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Spot the Language 19

Максим (Кроха) практически не скрывал своих противоестественных страстей. Никого не стесняясь, он заходил к очередному любовнику и принимался за черное дело. Свидетель такого цирка, оттого ушедший из МП, тогда неосторожно заглянул в помещение и, увидев, чем занимается правящий архиерей, сказал:

- Паскуда, хотя бы панагию снял…
В свое время еще существовавший Совет по делам религий был обезкуражен многочисленными неблаговидными выходками одного Члена Синода. Поводом послужило несколько письменных заявлений уборщицы. Суть заключалась в следующем.

- У меня – строгий рабочий день,- сообщала глупая тетка.- В 19.00 я оканчиваю работу и ухожу домой. По трудовому договору я обязана до этого сделать мокрую уборку в помещении. А я захожу в митрополичий кабинет – а они там безобразят.

- Как это? – испуганно интересовались чиновники.
- А так,- не сдавалась представительница пролетариата.- Они друг дружку употребляют прямо на письменном столе и мешают уборке. Я им говорю: «Кончайте быстрее. Мне надо убираться и уходить». А они – ни в какую, только сопят. Ну, я их мокрой тряпкой попыталась разогнать. Так они мне стали угрожать увольнением. Я так это дело не оставлю!..

Но особенно хорошо:

Вспомнилась мне, когда-то прочитанная стенограмма одного заседания в обкоме КПСС, кажется, Волынской области. Там что-то сильно требовались зоотехники, скотники, доярки и т.д. Речь шла, если помню правильно, о селе Торчине. Но каков официальный ответ местного партийного руководителя:

- Зоотехникiв немаэ. Абу пип, абу милиционэр. Скотникiв тэж немаэ…

И вот так везде - абу пип, абу милиционэр, а скотникiв немаэ.

To mother! Mother! Holy Mother! Glory to Mother!

It was 1910-1914. It was before King-Crane already, yet the cruel imperialists were already carving up and feasting on Arab lands, and Mother sat down to eat. Dining on Ottoman's choice cuts, as she had always lustily dreamed. The hate, the hate for Ottoman, the burning hate.

Well, no man will stand for being eaten alive, and in Ottoman's mansion, a great mutiny arose with the finest of his sons, the Young Men. There was a rising on the Bosporus and they had murder in their eyes.

Little did history realize the significance of those days, the rise of the Young Men, that it would lead to a war that shattered all things, the Great Imperialist Slaughter as the Left snorted amid heaves, half a decade hence. Who today yet connects the two tremors? Ah, but it is true. The War, the war, the maddest of all the horrible wars, a war for no reason!

It was 1914 and it was 1915 and it was war, the worst war the world pretended it had ever seen.

Mother was beaten and nearly died at Tannenburg and Masurim Lakes as a Hun went mad.

Mother crawled back scrambling to the Hinterland, where no man could ever beat her for good. With her, a 100,000 man Czech Legion, traitors to a one, rallying to the cry of their own flesh and blood. There was war in Galice, in the Pallid Lands. There, in a Sallow Land, the fight stalemated for years, and a million of Mother's sons never did breathe again.

Brusilov, in 1916, opened the door, and Mother grabbed the tallest Carpathian peaks. In reaching for the sky, a million more sons were trampled dead. At home there were riots and frustration with the dying, the long dying and the sadness of the dying. The monarch toppled and the people dreamed that they ruled. It was March 1917, and the world was shaking.

Mother was dragged to Brest-Livotsk, raging and snarling all the way and clawing with her nails. At gunpoint, she signed, and they cruelly hacked away her flesh. "Mother! Holy Mother!" the people cried, as they always did in this cruel enraptured land.

"For land, for bread, for peace," the wild peasant crowds longed and roared, and revolution shook the land. In Red and White, the blood ran across the wheezing land for years.

Wrangel and Denikin grabbed the South, and Kolchak grabbed the East. 40,000 Czechs, turncoats in the Great War, changed colors again and the rails were seized.

It was 1921, we were at a seaport, just us. We watched in terror, you and me, as the sailors raged and burned, and 400 brave ones fell. We ran from the flames and the soldiers bullets mowing down men.

Agile and adaptive as a snake, from privation, the state went to NEP and won the bloody war. The people had no food, they shrunk, huddled and then died, and no one knew how many starved, but starving was a normal way here, like the endless forests and the mean soil.

Everyone from other lands pitched in to the fight, everyone against Mother, as usual, but in the end the People prevailed as the peasants cheered. To this day, the Ruling Class of the World trembles with rage at this horrible blow.

The saga of Mother, the strange, sad, terrible and beautiful saga of Mother, so proud but so backwards and full of rage, like a wild woman living in the woods with her head held high, does not end here, but here we shall end our tale. Even today, she rises again, and no one can figure her out.

Those wily Eastern ways, and the eternal resentment of the West. The icy wind blows, she throws back another hard drink, and listens to her great composers. The bookshelves heave with her authors, the greatest lettermen that walked on soil. Her pride and her pain and her rage. She tosses back another drink as the wind howls.

It is late, she is beautiful, blond and blue yet alone again, and she rages at the snowy drifts fighting her sills. Mother is horny and she wants sex again and again, wants the world, wants to do the world, and the men are all drinking again, drinking and singing, drinking and fighting, drinking and sleeping. There is death everywhere, but there always is and always was, as death is part of Mother as dear as her very heart.

She will rise again.

Like her or not, always respect Mother. The way you respect a Grizzly Bear. Imperious yet crippled, she demands you look her in the eye and give her her due.

The War Project Versus the Nice Project

The War Project is interfering with the Nice Project. Here I am, sitting and practicing being nice while no one is around in the middle of the night, and memories of war shake in my bones.

Upstairs, it's the War Channel. It's on most nights. Screaming and yelling bloody murder. Hate and rage, crashing and smashing, mad screams of insane people. This is normal. The War is normal.

There's an Hispanic couple upstairs who are at war. There may be others at war too. I think people are on drugs. I hope no one is armed. I hear them screaming and yelling bloody murder at each other, crashing and burning across the room, like a herd of antelope on an African plain. The cops got called. A couple of times.

Inquiries are met with smiles. There are no blows exchanged, the woman is a fighter, everything is fine. Don't believe it. When people scream like that, fists and objects fly. They are trying to kill each other. Nothing will happen until some day, someone may end up dead. This is how these things tend to end.

Next to them, upstairs, are Black people. A young Black woman and her huge Black boyfriend are trying to kill each other, or at least trying to beat each other up.

It was on earlier tonite, the Fights. You can turn on the Fights here just about any nite. Just open your ears.

The war went on on the sidewalk before, earlier in the night, but I looked outside and could not see. Only voices, I heard, disembodied voices. Fighting, fighting, yelling and fighting.

The war went on outside, earlier in the evening. The police pulled up outside my window, three cars, stayed there half and hour, talking to some young Hispanic men. I opened the window and watched the friendly people in blue.

The news just came in, two local kids locked up, the War goes on, two soldiers off the streets. You cheer for the blue men who take away 16 year old POW's. Where? Anywhere but here. Anywhere.

The gangster rap pounds away a good part of the day, from computers and radios. It's not exactly a message of peace and love. It's a message of hate, rage and crime, sociopathy packaged as art. It gets into your bones if you're not careful, your inner psychopath emerging in your tensing veins.

You shut all the windows and tell everyone not to look outside. The world out there and the world in here, and never the twain shall meet, or at least not tonight.

Dammit, I'm trying to be nice.

How can anyone be nice in a place like this?

Video killed the radio star, and the War Project is killing the Nice Project. What's a guy to do? Pour another glass.

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New Sex Poll

A sex poll came out 2 1/2 years ago, but I am only just now hearing about it. Oh, well, it seems like sex is always leaving me standing at the station these days.

The articles on the poll deal with teenagers having lots of oral sex, apparently instead of intercourse. The article all act like this is horrible, but I actually think it is good. Despite my feast or famine bachelor life, I actually do love sex, and I am a sexual liberationist. The articles mostly fuss on and on about all of the diseases one can acquire from oral sex.

First of all, this is part of an insane national neurosis we have long had in this nation about sex. Europeans have long commented on it. We are Puritans yet we demand that Americans be having sex continuously. Even if they are not married. Even if they are not 18.

Yes, it is true. There's a $6 billion dollar a year porn industry and we are in the midst of a Mass Hysteria called Child Molester Hysteria. Although there are reasons to worry about adult sex abuse of children, I really fear that this is part of our neurosis about teenagers, especially teenage girls, having sex.

Child Molester Hysteria, the way I understand it, pretty much makes it illegal for teenage girls to get laid. If she does it, the guy's a molester, no matter what his age is. It is understandable that conservatives, Christians, married men and vaginized males of all types would be behind this Protect Our Teenage Girls! bullshit. What doesn't add up is that the feminists are behind it too.

Yep, feminists, the very women who ought to supporting teenage girls who choose to have sex, who ought to even be urging girls to learn to have an orgasm by age 15 since science shows waiting longer increases the odds she will never get one, are leading the charge of this preposterously chivalrous, putting girls on a pedestal nonsense.

Anyway, on the article . Article says, teenagers not screwing so much, good. Having oral sex instead, bad. Why is it bad? Because, the article worries, you can get VD. What sorts of VD can you get? Well, syphilis, warts (HPV), gonorrhea and herpes. Well, let us look at this notion.

As far as cunnilingus goes, it would be quite hard to catch much of anything from doing that. You would be better off to worry about getting hit by a meteor. So go ahead and do it! To your heart's content! She'll love ya for it, guys!

Now, onto fellatio. It is true that one can get gonorrhea of the throat from doing this, but it's not a common problem, except maybe in the gay community. Syphilis is quite rare outside the gay community, and you always just very noticeable symptoms. So it's not much to worry about.

About herpes, well, one out of every six adults has it anyway and it won't kill you. It comes on strong at first, then it fades to an annoyance, and there are drugs that take out the flareups. So no worries.

HPV is much more troubling here since research shows that you can catch it in your throat, and it apparently can lead to throat cancer. I'm at a loss for words about this, but I don't think it's the worry of the century.

Lesbianism got a lot of writeup in the study. Apparently 14.4% of young women aged 20-24 have tried it with another female. That's interesting, but it's got to be higher than that. Only 6.5% of males that age have done it with another guy. Those figures have got to be wrong.

What's interesting is that whenever they go out and do these face to face surveys about sex and dope, they come with some very low figures for both gay sex and dope. No one wants to fess up to being a fag or a doper, even if they were only gay for a day, or if they didn't inhale.

But recently a new study allowed persons to answer questions about sex and dope anonymously via computer in a locked room. They were assured repeatedly that there would be no way to link up their computer answers with their actual selves, since the testers themselves were not grading the tests.

As one might expect, scores for sex and drug use for young Canadians were much higher when the answers were submitted via computer privacy than via face to face.

The authors considered that maybe people were making stuff up on the tests, but then rejected that. Testers had been closely questioned before about the importance of being honest on their answers. If they were inclined to make stuff up, they were asked not to take the test.

The numbers for current homosexual behavior among this group of young Canadian males were about 13-14%. Most of it seemed to be what we would call opportunistic homosexuality, or bisexuality, among especially single males. I don't intend to have sex with males myself, but as a young men I saw epidemic levels of opportunistic male homosexuality all around me among young males, especially single ones.

This was in Southern California in the late 1970's and early 1980's.

Other studies have shown some fairly high levels of males experimenting with homosexuality. Kinsey got 37% lifetime, but his work has been questioned. The Playboy Survey of the 1970's got 25% lifetime, and I always thought that was about right.

The same computer surveys above also found remarkably higher drug use among respondents than face to face surveys found, especially of hard drugs like PCP or heroin.

One of the major findings of the study was that more and more straight folks are getting into anal sex. 40% of men have tried it, and 35% of women have. That's about double previous surveys. Gay men have always gone in for this kind of sex bigtime for obvious reasons. I'm not going to say much about this for myself except to say I don't have much interest in that sex act.

Porn has made anal sex very popular, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea.

As a sexual liberationist, I really don't care how people do it. I think people ought to consider that there may be a health downside to this type of sex. I have seen reports on bulletin boards of women aged 30 or so who had lots of anal sex in their 20's who know have to wear a type of diaper because they have lost some control over their bowels. That's called anal incontinence.

I don't know how much anal sex you have to have before something terrible like this happens to you, but it's something people might want to think about before they jump into anal sex too much.

There are all sorts of gay rights types and sex educators that say there is no way this can happen to you if you practice anal sex the right way, but I wish they would spell out their theory in clear science so it's something more than a crap shoot.

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Crazy Women Ahoy, Pull the Anchor and Leave

Ah, crazy women! I suppose if I were really nuts, I would not mind a crazy woman. After all, I would probably deserve her, right? Sad thing is, I am hopelessly prejudiced against crazy women. I don't like em. I discriminate.

I have enough problems of my own to deal with without crazy women on top of everything else.

I remember this one crazy woman, I broke up with her, and she goes and punches a hole in the wall! Whoa, baby, hold onto your horses! I broke up with you? Hell, you should be happy!

She used to swallow handfuls of acid tabs (like five hits at once) when we went out on dates. She drank like a fish. She would smoke any kind of weed you gave her and probably take any kind of drug too. All her friends were fags and she specialized in the sickest fags of them all, the ones in Hollywood who loved masochism. She regaled me with their tales of how these guys required welts raised two or three inches before they were satisfied. Her idea of a good time was going to an LA fag bar. That was what she did most of the time, as she was almost a full-time fag hag. She also had straight boyfriends, apparently, as she did like men and sex. Going to an LA gay bar is not my idea of a good time.

One night she was drinking like a maniac and she grabbed four or five tricyclic antidepressants and tossed them down. I protested and she cried out that this was for all of the misery that she was in. So she was deeply psychiatrically ill, as you can see. Diagnosis: Borderline Schizophrenia, which nowadays goes to Borderline Personality Disorder.

She had a weird way of talking, and we would go out and it seemed that she would act so crazy and weird in public that I would be embarrassed to even be seen with her. She spoke in weird metaphors and it really started annoying me. I'm kind of like neurotic, "staring off into space like a weirdo" nuts, but I'm not "stark raving acting out bats" nuts like that. Forget it. I told her, "Hey, look, you are just too nuts for me," and she freaked. I wonder if she is still alive. She was also quite a masochist as far as sex went, but I could not really get into that too much. Anyway, most females are like that to some degree or another, let's face it. It goes hand in hand with being female.

She was always telling me about stories where she was meeting guys who would pull knives on her, rape her, threaten to kill her, torture her, etc. One time it was a whole group of guys and she gangbanged them all. Whopeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Except they were all pulling knives on her and trying to torture her and threatening to kill her at the time. She was quite proud of her gangbanging experience, but my best friends heard about it and were totally freaked out and appalled, saying she was a disgusting slut pig whore. That was true of course, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

She also liked women a little bit, but only a little. She really loved young boys, as she called them, and delighted in having sex with teenage boys, especially around 13 years old. Her Mom was schizophrenic and had tried to stab her to death in her sleep when she was a little girl, and I guess it was all downhill after that. She had all these weird seemingly different personalities that she would fade in and out of all the time. Now, I'm into channeling myself, but this sort of thing really ought to be controlled in order to work best, otherwise you just seem like a street person or a potential maniac.

Later she accused my best friend of hitting a baby in the EEG lab where he worked. According to everyone else, it never even happened, but she insisted and insisted. I think maybe they fired her, but I forget.

I saw her once later, she came over to the folks house in the daytime, and you know how that goes. I was 27 years old, graduated USC with post-BA degree, back living at home again, teaching school full-time, smoking lots of dope, going nuts, but couldn't get it together enough to move out. Dumb or what?

The culmination of the sex act on my end left her all pissed off, but I thought it was funny that when I kissed her goodbye at the car, I swear some of the middle aged neighbor ladies were laughing and smiling and giving me the thumbs up?

One housewife even sneaked outside and gave me a great big beaming smile. Who says women don't like guys who score?

Women ain't all bad, guys.

Red Revolution For Bangladesh

Bangladesh seriously needs revolution. Thank God the Maoists have taken up arms there to overthrow the system. They have not done too well, they are completely insane, and the Islamists have united against them, but we must wish them well. After all, only the Maoists are fighting to get rid of the system, the system that kills so many.
Reasons.

Electricity is scarce and most do not have access to clean water. Roads are in terrible shape and agriculture is lagging far behind where it ought to be.

In other words, it is a total capitalist South Asian clusterfuck. Get rid of it.

Even more reasons.

⅓ of rural Bangladeshis are landless (for contrast, 50% of Central American rural ppl are landless). All land reforms since independence have failed.

Truth is, if you are landless in Bangladesh, I would wager that you are probably starving. The land question is clearly the heart of the matter here. If someone disagrees that giving these folks land will keep them from starving, please speak up in the comments.

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Black IQ Gains in the US

These scores are taken from this paper, and indicate varying scores for IQ tests and semi-IQ tests taken over about 30 years. As you move down in each individual row, you move into revised versions of the tests in more recent years. Standard deviation is not all that relevant to me, but may make sense to someone else.

As you can see, White adult IQ (age 25+) in the US is now 102.9 or 103 rounded off. Black adult IQ (age 25+) has increased in recent years to 89.1. There remains a 13.8 point gap between Blacks and Whites.

Ok, let us take a look at Black and White IQ's in the US.

These scores above are over roughly 30 years or so, and all tests are standardized as more or less IQ tests, though there is a lot of controversy over whether or not the AFQT is really an IQ test, since it mostly just questions what you learned in high school, and if you did not learn much in high school, which I suspect is the case with a lot of Black students, your score is going to be low on that test.

It is true that Murray and Herrnstein in The Bell Curve treat AFQT as an IQ test, but that is really their problem. A casual glance at this chart indicates that Blacks seem to have made some definite gains on White in the IQ department over the past 30 years. This is something no one wants to talk about, since all talk about this whole subject is just completely banned.

On the Stanford-Binet, the B-W gap shrunk from 13.6 pts to 10.8 pts, a gain of 2.8 pts for Blacks. White scores actually declined by .7 pt, and Black scores went up by 2.1 pts. The S-B is probably given to both adults and children.

The WISC is the children's IQ tests. It is here that Blacks have shown the most massive gains of all. Blacks gain 5.3 pts, while Whites gain .9 pt, and the B-W gap declined from 15.9 pts to 11.5 pts, a gain of 4.5 pts for Blacks. Black adults gained 2.3 pts on the WAIS and White adults gained 1.2 points. There is not much difference.

The WAIS is given to adults of all ages and is now normed even for older adults, I believe. The B-W gap declines from 14.6 pts to 13.5 pts, a .9 pt improvement. I realize that this is not much of an improvement, but US Black adults have shaved the B-W IQ gap by about 1 pt over 30 years.

Considering claims that the gap is set in stone for all time, this does count as very real progress. Even more important that according to the WAIS, Black adults can no longer be said to have IQ's of 85!, as the White Nationalists scream and scream.

WAIS puts Black IQ at 89.1. That is definitely getting up towards the level of some European White groups. For instance, Serbs and Croats both have IQ's of 90. 89.1 is not all that different from 90.

For the WAIS under age 25, the scores are a bit better. Blacks shrunk the gap from 14.2 points to 11.7 points. That's a really significant reduction. Blacks raised scores by 3.9 points, while Whites only went up by 1.4 pts.

On the AFQT, which I am not even really counting, the gap declined from 18 points to 14.4 points. It is here that we are really getting into the hardcore achievement gap stuff, but as you can see in the real IQ scores above, the huge gap does not have to do so much with raw brains as with failure to learn much in high school.

The median gap between Black and White adults, young and all adults conflated, is now 12.6 IQ points, not 15 IQ points.

The median gap between Black and White kids, with some adults conflated, is now 11.1 points, not 15 IQ points.

The median gap between mixed Black and White kids and adults is now 11.6 points, not 15 IQ points.

Blacks of all ages conflated have gained a median 3.1 IQ points over 30 years on average, and Black children have gained 5.3 pts. Whites of all ages conflated achieved an average 1.1 IQ points gain over that period, with White children showing no special gains relative to adults.

The median reduction in the B-W gap for both Black adults and children combined over 30 years has been on the order of 2.7 IQ points . Black kids reduced the gap by 4.5 points. Philippine Rushton and Charles Murray have actually acknowledged that Blacks have closed the gap by "a couple of points". Jensen and Gottfredson will probably never come around.

The median Black IQ for both Black adults and children conflated is now 91.3, not 85. For Black children, it is 91.7, not 85. For Black adults under 25, it is 90.9, not 85. For Black adults of all ages, it is 89.1, not 85.

There are those on the other side who like to pull up plenty of modern studies that, compared to the above, show little or no gains in Black IQ. That is interesting, but we should at least point out that there are a number of IQ tests out there that are showing significant Black gains and Black reduction of the famous 1 standard deviation IQ gap.

Those who charge that US Blacks "have an IQ of 85!" (implying they are idiots) need to be seriously challenged, at least to hedge their responses, as there is good evidence that it is now 91.3, not 85. The continuous refrains of the 15 pt B-W IQ gap in the US also need to be seriously challenged, as it appears that on many tests the gap is now on the order of 11.6 points for Blacks of all ages, not 15 pts.

Debaters ought to adjust their talking points in light of these new realities. Any refusal to do so borders on hate propaganda against Black folks, as if they don't have enough problems as it is.

References

Dickens, William T. & Flynn, James R. October 2006. Black Americans Reduce the Racial IQ Gap: Evidence from Standardization Samples. Psychological Science.

Dickens, William T. & Flynn, James R. Common ground and differences
Forthcoming: Psychological Science

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That Long Newspaper Spoon

Let's see what's on the end of that long newspaper spoon... William Burroughs, "Naked Lunch" (1959).

This book really ought to be mandatory reading for all second graders, by the way. On the end of that long newspaper spoon? A mean gruel and lies, cons and mind-heists.

Let us look at a few recent topics: How I Helped Moved a Factory To Mexico, from Business Week, actually a pretty good business publication. This article goes to show you the sheer insanity of the US government. Sure, global forces often more or less mandate taking plants out of the country.

The factory in the US closes, and $18/hour workers lose their jobs. The jobs go to Mexico, where the same work pays $3/hour, including benefits. Since $3/hour is not nearly as good as $18/hour, the flood from Mexico to the US continues.

Almost no one in Mexico is starving. As an illegal alien farm worker from Oaxaca told me over drinks at the bar about Oaxaca, "Comida, si. Dinero, no." In Oaxaca, there is plenty of food, but no money. So everyone heads up here. Why, cuz they are starving? No, so they can buy 27 inch color TV sets.

US workers lose when US jobs are shipped overseas, then lose once again with the mad, lunatic illegal alien invasion that is ruining US working class jobs all over our nation. We have been shipping jobs to Mexico wildly since NAFTA in 1994.

One would think that this flood of jobs to Mexico would have resulted in a dramatic reduction in illegal immigration, but in fact, 1994 approximately coincides with a total explosion in the illegal immigrant tsunami to the US.

After NAFTA, workers and consumers in the US, Mexico and Canada all lost ground. Got that? Workers in Mexico, the US and Canada all got screwed by NAFTA. Some say they never made it up since either. Only business cleaned up, and only some businesses at that.

All free trade agreements between disparate nations, that I can tell, are going to have the exact same effects as NAFTA. Probably all free trade agreements that the US has negotiated since NAFTA have had similar effects, probably on a smaller scale.

Workers, consumers and public all get screwed. The environment takes a massive hit. Crappy Mexican trucks flood our highways and destroy them. All free trade agreements are always sold with the same load of crap that NAFTA was, as benefiting workers, consumers, the public, and hell, even the environment, why not?

Nearly the entire US media, from top to bottom, is in on this lie, and if you only read the MSM, you will never figure out the con. Workers, consumers, the public, the environment, and lots of small businesses get screwed by NAFTA-bullshit, and on top of that, we get an avalanche of illegal aliens.

Wow, what a deal! Hail NAFTA! Hail free trade!

File under lies, lies, and more lies: As reasonable folks may have guessed, Business Week (once again, heads up to a good capitalist magazine) columnist Ed Wallace informs us that there is no gas shortage. No gas shortage, no oil shortage, no nothing like that.

Has the media ever told us that? No. Have the politicians ever told us that? No. What do the media and pols tell us? That there is a gas and oil shortage! Why is there a gas and oil shortage? Oh, so many things! Especially, rising demand in China and India! Oh, but what a load of crap that is!

We are also told that we are somewhere near Peak Oil (but no one knows when that hits or what it even means) and this is the cause of the problem. Forget it. Peak oil implies a supply-demand equation, and no such mathematics is working like that here.

The cheerleaders for capitalism tell us that one of the great things about capitalism is supply and demand. It is true that this is an excellent way of fixing prices, and it is possible that socialist economies ignore this at the risk of their extinction. But oil prices have nothing to do with supply and demand! Nothing!

The fundamentals of the oil and gas market are exactly the same as when oil was $60/barrel back in 2006. Whether the market can go back to the $20/barrel in 2002 is not known; possibly it cannot. Check out this great, prophetic Tom Friedman column from that year wondering if the Iraq War will shoot oil to the horror of $60/barrel.

But as far as supply and demand go, oil ought to be no more than $60/barrel and I assume that gas should be no more than $2/gallon or so. So why is it $120/barrel instead of $60?

Because capitalism doesn't necessarily work on supply and demand. The rest is just sheer speculation. Traders are pulling their money out of the sinking dollar and plunking it right into oil and other commodities, and it's sure been a nice ride all right. Just a bunch of speculators bidding the price up like crazed buyers at an auction; that's all it is. That's the cause of your $4/gallon gas.

Oil reserves are at their highest levels since 1999. Gasoline reserves are at their highest levels since 1993 (!) But surely demand is rising, China and India and all that? Nope, demand has been falling all year now and will probably fall even into the summer.

On the other hand, oil refineries are not necessarily doing that well at all, at least according to them. They are getting killed by high oil prices on the one hand and low gasoline demand on the other. In order to make a decent profit, refineries have deliberately cut back oil production. The purpose of running the refineries at low speed is to push up the price of gas even further.

Distillates such as airline fuel and diesel have seen their prices so through the roof, and there are shortages of these, but they are deliberately created by the industry. If there were, why are we exporting more distillates than we are importing. Not only that, but imports of distillates have crashed by some 40% in a year.

It would seem that in all of this insanity something like a National Industrial Policy would be called for. For decades, countries South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan and now China, not to mention most of Western Europe, have done just that.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that capitalism with no government (free market neoliberalism) is an orchestra of great musicians with no composer. At some point, it's the economic equivalent to an insane asylum or an elementary school playground.

We can also see that that all of the feverish nostrums peddled by the politico-media Lying Classes are loads of garbage? We need to fly to Saudi Arabia and beg the Saudis to turn up the oil spigots! We need to drill in the Arctic!

We need to drill everywhere, off the beach next to your house! We need to get rid of environmental regulations and taxes that make gas so expensive! And last but not least, the favorite of right-wing liars everywhere, we need more refineries!

We do not really need any of these things, at least at the moment. The oil refineries lie is one of the most evil of them all. It is probably peddled by the stinking garbage in human forms that run the oil industry itself.

The line goes like this:

-Oil is high!
-Why is it high?
-Hardly any new refineries since (insert year)!
-Why not?
-Evil environmentalists! Evil regulations! They've made it impossible to build new refineries!
-(sputtering) Bastard environmentalists and regulators! Get rid of them so we can build more refineries!
-Yes, yes, yes!

The thing is, this whole line is just an incredibly devious lie peddled by Oil Company Scum and their gargoyle allies in government and media and rightwing politics. No regulations have gotten in the way of building any new refineries in the US.

The industry itself has flat out refused to build new oil refineries in the US because industry does not want to create more refinery supply. Low numbers of refineries are good for keeping gas supply low and prices high. The conversational ruse above is designed to get rid of existing environmental and other regulations at existing plants.

This ethanol mandate crap is about to do the same thing to food prices. My advice if you are worried about your money to put it into food stockpiles, preferably non-perishable. Food is going to go up in value quite a bit soon - it is already - and it is not going to be pretty.

It's looking ugly and it's going to get uglier. We socialists have in general done a superb job of feeding people and a way better job of feeding people than capitalism has (despite the Mt. Everest of capitalist lies about how socialism starves people) and hopefully a hungrier world will find more socialist-oriented policies are better for filling the belly.

My bullshit detector was screaming the other day when Yahoo Headlines shouted in my ear that Congress was going to be briefed on how evil North Korea was helping wicked Syria build a diabolical nuclear reactor.

I remember well when Israel bombed the plant in question.

I looked into the story extensively at the time and my conclusion was that Syria was building a chemical weapons plant, not a nuclear reactor plant, at the site. The North Koreans are experts at chemical weapons stuff and the Scud missiles to shoot them with, and that was apparently why they were there.

Now there is reportedly a new video showing that evil Syria was just about this far (index and thumb nearly touching) from building a devilish nuclear power plant, to build nuclear bombs with, to load on missiles, to shoot at Israel, to kill all the Jews!

To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews!

Holocaust 2. Holocaust 2. Holocaust 2. Holocaust 2. Holocaust 2. Holocaust 2.

This is obviously a Jewish media cabal influenced article, and all such articles include the Holocaust Porn fetish typical of most Jews nowadays.

The Holocaust traumatized them, but they'd already predicted it for millenia, and it had already been attempted over and over according to them, because Jews really do love to believe that their enemies have been trying to exterminate them all from day one!

The whole history of the Jews, according to them, is Jews fending off mad Final Solution attempts by Persia-Nazis or Roman-Nazis, or Russian-Nazis, or Arab-Nazis, or This-Nazis or That-Nazis.

You can't understand the Jew until you get to the Holocaust Porn thing. It's not just his own death; that's bad enough. The baddies are never going to be satisfied with one Jew. They are going to do every single last one of them.

Understanding this helps shed light on phenomena like Zionism: Go Nazi ourselves, steal some land, arm to the teeth with nukes, and dare the anti-Semites to wipe us out.

How bout Iran? Does Ahmadinejad want to kill one Jew? Course not. He wants to kill them all.

Does the PLO and Hamas just want to kill a Jew here and there for sport? Nope, they want to "destroy Israel" = code for kill all the Jews.

Why do Jews need to go to Israel? Because evil whatever-Nazis in the Diaspora are getting ready to kill all the Diaspora Jews.

For Chrissake man, it's porn! It's Holocaust Porn! It's a fetish already. How else to explain the absolutely sickening and clearly unhealthy Jewish obsession with the horrors of the Holocaust. Holocaust museums, coming soon to a city near you. Holocaust Museum, my Jewish girlfriend took me to visit her very own, this was an essential part of our romance.

What's a Jew reading these days? Oh, a Holocaust novel. Or maybe some non-fiction, surely with a Holocaust twist somewhere in there. Hollywood has a Holocaust hard-on . Seems every year there's more and more Shoah tales.

I do not have enough information yet to look into the North Korean - Syria reactor thing yet, but I have studied Syria's nuclear program in the past. My take was that Syria has been working on a nuclear program for about 25 years now but has made little headway due to shortages of money, technology, brains, etc.

This is actually quite common; many smaller countries have similar nuclear projects in the ruts. People just do not get it. Rome was not built in a day, and neither was any nuclear program. They require a highly developed economy and always take years and often take decades to even get going.

Even when they do, there is one problem after another. The super brains like A. Q. Khan of Pakistan are few and far between, and he's under house arrest.

So let us say I am somewhat skeptical that Syria was about "this close" to building a nuclear weapon.

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