US Conservatives Are Not Evil; They Are Insane

I really don’t think most US conservatives are evil or bad. I just think they are wrong. Actually I do not think they are wrong. I know they are wrong. Almost everything they say and believe is simply wrong. For the most part, what they believe are lies, nonsense, crap, idiocy and bullshit. If we know a human being whose beliefs are all nonsensical, we usually won’t say he is evil. We might be charitable and just say he is a nutcase.

Almost all of the problems with US conservatives are because they are ludicrously partisan. To be partisan is one thing, but a conservative will never admit he is partisan.

Let us look at some examples:

Benghazi Embassy scandal: There was no scandal. Al Qaeda is waging a global war on us, and they will attack our troops and embassies any chance they can get. The Administration tried their hardest to fortify the embassy, as hard as any other administration would have tried. The diplomatic aspect of the state in the State Department is nonpartisan. Embassy personnel are staffed via the Pentagon and the CIA and contractors. Under any administration, priority will be on protecting the lives of diplomatic personnel and the integrity of US embassies.

Democratic administrations are not so stupid as to scrimp on security overseas, and there is no evidence that Republicans protect embassies any better than Democrats. One of the worst attacks ever on a US embassy occurred in 1983 when Hezbollah hit the US Embassy in Beirut. Almost all the American “civilians” killed were working for the CIA, but don’t let that bother you.

As sometimes happens, our enemies got the best of us one day in Libya. This would never have happened under Gaddafi, but we overthrew him and put Al Qaeda in charge of Libya, so that’s why our embassy got overrun.

Truth be told, wasn’t the 9-11 attack on the US far worse than the Benghazi attack in which one ambassador was killed? On 9-11, 3,000 Americans were killed, on our own soil nonetheless. But somehow to conservatives this is not a failure to protect the US homeland and citizens, but an attack that kills one ambassador is? That’s just partisan bullshit; it’s nothing more and nothing less.

If the Benghazi attack occurred under a Republican President, conservatives would not have said a word. Security failures only occur under Democratic Presidents, never under Republican Presidents. If 9-11 would have occurred under a Democratic President, conservatives would still be screaming about how “the liberals let Al Qaeda attack us.” But since it happened under a Republican, you will never hear a word of this. This makes no sense. 9-11 was either a security failure or it was not. It can’t be the case that it would have been a security failure under a Democrat, but since it occurred under a Republican, it could not possibly be one.

Lie: Obama represents something called “Chicago-style politics.” The implication here is that Obama is corrupt to the core, a representative of corrupt Chicago Democratic Party-labor union machine politics going back decades. The truth is that that corrupt machine got dismantled quite some time ago. It is true that Democratic politics in Chicago used to be very corrupt, especially under Mayor Daley. Corrupt elections were the norm, and dead people voted early and often.

Corrupt Democratic crooks in Chicago stole so many votes in Chicago in 1960 that they probably gave John F. Kennedy the election. So JFK no doubt stole his way into office. The dead have not voted in Chicago in quite some time, and federal RICO prosecutions and raids have pretty much shut down the overtly corrupt aspect of Chicago politics. To my knowledge, Chicago politics nowadays is no more corrupt than the politics of any other large US city.

Furthermore, there is no evidence that Obama is part of any Chicago corrupt Daley-style machine. That machine was made up of old style ethnic Whites, and the new Democratic politics in Chicago is much more progressive, even radical, and clean. It’s true that Penny Pritzger, Rahm Emanuel and Bill Ayers were part of the local politics scene, but neither one is corrupt. In fact Ayers and other radical types would be very against that sort of thing. Emanuel and and Pritzger come out of US finance capital and are as corrupt or non-corrupt as anyone tied at the hip to Wall Street as almost 100% of the Republican Party is.

How about Obama since he has been in office? There is no evidence that the Obama Administration is particularly corrupt as an Executive Branch. Sure, they take lots of corporate money, but the Republicans take way more, and that’s all legal anyway. There have been very few serious corruption cases under Obama.

The truth is that corruption in the US reached an all-time recent high under Ronald Reagan. It was also very high under George Bush Jr. The more capitalist the political party is, the more corrupt it is. The Democrats are not so wedded to US big business and multinational corporations as Republicans are, hence you see a lot less corruption. Any political party with profound ties to Big Capital will almost always be extremely corrupt. This fact can even be shown on a worldwide scale. Parties that are more socialist or populist and less tied to the rich and Big Capital will tend to be less corrupt since there is less Big Money to go around and they at least pay lip service to the lower 80% of the population.

Conclusion: There is no “Chicago-style politics” anymore, and even if there is, Obama is not representative of it. The old machine is dead and gone, possibly never to be revived. That Obama is some corrupt, vote-stealing, bribe-taking, brutal Daley style machine crook is simply nonsense.

Lie: Obama is killing the Keystone XL pipeline because he has ties to the Waltons, heirs to the Walmart fortune, who will lose big money if the pipeline goes through. Truth is that Obama, corporatist that he is, largely supports the Keystone XL, but he is under huge pressure from environmentalists to cave in. So Obama the corporatist is caught between his Big Money backers in Big Oil (Obama is a strong supporter of Big Oil) and the environmentalists on the Left of his party.

Obama, being a rightwing corporate capitalist whore, is inclined to support the pipeline because his corporate pimps demand it of him. However, he is pressured from the Left to kill the pipeline. So he is caught in a bind. The only wavering he is doing at all is because he is under pressure from environmentalists. If he stops Keystone XL, it will be because the environmentalists convinced him.

Conclusion: Obama has no position on Keystone XL, but is inclined to support it. But he is under pressure from his Left to kill it. The verdict is up to him.

Lie: Environmental organizations lie about the environment because they are paid many millions of dollars to lie about it. This is simply not true. Environmental groups are not corrupt, and there is no money in protecting the environment. There are no rich or business interests paying off environmental activists to do this or that. The entire environmental movement really is anti-capitalist.

Its goal is to shut down or regulate various capitalist enterprises so they can not make any money at all since they are not allowed to start up or because their operations are shut down. In other cases, it seeks to regulate capitalist enterprises in such a way as to limit the profits of Capital. The capitalists are the ones with money in capitalist societies. Since the goals of environmentalists’ projects are to limit or in some cases to disallow capitalists’ profits, no capitalist will ever support this movement.

It is certainly possible that there are rich people somewhere dishing out millions of dollars to environmental groups in order to lie about environmental problems, but there is no evidence that this is occurring. Anyway, US environmental problems are bad enough that there is no need to lie about anything; the truth is bad enough as it is. I have been following this movement for decades now and I have never uncovered a single case of environmentalists inventing nonexistent problems or even exaggerating current ones. There’s no need to do so. If projects are environment-friendly, environmentalists are content to let them go forward.

Conclusion: There are no environmental groups lying about environmental problems as the truth is bad enough. 100% of the lying is on the side of the capitalist destroyers and polluters who obviously have huge pecuniary interest in lying. No one is giving millions of $ to environmentalists to make up lies, and there is no evidence that no one ever has.

Lie: China and India are causing the majority of global warming, so we needn’t worry about global warming here in the US. Pollute away!

The truth is that China and India together cause ~8% of global warming in the world. Sure it is on the rise, but that is the current figure. Most global warming is coming out of the West.

Conclusion: The West is causing global warming, not the rest of the world.

Lie: Barack Obama, radical Islamist Kenyan born Muslim, is supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The MB are radical Al Qaeda style terrorists who hate the US and Israel. It is true that the MB are radical Islamists and they are pretty nasty. But a Republican administration would probably also support the MB regime in Egypt. Egypt gets that $2-3 billion/year as a payoff for making peace with Israel back in 1979.

So all those billions are not going for the radical Islamist MB in Egypt, instead it is going for a bunch of Jews squatting in Palestine. It’s a payoff to the Jews, nothing more, nothing less. If you’re upset about it, head on over to Hymietown, find yourself a deli, and complain to anyone who will listen to you.

Truth is that due to geopolitics, a Republican administration would probably have to support the MB to the tune of $2-3 billion a year too. If you cut off all that aid, Egypt might just tear up that peace treaty with Israel, and we can’t have that. So the aid stays, no matter which administration is in charge.

Besides, there is not a whole lot of evidence that the Egyptian MB is any more radical Islamist than the radical Sunni Islamist regimes in the Gulf. Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Yemen are all run by radical Islamist regimes. In fact, the Egyptian MB has very deep ties to the Wahhabi clergy in Saudi Arabia, and it was the emigration of many MB Islamists to Saudi Arabia due to persecution by secular regimes that helped fuel Al Qaeda in the first place.

What created Al Qaeda? Al Qaeda was created when large numbers of MB activists from Egypt and then later from Syria migrated to Saudi Arabia due to persecution by secular regimes in Egypt and Syria. The Wahhabi clerics had been rather quietist up until this point. But the MB cadres were radicalized by persecution and torture in their homelands, and they riled up the locals, turning up the heat on the quietist Wahhabi clergy. It was out of this union of Mediterranean MB activists with Saudi Wahhabi clergy that Al Qaeda itself was born.

Conclusion: Obama probably doesn’t like the Egyptian MB regime any more than any Republican would. But the rules of geopolitics are that Egypt must be supported as a consequence of US support for Israel. As with so many things in the Middle East, all roads lead back to Jerusalem.

Walter E. Williams: Idiot, Tool, Black Conservative

The latest Walter E. Williams article.

A truly insane article by a typical Black conservative nut. This kook points out the logical fact that is known to anyone: What do the Top 10 US cities with the highest crime rates have in common? Guess what? They are chock full of Black people! Duh.

One would draw certain logical conclusions from these obvious facts, but a Black conservative is too much of partisan monkey liar to ever do that. As bad as Black liberals can be (and they can be pretty bad), Black conservatives are by far the worst that the Black race has to offer.

According the Williams, the logical conclusion that we draw here is twofold:

1. These cities are full of Black folks.
2. They are all run by Democrats, for the most part liberal Democrats.

Conclusion: Liberal Democratic administrations cause unbelievable amounts of crime!

I kid you not. Black conservatives really are that stupid. As if Black people would act any better under a hard rightwing administration, not that they would ever elect one.

We have an actual experiment to see if this is true: the South. All Southern states are run by radical rightwing Republicans. Before that, they were run by radical rightwing Democrats. All of those states have been run by Black-hating racist White people for ever and ever. And how do Black people act down South? Perfectly horrible. They act as bad as Black people do anywhere. Why would Black folks suddenly act better if a rightwing Republican racist White massa was in charge, cracking the whip on those niggas? You think is going to stop making them act up? Come on.

The truth is that those cities are full of crime for the precise reason that they are full of Black people. Once you get a city full of Black people, you tend to get a city with lots and lots of crime. Those Black people created all that crime, and they will create about as much crime whether they are under a liberal Democratic administration as when they are under a Republican white racist massa administration.

Williams is truly crazy: a Libertarian Black. Black Libertarians are even more insane than Black conservatives. About 3% of Blacks are Black conservatives. We know this because ~3% of Black voted for Mitt Romney in the last election. However, if you looked at the US news media, you would think that 50% or more of Blacks are conservatives. Black conservatives may be as rare as four leaf clovers, but the “liberal” media loves them, and loves to over-represent them as demonstrative of the politics of US Blacks. If you are a US Black conservative, you are almost guaranteed of getting your own radio or TV show or your own newspaper column.

Does anyone on Earth think that Libertarianism will do anything for US Blacks?

Libertarianism is what exists in the 3rd world. In the 3rd World, the state is almost nonexistent, spends almost no money on the people on social programs, and what money it does have goes solely for police and military to enforce class rule over the lower classes and the workers. If the lower classes and workers get too out of hand, you just call out the cops and army and slaughter them.

Other than that, the government exists solely as an arm of the richest sectors of society and serves to protect their interests. The rich and business classes get to do everything and anything they want to. The state is starved for funds because the businesses and the wealthy pay no taxes, and the elites don’t believe in government spending anyway due to “the threat of a good example.” If the state spends money on pro-people programs, that is socialism, and we oppose socialism. Also the people might come to like this socialism and might want to have a more socialist country. This would interfere with the moneyed interests of the nation’s elites, so we can’t have that.

Libertarianism is what Blacks have in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and a few other places. Probably Haiti is the best example because it is the most Libertarian society ever attempted in a Black country. You can see how well that is working out!

Over in Africa, we can look at Kenya, Nigeria or Zaire as examples of nearly Libertarian Black countries in which elites steal 100% of the money in society leaving the masses with nothing but starvation and disease. As you can see, that is working out just fine!

Most other Black nations are socialist to some degree or another, so it hard to find a Black example of a radical rightwing country, but the above examples are pretty good.

Libertarianism won’t do anything good for Black people. All it will do is turn Black neighborhoods and cities like Detroit and Oakland into Haiti or Nigeria. If you think that is an improvement on the present state of affairs, you are wrong.

A Capitalist World is a World of Crime, Corruption and Wars of Agression

Dota says:

I think Roger Hill is onto something here. Robert mistakes capitalism for opportunism and sociopathic behaviour in general. As I’ve pointed out before, we’ve seen exploitation in non-capitalist societies during various periods of history. Feudalism and Caste immediately come to mind.

Lee Kwan Yew once said that in order to spread the wealth around, a society must first create it. Capitalism is a good engine for wealth creation. Historically, its egalitarian societies that have been expansionist. The Arabs and Mongols come to mind. They were expansionist because they failed to create any wealth for themselves. Once they acquired wealth through conquest, they divided it amongst themselves equally (more or less).

It’s obvious that the Rockerfellers/Fords etc. represent a ‘capitalism’ that is alien to Smith’s wealth of nations. Capitalism is merely privately owned factors of production. The elites mentioned above represent plutocratic sociopathic insanity at its highest degree.

Under capitalism, all manner and degrees of opportunism, corruption, lying, cheating, stealing and sociopathic behavior becomes positively epidemic.

That is because in pursuit of money, humans will do just about anything: lie, cheat, steal, become opportunists or corrupt, and behave sociopathically in every manner and degree possible. They will also commit tons of crime and will tend to abuse women in all sorts of ways.

We saw much less of this behavior in the socialist societies of the last century. When these socieites such as Eastern Europe, the USSR and China went to capitalism, the crime rate went through the roof, entire nations became corrupt to the core, and the abuse of women increased dramatically. In fact, some socieites were almost completely taken over by organized crime. Russia to this day is significantly controlled by Organized Crime. Organized crime elements run Russia and rule it via the state.

In the past century, the most egalitarian societies committed little aggression, started few wars and committed few acts of conquest in order to obtain more land and acquire new markets and resources. On the contrary, almost all aggression in the past century was committed by unequal capitalist (and imperialist) countries trying to conquer new lands and peoples for new markets and to steal their resources for the capitalists.

In fact a world regime of capitalism virtually guarantees almost continuous wars among capitalist countries over dividing markets and resources. Capitalist countries will always fight each other over markets and resources.  This is almost guaranteed under capitalism, and there does not seem to be any way around it. A world of capitalism is a world of constant war with no way out.

Under more socialist systems, crime, corruption, abuse of women, wars of aggression, homelessness, hunger and preventive disease are dramatically reduced, as is all manner of egoistic sociopathic behavior.

As those societies transition to a capitalist model, crime, corruption, abuse of women, aggressive (imperialist) wars, homelessness, hunger and deaths due to preventive disease often skyrocket.

Bottom line is capitalism is bad for your health.

Capitalist Problem Creation, Socialist Problem Solution

Roger Hill writes:

Well Robert, I hardly see how socialism solves anything you complain about. What we have here is not a problem with the corruption of one particular group of people you label “capitalist” (a label I do not hang on myself). The real problem is with the corruption of a group of people I call the human race.

No system has better solved or ameliorated the problems of slums, starvation, lack of medical care, basic sanitation, freedom of slaves, global warming, pollution of air and rivers, poorly built sweatshops, unsafe roads and products, ruined environments, workplace illness and injury, etc, than the socialists. In fact, all of those problems above on this Earth are generally created by the capitalists, and capitalism will always cause these problems because it is not designed to solve them, and it doesn’t even care if they exist or not, as they are not important to Capital.

All of those problems above can only be ameliorated by the socialists and by state intervention in various ways. They can never be solved or in general even ameliorated by the capitalists.

I will elaborate on this in a later post.

What Good Are the “Natural Limits of Capitalist Profit?”

Roger Hill writes:

Clearly, there are those who do not wish any coercive restraints placed on the economic freedoms of individuals, but who sincerely believe there are natural restraints on all profit ventures in the very exercise of mere economic realities themselves.

These people would be called capitalists, and this is the mindset of all capitalists. That there are natural limits on profits is not particularly interesting when we see environments completely destroyed, massive slums as far as the eye can see, millions dying every year of starvation and lack of health care, countless dying from tainted products and unsafe structures and streets, countless sickened, injured and killed in their own workplaces, on and on. That all of this happens even with some sort of “natural profit limit” is not particularly interesting nor is it enlightening. Clearly, the natural limits of capitalist profits are far too high to be of benefit to any decent society.

The “natural limits of profit” produced the Irish Potato Famine, starve 14 million humans to death every year, and logically produce such catastrophes as Nairobi, Lagos, Rio de Janiero, Mexico City, Detroit, Dhaka and Calcutta.

Clear-cut rainforests, nearly extinct fish stocks, global climate catastrophe, sewage choked rivers, rivers that catch on fire, hundreds of miles of grasslands desertified by bovine locusts with hooves, flaming and collapsing sweatshops with hundreds of charred and flattened corpses, the fetid slums of Bogota, Lima and Sao Paolo: this is what the “natural limits of profit” give us. These natural limits gave us hundreds of years of slavery. Surely those slaves could find a glimmer of hope that their masters’ profits were being restrained by some natural limits, else their fate be even worse?

Roger Hill:

For example, what constitutes ‘restraints on profit’? Are these restraints enforced by coercion – in other words, by law and the power of the state?

Yes, one definition of a socialist is one who is willing to constrain the profits of capitalism via state regulation. And in a capitalist economy, the only possible decent society can be had by socialists in government running and regulating the capitalist economic engine. Allowing the capitalists to move from a mode of economic development to a form of governance via the capitalist state (where the capitalists run the state) quickly creates economic crisis and eventually results in some sort of a 3rd world system.

Is Germany a Socialist Country?

Joerg Hensiek wrote:

Robert: Germany is not the “socialist” – or rather “social democratic” – country it used to be in the 1970s. Neoliberalism has changed this nation too, even if of course not as drastically as the US. However, there are signs that this will come to end, sooner or later.

As a socialist, I consider social democratic countries to be socialist countries. In the Socialist International grouping of political parties which I support, there are many social democratic political parties there.

To me, a socialist is anyone who is willing to constrain the profits of the capitalists.

A capitalist is someone who believes that no restraints should be placed on the profits of capitalists.

Also I do not agree that Germany is a neoliberal country. The most neoliberal countries in Europe are Estonia, Latvia and the UK. Neoliberalism fails everywhere it is implemented, and Europe is no exception.

Why The ETA Political Wing Was Banned

Repost from the old site.

I received an interesting email from one Gonzalo Polo (website here), a Spanish nationalist. I am publishing the parts of it that can be published here. I normally don’t post the names of emailers as it is a violation of Netiquette, but he issued a veiled threat to me, so he gets named. If you don’t want me to reveal contents of your mails, don’t threaten me.

I always supported the Basque and even Catalan separatist causes. In the Basque movement, I supported the armed wing called the ETA. This mail points out some less than flattering things about the ETA, so I am running it, and it also tells us some interesting stories about the history of the Iberian Peninsula.

I am posting it to provide another perspective to the National Question in Spain.

I still think that Spain should allow a referendum on independence, and that is really what this whole fight is all about. I understand that Spain will never hold this referendum, which makes me wonder when they crow that only a minority of Basques support separatism. So hold the referendum already. Truth is, I do not think that Spaniards are civilized enough to split up their nation.

Few nations are.

Only the former USSR and Czechoslovakia have broken up peacefully, with Quebec and and the UK showing a willingness at least. Spaniards have always been terribly intolerant as a people, a tradition like the peculiar one of church-burning that is proving hard to break.

At least the intolerance part is traced by Carroll Quigley back to the Arab occupation, said influence of which makes the area from Latin America across the Mediterranean to Pakistan the Peru-Pakistan Axis, as he calls it.

That much of Spain’s industry is in the Basque Region makes separatism supposedly lethal for Spain, but I doubt it. Spain is a mature and wealthy country and I think they could handle separatism just fine, but Spaniards are just too backwards to do it. I include the famously liberty-lovers the French in this backwardsness, and all of Asia, including those supposedly more highly evolved humans in Northeast Asia.

China is utterly insane when it comes to Tibet (as we saw in the past few days) and Taiwan, and in this way they are firmly in a backwards Asian tradition. Burma, Indonesia and India won’t tolerate separatism either, and the result has been horrible massacres and even genocides.

I suggest that a willingness to break up one’s country is the ultimate act of a civilized people, and it is a litmus test for seeing how civilized you are. By that test, most of the world fails except for some Europeans, but that makes sense. Europeans are the only people who will even try to play by the rules of war either.

The Catalans seem to be debating separatism in their media, and there are some interesting debates going on. One of them is revolving around the nature of the ethnic nationalism that Catalan nationalism is. There are good progressive arguments saying that all ethnic nationalism leads to some variety of fascism, since, like the anti-Semitism I discussed previously, the impulse has nowhere to go but to the Right.

Put another way, internationalism is language of the Left (yet note armed separatists are often Leftists) and nationalism is the language of the Right. It was only the stew of 70 years of internationalism that so wore down the nationalist sentiments of the USSR and enabled them to cleave off 15 republics with very little bloodshed.

There were bloody and fascist-like nation-building episodes in many of these new countries, but that’s just the normal nation-building experience, and if we had to deny the legitimacy of every nation that had ever done this, we would have few countries left on the globe.

It’s probable that that same evil Commie internationalism allowed the Czechoslovaks to separate so amicably. You can’t say that 43 years of Goulash Communism didn’t do any good at all.

Nationalism created the Axis in World War 2 and probably led to World War 1 too. All these fetishists of the state that demand states have their precious “monopoly on violence” and that all armed non-state actors surrender all arms immediately or be destroyed as “terrorists” might want to think that one over sometime. Note that the worst enemies of the Axis ultranationalists were the armed partisans, often Communists.

If you lurk around Internet fascist, Nazi or nationalist forums long enough (and I like to do this for a lark) you will notice that these types hate no one worse than Communists. As nationalists are often not members of the towering heights of capital, one wonders what all the fuss is about.

Fascists, and the nationalists who dress up like them once in a while, Halloween-like, hate Commies over the nationalism question. Commies are dubious, at best, about nationalism. The blood drenched soil of ethnic and Lazarus-like nationalism is the essence of fascism. That’s what the whole bloody Commie-fascist fight is all about in a nutshell.

There’s also the fact that fascism is a last-ditch effort of capital to preserve its privileges in the environment of a serious threat by the Left. The seriousness of the Left Threat provokes a deadly anti-Communist reaction in the fascist. Commies are no longer some ludicrous phantasm – they are marching in the streets – and we need to kill as many of them as possible and put the rest in jail.

It’s curious why more don’t support ethnic separatism. Ask an American, if you can get lucky and find one who even understands the concept, and 90% chances are they support the state and oppose the armed separatists everywhere on Earth. Most folks you meet on the Net are the same way.

But go to a separatist region and you will find large numbers who support separatism. It seems we are not empathizing well enough with the national aspirations of our brother humans.

That ethnic nationalism brings out the caveman in anyone is shown how the separatist Catalans are total nationalist pigs when it comes to granting the Occitan speakers their legitimate human rights.

The ETA political wing was banned (although their men were elected in the last elections to the Basque Parliament under another name, and therefore they act as deputies in the Basque Parliament and mayors in some villages) because they used the public money they earned to send it to the ETA, and also because they gathered information about politicians and submitted it to ETA.

They have decided to boycott Spanish elections so they do not present candidates.

The current President of the Basque Parliament (the moderate Basque PNV) and all political parties of Euskadi (including leftist radical but non-violent Basque parties) define the ETA as a terrorist group (the EU and the US also).

In the last general elections of Spain the political wing of ETA asked Basques not to vote. Even considering that in the villages where ETA supporters have more influence, that this means that if you vote you become a target, people who decided not to vote grew 10 per cent since last elections.

ETA murdered a retired socialist politician who walked in the streets along with his wife and daughter a day before the elections. He was a poor man who worked in a highway booth and handed tickets to the drivers. ETA political wing’s major of the village of Arrasate-Mondragon refused to condemn the assassination.

For this reason all the rest of the parties who governed the town in coalition with this party (including radical left parties) determined not to back her position. This means that there will be soon be another mayor in this town formed by a coalition of the rest of the parties.

For your information I would like to highlight that the PNV (the moderate Basque party) is so scared about the ETA that in the last Basque elections, they could not find candidates for some towns. The Spanish socialist and conservative parties found candidates and, for instance, Mrs. Regina Otaola (Otaola is a Basque name and she is 100% Basque) is the current mayor of Lizarra.

All socialist and moderate candidates in the Basque Country have bodyguards. The man who was murdered two days ago had no right to have a bodyguard because he retired from politics so he was an easy target.

I also would like to inform you that the population of the Basque country is diminishing, the reason being that about 1/3 to 1/4 of 100% Basques have determined to run away from their homeland – the reason being that they want their children to live in a non-violent atmosphere so they have moved to other regions of Spain, for instance my brother-in-law Mr. Aguirre Ormaetxea (100% Basque).

For your information, the language spoken in Galicia is not a dialect of Portuguese, although both languages have a common origin. In the 8th century the Arabs invaded the entire Iberian Peninsula except the mountains of the north. Only the mountains of the North of Spain from Galicia to Catalonia were not invaded.

The original Spaniards (a blend of races and peoples united under the Roman Empire and highly sophisticated at that time, as opposed to people from Northern Europe) started to recover territory from North to South.

Little kingdoms such as Portugal, Castilla, Navarra, Leon and Aragon started to fight Arabs. Galicians joined the kingdom of Leon and Portuguese created the kingdom of Portugal.

Catalonia at that time was invaded by the Emperor of the Sacred Roman Empire, a German emperor of the tribe of the Francs who controlled France and Germany under the blessing of the Pope. The Catholic Church maintained the fiction that the Roman Empire was still alive.

Catalans expelled the Francs from the Hispanic Mark (the name of Catalonia at that time that included a province that nowadays belongs to France) and joined the kingdom of Aragon (a big kingdom that nowadays covers the regions of Aragon, Catalonia, Majorca and Valencia). The French Catalans do not have a Catalan department; Catalans have no rights as a minority in France.

The valley of Aran is part of the province of Lerida (Catalonia), although it is located in the Northern part of the Pyrenees Mountains. People from Aran speak an Occitan (Langue d’Oc) dialect similar to the one was spoken in all Provence before the Germanic tribes imposed French (the former Langue d’Oil that was spoken in Norther France).

Occitan is not spoken nowadays in France. The nationalist Catalan parties do not allow the Aranese language to be taught at school, and they force children to learn Catalan instead of their native language.

The Catalan and Spanish languages are spoken in all the Mediterranean coast from the Border of France to the region of Murcia (including the Balearic Islands). Catalan was never spoken in the current region of Aragon except in the border with Catalonia where children are able to learn the Catalan language thanks to the Aragon Government.

In the Regions of Majorca and Valencia, Catalan is freely spoken as well as Castilian. The people of these regions vote PP or PSOE – Spanish conservative or socialist parties. In the last general elections, the winning party was the Socialist Party, and nationalist CIU party obtained only 11 seats. Furthermore, the president of the Catalonian Parliament is also a socialist.

Catalan radical nationalists pretend to create a new country that would include the regions of Catalonia, Valencia and Majorca together with French Catalonia. French Catalans, Valencians and people from Majorca want to remain in Spain and dislike Catalan imperialism.

I would also like to point out that Guernica is a painting the Republican Legitimate Spanish Government asked Picasso (Picasso was born in Andalusia, namely in Malaga) to paint in order to show the world the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Once the painting was finished, it was shown for the first time in the Universal Expo of New York, namely in the Spanish pavilion.

The US government refused to return the painting to Spain once the war was over, and it remained in the Metropolitan until Franco died. I would like to point you out that around one million people died in the Spanish Civil War. Guernica was bombed by the Germans, but many other Spanish towns were also bombed and destroyed by the Russians.

I would like to highlight that neither the US nor the European democracies helped the Republican Government of Spain because they were scared about Hitler so they preferred not to see what it was happening except for Germany (who backed Franco) and Russia (who backed Republicans.)

Once the Civil War was over, many republicans ran away from Spain and stayed for years in concentration camps in France (my grandfather among others).

Many democrats felt that the US and the European democracies were acting in bad faith, so many people (like Hemingway) came to Spain to fight as volunteers with the Republic.

P.S. In a recent poll published by The Economist, you can read that only between 1/4 and 1/3 of Spanish Basques back independence. In the last elections to Spanish parliament Basque PNV party obtained only 300,000 votes in the Basque Country.

The Camp of Saints

Repost from the old site.

A very nice, but somewhat dated (though the situation has probably only gotten worse), review of The Camp of Saints, one of the most hated books ever written. The link is on the execrable Free Republic, and the author of the review is a libertarian fool. Looks like Jean Raspail, the author of the book, was some kind of rightwing nut too.

They both blame “socialism” for causing such horrible living conditions, along with starvation and mass and early death and disease, that afflict the Third World. This is truly bizarre. Even autarkic Albania nearly doubled life expectancy from 1946 to 1980, though it was not very successful in other ways.

Almost all of the true Third World nightmare states are operating under some kind of capitalism, usually a particularly ferocious.

That socialism is good for life can been seen in the figures of Sri Lanka and India. Because India lacks Sri Lanka’s infant mortality figures, India suffers about 2.7 million dead babies every year. Those are some real numbers for you Black Book of Communism clowns to chew on. Sri Lanka’s great figures can be attributed exclusively to a mature socialist system there (Sri Lanka is a member of the Socialist International).

Everywhere we look we find the same thing, with some aberrations such as North Korea. One thing Communists in general did and do a great job of, other than a few disruptive periods, was putting enough food in everyone’s stomach. This is also something that capitalists everywhere and at all times have done poorly, ranging from deficient to just plain disastrous.

Almost every Communist country ate vastly better after Communism than before. Cuba currently has the lowest malnutrition rate in Latin America, and the UN says they have beaten it altogether. Even Costa Rica has 7% malnutrition – so much for Latin American social democracy. That Communism or socialism “causes mass starvation everywhere it has been tried” is surely one of the vicious and stupid of the anti-Communists’ lies.

Anyway, ignoring the libertarian delusional thinking, the review is a good one, and the Spaniard author notes that it is taking place as we speak, with boats patrolling the shores off the coast of Europe for flotillas pouring out of West Africa towards Europe. Boatloads of Kurds landed on the Riviera and then poured through the streets of Marseilles a while back. Those are scenes right out of the book.

The book has been dismissed as racist claptrap, but that is not entirely true. Raspail was non-racist enough to suggest that Western civilization was a cultural concept and not a racial one. I currently live in Greater Tijuana, now extending 500 miles north of Mexico into California. Only an Hispanic or the most deluded Leftist would see this transformation of a White working class town into just another Mexican city as positive.

I have nothing against US expats, but I never intended to become one. Instead the foreign country came to me, and nobody asked me to vote on it either – instead, it just got shoved down my throat and I was told to lick my lips and say thanks. The US-Mexico border in some important ways no longer really much exists.

Raspail conflates immigration with illegal immigration, the same way the Leftist illegal immigrant lovers do. Legal immigration to the US, other than refugees, is hardly a problem. We vet them very carefully, and few get into trouble. We need to limit it for environmental reasons, but other than that, the real massive damage is being done by illegal immigrants and increasingly their offspring.

Here in California, once a city goes over 60% Hispanic, it is pretty much wrecked in the eyes of any sensible non-Hispanic. We are even starting to see some guilt-riddled Hispanic Flight, with more well-to-do and self-preserving Hispanics fleeing Hispanic-destroyed towns for Whiter suburbs.

Over 60% Hispanic and a city starts getting dirty, trashy, run-down and falling apart. Crime explodes, especially petty theft, but really all types. Gangs are everywhere and so is graffiti. School failure and dropout rates go through the roof. It’s a chaotic and somewhat dangerous mess, but I guess maybe illegals like it that way, because they are just reproducing the Mexico they fled.

This unfortunately titled Usenet post sums it up quite well. What the policeman describes is reality that any honest Californian understands oh so well. He’s not hallucinating. This is basically par for the course in this state.

Particularly poignant was the destruction of the wages and lifestyle of good honest working class Americans, a devastation outrageously championed to the hilt by the entire US Left. It’s hard to imagine a position that is more hostile to working class Americans, but the Left has taken it up.

I don’t necessarily agree with the rightwing “illegals only come here for the welfare” crap in the post but the portrayal of a decent American neighborhood destroyed by Mexican illegals is gut-wrenching.

Mostly this is associated with the illegals and their nightmarish and oversized broods of children, who are growing up as an Underclass that rivals the Black one but is not nearly so pathological.

Hispanics, like Blacks, are splitting into two races. Blacks have already split and Hispanics will be next. There is an assimilated Black group that can be describes as relatively “non-Ghetto”. There is another group with a “Ghetto” mindset to this extent or that that extends tentacles to varying degrees down into the clusterfuck called the Black Underclass.

The Blacks that have left ghetto behind are increasingly disgusted with their ghetto brethren, and are for all intents and purposes just leaving them to twist in the breeze. I don’t blame them.

The same thing is starting to occur with Hispanics. In my town, there is a group of Hispanics that has grown up (usually) speaking Spanish and English and is comfortable in both languages. They tend to be lighter and to make more money, but that’s not always the case. They are just another group of Americans pretty much like the rest of us, and they are no cause for concern at all in most ways.

There is another group that, as noted above, resembles a much better behaved Black Underclass in too many ways. I figure these groups are going to split more and more in the future. Class generally trumps race any day of the week with anyone.

The illegals have just transplanted the poor and peasant societies of Mexico to America. Their kids have largely become the new Underclass described above. This group tend to be darker and to make less money, but once again, no hard rules.

When the book burners scream, rational people want to know why.

By the way, I agree with some of the commenters after the piece on the need to read the book critically, to say the least.

The reviewer also offers some interesting points on a uniquely Iberian point of view, especially in terms of defending Western civilization in Europe from various unwashed or barbarian hordes, and their disgust at the Northern Europeans for wimping out on defending the continent. They also lived under Islam for way too long, remember it well, and are not going back without a fight.

Contrast to the Continental Left that seems to think new majority-Muslim states in Europe will be glorious explosions of progressive expression.

Iberians and non-Iberians have some conflict, but a little conflict adds luscious spice to life, and those who refuse to act aggressively in defending their interests get bulldozed.

“When Will the Siege End?” by Saul Landau

Very nice article on Cuba by Saul Landau. Any system where university graduates make more money driving a taxi or making pizza doesn’t seem to work very well. Is this what socialism looks like? If so, count me out for at least that variety of socialism. People want stuff, money and stuff. And what’s wrong with that, anyway? What’s wrong with people having money and stuff? I am certainly not opposed to it in principle, and socialists should not be opposed to a certain amount of materialism as a human desire and need.

PROGRESO WEEKLY
When Will the Siege End?
By Saul Landau
Published on Wednesday, 06 March 2013 14:08

HAVANA – I walk some of the same streets I did in 1960 and 1961, a time when most Cubans awaited an attack from the United States, a time when people in their twenties and early thirties ran the government, and several hundred thousand of the propertied and professional classes fled to south Florida in fear of these young bearded radicals.

By mid 1960, the flow of U.S. tourists had slowed to a tiny trickle. The big hotels housed foreign supporters of the revolution and soon after honeymoon couples from the island itself.

Planes regularly flew from south Florida bases to drop bombs on island targets and Cubans joined the militia, wearing their well-laundered blue uniforms. Committee for the Defense of the Revolution met on almost every city block to try to keep their own turf secure from counterrevolutionary threats.

President Eisenhower played a kind of tit for tat diplomacy with Fidel Castro, responding with punishment for every move Cuba made that lessened U.S. power and influence on the island. Cuba bought cheap Soviet oil; Ike ordered the US-owned refineries in Cuba not to refine Soviet oil. Fidel nationalized Esso, Texaco and Shell; Ike place an embargo on Cuba.

Before all that, in March 1960, Ike had already ordered the CIA to plan the overthrow of the Cuban government. The Agency began to recruit Cuban exiles in Florida for an expedition that later bore the name of The Bay of Pigs fiasco, a 1,500 man force that invaded Cuba’s south coast along three beaches in the Bay of Pigs. The fighting endured for 72 hours before the Cuban military claimed total victory over the CIA-backed exile invaders.

Now, the Socialist government of Cuba has converted the swampy area into a resort, with a hotel and restaurants for curious tourists and Cuban vacationers. A museum offers remnants and keys to understanding that historic encounter that left President Kennedy with much diplomatic egg on his young face.

Save for a few short periods, U.S. hostility has remained unrelenting toward its small defiant neighbor. But Cuba built a formidable health-care system, a prodigious educational machine that begins in infancy and continues through the PhD, for those qualified.

But Cubans feel starved for things, commodities they see actors wearing and using in movies shown on Cuban TV. Well-educated and trained Cubans don’t see good jobs in their future when they graduate, as the island’s economy doesn’t generate a sufficient number of positions for the qualified people its schools produce.

The lure of Miami, where hundreds of thousands of Cubans now live, remains strong. An engineer drives a cab or makes pizzas, a woman with a University of Havana PhD in literature now lives in San Francisco and works as a translator. “I have more personal freedom here. Nobody mixes in my personal life as they did in Cuba, but I don’t want to get old and die in the United States. There’s no warmth here.”

On the same streets, I walk and chat with people and find enthusiasm for Raul Castro’s reforms, allowing private business and freedom to travel. But Cubans want more things, more opportunities, not an easy task for a government running an island economy.

Cuba has lots of qualified and highly trained workers, but no foreign investment to build the kinds of facilities that might employ them. So, as I walk along the ocean drive, El Malecon, I note hundreds of people idle during the middle of a workday. Some have ear phones plugged in, listening to music.

Others have cell phones and snap shots of their girl or boy friends. Tourists, mostly Canadian and west European populate the streets and downtown cafes and bars. Some U.S. exchange students also appear, eager and energetic. So far, they’ve learned a lot about Cuba from “dating” and “hanging out” with their Cuban counterparts.

I get nostalgic for old times and youth. But when I see the old U.S. Embassy, not the US Interest Section, I recall the nasty old days of violent counter revolution coming from Florida, the heroic deeds of Cuban guerrillas who had fought for the revolution and the good times of the old days.

Maybe, before I make another trip to the island, Secretary of State John Kerry will open discussions with Raul Castro for the purpose of restoring diplomatic and even commercial relations. What a change that will bring… I can imagine the Havana streets full of U.S. tourists and students
—-
Saul Landau is filming with Jon Alpert a documentary on Cuba’s campaign against homophobia. His Fidel and Will the Real Terrorist Please Stand Up are available on DVD through cinemalibrestudio.com.

That Long Newspaper Spoon

Repost from the old site.

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 hardon . 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.