Wednesday, October 17, 2018

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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Thursday, July 24, 2014

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.