds their Kurdish Zone in 1991.

This is a continuation of long-standing Kurdish Sunni Muslim Nazi-like racism against Assyrian Christians extending back to the 1920's. In that decade, Kurdish Muslims gleefully slaughtered huge numbers of Assyrians in a naked display of Islamofascism that reached genocidal proportions.

Formally, the Yezidi religion was founded in the 1100's by Sheikh Uday bin Masafel al-Amawi. Uday was born in Damascus but died in Shaikan in northern Iraq. His tomb in Shaikan is now Yezidism's holiest site. As noted above, many scholars trace Yezidism to one of the world's oldest extant religions, Zoroastrianism, founded in ancient Persia.

Traditionally, Yezidism is variously regarded as either an offshoot of Zoroastrianism or Shia Islam. Those who say the Yezidis are Shia hold that they are an extreme Shia "Sevener" Ismaili sect similar to the Druze and the Alawi (see discussion of the Alawi and Druze above).

A better analysis is to regard Yezidism as a syncretic mix between Zoroastrianism and Shia Islam.

Others note Judaic traits in the Yezidis; some suggest that the Yezidis are former Jews who broke away from Judaism and formed a new religion. Indeed, some theorists that the Kurds in general are former Jews. See Rabbi Joe Katz's Eretzyisroel site for more on that interesting theory, which may have some validity.

The best analysis would leaven the Zoroastrian-Shia syncretism of Yezidism with dollops of Judaism and tablespoons of ancient paganism, while noting the Yezidism is probably older than any of its parts except for the pagan.

Oddly enough, the Yezidis have a monk and nun class, men and women who dress in white and have taken a vow of celibacy. Yezidis are also said to be sun worshipers, in another similarity with Zoroastrianism.

A famous Yezidi, Sharfadin, has a tomb in Sinjar. Sharfadin also serves as a personified sun god. Note that sun-worship is one of the most ancient of human religious tenets, dating back to the Egyptians and probably beyond.

The leader of the Yezidis is a prince called mir, or mireh shekha. The Yezidi religion is passed down orally through families and officially, there are no Yezidi religious texts. However, closer analysis seems to reveal that there are a couple of Yezidi holy books, but they are hidden by followers, and their existence is denied to outsiders.

Outsiders have somehow managed to get a hold of a couple of copies of these holy texts, or at least parts of them, and they have been published, both in print and on the Internet. Some say that these supposed Yezidi holy texts are actually fakes and that no extant holy texts exist, as all knowledge is oral.

I glanced through the material in these texts along with an analysis of them. Shall we say that Yezidism is an immensely complex religion and that this article does not begin to tickle out an understanding of it?

Kakaism is another Kurdish sect that is very similar to Yezidism. It arose 1,000 years ago in northern Iraq due to conflicts between the Umayyad rulers of Islam and the Zoroastrian priesthood. Kakais, like Yezidis, are forbidden from cursing Satan on religious grounds. Hence, many Muslims see them, like the Yezidis, as devil-worshipers. There are 300,000 Kakais in Kurdistan.
*****

Racial Holy Wars, Real and Phantom

Due to the recent abuse of the comments section, mostly by rightwingers (and a few Zionist) commenters, I have had to formulate a Rules Policy on commenting. I never really had any problems with comments until I wrote what was pretty much a harmless, factual article dealing with a group of humans called "Jews".

This group of humans is apparently so special, so great, so awesome, so incredible, so protected and possibly so powerful that a strange situation has arisen in the Western World.

We non-Jewish humans can write about most any other group of humans, but we cannot write about this group called "Jews" without a creating a firestorm. There are exceptions. We can write about "Jews" if we adopt a slavish, worshipful tone that emphasizes how wonderful, special, perfect and totally awesome this group is.

I suppose this quite insane reaction has something to do with recent history, notably the Holocaust. At any rate, the policy of "non-Jews must not say or write the word Jew" due to Holocaust guilt or whatever is just not going to work and is likely to backfire.

Western crusaders against racism, sexism and anti-Semitism need to focus on real racism, sexism and anti-Semitism and not get lost in PC-insanity of focusing on the fake racism, sexism and anti-Semitism of silly little words, phrases, sentences and jokes.

For instance, we now have a government under Bush that has just practiced some of the most blatant anti-Black electoral racism since Jim Crow in this latest US Presidential election.

This was done by deliberately denying many US Blacks the right to vote in a variety of very clever ways, too widespread to be coincidental. The Bush Administration has also gutted civil rights enforcement and appointed a number of blatantly racist white judges.

At the same time, it has indulged in an attack on the welfare state that has definite white racist overtones. Yet not one word of any of that from the useless, whored, corrupt, depraved US media or either of the two worthless major political parties here. Not even one peep either, usually, from the many House Negroes and silly Toms populating our TV screens.

Instead our society focuses (through the insidious US media) on whether some prominent American used some "anti-Black" or "anti-Jewish" word, phrase, sentence or joke on some occasion when they opened their mouth.

Once the horrible word-crime is reported by the media with bated breath, a wild goose chase called "racist hunt" ensues while Americans, glued to the TV, watch mesmerized as The PC Cops chase these heinous "racist" words, phrases, sentences or jokes across our TV screens.

90% of the time, it's an innocuous or even factual utterance, yet the PC Word Police are right there on the job, chasing bad words, diabolical phrases, evil sentences and vile jokes across our land, 90 miles an hour, sirens blaring.

Meanwhile, holding down "Fort Sexism", the completely useless US feminist movement obsesses over "anti-woman" and "sexist" words, phrases, sentences and jokes, while much of female humanity outside of the US cringes under the terror boot of a vicious patriarchal dictatorship.

Some idiot spray-paints a US synagogue with nasty words, evil little symbols or malevolent sentences and the US media pants hyperactively for weeks about some "anti-Semitism wave sweeping the globe". While at the same time, the US military wages a blatantly racist war against the "inferior" Iraqi people to either media silence or outright cheerleading.

This is a racist war that has already killed 100,000 dark-skinned Arab "untermenschen" at the altar of American Supremacy, and we are just getting started. Not far away in Palestine, grinning Israeli stormtroopers, smiling with sadistic glee, practice their own Racial Holy War, lording it over the "lowly, inferior", dark-skinned Palestinians in a Levantine Kristallnact re-run that seems to never end.

Let's shoot back to the year 1990 for a moment. In the alternate universe called the US media, media hypesters are going insane because President George H. Bush said a horrific phrase, "Jewish power", before a fund-raising speech to a Jewish group.

Never mind that Jewish power, monetary, media and political, was a fact of American life in 1990, and is even more of a fact today. But some facts may not be stated, so say the solemn Word Police.

Why? Because truth is irrelevant in Alice in Wonderland Zionized America. All that matters is that a foul crime has been committed, a crime called "anti-Semitism". A bestial crime with no legal definition, a repulsive felony no legal code number, a horrifying violation with no penalties legally proscribed, but a horrendous crime nonetheless.

For this particular horrific "anti-Semitic" crime, the President of the United States himself was forced to get on his knees and abjectly kiss the shoes of the offended group as they towered arrogantly above his debased figure. Ironically, with this act, the naked lie that this group had no power was revealed as the howler that it was. This group had no power, yet they forced the President of the US to kiss their toes! Ha!

A year later, International Zionism and its US imperialist partner hatched a racist genocidal plot to draw Saddam Hussein's military into Kuwait, trap them there and forbid them from leaving, purely in order to destroy his military and slaughter 265,000 of Iraq's "racially inferior" soldiers and civilians, mainly because they were considered to be racial enemies of the Jewish state.

Later the same year, after the initial slaughter of 265,000 "sand niggers", the killers were not yet sated. They lusted for more blood - Arab blood. And so another diabolical, genocidal, racist plot was hatched, this time by America and Britain - a plot to murder 1 million Iraqi baby racial enemies of the Anglo people over the next decade.

This conspiracy was called the Iraqi Sanctions Pogrom. Yet, for the next 12 years, Americans heard not one peep about the slaughter of these "lowly, inferior" dark-skinned Arabs by their "racially superior" Anglo mass murderers.

As the bodies stacked up like cordwood, both the Jewish state and its multitude of US agents, along with the paid hacks for Anglo imperialism, cheered from the sidelines.

They demanded that the mass murder go on, threatening anyone who tried to stop it or slow it down, all the while either denying that there was any mass murder occurring, or acknowledging the slaughter, but blaming the Iraqis - the victims - for killing themselves.

Through the 90's, while the Iraqi Sanctions Charnel House burned, the devious US media was busy distracting the shallow American people. The media browbeat and deluged gullible Americans with reports about a phantom threat coming from White people in the US, people called "White racists", "skinheads", "Nazis" and "White Power fascists".

This "White threat" was said to be running amok across our land, swarming our streets, arming themselves for war. The nation was portrayed as being on the verge of a White fascist takeover.

Over the whole decade of the 90's, these "horrible US White Supremacist Nazis" killed a mere handful of Americans in their Racial Holy War, while the Anglo-Israeli Racial Holy War, described above, continued in reeling Iraq and Palestine, killing 230 Arabs a day, day in, day out, no end.

From 1991 to 2005, Anglo and Anglo-Zionist racist pogroms, combined, killed 1.36 million "racially inferior" dark-skinned Iraqi Arabs, yet not one peep of outrage was heard from the media. The only sounds heard from the US media were outbreaks of cheering the slaughter of our racial enemies, the Arabs, during the hot wars.

During this period, the media's splenetic outrage was instead reserved for the rare White skinhead murder of one Black man, or maybe the murders or three or four Black men. Surely the deaths of this handful of US Blacks were terrible crimes, but look once more at the figures above. You do the math. Where's the real racism anyway? Where's the real menace? To paraphrase O.J. Simpson, who are the real killers?

America's whole discourse about racism, sexism and anti-Semitism has become seriously disturbed. We obsess and wax hysterically over silly little "racist" words, phrases, sentences and jokes, while at the same time, our nation and its racial allies commit racist massacres of 100,000's of our racial enemies - the Arabs - to either silence or open cheering.

The Catastrophe of the Iraqi Resistance

I am looking for translators to translate this post into German. Email me if you are interested.

By any progressive standards, the Iraqi resistance seems to have morphed in recent days into one of the most unprincipled, unethical, fanatical, unreasonable, and reactionary resistance factions on Earth.

From a progressive standpoint, it would seem the Iraqi rebels have some principled grounds to fight for - we see them as resisting a US imperialist, neocolonialist and Zionist invasion of Iraq, one intended to subdue all of those forces in the Middle East resisting US and Israeli desires for total economic, military and political domination of the region.

The US invasion was completely contrary to international law, there has been massive colonization and outright theft of Iraq’s resources and economic base, and the US appears to be demanding the right to establish several colonial garrisons in the conquered land in furtherance of its imperial plans for the region.

We could go on and on about the larger political and economic schemes at play here, but that’s all been dealt with extensively by others. The point I am trying to make here is that merely from anti-imperialist or anti-colonialist point of view, the Iraqi resistance would seem to have a valid cause for armed struggle to throw the invaders and occupiers off their homeland.

Given the seedbed for a patriotic, nationalist, principled resistance the US has sown in Iraq, what have the Iraqi guerrillas done? In 2003, one could still hold out hope for some sort of a progressive, secular, nationalist armed resistance in Iraq. Through 2003, a plethora of resistance groups appeared, with new ones popping up every week or so.

A number of them were standard nationalist groupings, others stridently opposed sectarian politics, and a number were decidedly secular. Some of these groupings were associated with the former regime, but many were not.

They were generally made up of Sunni Arabs, though there were also a number of Shia Arabs, along with a few Kurds, Turkmen and even Iraqi Christians filling out the ranks. Further, there were a number of openly Leftist armed groups, though their numbers were small.

From the point of view of the Iraqi resistance, the best thing to do would be to cast aside all sectarian nonsense and try to unite as many groups as possible against the occupiers. This is what a sensible, intelligent, nationalist resistance does. Even in a region where tribal politics holds sway, the fighters close ranks in the name of “national unity”, as the guerrillas in Palestine have done.

The resistance should avoid imposing noxious, draconian law on the peoples under its control, proceed cautiously in the case of spies, and avoid trying to form local government. The case of Palestine is instructive for how a “national unity” resistance should be run.

Prior to the founding of Hamas in 1987, Islamists in Palestine were hardly involved in the armed struggle - they spent most of their time, believe it or not, arguing about how long to grow one’s beard. If one took up arms, one was regarded as a “Communist”, since armed struggle against Israel was for “Communists”.

There was a great deal of sectarian conflict in those days and the precursors to Hamas killed and wounded many Leftists, who the Islamists despised.

Around this time, Israel helped found Hamas as both a divide and conquer strategy against the Palestinians and to Islamicize the face of Palestinian struggle in order to make it less appealing on the international front. In many ways, this strategy was a complete failure. Before the founding of Hamas, the Islamists were attacking Leftists in Palestine all the time.

This internecine conflict came to an end soon after the founding of Hamas. After things settled down a bit, the Palestinian resistance moved to a point of equilibrium called “national unity”. Presently, open Leftists and Communists in the PFLP and DFLP fight side by side, with no problems whatsoever, with the hardline Islamists in Hamas.

Professors on Palestinian campuses write openly atheist and blasphemous tracts against Islam and are not harmed. One of the top figures in the PLO is an acknowledged atheist and no one bothers him. There are large marches against suicide bombings. Hamas eschews all local law enforcement and refuses to implement an Islamic dress code.

In Ramallah, one can walk into a bar and order a drink during Ramadan - the only place in the Arab World one may do this - and Hamas refuses to even issue an official denunciation. Hamas has never tried to shut down the numerous bars in Palestine.

Although Hamas is officially the Palestinian branch of Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas keeps this a big secret because the MB is so disliked in Palestine (it is regarded as an Islamic extremist organization). Most Palestinians are not even aware of the relationship. Last Christmas, Hamas members actually presented gifts and toys to churches in Bethlehem - an unthinkable act for a hardline Islamist group.

Hardline Islamist imams in Gaza have called for Palestinian Christians and Muslims to fight side by side against Israel. Palestinian Christians, and some Muslims, wear whatever they please, and miniskirts and not unheard of, even in Gaza. The Islamists don’t like Western dress, and comments are made, but Hamas has never tried to enforce any kind of Islamic dress code in Palestine.

Palestinian papers are filled with articles that many hardline Palestinians would consider to be openly treasonous - calls for calling off the armed struggle, for settling for the most debasing peace agreements with Israel, for peaceful struggle a la Gandhi, for disarming the armed groups, etc.

Through it all, Hamas and the hardliners generally keep their mouths shut and tolerate openly “sellout” positions, all in the name of national unity. Although the differences between the Left, the PLO and the Islamists are often very wide, there is not much discussion of these differences - they are all temporarily glossed over in the name of national unity.

PFLP and DFLP fighters, open Leftists, came out for the funerals of Hamas leaders Sheik Yassin and Abdulaziz Rantissi and were seen fighting in the battles with the IDF that erupted afterward. Human rights organizations operate openly in Palestine, criticizing both the Israeli and the Palestinian sides, and the armed factions leave them alone.

Most importantly of all, all Palestinian factions have deep roots in their communities and do not brutalize the people they live amongst. In many places, almost everyone in the community is part of the resistance in one way or another, from young kids to women to old folks - everyone serves some function. You can’t get closer to the people than that.

Journalists, politicians, government workers, UN employees, aid workers, Christians, Druze, students, innocent civilians, even ISF volunteers, have nothing to fear from Hamas, the most radical of the Palestinian factions. Hamas has never been known kidnap foreigners for ransom, or to behead prisoners, much less to do so on videotape.

Hamas has never attacked a Palestinian school, store, campus, neighborhood, mosque, church, bar, press office, polling place, government office or hospital. Only informers for Israel have something to fear, and usually only after a serious investigation.

Even on the rare occasions when Hamas has taken an Israeli soldier hostage, the captives were treated fairly well, at least until Israel made the mistake of trying to “free” them. Hamas held them as ransom to try to get its own prisoners out of Israeli prisons.

When Israel refused to negotiate and stormed the hideout, the guerrillas executed the prisoner, which is a crime, but that is still not the same thing as wanton execution of all enemy prisoners or beheading prisoners on tape and peddling the gore-fest around the Internet.

Even during the 90’s, while the PA spent much of its time arresting Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists as favors for the US and Israel, Islamic guerrillas generally refrained from attacks on the PA, a breathtaking show of self-restraint.

While controversy has swirled over the Palestinian terror tactic of suicide bombings against civilians, the world fails to recognize that almost all Palestinian attacks have been against military or settler targets in the Territories, and only a relative few attacks have occurred inside the Green Line.

Palestinian guerrillas have repeatedly offered to cease all attacks on civilians inside Israel, only to be endlessly rebuffed. One gets the feeling that Israel wants a suicide attack inside the Green Line now and again to malign the enemy and feed its propaganda machine. Even here, though, Palestinian terrorists have taken a nuanced stance.

Note the International Solidarity Movement’s (ISM) volunteers that swarm the Territories, standing by the besieged Palestinian people and helping protect civilians. Most people don’t realize that 1/3 of ISM volunteers are Jewish.

Generally, these Jews who have chosen to stand by the Palestinian people do not complain of racism from the supposedly Jew-hating Palestinians. How long would a Jewish civilian volunteer last in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle, no matter how pro-resistance he was?

The point here is that all of these people - atheists, blasphemers, bartenders and bar patrons, women in miniskirts, “sell-outs” and compromise at any cost types, human rights activists, journalists, humanitarian workers, Leftists, Communists, feminists, Christians - are basically left alone!

There may be some words exchanged here and there, but in general, no one threatens them, puts a gun to their head, beats them up, attacks them, tortures them, much less kills them or chops their head off on tape. This is the intelligent way to run a principled, intelligent, nationalist resistance to a colonizer, occupier or invader.

Why? Because by fracturing and fighting amongst themselves, the resistance serves the needs of the occupier. Divide and conquer is the age-old colonial game and the smartest resistance movements try not to fall for it.

So what has the Iraqi resistance done? Exactly the opposite of the Palestinian resistance! Instance of uniting for national unity, they are presently pursuing one of the most reactionary, backwards, barbaric, sectarian, fascistic, oppressive, domineering, racist, tribalistic, and downright stupid agendas imaginable.

Allow me to elaborate: In late 2003, after the capture of Saddam, the resistance started moving towards Sunni Islamism and the pro-Saddam factions started drying up. Although there have been a couple of serious, and commendable, flare-ups of Shia nationalistic Islamism with the 2 Sadr rebellions in 2004, at the moment, the resistance is probably 90% Sunni Arab.

Furthermore, as 2004 wore on, the Sunni Islamists became more and more extreme, with a movement towards Salafism or Wahhabism, the most extreme Sunni Islam with roots in the Arabian Gulf.

Through 2004 the Leftist, nationalist, and unified front type groupings gradually seemed to give way to this extreme fanatical Sunni Salafist Islam, which now dominates the Iraqi resistance with its bleak, cruel, Medieval, puritanical, theocratic agenda.

With each passing month, more and more Shia are alienated from the resistance as the Sunni extremists attack the Shia with increasing regularity. In the areas they control, the Sunni fanatics have imposed the most backwards, insane, brutal and stupid version of Islamic law since the fall of the Taliban.

Even Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Sudan are not this harsh. Women are threatened and then shot dead for the crime of wearing blue jeans. Drivers listening to music are pulled out of their cars, beaten, and ordered to listen to religious music. Stores selling musical instruments and music and video CD’s are ordered to close and attacked when they don’t close. Hairdressers and makeup shops are ordered to close.

Women refusing to wear the hijab are threatened with guns and sometimes killed for not covering up. Alcohol stores are ordered to close and bombed when they don’t comply. Alcohol sellers are flogged in public. Men with long hair are given mock public trials where they are beaten and their “Western” haircuts shorn.

In recent days, the Sunni guerrillas around Latifiyah in the so-called Death Triangle have committed the ultimate outrage of shutting down the schools in the region, either in “solidarity with Fallujah” or because “schools are cooperating with the Occupation”.

One has to think hard to think of a resistance group in recent years that has shut down the schools of very same people they are claiming to “protect”. The damage that could be done to the Sunni youngsters in these areas from long-term school shutdowns is hard to calculate.

Journalists are kidnapped, beaten, tortured, shot dead, and even beheaded on tape in a frenzy of delirious rage that is hard for the sane mind to comprehend. News agencies are attacked for not sufficiently toeing the guerrilla line.

And in the ultimate crime and the nadir of stupidity, an aid worker who dedicated her life to the Iraqi people and hated the Occupation was kidnapped and brutally murdered for reasons only an asylum inmate could comprehend.

God forbid, even hospitals are attacked; in the most egregious case, after the idiotic bombing of a Christian church, in order to doubly punish the "infidel Christian" victims of the blast ferried to the hospital.

Execution of “spies”, “informers” and the like is utterly random and at the whim of the guerrillas, often without much evidence or the slightest hint of a proceeding.

The upshot of all of this is that in the areas where they Sunni fanatics hold sway, they are often feared and hated by a certain number of residents, Sunni Arabs themselves. Some residents are so fed up with guerrilla high-handedness and cruelty that they have welcomed the re-Occupation of their cities by US troops.

When a guerrilla faction is reduced to ruling and surviving through terror and not through the deep, passionate support of the people, that resistance faction is utterly failing in one of the primary rules of guerrilla war.

This rule, cited from Mao to Che to the finest war colleges on Earth, that the guerrillas need to gain support from civilian populations through good deeds and by the passionate commitment to the guerrilla cause of the people the guerrillas live amongst. The people’s support for the guerrilla works best when freely given and not coerced - terrorizing the people you claim to represent only gets one so far.

And how are the Sunni Islamists treating other religious groups, whom any half-sane Sunni resistance ought to be trying to enlist in a national resistance? Christians are threatened, ordered to close their alcohol, hairdressing and makeup shops and wear the hijab. If they refuse, they are killed.

Some Christians are being ordered to convert to Islam on penalty of death and there have been a few deaths in these cases. Iraqi churches, some of the oldest and most beautiful in the Christian World, have been repeatedly and shamelessly bombed.

It is true that many Christians have supported the Occupation in the past, but many others have not, and some large Christian parties have recently strongly opposed the Occupation.

The Shia are threatened, bullied, humiliated and ultimately ethnically cleansed. An entire region, from Abu Ghurayb down to Yusufiya and Latifiyah, is being systematically cleansed of Shia in an attempt to expand the Sunni Zone west of Baghdad.

Clearly, this is no better than what Israel does in their Territories. In Latifiyah, Shia mosques have been ordered to close and Shia are being thrown off the land so that Sunnis can take their farmland. Landowners renting to Shia are threatened with death unless they throw the Shia off the land.

The Sunni Islamists have begun setting up checkpoints in Latifiyah, on the popular Shia pilgrimage route between Baghdad and Najaf/Karbala. When Shia pilgrims arrive at these checkpoints, they are pulled out of their cars and ordered to denounce Ali, their patron saint. If they refuse, they are shot dead on the spot.

Other Shia are pulled out of their cars, beaten, and ordered not to come that way again. A Shia armed brigade, the Fury Brigades, was formed recently in Basra to deal with the blatant Sunni racism and oppression of the Shia in Latifiyah.

This Shia armed group recently fought a battle with Sunni Salafists in Latifiyah. Of course, US forces sat back and watched for a couple of hours while they bloodied each other. Obviously, it serves the occupier, the US Coalition, Israel, and imperialism in general to have various Iraqi factions fighting against each. This is exactly what the US and Israel want - the better to control Iraq.

The long-term strategy of the Israeli Right has long been that in order for Israel to survive its hostile neighborhood, Israel needs to become the dominant imperialist state in the Middle East and take control of the neighborhood by attacking its various hostile Arab neighbors (or getting the US to do it for them) and breaking up hostile Arab states into endlessly warring ethnic statelets.

This strategy was laid out in an internal Israeli document published in 1980 and uncovered and revealed to the world by the brave Israeli dissident Israel Shahak. Other more recent documents echo the same line, especially Securing the Realm in 1996 (The Securing the Realm document appears to lay the groundwork for the Iraq invasion).

The 1980 Israeli paper said that the optimal situation for Iraq, from Israel’s point of view, would be endless civil war between the various sects and ethnic groups, especially the Kurds and the Shia and Sunni Arabs. An eventual breakup of Iraq into unstable ethnic mini-states would be ideal.

A number of prominent American thinkers have also recently published on the benefits of breaking up Iraq into unstable, weak, easily controlled ethnic statelets. So, in their bottomless tribal stupidity, the Iraqi resistance is playing into the precisely laid plans and wildest dreams of their worst enemies - the Israelis and the Americans!

At the moment, the Sunni resistance has various goals. The first and only noble goal, from the point of view of an ideal resistance faction, is to throw the US Coalition out of Iraq. Beyond that, the Sunnis increasingly fear a Shia takeover in the coming elections in January. The Sunni Arabs have brutally ruled Mesopotamia, and later Iraq, for many centuries, lording it over the Shia Arabs in the process.

This 20% oligarchic elite, the Sunni Arabs, feel somehow entitled to lord it over Shia Arabs and Kurds like the worst feudal overlords.

A Shia victory in the coming elections would be the end of the reign of this racist ruling class Sunni elite, the end of their supremacism and domination of the other groups in the nation, and the end to their ill-deserved privileges obtained by brutally exploiting the other groups. The Sunni Arabs need to get used to the fact that they are a minority in Iraq.

If the Sunnis had any sense, they would be negotiating deals with the Shia at this very moment. Instead, like a typical ruling class thrown out of power, they are not giving up the tiniest bit of their illegitimate power and privileges without a vicious fight.

These deals would take the form of some sort of apology rituals by the Sunnis, such as statements of apology by the Sunni clergy for the crimes the Sunnis have committed against the Shia over the centuries, or perhaps pilgrimages to Shia mosques where prominent Sunnis essentially repent to the Shia for their crimes and ask for their forgiveness. The fact that these rituals would be largely symbolic is not the point.

In this sort of sociopolitical ritual, the symbolism itself can have potent sociological and political ramifications. The Sunnis could also cut deals for some sort of affirmative action or power sharing in government, a la Lebanon.

The Sunnis could point out that the Shia can hardly run the country without Sunni expertise and wealth. In return, the Shia would offer the Sunni Arabs, say, 20% of the seats in Parliament, 20% of the positions in the Cabinet, and perhaps one top-ranking post.

The basis for this deal would be that sharing power is preferable to civil war and that Iraqi Muslims ought to unite against the US and Israel instead of serving the enemy by infighting. Now that’s if the Sunni Arabs had any sense. But it appears that deep-rooted tribalism and bigotry and the towering arrogance and sense of entitlement of an ancient ruling class is trumping pragmatism in Iraq.

The Sunnis feel that they have enough power, guns and money to both throw out the US Coalition and then put the Kurds and Shia back under their boot, just like in the good old days. And they are willing to gamble a lot to get it all back. The game here is the zero-sum game.

Each group - Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Shia Arabs feels that either their tribe gets it all, or their tribe gets nothing. There is one winner who gets everything, and two losers who get zero. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Certainly sharing the wealth and power is preferable to endless civil war that only serves the enemy.

There are plenty of logical, historical reasons for Shia Arabs, secular Iraqis, progressive Iraqis, nationalist Iraqis and even Iraqi Christians to oppose the Coalition’s Occupation of Iraq. In 1920, all these groups rose up against the British.

At the moment, many amongst these groups are either supporting the US Coalition or sitting on the sidelines because the Taliban-like Sunni resistance either offers them nothing or seems even worse than the US. In this case, the US presence at least offers Christians, the Shia, the secular, progressives and even nationalists some modicum of protection against the nightmare of a brutal Sunni theocracy.

The leading figurehead for this insane, fanatical, brutal Sunni nonsense is none other than Mr. Zarqawi. This man is a certified sadist, a sociopathic freak with the mind of a serial killer who delights in personally sawing off the heads of live human beings for the whole world to see.

A few of his more famous victims have been utterly innocent in any sense of the word. Zarqawi harbors a crazed, pathological hatred of Shia Muslims and Christians in general, not to mention Sunni Muslims who are insufficiently fanatical. One could hardly think of a more backwards, terrifying, medieval, monstrous, criminal, racist pig of a man to head the Iraqi Resistance.

The US and Israel must be delighted. Zarqawi is a grade-A villain right out of the movies, with virtually no redeeming qualities and a mortifying, bloodthirsty, genocidal vision. The elevation of Zarqawi to the symbolic leadership of the Iraqi resistance symbolizes the depths of the depravity and lunacy to which the Iraqi Sunni Salafist rebels have sunk.

On the one hand, we have the ultra-reactionary, backwards, racist, corrupt, sexist, cruel-hearted, supremacist, chauvinist, criminal, fundamentalist, crusading Bush Administration and its imperial armies smashing around the globe picking fights and bullying the planet.

Lined up against them, in Iraq and Afghanistan, are some of the most backwards, ultra- reactionary, supremacist, chauvinist, medieval, fundamentalist, racist, corrupt, sexist, cruel-hearted criminals on Earth, offering a vision at least as vicious, animalistic, cold, primitive and fascist-like as Bush’s crusaders, if not much worse.

Rational people realize that religious wars are some of the stupidest of all possible wars. This war - the “War on Terror” - is a becoming a war between insane reactionary religious fanatics, one side waving the banner of Christianity (and more surreptitiously, Judaism), the other the banner of Islam.

The failure of the rest of the Earth, inhabiting the relatively sane terrain between these terrifying extremes, to offer a substantive vision between these two utterly bleak alternatives, is profoundly dispiriting.

Does Tiki Tiki Only Have 250 Words?

Forget it.

Via Marilyn Vos Savant in today's Parade Magazine, we are told that Tiki-Tiki, otherwise known as Sranan Togo, a creole with 100,000 native speakers and many more second languages speakers on Suriname, has the smallest vocabulary of any known language - with only 250 words. This claim is credulously repeated elsewhere on the Net.

It is true that Internet dictionaries of Tiki-Tiki do show few words, possibly as few as several hundred. The SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics) page says that Sranan Togo has maybe 3,000-4,000 words, as opposed to hundreds of thousands of words for major world languages (Vos Savant notes that English has the largest vocabulary at 250,000).

Many of those English words are neologisms, that is, new words that are being created on the fly, especially on places like the Internet. I actually think that English has more than 250,000 words, but I can't prove it. As slang and whatnot proliferates in a widely spoken language, it gets pretty darn hard to count up all the words, much less write them all down.

There are other ways to create words, so it is not really so true to say that certain languages have low vocabularies. For instance, many languages spoken by small tribes have an almost endless productive variety of features for word production. In some (or perhaps many) such languages, roots can be manipulated almost endlessly to create new words to describe just about anything.

Nouns can turn into adjectives, adverbs and verbs and verbs can turn into nouns, adjectives and adverbs. Adding morphological particles onto existing roots creates a process whereby one root could possibly create up to 1000 or so new words if one is creative enough.

This potential is lost in much of the nonsense about "primitive" versus "advanced" languages, a distinction that hardly exists anyway. The truth is that the most insanely maddening languages on Earth, languages so crazy that brilliant linguists are still trying to figure them out, are spoken in general by the world's most primitive and backwards peoples.

As a language gets bigger and used more by a civilization, it gets stupidified more and more as it loses its complexity. The reason is that people need to be on time and earn a paycheck. They need to say things quickly, make the sale or hang up the cellphone, and get to work on time.

In a more primitive situation, people are hunter-gatherers or they are laid-back agriculturalists who just take it easy and tend their fields all day. Despite blatherings of IQ theorists, even primitive humans are highly intelligent beings. We can prove this by looking at the insanely brilliant languages they have constructed all by their own selves.

We think that people get bored in these primitive settings, as their high intellect is not stimulated enough. One of the things these tribes do to stimulate their high intelligence is to play games with languages. This is why you such wildly complicated languages in such places. Much of this complexity is superfluous (noun markers, case endings, etc.) and can easily be jettisoned if one wishes to become a multitasking metrosexual.

Anyway, I did some quick research on Sranan Togo and found this paper. Creoles are intensively studied by linguists for a variety of reasons. As part of this paper, the authors used a German-language dictionary of Early Sranan Togo, Neger-Englisches Wörterbuch , completed in 1783 by Christian Ludwig Schumann. This dictionary contains 2,391 types and 17,731 tokens.

Types and tokens are often used in creole literature because it gets hard to figure out what exactly is a word in a creole language. Types and tokens is a semantic distinction derived from philosophy. Briefly, a type is a generic and a token is a specific instance of that generic. For instance, tree would be a type and maple tree would be a token. Waterfall would be a type and Vernal Falls would be a token. Man would be a type and Jesus would be a token.

So in 1783, an early version of this creole already had 20,122 words. It must only have increased its vocabulary since then. I'm calling bullshit on this 250 words line.

A creole is different from a pidgin. A pidgin is often created by immigrants to a new country where none of them understand each other.

Early immigrants to Hawaii created some pidgins. Filipinos, Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiians, Koreans, etc. were all thrown together on sugar and pineapple plantations and no one could understand each other. English was the main language. The immigrants took English, I believe, and then layered onto it parts of their native languages and finally created a pidgin that they could all understand.

A pidgin is a mess, since it is a language made by adults, and due to brain constraints, adults cannot create a functional language out of thin air on the fly. The pidgin is then spoken to the adults' kids, who pick it up as a first language. But kids are little language-creating genius machines, and they somehow take this messed-up pidgin and transform into a full-fledged language, a creole, by expanding it in a variety of important ways.

The creole is then transmitted to kids again, and soon the pidgin dies and everyone is speaking creole. It took some time for us to figure out what was really going on here, but we are pretty confident that kids are indeed expanding the pidgin and turning it into a creole. A guy named Derek Bickerton at the University of Hawaii has done some great work in this area.

I actually bought and tried to read Bickerton's Language and Species, but I only got 40% of the way through it. Some of this stuff gets pretty intense. I don't want to say ponderous, but pretty soon you have the book down on the desk and both of your hands are wrapped over your head Praying Mantis-like, bent down over the book, as you try to suck the concepts into your humiliated mind.

In Suriname, actually formerly Dutch Guyana, Sranan Togo is the mother tongue of some 100,000 descendants of former slaves brought to the country. It has also become a lingua franca for other ethnicities in the place, including speakers of Hindustani, Amerindian, Javanese, Dutch, and Chinese tongues.

Like all of the Guyanas, there is quite a fine mess of ethnicities in Suriname, and I think they have been breeding together for a while such that race is becoming a bit of an afterthought.

As another aside, although Vos Savant, in addition to being a hottie, is quite brilliant and is even smarter than I am, it is not true that she has the highest IQ on Earth, or that her IQ is 220 or whatever. She got that score at age 10 or so. There are others who have gotten sky high scores at that age.

At a young age, IQ is computed by looking at how the young person's mind compares to older peoples minds. In adults, we do not compute it that way, and adult scores are never as high as the same kids' score. In Vos Savant and other extremely high-IQ kids, their IQ's have seen considerable regression in adulthood, but they are still sky-high.

Glad to see she's getting a paycheck just by being smart. Wish I could.

References

Braun, Maria and Plag, Ingo. (2002). How Transparent is Creole Morphology? A Study of Early Sranan Word-Formation. University of Siegen, Germany. To appear in Yearbook of Morphology 2002. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Schumann, Christian Ludwig. (1783). Neger-Englisches Wörterbuch. Editio Tertia. Paramaribo.