Bipartisan Support for Slavery in America

Here.

This stunning article from Alternet touches on a subject that no US news outlet will touch as they are all corporate outlets: the profound and inhumane abuse of immigrants via the H-2B guestworker program. On its surface, the H-2B program has no right to exist at all. Its existence is based on the notion that for some bizarre reason, the employer cannot find any or enough Americans to fill the needed the jobs. Nevertheless, most H-2B workers work in places with double digit unemployment.

The last time I was in Yosemite, where I formerly lived, the place was swarming with H-2B guestworkers. When I lived there in 1977, there was not a single job that went open for lack of a US worker to fill it. Now that corporate criminal Delaware North has taken over concessions from the more fair though still abusive Curry Company, many to most of the positions are filled with H-2B guestworkers, easier to abuse and mistreat.

The list of jobs in need of H-2B guestworkers is utterly amazing. One of them is “welder.” In shipyards all up and down the US Gulf Coast, thousands of welding jobs formerly filled by proud American workers are now filled by hyper-exploited H-2B guestworkers. Apparently, “welder” is one of those jobs that Americans just won’t do.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Bush Administration quickly passed a directive allowing enforcement-free mass importation of immigrants, legal and illegal, to do cleanup and rebuilding work in New Orleans. That there were countless able-bodied Blacks in New Orleans was overlooked, or maybe it wasn’t. This directive was passed for one reason and one reason only – so that corporations exploiting the rebuilding process would not have to hire New Orleans Blacks, or any Americans for that matter, to do the work. Instead, tens of thousands of post-Katrina jobs that could have gone to the desperate Blacks of New Orleans went to 25,000 illegal alien criminals.

Scarcely a single word was heard in protest of this directive. All Democrats and all US liberals will fall all over themselves to do anything to worship the Illegal Alien and Immigrant God that they prostrate themselves over. Conservatives will not say a peep because immigrants, legal and illegal cheaply replace costly US workers, On both sides of the aisle, on the Left and the Right, the polarized sides of the political chamber fall all over themselves to beat the US worker to a bloody mass of a pulp.

And it is true: If liberals and Democrats could replace the vast majority of US workers with immigrants, legal or illegal, no matter how exploited, they would do it in a heartbeat. And there is not a conservative who would not do the same.

The abuses of the H-1B program among tech workers in the US and especially in Silicon Valley are many and legion. Yet the loudest champions of the program, a knife expertly aimed at the pulsing heart of the US tech worker, are US Democrats, often liberal Democrats. Of course all Republicans support the plan. And Barack Obama loves nothing so much as he loves his H-1B wage slaves and job thieves.

It is interesting that a progressive organization, in this case, the sickening worms of Morris Dees’ SPLC, are actually protesting about abuses of US workers under the H-2B program. It is incredible that anyone on the Left would attack worker abuses of any kind. Yet the truth is sadder than it appears. The SPLC only wrote this report because the workers being abused were their cherished immigrants. The SPLC would never waste a tear on US workers. Like the rest of the US Left, they care only about immigrant job-thieves. There is no room in their heart for the abused American worker. US workers only get the sympathy of the Left if they hail from some foreign shore.

And what is the SPLC’s solution to the abuses of the H-2B program? A responsible position would be to support the reforms of the program outlined a bill killed with the indispensable help of Senate Democrats. But we know that the SPLC goes far beyond this. The SPLC, like the entire US Left, is an Open Borders organization. Their preferred solution would be abolish the H-2B program and open the US borders to hundreds of millions from the around the world who would quickly funnel through through our ungated edges.

And so we have it: when it comes to US workers, we truly have no friends. The Democrats and Republicans are both corporate capitalist parties, and as such will always oppose the workers when the interests of the workers and our elected leaders corporate masters collide. Selling one’s soul is simple, but it always comes with a price. And indeed, the loudest champions of the horrific slave labor abuses of the H-2B programs have been Democrats, including Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, usually typed as a liberal Democrat.

What we need is a pro-working class party in America. A party that will always or nearly always side with working class Americans, and I emphasize Americans. In the conflict between American workers and foreign invaders and job thieves, the position of the working class party should be obvious.

The Horror, the Horror: A Katrina Tale

Repost from the old site.

This post was written by Patricia Deamer, a Math professor at Skyline College in San Bruno, California, explaining why she was in Baton Rogue for five weeks after Hurricane Katrina. Check out this appalling tale about Patricia’s forlorn, heartbreaking and terrifying quest to find and identify the bodies of her father and aunt who were killed in Hurricane Katrina.

I am in Baton Rouge now. I have been here for five weeks. I have attached the reason why. I will be in Baton Rogue until I can finish the gruesome tasks ahead of me.

September 29, 2005

My news is not good. I am in Louisiana. There was a body found in the house where my father and aunt lived and we do not have confirmation on whether it is my father or my aunt. It took three and a half weeks to get this information and we have no official statements at this point. I did a DNA test today which will take some time for any type of confirmation.

After four weeks, my hopes have been reduced to a minuscule fraction of what it was a few weeks ago. I need closure. I need some type of confirmation. The “body is your father’s” is one unofficial statement we received but because of the time that the body has been in water, it has probably deteriorated terribly…a memorial service is what will more than likely occur…when I don’t know.

We did get a response from a lady that taught with my aunt and she said that my aunt was on the cell phone going to her attic…that was the last of any messages that were received from her. If someone saved her we do not know who or where she was taken.

All bodies are supposed to be in St. Gabriel. I will have to wait on a release if the body found is my father. I will be here for a month, maybe. I have my lap top with me, so let’s keep in touch. I am going crazy…officially.

October 1, 2005

I have completed the DNA test. It will take about three weeks to identify the body that was found in the house and we are 90% certain that it was my father. He was found laying in the bed. I hope he was in such a deep sleep that he never saw the water coming. I pray that he was simply at peace. Aunt Ella has not been located…she must have been air lifted from the house but we can’t find her anywhere.

New Orleans is dry now. OB took me into New Orleans on Friday and Saturday. Friday we went just to confirm that my Aunt Ella was not in the house somewhere where the search team had not looked. There were tracks all over the buckled wet floors and all around the heavy furniture that the water moved to the center of the rooms. That along convinced me that the team did do a thorough search and look.

The sad and frustrating part is that we can not find Aunt Ella in any shelter or hospital. She did make it up to the attic because there were some found wrappers and a jar of tea up there. I would not wish this waiting game on any enemy. My aunt’s house is destroyed. The family will have to totally gut the interior and start with fresh hope.

Pictures on the internet can not describe the smell of mold and decay. People are trying to get back to their homes and some have started clearing away the debris. There are numerous refrigerators and freezers lining the streets of the better neighborhoods…such as the St. Charles area.

St. Charles street looks like a tree pruning company has invaded the area and cut indiscriminately anywhere and everywhere they wanted to cut. There are limbs so high that you can not see some two story houses…this is in the better areas!

Furniture is piled high with antiques and other personal belongings that are no longer precious. This is not the New Orleans I grew up loving and wanting to leave as soon as I could. This is not a city of joy and family. But…all that love it says that they will be back!!!! Keep my family in your prayers and thoughts.

October 5, 2005

This is the worst day of my life. I had dreaded the fact that my father might not be with me because of the hurricane disaster. After doing a DNA test to identify the body that was found in the house where he and my Aunt Ella lived…the worst of any worst happened.

One of father’s sisters (Aunt Pearl), his brother (Uncle Joe), my cousin Chris (Uncle Joe’s grandson), and I went to New Orleans today to start clearing the debris from the house. We were there for more than two hours as we proceeded from room to room. My cousin Chris went into the guest bedroom for a second trip to remove small furniture and he found my father’s body stretched out in a prone position on his face.

Chris screamed a horrible sound that shocked both my Aunt Pearl and me.

Yes, after 25 days, the body that was found in the house…was never removed. This level of incompetence is unacceptable. To leave my father in all of the sooth, muck, and settlement is a “sin against God“. His siblings are so angry that I can’t describe it clearly.

I am at this time experiencing the most gruesome level of hate that I have ever encountered or imagined. The pain of being in the house and finding my father is indescribable. I need help . I need to get it together. I need not to hate. Today was the first official day for residents to enter New Orleans. The news said that all bodies had been recovered. Not!

Every bit of info about my father was researched and investigated by me and my family. Even the information about the gender of the found body was discovered by my cousin in Illinois. The DNA was for a body that they did not have in custody. All of the official work that was supposed to be completed has been a lie!

And on top of all of this…we still have not found my Aunt Ella…and it will still take three weeks to identify a body that we found…even with the matching description that we gave the removal team. I am so angry that I could bite through a nail. Whatever you hear on the news, forget it.

October 6, 2005

My Aunt Pearl and I did an interview with WBRZ and it aired today. The mistakes here in Louisiana are gargantuan. The newscast started with our story and showed a picture of Aunt Ella…she is still missing. I am tried of crying.

Thought I would bring you up to date.

October 16, 2005

Thank you to all of my friends and family members that wrote to say that they were praying for me and all of the other family members. Well, the wait is over. I thought that last week was the worst day of my life when we found my father’s body still in the house where he and my Aunt Ella lived. It wasn’t.

Today my Aunt Pearl, Uncle Joe, my cousin Chris, my cousin Wayne, OB and myself went back to the house to try to remove more debris. My cousin Wayne used to live with my father and aunt. They were like his second set of parents all through his high school and graduation days.

Wayne had been evacuated to Milwaukee but decided to return to New Orleans to live in his apartment in the French Quarter which was spared any flooding. Wayne, knowing the house better than any of us, search every nook and cranny. He kept smelling a bad odor from the attic. I refused to enter the house. I had them hand me articles through the window.

We tried to convince him that the Kenyon people, the body removal team, had searched the house ” thoroughly” and there was nothing to be found. They were wrong! From the attic we heard this horrific scream. He screamed, started running and bruised his legs trying to run down the fold down attic ladder. Wayne found Aunt Ella’s body in the attic far back in a corner.

She lay there as if she were asleep and at peace. It’s a shame that even after we asked the Kenyon group, whose official job it was to retrieve bodies, to double check the house when we found my father’s body…we had to find our loved ones ourselves. The wait is over for finding Aunt Ella…we found her.

Now to deal with the bureaucratic processes…we still have to wait until the bodies are released after official identification. Three individuals identified the body before it was removed. We had to show them where to look in the very front of the attic. But we still have to wait for the release from the state coroner. It will be at least four weeks before I return to my own home.

If we are lucky, the bodies will be released for a memorial service in three weeks. However, the news today had the state coroner saying that in some cases it may take up to six months to identify remains. This has been a tough time for all of us. It’s not just the lost of family but the sheer inhumane way the people of New Orleans have been treated. Remember the hurricane was in Mississippi when the levees broke.

We were told that the force of the water was strong and fast. Writing has been cathartic again…I am writing what I feel, disregarding the English language and trying not to curse. Wish me luck and keep including me and all of my family in your prayers.

October 28, 2005

We are still waiting for the state coroner to release the bodies. They are checking Aunt Ella’s dental records even though three people identified the body before it was removed from the house.

The Worst Katrina Photo Sequence Of All

Repost from the old site.

On September 19, 2005, I published a post called Worries Over Starving Pets in New Orleans May Be Exaggerated. Admittedly a gallows humor piece, the post posted two photos of what appeared to be dogs eating human corpses after Hurricane Katrina.

The scenes were photographed by Allen Frederickson, a Milwaukee-based freelance photographer, for Reuters/Corbis. In an email and phone interview with me, Frederickson said he took the photos on September 5, a full week after Katrina massacred New Orleans and three days after the federal response finally reached the city.

At that time, two dead bodies had been lying in the open for at least three days on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Frederickson had seen the bodies laying in the same spot for the previous few days from his vantage in a National Guard helicopter. There were no live humans seen anywhere near the bodies during that time.

At 3:39 PM on September 5, Frederickson shot photos of what appeared to be dogs eating the two corpses that had been seen for days in that area. The photos were sparsely published, and they were probably viewed more on this meager blog than anywhere else, which is a sorry statement, because they were surely headline material for any large US newspaper, magazine or TV station.

The photos aroused quite a bit of controversy, including quite a few naysayers who insisted that there was no proof that the dogs were eating the bodies, or that the dogs were just checking out the bodies, or that the photos were faked, or that the dogs were cadaver dogs who were finding bodies, not eating them.

With the publication of this missing photo from the series, a photo taken 11 minutes after the first one, at 3:50 PM on September 5, hopefully the controversy will be laid to rest.

To recap:

Photo 1, the before photo, taken at 3:39 PM on September 5 on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain, shows what appears to be a dog eating the corpse of a man.

The new photo, Photo 2, taken on the same date in the same area at 3:50 PM, shows that the corpse’s leg appears to be significantly gnawed off in precisely the area where the dog appeared to be dining.

I nominate this photo sequence as the worst Hurricane Katrina photo sequence of all. The competition is admittedly tight.

The after photo, Photo 2, is being published for the first time anywhere on this humble blog. The photo is the copyright of Allen Frederickson, and any reproduction for profit must be negotiated through the photographer. He may be reached through this blog’s email address at the top right corner.

Fantastic Photos of Katrina Damage

Repost from the old site.

Of course, the entire Internet was full of incredible photos from Hurricane Katrina after the storm. One thing I have not seen much of, though, are overhead pics of the damage. Sometimes, to get a “bird’s eye view” of a situation, an overhead pic is capable of showing us tumultuous scenes in an entirely new way, a whole new perspective, so to speak – one which we can rarely grasp from the ground as non-flying mammals 5-6 feet off the ground.

The fantastic photos above were taken by a forensic dentist who was down in NOLA after the flood helping to identify bodies (in keeping with the Katrina death toll theme of this increasingly morbid blog). One of the things I found stunning about the photos above is how much water is still in NOLA, and how NOLA seems to have taken on some aspects of what we radical treehuggers call “re-wilding”.

In case you don’t know, re-wilding is a deep ecological concept that holds, rather quixotically, that mankind should begin “re-wilding” areas that had been previously seriously altered by human activities. Since re-wilding doesn’t have a positive effect on anyone’s bottom line, it hasn’t been implemented much. But we see signs of it anyway, though it is inadvertent.

For instance, I am told that some US inner cities are decaying so badly and consequently being abandoned by their human populations, that certain lots are heading back towards native vegetation.

Detroit comes to mind. About 20 years ago, I read that there were parts of Detroit where so many structures had been torn down that vacant lots outnumber developed ones. Purportedly, these lots were going back to something like native vegetation. At the same time, wildlife was supposedly returning.

Now, I figure if a US city is going to fall apart, it’s better to have vacant lots re-vegetate and have the real wildlife come back, as opposed to such “wildlife” as heroin addicts, criminals, crack dealers and addicts, homeless folks pushing shopping carts, etc. The non-human animals cause very little harm, cost society very little, and in general, have a positive impact on society, while the human wildlife above does the opposite.

With that in mind, take at look at the photos* above.

In the first photo, an entire street is devastated and is now surrounded by what looks like native forest. A vast green area, dotted with homes, lies in the distance. Through this verdant grassy plain flows a totally improbable river (Or is it an elongated lake?) which probably never existed before. The plain is spotted with equally improbable smaller lakes, sloughs, backwaters, etc.

In the second photo, what looks like riverfront homes have been devastated, Hiroshima-like. There really is nothing left. All that is left is the remains of a woodland, combined with sand where homes once stood.

The third picture has not really re-wilded, since this was a densely settled area of probably expensive riverfront homes. Yet possibly 70-80% of the homes are pretty much totaled. Trees seem to dominate the as houses seem to recede into the background. The effect is to transform a densely settled city riverfront district into something like a rural tract with homes on large lots.

A street winds through the homes that no longer exist – a street that can no longer be called a “residential” street. I can just picture a deer or coyote wending down that street. It wouldn’t seem out of place at all.

With that, I leave you, and I hope you all had a very nice Thanksgiving.

*These photos were originally huge – each about 2 to 3 MB in size. The photos themselves would have been about 12 inches across in actual size. It was rather messy, but the inimitable Photoshop was able to shrink them down to about 50-70 KB (a 97% reduction) with very little loss of quality, which I consider to be an amazing feat. We also enhanced the photos quite a bit, also with Photoshop.

Tulio on Black Crime and Feminism and What to Do About Them

Tulio, a Black man in his 30′s, is a regular commenter on the site. It was nice to see him move out defensive mode on the subject and write a deep and heartfelt post about these matters which are so painfully dear to his heart. He said that he thinks about this stuff constantly, as he is a young Black man. That’s sad, but if you care, it’s understandable.

Tulio notes that the problem is now so entrenched that it seems to be intractable. He also notes the corrosive effect of a lot of the new Black music.

Even White prison gang members have remarked on how detrimental they feel this music has been to White youth in recent years. They say young White man come to prison after listening to hip hop for years and think they are tough badass gangsters going to live it up in paradise in a maximum security prison. And boy do they have another thing coming!

I would like to thank Tulio for this post. Even if these problems seem intractable, we should at least be discussing them, as the human and societal damage is of epic proportions.

Black Crime

As for Black crime, it’s a confluence of a lot of different things and not an easy problem to solve.

Single motherhood. You have a lot of fatherless homes and single mothers. While not all single mothers raise bad sons (I personally know great guys raised by single moms), most guys in prison never had a strong father in their life. Women’s role is nurture; men’s role is discipline. Boys aren’t afraid of their moms. They’re afraid of their dads. Boys need fathers first and foremost.

I don’t know what the high cause of single motherhood is in the Black underclass. I truly have no idea, and I think about this stuff all the time since I’m a Black man. It wasn’t always like this. There was a time that Blacks were known for having strong families. The explosion seems to have happened in the 60s.

I don’t think there’s anything genetic about it. This doesn’t seem to be the case in Africa, especially traditional African society. It seems to be something unique to Black Americans. I don’t know what it looks like amongst Black Latins or Caribbeans. But family in Africa seems pretty strong, so I know it’s not genetic.

Dead zones. Secondly you have a large cultural vacuum in certain parts of the country.

Do you ever read about how there are dead zones in the ocean? Certain areas where there is not enough oxygen and that part of the ocean is devoid of life?

The inner cities of America are dead zones. They are islands of misery, hopelessness, broken schools, high unemployment, drugs, urban decay. There’s very little there to give people inspiration and hope. The church is often the only thing. The people living there have just enough so as not to revolt, yet not enough for them to be functional players in the economy.

The origin of such ghettos can be traced back to segregation. Some of these communities thrived at a time and were fairly self-sufficient. The Black middle class fled these places. And all that was left behind were the poor and a crumbling society. The middle class Blacks might have served as role models to those less fortunate. The Whites didn’t care about them either. Everyone that could afford to get out, got out.

So what can be done about it? I don’t know. The problem seems almost intractable. So I guess the only real solution here would be some sort of gentrification. Concentrated poverty is a very dangerous thing. As I’ve shown before, it can turn White people violent as well like it did in NYC tenements or as it currently does in Glasgow.

Spreading the poor out a bit should help. And it should also make their behavior better through cultural osmosis.

I can imagine no worse situation than being a Black kid raised by a poor single mother where the only male role models are thuggish rappers and drug dealers. They need to see other things and get out of that box. They need something positive to aspire to.

High unemployment. When unemployment is high, it makes working in the dark side of the economy more seductive. I’m sure many of these kids coming up would like to be able to make a decent living and not have to worry about ending up in jail or getting gunned down. But the fewer jobs there are, the more it makes the risk of selling drugs seem worth it. Even fairly decent people will start acting shady if that’s the only way they have to survive.

Well one major problem is that many blue collar jobs that Blacks used to do for a living wage either went to China or went to illegal aliens. It wasn’t uncommon to see Black carpenters, drywallers, construction workers, meatpackers, etc.

Now these jobs are almost all entirely done by Mexicans illegally in the country. This was a huge issue in the rebuilding of New Orleans after Katrina. There were a lot of Blacks out of work that wanted those construction jobs, and they were livid that they were going to Mexicans who aren’t even citizens and don’t even have any roots in the city. How can anyone not feel their pain?

The gutting of solid blue collar work has had a huge effect on Rust Belt White America but it has been an utter disaster for Black America. I see no easy solution here either.

Music. I also thing the music is a problem. Now maybe it’s an issue of art imitating life, or it’s the other way around, I don’t know. But I do think it has something of a feedback loop effect. A lot or rap music, even if not explicitly advocating violence, tends to reinforce a lot of selfish attitudes, hyper-materialism, fast money, fast women, party hard, a lot of Machiavellianism. It’s pervasive, even in the more lukewarm hiphop music.

Sometimes it’s just the attitude. The anger. One rarely sees rappers smiling or seeming happy unless surrounded by money, bling and sexy women. This stuff has to stop, and if I had a kid, I’d be very careful about what they listen to.

That said, not all rap music is like that, a lot of it is positive and life affirming. Some of it is great to dance too or just enjoy in the background if you have the smarts to not get caught up in the Machiavellian stuff.

It should also be noted that not all “Black music” is like this. The majority of Black music is not rap and does not contain violent lyrics. Unfortunately though, most of the music young Black males of the inner city listen to will be rap and often with terrible messages. What can anyone do about this? Not much, as long as there’s a first amendment, rappers can pretty much talk about whatever they want sell their music to whomever they want, most of which is bought by Whites anyway.

Sorry I don’t have any easy solutions, but these are just a few things that contribute to the issue.

Feminism

As for feminism, and I assume we’re talking about feminism of the more militant variety, the Pandora’s Box is open on that one. I wish things had stayed with equity feminism, and we could’ve left it there. But it then evolved into an assault on gender roles and gender as some sort of social construct rather than biological reality. That’s what happens when people with PhD’s take over the movement.

I know it’s not realistic for every American man to find a foreign woman, but for those that can, I think that’s the best solution. Foreign women are much more enjoyable to be around.

Best Explanation Yet For the Holodomor

Repost from the old site.

First of all, we really ought to note that there was no “Holodomor” as the Ukrainian nationalists and Ukrainian Nazis have it. According to them, there was a man-made famine in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that led to 6 million Ukrainians dying.

The harvest was excellent, but the evil Stalinists confiscated all of the grain to starve the people due to their resistance to collectivization. This is the view that Americans have been fed their entire lives by the controlled US propaganda media (There is no free press of any consequence in the USA).

Most historians now completely reject the notion that the USSR intentionally starved anyone to death in order to punish them for resisting the state’s directives. There was a famine in 1933, and it continued for a few years afterward, but it extended over most of the USSR and was not confined to the Ukraine. The government was not happy about the famine and took severe measures to curtail it.

Most died of disease after being weakened by famine, not of starvation itself. Poor decisions were made by the state, but historically, this is often the case during famines. One can argue that the famine was caused by state policies, in particular an effort to jump-start collectivization and do it very rapidly.

A similar effort in China in 1959-1962 also caused a famine and led to 15 million deaths, again, mostly from disease. There seems to be a pattern of too-rapid collectivization of agriculture causing disastrous famines in Communist countries (something similar happened during Pol Pot’s reign).

There was also an armed struggle going on, with bands of kulaks taking up arms against party officials, collective farms and farmers, etc. In the course of this armed struggle, the state killed 390,000 people, mostly Ukrainians. If you want to call this mass murder or genocide or whatever, you’re entitled to do that, but that’s not what the Holodomor crowd is arguing.

Also, there was widespread sabotage in the USSR around this time, mostly in the Ukraine again, whereby those resisting cultivation destroyed 50% of the livestock in the USSR and a good part of the grain crop too.

The reasons for the famine and the story of the famine itself are quite complex and go beyond the scope of this post. For now, this review by Mark Tauger of a recent book by Davies and Wheatcroft perhaps sums up the famine in the USSR during this period to the best of our knowledge. Instead of summarizing this complicated review, I will just link to it and let you go read it yourself.

On a related note, it appears that the Ukrainian Nazis (Holodomor crowd) have taken over an article called “Holodomor Denial” and pretty much ruined it. Most of the people accused of being Holodomor Deniers do acknowledge that there was a famine in the USSR during this period that killed at least 1 million people.

Walter Duranty, the famous New York Times columnist, acknowledged at least 3 million deaths from famine. Douglas Tottle, Mario Sousa and Jeff Conlon, all supposedly Holodomor Deniers according to this outrageously biased article, all agreed that from 1-2 million died of a famine in the USSR during this period.

The reason the Ukrainian Nazis have even come up with the phrase Holodomor Denial is to parrot the Jews’ Holocaust Denial. The Holodomor was given that name in the late 1980′s by Ukrainian nationalists in Canada, most of whom supported the Nazis and often fought beside them in WW2. Anti-Semitism and Holocaust Denial are rampant amongst these fascist supporters.

Just to show you how wicked Wikipedia is, take a look at the talk page for the article. The talk page was taken over by Ukrainian Nazis, I mean Holodomorists. Check out this entry.

The person who wrote that, Jeff Peters, was subsequently permanently banned from working on Wikipedia merely for opposing the Ukrainian Nazis’ Holodomor lies. Here is his talk page with all the dirty details. Looks like he was also a supporter of Hezbollah and the Palestinians and ran afoul of the Wikipedia Jews.

This is par for the course on Wikipedia. Most articles on Communism are seriously ruined by the Wikipedia Cabal. The Cabal, which takes orders from Jimmy Wales himself, is heavily loaded with libertarians who are quite hostile to any kind of socialism or social justice.

Jimmy Wales himself is a wild and extreme libertarian who argued that the federal government should not have lifted one finger to help the Hurricane Katrina victims in any way.

It’s amazing that not one single article in the “US free press” about Wikipedia or its corrupt founder has ever mentioned the extreme corruption and intellectual dishonesty at Wikipedia, the propaganda cabals that are allowed to run amok, or even Wales’ own extreme political views themselves. A free press in the US? It would be a great idea!

Was there famine? Yes. Was there a Holodomor? No.

The most responsible estimate of deaths due to the famine range from 1.5-6 million over a few years across much of the USSR.

It is interesting that in private correspondence, Robert Conquest, who for decades insisted that the famine was intentional (his view is now the received wisdom on the subject in the West) admitted in private correspondence with Davies and Wheatcroft that the famine was not intentional.

It’s truly sad that what is now regarded as settled fact among responsible historians is still regarded as wild, unheard-of propaganda in much of the West. But then we get back to that wonderful American “free press” again, right?

References

Coplon, Jeff. January 12, 1988. In Search of a Soviet Holocaust. The Village Voice. Douglas Furr’s website.

Coplon, Jeff. March 1988. Rewriting History – How Ukrainian Nationalists Imposed Their Doctored History on High School Students CAPITAL Region. Douglas Furr’s website.

Davies, R. W. and Wheatcroft, Steven G. 2004. The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Souza, Mario. Lies Concerning the History of the Soviet Union. North Star Compass website.

Tauger, Mark B. 1991. The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933. Slavic Review 50:1, pp. 70-89.

Tottle, Douglas. 1987. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: the Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard. Toronto: Progress Books.

Wikipedia on Mao

Repost from the old site.

Granted, he’s a controversial fellow all right, but this hit piece is just an outrageous travesty of anti-Communist propaganda. The discussion page shows the details of the travesty, including the banning of anyone promoting an opposite point of view (a typical smarmy Wikipedia “Neutral Point of View” practice).

My 1990 World Book article on China< and my Time-Life book, China, from 1962 (height of the Cold War) are vastly more fair than this. World Book is hardly pro-Communist and Time-Life was always fanatically anti-Communist.

Fact is, Wikipedia is run by a bunch of little libertarian shits. Jimmy Wales is a wild-eyed, fanatical libertarian crazy person, and he’s using his evil website to try to poison the mind of a planet in favor of his libertarian nightmare.

That’s his right, but the US “free press” (there is no free press in the US) really ought to call him on it. I’ve seen all sorts of MSM bullshit about Jimmy and his jerk-off webcyclopedia, and every single one of them has been a fawning valentine (as we call such pieces in the journalism field).

Never once has even one article hinted that Wikipedia is grossly unfair, or that it is run by various cabals that are all tied in with the super-cabal of ultra-right libertarian Hindutva-Zionists around Wales. It might be nice to let the world know exactly what the politics of him and his creepy followers really are.

Let them know that Wales was furious that the federal government had done anything whatsoever to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina before, during and after the storm in any way whatsoever. Can you imagine?

In Wales World, there is no role for a government to play in a world-class hurricane. Need to be rescued? Call your friend who obviously has a helicopter, or pay $1000′s for some Israeli-cum-Halliburton mercenaries to come rescue your ass.

No government help to put up victims afterwards, to clean up the mess, or even to collect the fucking bodies. Let the epidemics come. No government help to rebuild the city afterwards. Let it stay underwater oozing gators, toxic waste, mold, decaying flesh and ruined structures. All of this is the proper domain of the private sector! Can you imagine how many people would have died?

I mean, this is what we got anyway under Libertarian Lite George Bush, but in Jimmy World, things would have been incalculably worse.

Look. If that’s Jimmy’s worldview, no problem. Hell, there are still dedicated Pol Potists out there. But the world really ought to know what Jimmy Wales’ fanatical ultra political views are so they can decide whether or not they agree. They should also be told how he uses his fake unbiased Webcyclopedia like Rupert Murdoch uses his media empire, to push reactionary politics in the name of “fair and balanced” bullshit.

That the “liberal media” MSM refuses to do this is worrying. It makes me wonder how reactionary they really are. Is the MSM as ultra-right as Wales, or are they just scared to talk about it? What’s up?

Notes

1. Here is some text from my World Book article on China. Note how the very rightwing World Book encyclopedia is able to acknowledge that Mao did many great things:

The Communist government has achieved an impressive record of economic growth. The Communists have provided widespread job opportunities, job security and a more even income distribution to the workers…China’s farm output has expanded greatly under the Communists…Production of chickens and livestock has improved significantly since 1950…

Under the Communists, industrial production has grown at an average rate of 12% per year…Since 1950, China has made great progress in educating its children. The number of children in both elementary and secondary school has increased sharply…Communist have conducted mass literacy campaigns so that now 75% of the population is literate…

All of the Communists’ health programs have resulted in a population that is much healthier than before. The Communists have almost wiped out cholera, typhoid and many other horrible diseases that used to kill millions of Chinese every year.

“Facing the Next Fifty Years: Global Warming,” by Abiezer Coppe

Climate change is killing 150,000 people a year now. That is the estimate of the World Health Organization for the year 2000, and now it is ten years out of date. So let us double that:

The once in a thousand year 2010 Moscow Heatwave caused an estimated 15,000 deaths.

For the “we have nothing to do with it” global warming deniers, here is a little primer on the current state of the science.

The science is already in.

There are metacommentaries on Russia’s heatwave here and here.

Climate records are being broken all over the world this year.

This is the actuality. It does matter. We can, all of us as individuals, do something.

Stopping global warming is actually a dream from which some of us still have to awake: it is more realistic to prepare ourselves and our society for the shocks that will inevitably come by practicing bioresilience. Our extraordinary adaptability as a species will be tested to the utmost in the next one hundred years. We have never had a challenge like it in the history of mankind.

Slowing the rate of growth of human carbon emissions (the global economic recession did so last year, although I see no real evidence at the level of political leaderships to cut carbon emissions) is one goal for the political elites, with eventual cuts at some unspecified date in the future, but a reduction of carbon emissions by 90% is actually what we must aim at as a society, which involves almost inconceivable transformations in the way we live, work, eat, travel and generate energy. A worldwide citizens’ movement is our tool.

We shall still move to a hotter world, but one that we shall survive, with far more modest and local lifestyles. We/I will also make the spiritual shift in our/my consciousness, and create new ways for ourselves/myself and our/my children to connect with and appreciate the beauties of nature in our over-informatized and mediatized world. Spiritual shift has now become a categorical imperative. Be the change you want to see. May I be the change I want to see…in me and in my world.

We have the luxury, in the privileged West, of having a little bit of potential space in our lives to accomplish this. If you are starving, drowning (as in Bangladesh and Pakistan), living at the edge of subsistence (Mali, Niger and Southern Sudan) and walking 12 miles a day simply to fetch water, there is much less space.

And the very poor are not producing the carbon emissions. It is us, in the developed world. I am not asking for guilt or a hair shirt: I am asking for awareness. And action. From myself, and from you!

Too much information, especially about such an explosive topic, actually creates anxiety and depression: have you noticed? I did in 2006, when I studied global warming nonstop for months. Too much (usually poor quality) information is actually the curse of our world: paying it too much attention creates a state of no peace.

Therefore we/I need to learn new ways to care for ourselves/myself, as we/I reconnect with the warp and weft of our ineffably beautiful and breathtaking living planet.

In time, perhaps, too, biodiversity will start to return to a planet currently in the sixth great extinction crisis of its long geological history. We need not be a plague on the planet. It is not our purpose here.

Once we come from a place of deeper peace and connection in ourselves, we rule out fear and chase it from our bodily abode: we then inspire others to seek that as well. Our activism has a more transformational quality on all around us. I have much to learn, much to heal, and much to change in myself.

Most campaigners, and part of the scientific community (James Hansen in particular), think that emissions cuts should begin at the latest by 2015. With the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition in power until then, we certainly have our work cut out.

“Business as usual” = civilizational collapse, sooner or later. And unimaginable human suffering. The suffering of Pakistan at the moment, but multiplied a million fold…

If you do not care, do not have children. They may not forgive you. Consciousness is rising about the scale of the challenge we face.

If you wish to be up to date on the subject of global warming, read the scientists! I suggest here and the NOAA, plus the climate progress website mentioned above.

I read them, and I am not a scientist.

The human race currently emits 29 billion tons (29 gigatons – more here) of carbon a year. And we do not do it by breathing or farting alone!

We have multiplied our biological carbon emissions as a species many fold through the development of technology, which required the burning of fossil fuels, the ancient sunlight of antiquity. Thus we become our own Nemesis.

It is difficult to point to any aspect of our current material lives that is not dependent on fossil fuels in some way, from plastic bags to cheap food.

We are changing the climate, and without global carbon emission reductions there is a point of no return, where positive feedbacks kick in and carbon emissions from natural processes such as the melting of the subarctic tundra, the loss of arctic sea ice in summer, and the burning of the world’s forests, start to render annual human emissions almost insignificant, kicking global warming into high gear.

We have – perhaps – a little window of opportunity now. It is human to hope. Nobody knows how long we have. It seems, from my many years of reading on the subject of global warming, that the window will certainly close by 2030.

And that date is based on the most optimistic of all projections.

When the climate “tipping points” are passed (the scientific consensus – but no one really knows – is that this starts to happen at 1.5 to 2 degrees centigrade above preindustrial global temperatures: we are currently 0.8 degrees Centigrade above), we are in for a very rough ride indeed.

That article is from yesterday’s UK newspaper, The Independent.

Given the current levels of urgency regarding this issue on the part of the global elites, runaway global warming is currently more likely than not.

Anthropogenic global warming has the potential to be the new global genocide. A genocide of the poor by the richest countries, with the highest per capita output of carbon emissions. Ask a Pakistani farmer in Sindh province how he is doing at the moment, and what his prospects are for 2011.

With runaway climate change, civilization will collapse, and there will – at some point after 2050 – be a catastrophic collapse in the global human population in the “business as usual” scenario (I do not like James Lovelock’s politics at all, but in that sense he is hard to contradict). For more on this, see Anatoly Karlin’s review of Six Degrees, by Mark Lynas.

It is a very graphic and a very detailed description, degree by degree of global warming above pre-industrial levels, of how human-induced global warming is changing the world we live in. And the précis saves you reading the book.

By 2020, at the current 0.2 degrees Centigrade of global warming per decade, we shall have passed the threshold of 1 degree of global warming globally since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Here is Anatoly Karlin’s summary of one degree of global warming.

One Degree

Though the Great Plains are one of the world’s great agricultural breadbaskets, a desert slumbers underneath. Increased dessication and pummeling storms will erode away the thin topsoil, recreating the Dust Bowl on a giant scale and re-awakening the sand dunes. More irrigation will only postpone the inevitable. There will be large-scale migration to the wetter Mid-West and Great Lakes regions. AK: actually called the Great American Desert during the 19th century!, and is now dependent on depleting Oglalla Aquifer.

Higher rainfall, glacial melt and strengthening Siberian rivers may interrupt the Gulf Stream (part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation system), drying western Europe and cooling it by as much as 2 C – recreating the conditions of the Little Ice Age during the worst winters. However, most models predict this will be a slow death. AK: If not, expect increased European dependency on Russian gas during the 2010′s and 2020′s.

In Africa, Kilimanjaro will lose its remaining ice by 2020 – causing wildfires, fish stock declines and problems with hydroelectricity production. Based on paleoclimate, in the long term, there will be a greening of the Sahara (into a savanna) and an enlarged Lake Chad…however, models say that there will only be a short interlude of heavier rains in the Sahel and on the West African coast, followed by even fiercer drought.

Coral reefs around the world will be increasingly bleached and taken over by seaweed; polar bears are pushed off the top of the world and creatures like pikas are shoved off the planet, accelerating the Anthropocene Mass Extinction event. Hurricanes will become stronger and more ubiquitous, spreading to the South Atlantic. More rockfalls in the Alps. Increased incidence of drought in the Amazon, pushing it to the brink. Atolls become doomed worlds, fated to submerge amidst the rising waves.

It will have taken around 250 years for a one degree rise in the mean global temperature to occur. However, climate dynamics are like a slumbering beast. There is a great deal of inertia locked into the system. First, there is very good evidence that the level of greenhouse gases being added to the atmosphere is itself rising. Secondly, the rate of global warming has been speeding up. Therefore we can, optimistically, expect the second degree of global warming after 2050, even with a concerted scaleback in emissions. That is within my children’s lifetime.

Now read Karlin’s summary of two degrees. Many of us will live to see this. At 0.3 degrees centigrade of increase in the global mean temperature per decade, two degrees arrives in 2053. A “climatic flip” is also possible: a sudden, dramatic acceleration, leading to climate collapse, from our perspective. The British Meteorological Office considers four degrees of global warming a possibility by 2060:

Now read Karlin on four degrees of global change. Are we not living through a planetary emergency?

Please read Anatoly Karlin’s review of Lynas if you read nothing else I reference. It is a glimpse into the uncertain future toward which we are headed, with no stars to steer by.

Global capitalism requires 3% compound growth to continue in existence, as David Harvey explains here in 3 parts. Capitalism must expand, or die. Both natural and institutional limits to the self-reproduction of Capital are a mortal threat to its very being. 3% compound growth, and our additional numbers, explain why the human species has moved from using 62% of planetary biocapacity in 1961 to 144% of planetary biocapacity in 2006. Is your country living within the mercy of its ecological means? Check the ecological footprint network atlas.

Not sustainable, and not a good outlook for the species. “No future, no future, no future for me,” as the Sex Pistols once sang.

I suspect, therefore, that the answer to human survival in this century and the next, and a civilizational level higher than that described in the visionary and beautiful written novel of our potential future in a much warmer world, Far North by Marcel Theroux, lies in a re-visioning and implementation of communism.

Read it and see what you think; then comment.

Despite the 20th century deviation of Communism from its original envisioning by Marx and Engels and the ecological disasters of the Eastern Bloc, Mao’s China and the Soviet Union, Marx’s vision of post-scarcity communism was profoundly ecological.

Cuba is the only country in the world today that lives within its ecological limits (page 14).

I find it very heartening that there remains one country in the world that has, largely by default, found a sustainable way to live, and that it is, with all its human rights and politico-economic flaws, a non-capitalist country.

Cuba is a glimmer of hope in a world ruled by the mantras of greed and growth. But not the only one by any means. People are waking up all over the world. Morales’ Bolivia, one of poorest countries in the world, and heavily dependent on extractive mining, has produced one of the most visionary ecological statements of the last year (to find it go to the Climate and Capitalism website).

Hope was the last thing left in the Greek myth of Pandora’s box, which we have, in the course of industrial civilization, unknowingly thrown open wide.

May we not let hope fly away altogether: this is my prayer for my children and yours, their children and your grandchildren.

Worries About Starving Pets In New Orleans May be Exaggerated

Repost from the old site. This is a famous post. It got tons of hits on the old site, but it’s an old post.

As you can see from these pics here, the widespread worries about all the lost pets, especially dogs and cats, starving to death in NOLA after Hurricane Katrina are somewhat overdrawn. Clearly, some pets, such as the enterprising hungry stray dog above, are finding plenty of food on their own, although it’s not exactly Alpo.

Some folks asked me why the MSM (mainstream media) doesn’t show these pics and I said I did not know.

Clearly, the MSM have been carrying water for Bush for much of this disaster, though at the start, segments of the media demonstrated some rarely-seen backbone and stood up to Bush for once, as demonstrated in my previous post, New Orleans Is Gone.

Does the media not like to show disgusting pics like this, out of ethics (sic) or worry over being criticized for pandering (as if they don’t pander enough as it is)?

Not sure what the answer is. Feel free to weigh in.

Pics from Postman Patel, a fine British blog.

One more thing: alligators. Initial posts noted that rumors of alligators in NOLA after Katrina were unfounded. However, we now have verification, via Juan Cole’s blog, that alligators have in fact been lunching on folks in NOLA. Sorry folks, no pics yet. But I’m working on it.

What about other hungry critters? Anderson Cooper on CNN noted here that he observed rats eating corpses in NOLA. Sorry, no photos of that either.

I have received numerous complaints and comments about this post:

1. The dog (there is only one dog in both pics) is not eating people, but is instead a cadaver dog – dogs that work with police to locate corpses.
2. Those are not corpses, but “dummies“.
3. The statement that these photos and “sensationalistic captions” are a reflection of the “poor journalistic standards” of National Geographic and put it on a par with National Inquirer.
4. They can’t be stray dogs because strays always operate in packs.
5. This post is amateur, yellow-journalistic tripe and that it’s credibility is further weakened by appearing on a “random blog”.
6. The dog is only interested in hands and feet, and therefore must be a cadaver dog and cannot be a stray dog.
7. I am not honest, and that the MSM is objectively more honest than I am. (Now that’s insulting!)

In order to try to resolve these questions, I somehow tracked down the freelance photographer who took the second photo (I still can’t figure out who took the first photo).

Allen Frederickson is a freelance photographer from Milwaukee who was in NOLA after the flood to cover it as a photojournalist. I communicated with Fredrickson via email and phone to try to resolve some of the questions posed above about his photo. Here is his abridged email correspondence:

Robert, you present some interesting questions. I work for Reuters as a contact photographer, and have since August 1990. Faking or manipulating photos is not a smart practice, and something I do not engage in. Corbis [where one of the photos was found on the web] does some of the secondary sales for Reuters .

The photo in question was taken in New Orleans on at 3:39 PM (according to digital info on my camera) on September 5, not September 6, as National Geographic states on their website.

The photo was taken as I flew as an embedded photographer in a U.S. Army Chinook helicopter piloted by National Guard aviators. The Guard was engaged in repair of a levee wall very close to the south side of Lake Pontchartrain.

The dog in the photo appeared to be a stray, and the corpse was about 50 yards from the spot where 16,000 pound bags of sand (actually crushed limestone) were being dropped. On two separate runs, about 15 minutes apart, the dog appeared to be eating this poor man’s leg.

I cannot imagine the dog was simply licking his master but that’s an outside possibility. The pilot of the Chinook told me he’d seen two dogs, a black one and this brown [or yellow] one, near the cadaver for the past three days, (September 3-5), as he helped drop bags. There were no live persons on the ground in the area, and no indications that either of the two dogs near this man would be cadaver dogs.

In his phone conversation with me, Allen basically reiterated these points. He said that cadaver dogs operate with police close by, and there were no police, or any live humans period, anywhere near this site for days on end. Furthermore, the dogs in question had been running wild and hanging around the corpses for three days prior, once again under no human supervision.

I think we can put this matter to rest and assume that this yellow dog was actually eating a human corpse in NOLA at 3:39 PM on September 5, 2005 on the south side of Lake Pontchartrain. Further, we can suspect that the same dog may have eaten another corpse around the same time frame (note the first pic from an unknown source).

We can also assume that the yellow dog and a black dog had possibly been eating at least the body in the second pic above for the prior three days.

Let us deal with the questions above. The dog in the pics is a stray dog, not a cadaver dog. The bodies were real bodies, not dummies. The fact that the what may be the same dog is eating two bodies is not relevant and does not prove he is a cadaver dog.

Apparently, dogs who eat people eat extremities, not just central areas, and cadaver dogs are not the only dogs who investigate extremities of corpses. Apparently, stray dogs do not always operate in packs, maybe especially after major disasters like this one.

Based on Fredrickson’s statements, National Geographic is not exercising poor, National Enquirer-style judgment in its photos or captions, nor am I dishonest.

The notion that blogs are an inherently dishonest medium is a common prejudice against us poor unpaid bloggers, and it seems to be without substance. Some bloggers are principled and fact-check (ahem) well while others are pretty atrocious and don’t check sources.

In contrast, the MSM has been demonstrably dishonest for a long time, as Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and other works make clear.

The second photo above (Fredrickson’s photo) has appeared in a number of other places on the Net. The original National Geographic site where the photo appeared is here. It also appeared on the Corbis site, where some posters nabbed it.

The first photo mysteriously appeared only on this strange site here. The site is accessible only through it’s uploads folder; the main page is blank. In the past, this odd page has been used to upload controversial photos to the web. Fredrickson says he did not take that shot, and he knows nothing about it. The page with the photo may be affiliated with the Indymedia Pittsburgh site here, based on its partial web address.

Final Katrina Death Toll at 4,081

Repost from the old blog. I received a lot of criticism for this, but this is still probably the best death toll for direct and indirect deaths for Hurricane Katrina out there.

I used my own total of 1,723 direct deaths combined with testimony about a study done after the hurricane that showed a huge increase in excess deaths in the period after the hurricane was over. The resulting total of 4,081 is probably the most accurate total out there for direct and indirect deaths from the storm so far, unless someone has added in some more indirect deaths. This figure came under some criticism, but it is based on the solid epidemiological theory of excess mortality.

My official death toll of 1,723, representing deaths due to immediate and direct effects of the storm, has not changed since August 22, 2006. However, we now have a fascinating document that comes from testimony delivered to Congress, which has caused me to raise the total deaths from Katrina due to direct and immediate plus delayed effects to 4,081.

For those who are interested, a list of 1,195 people who were killed in the hurricane is available here.

The testimony was part of a hearing titled Post Katrina Health Care: Continuing Concerns and Immediate Needs in the New Orleans Region given before the House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on March 13, 2007.

The list of speakers is here. Of particular interest in terms of the Katrina death toll was the testimony given by a physician, Dr. Kevin Stephens, Sr., Director pf the New Orleans Health Department.

In his testimony (pdf), Stephens points out that New Orleans already had serious public health problems before the hurricane, including large numbers of poor and uninsured people. The number of doctors has been reduced by 70% and the number of hospital beds in Orleans Parish has been reduced by 75%.

In some areas such as the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East in Orleans Parish and Chalmette and other places in St. Bernard Parish, residents have no access to health care whatsoever. Mental health is another serious problem: even last year, 20% of residents reported suffering from severe stress and depression.

Yet the number of mental health inpatient beds has been reduced by 83% and the number of psychiatrists has dropped by 90%. Residents reported observing a larger than usual number of death notices in the newspaper, even long after Katrina and into 2006. At the same time, even months after the storm, residents reported going to more funerals than they ever had.

These anecdotal reports caused Stephens and a team to undertake a study to count the number of death notices in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and compare it to a reference year which would serve as a baseline. 2003 was chosen as a reference year. The data can be seen on page nine of the testimony linked above.

In the first six months of 2003, 5,544 deaths were counted. In the first six months of 2006, 7,902 were counted, an increase of 2,358 deaths over baseline in the post-Katrina period. Based on this, we will assign 2,358 deaths as caused by the accelerated death rates that occurred in New Orleans even long after the storm.

Although the population of New Orleans is only 1/2 what it was prior to the storm, the obituaries covered not only New Orleans but also included many of the refugees tossed about to various parts of the country.

Based on this new information, we can add the previous toll of 1,723 to the new post-Katrina figure of 2,358 to posit a new unofficial death toll of 4,081. Possible causes of the excess deaths in 2006 include stress, suicide, pollution, contamination, impoverishment and the devastation of the heath sector after Katrina. For instance, the suicide rate tripled in the first 10 months after Katrina.

Thanks to Ezra Boyd of Louisiana State University for sending me this information.

Louisiana 20061: Tue., Mar. 13, 2007: 2,358
Louisiana:       Mon., Aug. 2, 2006:  1,464
Mississippi:     Tue., Jan. 24, 2006: 238
Florida:         Mon., Jan. 9, 2006:  14
Georgia:         Mon., Jan. 9, 2006:  2
Alabama:         Mon., Jan. 9, 2006:  2
Ohio2:           Wed., Aug. 31, 2005: 2
Kentucky3:       Wed., Aug. 31, 2005: 1
Total:                                4,081

Footnoted totals are controversial. Explanations for controversial totals follows:

¹The explanation for the 2,358 excess deaths in the first six months of 2006 as compared to the baseline of the first six months of 2003, presumably due to various effects of Hurricane Katrina, is above. This total reflects deaths due to delayed effects, whereas the other figures all represent more immediate and direct effects of the storm.

²The two Ohio victims are Cassondra Ground, 19, of Monroeville, Ohio, and Thelma Niedzinski, 84, of Norwalk, Ohio. Both were killed in a car accident near Monroeville, Ohio on August 30, 2005. The Ohio State Highway Patrol felt that a wet road caused by Hurricane Katrina caused the car accident. See Ohioans Focus on Helping Katrina Victims, Jay Cohen, Associated Press, August 31, 2005.

³The Kentucky victim was Deanna Petsch, 10, of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. On August 29, 2005, she fell into a Hurricane Katrina-swollen ditch in Hopkinsville and drowned. See Storm Surge: State Gets Soaked, City Avoids Major Flooding, Homes, Life Lost in Hopkinsville, Sheldon S. Shafer and James Malone, The Louisville (Kentucky) Courier-Journal, August 31, 2005.

Update: This post has been linked on the always-excellent blog Majikthise and criticized in the comments there. The comments question how the 2,368 excess deaths after Katrina can possibly be attributed to Hurricane Katrina. Answer: They cannot.

But using that number is perfectly in accord with the Theory of Excess Mortality. That theory is widely used by epidemiologists, and was used by Les Roberts’ team to come up with the figure of 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq since the US invasion.

Dr. Gideon Polya has done a lot of work in the area of excess mortality and avoidable mortality, some of which has been published in peer-reviewed journals. Examples of his work are here, here and here.

Can we prove that anything in particular is causing excess mortality in any particular place, absent disaster or war? Nope. But something is killing people in various places at various times at an excessive rate. Anecdotal evidence indicated that many more people than normal were dying in New Orleans in the three to nine months post-Hurricane Katrina. Something was killing them.

They just didn’t up and decide that 2006 was a nice year for dying. Barring other reasonable factors, we may assume that Hurricane Katrina had something to do with the excess deaths in New Orleans. The theory and methodology used in my Katrina excess deaths post in no less rigorous than that used by Roberts, Polya and epidemiologists everywhere.

This comment in the same thread on Majikthise backs up my comments quite well.