Robert Lindsay

For Justice, a River of Blood

2008-07-25T22:04:00.000-07:00

Or at least a rivulet.

Abimael Guzman, imprisoned leader of the Shining Path guerrillas in Peru, famously said that for the revolution to succeed, "Peru would have to cross a river of blood". Much of the civilized world was horrified by this bloodthirsty statement, but was he onto something?

I would argue that the vast majority of social progress achieved in the past 150 rivers has unfortunately occurred only after rivers of blood were shed. Or at the very least trickles. To but it bluntly, people had to die. They had to get hurt and die.

It's sad that it has to be that way, but it seems that that is just the way it is. Powerful people do not give up stuff just because they wake up in a good mood one day or go to church, find God and start feeling guilty.

Here in the US, Blacks only gained their liberation in the context of a devastating Civil War in which 100,000's of Americans shed their blood and lost their lives. Haitians only got rid of slavery by rising up and killing every single one of 25,000 Frenchmen on the island. For Algeria to blast free of colonialism and to shock the French out of the colonial habit, 1 million people, including 25,000 Frenchmen, died.

Britain only chucked colonialism after British soldiers died in Malaysia, India, Palestine and other places. Does anyone think even a modicum of a Palestinian state would exist had Palestinians not taken up the gun? Without the armed struggle of the Iraqi guerrillas, US troops would have ovverun Syria and possibly Iran by now.

The Basque Country has the considerable autonomy it does today only after 800 Spaniards died in the ETA's armed struggle. Land reform was only instituted in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan after the war to ward off the threat of Communism from North Korea and China.

Apartheid is gone in South Africa and one man one vote democracy is in its place for the most part only due to an armed campaign by the ANC stretching over decades.

US workers only got rights after bloody strikes in which workers were killed by goon squads.

The social market that James Schipper praised in Europe in earlier comments is also the project of massive labor union mobilization in Europe.

I would also argue that it was created by devastating the European Right, first by killing 10 million of them (10 million dead fascists in WW2), next by making rightwing ideology toxic for many years after the war, and finally by revolutionary pressure from the Far Left before and after the war, which led the business sector to seek out a class compromise and a social contract, mostly to ward off revolution.

Even the Swedish model mostly came into play in the 1930's when the nation was wracked by violent, radical and revolutionary labor actions all up and down the land. This so rocked the business and ruling classes that the Swedish model was created as a lesser evil alternative to ward off revolution.

Most do not realize that Swedish society was not very liberal during the 1930's. People are misled by the fact of Sweden's neutrality in the war to think that Swedes themselves were neutral. Most of the middle classes and certainly the business classes were firm Nazi supporters. Furthermore, I understand that Swedish businesses continued to supply the Nazis well into the war.

In Costa Rica, radical pressure helped create Costa Rican social democracy, now deteriorating after Reagan ordered the Costa Ricans at gunpoint in the 1980's to get rid of it.

After WW2, Costa Rica outlawed the Communist Party, killed 6,000 Communists, instituted a social democracy to buy off social unrest and got rid of the military as a rather interesting way to top it off. Without revolutionary pressure in 1946 and the bodies of 6,000 Communists, Costa Rican social democracy may never have occurred.

Mexico today has some semblance of socialism and a land reform that enables to poor to own small plots and at least survive and eat if they cannot find work only because 20 million Mexicans died during Pancho Villa's revolution that put Mexican feudalism in the grave forever. Most do not realize that Mexico was actually a horrible and truly feudal society as late as 1910. Yet it was.

In the same way, in El Salvador now, one can at least farm a small plot, eat and survive, something often not possible before the Revolution started. For that meager reform, 70,000 people died and Salvadoran feudalism was crushed, possibly forever.

Lenin said power never gives up without a fight. And most social reforms in capitalism have come on the heels, tragically, of a river of blood. Or at least a small stream.

Without pressure from below by revolutionaries and radicals, it is uncertain how many of the progressive social contracts in place in the world would exist.

Unions and Wage - Productivity Increases

2008-07-25T21:57:00.000-07:00

James Schipper's comments in the comments section suggest that productivity naturally leads to increased wages in capitalism due to the laws of capital and labor. I argue that productivity increases during conditions of labor surplus normal in most capitalist states probably come mostly due to the militant actions of Organized Labor.

James does aver that the replacement of American workers with illegal alien labor did have an effect on the destruction of wages in the construction industry. I argue that there were two stages to the process.

First they broke the unions, then they hired the illegals. Those were the two stages. The exact same thing occurred in many manufacturing plants, especially meat processing. Slaughterhouses, poultry-processing and seafood processing plants all used to be good union jobs with high wages as recently as the 1980's.

First they took out the unions, then they brought in illegals or other immigrants to the work. Many other fields besides construction have been taken out by illegals, including painting and landscaping. My White friends did all of these jobs and made good or decent money doing it. Having your own landscaping business is still a good way for young White men to earn some decent money. So much for Americans won't mow lawns. This is all gone now as most of this has gone straight on over to illegals.

James' argument operates only in the cases of a labor shortage. With a vast surplus of labor, an "army of labor" as the capitalists call the teeming hordes of unemployed, there is not much need to raise wages to compete with other businesses for top employees, as there are 5 guys waiting to take the place of the guy who quits.

The notion that unions are not necessary for workers to have good working conditions is unique to union busters. If unions are superfluous, do nothing but harm workers, and don't even raise wages or improve conditions, why would anyone join one? Better yet, why would capitalists oppose them so ferociously?

The record all over the West seems to be that the more unionized a labor force is or was, the higher wages were. Economic growth used to be spread out among all income classes in the US back in the 1950's and 1960's. In the 1970's, this started to decline to the point now where, from 1980-1992, only the top 20% gained money and the entire bottom 80% of the population lost money.

I would argue that this is exactly how the capitalists wanted it. This occurred during the pro-business Reagan and Bush Administrations. Furthermore, the decline in US wages and the lack of filtering down of productivity dovetails perfectly with the devastation of US unions. Not only that, but the war on US unions, along with the theft of workers' productivity growth, was all part of a project by US business.

To say that in the US, the businessman is the worker's friend stretches reality. Unless the worker organizes to get a good wage, a share of economic and especially productivity growth and better conditions, thing look quite bleak.

James argues that it is better to work for a big business than a small one in Canada. This is probably true, but I would argue that workers are often treated better by very small businesses, who, around here anyway, often treat workers as if they are part of a family.

Jesus Loves Tortillas

2008-07-25T17:34:00.000-07:00

Look closely and you can see the Son of God in yellow outline, Shroud of Turin-like, in the center of the heated and rolled slab of dough. If you're schizophrenic, this is a secret message telling you to go to the nearest taco truck, buy two rolled tacos of any type, and eat them, right now. If you aren't and are merely a believer, you may be having a religious experience right now. I'm not, but then, I'm so secular, I'm just this side of agnosticism.

Guy shows up everywhere, huh? All those Mexican Catholics going to Mass all the time and praying finally had an effect. Jesus repays their prayers by showing up on their favorite form of flattened dough.

Wonder if he likes tacos too?

The Paradox of Capitalist Regulation

2008-07-25T12:57:00.000-07:00

James Schipper writes in the comments section:

The historical record shows that wage increases eventually follow productivity growth. For instance, in 1960 South Korea was dirt-poor, and naturally wages were extremely low. By 1990, SK had become a prosperous country, due to massive productivity growth, and wages were also much higher.

As workers become much more productive on average, they become more valuable to employers, who are therefore willing to pay them higher wages, for the same reason that a dairy farmer is willing to pay a higher price for a cow which gives 10,000 liters of milk per year than for a cow which gives 5,000 liters per year.

It seems to be true that wage increases in the US have not kept pace with productivity growth in the last 3 decades. I have no explanation for it.

It can't be doubted that the transition to a market economy in Russia was handled very badly. Such major changes should be introduced gradually. Just compare China's performance with Russia's in the 1990's.

The problem with Chile between 1973 and 1983 was that the country was completely opened to foreign economic influences almost overnight while the exchange rate was kept fixed. They liberalized the entire foreign sector, except the exchange rate. If they had also brought in flexible exchange rates, the results would have been less catastrophic.

I hate neoliberalism as much as you, but I'm a moderate economic liberal. I believe that durable prosperity is not possible without considerable private ownership of the means of production and free markets. The motto should be: the market when possible and the state when necessary.

The Chicago boys are like a doctor who always prescribes the same medicine and then argues that the medicine wasn't taken properly when some patients get worse.

Inflation is not bad for all capitalists. As a rule, inflation, or at least unexpected inflation, is bad for lenders and good for borrowers. Most companies are borrowers. Inflation tends to reduce the real wealth of lenders and increase the real wealth of borrowers.

Suppose that I lend you 10,000 for a year at 5% interest and on the assumption that inflation for the coming year will be 0%. Instead, inflation is 20%. After a year, I get my 10,000 back, but their real value is only 8,000. I lost 2,000 and you gained 2,000.

It is a libertarian myth that big government equals oppressive government. In what way do I become less free because in Canada the state provides most health care for free? I can't just demand any treatment that I like, but I wouldn't be able to that either if I were privately insured.

There is something fraudulent about neoliberalism. They constantly talk about freedom, but what they really mean is that they are opposed to economic egalitarianism. The freedom that they are most interested in is the freedom to make lots of money. Still, hostility to neoliberalism should not blind us toward the virtues of free enterprise, which are considerable.

I respond:

I really dislike capitalism, James, but I am the first to admit that pure socialism has some very serious problems. Socialism has done great at building economies for a while, but after a few decades, it starts bogging down into bureaucracy. Furthermore, while alleviating poverty, we have only been able to provide a low standard of living for the people. Social capital only goes so far - people want stuff too.

My attitude is that some capitalism may be necessary, like death and disease, but that doesn't mean it's a good thing by any means. Lots of nasty stuff is necessary.

Class war is continuous under capitalism.

Owners are continuously waging war against workers to take more of the profits generated by their enterprises. If there is X amount of profits from an enterprise, owners must decide how much to take out for themselves and how much to give to workers. Clearly they wish to give as little as possible to workers. So there is a battle between workers and owners to divvy up the profits from the enterprise.

Owners oppose increased % of profits going to workers since that means less for them, so they are always trying to cut down on the workers' % to get more for themselves. The tendency among capitalists would be to take 100% of productivity increases if they could get away with it. The only reason that workers get any % of productivity increases at all is when they organize to fight for it.

During the period you mention, the South Korean labor movement emerged and became extremely combative. This is probably the reason for the wage increases you mention. Capitalists will never give a wage increase just to be nice. Their whole project, in part, is to screw the worker to the greatest extent possible and even kill him if they can get away with it.

Indeed, capitalists kill millions of workers every year in the world, which is exactly what their project is designed to do. Workers and management are de facto enemies in capitalism, and if workers do not organize, they don't get much of anything.

I'm sure there were productivity increases in housing construction from 1975 to today and the prices of houses have certainly gone through the roof. At the same time, wages for construction workers have probably collapsed by anywhere from 50-80%. 100% of that vast surplus and probable productivity increase went into the hands of owners. Workers got less than zero. In a time of booming profits and probable productivity raises, instead of getting even a meager slice, they got a massive pay cut.

Builders reaped massive benefits from declining wages and from increased prices for their homes. Many industries have seen declining wages in the US since 1980 due in part to the busting of unions and their replacement typically with illegal immigrant or H-1B guest worker labor.

During a 15-year period in Guatemala from 1948-1963, the economy grew by 5% per year. During that same period, the % of the population living in poverty actually increased from 87% to 93%. 5% economic growth over 15 years equals a 75% increase in the size of the economy. 0% of the benefits of this economic growth went to the vast majority of the population.

This is how capitalism is supposed to work.

Every capitalist on Earth wants to live in a country like that - where owners, the rich and the upper middle class reap all or almost all of the benefits from economic growth and the workers get little, nothing, or even lose money. To avoid this, workers must organize into unions, since workers usually never get anything from capitalists without a fight. In the the 3rd World where murders of trade unionists are par for the course, it's often a deadly fight.

I repeat, capitalism is evil, but pure socialism doesn't seem to work very well.

I don't have much issues with small businesses, who often seem to really care about their employees and consumers (customers) and even in some cases, the environment and the society they live in. But Organized Small Business is always profoundly reactionary.

But big business is just bad. Whatever benefits it gives us in terms of jobs and decent products, good service or reduced prices is typically vastly outweighed by havoc it wreaks on society, the environment, the workers and consumers.

It's true that regulation and organized workers and consumers can ameliorate a lot of this downside, but in capitalist nations, the capitalist classes buy all the media and institute a Gramscian cultural hegemony over society with their media and cultural control. At the same time, they use their money and media and cultural power to buy the state itself which ideally ought to be regulating them in the interests of workers, consumers, the environment and society itself.

So you have a state that will do nothing in the face of the bulldozer of capital. The result is a flattened social society, a wrecked public sector, slums, homelessness, disease, early death, environmental devastation, harmed consumers and crippled workers and nothing in government to stop any of this.

The housing crisis is a case in point. Contra your assertion that the New Deal failed (which is actually rightwing revisionism against the New Deal), in fact, the New Deal, in particular the financial reforms - the FDIC which restored confidence in the banks, the SEC that regulated the stock market and Fannie Mae to bring back the mortgage market - is what finally got the economy going again.

This was one of the greatest accomplishments the US government ever did, it was wholly socialist in nature, and it was opposed ferociously by the Republican Party and the entire US business sector at the time. After Roosevelt rammed it through anyway, the business class vowed to wage struggle, for decades if they had to, to overturn these things.

Finally, by the 1990's, much of this regulatory structure had been whittled away.

Whittling away this structure had been a project of Capital since this regulatory apparatus had been put in place. Now that the regulation is a shadow of its former self, we have another Depression-like phenomena with the housing crisis, all the way to failed banks, bank runs, loss of deposits, etc. As one might expect.

This is the problem. The only way to keep capitalism from being completely nightmarish is to regulate it, and the capitalist sector reflexively fights to the death any attempts to regulate it.

Furthermore, they grab the media and culture itself to brainwash gullible workers and consumers to support their elitist agenda and to get the workers, consumers and society itself to oppose their own interests and support the contrary interests of Capital. Then they grab the state itself and prevent it from enacting those very regulations necessary for a civilized capitalism.

This is one of my primary problems with capitalism. Regulation is mandatory to keep capitalism halfway civilized, but the nature of the capitalist system, as described above, works in such a way as to make such regulation often extremely difficult or impossible.

Wikipedia Jews Attack James Petras

2008-07-24T00:26:00.000-07:00

James Petras is a fine man of the Left who has long been interested in Latin America and especially revolutionary movements down there. He has long supported the FARC revolutionaries in Colombia (as does this blog) and lately he has been supporting the Movement of the Landless in Brazil.

He's a great labor organizer who goes down to Latin America and works with the people, getting his hands dirty with the workers and peasants themselves. He's a towering intellect, and has often criticized Left movements from a Far Left perspectives, accusing them of being sellouts. For instance, he has gone after the FMLN in El Salvador lately for pursuing a half-hearted effort at reform.

I believe he was going after Evo Morales in Bolivia lately. He's great for tearing the masks off these Latin American Leftists who the US press is screaming Commie Bloody Murder about, showing us that many of them are not even very far to the Left and the proposals they are offering are quite moderate and unlikely to seriously shake up socioeconomic relations in these places.

It's always great to read him on anything having to do with the Latin American Left.

Lately he has sort of gone off on a bender against US Jews and particularly the Israeli Lobby and Israel. He has received some criticism for this from the Left, especially the anarchist Left (see Three Way Fight) and Maoists. Maoists and anarchists (Three Way Fight critique here) are among those on the Left who are particularly sensitive to charges of anti-Semitism and go to great lengths to avoid such.

This despite the recent rightwing Jewish - Zionist rewriting of history that shows the entire 20th Century Left as being anti-Semitic. See Why the Jews? The Reasons for Contemporary Anti-Semitism by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin for more on that - it's actually an excellent read and I recommend it.

The ADL has recently weighed in against Petras, accusing him of fomenting some kind of "New Anti-Semitism" (this means an anti-Semitism focussed mostly on Israel). All of this crap is a rather minor sideshow to Petras' excellent corpus and career, but as you can see in his Wikipedia entry, most of the entry is given over his tussle with the Jews.

On the discussion page, the Wikipedia Jews have gone nuts, accusing him of being an "anti-Jewish racist" and other bullshit. There's the usual crap about Israel Shamir on there, straight from the UK Spotlight Trotskyite antifa loonie-tunes accusations - Shamir as a Swedish neo-Nazi living in Norway.

In fact, Israel Shamir, whatever one thinks of him (and he surely has his anti-Semitic moments) is a Russian Jew, son of a famous rabbi, who immigrated to Israel, fought in the Israeli military, wrote for some Israeli papers, moved to Japan where he translated Japanese haiku books, moved back to Russia where he got involved in some dubious anti-Semitic far right Russian publications, moved back to Israel, where he currently resides in Jaffa (in fact, you can probably even visit him there - lots of folks do).

It's really sad that this "Swedish neo-Nazi" bullshit has been allowed to gain as much traction as it has. Yes, his Wikipedia page says that too. I know what you were thinking. Chip Berlet is one of the leaders of the Israel Shamir Lynch Mob. Berlet, the strange "Marxist" who is in deep with the radical right libertarians that rule Wikipedia.

Looks like the Wikipedia Jews got pretty much thwarted on this one. Maybe someone is finally starting to reign them in over there. Note that "Humus Sapiens" is one of the most notorious Wikipedia Jews, active for years now. Still at it, I guess.

Check out the article history. Real food fight.

Links to some Wikipedia nasties.

Wikipedia Jews: Jayjg, one of the worst Jewish POV-pushers on Wikipedia. Humus Sapiens, a Russian Jewish immigrant to the US. Izak, one of their sidekicks.

Slim Virgin, one of the worst ones of all. I understand that SV is not even Jewish (!); she's just some Gentile philosemite. She's obsessed with 1. The Jews, 2. 9-11. SV is one of the most horrible and abusive administrators on Wikipedia. She was so abusive that the Wikipedia Review undertook an investigation of her.

She was very hard to track down as she covers her tracks very well, but they eventually determined that she is a former Cambridge University graduate student named Linda Mack who was hired by investigative reporter Pierre Salinger and John K. Cooley to investigate the Lockerbie bombing.

Two Libyans were eventually convicted of the bombing, and Ghaddafi was ordered to pay a huge fine, but there is good evidence that Libya had nothing to do with the bombing. There is also evidence that UK law enforcement knew this but went after Ghaddafi anyway because they hated him and wanted to wrap up the case.

It is still not known who was behind the bombing, but the Iranian regime was probably the author of the attack. The attack was probably a payback for the US shooting down of an Iranian airliner during the Iran-Iraq War, an act that the US said was accidental. Iran refused to accept the accidental shootdown theory.

Linda Mack was instrumental in steering Salinger and Cooley towards the Libyans. Salinger and Cooley eventually decided that Mack was a spy with the UK's notorious MI5 intelligence agency (the British CIA). Linda Mack is now reportedly living in Alberta, Canada under the name Sarah McEwan.

According to other information I have uncovered, Mack seems to have switched at some point from the MI5 to the Mossad. I feel that Slim Virgin (Linda Mack) is an undercover Mossad agent who has infiltrated the highest ranks of Wikipedia (she is one of the site's top administrators) in order to promote Israel's views on the online encyclopedia.

Antifascist, who uses the same handle and has the same obsessions as a notorious Jewish Zionist who used to stalk anti-Zionists on Indymedia, often issuing them horrible death threats. He's obsessed with Wendy Campbell and Gilad Atzmon.

His name is Ketlan Ossowski (blog here) and he is describes as an obsessive Jew who uses Leftism and anti-fascism as a cover to promote Zionism. I strongly suspect that he is the same guy who stalked and threatened Wendy Campbell. Zeq, long-notorious, the lone Wikipedia Jew busted in the CAMERA fiasco, now banned.

Others: Roland Rance, a Jewish Marxist (Jewish first, Marxist far distant second) from London, famous from the wars over Gilad Atzmon and Mary Rizzo's Peace Palestine blog, apparently active in the Socialist Workers Party and in with the Lenin's Tomb crowd. I'm not going to comment on this guy much as he's written me civilly via email.

Just another frothing Trot about sums it up though.

More on Laissez Faire Economics

2008-07-23T15:42:00.000-07:00

Updated July 25:

In the comments section, James Schipper makes some interesting comments about laissez faire economics and libertarianism in general. His comments are in italics, mine are follow in normal font.

JS: Laissez-faire usually means short-term gain for a small minority and short-term pain for a large majority, medium-term gain for a larger minority and medium-term pain for a smaller majority and only long-term gain for the majority.

RL: I don't agree with this at all. The case of neoliberalism seems to show us that the gains never do filter down to anyone below the top 20%. This is what the neoliberal advocates keep saying - "Give it time, give it time." But no matter how much time you give it, it never seems to work. We are now 28 years into a neoliberal revolution in the US, and have things gotten any better for any larger majority?

Of course not. Things just seem to get worse and worse. Neoliberalism only accomplishes massive wealth transfers from the bottom 80% to the top 20%. It's designed to do that in perpetuity, since class war never ends in capitalism, even in fascism.

JS: The Chicago boys are actually right in that speculative bubbles are only possible if the government engages in massive monetary expansion or allows the banks to do so. This means that the most essential part of government regulation in a modern economy is the regulation of credit and the currency. Too much money and credit = inflation and speculation.

RL: The problem here is that these Chicago Boys characters have been cheering on every single speculative bubble that ever existed, and they created quite a few of them themselves. Their libertarian project in Chile ended in massive failure such that even Pinochet had to step in with major government intervention to save the economy. Huge intervention by the state was the only thing that saved the economy.

In Russia, the Boys succeeded in looting the nation, transferring the money out of the country, engineering a Depression 3.5 times worse than the US Depression and killing 15 million Russians. The Chicago Boys and their acolytes were behind the Asian Flu crashes in the late 1990's too.

The only way to prevent speculative bubbles is through government regulation of an economy, and the Chicago Boys apparently oppose all such. The business sector, whom the Chicago Boys represent, always supports a loose money policy during the good times in order to facilitate the cheap money necessary for economic expansion and of course speculation.

Furthermore, the US capitalist class, nor any other capitalist class, would never support the Chicago Boys' apparent prescription here - getting rid of the Fed's regulation of the money supply. Business loves and needs the Fed, despite all of its rants against socialism. Anyway, the role of a central bank is overestimated. Even in a state without a strong central bank regulating money, you can still get massive speculative inflows. This was the case with the nations harmed by the Asian Flu.

The Fed itself is run by economists who are themselves working hand in hand with Big Business and are generally followers of Chicago School Economics. The only thing the rich care about is inflation, and business everywhere on Earth has cheered on every speculative bubble that ever existed. They can't get enough of them.

To blame these bubbles on a reactionary government institution called the Fed, implying the Fed is some kind of socialist institution (though its recent actions have indeed been socialist) is beyond perverse.

What's deadly to business and the rich is inflation. The rich hate inflation because it cuts into their incomes. Most rich people don't even work at all. They just kick back and live off rents and equities. Nothing cuts into their lazy money more than inflation. Further, inflation engenders demands for wage increases, which is why business hates it so much. It also increases costs for supplies, which they may or may not be able to pass on.

In order to stop inflation from hurting the rich and business, the Fed fights inflation by throwing millions of Americans out of work, since inflation and unemployment are two ends of a scale. As unemployment gets "too low", workers start getting "uppity" and demanding wage increases. This is deadly to capitalism, so the Fed responds by deliberately increasing unemployment and throwing millions out of work.

If you take a university course in capitalist economics, they will tell you that capitalism operates on the premise of "the benefits of mass unemployment". The benefits lie in the disciplining of the worker. The notion that mass unemployment has any benefits at all is enough to turn my stomach against capitalism.

Further, I'm not enamored of any Austrian economist.

JS: Too much money and credit = inflation and specualtion.

RL: Problem here probably being that the Fed cares little about speculation (although it does worry about it a bit - witness Alan Greenspan's famous "irrational exuberance" comments a while back) but cares a lot about inflation.

Speculation does not necessarily lead to increases in core inflation, but it surely runs up some prices. Housing market, oil and dot com stock speculation surely created bubbles in those sectors, but in the case of housing and dot com's, did not effect core inflation.

JS: As to the New Deal, it was a colossal failure.

RL: I can't comment on this. The general analysis here in the US is that the New Deal saved US capitalism from Revolution, hence it was painful but worth it. This analysis comes from the more enlightened among capitalist sectors themselves.

Of course Western Europe and the Asian Tigers were not built on laissez faire. Even today that Japan, Singapore and Korea have extreme government intervention in the economy in terms of state planning of the economy. That's often termed corporatism.

It's not like Gosplan where the social economy is planned down to the # of eggs you will eat in a year. Instead this sort of economic guidance actually works. Government works with firms to help them compete against foreign sectors, goosing some sectors while letting others wilt.

No country with a mostly private education system and a poor public education system has ever produced any kind of an educated population.

Up here in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, we have many roads that are private. The country never got around to making them county roads. Without exception, they are horrible. In many cases, there are expensive homes and properties lining these roads. The homes sell for about ~$300,000+ now. Most people living there have some money and they are not poor at all.

Thing is, everyone would have to get together to pitch in to fix the road and maintain it. People, even well to do folks, can never seem to get together to do that, so you have a horrific road. It's really strange to try to drive down a nightmarish road while looking at very nice, fancy houses with new cars on either side.

The "Benefits" of Deregulated Capitalism

2008-07-23T00:10:00.000-07:00

Updated July 25:

Lack of regulation in capitalism leads to the ability to roll up huge gains in wealth for those at the top of the food chain, and also leads to huge economic disasters on a national scale such as we are experiencing now in the US.

The italicized portion of the previous sentence is precisely why business, the rich, the media and the plutocratic political parties in the US (originally the Republican Party, but now both parties), support the deregulation of the capitalist system in the US and all over the world.

The verdict is in on the deregulation of capitalism that has been the rage all over the world for the past 30 years. Almost everywhere it has been tried, it has caused massive discrepancies in wealth distribution. The top 20% of the income earners everywhere on Earth have benefited, and the bottom 80% have lost out.

That's why Latin America has been voting in leaders who have campaigned on platforms that can be roughly translated as, "The Hell with neoliberalism". Far from being Leftists or Communists, most of the new Latin American Left is simply objecting to the observable failure of 20-30 years of neoliberalism in Latin America and trying to fashion some sort of social democratic alternative.

Even honest proponents of neoliberalism in the US media like Fareed Zakaria have admitted that neoliberalism in Latin America has failed. The usual lie has been, "It hasn't had enough time to work yet."

This is a lie.

Neoliberalism in Latin America is working exactly as planned.

It was designed to enrich the top 20% and impoverish just about everyone else. Everyone on Earth, neoliberalism has devastated the public sector, wages, working conditions, schools, health care, etc. It has probably killed millions of people. In fact, there is good evidence that it is killing millions of people all over the world every single year.

Read about the history of the US economy in the late 1800's as it lurched from one panic to another, with wild run-ups in wealth for the rich in between.

Unregulated capitalism is like a cocaine addict with a trust fund. He can have a real wild blast as long as the money lasts, get high as a damned kite and soar to the skies. There's almost no limit to how high he can get. When the crash comes, he's going to be pounded physically and psychologically, and his trust will be drained. Freemarketeers argue that it's worth it for the fun of the run.

Regulated capitalism is like a middle-aged man who drinks a couple of glasses of wine a night. He's not able to get rip-roaring drunk like he did in his youth, nor is he able to drink his troubles away, but the hangovers are nonexistent, and he's not committing slow suicide anymore either.

Regulation is like a fog layer on the coast in a Mediterranean climate. It takes the extreme heat and cold out of a climate and leaves it at a moderate, some would say boring, middle.

During the Roaring 20's, people forget 80% of the US population actually lost money. It was only "roaring" for the top 20%. Nevertheless, most Americans think of this as a time unlimited prosperity. As we can see, not only is America governed and reported on exclusively by the Rich, but even our very history is the History of the Rich.

The Great Depression was directly caused by unregulated capitalism in the US, despite the desperate efforts of rightwing economist Chicago School professional liars to lie their way out of the facts. In the 1930's, a huge regulatory structure was put into place in part to prevent a second Great Depression from occurring.

It's worked well, but now a lot of the regulations that were put in post-Depression have been whittled away, such as the Glass-Seagall Act, that attempted to build a wall between commercial and investment banking. That way, if high-risk investment banking goes under (as it is prone to) it doesn't take down the commercial banking sector (where Mrs. Jones has her nest egg) with it.

Deregulated capitalism quickly leads to a state of affairs where you have wild economic growth and bubbles followed by bubble deflations and panics.

It's no way to run an economy, but this is the way every capitalist on Earth wants it.

Every capitalist on Earth is like a gambler in a casino with a credit card with no limits. Sensible nations do not listen to what the capitalists want - they never want anything good for the nation in the long run. The capitalist perennial children need to be continuously regulated on a short leash by regulatory adults in government in order to have any semblance of a decent society under capitalism.

Since 1980 and the beginnings of massive deregulation, the wages of 80% of the US population (nonsupervisory workers) have declined by 1% in constant dollars. They should have been going up in tandem with productivity increases, and productivity has gone up a lot in 28 years. 100% of the productivity increases in the last 28 years went to the top 20%, and 0% to the bottom 80%.

Before anyone screams race, this is the way unregulated capitalism works in any society - even an all-White one. The bottom 80% of the US population that got screwed massively in the Roaring 20's and resulting capitalist hangover called the Great Depression was overwhelmingly White.

A regulated capitalism would look a lot like what we had in the US in the 1950's and especially 1960's and 1970's. It works pretty well for a capitalist system. It's true that it tends to stifle massive wealth run-ups and bubbles (almost always caused by massive fraud anyway) but it also makes for a smoother ride and much fewer crashes, panics, recessions and depressions.

The Taoists discuss the Middle Way. So it is in capitalist economics as in the rest of life. "Live fast, die young and leave a pretty corpse," sounds romantic at 18, but a 50-yr-old who makes such a statement is a moron. Our economy has been run by 18-yr-olds for decades now. As long as we have a capitalist economy, it's time for some adult supervision.

Extremely Tired

2008-07-22T23:49:00.000-07:00

Sorry folks, for the lack of posts, but I am finding it hard to get much of anything done these days. My sinusitis is really bad, and I don't feel like doing much of anything at all. I slept 15 hours last night no problem at all. I think I may need to go back to the doctor and get on some antibiotics and maybe even steroids this time. I've had two operations so far, but maybe I need another one.

I think I may need another CT scan or MRI to see how my sinuses are doing. My maxillaries are so swollen they feel like they are pulling my whole face down. Feels like lead weights in my cheeks. I'm not sure what's going on here. Just went through the spring pollen season, but it seems to be ending. I don't really get it.

Sexmaniacman Praises Sex Crimes

2008-07-19T01:13:00.000-07:00

Updated July 21:

Sexmaniacman kept reading the news in the papers and on the Net, and could not believe his eyes anymore.

A US diplomat goes to Brazil and "molests" some "little girls" aged 14-17, which Sexmaniacman assumed is perfectly legal in Brazil. He comes back to the US and gets arrested on "pedophile" charges.

A gay man "molests" a 15-year-old gay "little boy" prostitute in the Philippines, comes home to the US, and is arrested and labeled "pedophile". His arrest is uncovered when he goes to work for a local politician and his career is shot.

A local US mayor with long hair and a beard like a ZZ Top musician "molests" a 15-year-old "little girl". He's sentenced to prison and reviled by a town who hopes he stays away for a long time.

Roman Polanski gives a 13-year-old girl a Quaalude long ago, "molests" her, flees the phony prosecution for the sanity of France, where he remains to this day.

Mark Foley does little more than talk dirty to some "little boy" pages aged 16-17 (some of whom apparently enjoyed it), never touches any of them even once, and is labeled "pedophile".

In the UK, a father takes pictures of his kids on a slide in the park and insane irate mothers order him to stop taking pictures, and when he refuses, they go to the cops. Obviously he's a child molester. Whoops. He's just a father taking pics of his own kids.

Sexmaniacman looks at all the "pedophiles" above and cheers them on, despite the hysteria, although he thinks Mark Foley was an idiot. Sexmaniacman figures that if these guys want to have sex with teenagers, that's their business. Sexmaniacman realizes it's illegal, and he hopes he won't do it himself, but he can't see it as a sin.

We're in the midst of madness. Child Molester Mass Hysteria, to be precise.

Sexmaniacman did lots of "molesting", and had lots of fun, back in the day. He was 18, 19 and 20, and the women and "little girls" never stopped coming. The females were all ages, but plenty were 14, 15, 16 and 17. He had sex with them all, and then he got up in the morning and did it some more. He's proud of it to this very day. Nowadays, he'd be a "pedophile" for doing that. Back in the day, it was just good times.

Sexmaniacman had some "pedophile" friends. One was 28 years old, had a 16-yr-old "little girl" girlfriend, and "molested" her regularly.

Sexmaniacman cheered his friend on for this dastardly "pedophile" episode.

Sexmaniacman had another friend, Killerdude. He was 29 years old, and they were over at Killerdude's Mom's house getting high as kites and laughing their asses off. Killerdude's little sister's 15-yr-old girlfriend walked out of the bedroom and out the front door, waving goodbye. Killerdude confided to Sexmaniacman that he had just had sex with that "little girl" the other day.

His sister had approached Killerdude, said her friend wanted to have sex with him, and would he do it? He obviously obliged. What else could he do but "molest" her, right?

Sexmaniacman approved, and cheered his "pedophile" friend on.

Sexmaniacman gave up on the young girls when he turned 21. After that, they needed to be 18. In dubious cases, he even asked for ID.

Sexmaniacman read a pdf on the Net about Costa Rica. There are all kinds of American men down there having all sorts of sex fun with girls and women. In Costa Rica, a girl is a woman at age 13.

So you could say that Costa Rica is just a nation of sex perverts and child molesting sick fucks, and the whole country needs to be arrested. The males all need prison or castration or preferably both, and the females all need lifetime therapy for "getting molested".

Sexmaniacman cheers on Costa Rica in their freedom of choice and thumbing their nose at Child Molester Mass Hysteria.

There are men down there, American men, the pdf said, older guys, and some are having sex with underage girls. It didn't really give ages, but the implication was they were 14-17 years old. The guys were also doing it with women. They were just screwing anything, like any real man does if he gets a chance. The Costa Ricans wouldn't do anything about it because they didn't think it was a crime.

Sexmaniacman cheered them on, all of them, the American men doing this, the Costa Ricans for shrugging their shoulders, and the girls for having a good time. He didn't think he would want to go to Costa Rica, or any foreign land, and do it himself, since teenage girls hardly interested him much anymore, but he didn't care if another guy did.

The idiots in the US government, egged on by the Child Molester Mass Hysteria sweeping the land, passed a weird and retarded law. Only women and pussy-whipped married men would ever pass such a bitchy law, but pass it did.

It bizarrely extended the purview of US law overseas! If an American man of any age goes to a foreign land and has sex with a girl or boy who is 17 years and 11 months old or younger, he goes down on US child molesting laws!

Although at first it would seem that US law should never extend to crimes committed in foreign lands, which are properly the purview of those foreign lands, Sexmaniacman realized that this happened for a reason.

Actual Western pedophiles were going to Philippines, Thailand and other places and having sex with really young kids, because it was more or less legal over there, and the locals didn't care. In order to put a stop to this, the US and Western Europe passed some laws to bust pedos when they went overseas to molest little kids.

Otherwise, Western pedos would run around the world seeking out 3rd World hellholes where no one cared about pedo stuff, and dollars shut up everyone. In order to put a stop to this, anti-pedo laws were passed in the West extending Western law to other nations.

Sexmaniacman thought long and hard about this, and finally decided that this was really weird and legally obtuse, but still unfortunately right and proper in the case of Westerners having sex with actual little kids, but not with teenagers.

One thing Sexmaniacman bemoaned with the coming of Child Molester Mass Hysteria was the extinction of statutory rape, a perfectly valid category, and its blurring with actual pedophilia with young kids. Child Molester Mass Hysteria came to America, and quickly, a 17-yr-old girl and a 9-yr-old girl were the same thing. They were both "children", and those of all ages who had sex fun with them were all sick evil pedo fucks.

Even teenage boys were going down on these sissy, bitchy pedo laws for the crime of proving their manliness by sticking it to their teenage girlfriends. It was as if Iraq or Iran had come to the USA. A 13-yr-old boy and his girl have some sex fun, videotape it on cell phones and pass it around. The boy, but not the girl, goes down on charges of distributing child pornography. Just as the feminazi bitches would have it.

The anti-pedo laws, the blurring of teenage sex fun with sick child sex, the idiot wind attacking virile teenage boys and young men - they were all part of the war American women and girls were waging on real American men and boys. The bitches' wormboy boyfriends, vaginized male allies and pussy-whipped husbands defending the chastity of teenage daughters - they were all behind this bullshit too.

Real American men and testosterone-charged American boys, the few that were left, should have stood up to this attack on manliness, but they were too scared of the pedo charge to speak up.

Millions of vaginized males and girlymen all over America stood up alongside their pants-wearing, hysterical girlfriends and wives, screeching defense of the fake honor of hymenless 17-yr-old girls all over our fair land.

There were some serious issues here. Sexmaniacman had to agree. What was to be done?

You couldn't exactly legalize sex between adults and teens all the way down to age 14 or so. Otherwise you would have guys 40 and 50 walking down the street in broad daylight with their 15-yr-old girlfriends in tow. Sexmaniacman decided that that would not do.

How's about we went back to the old days, Sexmaniacman suggested?

Two laws.

One called statutory rape, judiciously prosecuted against egregious cases of sex between men and girls and gay boys 14-17. Another, child molesting, for sex between adults and girls and boys under the age of 14.

Overseas, clearly there was a national interest in the West to stop pedos from heading to SE Asia to have sex with little kids. If the Thais won't stop it, doggone it, we will. Sexmaniacman nodded his approval.

But Sexmaniacman could see no national interest in busting a Western man of any age for messing with a teenage girl in some sweltering foreign land. That was beyond absurd.

Child porn. Sexmaniacman pondered the very phrase, and lately did so frequently, and he didn't even feel guilty. He loved to think about child porn, since it offered so many legal and philosophical quandaries.

Child porn! The phrase alone drove Americans to paroxysms of madness.

It actually posed a most difficult case, Sexmaniacman noted. To merely look at the stuff was a crime. Child porn was on the Net, and you could find it if you really, really tried. Could you stumble upon it? Highly dubious.

Sexmaniacman felt that in analogy, child porn seemed like the case of a book in a library. It sat on a special shelf called the Internet Shelf. The book was out there in plain view, but there were signs next to it saying DO NOT LOOK AT THIS BOOK! ILLEGAL! LOCAL ORDINANCE BLA BLA BLA! Now and again, some maniac thrillseeker would grab the book and sneak a glance at a few pages.

They would almost always be caught, and the police would haul them away. They would be bashed in the press and their communities as sickos for looking at a book in the library, and their careers and lives would be ruined.

Although this scenario seems absurd, Sexmaniacman realized that that's pretty much how it is with child porn. It's out there on the Net, but if you look at it, you're going to prison. It has to be just about one of the only things on Earth, Sexmaniacman noted, that, if you look at it, you go to prison. Think about it, real hard. Anything else illegal to steal a glance at? Anyone?

Sexmaniacman pondered the weird legal and philosophical arguments for why looking at something , say, child porn, or anything, really, should be illegal:

Child porn is the portrayal of a crime.

Therefore, when you look at it, you violate the kid's privacy. Ok, but the kid has no idea you looked at their pic. Sexmaniacman felt it was impossible to argue that by stealing a glance at their porn pic, you have psychically harmed this kid via telepathy.

Furthermore, Sexmaniacman pointed out that there are all sorts of videos out on the Net that depict crimes, sometimes homicides. You can even find them on this blog. Should those not be illegal too? After all, they portray a crime, no? Or should they be allowed because the victims are dead and can't be harmed anymore?

When you look at child porn, you create a market for it, and that makes producers abuse more kids.

Well, ok, Sexmaniacman nodded. But once again, the criminal appears to be the person who made the child porn, not some guy looking at a picture.

What about trafficking? Sexmaniacman agreed this was a tough one. Here things get more dicey. Now you are actually making money off kids getting molested. He noted that this is getting quite close to actual harm, but there are still some problems.

Sexmaniacman offered up the scenario of the stuff being traded back and forth by pedos for free. No profit is involved, but Sexmaniacman figured we can't really legalize it, can we? If we did, child porn trading sites would open up all over the web, and probably those who make the stuff would create more of it. Sexmaniacman felt that society had an interest in preventing that.

No matter that merely looking at the stuff constituted quite a bizarre sort of crime. Sexmaniacman offered up, "What if we acted logical and said it was legal to look at the stuff, but not to peddle it?" But then he noted that child porn sites would pop up all over the web, just for folks to "look at". Society clearly has an interest in preventing that.

As far as the Internet goes, Sexmaniacman felt that probably the present state of affairs is the best. Child porn is quite illegal, hence it is extremely difficult to find, although with enough effort and hours of searching by savvy Net users, it's surely out there. So child porn is rare and very hard to find. It's almost impossible to stumble upon it by accident. This is probably the way it ought to be, he agreed.

Sexmaniacman pointed out that if we allowed folks to look at it, websites would sprout up all over, and hundreds of thousands or millions of people would be looking at the stuff, just like they are feasting on all the other shock stuff out there. And that didn't seem right to Sexmaniacman.

Sexmaniacman bemoaned the fact that child porn, child molesting and statutory rape are subjects that are banned from polite conversation, and frankly all conversation, in today's Idiot America. The only talk allowed about these subjects is to rant about how we want to castrate the sick fucks who "molest". No problem ever got solved by not talking about it, or only talking stupid about it.

Just to piss people off and make them hate him more than they already did, Sexmaniacman deliberately brought up these subjects, especially in public, just to watch the freakouts and hard stares.

Despite the fact that hardly anyone was talking sensibly about this sick stuff but Sexmaniacman, he noted that these areas opened up a lot of interesting philosophical and legal dilemmas that do not have easy answers.

Wikipedia Jews Redux

2008-07-17T13:31:00.000-07:00

Updated July 19:

I've been informed that the Wikipedia Jews (click the Wikipedia Jews category at the end of the post for more) have been successful, incredibly, at eliminating an entire Wikipedia category called Jewish Businesspeople. The list had 550 names on until a few days ago, and now it has zero. The Wikipedia Jews win again. The crusade to get rid of it was led by Jayjg, one of the Wikipedia Jews' top henchmen.

Now the Wikipedia Jews are going after the list of Jewish Sportspeople. For what reason, I haven't the faintest idea.

A little background. The Jewish Businessmen category was eliminated by the Wikipedia Jews in order to hide the truth about Jewish success in the US. Jews have been very successful in this country, and reportedly 50% of the richest Americans are Jewish. The Wikipedia Jews are trying to hide the story of Jewish success in America because it is common fodder for anti-Semites.

All through the centuries in the ghettos of Europe, wanted Jewish criminals were always hidden by the Jews. Why? Probably in part due to fear that a Jew accused of a crime would set off a pogrom. The same mindset is afoot here with the Wikipedia. Knowledge of Jewish business success in the US, it is feared, may feed anti-Semitism in the US. Letting this information get out is like "trying to start a pogrom".

When I was on Usenet, every time a Jew would relate something uncomplimentary about Jews, for instance, the blatant racism of Hasidim they knew, the others would actually scream that: "What are you trying to do? Start a pogrom?"

Jews can talk about this stuff behind closed doors, but please, not when the Gentiles are listening. This is why the Israeli press is much more critical about Jews and Israel than the US press is. The Hebrew language press is the most uninhibited of all, because they assume that no Gentiles are reading it.

My mother went to school on the South Side of Chicago in a mostly Jewish school, apparently one of the same ones that Barack Obama now sends his kids to. Whenever a Jewish criminal was captured, the Jewish kids, many of whom still spoke Yiddish at home, would always say, "Oh, this is a bad day for the Jews!" She never heard of any other ethnic group saying such a thing.

What she describes is what Kevin MacDonald calls Jewish hyperethnocentrism. Understanding Jewish ultratribalism and hyperethnocentrism is one of the keys to the riddle of Jewish Question.

The deletion of the Jewish Sportspeople category is much stranger. The stereotype of the Jew is that he is a wimpy intellectual, he's not much of an athlete, and he would rather run than fight.

Israel's bristling, in-your-face, land-working, salt of the Earth, fight-to-the-death Sabras were supposed to put an end to all of that. On Usenet, Jewish ultranationalists loved to wave the few Jewish athletes in everyone's faces. "See? We're not all neurotic, myopic bookworms!" they seemed to shout.

The recent Wikipedia article on Samir Kuntar is another example of the Wikipedia Jews and their allies running amok. Kuntar is a Lebanese guerrilla formerly with Abu Abbas' notorious Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) who has been in an Israeli prison for the past 29 years. He participated in a raid on Nahariya, Israel in 1979 that went down as one of the more grotesque and criminal Palestinian terror attacks.

I won't go into the lurid details of this attack, although, after extensive reading about the incident, I finally learned that the purpose of the attack was not to wantonly murder Jewish parents and their toddlers, but to capture some Israelis as hostages to trade for Palestinian prisoners.

When their getaway was thwarted, yes, Kuntar killed Danny and Einat Haran. The description of the killings is pretty horrible, but one wonders exactly how the Israelis were able to figure out down to the last detail every word uttered and motion undertaken by Kuntar and his victims, since the two Israeli hostages were killed, two of the terrorists were killed, and only Kuntar and another terrorist were captured.

Kuntar has always maintained that the killings did not go down as described, and that the Harans were killed by Israeli bullets in the shootout on the beach.

The Wikipedia article on Kuntar is a wreck. There are long, windy passages describing the Israeli account (They figured this out how?) of the killings, complete with emotional and heartrending prose.

A look at the Discussion page shows there was a huge fight over whether to call Kuntar a terrorist. Wikipedia is not supposed to use the word terrorist to describe anyone.

AnonMoos, a notorious US neoconservative, wildly pro-Israel, Gentile Democrat I know from Usenet has apparently landed on Wikipedia, is now part of the Wikipedia Jews team (some of the worst of the Wikipedia Jews are Gentiles, so the name is somewhat misleading).

The wreckers of the article are mostly Jewish and/or Israelis.

Kuntar has become famous again in the past few days since he was just part of a prisoner swap between Hezbollah and Israel.

Much is made of Hezbollah wanting child-killer Kuntar back, but the truth is that their focus on Kuntar is because he is Lebanese, not because he's a child-killer. Hezbollah is a Lebanese nationalist organization, Kuntar is a Lebanese prisoner, so they want him back for nationalist reasons.

The problem on Wikipedia is not that there are a bunch of little Jewish shits running around on any article remotely Jewish-related, censoring and POV-pushing. There are little cabals all over Wikipedia, including many ethnic cabals. In most cases, sober administrators stop the cabals cold, and the articles end up pretty fair.

But the Wikipedia Jews have been running amok from Day One, due to deep connections with a little shit named Jimmy Wales, an ultra-rightwing libertarian who runs the place. Why do the Jews get away with murder on Wikipedia while all the other cabals are put in their place? In this way, the Wikipedia Jews are a microcosm of America, for all intents and purposes now a Jewish country.

For more on that theory, see Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century and Alfred Lindemann's Esau's Tears, the 20th Century and the Rise of the Jews. Jews help man the commanding heights of America, just as they are in with the top dogs on Wikipedia, and the Gentiles are all de facto "Jewish".

Nobody can say shit about them in America or on Wikipedia, and their critics in both the US and Wikipedia are destroyed mercilessly. The story here is the familiar one of the corruption of power, along with the testy paranoia of a tiny ethnic group.

Chip Berlet is also a top Wikipedian who is in very, very deep with the ADL, the Wikipedia Jews and the upper echelons of Wikipedia leadership. A commenter posted comments on here recently implying that Chip Berlet works for either the CIA or the FBI or both. The hero-worship of Berlet on Wikipedia makes no sense unless he is some kind of agent.

Wikipedia is run by a far-right crowd of super-libertarians. Communism and socialism are trashed in most places, and radical freemarket economics of the sort that is now devastating America are pushed relentlessly.

Most articles on Communism and socialism are grossly unfair. Hard-right fascist Jewish nationalists and hard-right fascist Hindu nationalists have formed an alliance and destroyed most articles relating to India, Israel or Jews.

Chip Berlet is supposed to be some kind of a Leftist. He's reportedly even a hardline Communist. Ok, so why is he the hero of and hobnobbing with some of the most extreme anti-Communists and radical Right types around? Furthermore, Berlet helped the ADL spy on many Left and even Communist groups in the US on the grounds that they were anti-Semites (anti-Israel). What kind of a Communist spies on the Left?

An agent.

More on Wanat and the Waygal Valley

2008-07-17T12:01:00.001-07:00

Updated July 18:

US forces abandoned their post at Wanat in the Waygal Valley of Nuristan after the major attack over the weekend in which the base was nearly overrun and 9 US troops were killed and 15 more were wounded.

This is the only photo I could find of Wanat, Afghanistan. This is a ceremony honoring the building of this bridge, probably over the Waygal River.

The town's name is actually Want, according to Richard Strand, an anthropologist and linguist who has done a lot of work in the area.

Here is a blog full of excellent pictures of the area in question. It's written by Joel Bashore, a US Navy Physician's Assistant working with the troops in that part of Afghanistan. The town of Want is not shown in the photos, but Firebase Bela is. Firebase Bela is about 5 miles north of Want on the Waygal River where it meets with a tributary coming from the Aranas area.

This Youtube video made by US soldiers is all about Camp Bela and the 173rd Airborne Brigade, US Army. A soldier interviewed in the video, Team Leader Sergeant Jeffery Mersman, was killed along with five other troops in an ambush last year on 11-9-2007 in this very area. US forces also had a base at Aranas.

FOB Aranas, otherwise known as the Roadhouse. Very, very spartan living conditions here. Now abandoned, probably due to its remote location and the large number of high-casualty attacks on US troops here in the past two years.

Here is an interesting description by Bashore of his trip from Camp Blessing at Nangalam up the Waygal Valley, fording the Waygal at Camp Bela, and on foot to FOB Aranas.

The FOB at Aranas, now abandoned, probably due to continuous attacks and difficulty in resupplying it by foot or donkey. Spectacular view.

There have been a number of deadly attacks against US forces in this part of Afghanistan. The guerrillas here are some of the best in Afghanistan. I think they are protecting Osama bin Laden, because I think he hides in Nuristan at least part of the time. Clearly there are top-notch Al Qaeda fighters up here.

The trail from the town of Aranas to FOB Aranas, another couple of hours away. Access is only on foot or by donkey. As you can see, this is perfect ambush country.

A map of Wanat is available on this blog (map of Nuristan). The map also shows the Waygal Valley, Waygal River, Nangalam (where Camp Blessing is located), the location of Firebase Bela and Aranas. All are located in or near the Waygal District on the map.

In the past two years, there have been some major attacks in the Waygal Valley:

August 2006: Three US soldiers killed in an ambush between Aranas and Bella.

October 2006: Three soldiers killed by an IED between Want and Bella.

June 2007: The police station at Want was attacked and overrun by insurgents. At least one policeman was killed.

August 2007: Two ANA soldiers killed, 11 US wounded when insurgents entered the FOB at Aranas disguised as ANA soldiers.

November 9, 2007: Six US soldiers killed, eight more wounded in an ambush between Bella and Aranas. 11 Afghan soldiers were also wounded. All told, there were 6 Coalition forces killed and 19 wounded in this major attack. The video shows the troops being medevac'd out after the attack. This operation took 31 hours in all. The troops were being picked right off the edges of cliffs.

The murderous trail from Camp Bela to Aranas. There have been many deadly attacks and ambushes in this area, including the one last fall described above.

The FOB at Aranas has been eliminated.

The Meaning of "Out to Lunch"

2008-07-16T22:30:00.000-07:00

I just did a little Googling of this phrase, and I came up with some pretty piss-poor definitions. As they taught us in Linguistics, the true definition of a word is typically not to be found in an encyclopedia. Black and white types go nuts when I say that, so I like to say it to them a lot. I'm an everything is a grey area guy, and we and the Manichean dudes are the deadliest of enemies, so I like to prick them with needles whenever I can.

The text in italics above is an "everything's a grey area" type statement.

For instance, there are many ways to say that someone is nuts, and there are many different ways of expressing the nature and degree to which someone is nuts.

All of the definitions said that "out to lunch" means someone is crazy. Well, not in my neck of the woods. Truth be told, the phrase is seldom used. It has a humorous tinge to it and expresses a degree of harmlessness. It refers to someone who is eccentric in a humorous and harmless way, but there is more to it than that.

It also means that the person is not truly crazy in any real or meaningful way. You would never say it about a schizophrenic wandering the streets or about a deranged serial killer.

In addition to being humorous and harmless, the person who is out to lunch is often extremely intelligent. As an old college friend of mine, Tom Chorneau, once said as we were walking to the parking lot after class while discussing our strange professors and the logistics of selling large quantities of LSD without getting caught, "All of those genius types are totally out to lunch."

Well, that about sums it up. The out to lunch type is Einstein. He's off the wall and over your head, and after you talk to him, he walks away laughing and your mind is still spinning. He's so smart, he's above 99% of the population.

He's operating on a completely different plane, in part because of his very high IQ and also because he knows so much, he's a damned walking encyclopedia. You get halfway through a sentence and he's nodding his head and starting to answer you, because he already figured out the rest of your sentence. He's ahead of you and it pisses you off.

You can't understand a lot of what he says or writes, so he's always being misunderstood, often tragically, by the idiots who fill his world, as the laws of psychometric science mandate. He's over your head, and most everyone else's.

He's making jokes all the time, but almost no one gets them, so they're suspicious. They don't understand him, so he frightens them. He talks in riddles and codes, because his brain is going warp speed leaving the mule brains in the dust, and also because he thinks it's funny to play the Riddler. 90% of the time, no one follows his riddles, codes or jokes, and people misconstrue all sorts of frightening things from this.

He's "out to lunch", not because he's dangerous or antisocial or psychotic, but because he's introverted and he lives completely in his own world, the world of ideas rocketing around his brain at the speed of light. He's not all there. He can't be. It's not logically possible. He's in his head. He's not in the world of people. That bores him. He's in the world of ideas, and especially, he's trekking the trackless wildernesses of his own mind.

He's out to lunch. He wrote this blog post.

Afghan Guerrillas Kill 9 US Troops, Wound 15

2008-07-14T02:12:00.000-07:00

Updated July 15:

A large force of Afghan guerrillas, numbering 400-500, penetrated a remote US combat outpost (COP) base in the remote town of Want.

Want is properly transcribed, Wâ˜t, or Wãt - the "a" is the "a" sound in "father", but it is nasalized, or said through the nose. There is no "n" sound in "Want". The "n" is written in the word because the nasalization of the "a" makes it appear that an "n" follows. Want is mistakenly identified as "Wanat" in press reports.

Want is located in the Waygal* Valley north of the Pech River in the Waygal District of Nuristan Province (mistakenly identified as the Pech District of Kunar Province) in the northeast of the country near the Afghan border.

The Nuristani tribe that traditionally lived in the area is called the Wãtä (the final "a" is the "a" sound in "bad"). But their traditional enemies, the Safi Pashtuns, have been moving up the Waygal Valley all the way to Want in recent years, and the situation has become pretty tense. The Wãtä speak a Nuristani language called Waigali, an unwritten language that has only 1,500 speakers.

The corrections are from David Strand, who has done excellent linguistic and anthropological work in the are. His homepage is fascinating.

The attack reportedly began late Friday night on July 12 and continued until mid-afternoon on July 13. It was the biggest battles of the war so far. Attackers used small arms, machine guns, mortars and RPG's during the battle.

They nearly overran the base, killing 9 US troops and wounding 15 more in a battle that began at dawn and raged until early afternoon. US forces called in planes and helicopters for air support and the attackers were eventually repelled.

The guerrillas lost about 40 men in the audacious attack, and another 60 were wounded. 4 Afghan troops were also wounded. The base had a force of 70, 45 US troops and 25 Afghan forces, so US forces suffered about a 55% casualty rate, and 20% of them were killed.

The base had been built only 3 days prior. The attackers were able to inflict such high casualties because they penetrated the base. Once inside, hand to hand combat ensued.

The attackers first warned villagers to leave the area, and about 20 families left, but many men stayed behind to fight with the guerrillas. Then they took up positions in homes, stores and a mosque. At dawn, they launched the attack on the base from all sides using automatic weapons. The area is very mountainous and forested. In many places, access is only by foot or mule. US forces actually travel by mule in this area.

US forces had launched an air strike on a caravan of vehicles in the area of this assault on July 4 that locals claimed killed 17 civilians. The US military said that they attacked insurgent vehicles, but locals said that the vehicles contained civilians.

That followed another airstrike that reportedly killed quite a few civilians in Nangarhar Province.

Tamim Nuristani was formerly the governor of Nuristan, but was just fired last week after criticizing the raid that killed civilians on July 4.

He said that the attackers were a mix of Pakistanis and Afghans, and that the Afghans had come from not just Nuristan, but also other provinces. They are angry at the Karzai government and upset over these latest instances where US forces killed civilians. Some are just locals, not even official members of armed groups.

Although US forces said the attack took place in Kunar, Afghan officials said it happened in the Waygal District of Nuristan. At any rate, Want is only 2 miles south of Nuristan on the maps that the government uses.

A Google Maps map of the area shows that the base is surrounded by peaks that tower 1000 feet above the base, at 4,200 feet, on three sides.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates was briefed early July 13 on the assault, reflecting its serious nature.

Only five days before, guerrillas had attacked US forces at the Want District Center with small arms, machine guns and RPG's, but they were repelled. The base had just been constructed. The other base had been across the border in Nuristan Province and US forces had abandoned that one to move across the border into Kunar and set up a new base.

This is part of a new strategy of setting up small bases in small villages so that US troops can be closer to the villagers. It looks like these small bases also run the risk of being overrun.

About 500 guerrillas were seen crossing the border from Chitral in Pakistan into Nuristan and Kunar just recently.

It was the worst loss of US life in Afghanistan since 16 soldiers died, also in Kunar, when their Chinook helicopter was shot down. It were shot down in Chichal, 9 miles to the south, also in the Pech River Valley.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami has a major presence around Want, and in addition to a large Taliban presence, there are many Arab, Chechen and Pakistani fighters in the area. Arab and Chechen fighters in that part of the world means Al Qaeda. I also think that Uighur and Uzbek Al Qaeda fighters are in the area.

Indeed, Kunar, and the Pech River Valley in particular, is a major base for Al Qaeda in the region. In my opinion, both Osama bin Laden and Hekmatyar are based across the Pakistani border in Dir Province. Hekmatyar probably moves back and forth into Afghanistan also, and I think he stays in the Pech River Valley a lot.

Bin Laden is also probably in Kunar at times, but is more likely to be found in Nuristan Province. In summers, I think he takes off deep inside Pakistan into caves in very high and remote areas. In wintertime, he comes back down to the Dir - Nuristan area.

A September 8, 2003 Newsweek Magazine article said that bin Laden was hiding in the area of this attack. The reporter interviewed an Afghan man who in the Pech River Valley whose daughter was married to an Algerian in bin Laden's praetorian guard, or Black Guard. He pointed north of the Pech Valley to where he said bin Laden was. The Algerian would come down from time to time to visit his wife.

Hezb-i-Islami Khalis, which is Yunus Khalis' guerrilla front, and Lashkar-e-Toiba, the Shia-hating, Al Qaeda-allied Pakistani group that fights in Kashmir, also have a presence in the area. A new group called Sword of Islam (Saif al Islam) also operates in that area.

You can download a superb map of Kunar Province on this blog here. Find the Pech District at the north center portion of the map. Look north along the Pech River tributary that flows into the Pech at Mano Gai. It's not marked on the map, but it's called the Waygal River or the Waygal Valley.

Follow the Waygal all the way up to near the Nuristan border and you will see the town of Want (mistakenly identified as Wanat) about 1 mile south of the Nuristan border.

Actually, the map is wrong and Want is actually in Nuristan Province.

I also have lots of other excellent maps of other Afghan provinces, and I also have lots of good maps of Afghan districts. Just follow the links to the posts.

Photos of the Pech River are here. There are plenty of pics of the general Kunar and Nuristan area along with lots of good data here if you look around a bit.

*Also known as Waygul, Vaigal, Wâigal or Väigal.

Blacks in Paradise Are a Problem

2008-07-13T03:32:00.000-07:00

The Concow Fire, or Humboldt Fire, is a fire burning near a town called Paradise in northern California. It's in Butte County in the foothills of the Northern Sierra Nevada Mountains.

I've never been to the area, but I was in Yuba City in 1973 (30 miles away). I went fishing in the Yuba River and caught a smallmouth bass on a lure (Yay!) and went fishing in a strange place called Sutter Bypass, which is a sort of endless twisting mess of bypasses, channels, fake streams, and whatnot, apparently diverted from the Sacramento River.

We also used to stop in a place called Orland and buy really great olives in these little farmers' stores. This part of the Sacramento Valley is infernally hot in the summer, and there are all kinds of weird flying bugs out in the evenings, when it barely cools down. There's a lot more water in the Sacramento Valley than in the San Joaquin Valley (farther north), and you see many fields flooded with water to grow rice.

The Humboldt Fire is one of the huge fires burning in northern California right now. It is quite strange now in the Central Sierras, a long ways from the fires. Two days ago, this area was covered with smoke. That's the case in the Valley too. It looks odd, as if there is a fog layer in the area, except it doesn't quite look like fog.

No news stories are covering this, but here in the foothills, we just received news from people in the Paradise area about the fires.

Unfortunately, the news is rather racist. I'm going to cover it anyway. It starts out with a racist joke about the town of Paradise. The joke is that there are 26,000 people in Paradise, but there are no Blacks, and that's why they call it Paradise.

Ok.

Actually, there are about 50 Blacks out of a town of 26,000, but you get the idea.

Anyway, apparently there was a mandatory evacuation order due to the Humboldt Fire for about 1/3 of the town, and most of them left. A nearby town called Concow (named after the Konkow Maidu Indians who lived in this part of the Sierra) was also under evacuation order but some folks stayed behind. One of them died when a fire swept over their home.

Anyway, the scuttlebutt from Paradise is that these folks evacuated their part of Paradise, and then they were watching the TV from wherever they evacuated to.

On the news reports, they saw all these young Black men roaming around the part of the town they had evacuated. Since Paradise has almost no Blacks, they became suspicious. They suspected that maybe these young Black men had not come there to be good Samaritans and help to protect the homes from the fire, but were instead looters.

The nearest town with a significant Black population is probably Chico, a blazing hot university town with a party reputation 15 miles away. But there are only 2,000 Blacks in Chico. A more likely explanation is that they came from Sacramento, 65 miles away, which has a large Black population.

Truth is that in California, we have a small Black population. They are only about 7% of the state and are mostly confined to certain neighborhoods where a lot of folks just don't go. So you don't see so much of the anti-Black White racism here in California as you see back East or in the South.

For instance, I do not care anything about Black people at all - they've never done much to harm me or even make my life unpleasant. You hear all sorts of horror stories about Blacks from Whites back East, but that doesn't do much to me. We don't have many Blacks here, and most of us Californians have not been victimized or harmed much by Black crime and pathology.

At any rate, Paradise residents saw all those young Blacks roaming around their evacuated neighborhoods and decided to return to their homes, fire or no fire. Turns out that July 12, they were already being allowed to return.

This shows how anti-racism in its modern form is utterly insane.

No one is allowed to make any kind of judgments at all about any racial group in any situation. If you evacuate an all-White neighborhood due to a fire, turn on your TV and see crowds of young Black men roaming around your lily-White area, you are supposed to assume that they are there either as sightseers or they are bringing food, water and other goods to the firefighters.

You're not allowed to assume that they might be a bunch of criminals, much less go back and protect your home on that basis, because that is stereotyping and racist.

Black Bear Seen in Ripperdan, California

2008-07-12T03:23:00.000-07:00

Updated July 13:

Incredibly, a California Black Bear (Ursus americanus californiensis)was spotted on the floor of the San Joaquin Valley at Ripperdan on June 23 around 7:30-9:30 PM. That's very unusual. I looked on the Internet and could not find any other reports of bears roaming around on the Valley floor.

Even historically, it was not common. Back in the old days, Black Bears tended to reside in the foothills at the lowest. Sometimes they would come down from the foothills in times of scarce food to feed on carcasses of some of the vast herds of ungulates that roamed in the Valley.

At that time, the California Grizzly Bear was the most common bear in the Valley, and it roamed all up and down this great Valley. They were also very common in the foothills. With the coming of the White man, conflicts were inevitable between settlers and Grizzlies.

They were shot all up and down California for over 100 years. By the late 1800's, they had become quite rare. The last California Grizzlies were seen and shot in the Sierra foothills around Sequoia National Park in the early 1920's.

I drove down to the Ripperdan area where the bear was sighted. There are farms - mostly vineyards and orchards - as far as the eye can see. But the San Joaquin River is only about 1-2 miles away. I drove down to the river, but it was hard to get to it due to private property signs.

At Scaggs Bridge Park, you could access the river. There was still a fair amount of water in it for this far downstream. Keep in mind that agriculture sucks so much water out of this great river that it actually goes dry at a place called Gravelly Ford.

It became clear to me that the bear had been roaming up and down the San Joaquin River, using it as a corridor to move down from the foothills into the Valley. Down near Ripperdan, it moved out of the river area and into the agricultural fields, possibly to feed on crops.

Much of the river from Friant to Fresno is now part of a great thing called the San Joaquin River Parkway, and it looks like they have preserved enough land that bears are actually using it.

A visit to the parkway site showed no records of bears using the parkway.

On the other hand though, bobcats, deer, foxes, coyotes and mountain lions do. This excellent map of the parkway shows that much of the river is now being preserved.

Even with our increasing population growth, we are setting aside so much land for preserves that to some extent animals are able to use the preserves despite the ever-expanding population. This may be why we are seeing so many large mammals making comebacks and recolonizing old territories.

There are probably about 40,000 Black bears in California, and the population has been growing lately. They are not in any kind of danger at all.

I have seen these animals up close quite a few times, and I must tell you that they are actually in general timid creatures. On rare occasions, they can become aggressive, attack or even kill. But considering the number of human-bear interactions in the US every year and the number of bear attacks, the likelihood of this occurring is vanishingly small. But I still carry a big long stick when I hike in the woods.