JHK’s Three-Act Play
It’s sad to be a citizen of a nation that can’t do anything right. While BP was fumbling its “kill shot” into the Deepwater Horizon hole, and the dying pelicans were flopping in the poisoned marshlands, and rumors seeped across the Internet that nothing short of an atom bomb would avail to stop the underwater oil gusher — not to mention, meanwhile, all the other problems out there, such as the ongoing melt-away of of capital in every corner of the world — I found myself in Berlin, Germany, touring the city on a rented bicycle (after a 4,500-mil airplane ride, it is true).
When last I was in Berlin in 1997, the town was still reeling from the shock of reunification. Only a few tentative businesses had started up on the former communist side, and most of the route of the infamous wall remained a yawning, weedy scrape-off zone. Now the repair of the city is well-advanced, though I give very mixed reviews to some of the premier projects.
Back in ’97, my biggest surprise was, holy shit, the place is in color. After almost fifty years of watching Hitler documentaries I’d assumed the city only existed in black-and-white. By extension, of course, I realized that Hitler himself had been in living color, and that’s where a really vivid sense of the horror set in. In ’97, the scars of World War Two still showed all over the east side, where an acne of bullet holes and artillery craters defaced virtually every older building. They said the communists had been too poor for cosmetic renovation — or else the Russian overlords took a certain sadistic pride in their wartime handiwork and wanted to keep the hostage denizens of the east cowed with never-ending reminders of their subjugation. A necrotic odor of defeat lingered in the streets there. The west side, meanwhile, was all jaunty with shopping and techno-pop teens and the normal hoopla of a money economy.
The the Battle of Berlin, fought mainly by the Russians, had left most of the important civic stuff inside the communist zone of the city — major museums, the opera and symphony, Humboldt University, the Brandenburg gate and the grand avenue called the Unter Den Linden leading off it, the site of the old royal palace, most of the old government buildings (their shells at least), and, of course, the chief souvenirs of Hitlerdom, especially the dreadful bunker of the final days. It was all in pretty shabby shape when I was there in ’97. Hitler’s bunker, which had proved too sturdy to blow up even with controlled demolitions, was finally just filled with sand by the Russians, and looked like a mere weedy mound in a vacant lot. The spot was apparently deemed too spiritually toxic to do anything with it. The nearby Potsdamer Platz, once Berlin’s Times Square, was a vast set of holes in the ground with a bizarre network of primary-colored pipes emanating from them to drain groundwater preceding foundation work. And finally there was Sir Norman Foster’s rebuilding of the Reichstag, just then getting underway in a rubble-strewn plain.
All those projects are about finished. The area around the Brandenburg Gate, once a forlorn encampment of morose ragtag Russians hawking fake amber plastic necklaces, now swarms with tourists. Likewise the Reichstag and its landscaped front and rear courts. The Unter Den Linden is almost too crowded to walk down. And the whole region around the old communist Alexander Platz — originally designed by the commies to look like a Jetson’s shopping mall, minus the shopping of course — seems to have become the consumer electronics mecca of Europe. Sad to say, those holes in the ground around the Potsdamer Platz grew up to be a set of inglorious glass box towers, each trying to out-do the next in sleek corporate narcissism, while the streets themselves look like something the state of Georgia DOT would come up with — intersecting six-laners, a demolition derby in a suburban office park.
When I was there in ’97, I was struck by how utterly all remnants of Hitler had been erased. I suppose it was a form of post traumatic stress syndrome. Quite a bit of memory has been recovered since then, and new monuments abound, from the Peter Eisenman-designed Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe — very solemnly eloquent — to a smaller memorial to Hitler’s gay victims in the big park called the Tiergarten. Plaques explaining one Nazi horror after another are now liberally deployed around the old city center, and Herman Goering’s Air Force Ministry was left standing as the last example of Third Reich art deco — a form of extreme stripped down neo-classicism with all femininity removed, no curves, no ornaments. The site of Hitler’s bunker is no longer a weed patch, but perhaps appropriately one of the city’s rather rare surface parking lots, with a plaque telling the tale and tourist docents pointing out (I swear I heard this) that “…Hitler’s bedroom lay about where that white Audi is parked….”
It seemed to me that, altogether, the German expression of regret appears deeply sincere now and absolutely straightforward, with no side-trips into the realm of excuses or attempted explanations. With the German social mentality now restored to normality — laughter in the busy streets and all dark thoughts of race vengeance banished — one was prompted to reflect on just how such a civilized folk could fall into a mass psychosis like Naziism. And by extension, it was hard to evade the question as to how the USA might not lurch into something worse. The Germans were punished pretty severely for losing (and starting!) the First World War. Depression and hyper-inflation drove them to their knees. I daresay, too, that something about industrialization meshed with their ethnic neuroses to very bad effect (though this is a subject that would take a book to lay out). Anyway, it drove them batshit. They followed a madman through the gates of hell and made a smoking ruin of their home place.
America today is arguably a far less civilized land, and even more neurotic, than the Germany of the 1930s. We live in places so extreme in ugliness, squalor, and dysfunction that just going to the store leaves a sentient American reeling in angst and anomie. Our popular culture would embarrass a race of hebephrenics. We think that neck tattoos are cool. A lot of our pop music is overtly homicidal. Our richest citizens have managed to define a new banality of evil. Our middle classes are subject to humiliations so baroque that sadomasochism even fails to encompass the finer points. And we don’t even need help from other nations to run our own economic affairs into the ground — we’re digging our national grave with a kind of antic glee, complete with all the lurid stagecraft that Las Vegas, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue can muster.
Biking around Berlin — especially the non-tourist neighborhoods, and the beautiful, shaded paths beside the little river Spree, where young people sat enjoying the simple tranquility of the waterside on a spring day — I could only imagine the scene back home at the Indianapolis Speedway (or the dozens of Nascar ovals around Dixie) — the frantic idiocy of America-on-wheels, the fat slobs in beer can hats grilling cheez dogs in the parking lots, letting loose their asinine rebel yells as though this made men of them, and above it all the deafening noise of a people literally driving themselves to death and madness.
Meanwhile, the evil plume of crude oil in the Gulf of Mexico grows ever-larger by the hour and every living thing in that quarter of the sea faces slow death. That’s our memorial-in-the-making to ourselves. I feel sorry for Barack Obama in this situation. Dmitry Orlov is right: this is our Chernobyl. This is the cherry-on-top of all our feckless foolishness. Memor
ial Day this year is the welcome mat to our hard time. We’ll be lucky if some honorable as-yet-unknown colonel in the wadis of Afghanistan comes home to overthrow president Glenn Beck, or whichever lethal moron ends up in power after 2012. We’ll be a very different America then, with no going back.
ial Day this year is the welcome mat to our hard time. We’ll be lucky if some honorable as-yet-unknown colonel in the wadis of Afghanistan comes home to overthrow president Glenn Beck, or whichever lethal moron ends up in power after 2012. We’ll be a very different America then, with no going back.
Coming home to the USA was like re-entering a special kind of mega-slum where nothing that can be screwed up is left un-screwed up. My Delta flight was two hours late, of course. Amusingly, the explanation given was that new runways were under construction at JFK airport — like, Delta just discovered it that morning, or somehow they’ve been unable to work that into their scheduling process after months and months. The things we tell ourselves are so absurd that even the late George Carlin couldn’t make them up. We stopped on the tarmac at JFK because they didn’t have a gate for us. We passengers were put onto some kind of people-mover contraption. The engine failed so we we sat in this steel box in 90-degree heat until they fetched another one. Then there was the journey through a set of dim tunnels to customs, and another journey up a steep ramp shared by motor vehicles and their exhalations to the terminal exit. Welcome home to Slum Nation.
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A sequel to my 2008 novel of post-oil America, World Made By Hand, will be published in September 2010 by The Atlantic Monthly Press.
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit:Kunstler.com/vaulted
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It is interesting that no American city made the top twenty five in livability.
http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/26/news/international/greatest_cities_to_live/index.htm
A gorgeous and thoughtful essay. Welcome back.
Interesting theme. Even more interesting, even a bit uncanny, that you had mentioned Dimtry Orlov. I had just recently listened to an older Diet Soap podcast with him as the guest, followed by an introduction and reading of his blog’s. Spent time this weekend discussing his perspectives over brews and campfire light. Anyways…yeah.
Suburbia may be ugly, but you know what’s beautiful.. solar panels on the roof. They’re the ultimate expression of trying to bring some sanity to the excess of the American landscape. They make clean power that makes your life infinitely easier, without the carbon from the coal. They’re also a personal expression of independence which says “I will be more resilient to the shocks that the pundits say await us.” A solar panel on the roof for hot water is even more beautiful because its payback is even faster, and how great it will be to have a hot shower as things unravel. From geothermal heating and cooling systems to backyard gardens, all the things that make you more independent add beauty to your home. We just need to change our definition of beauty, and technology in this case can offer solutions. http://www.cammmather.com
“America today is arguably a far less civilized land, and even more neurotic, than the Germany of the 1930s. We live in places so extreme in ugliness, squalor, and dysfunction that just going to the store leaves a sentient American reeling in angst and anomie. Our popular culture would embarrass a race of hebephrenics. We think that neck tattoos are cool. A lot of our pop music is overtly homicidal. Our richest citizens have managed to define a new banality of evil. Our middle classes are subject to humiliations so baroque that sadomasochism even fails to encompass the finer points. And we don’t even need help from other nations to run our own economic affairs into the ground — we’re digging our national grave with a kind of antic glee, complete with all the lurid stagecraft that Las Vegas, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue can muster.”
-JHK
Man, oh man! There is a true beauty in this succinct description of “american” “culture”, for all its’ soul-killing horror. Very nicely done, Mr. Kunstler. Yes, it may be that peering into the abyss could prove [psychologically] beneficial. Would you think that a dignified death is somehow life-affirming for those who remain? (I don’t think after-life supposition is worth wasting breath about here. Pun absolutely intended.)
Thanks for another great essay, Mr. Kunstler. My Monday morning is now complete.
The Germans seem to have grieved and come to terms with their past sins; in North America we’re just beginning to be aware something’s amiss. From the standpoint of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross five stages of coming to terms with grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance), we’re just at the start over here – denial, with some real anger. The next stages involve the hard work of building something locally that will survive the collapse of the old. Something much more modest . . . but also maybe a bit more human if we’re not eaten by zombies.
http://www.radicalrelocalization.com/
That nasty little puncture in the face of earth under the gulf of Mexico, that’s just all the chickens of cumulative industrial risk, coming home to roost.
Yeah, we been ignoring the minuscule risks of plying into the face of earth with ever deeper drills, ever farther into the ocean waters, over and and over again, for decades. Oil spills and leakages have long been the unacknowledged “nuclear waste” of the fossil fuel energy industry. The systems have gotten too complex. The risk have piled up. When all the sea life one side of Atlantic is dead, and we sit down to take stock of our transgressions, we’d realize this was just, inevitable.
http://hurricanekatrinakaif.com
Arguably, the worst weekly column wriiten here to date. Personally, I couldn’t be bothered finising the prattle. Sorry to say, Mondays won’t be the same without visiting here.
A beautiful essay on the residual damage a cult of war created for both Germany and the USA. The Germans appear to have learned something from their failed attempt at claiming the Master Race title. We have learned little because most of our failures have taken place in distant places like Vietnam and Somalia.
Here, on Memorial Day, when we celebrate our military culture — even though we haven’t won a war in sixty years. We could learn a lot from Europe, in some ways.
http://www.HealthyPlanetDiet.com shows the two big ways we are wasting the oil we have left.
Ah, I remember when the Wall came down and there was so much excitement over reunification. A German friend of ours couldn’t wait to go home and get started.
But when West G saw what a mess East G was really like after the Russians walked away, they realized that it wouldn’t be an very easy job. But hey, they are Germans right? So they got to work and now you see the result.
Here, if the US falls apart, well, I don’t know, I think that everyone will be looking for someone to blame, and its not US. Its those Mexicans that have been sneaking over the border (and doing all our work for us), thats who! I call scapegoat!
But hey, here in the good ol’ USA, just get another tat’ & crank up the death metal. Whats on the Toob? Oh boy, NAZCAR cheese doodels & beer! yum….
Good luck.
Sorry, had the wrong link http://www.cammather.com/
Great essay this week. I lived in Dresden, Germany in 1998 as a very young man and saw (probably more than you did in Berlin in 1997) what WW2 and 50 years of Soviet love had left of the place. And yet, I found that place (and people, to follow) were shockingly more civilized than my counrymen back home. It’s in how they eat, what they choose to talk about, their posture, and simply their dignity.
There almost seems to be a lack of personal wisdom that comes with growing up on this side of the water. We’re so damn sloppy over here. It’s as if the Enlightenment were no more than a bib to a Yankee exercising his god-given right to be a slob. I wonder where our training goes so wrong.
It’s not at all widely known, but Nigeria’s been completely trashed by Shell. Read this link. It’s not pretty.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell
Here is a quote.
[quote]
In fact, more oil is spilled from the delta’s network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig last month.
That disaster, which claimed the lives of 11 rig workers, has made headlines round the world. By contrast, little information has emerged about the damage inflicted on the Niger delta. Yet the destruction there provides us with a far more accurate picture of the price we have to pay for drilling oil today.
[/quote]
I’m usually such a fan, but your post feels so condescending, ‘the germans seem to have…” listen, today’s Germany is the most tolerent place on the planet, Berlin is the greenest city in Europe, arguably the coolest, most affordable city in Europe, and that memorial, gawd, such a disappointment to everyone, absolutely atrocious, aesthetically displeasing, just a bunch grey slabs at thrown down at various height, it’s simply an awful gash through the middle of Berlin.
The Versaille treaty, prior to the Versaille treaty, not even going to bother.
Gawd…why study history, it’s so tedious…
Hey Jim. I’ve been reading your blog for about a year or so. Bummed that I missed you here in Berlin. I could’ve shown you some stuff in this city that would blow your mind & give you a little hope. That’s not to say it’s not under threat – there’s a massive development known as Mediaspree that will transform the riverside by the biggest remaining chunk of wall in to Houston. Not to mention the planned extension to the urban ring autobahn which will destroy my neighbourhood. Make no mistake, East Germany is a mess socially & economically, but this battered wreck of a city still gives me hope, despite the unemployment, neo nazi problems & attempted rape by the turbo-capitalist real estate speculators. If you can bear to make that plane flight again try & stay for a week or so & try & make it in the summer, when the city is truly alive. We could all learn a lot from this place & how its people have survived fascism, war, destruction, famine, disease, division & post-reunification economic collapse. And that’s just the last 80 years…
The US is falling into the Gulf Of Mexico: drill-it, just drill-it, no need to kill-it, don’t kill-it, just spill-it, just spill-it…!!!
Michael Jackson’s ghost could remake his hit into something horrible in honor of Tony Baloney Hayward. The guy should be indicted. He proclaimed, “So, what plume?” “I don’t see no stinkin’ plume!”
We hear Liz da Jiz Cheney proclaiming that there needs be an investigation over this Joe Sestak-Democratic Party-Bill Clinton offer. HUH? So Liz, do you have any interest in investigating your demented dad as he plotted with the oil industry oligarchs over how to deregulate their offshore drilling platforms and procedures so they could just-spill-it, just spill-it into the Gulf at full profit throttle? I guess not. It is not about honest to goodness theft and corruption, let alone mobster rule.
In addition, we have Arizona’s Anti-Immigration Law being championed by a known neo-Nazi colluder, as they legalize vigilanteism and mob-rule throughout the state.
And finally, we have our president strolling the streets of Chicago as he is photo-opted being the Family Guy as the Gulf and all those families mourn the losses of income, tourism, beauty of the environment, death to the eco-system, and more.
Nothing like taking a stroll during a time when our nation has had a legalized breech to our national security and one of our worst ecological disasters that is likely unable to be fixed by the oligarchs most apparently incompetent CEOs.
Hasn’t BO or Congress learned a damn thing over the Lehman Bros-GS-BoA-AIG theft and breech to our national security through legalized collusion and corruption?
Where is FDR? Where is Mr. Buck Stops Here Harry Truman?
Even Colin da Colinoscopy of the LilBoyBush years has said that BP is over its head and it is time to SEND IN THE CLOWNS, OOPS, I MEAN DA MILITARY! You know what that means—the Master Blaster Machine.
http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com
Signing in from “Military Free” Costa Rica. Exploring several eco-villages under development for Americans looking for the best solution for “Plan B.”
I find myself wondering how best to balance creating community and being in a location that ends up being protected from the starving masses. Any insights would be appreciated.
After lots of driving over the past few days, today is a day of settling in.
Have a great week everyone!
I admit I enjoy reading your Monday commentary but can’t help to wonder about your own hypocrisy: did you take a solar powered plane to Germany? I’m guessing everyone’s need/desire to travel has to land them some level of eating their own words: the fact is, we’re dependent upon fuel for the lifestyles we lead. Travel = oil = the potential for environmental disasters like the one we’re dealing with. We can’t completely blame BP. In a capital economy, we still have the power of demand; unfortunately, we still demand oil/gas because we demand little change in our lifestyles. Keep traveling and keep driving your cars everywhere. BP will still supply to our demand.
The USA headed for Nazism? I really doubt it. The USA is too inept at this point to do Nazism properly. We’ll probably end up with some redneck version of fascism. Ugly, stupid and murderous at the local level. It’s main proponents will be its chief victims.
Once again Kunstler prattles on about cosmetics and appearances. It’s kinda like worrying about the choice of draperies on the Titanic. I know architecture is his thing, but at this point why bother ranting about decades of poor design. Given the lack of resources, we’ll be lucky to even have functional shelter — design and esthetics will be a distant memory.
Nice article until the end, where you “feel sorry for Obama…” and trash Glenn Beck! I feel sorry for us having such an anti-American, unqualified hack like that in the oval office at the most critical time in our nation, thanks to morons like you who voted this idiot in! (Not that McCain would be too good, but not like this clown!) As for Beck, PLEASE tell me what he has said that isn’t true?? Sorry he has exposed this administration and past progressive scum, that you have worshipped, that has been slowing killing this country! By the way Jim…BP was a big Obama supporter, Bernie Madoff and most of the wall street scum too, so let’s be real and get out of your little hippie sheep mode on everything, not just what suits your political point of view
FDR is dead and buried thank God! That’s the last thing we need is another dictatorial (Japanese interment camps, gold confiscation, Federal reserve worshipper who was a banker, etc), P.O.S giving us a RAW deal!
I’ve often heard that the Chinese word for crisis has two meanings. The first meaning refers to a calamity in the making while the second means opportunity in the midst of unique circumstances. I don’t know if this is true, but the very fact that we won’t be returning to the “narcotized inattention” of the 80’s and 90’s must give JHK some reason to celebrate. For every down-on-his-luck individual just trying to make ends meet their is another person who is using our global economic clusterfuck to do something pro-active, whether it involves turning industrial brownfields into organic gardens or converting old, abandoned factories into sustainable housing.
How conclusively sad this is! Yesterday, took my child to DC for a day trip. Quite frankly, I did it because I’m afraid for the future/his future, and don’t know what more nasty surprises, but feel there will be, will develop in the months to come. I wanted him to have a chance to see the sights of our nation’s capital before it’s no longer possible. This unstoppable terra oil gusher puts a whole new spin on the myriad of events that are piling on on our globe. Went to see IMAX Hubble Space Craft Expedition in 3D. We felt as if we were literally taking that trip off the earth along with the Hubble crew, and I found myself wishing I could do it in real life and wait out the hell that’s about to be unleashed here on earth!
There’s no going back now. BP is clueless about what they’ve done, and the government has no idea what to do. From day one, I’ve had a sinking feeling about this event. Looks like this could be a slow death sentence for the oceans of the only planet we humans have to live on. Between August and year-end, President Obama may have to declare the Gulf States, unfit for human habitat due to the death of the economies, and physical threat to humans of the toxic fumes from fresh crude gushing up along with the toxic disperants unleashed by BP. There goes the so-called recovery, here comes Depression part deux!
Events are going to get truely dicey from here on out.
That’s why I’m still hoping/praying for the best, but definitely now preparing for the worst!
Slum America gets its comeuppence…hmmm, I wonder if all those computer experts that were trained in the US colleges, and then returned to their home countries…what if they launched cyber attacks on the Pentagon that couldn’t be countered?
All we have to fire back or fix things are low paid, non-experts on a temp basis. Remember, we don’t want to pay people what they’re worth, but China, India, and Pakistan don’t have that problem.
Glad to have your comments Jim.
Mr. Kunstler is very good at his job today, which is articulating what he sees as he looks past the bullshit and connects the dots. Very much looking forward to the new book.
Hello everyone. I’ve been an avid cf reader for years and only now have decided to take the plunge into blogging here. Another great post Jim. Your musings are at once depressing and inspiring. A rare combination!
The oil gushes out at an estimated rate of 20,000 barrels per day – a minute and a half worth of US daily oil consumption. The reservoir is estimated to contain 50 million barrels – 2 and a half days worth of US oil consumption.
“Coming home to the USA was like re-entering a special kind of mega-slum where nothing that can be screwed up is left un-screwed up.”
I’d have stayed in Germany, Jim. They’ll do better post-Peak than we will.
And, yeah, even when I come home from Istanbul, a place with lots of problems and hellish traffic, I see how Americans make a desert and call it peace. At least the Turks know how to enjoy public spaces with tranquility and their families (except after a big football match).
The Europeans, like the Turks, have many problems, but they’ll all sit back as the U.S. crumbles. They’ve all been there already.
Happy Memorial Day.
I find the sycophantism of this group very disturbing. HK has been blowing out his own stream of oily pessimism and elitism for years now. I check in to read CN because I agree with much of the opinions expressed, both by HK and his readers. But after reading over and over about how tacky, fat, cheez whiz, chicken tenders, NASCAR, blah, blah, blah…makes us an embarrassing nation of idiots (except for HK, of course), it just becomes repetitive. No originally. Just the same, relentless drumming of the same points over and over. And HK uses such a broad brush in his cultural criticism. It’s not as if all folks who enjoy automobile racing are the same folks we see on People of Walmart. I actually watched all the hype and self-aggrandizing schmaltz of the Indy 500 pre-race show, replete with grainy, sepia toned moving images from past versions of one of our nation’s most historic and meaningful traditions. I know it’s mostly bullshit, but most of any culture is bullshit. It’s spectacle. It’s what societies do. It’s what Europe does on a different level with football (soccer?). Go to an AJAX game in The Netherlands and tell me if their football hoods are any better or worse than our, comparatively benign, “fat slob” with his beer can hat. I actually love F-1 racing, and I feel no compunction in saying so. There is probably more technology transfer from F-1 to other related industries than there was in our Apollo missions. The rocket car remains a thing of comic books. That said, I can’t see any hope in fuel conservation or fossil energy innovation as long as fuel remains a commodity. The world seems to be taking sides in that regard with Central and South America looking at fuel as a NATIONAL resource, rather than the ersatz commercial version of NATIONAL resource the present energy oligopoly and its government minions creates.
I’m gonna go look at that broken riser live feed now…
And dammit!! I’m gonna have a grilled cheese-dog and enjoy it ironically just to spite HK!!
“America today is arguably a far less civilized land, and even more neurotic, than the Germany of the 1930s. We live in places so extreme in ugliness, squalor, and dysfunction that just going to the store leaves a sentient American reeling in angst and anomie.”
Obviously JHK’s standard of civilization and beauty is not on par with the rest of America. I recently had a picnic of cheese doodles and high fructose corn syrup in the parking lot of the local Walmart. I watched the shoppers as they waddled from their cars to and from the Walmart. What beautiful heifer women fill the asphalt parking lagoons. Have you gone to the coast to watch wales? Chances are there are 300 lb. wales right in your home town that you can watch year round. And the proud men—with their baseball hats, sweat pants and ass crack on display because their beer bellies keep it hard to prevent sweat pants slipping down. Were the Nazi’s so well fed Mr. Kuntsler? Just because you don’t appreciate the aesthetics of blubber and the art of engineering asphalt expanses(any designer will tell you black goes with everything)
does not mean we’re more neurotic and uncivilized than 1930’s Germany.
Here is how its different now from 1930’s Germany. Recently I got to be friends with someone. She got me to take her places to pick stuff up for various reasons. It turned out she was picking up drugs. It struck me that the drug dealers live in the most ordinary suburban houses. They have kids and regular jobs. It hit me that hard drug abuse is probably ten times worse than people who are not in that world think. I remember as a kid that most neighbors knew and talked with one another and a few weirdos that stayed to themselves. Now most neighborhoods are full of the weirdos that stay to themselves. Look out on your street at night. Do you see traffic in a few houses? Perhaps they are selling pain pills, cocaine, heroin or meth. But what about folks with yuppie jobs who are watching movies and TV at night. They are sitting for hours passive and comatose in an altered state of mind transfixed to a screen. Is that much different than being on heroin(besides the cost)?
So as JHK says we are a nation of overfed clowns –but actually we are a nation of doped up overfed clowns. Hitler never would have stirred up anyone if he had 500 channels to compete with. And if I am right that Americans are so doped up you have to ask, why? Could it be that the dispiriting environment of suburbia drives people to drugs?
Can it be anything other than extinction that we are facing? We are raping and pillaging this planet at an increasingly accelerated rate. We are twenty years too late to develop new technology.
I am beginning to see the odd horse and cart here and there and solar bicycles. But not enough to make any kind of change in the way we do things. My friends keep buying SUVs, clueless. I am surrounded by behemoth trucks.
“One has to buy big to protect oneself on the highways”. Well denial will keep you gobbling and belching oil fumes at an alarming rate, pal. Meanwhile a few like me drive lesser and smaller but make no difference because of YOU.
Extinction is too good for this moronic species.
I just checked out a CNBC story on BP’s traders leaving en masse — http://www.cnbc.com/id/37432694 — and came across some interesting comments. It looks like BP’s legal folks or big shareholders are weighing in.
Thankfully there’s no such whoring on this blog.
Here’s a sample:
“Rather strong statements considering BP has not been accused of breaking any laws. You are advocating murder. Advocating murder is not something you want to be accused of. (That’s in response to this comment: ‘They should dump all of the scum from BP right into that leak. What a bunch of dirtbags!!!’)
“As you comment here remember you are not journalists and are not covered by freedom of speech. Slander and libel apply here as well. If I was on BP’s legal team, I’d be serving CNBC tomorrow for the IP addresses of irresponsible comments not based on evidence in fact that are inflammatory and derogatory. The legal team at BP would make lunch meat out of you.
“I’m extremely upset about the leak in the Gulf, but the only legally responsible parties at the moment are the manufacturer’s of the Blow Out Preventer, and the MMS which grossly exhibited negligence.
“In the interim, we should exercise and use our creativity and misguided anger to positive ends and push for change to the very guidelines that allowed a situation like this to happen.
“Read the MMS charter. Make comments on it.
“And watch your language. You obviously have no idea about who could be reading these posts.”
Psychohistory proposes that the Germans were ripe for group psychosis because their child rearing practices were among other things very rigid and focused on discipline and socialization to the extreme.
Americans are not raised in the manner of Germans in the early 20th century so our group psychosis will be different. The results won’t be as drastic and evil. They will be bad, but not as bad.
Aimlow Joe was here.
http://www.aimlow.com
I think that NASCAR is mostly a guy thing, although one of my co=workers insisted that I should love NASCAR because there is now a girl in it. I’m a girl, she’s a girl, don’t I know Danica in NASCAR?
Watching cars go around in circles seems pointless and boring to me. And when I actually went to a stockcar race as a teenager, I hated the noise and the fumes.
One time, as I walked past the waiting room with a patient, there was a great male roar. I said
“Someone must have made a touchdown”. Oh, no, they said, it’s NASCSAR. So I snidely said, “Oh, boy, the cars went around the track again”.
The women cracked up laughing. The men were upset.
Plus, it’s a giant waste of oil. Which we must stop wasting.
http://wagelaborer.blogspot.com/
Amen. Just makes you want to get out the ol’ harpoon don’t it? You can’t be an Ahab without 300 pound waddling whales! Jillian Michaels is a post-industrial saint who tries to make the whales back into people. This is the form our fascism will take: compulsory dieting and fitness with recquired membership in state sponsored health clubs. Failure to get thin will incur removal to a “health camp”.
Sorry for Obama? The man who endorsed drill baby, drill a month before the blowout? The man who has no serious plan for any of this? The guy who can’t even commit himself to Bush’s “we’re addicted to oil” diversion and will only say we’re dependent on foreign oil?
He’s as deep in this as anybody, by choice.
This is the wisdom of Solzhenityn: modern so called liberalism is a culture killer. It destroys quickly by corrupting the human being, especially the memory of what came before. Thus when the problembs become apparent, there is no basis for change – except for more of the same thing that created the problem to begin with.
Communism by contrast, had the odd effect of preserving the very basics of culture, the human mind and human relationships. It did this by being so utterly alien and obviously evil that good people just rejected it and formed underground alliances. Liberalism, with its smiling face is far more insidious in the long run. Thus Huxley’s “Brave New World” has triumphed over Orwell’s “1984”. Liberalism is a diet of candy without the roughage of strife.
The West Germans have not forgotten us much as we have but they are far from healthy. Many of them do believe the crap Kunstler said about how Germany started both World Wars. Thus piece by piece their National and Ethnic pride is being taken away. The coup de grace for them and for Europe will the Islam take over. Normal, Healthy People do not just let their land be taken over by Aliens!
It’s certainly my experience that we’re undergoing an epidemic of incompetence in the U.S. these days. I’m pleasantly surprised whenever anything is done right.
Here in New Orleans we’re especially intrigued by how an organization can institutionalize a culture of total incompetence, with the Army Corps of Engineers being exhibit A. They seem determined to destroy southern Louisiana, first by producing, with gross negligence, levees that couldn’t withstand Katrina, now by throwing up regulatory barriers to protecting the coastline from the oil spill.
Part of the current bizarre cult of militarism in this country is the notion that the military is a bastion of competence. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Has the modern civilized technological world become just another overpriced crap hole ?
Yep and they drive So Agressively. run ya right off the road, literally without a care.
my puts it this way, they are suicidal and don’t care if they take you out also.
i would say they are more homicidal.
it is a nightmare on our highways.
“One has to buy big to protect oneself on the highways”. wisewoman knows.
frank says:
Look out on your street at night. Do you see traffic in a few houses? Perhaps they are selling pain pills, cocaine, heroin or meth. But what about folks with yuppie jobs who are watching movies and TV at night. They are sitting for hours passive and comatose in an altered state of mind transfixed to a screen. Is that much different than being on heroin(besides the cost)?
sums it up well. thanks for the insights.
the drugs these days are so Destructive. meth being the worst imo.
the $$$ behind all drugs even relatively harmless like POT, makes it dangerous. gangs, drugs, meth, death.
our culture is going down the tubes. i’ve been watching it for 54 years. no doubt there is too much violence and destruction, even on west coast california. daytime. in Paradise by the Beach.
anyway, i don’t comment often as i am not well spoken and know it, but been reading this page for a long time and jhk’s books forever.
‘happy’ memorial day. god bless the soldiers.
g damn the pusher man !
melinda
I look forward to your new book. I did enjoy the last one.
Now if only the Jews would give up their claim to be the Chosen or Master Race. Also why are we about to go to war with Iran over a nuclear missile or two when Israel has 300 plus? Should’t we passing sanctions on them?
A Hole made of Oil,
Some pressure to boil.
Rising a mile,
To level, then spoil.
Slippery stuff, for wings and scales,
Energy dense, then smoky trails.
No air for a fish, no sky for a quail,
Slithering out, greasing success with fail.
Plug it for heaven, or burn it for hell,
Plug it for peace, or light if for smell.
Oil is a tea for devil may care,
Tethering liquids with hands,
When a tail should be there.
It’s funny you should mention the spectacle of the 500. As someone who has spent most of their adult life living in Indy, I just want to mention that it is almost entirely possible to ignore the race.
Now, the mini-Marathon and the Parade are hard to ignore if you are trying to get around downtown, but only for about 20 hours (the night before when the DPW blocks off certain streets, during the parade, and then a few hours after as streets are cleaned and unblocked). Stay off the near Westside/Speedway area and you wouldn’t even know there’s a race on. And almost as soon as the race is over, all the folks who came to visit and act like drunken asses get in their RV’s or helicopters or Gulfstreams and leave.
Because of some ancient agreement between the Speedway and teevee networks, it’s not even shown here on the telly.
There is a secret I will let people here in Kunstlerville onto: Indy is actually a great city to live in if you hate people. Get a job at night, live downtown, and try to live within 5 minutes (driving) of your job. When you are going to work, everyone is traveling in the opposite direction, and vice versa in the morning. You have the whole city to yourself at night, your neighbors are probably less likely to be the lumpen-bourgeoisie idiots most people encounter from Indy out on package tours. It’s pretty glorious, IMHO.
The Mexican Illegals are turning our National Parks into Pot farms – and shooting anyone who gets too close. That’s why visitors are now allowed to carry inside the Parks – for protection against the violent invaders. Not that American Cultivators are without blame in all this. They have lobbied against legalization in order to maintain their profits.
Legalize the shit and be done with it. Alcohol has destroyed more lives than all the rest put together.
Jim, I hate to tell you, but trust me: “The Dukes of Hazzard” was NOT a documentary. Your stereotypes of the south are seriously off the mark.
“I feel sorry for Barack Obama in this situation.” EXCUSE ME? You WHAT? You feel sorry for the individual who has wasted so much time while the Gulf simmers and swims in black goo and sends this country into further misery? Listen, Jim, I don’t really care if you feel it so liberally correct that you still suffer with white-man’s guilt and feel pride for having elected a black man as President — race is NOT the point of electing someone with the backbone to deal with this country’s many problems. Go ahead and blame this mess on Obama’s white half — I don’t really care. What I DO care about is that our President has wasted precious time giving speeches and taking vacations while BP denies that workers are falling ill from the effects of this God-awful mess that is spewing out from apparently more than one source in the ocean floor. Our bowing President had better get down on his knees in front of the Russian Powers-That-Be (who evidently, have already dealt with such “spills” as this) and ask (no, make that “beg”) for their assistance in stopping this mess ASAP.
I don’t personally give a rat’s patootie about the resurrection of East Germany beyond the possibility that the USA may have to rebuild from a situation that far surpasses bullet-pockmarked buildings in its ramifications. I consider the use of your column’s valuable space an absolute waste.
Nothing like a nice, tall glass of KOOL-AID on a Memorial Day afternoon, eh, Desert Dawg?
Money is not the root of all evil. The root of all evil is corruption and greed. As long as citizens accept corruption, there will be no change for the better and only for the worst.
As for Europe, the place needs to be depopulated of its current human stock and restocked with anything else from anywhere else. Anything and everything except the current human stock of Europeans. That’s my feeling about Europe.
Memorial Day… a time to remember.
Remember that the USA is number one in war. This coming year, the US will spend 708 billion dollars on war, and another $125 billion for Veterans Affairs – over $830 billion. In a distant second place is China, which spent about $84 billion on its military in 2008.
Remember that the USA leads the world in the sale of lethal weapons to others, selling about one of every three weapons worldwide. The USA’s major clients? South Korea, Israel and United Arab Emirates.
Remember that the USA has 5 percent of the world’s population, but accounts for more than 40 percent of the military spending for the whole world.
Remember our troops have the option to question orders. Our troops have the option to refuse orders to bomb and invade and occupy other countries. Remember that our troops who obey illegal orders are war criminals who are making the USA less safe with each door they kick in, each family they terrorize, each wedding party they bomb, each civilian they shoot down in cold blood.
Do not support our troops in their illegal activities. Do not support the politicians who vote for war. Do not support the corporations who benefit from killing.
We are being set up to have a total lack of faith in our “government”. The first result is increasingly lower voter turn-out. How long have we been voting for “the lesser of two evils”? Two evils — why would anyone even bother voting for something only describable as “less evil”? Evil is evil. And in this society evil runs rampant. What is the federalgov’t up to whilst all this nail-biting over the Deadwater Spill is going on in the media? This Gulf of Mexico blow up is but one step towards the ultimate goal. The fedgov and BP know exactly what they are doing, and of course what they are not doing. Evil conniving sleazy weasels always have contingency plans; none of this Environmental Disaster was an accident. When Your Millions are involved you make no mistakes, when others’ millions are involved you twist their losses to sing to your advantage — beforehand.
Asoka: Do not support our troops in their illegal activities. Do not support the politicians who vote for war. Do not support the corporations who benefit from killing.
And do what exactly instead? Don’t support the troops who have no choice but to follow the orders they’ve been brainwashed to follow?
There are no politicians who don’t vote for war, except two or three — they aren’t gonna change anything are they? Don’t support corporations who benefit from killing you say? Well nearly all corporations benefit from killing number one, and number two if you live in the USA most of your tax dollars support corporations who benefit from killing, or the pentagon/military-industrial complex who benefits from killing or the CIA black budget which supports all styles and development for means of killing — all without your approval — or anyone’s approval. So please elaborate.
Here are five ways to avoid paying war taxes:
1) Symbolic withholding. This is the form of resistance that requires the least amount of preparation and effort. You can go about your daily life as you currently do, and when you fill out your taxes, if you happen to owe money, you can withhold some of this amount (many resisters choose to withhold $10.40) with a letter of objection. The amount you withhold can be as small or great as you like.
2) Complete withholding. Adjust your W-4 allowances to whatever level you’re comfortable with, and when Tax Day comes around, fill out your 1040 normally, but in lieu of a check include your statement of conscientious objection. Make sure you save a copy of this letter.
3) The Blank 1040. Same as #2, but you just sign a blank copy of the 1040 and send in your letter of objection.
4) File a “Zero Return.” You fill out a 1040, but with zeroes in all the fields. Sign it and send it in. One of the resisters I spoke with said this method had worked for him for five years. In light of the arbitrary nature of IRS collections, that doesn’t mean too much, but there is a small and seemingly apolitical movement around the Zero Return.
5) Off the books. Simply don’t file a 1040 at all.
The potential for collection on each of these can vary quite a bit. No. 1 is the safest, especially if you’re withholding only a small amount of money. No. 5 makes is considerably harder for the IRS to track you down, if they ever do. Numbers 2-4 are high profile statements of dissent, and you’re basically asking the IRS to come after you, but thanks to the economic crisis and the size of the IRS bureaucracy, that could take years to happen, if ever.
DO NOT VOLUNTARILY SUPPORT WAR
By taking a stand that requires personal change and perhaps personal sacrifice, you demonstrate the depth of your commitment to a more just world. Anyone can complain about the government and ask it to change, but it means much more to change your own life and put your money where your mouth is.
Some war resisters find that resisting the whole package of consumerism, overconsumption and taxation appeals to them more than other tax resistance strategies.
Some discover that by living simply they live more satisfying and meaningful lives, and would choose to live this way even if it didn’t help them to resist taxes.
Some prefer this method of tax resistance because it can be accomplished within the law, demonstrating their desire to be law-abiding citizens without at the same time having to violate their consciences.
“As for Europe, the place needs to be depopulated of its current human stock and restocked with anything else from anywhere else. Anything and everything except the current human stock of Europeans. That’s my feeling about Europe.”
I like Europe and don’t see the need for depopulation, yet i think you see a likely future. Most of Europe has birthrates below replacement rate and dropping. Also historically “Euro-peons” have been quite adept at population reduction through warfare. After the Euro implosion process is complete they are likely to resume their historic ways. There are wide variety of “barbarians” awaiting their chance to fill the resultant vacancies.
The article Wonk links to is very important. Please check it out. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell
Further quote:
Judith Kimerling, a professor of law and policy at the City University of New York and author of Amazon Crude, a book about oil development in Ecuador, said: “Spills, leaks and deliberate discharges are happening in oilfields all over the world and very few people seem to care.”
There is an overwhelming sense that the big oil companies act as if they are beyond the law. Bassey said: “What we conclude from the Gulf of Mexico pollution incident is that the oil companies are out of control.
“It is clear that BP has been blocking progressive legislation, both in the US and here. In Nigeria, they have been living above the law. They are now clearly a danger to the planet. The dangers of this happening again and again are high. They must be taken to the international court of justice.”
“Now if only the Jews would give up their claim to be the Chosen or Master Race. Also why are we about to go to war with Iran over a nuclear missile or two when Israel has 300 plus? Should’t we passing sanctions on them?”
Vlad, is it that my sense of irony is currently non-functional, or are you really that un-informed?????
Who do you think supplied (and probably PAID for as well) their nukes?? The US Taxpayer, of course!
A line from a poem by T.S. Eliot:
So JHK ventures forth and returns to find America a slum.
The upside of which is that he sees what is possible when people have the will to change.
Germany, from bombed out ruins to a place that humbles America and makes us look like a slum.
The message I’ll take from the post this week is:
Even though were in terrible shape we can yet turn it all around if we have the will to do so.
JHK gets 5 stars and 2 thumbs up from me this week.
A truly great post.
Eururope certainly has had its share of ruthless dictators — Hitler probably being the worst — but when you throw such cynicism around, it should be applied to the entire human race.
General Butt Naked and his band of cross-dressing child soldiers in Liberia prove that bad dudes can be found everywhere.
http://www.vbs.tv/watch/the-vice-guide-to-travel/the-vice-guide-to-liberia-trailer
I don’t agree with you often, but you are right on the mark with this. Legalizing weed is so necessary to: secure our border, weed (pun intended) corruption out of the Mexican government, give power to the Mexican government, weaken the cartels, save hardworking illegals from damaging drug-dealer stereotypes, reduce the level of militarization of our police force, create space in prison for people who should truly be there — the violent, save government budgets, create revenue, etc.
What will be really interesting, I think, is to see how the voter patterns turn out for the weed proposition in CA. It would be extremely ironic if the supposed bastion of progressivism — Humboldt County — votes against it due to the amount of money illegal weed brings in there. If they do, the so-called hippies up there will be on the same side as the police state.
Pay attention to Humboldt County. It will be interesting.
Europe has had a 3,000 year plus, long non-stop history of “ruthless dictators” and genocidal mass murderers with expansionist territorial ambitions. Hitler’s Europe, (Hitler was not alone in his enterprise) is just the latest modern incarnation of the same old story. James is sadly mistaken if he thinks Europe is “reformed”.
And no, there’s no comparable history anywhere else. Not with that consistency. The Arab Islmo-nazi imperialists only appeared on the scene at around 700AD.
Okay then,
Perhaps I’m taking a quick peek with a [very] jaundiced eye, but I’m perceiving Fear(!) starting to infect a big bunch of the comments.
Well, good, you should be afraid; now what you intend to DO about it is going to be your saving grace or undoing. I’m seeing some damnfoolishness, some donothingness, and some OHGODSOMEBODYSAVEMEFROMTHEOTHERSANDMYSELF!
Well, good; helps me figure out who to help/cooperate with, and who to…………..
Thanks, most informative! A simple interaction and all will be revealed.
Nope, not an implied terror; call it a “continuity strategy”. Ahhhh, that’s better. See how the naming of a thing can make it so much more palatable?
On my last Delta flight, I was seated in a small section behind a bathroom. I never saw an attendant for the entire flight until they sat in the back row upon landing. The captain announced that he was sorry that no service had been provided because of the bumpiness and continued to tell us that it had been bumpy for over a week.
On my previous Delta flight, the attendant scolded me for asking for a second beverage. What if everyone did that?, he asked. I wanted to reply that if the attendants hadn’t spent most of the flight kissing first class asses, he would have had more time but reasoned that in Homeland Amerika, such observations might not be appreciated.
Genocide of the White Race is the ultimate goal of the Jewish/Leftist Cabal. Thus they promote anything that weakens White Nations and populations. This includes Feminism, Political Correctness and White Guilt, Homosexuality, zero population growth (which I agree with, but only Whites took seriously), and of course massive Non-White Immigration. Mika is not unusual just unusually candid.
Chaim Weitzman had a similar moment of honesty in one of his journals. He said that anti-semitism was often rational since Jews often have agendas contrary to the welfare of the Nations in which they reside. Of course the Jews will always loudly proclaim that they are just trying to protect themselves. But in real life, there is often a very fine line between offence and defence. And in their very private writings, they exalt about the prospect of the downfall of the White Man and the subsequent World Civilizaton under them and their Masonic Underlings.
I was wondering if maybe during his magical mystery tour of Europe, James could maybe look at a couple of American military cemeteries, where he could see some of the sacrifices the American lower classes he so despises made in helping to stop fascism and militarism.
Or maybe look at a cathedral, where he could see that everyone who believes in God isn’t a maniac.
OBAMA LEADS SLUM NATION INTO 10TH MONTH OF ECONOMIC RECOVERY AND INCREASED MANUFACTURING
“Legalize the shit and be done with it. Alcohol has destroyed more lives than all the rest put together”.
This is supposedly “the land of the free”. Drug freedom would be a logical and moral solution, but it’s unlikely to happen soon. Why?
1. Unemployment. There would be a million nonviolent drug “criminals” not being replaced as they are released. The staffs of courts, customs, DEA, law firms, police, prisons, etc. would need serious “downsizing”. Several federal agencies owe much or all of their existence to “the war on drugs”. Recalling the forces in Afghanistan would make sense, as there would be no more black-ops drug (opium/heroin) profits to protect.
2. Profits. Illegal drugs comprise the most profitable businesses in the country, in some counties it is the largest business. The lion’s share of those profits are laundered and appear on balance sheets of otherwise legitimate businesses that would mostly be showing losses without the “immoral support”. Potential legalized drug businesses would be much less profitable. As the Greater Depression settles in, how many polititians are going to vote to make it deeper?
3. Power. Those profiting from illegal drugs have had generations to turn those massive profits into power, and now own a large share of the “legitimate” economy. They have megabucks to influence legislation, elections, and the media. They are unlikely to let go of the source of that power easily.
Now it is true that goverment, in search of revenue, has been taking over and/or legalising gambling over the last fifty years, a process that is still underway. That process is beginning with drugs, it will be interesting to see how far it gets in the time remaining
LOL. I donno, Vlad. Maybe you’d look cute in a skirt. Don’t knock it ’til you try it.
SLUM NATION ON THE REBOUND
Thursday’s announcement that the slum nation economy led by Obama grew by a surprising 7.3% in the first quarter, however, renewed optimism, with economic managers saying an upward revision to the 2.6% to 3.6% full-year growth target is in order.
The latest Leading Economics Indicators (LEI) index — which gives a hint on how the economy will fare in the second quarter — showed positive contributors outpaced the drags eight to three.
Total merchandise imports, inflation, wholesale price index, tourist arrivals, stock price index, electric energy consumption, hotel occupancy rate, and money supply all buoyed the LEI, the NSCB said.
I agree with all you said, but it appears that marijuana is on the verge of being legal in CA, and that could start the whole thing rolling (with respect to weed). So it’s not hopeless.
As for the hard drugs — meth, crack, heroin — keep them illegal, I say. They are deadly and instantly addictive for a large segment of the people who do them. Besides, whereas around 95 million Americans have smoked pot, only around 2-3 million or so are into hard drugs. Therefore, legal pot alone would solve a lot of problems.
I would like to see the cartels try to survive on a customer base that is just a fraction of what it was before.
Legalizing weed should be a bi-partisan issue — for one, it would likely cut down on illegal immigration and, of course, it’s all about peace and love on the other side.
It’s just a matter of getting people to see through the Refer Madness bullshit.
I’d rather have would-be criminals high and playing video games than drunk and out on the town.
I agree. But I would contend that in some instances the Europeans just happened to have the better technology at the time (though, of course, technology has evolved in various parts of the world).
I think your style of self-righteousness is dangerous. For when certain groups — be they racial, ethnic or religious — begin to think they can do no wrong, that their people are pristine, that’s when bad things happen. That’s when violence becomes justified in that person’s mind.
Remember, Hitler and Germany saw themselves as oppressed before they unleashed the most murderous campaign ever seen.
Brown, black or white dictator — I don’t want any of ’em.
I, personally, like Martin Luther King Jr., prefer to judge people by the content of their character.
Damn it, the above post was in response to Mika, not myself. Sigh…
Boy am I glad I found this blog.
What a writer!
I live in Palo Alto, CA which has one of
the highest per capita income levels in
the nation and more Ph.D.’s per capita than
any town in America. You can hardly tell
based on its downtown and the mix of
businesses.
Can you imagine that the town which houses
Stanford U. has NO MUSIC STORE and only
TWO of NINE bookstores has survived? I
guess MBAs don’t bother with reading or
art. It cuts into their obsession with
moneymaking.
Many very tony California towns are giving
in to the MBA mentality which likes to cut
corners when it comes to aesthetics and
the life of the mind. Even Sausalito, a
formerly vibrant and beautiful town, lost
its most gorgeous Bed And Breakfast. This
B&B had a stunning view of San Francisco,
Berkeley, Alcatraz, … everything and now
it’s a gated small industrial park with
dopey guards on duty who wouldn’t even
tell me when the Alta Mira was shut down.
Beauty is now hardly even considered a
variable in decisions we make about designing
buildings or communities. In SF, they even
uglified the formerly gorgeous De Young Art
Museum into a hypermodern building which now
ooks like those black plastic-mesh pool fences.
One wonders … if all these towns which were
formerly glamor capitols have turned into gray,
postmodern functional architecture displays,
where can one find CONSISTENT beauty in any
American town, no matter the size.
I can imagine that Jim saw a few nice cathedrals,
town squares, and promenades over in Deutschland.
It must have been a stone, cold bummer to come
back to a place where the aesthetic ugliness
is exceeded only by the increasing stupefaction
of our service providers such as the airlines.
Eleuthero
Kunstler–there you go again bashing Southern’s.
Big deal a few Rednecks like to have a few beers and blow off some steam watching NASCAR. Most spend the rest of their 6 days a week at an honest living, and many have served in the miltary to protect the USA. It’s the cultured and scheming Madoff’s of the world that do alot more damage to society. The elites burn more jet fuel traveling the world, they goober and his buds. They(Southerners) are not the next coming of Hitler ready to lasso your paranoid elite ass and pull you a few mile behide a horse.
I am a Texan, so I guess that makes me a Southerner by some definitions. But I don’t agree that the fact that Southerners robotically sign up for the military makes them special. There has not been a war fought to “protect the USA” in my lifetime. The MIC has bankrupted the U.S. government and now we will witness the elimination of the “entitlements” a lot of these flag-waving goobers rely upon, some for their very survival, when Barack’s “Catfood Commission” reports back to the new GOPer majorities (many of them Southerners and Texans, of course) next year. It’ll have to be done because the war machine must continue to be fed. Meow Mix — Cats ask for it by name. And so will millions of Southern goobers.
I have to admit I was at the Indy 500 this weekend, drinking lots of beer and making lots of noise.
I would like to point out, however, that Indy cars run on ethanol, not gasoline.
Say what you want about ethanol — I certainly don’t think it’s the answer to our energy problems — but it isn’t pumped out of Arabia or Venezuela. For me that’s a big plus.
Look like big storm approaching, sister! I don’t think solar or technology will come to the rescue, either. But you’re right, we won’t go right away to extinction…we too nasty.
I really enjoyed the JFK part at the end. We’ve grown accustomed to strange delays with any kind of “public” transportation. Even if you don’t like it and are angry, you certainly aren’t surprised. If only I had a private jet! And private runways I guess…maybe a jet with pontoons so I can land in rivers or something. It could run on discarded plastic chairs.
I take NJ Transit to Newark for work and it is late or otherwise delayed enough times to be described as dysfunctional. You can’t really get mad at the train crew as they have no control over it. And in a sense you can’t get too mad at NJ Transit because they have to share the tracks with Amtrak and Conrail. There’s only a few tracks.
They could schedule it better though. There’s a Raritan Valley train that leaves at 7:10 or something and every night it leaves the station, goes about a 100 yards and stops to wait for an oncoming train. I can’t understand why they don’t just leave the station a little earlier or later.
It gives one time to admire the graffiti and a housing structure that’s a personal favorite of mine. The residents throw their garbage out the window (15 floors high maybe) and it accumulates on the roof of a single story building next to it. I measure the garbage build up over time as a gauge to the economy. Eventually they sweep the roof or just flare off the garbage I guess.
COWSWITHGUNS, I understand what you’re saying, I just don’t think that’s a realistic scenario. I just don’t care to waste my emotional energy on that diseased population. I don’t consider them human beings. To my eyes, they’re little more than greedy blood thirsty cold-blooded alien lizardoids. I don’t care to get involved with them, and I really don’t care what fate befalls them.
“Can you imagine that the town which houses
Stanford U. has NO MUSIC STORE and only
TWO of NINE bookstores has survived? I
guess MBAs don’t bother with reading or
art.”
===============================
Apparently you are even more behind the times than I am!
Don’t you know that students these days don’t BUY music, they steal it on the internet? Bookstores?? they have been going the way of the buggy whip for years, and that was before the digital reading devices. I spend more on books each year than clothes….by a wide margin…and I hardly ever sit foot in a bookstore. Why bother….Amazon is cheaper and better. I miss bookstores in some ways, but not enough to make me wish for the end of the internet. Oh…..and I did get an MBA about 35 years ago. Cheerio.
You’re an imbecile Mika. I’m guessing you’re a psychopath/sociopath as well. I’m all for free speech, but what you say isn’t free speech, it’s sheer racist nazi lunacy. Another possibility you may be some sort of provocateur. Whatever you are, you’re detracting from thoughtful discussion here.
Most if not all of our ills here in the US stem from the worship of Mammon. Hence we learn the price of everything and the value of nothing. Why is our landscape so ugly? Because we don’t value a harmonious one. Perhaps our landscape is actually a looking-glass into our real psyche, in the same sense as the Roman adage, in vino veritas. The root of much evil is the love of money. True words, I dare say.
Yep the country is clueless, even my generation, G-X have all caved in, once anarchistic in nature, doubting all the double talk, knowing we were going to eventually either blow our own heads off with the sacred atomic bomb or drive ourselves literally ‘to death’.
Now everyone I know has a kid, two , or three…. each one of them taught materialism extreme at an early age… plugged in at age 5 or 6 to some fabulous electro device… mindlessly as if Ipods will cure all ills. Now all toys are Chinese and plastic… at least when I was a kid there was a wooden paddle duck around.
Each mother is a warrior too… driving their monster SUV to protect their ‘precious’. And driving FAST! No one has respect anymore for life… they all rush about mindlessly (unless it is on they spawned), no thought of biking, or walking…. or they drive to walk, or bike, or run…. because hell its way to dangerous to go anywhere without the SUV as a roll cage especially the way everyone drives in this day and age.
Worst yet is the fact that if you dont join this club of reproductive consumers…. there is something wrong with you, your treated like a traitor, someone who has cheated the system…. “hey that couple over their is cheating! They dont have kids, (who require mindless numbers of hours and material resources)… hey that couple didnt give up their life…. they arent productive, they dont work all the time, to provide for their own brat, princess! No fair! And look what their driving… oh how dangerous! Like a tin can!
I live in a rather newish town in the Rockies…. its like a rookery…. there are more children here than adults… its ‘in’. And each one of them is raised to be the best… smartest, fastest, with all the brand new expensive accessories to get them there. I actually feel sorry for these kids… there lives are going to be even more disappointing …. and I guess overly competetive if they are going to survive with the massive population thats blowing up at this very minute. Oh and how many times I hear a parent tell me that population growth is not a problem in the US…. it is! You dont have to even see the numbers on a population counter to know it. In my brief 43 yrs I have seen the growth…. I can hardly go to a place that has not changed and for the worst… the last 5 decades US citizens have become increasingly needy, with commercialized consumerism running the place. They child of today stands no chance against the materialism shown to them in the most sophisticated ways of TV advertisement.
Dont get me wrong, I am not some child hater. I like children, I have 3 nieces, I enjoy playing with them. Thats the key, I enjoy playing with them….. not just pacifying them with video games, and plastic toys…..I would rather be the non burned out uncle than the overworked, rushing around, dont have time to play with my kids dad. All of my Gen-X friends are seemingly the same…. just struggling to keep up with the Joneses. There is little time in the day to enjoy the simplicities of life…. like the kids you spawned.
Well thats my rant…. join the Kunstler rant… its good for you … get it all out.
Why is our landscape so ugly?
Well, I think the problem here is the use of the word “our.” That implies a certain sense of civitas, a concern for the many rather than that of the individual. Truly “public” space continues to become more and more privatized, so what we might call “our” landscape is actually the aggregate of many private landscapes. I have a feeling that for a lot of people, the only landscape they care about is that of “their” (really the banks’) single family home or the interior landscape of where they live…you know, their flat screen, Ipod, Iphone, Ikea furniture, etc. This abandonment of the public, the rejection of the idea that we are all in it together is very evident when driving around in a car. People with the cell to their head, throwing gum wrappers out of the window, not using turning signals, etc. And the whole “wheels” thing among certain minority groups indicates an obsessive selfishness and superficiality. I do wonder how these folks with neck tattoos do at job interviews. Here in Atlanta, this latter minority culture with giant, waddling single moms with 3 kids everywhere and hordes of young, directionless men clutching their baggy pants is a thing to behold, albeit with a depressing incredulity. How could there be so many useless, basically wandering people making no real contribution to anything? The same could be said for the mindless consumers driving their Prius hybrids out of the IKEA parking garage. I laugh when I see the token blue recycling bin in front of the giant McMansion that replaced the much-smaller and practical ranchburger, as if they are making a big difference in the world. They’ve got TWO big AC compressors whirring away to cool their giant house where only TWO of them live. What a joke.
LOL. Nice exercise in psychological projection, “diogen”, aka a-thousand-and-one-alias-names. Of-course, everything you just said, I’ve already said about you in our previous encounter. So back to your regular scheduled racist baiting sessions you go with your bosom buddy Vlad, I really don’t give a shit. 🙂
As someone who spent 2/5 of my life as a European, and 3/5 (so far) as an American, I’d like to share my thoughts on this culture debate. Every culture has low-brow, mid-brow and hi-brow aspects to it. Some posters here compared the hi/mid brow European cultures with low-brow aspect of American culture, which is clearly comparing apples to meat-by-products. If you compare the low-aspects of European culture with high-aspects of American culture, Europe would look rather dim.
Vlad is correct, misguided liberalism is changing the landscape of Europe in a way which may be deadly to the best of European culture, and ironically to liberalism itself.
Still it’s interesting, that in the link provided by someone here, one half of the top 10 best cities in Europe are in the German-speaking world. We in the U.S. have much to learn, and would benefit greatly, from emulating the ways in which the Europeans inhabit their landscape (to borrow a phrase from JHK). In much of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, city sidewalks have lanes for bike riders, virtually all streets and even many inter-town roads have dedicated bike lanes separated from the road, and they don’t destroy their cities by routing highways thru them. They don’t allow corporations to destroy small businesses (this is true of most places in Western Europe, most shops and restaurants are not corporate look-alikes, family owned shops are the rule and are thriving).
I think one difference is that most Europeans aspire to mid/high brow aspect of culture there, where in the U.S. the low-brow culture is promoted by corporations for its profit potential. There’s some degree of egalitarianism in that, but for the most part it’s detrimental to the quality of life for all Americans.
Another great American decease is grandiosity and a grandeur delusion. Somehow we fancy ourselves the world’s benefactor and the world’s policeman. Most of the foreign aid we provided for the underdeveloped world in the last 50 years ended up benefiting Mercedes Benz and other European luxury goods makers than it benefited its intended recepients (aid being stolen by the elits and enriching them). THis grandiosity delusion is bankrupting both the gov’t and the American people, not to mention the American lives being wasted in foreign lands.
So much more to say, but I’ll stop here. The redemption for America will be politicians who have the courage and conviction to say “America for Americans’, and the electorate supporting them.
I concur with calling out this neo-traditional cohort of Gen-X parent freaks. That model is a boon to the economy, and a great target for markenting all sorts of shite. And lawns…don’t get me started on lawns…
Why is it that the average foreigner seems to have a better grasp of style than the average American? By foreigners, I include the Europeans, many Asians and Polynesians, even Africans. I’m not saying that all foreigners have an eye for style, but I would say that most Americans are clueless. What’s also rather startling is that most Americans stem from foreign roots. It’s almost as though ignorance of style is some kind of American affliction that is transmissible. Also interesting is that it wasn’t always that way. If you take a walk in the older parts of American cities, there is clear evidence of style being an important factor. JHK rails about this frequently, of course. But what happened to the Americans? How and why have we become so crude?
Hard working illegals? What the hell? Those jobs belong to Americans not the little brown Nazis! Leave off the pipe for a few days until your head clears and then – THINK AGAIN WHITE MAN.
Atta boy Mika, you tell him. According to the Talmud, only Jews are human beings – all other races and nations being just animals. You’ve gone this far – why not tell them everything?
Yeah…how COULD they?
Jews are so self-deceptive, it’s pathologically impossible to understand how having your clan’s fingerprints all over every financial crisis this century might provoke alienation, NEVER MIND the perception of the zionist misbehavior in the middle east.
Just more white-baiting from JHK when he has nothing else to say. Always back to the old distrust and closet hatred of things anglo-saxon. Right now the biggest danger to us is not a bunch of toothless hicks in the Deep South, Jim, it’s from PRINCETON and HARVARD educated members of your Tribe who are systematically robbing the entire world blind with financial scams. What say ye? Oh wait, can’t comment on that EXCEPT to say that those aforementioned “rednecks” have started to NOTICE it.
Just tick down the list of the Federal Reserve Board and the vampire squid banks if you can’t figure it out, J. What are you afraid of, that people are going to NOTICE the monoethnicity of it all? What happens when people rebuke the “jew confetti” as the Bavarians referred to those rentenmarks?
People who refuse to learn from history…
So true on Ikea…. and for that same instance prefabricated homes…. what a bunch of brainwashing Dwell magazine has done …. its all still consumer culture… that is supposed to look ‘cultured’ but what it really is is cheap presto building materials with the right laminate glued to the outside, made in a depressing factory, then marketed, marketed, marketed till it comes out a winner. My Gen X class mates have piles of Dwell mags stacked up just wishing they could have something from a factory too…. weird!
As a designer… I have my agreements with Kunstler and my disagreements…. I do think that humans should be able to express the way they want to live in a home, but this should not be decided by only Historicists. The problem with housing now has so much to do with our codified times…. everything has to meet a mediocre standard…. and nothing beyond this is really pushed… except for glamor… and glitz, and size…bigger is better.
Most town Zoning standards ensure that we drive everywhere… the European model that the new urbanist wax for is really the traditional housing over shop space. In america we build suburbs that try to be as if they were rural…. they are rural in some aspects like you dont have a neighbor to talk to ….you fenced him off… you have to drive really far to get some food. But they are not rural… you cant have chickens, you can barely grow a small garden… and with all the round up the neighbors use… I wouldnt eat them anyway.
Home Buildings have become so codified… thanks to the IRC (International Residential Code. globalized construction codes great!) Everything is typified, given a number, a fire rating…. and the construction products industries sleep with Dow Chemical… so they get better ratings.
As a designer / builder its almost impossible to meet these modern codes… its like the home has turned into a Space shuttle…. it is expensive from the get go just to pass town planning which seems to want to push through with mega size box stores, and 25 yr homes… meaning they fall apart in 25 yrs…. What ever happened to a simple well built home, but maybe designed with the inhabitant in mind. Not just a TV watching, Consumer…. and I guess that is where we are at.
The whole building industry has become just that … industry that measures homes as ‘Units’.
I dont know about you but referring to my home as a unit….. something just wrong about that. I have given up on the idea of ownership of a home… really its a shitty overpriced ‘investment?’ that resembles a trap set by banks located in Texas. I for one like the freedom of not being tied to a piece of real estate … and what makes it so ‘real’ … a big price tag? And once you get the home…. then you can fill it up n with Ikea junk… cause supposedly you will never have to move again… hurrah!
your sick….you need some psychological counseling… your twisted… Americans are multinational… always have been… remember Ellis Island?
Which came first the Chicken or the Egg?
Is it the elite Educated manipulative bankers, lawyers, politicians that have caused the system to crash? or ….is it the mindless consumers that eat sugar covered hydrogenated fats for breakfast to feed there diabetes and brains, and travel 100 miles to go to work at walmart, and get a free tattoo as a rebate for their Harley Davidson exhaust baffler…. Oh… and from the South. Could help if everyone stopped blaming everyone and looked inward at their own loser ways. We have all sold out… just some dont want to admit it.
>According to the Talmud
I searched the web and I couldn’t find the relevant passage, could you provide the reference to a credible source?
Well, Vladik, when you behave as a criminal beast you don’t get to qualify as a normal human being, not in my eyes. And when a whole culture and society with its institutions voluntarily vote for and follow criminal beasts, and do so on a consistent and repeated basis over thousands of years, than as far as I’m concerned they too disqualify themselves as human beings in my eyes. It’s a simple arithmetic, Vladik. Really not that hard to understand. Really.
>And lawns…don’t get me started on lawns…
When fossil fuel is to scarce for lettuce and carrots to travel from CA to a Chicago supermarket, folks in Chicago will grow their own lettuce and carrots where a lawn once was…
It is really no great mystery how Germany “lost it’s collective mind” in the years between WWI and WWII…. it was engineered.
John Foster Dulles slipped a couple of paragraphs into the treaty of Versailles that almost guaranteed the outcome to be what it was. (hyperinflation, destruction of Germany’ middle class, conditions ripe for a dictator).
Lord Curzon called the Treaty “Not peace, but rather twenty years truce”
He was so right.
Madness does not “JUST happen”…. it is engineered. Hitler couldn’t have done what he did without the I.G. Farben Chemical Company, and I.G.Farben could not have done what it did without money and raw materials… provided by Standard Oil, IBM, Brown Brothers Harriman….(Rockefeller’s and Bushes)
(“funny” how banks and oil companies seem to always be RIGHT THERE, at center of history)
Acerbic comments once again from JK about flying while flying.
Everyone has to change but him.
Fail.
trav777,
Questions for you:
Did you ever notice the “money ethnicity” of anglo-saxon petroleum industry criminals? (Project BP. Project Standard Oil. Project ARAMCO. Project Saudia. etc.)
Did you ever notice the “money ethnicity” of anglo-saxon auto industry criminals? (Project General Motors. Project Ford. etc.)
Did you ever notice the “money ethnicity” of anglo-saxon rail industry criminals? (Project too many to name)
Did you ever notice the “money ethnicity” of anglo-saxon housing industry criminals? (Project Suburbia. Project lie on your mortgage loan application)
Did you ever notice the “money ethnicity” of anglo-saxon war industry criminals? (Project WWI & WWII. Project Holocaust. Project Vietnam War. Project Iran-Iraq War. Project Gulf War I & II. Project every mideast war in the last 100 years)
Did you ever notice the “money ethnicity” of anglo-saxon food industry criminals? (Project Mad Cow Disease. Project Monsanto. etc)
Did you ever notice the “money ethnicity” of anglo-saxon religion industry criminals? (Project Pederast. Project free housing and tax-free living for all pederasts)
Did you ever notice the “money ethnicity” of anglo-saxon propaganda industry criminals? (Project CIA. Project SIS. Project BBC. Project CBC. Project MSM)
Did you ever notice the “money ethnicity” of anglo-saxon genocidal imperialists? (Project Amerikkka. Project KKKanada. Project South AfriKKKa. Project Australia. Project India. Project China. etc.)
Just asking.
1st..its you’re
2nd….the US is a nation. its history of immigration is honestly outline in pat buchanons and pete brimlows books.in ’65 the nations of origins clause was erasedand thats….THE BEGINNING OF THE END.
3rd…it was js/vlad who taught me bout emma lazarus and her racism!
HOW MUCH OVER 60+ YEARS?
adjusted for inflation is it trillions the us has given the gd israelis?
“In fact, more oil is spilled from the delta’s network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig last month.”
But the thing is, the BP disaster is just beginning. Can you even imagine what the Gulf will look like by August, when the relief wells are supposed to tap in and “stop” the leak?
Oh, what if they fail to stop it, or even worse, they blow out too? Then we will have 3 wells spilling over 100k bbls a day into the gulf.
Its not looking good.
But say, did you know that Florida now has black sand beaches, just like Hawaii? And no volcanos too. Get your tickets now….
‘Americans are multinational…’
oxymoron from a moron
what the fu*k…you are really deracinated
I dont think amazon is better than BODHI TREE.
but BT didnt put its catalog online and that spelled its end.
kindle seems to be where books are going, but not for me and others past 40.
clearly KHJ doesnt like ‘conservatives’ n ‘southnas’!
commies and facists know to ‘ get em while they are young’.
>Did you ever notice the “money ethnicity” of >anglo-saxon
Mika, you’re smoking the same crap that Vlad does, xcept he has interesting things to say, but you’re an imbecile 🙂
I’m done with you, enjoy the ride while your “project” is sinking fast… because of imbeciles like you…
Have a nice day 🙂
Oh, and did you notice over the past years the “money ethnicity” of the million anglo-saxon crooked and corrupt US law-enforcement agents and politicians from local, state, and the fed gov?
Again, trav777, just asking.
“Mika, you’re smoking the same crap that Vlad”
==
Not at all, “diogen”. I’m just holding a mirror to you racists, that’s all I’m doing. Btw, how come I never see you rebuke your racist bosom buddy Vlad? How come you seem to hold faith in him? (and for such a long time now). LOL. 🙂
>Btw, how come I never see you rebuke your racist >bosom buddy Vlad?
See how full of shit you are? If you actually read the posts from the past weeks, you’d know that Vlad and I have had nothing but disagreements, and I called Vlad on his errors of fact and judgement. You’re an extremist of the worst kind, and now I’m really done with you. Oh yeah, and you’re an imbecile too.
To join the cultural bend of this discussion, I find the following as/more disturbing than the alleged redneck NASCAR/beer/bass-boat activity:
– Traveling in public wearing pajamas or sweatsuits
– Listening to horrible pop music (Lady Gaga = Miley Cyrus = Beyonce = 2 possible tempos written in 3 possible musical keys and then techno filtered/corrected)
– More and more reality TV shows that seem like they should be satirical but are serious (do you think the Germans have ‘Housewives of Dusseldorf’?) – to be fair, I hear there’s plenty junky stuff on their tube too.
– Pimped out cell phone ring tones
The culture meter is at an all time low and its happening in these Northern United States too!
😀
“Diogen”, you’re too funny!
Did you call him an imbecile too? Did you call him a psychopath and a sociopath?
Or do you only reserve these terms for Jooooooooooooooooooos pointing out your blatant racism.
Anyway, I’m done here. Fun as it was, I got better things to do than to waste my time with you homely losers.
Good grief, Jim, take a chill pill. It’s getting downright depressing to watch you wallow in a cesspool of despondant semantics every Monday morning. Yea, things are crappy — really crappy. But most people I know who are going to take it in the neck someday because of a financial crash will richly deserve their pain. Oh, there are the few who see it coming and can’t do anything about it but the vast majority of people who will suffer the most just don’t care about worrying over the future or are too damn lazy to do what it takes to get better prepared. You keep laying the wood to the NASCAR crowd every week when it’s a good bet most of the fans at the Daytona 500 are way ahead of the average schmuck walking down Main Street, USA who hasn’t a clue about how to protect themselves, can some veggies or field dress game killed with a firearm or a bow and arrow. The suckers still salivating over Obama being President are the ones I am anxious to see standing in the streets wondering where the hell their public assistance went. At least the Palin idiots will be able to defend whoever is living under the bridge with them and their families. My wife and I sacrificed a lot of good times over the years to be in the position we are now. I’ll be disappointed when the SHTF but it’s gonna happen so I’ve got no pity for the weak or the stupid because they didn’t get ready for what’s coming, they kept blowing money on junk and they just flat refused to get with the program. If a person’s job got shipped to someplace where toilets are a rarity then they should get busy doing whatever it takes to survive and don’t depend on the generous handouts our clueless politicians who think they are somehow going to avoid the inevitable crash with federal handouts/bailouts and also absolve themselves from their guilt in putting America in line for ye olde financial squat hump that’s on its way.
LOL! You sound like you’ve been reading some Elijah Muhammad. Check out the Autobiography of Malcolm X to discover how he shook the chains of Elijah’s propaganda.
Sadly, it got him killed.
You took your eye off the ball again JHK. Events in the good old United States have once again taken a back seat to the powder keg in the Middle East and this is going to have ramifacations that make the oil spill in the Gulf look like a tempest in a teapot. Get ready for $10 a gallon gas and long lineups at the gas pumps that are reminiscent of Serbia cira 1992 all over North America because it looks like all the rage in the Islamic world has finally boiled over after the latest propaganda campaign by the supporters of Hamas ended in a huge clusterfuck off the coast of Israel and Lebanon has formally declared war on Israel.
If Obama was like other presidents, he would not go after British Petroleum for criminally negligent homicide that resulted in the death of eleven oil rig workers… but Obama is going after BP.
“We will closely examine the actions of those involved in the spill. If we find evidence of illegal behavior, we will be extremely forceful in our response,” Holder said in New Orleans.
george: Lebanon has formally declared war on Israel.
JERUSALEM – Israeli military aircraft came under anti-aircraft fire over Lebanon on Tuesday but there were no casualties, an Israeli security source said.
Israeli planes over Lebanon. Lebanon engages in self defense. Is that “formally declaring war on Israel” or just shooting at planes in Lebanon’s air space? There is a difference.
A declaration of war is the action of a formal governmental body. For example, Israel is still at war with Lebanon and Syria since the Yom Kippur War.
Dio, I googled “Talmud, only Jews are human beings” I clicked on the first link that came up and it contained the following … and more.
========================
“The Jews are called human beings, but the non-Jews are not humans. They are beasts.”
Talmud: Baba mezia, 114b
————————
“The Akum (non-Jew) is like a dog. Yes, the scripture teaches to honour the the dog more than the non-Jew.”
Ereget Raschi Erod. 22 30
———————–
“Even though God created the non-Jew they are still animals in human form. It is not becoming for a Jew to be served by an animal. Therefore he will be served by animals in human form.”
Midrasch Talpioth, p. 255, Warsaw 1855
——————-
“A pregnant non-Jew is no better than a pregnant animal.”
Coschen hamischpat 405
——————-
“The souls of non-Jews come from impure sprits and are called pigs.”
Jalkut Rubeni gadol 12b
—————
“Although the non-Jew has the same body structure as the Jew, they compare with the Jew like a monkey to a human.”
Schene luchoth haberith, p. 250 b
—————–
“If you eat with a Gentile, it is the same as eating with a dog.”
Tosapoth, Jebamoth 94b
——————
“If a Jew has a non-Jewish servant or maid who dies, one should not express sympathy to the Jew. You should tell the Jew: “God will replace ‘your loss’, just as if one of his oxen or asses had died”.”
Jore dea 377, 1
——————-
“Sexual intercourse between Gentiles is like intercourse between animals.”
Talmud Sanhedrin 74b
——————-
“It is permitted to take the body and the life of a Gentile.”
Sepher ikkarim III c 25
——————–
“It is the law to kill anyone who denies the Torah. The Christians belong to the denying ones of the Torah.”
Coschen hamischpat 425 Hagah 425. 5
—————–
“A heretic Gentile you may kill outright with your own hands.”
Talmud, Abodah Zara, 4b
—————–
“Every Jew, who spills the blood of the godless (non-Jews), is doing the same as making a sacrifice to God.”
Talmud: Bammidber raba c 21 & Jalkut 772
—————-
How does a Jew prepare for his crime?
Moed Kattan 17a . If a Jew is tempted to do evil he should go to a city where he is not known and do the evil there.
Hitting a Jew is the same as hitting God
Sanhedrin 58b. If a heathen (gentile) hits a Jew, the gentile must be killed.
O.K. to Cheat Non-Jews
Sanhedrin 57a . A Jew need not pay a gentile (“Cuthean”) the wages owed him for work.
Jews Have Superior Legal Status
Baba Kamma 37b. “If an ox of an Israelite gores an ox of a Canaanite there is no liability; but if an ox of a Canaanite gores an ox of an Israelite…the payment is to be in full.”
Jews May Steal from Non-Jews
Baba Mezia 24a . If a Jew finds an object lost by a gentile (“heathen”) it does not have to be returned. (Affirmed also in Baba Kamma 113b). Sanhedrin 76a. God will not spare a Jew who “marries his daughter to an old man or takes a wife for his infant son or returns a lost article to a Cuthean…”
Jews May Rob and Kill Non-Jews
Sanhedrin 57a . When a Jew murders a gentile (“Cuthean”), there will be no death penalty. What a Jew steals from a gentile he may keep.
—————–
Baba Kamma 37b. The gentiles are outside the protection of the law and God has “exposed their money to Israel.”
——————
Jews May Lie to Non-Jews
Baba Kamma 113a. Jews may use lies (“subterfuges”) to circumvent a Gentile.
Non-Jewish Children are Sub-Human
Yebamoth 98a. All gentile children are animals.
—————–
Abodah Zarah 36b. Gentile girls are in a state of niddah (filth) from birth.
—————-
Abodah Zarah 22a-22b . Gentiles prefer sex with cows.
—————–
Insults Against Blessed Mary
Sanhedrin 106a . Says Mary was a whore: “She who was the descendant of princes and governors played the harlot with carpenters.” Also in footnote #2 to Shabbath 104b of the Soncino edition, it is stated that in the “uncensored” text of the Talmud it is written that Jesus mother, “Miriam the hairdresser,” had sex with many men.
Horrible Blasphemy Against Jesus Christ
Gittin 57a. Says Jesus is being boiled in “hot excrement.”
Sanhedrin 43a. Jesus deserved execution: “On the eve of the Passover, Yeshu (Jesus) was hanged…Do you suppose that he was one for whom a defense could be made? Was he not a Mesith (enticer)?”
Talmud Attacks Non jews beliefs
Rosh Hashanah 17a. Christians (minnim) and others who reject the Talmud will go to hell and be punished there for all generations.
——————-
Shabbath 116a. Jews must destroy the books of the Christians, i.e. the New Testament.
————–
Dr. Israel Shahak of Hebrew University reports that the Israelis burned hundreds of New Testament Bibles in occupied Palestine on March 23, 1980 (cf. Jewish History, Jewish Religion, p. 21).
—————–
Sick and Insane Teachings of the Talmud
Yebamoth 63a. States that Adam had sexual intercourse with all the animals in the Garden of Eden.
—————-
Yebamoth 63a. Declares that agriculture is the lowest of occupations.
Sanhedrin 55b. A Jew may marry a three year old girl (specifically, three years “and a day” old).
—————
Sanhedrin 54b. A Jew may have sex with a child as long as the child is less than nine years old.
—————
Kethuboth 11b. “When a grown-up man has intercourse with a little girl it is nothing.”
—————-
Yebamoth 59b. A woman who had intercourse with a beast is eligible to marry a Jewish priest. A woman who has sex with a demon is also eligible to marry a Jewish priest.
—————
Abodah Zarah 17a. States that there is not a whore in the world that the Talmudic sage Rabbi Eleazar has not had sex with.
—————
Hagigah 27a. States that no rabbi can ever go to hell.
—————-
Baba Mezia 59b. A rabbi debates God and defeats Him. God admits the rabbi won the debate.
————–
Pesahim 111a. It is forbidden for dogs, women or palm trees to pass between two men, nor may others walk between dogs, women or palm trees. Special dangers are involved if the women are menstruating or sitting at a crossroads.
—————–
Menahoth 43b-44a. A Jewish man is obligated to say the following prayer every day: Thank you God for not making me a gentile, a woman or a slave.
Is that “formally declaring war on Israel” or just shooting at planes in Lebanon’s air space? There is a difference.
=====================
What do you mean when you say “Lebanon’s air space?” I was in an airplane over the mideast and there were no visible borders in the air above one country vs other countries.
You know what’s interesting about books -actual books, not Kindles? Hard copies are a nice hedge against technology that can make content disappear anytime. Money can disappear electronically; so can history and literature without a PC agenda.
This is particularly true in research where students now get their information from the internet where every idea and POV is presented with parity.
Qshtik: “What do you mean when you say “Lebanon’s air space?” I was in an airplane over the mideast and there were no visible borders in the air above one country vs other countries.”
Don’t tell me you are one of those people who don’t believe in borders! Borders are artificial, man-made, imaginary, non-existent lines that, in the imagination, can extend directly upward into space… and then wars can be fought over them. Both Israel and Lebanon believe those lines exist.
The realization spreads:
http://www.miller-mccune.com/environment/peak-oil-and-apocalypse-then-16535/
U.S. Workers Report Most Job Creation in 19 Months?
Gallup’s Job Creation Index hit its best level in 19 months in May, with 28% of employees saying their companies are hiring and 21% saying their companies are letting people go.
Hiring now exceeds firing in all regions of the United States.
wow! I googled the same string as you and got a bunch of hits. I think the one you went for may be from a website called http://www.missionislam.com. Not sure if mission islam is a credible source on jews, but still I asked my biking buddy Dave about it (he’s a jew). He said there are lots of fabrications in cyberspace attributed to talmud, most have been discredited, others taken out of context. I dunno. What bothers me more though is the renegade outlaw deeds of israel… we sure know how to pick friends and allies… and for what, they don’t even have any oil 🙂
>Money can disappear electronically
For me, it was after a divorce 🙁
I share your reservations about electronic books, or any kind of electronic records. My kids can’t conceive that computers or internet may be unavailable for any period of time, most of their books and music (and personal records) are online.
I can see a number of plausible scenarios that can render electronic data kaput. So I’m hanging on to my paper copies of the organic gardening and mother earth news!
Jim,
It truly is depressing “coming home” to America. the 3rd world. I remember the first time I realized the U.S. had become a third world was after living in Mexico City in 1990; in explanation, Mexico–Mexico! had a public transit system that was so superior to ours, I came to the conclusion that having a car in Mexico City was an inconvenience, whereas taking public transportation in the U.S. was, in a practical, gotta-get-somewhere-sometime-this-year sense, simply impractical. There were other Mexican superiorities (the family cohesiveness not least among them), but that should do.
The second time I was reminded that the U.S. had become a third world country was when returning home after having lived in Tokyo for a year in ’92-’93. I’d already accepted the fact that what the U.S. passed off as public transportation would be disallowed by the Geneva convention in war time, but now I had become frighteningly aware of just how dirty, fat, stupid, obnoxious and rude the average American is in the average public venue; in fact, I was so repulsed by the filth of the streets and sidewalks and the rudeness of those that waddled along them while dripping catsup and fudge from their chocolate whammy burgers that I hibernated in my apartment on the beach for six months–I never came outside. I couldn’t. It made me literally ill to be among them.
The third time I realized the U.S. had long since slipped down the slippery slope of nth worldism was after returning “home” from four glorious years in South Korea, living among what can only be reasonably described as the Kings and Queens of the world that should have been: South Koreans, on average, are extremely intelligent; physically, they are something akin to Rambo meets Fred Astair (they’re all black belts in Taekwando); they’re as active as mountain goats and can climb better; most of them play multiple musical instruments (you can pretty much spontaneously formulate an orchestra anywhere there are more than a few people gathered); and Koreans really love to spend time together in conversation, games and song, and they don’t sweat the small stuff–they’re too busy living to interupt life for a meaningless argument. They’re simply superior beings, on average.
As for cleanliness and public transportation, they enjoy standards that a large part of the U.S. could not even conceive of: cleaner than soap and faster than lightning (you can traverse the country, from Kim Jong-il’s northern vicinity to the southern-most tip (Busan, where the last stand of the Korean war was made and held prior to the American retaking of Seoul via Incheon) in less time that the average Korean man spends bathing at the sauna!
Plotting my next–and final–escape from the U.S. for “the fall…”
And I’d rather be dead than buy a round trip ticket this time.
Welcome back Jim!
I think we probably should check how our slum “culture” is zippin’ along in the good ol’ slum nation. Mmmmmm, yummy tat’s.
http://damncoolpics.blogspot.com/2010/05/55-bad-unicorn-tattoos.html
There, I’ve done my linkin’ dooty; where’s Mary Todd at, anyhoo?
Ps. ‘S’wounds; I kinda like Robocop riding the my-little-pony unicorn. (Gawd he’p me!)
And was there no America or Americans before “Ellis Island”? Or were the Indians the first Americans – as if a Nation is nothing more than geography. Look ignorant one – a nation is the story of a people. A family becomes a clan, a collection of clans become a tribe, and a collection of tribes become a nation. Indians have nothing to do with America per se – they’re just the ones whom we conquered to get the land that would become America. Too brutal for you? Then get the fuck out. It was necessary. There would be no America without the dispossesion of the Indigenes. Your staying here with views like this is nothing but bad faith, existentially speaking. Get out you undesirable alienated one.
Aw c’mon buddy – don’t deny our relatonship. Mika’s just jealous.
The complete Talmud can be found online at come-and-hear.com. Also you could google Christ and the Talmud to get the Christian perspective. There are innumerable sites. Or you could investigate the late Dr Israel Shahak who spoke out against both the ancient Talmudic hatred and its modern forms.
As for your friend: many liberal or secualr Jews don’t know anything about this – and they don’t want to know. They play the same psychological games with themselves and others to avoid finding out as they do about the history between the Palestinians and the Israelis. It took me weeks of enduring bitter denial before I could get my Jewish friend to investigate for himself the filth that is in the Talmud. One of his idea was for us to go to a Rabbi and just ask him. I vetoed this because Rabbis are instructed to lie about any of this to outsiders. Your friend might be lying to you too – but chances are he’s just uninformed and resistant to getting informed.
Thank you for your outrage – where is everybody else’s? I mean Mika was openly talking about genocide! His attitude is not rare as you will soon find out. The attitudes formed by the Talmud survived the Jewish Enlightenment and secularization among a hard core of the Elite and Wealthy Jews – and of course among the remaining Orthodox. Ariel Sharon once said, a Jews can judge any man, but no man can judge a Jew. Pure Talmud since Jews are human and goyim aren’t. Goyim means cattle btw. They see themselves as the herdsmen and us as the cattle to be used, driven, and disposed of. Look and you will see that they are driving us to a cliff and intend to drive us off.
Obama’s criminal investigation of BP seems to have caused BP’s stock value to plunge. Obama is in charge and his favorable poll ratings are going up. Obama now has a 54% favorable rating, up from last month before the BP crimes. Obama is holding BP accountable and the public likes that.
Back when I worked in the library (before the levy failed, before I was laid off) the kids would hit the place at 3 to hit the internet and at 3:05 the whole damn thing would come to a screeching halt. T-1 lines which are pretty good, but we had bandwidths problems. (two things I DO NOT want to hear is ‘bandwidth will not support… and software will not support….”)
And these kids were incredulous. “What do you mean, the internet is down?” Well, they learned one of life’s hard little lessons. Sometimes technology doesn’t work. I figure if (when) the internet goes poof most of them will come to after 3 or 4 days. The rest will never crawl out of mom’s basement or ever see the light of day, again.
Anything I write that I really want to keep, I print out in hard copy on high rag content paper. I LIKE doing my accounting for the store on big ledger sheets. I just like that hands on feel to it. The figures are more ‘real.’
Anytime any one mentions the electronic readers in my store I grab the nearest book and throw it on the floor. Then I pick it up. “Still reads! No batteries or computer chips. Try that with your Kindle.”
Wait a minute, you have a Jewish friend?
Sweet. To expand on that, I think physical newspapers will survive because, really, who wants to take a dump in a public bathroom stall while reading the New York Times on a laptop?
Ever look at old magazine ads from the 1940s and 50s? For trains, planes or even Grayhound buses? Everyone dressed like it was a special occasion.
I can still remember the 50s. We lived in a city, blue-collar working class neighborhood. Mom never even went to the grocery store without hat, purse, gloves and nylons. And, so did every other woman in the neighborhood.
Of course, I also remember that the prevailing color schemes were gray, tan, sand and brown. Maybe a touch of fleck pink, if you were daring. Venetian glass in oranges, greens and red for a real splash. Nubby fabric. Visually, pretty damned bleak.
The greed-heads at CNBC are advising people to buy BP because its stock is now such a great deal.
Then came fast-food, Spandex and cable TV — and you can see the results they’ve wrought at your local Wal-Mart.
http://www.peopleofwalmart.com
I hope this new info is causing you to revaluate your whole view of life and the history of the 20th century. Also check out the Balfour Agreement – by which the English made a deal with the Jews that if they were able to get the United States into WW1, then the British would give them their own State in Palestine. With Wilson surrounded by Jews, they were able to do just that thus insuring that a large but still local conflict became a World War that wrecked Europe, impovershed Germany, and lead directly to WW2.
Without our intervention, the Germans would have won without invading Britain or Britain losing its Empire. And all would have been if not well, at least much better. A strong Germany would have been a great bulwark against a Communist Russia. Between the British Empire, a strong united Germany, and the growing power of the United States, Western Civilization might have stayed in decent shape instead of crumbling into capitualtion as it is now. And if America had remained “isolationist” (as the Founding Fathers admonished) surely our civil liberties would have been that much stronger. Every large war chips away at them and the rights of the States.
Ahh, WWI, the war to end all wars, here’s a less controversial topic 🙂 I recently read THE PITY OF WAR by Niall Ferguson where he proposes another view of history (the book is hard to read because it has lots of numbers and statistics) of WWI (and by implication the history of the 20th century). Basically, the British had the option of not getting involved, and by chosing to get involved, unnecessarily in Ferguson’s view, they thus laid the foundation for everything that followed: Russian revolution, Versailles treaty, and WWII.
I’ve come to an unpopular view a long time ago that the German people were as much the victims of WWII as all others, perhaps more so. The Versailles treaty was a misguided attempt by France and Britain to permanently cripple Germany, condemning the German people to the future of privation and poverty and destruction of their national spirit. Under the circumstances, it’s not a surprise they elected radical leaders who lead (and mis-lead) them into a war on the rest of the world. Hey, when people believe that the rest of the world is waging a war on them, is it any surprise they want to fight back, especially when their leaders are clever at propaganda and highly charismatic? Look at how many level-headed Americans supported (initially) the Iraq war. Anyway, the vast majority of German people were as powerless as the rest of Europe to alter the course of ensuing events. Germany lost close to 9 million people in the war, much more than U.S., France and the U.K. put together. There’s a case to be made that they were painted into a corner with all resulting consequences. We were infected by the Iraq war fever with much less provocation then the Germans were in WWII… Many people equate the Jewish genocide with WWII, but really that was just a sideshow, the real pity of that war was the wholesale slaughter of all civilians and soldiers alike… Just my opinion 🙂
This blog has really become suck ass crap. Oh, I know some of you still write exposition. But, it just seem there is far too much racial blathering, too much CF unrelated non-sense.
Lately, many comments wonder whether Jim’s penchant for hating NASCAR folks is on target. And while one can argue the fine point of inane sources of entertainment, a bigger issue is represented by Jim’s attention to the beer-swilling population that glorifies cars going circles.
My point being, there are ways to frame a thoughtful discussion about what represent truly fucked-up, incredibly selfish approaches to life and humanity.
However, no matter what semantics, no matter what social-metrics are applied to describing human behavior; your perspective boils down to a personal belief system based on values known only to you.
So I ask “who gives a fuck” about someone’s position on NASCAR, or baseball or any video games or big cars or anything else? What is needed is less finger pointing and somehow an emergence of a shared consciousness of what it means to be “for” a balanced approach to energy consumption and sustainable living conditions.
What is needed is a way to measure and define the greater good – and a means to administer life-style change through government policies that reflect the best possible policies of those who are governed.
Writing that NASCAR equals bad – or this ethnicity equals good are pretty childish attempts at a very difficult problem.
>truly fucked-up, incredibly selfish approaches to >life and humanity
and to Nature and the planet
>”who gives a fuck” about someone’s position on >NASCAR, or baseball or any video games or big cars
Yes, true. Big cars do accelerate the destruction process…
>What is needed is a way to measure and define the >greater good – and a means to administer life->style change through government policies that >reflect the best possible policies of those who >are governed.
Well put. Now, how do we do it?
I hope Mr. Kunstler re-evaluates his fixation on the NASCAR crowd and the South, we’re all implicated in this mess, it’s really unfair to zero-in on any single group.
Off-topic: Okay, Jim? I don’t really expect this to mean anything to you at all, but I still want to let you know that if you defend Israel and that flotilla-massacre in your next column, that will be the last CF I will ever read. And I will likely depart with some very unkind words. That’s how it is.
I’d think that Peak Oil has a significant implication for Israel, they are only able to maintained their hold on the land as long as there’s petroleum to power their war machinery. Once they can’t fuel their vehicles, tanks and aircraft, they will be unable to defend their state. It would’ve been much smarter for them from the start to integrate themselves into the region and build alliances with their neighbors instead of depending on the military might to keep the neighbors out. My guess — Israel is finished in 10-15 years as Peak Oil hits. And if they continue to flout civilized behavior, maybe sooner.
Peak Oil will surely re-draw the map of the world… It would seem that Saudis and Kuwaitis have as much to fear the day when the oil runs low, not only will we (the U.S.) lose an interest in defending them, their fossil fuel war machinery is the only thing that keeps the hordes of their more radical brethren from taking power…
And what, may I ask, is the source of your irrational hatred toward the Middle East’s only democracy? Have Israeli commandos taken your family hostage? Has MOSSAD been monitoring your phone calls as of late? Truth be told, I don’t see how a bunch of Israeli soldiers armed with paint guns could be held solely responsible for that great clusterfuck on the high seas. If those peaceniks on the flotilla had nothing to hide, why did they begin attacking Israeli soldiers with crow bars even before the Israeli’s had landed aboard that ship? Oh, yes and what about that dead soldier who was murdered by a member of the flotilla? How do YOU think his family feels about losing a loved one in the prime of his life?
George, the Israelis had no business on those ships. In fact, they boarded them illegally in international waters.
george said: “I don’t see how a bunch of Israeli soldiers armed with paint guns”
They boarded a ship in international waters, which is what pirates do.
They took people and imprisoned them, which is what kidnappers do.
They are slowly starving 1.5 million people in Gaza, which constitutes “collective punishment” and is a war crime, a violation of Geneva accords.
February 2006:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0227/p17s01-cogn.html
60% of the population of Gaza has no food security or ready access to water. The blockade is inhumane, immoral, and illegal.
“60% of the population of Gaza has no food security or ready access to water. The blockade is inhumane, immoral, and illegal.”
=====================================
….and the leadership of Gaza is sworn to the 100% destruction of Israel, with the complicity of the population, but I guess that’s OK some how?
This is illustrative of the problem I have with ideologies, they have an almost pathological disregard for a full spectrum view of the problem.
One cannot logically, or fairly, disregard the Arab/Muslim obsession with violence and vengence as positive cultural values. While the Israelis have become almost as bad as what they oppose, the Palestinian “problem” will not resolve itself until the Muslim Arabs divest themselves of their own stubborn clinging to ancient barbaric values.
“….and the leadership of Gaza is sworn to the 100% destruction of Israel, with the complicity of the population, but I guess that’s OK some how?”
Don’t put words in my mouth, Dale. I do not support violence on either side. In any case, punishing an entire population because of its “leadership” is a war crime under international law.
“One cannot logically, or fairly, disregard the Arab/Muslim obsession with violence and vengence as positive cultural values.”
Please cite a source re: “the Arab/Muslim obsession with violence and vengeance” that justifies the use of the word “the”
Your ideology may be showing here, dale, to paint with such a broad brush. Most Arabs/Muslims are not violent and want exactly what Jews want: to raise their children in peace, with food and water, and to have the dignity of work.
If some Hamas militants are shooting rockets into Israel, do something about those individuals. Do not punish 1.5 million people. That is against the Judaic conceptions of law and justice, and against the commandments Moses brought to the Jewish people.
JHK is CRAZY. The guys writing on this forum are mostly all completely crazy, outside of reality, not knowing anything at all about the real world. They have all these fairy tale models within the comfort zone of their own minds, within the non threatening and completely pridictable and controlling environment of their own mind and thought paths.
The truth is 90 % of the REST OF THE WORLD outside of the United States is a monstrous SLUM! they are all mostly poor, high density towns cities without parking, without any kinds of real super big stores like in the US malls and strip malls, crowded, crappy, very few sidewalks, tiny homes 4 in 40 square meters if you are lucky or “rich”, no running water for the most part, no toilet or sanitation for the most part, crappy roads for the most part, no electricity for the most part, polluted, very little public transportation for the most part, no work, no money, no anything. Take a look at 90 % of India, China, Latin America, Africa, most of Europe. Are you guys kidding me ?
The USA suburbs would appear to be utopia to most of these folks, would be paradise on earth. Everyone has a “huge” home by their standards, fresh air, front and back yard, green grass, opne air, peace and quiet, wide comfortable roads, wide sidewalks, etc.
The USA is terribly spoiled, really, REALLY spoiled big time, so spoiled that they are really unaware of how massively high their standard of living is compard to 90 % of the rest of the world. Just one Walmart has more choice, more retail room, more parking, more everything than most of the entire city of Paris or London.
Wake up, the USA is way too rich to know what to do with itslef so it is chewing itself out, self destructing with health care costs, layoffs, etc.
eightm, you forgot one very important thing the United States does have:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Bus_transportation_in_the_United_States
Perhaps it is time to walk a new path…
http://wanderingsagewisdom.blogspot.com/
The kids are alright – sure they are. Instead of using the internet as the ultimate tool of education, they and the older kids in their 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s use it for facebook, myspace, and pornography. Now libraries, SO sensitive to “needs” are begining to downsize books and bring in ever more computers.
And the problems of the real world are echoed in cyberspace. Whites fled from the jungle atmosphere of myspace for the bucolic innocence of facebook. Scammers and Nigerians abound in cyberspace – traveler beware.
You are right – don’t anyone get too comfortable here. And don’t throw away your books.
asoka, you are just too cruel 😉
Yes and he is a saint for putting up with my tirades. You think I’m bad here, you should hear me in person…
I don’t blame all Jews for everything the Jews have collectively done. And I would hope (mostly in vain) that other races wouldn’t hold White Sins against me personally.
But none of these personal considerations deters me from the main issue: securing living space and a future for White Children. And you and your cohort are the worst – it’s so UNCOOL to care about White people – as if there can be any Western Civilization without us.
My friend and I agree to disagree. He’s never going to admit the obvious genocidal intent of the Judeo Masons, but he does now listen to Michael Savage due to my influnce. And he’s never going to admit the need for an All White refuge on this continent. But he does see enough to understand and forgive. He sees the Liberal Madness that is destroying this country. And he’s see the hatred that is focused on Whites and particularly White Men. And he even admits the Jewish Elite are very deeply involved in the perpetration of these things. Sometimes he knows this and sometimes he doesn’t.
Read Qshtk’s Quotes from the Talmud above. This is the source of Kunstler’s Gentile bashing. Not that he had any formal training – but the attitudes sometimes persisted even in Reform Judaism or completely secular families.
Attire does have a lot to do with the poor manners and the general slovenly behavior we see in the US. It is an act of civility to dress appropriately in public; sparing your fellow man from the eyesore of too much flesh and this is particularly true if said flesh is in poor condition. People do tend to behave better if dressed nicely. I agree that the way people come to airports is the worst. Add flip-flops to the list of bad travel attire.
I understand what JHK is saying about Europe; I spent several months in northern spain walking the camino de compostella de santiago. I could have stayed in Pamplona indefinitely. This was a different kind of trip than a Euro vacation. It was not a tourist experience as the camino goes through tiny villages, industrial towns, and long stretches across high sierra-like landscapes with smaller populations. With only a backpack for months i learned very quickly just how much stuff i didnt need. I was very content and alive living with less but having much more in the ways that sustain the spirit.
I think people tend to live well in Europe – more relaxed and more focused on real life and the beauties of life. Its too loud here, too frenetic. Too flashy. Too full of shit. But I still love “us”, or what “us” could be. We’ve lost our way. Maybe hardship will do us some good.
When I came off that pilgrimage, I decided to move to the country and begin a more sane life. It doesnt have to be NASCAR and WallyWorld and unicorn tatts. It can be music on the porch; garden to table meals; good dogs, good friends etc, etc….I’m just sayin’.
Vlad, I found the same quotes as Qshtik, they were on an islamic website, the whole website didn’t seem credible. I followed your link too, it was too much to read, but it looks like all the crap was written between 200 and 2,000 years ago. I asked my buddy Dave about it, he said no one he knows has read the talmud or even thinks it has any relevance to their lives. He thinks isolated orthodox sects read it, but they are weird in every other way (his words, not mine, apologies if anyone is offended).
My take on it is there’s anachronistic crap in all religious writings, including the Bible and the Koran (although i haven’t read it). I think only extremists take it seriously, but they are losers no matter what religion they belong to.
When did this comment section become such a forum for Jew haters and anti-Mexican sentiment. I think I’ll stick with reading Jim’s weekly rant and avoiding the disgusting muck below the fold.
Is it daft of me at this point to ask, what should they do instead of “watching TV” ? “socialize”, you guys are crazy, how much socialization can people take, especially after a day of work, fighting other humans essentially. And this myth of community, talking to others is so much BS, it isn’t even funny. There is a thread against pleasure in these forums, a punishing thread going on against people just sitting, minding their own business and watching TV. Well those people are the best in the world, they don’t bother anyone, and they are doing the most productive thing in the world, minding their own business and enjoying.
Dealing with other people and socialization is mostly a big pain in the ass for almost everyone, the TV culture is the future of humanity, is the solution to all our problems essentially.
Then you have this thread against consumerism, against people going out and constantly buying stuff. Well guess what ? if it weren’t for this “evil” consumerism you all would be starving to death! Why is the USA the only economic locomotive of the earth ? why is the USA the only country that hugely dominates the economy, is the real only engine of the economy worldwide ? because they have huge consumerism, they have mega malls, highways, a huge standard of living and consumption, enough to feed the industries of the whole world.
South Korea, JAPAN and Germany have been growing economically for 30 or more years, yet they have only one fifth at most of the consumption of the USA, they are esentially poor, can’t do anything except work for their american boses making them their TVs and cell phones, and cars, etc. Why ? because they have a culture that doesn’t cultivate the beauty of constantly buying things, new things, it doesn’t matter, just the buying gnerates economic activity. They will never even come close to the USA, in fact no nation will ever come close to the wealth of the USA, exactly because they have no consmuerism, they have no malls, mega malls. They don’t have single family homes with basement and attic where you can even place all the crap you buy: in fact an average single family home in the USA would be something only the very rich of JAPAN, South Korea or Germany could afford. Face it, the REST OF THE WORLD is poor and will reamin poor until they become exactly as the USA and that is what they all want to do: as soon as they have some money they try to build thier own single family home and start trying to consume.
Europe is against stores being open 24 – 7, what assholes! they are against mega malls, what assholes ! They have no consumption compared to the US, and even though the economic crisis was generated in and for the US, they are paying a much bigger price because they don’t want to follow the american model. What assholes, they will starve to death, good. And don’t get me started on JAPAN, the country of the lost decades and death by overtime – overwork. What assholes, don’t they know that people have to buy and consume like crazy for an economy to survive ? What assholes!
Homes with a basement, an attic all the goods inside of them and front lawns and backyards and 2 or 3 car garages ? This is utopia for most of the world, and in fact is the richest possible society that will ever be and has been. From here on it is all downward and downfall, thanks to all you idiots complaining against it.
You all have fairy tale models of the world within the controlled environment of your own minds. Instead of consumerism, “people should grow their own food in their backyard”. Well 6 billion people worldwide don’t have a backyard and dont’ even know what it is. And they mostly work in “agriculture”, the “primary” sector of the economy. And they are mostly starving and desperately trying to get into one of China’s or India’s sweatshop factories of 14 hours a day work for 100 dollars a month, just to get away from growing food, to get away from agriculture. This goes to show how clueless you all are.
Wake up guys, the economy of the 80s and 90s is over, globalization has been achieved, all of a sudden there are 100 million new workers from Indonesia to Argentina available with a decent education and very disciplined that work for a salary betwen 100 to 800 dollars a month. The handwriting is on the wall, you will all have to adapt to a standard worldwide salary of 400 dollars a month, mark my words.
AND YOU WILL ALL END UP WORKING FOR THE MAN, NOT IN YOUR BACKYARDS.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama says it’s time to roll back “billions of dollars in tax breaks” for oil companies and use the money for clean energy research and development.
FINALLY, A UNITED STATES PRESIDENT HAD THE GUTS TO SAY THIS OUT LOUD IN PUBLIC. NOW, IF CONGRESS WILL GO ALONG WITH THE PLAN, ALTERNATIVE ENERGY SOURCES CAN GET GOING STRONG.
thats never stopped them!
did they shoot down a US airship?
didnt the guy that exposed that recently die?
I will look at this.
I dont watch TV, except when im at the gym.
im horrified by whats on it. its not the cause but a symptom of how far the us/developed world has sunk!
wife swap
reality tv
ads
those born in the USA [ thanks bruce s ]/ living here without going abroad
ARE LIKE LOBSTERS IN A POT OF HOT WATER.
yes i remember the 90s a s ‘the good old days’,
prior to gatt/nafta, which is if not #1 problem right up there.
This week’s column was excellent; thoughtful and providing much insight.
Watching the BP mess destroy much of the Gulf of Mexico, threatening to become so much worse with hurricane season and the simple movement of the Jet Stream, is horrifying in the extreme.
While it’s part of the Long Emergency, and I agree our destruction will be a lengthy drawn out process, at the same time I feel like we’re on an out of control roller coaster going faster with every turn of the tracks. Surreal.
And why do people blame Obama for the spill and the failure to contain it? What do they want him to do, don a loin cloth, cram a knife into his mouth and dive in to fix it all up like some modern Tarzan or maybe Spiderman?
This mess started with Reagan and his passion for de-regulation. Instant gratification, greed and profit, and to hell with the future. That’s how we got here, folks.
Now if only Jim’s writing was matched in quality by the comments. I am tired of the nut bars, racists and fascists who derail the real debate every time.
The Jew bashing today is especially repugnant. I may just be a Canadian, Protestant old girl but I was taught to love all humanity. We are all Children of God, even if we have different ideas about who/what God is.
Revile people according to their evil deeds, not by accident of their birth.
Now smarten up people, let’s have a real conversation here.
1st south korea wouldnt exist cept for the US and its sothnas disparaged here.
see Jim Rogers books for thoughts on SK, hes spent time there.
also they are sinking…lowest birth rate on the planet. farmers find brides in nam.
hows that for eerie. they the most xenophobic people have to shop for mail order brides.
and theres charitys set up for the disowned foriegn brides.
they are a welfare state of the USA.
they are nationalists and racists , see articles written on the street kids, children of US GIs.
etcetcetc.
high IQ doesnt count for everything.
North koreas peeps had hi iqs till near starvation set in for 3 generations.
NK people are so small they cant compete in the olympics!
“Most Arabs/Muslims are not violent and want exactly what Jews want: to raise their children in peace, with food and water, and to have the dignity of work.”
===================================
If that is so why do they continue to support the most extreme and violent options available to them in terms of leadership? Gaza is a crowded and sweltering mess and the population continues to let those who are sworn to Israel’s destruction hide amongst them with impunity. Is there really any doubt that the “ship relief effort” would very quickly turn into a rearmament effort at the drop of a hat? Your argument simply bears no resemblance to the truth on the ground.
“Please cite a source re: “the Arab/Muslim obsession with violence and vengeance” that justifies the use of the word “the””
====================================
Don’t make me laugh!! How many efforts at Jihad have Muslims perpetrated in the last few years? How consistently do majorities of the populations of countries in places like Saudi Arabia, Syria, etc. support these efforts with money and the lives of their sons?
But then…why am I bothering to give you any credibility at all, in light of the fact that you have admitted that you post nonsense here just to tick people off?
Seriously Asoka, if that word can apply to you, you are WAY to predictable, you support any cockamamie cause which can be construed as a “liberation movement” no matter how devoid of value it may be. You are the unguided missile of this website.
why should I or anyone have to be pro mexico?
and are the comments any more polarized than JHKs anti southna thing he goes into ?
he even posted that faked photo of Palin in the bikini with gun.
the photo was faked by leftists.
photoshopped.
when it was exposed as a fraud JHK never posted a retraction.
hows that for white bashing!
well she gets more per speach and book than JK does! pulitzer envy.
bravo
but are you aware of other excesses of Israel over the last 60 years?
if not vlad maybe can post em
JHK, You describe American as “driving themselves to death and madness.” I won’t disagree. But the Germans are killing themselves too, in an odd, societal suicide – not having children. The Germany that you see today will no longer exist in 50 years. Their birth rate is so low (along with most Euro countries) that they will be populated by imports from across the middle east & northern africa. that’s fine, but it won’t be Germany anymore. It’ll be New Jordan, or New Africa, or some such.
Here in America we have a similar problem. Our birth rate hovers around 2.1, which is barely replacement rate, yet much of that comes from immigration. If we don’t start having more children then we face the same fate. Who does everyone think is going to pay for Obamacare?
Yet the environmentalists say our world has too many people. Wrong – it doesn’t have enough! At least not in the “rich” developed countries, which are quickly becoming poor, or worse. The only hope for Europe and America is a huge increase in the birth rate. Like yesterday!
Regarding some of the history discussed by Kunstler in his post: does anyone else see a historical pattern here in regards to the role which Jews play in nations?
For instance, Germany reached its nadir during the Weimar Republic of the 1920s-early 1930s. During the Weimar Republic Jews were also very, very powerful in Germany, hence the fervent anti-Semitism of the Nazis that followed in 1933.
Now in 2010, Jews seem to be at the apex of their power in America while the USA as a whole seems to be in a kind of nadir.
Kunstler constantly refers to the possibility of ‘cornpone Nazism’ arising in the USA, and I’m just wondering if anyone else has noticed these historical patterns in terms of nations suffering at the hands of rapacious Jewish plutocrats?
Once again, dale, the majority of Muslims/Arabs are not involved in violent jihad. The principal Jihad refers to an internal nonviolent spiritual struggle and it is in that sense of the word most Muslims engage in jihad.
But why even try to reason with you. With your posts of today you have lost all credibility as a buddhist. Your “compassion” does not extend to “the” Muslims/Arabs.
I love the Jewish people and want the diaspora to survive and thrive, but I also love the Muslims/Arabs… and it pains me to see a people so connected in so many ways fighting each other.
“The only hope for Europe and America is a huge increase in the birth rate.”
Yeah, that will help a lot when the natural gas used to produce most artificial fertilizers gets too scarce/expensive. Remember, most estimates are that sustainable agriculture can feed about 2 billion people worldwide. The real question is: Which 2 billion?
My last try at posting this didn’t go through, I hereby offer all due respect to JHK and try again:
http://www.miller-mccune.com/environment/peak-oil-and-apocalypse-then-16535/
Here’s the summary blurb from the article:
Based on the past experience of Japan, North Korea and Cuba, an Oxford researcher identifies three possible responses to peak oil: Predatory militarism, totalitarian retrenchment and socioeconomic adaptation.
I thought it was an interesting read. Especially the interviewer’s assumption that there will be some magic technological fix that will save the day:
“M-M: Why do you dismiss the possibility of a smooth transition from oil to other sources, such as solar and wind power or a new, improved generation of nuclear reactors?
JF: I do not dismiss this possibility. The ideal solution would be to electrify everything from road traffic to heating systems, and then produce electricity with whatever energy source is available. But let us not forget that such a technological fix would take a lot of time and investment. Unless the energy descent after peak oil is very smooth indeed, there may simply not be enough time. Alas, technological crash programs are much more difficult under crisis conditions. This is not to deny that solar and wind, as well as nuclear energy, can be helpful in the transition. But the transition is unlikely to be smooth.”
“With your posts of today you have lost all credibility as a buddhist. Your “compassion” does not extend to “the” Muslims/Arabs.”
=====================================
You are like an enabling parent of a spoiled child, unwilling or unable to see muslim/arab faults and mistakes for what they are, and thus incapable of constructive opinion or action.
Compassion is not wimpy excusing of harmful behavior. If the Gazans want compassionate aid, I’m all for that, but not weaponry, which is what previous behavior would suggest that “relief effort” was really all about.
For all of your pious high minded idealism Asoka, I strongly suspect such thoughts would quickly evaporate if you were faced with such an intransigent and implaccable foe as the Jews have faced for the last 60 years.
If the Muslims majority is really so peaceful at heart, then where are their leaders calling for non-violent resistance instead of jihad? Hamas makes no bones about it’s desire to push the Jews into the sea…. or kill them. Why do these “peaceful muslims” you speak of seem to always vote them into power?
Europe is against stores being open 24 – 7, what assholes! they are against mega malls, what assholes! They have no consumption compared to the US, and even though the economic crisis was generated in and for the US, they are paying a much bigger price because they don’t want to follow the american model. What assholes, they will starve to death, good. And don’t get me started on JAPAN, the country of the lost decades and death by overtime – overwork. What assholes, don’t they know that people have to buy and consume like crazy for an economy to survive ? What assholes!
=========================
8M is a scream. SIMPLE BUSSES has been replaced by What assholes!
BTW, if you want to see mega malls that make our (US of A) malls look like flea markets go to Dubai.
dale: “If the Muslims majority is really so peaceful at heart, then where are their leaders calling for non-violent resistance instead of jihad?”
Here they are dale. Maybe you should question your uncritical ideology.
MUSLIM CONDEMN TERRORIST ATTACKS
http://www.muhajabah.com/otherscondemn.php
There are over 1 Billion Muslims. If they were all bloodthirsty, vengeful, violent terrorists, as you are trying to paint them, Israel would have been destroyed already.
Thankfully, most Muslims want to live in peace with Israel.
Well that was a blistering screed.
I’m always amazed at how shameless we have become. I was having an online discussion, in the context of an amateur astronomy forum, about the simpler aspects of relativity. Well, one guy who was clearly a right-winger of some sort, just would write these long posts that were completely wrong – and you could point out where it was wrong, explain why, point to the right references, that is, deal with facts, and it just didn’t matter – a couple of days later he’d be off again explaining his personal vision of reality as if it were an aspect of the universe at large. That kind of thing astonishes me – it’s immoral, and the right reaction on being found out is not more of the same, it is shame – whatever happened to shame?
The shamelessness of modern America is much more distressing than some fat guys at the race.
-drl
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama says it’s time to roll back “billions of dollars in tax breaks” for oil companies and use the money for clean energy research and development.
FINALLY, A UNITED STATES PRESIDENT HAD THE GUTS TO SAY THIS OUT LOUD IN PUBLIC. NOW, IF CONGRESS WILL GO ALONG WITH THE PLAN, ALTERNATIVE ENERGY SOURCES CAN GET GOING STRONG.
————–
Yes!
I guess I can’t understand why none of the politicians who were literally shedding tears about the state of their beloved environment couldn’t see this was a possibility *before* it happened.
A 10-year-old could have foreseen this as a possibility.
My hope is that they’ll finally take stock and actually *do* something.
Well thought essay. Don’t agree completely but with a lot.
Broke a chain on the last hill tonight. I hope to be race ready for Sunday.
James Earl Carter seems Prophetic to me.
In July of 1979, Carter already anticipated that a continuing and unchecked thirst for imported oil was sure to distort U.S. strategic priorities with unforeseen but adverse consequences.
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/apr/06/00014/
This crisis is not your fault as President. It is the natural result of historical forces and events that have been in motion for 20 years. This crisis threatens the political and social fabric of our nation. Yet, this crisis also presents the greatest opportunity for you as President to become a great President on the order of a Lincoln, Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. More interestingly, it presents you with the opportunity, so rare in American history, to reshape the structure, nature and purpose of the United States in fundamental ways which your predecessors could only dream.
Standing on the moon
I got no cobweb on my shoe
Standing on the moon
I’m feeling so alone and blue
I see the Gulf of Mexico
As tiny as a tear
The coast of California
Must be somewhere over here – over here
Standing on the moon
I see the battle rage below
Standing on the moon
I see the soldiers come and go
There’s a metal flag beside me
Someone planted long ago
Old Glory standing stiffly
Crimson, white and indigo – indigo
Words by Robert Hunter; music by Jerry Garcia
50+ Masters
I am not a neo-Nazi and far from wanting to rehabilitate Hitler, but I cannot agree when everybody sees him as the DEVIL, when he was nothing better or worse than many others.
The Romans used to fight to get new land and new slaves.
They made a huge Emperor because they were first and mostly soldiers.
Many followed their examples, but the difference is that they tried to find excuses for being aggressive and oppressing.
Since the dawn of humanity the strong has oppressed the weak.
Look what Europeans (Americans) did with the Indians.
They exterminated them, first creating the problem, then solving it.
Indians were the terrorist to defeat, the “Bad”, the uncivilized who needed to be civilized.
The same happened in Australia or in India.
And what about the African slaves?
Hitler created the problem of the “Jews” and did what many before him did: kill the enemy.
What did and still do the Israelis?
They have to civilize the Palestinians, fight against terrorism, defeat and destroy the bad.
Every war in History had a good excuse and a real reason.
At least the Romans were not hypocrite, they fought to occupy other people’s land and steal their properties.
And when they found somebody stronger they lost.
Period.
The guys that bugged Israel with the boat are a bunch of spoiled babies who were bored. It was like they said, since we are bored and don’t feel like watching TV, I wonder who can we bug to get a little action, a little excitement in life ? Why not Israel ? Since they have nukes, they have been fighting Palestine for 50 years, they have Iran that wants to nuke them off the face of the earth, what better target ? They will surely get mad if we bug them there so let’s go for it.
This is why the people who mind their own business and stay at home and watch TV are the best people in the world: they are not trying to trigger the third world war. And the spoiled brats, the idiotic spoiled babies call themselves “pacifists”. What did they expect ?
If you want to take sides and get involved in the thousands of idiotic conflicts around the world, you will have a lot of fun and excitement. And risk getting killed, but since your life is useless and boring anyways it doesn’t matter. Conflicts can’t ever be solved, the fight defines the conflicting parts, they are their fight and their fight defines them.
Take the case of Israel and Palestine: if they had any half brain at all they would have left the “holy” land decades ago, the land is the devil’s playground. There are continent sized countries that are rich and full of possibilities from the USA, to Canada, to Australia to parts of Latin America (Argentina, Brazil), but they decide to keep on fighting for that little piece of crap of land and their fake GODS. They will never finds a solution because they don’t want to, because they are defined and define themselves only according to their stupid little idiotic fight, and their stupid idiotic past of who did what and who is to blame for what. What a bunch of losers …
I am in complete agreement with you. I live in a small, very conservative place (Centralia, WA.) and the local paper has a forum. It’s heavily moderated as it had a previous life that went right off the deep end. Basically, you can’t use bad language or personally attack another member. That works fairly well.
Right now, there’s a couple of pretty lively threads going on about climate change and peak oil. Luckily, there’s one guy who’s very calm. Kind of the ‘voice of reason’ and he has great links and practically a whole presentation with graphs and pictures, etc.
He just keeps responding to abysmal ignorance with well thought out, carefully considered responses. I chime in from time to time with appropriate links and observations of my own.
Sigh. I dispair over the state of public discourse, these days. The internet has given voice to every wacko, nut job and the tinfoil hat brigade.
I was reading an article the other day about some tomb discoveries in Egypt. A short, straight forward article about an archaeological discovery. Within two posts it had veered into all kinds of off-topic nonsense.
Saw a caption on someones webcam the other day …
“I’m bored. Let’s break something.” Or, “I was bored, so I thought I’d flog my willy for the cam.” Obviously, lots of folks out there who never intend to run for public office. 😀
Anytime they pick up some little young thug around here for anything ranging from arson to bomb threats to burglaries the excuse always seems to be “I was bored.”
I don’t know. When I was a kid (I know. Who cares about when I was a kid) I was never bored. And, I am very seldom bored, now. There’s always something new to look into or something interesting to do. Free stuff.
Don’t know where I heard the phrase, but I think it’s a failure of imagination.
“Well 6 billion people worldwide don’t have a backyard and dont’ even know what it is. And they mostly work in “agriculture”, the “primary” sector of the economy. And they are mostly starving and desperately trying to get into one of China’s or India’s sweatshop factories of 14 hours a day work for 100 dollars a month, just to get away from growing food, to get away from agriculture. This goes to show how clueless you all are.”
Check out this:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/19/the-fate-of-a-generation-of-workers-foxconn-undercover-fully-tr/
Why would all of these guys leave the countryside and their agriculture for this ? How is it that they don’t see growing food and agriculture so “cool”, so “good for the planet”, etc. ? Is it just how one is brainwashed, what goals and values are programmed in the minds of people that let them see working “in the city” and “climbing up an imaginary ladder”, better then staying in the country and growing food, mostly starving ? And why are they “starving
And why are they “starving” in the first place if they are growing food and working in agriculture ? The same situation 300 million agricultural workers in India, Bangladesh and other Southeast Asian countries find themselves. Maybe they don’t think we will all being growing food in our “backyards” because of an imaginary “peak oil”.
One “condemnation” does not make a majority, it doesn’t even make a reasonable voice in the wilderness of Muslim society. The simple truth is that a majority of the Muslim population consistently supports (actively or by silence) the thugs in it’s population. That’s just a fact.
Did you see the pictures of your peaceful Muslims beating the Israeli soldiers with pipes when the dropped onto the ships? If they were so peaceful why didn’t they just invite them to look around and see they were not carrying anything harmful?
Look Asoka, I’m no supporter of the way the Israeli’s have behaved at times, but to single them out for condemnation (as you did) is just woolley-headed nonsense.
dale: “Look Asoka, I’m no supporter of the way the Israeli’s have behaved at times, but to single them out for condemnation (as you did) is just woolley-headed nonsense.”
I didn’t mean to “single them out”. I condemned them for an act of piracy and murder in boarding a boat in international waters.
Just so you don’t think I am singling them out, be assured I condemn the Somali pirates or any other group that stops and boards boats in international waters and engages in murder. OK?
By the way, the Israeli government will not release the video of the killings, but the American citizen who was murdered was shot four times in the head at close range, which sounds like a mafia-style extrajudicial execution, not self-defense.
dale: “The simple truth is that a majority of the Muslim population consistently supports (actively or by silence) the thugs in it’s population. That’s just a fact.”
No, that is your assumption. The fact is hundreds of statements condemning terrorism have been issued by Muslim leaders and Muslim organizations, including Muslim condemnations of violence and discrimination against Jews.
I provided you with a representative list as proof.
Your insistence that “a majority” of Muslims supports thugs is not supported by the facts. As I said, if one BILLION Muslims were what you are trying to claim, then Israel would have been destroyed long ago.
Muslims do have nuclear weapons, but they intentionally do not use them against Israel, because the majority of Muslims want to live in peace with Israel.
Be thankful for that fact instead of trying to say Muslims are somehow inherently violent or that they “silently” support violence. That is a blasphemous statement which is just not true.
Your post displays a rare, “Greek” clarity. As Emerson said, “take what you want, but pay the price.” Before he was elected Satan, Hitler was extolled by many of the then World Leaders – including our own JFK in his journals. Hitler performed an economic miracle – and thus became the Father of his Country. Many German couples had been too poor to have children up to that point. And unlike many, Europeans/Whites tend not to have children they can’t afford.
It is too true Soak – read your Quran. We’ve trashed the Talmud this week so let’s move on now to the other Semetic Religion. The Koran says, kill one, terrify thousands. It is a manual of terrorism as well as a road map to Heaven.
Which two billion? Obviously the utterly pragmatic, hard working, and bright North East Asians. And maybe a few Whites – the ones who are lead by patriots like Vladimir Putin. As for us – we are going to be engulfed by the world’s biggest bongo party. People are going to be taking shots off our simmering belly buttons – and they’ll be the other kinds of shots too.
Oh that’s just great: you find out something new and you immediately want to bury it not unpack it. Listen, the Talmud is the main scripture of Judaism – not the Torah. The Talmud is the Law as well as the only key by which the Torah can be understood. Only a few extremists follow it? Sure about that? But how many may be influenced by it? We can guess that Mika is. And what about Mr Kunstler? Where did his utter contempt for rural Whites (kulaks) come from?
The Northeast Asians are a large group of submerged supermen. Like Whites, they went through the Ice Age and have the high IQ. But they seem to have gone through an even more rigorous sifting than we have. They have far fewer morons and anti-socials than do we. And their mentality is utterly pragmatic – as are their ethics. They are all for themselves – we put ourselves last if it all. It is utterly imperative that these brilliant, ruthless people be kept out of America if we are too have any future here at all.
America today is arguably a far less civilized land, and even more neurotic, than the Germany of the 1930s. We live in places so extreme in ugliness, squalor, and dysfunction that just going to the store leaves a sentient American reeling in angst and anomie. – Mr K
Come off it. I don’t think you have today in the US anything close to the racism of 1930s Germany out of which came the Holocaust.
The US of today is not even remotely as miserable as Germany was back then. You didn’t just pay out massive war reparations, your people weren’t rendered destitute by hyper-inflation and you don’t have a multitude of men that are extemely pissed about losing the Great War as well as being starved and unemployed.
Extreme in ugliness, squalor and dysfunction? Like a Calcutta slum maybe? Maybe you have some places like this but they are not the norm nor are they common. MOST of the US is still a very good place to live as compared to MOST of the rest of the world. A string of ugly strip malls doesn’t qualify.
Right on, Cash. I see it as Mr. Kunstler using hyperbole to illustrate his points, which are generally relevant, xcept the silly barbs he keeps throwing at several american cultural groups (which gives guys like Vlad ammunition to mis-characterize Kunstler is a white-hater).
>We can guess that Mika is.
My impression Mika is just a paranoid psychopath/sociopath, you have those among all persuasions.
>And what about Mr Kunstler? Where did his utter >contempt for rural Whites
This is silly, Vlad. Kunstler is just biased against a few socio-economic groups, it has nothing to do with them being white. We’re all biased in some ways, and you, my friend, are exhibit A 🙂
“Your insistence that “a majority” of Muslims supports thugs is not supported by the facts.”
====================================
I guess the election Hamas won with the Palestinians was just my imagination. Polls over and over again, show strong support for radical Islamists in the general populations of Arab countries.
You apparently also missed the footage of the boaters beating the crap out of the soldiers on board that boat with pipes as they landed.
You are worse than Sarah Palin when it comes to choosing which “facts” you want to talk about. Neither the Arabs or the Jews have earned much respect for their behavior as far as I’m concerned, over and out.
“Muslims do have nuclear weapons, but they intentionally do not use them against Israel, because the majority of Muslims want to live in peace with Israel.”
=================================
One last thing, this is bullshit, they would nuke Israel in a heartbeat if they thought they could get away with it.
Well said, Cash. Sometimes I read JHK’s columns and then I look out my window. The reality I see in no way resembles what is depicted as a slum nation.
I visited Seattle over the weekend. Granted Seattle is the first city in the country to adopt Karen Armstrong’s Charter of Compassion, so Seattle may not be like the rest of the country, but what I saw was thousands of vibrant, diverse citizens dancing together at the Folklife Festival (which is free of charge).
There was Argentine tango dance, Texas country dance, Scandanavian set dance, etc. and everyone was dancing together and enjoying each other’s cultural heritage. Remember, this festival was free and the place was packed with thousands of people. Hardly looked like a slum nation at all with all the happy faces.
dale and Vlad, maybe you should read and reflect on the Charter for Compassion and try to be a little less mean spirited.
http://charterforcompassion.org/
“…any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate…”
–from the Charter for Compassion
http://charterforcompassion.org/
“…any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate…”
Get real, people, various “scriptures” were written by people who lived in an eye-for-an-eye, no-law and-order, might-makes-right, etc. world. Haven’t we made some progress in the last 1,000 – 2,000 years?
If we can’t get along in the world of plenty, how are we going to get along in the world of scarcity?
Them Dukes: A Documentary
The Andy Griffith Show – NC version of Southern Culture in the late 50’s through maybe late 1960’s. For accuracy sake, I would add more Gomers than Barneys and two Darlins for every Earnest T. Bass. Andy remains the Sheriff of cool headed wisedom. Aunt Bea and her church friends are an accurate protrayal small town kindness and unfriendly gossip.
Then along came “Them Dukes” as Boss Hogg would say. Charlene Darlin dropped her skirt, sawed off a pair of blue jeans and morphed into Daisy. The Duke boys became the “Last American Hero(s)”. Uncle Jesse as Aunt Bea and Andy? Barny’s dark side was realized in the person of Roscoe P. Coltrane.
Add a little “Deliverance”, banjo please, and you get the total picture of the South before the last Northern invasion.
dale: “One last thing, this is bullshit, they would nuke Israel in a heartbeat if they thought they could get away with it.”
What is stopping them, dale? Muslims are fanatical violent Jew-haters, according to you.
What does “get away with it” mean exactly, to fanatics who think dying for the right cause will only mean being rewarded with 72 virgins?
Your own rhetoric is tripping you up, dale.
What is stopping them, dale? Muslims are fanatical violent Jew-haters, according to you.
What does “get away with it” mean exactly, to fanatics who think dying for the right cause will only mean being rewarded with 72 virgins?
Your own rhetoric is tripping you up, dale.
I’m a gardener. I sometimes ask myself why I put up with getting sweaty and dirty, itchy insect and tick bites, devastation from the weather, plant diseases, voles and cutworms. Then when I went out to check on the garden. There were healthy green veggie plants, shrubs, fruit and nut trees, and vines. I looked inside a birdhouse and found a single, royal blue bluebird egg. Living things were on the move in the air, on the ground, beneath my feet. This is reward for your soul…but really, once you’ve eaten organically home-grown produce you don’t want to go back to that chemically-grown crap. That shit will kill you.
Last!
(Last non-pissing-on-other-humans, a-religious post. Don’t worry; Perhaps I’ll piss on/off somebody next time.)
;o)
dale, it was not your imagination. Hamas was democratically elected.
It is your imagination that those who voted for Hamas are terrorists. You are wrong about that, dale.
You seem to believe that Hamas is committed to the destruction of Israel, therefore Israel is within their rights to do whatever they wish.
The only problem is that the destruction of Israel is no longer a part of the Hamas charter. It was removed as a move to be more acceptable by Israel when it was elected the government of the Palestinian Territories.
Hamas is responsible for schools and filling potholes, and for making the lives of their constituents better.
The blockade is not in Israel’s interest. Blockades and embargoes don’t work. They only serve to strengthen the hands of your enemies.
The reason Israel is so scared of Hamas being elected, is for the first time Israel had to deal with a strong Palestinian government, and not a corrupt divided government.
Israeli leadership knew if Hamas was to succeed they would someday have to recognize a Palestinian state, and the current Israeli government does not want that, they want a greater Israel.
dale, I am sure you already know that this Israeli government was born out of terrorism. Israel used terrorism to force their nation into existence. Zionists had no problem using terrorism against British and Palestinian targets to force the issue of statehood.
Terrorism is the tool of the weak against the strong. We can and should condemn bombers, especially when their targets are innocent civilians, yet in the same breath we need to condemn a government that starves children to punish Hamas. Both are reprehensible.
Yet Hamas rewrites their charter, Israel backs a coup against their elected government.
Hamas ends rocket attacks from Gaza, Israel maintains the blockade and bombs Gaza.
Hamas offers to meet with Israel and publicly recognize the 1967 borders; Israel uses the pretext of a couple of rockets not fired by Hamas that landed in an empty field to invade Gaza.
Hamas is not a saintly organization by any means, but they are not the impediment to peace. The impediment is the ultra-rightwing government of Israel.
American Citizen Killed by Israeli Navy
Hey, Tea Party. A foreign navy boarded an unarmed ship flying the flag of a NATO member in international waters and shot dead an American citizen with four bullets to the head and one in the chest on Memorial Day. It did this while the head of the belligerent state was on his way to a state visit to Washington, DC, to be awarded a further $200 million in aid on top of the $3 billion of American taxpayer money the US gives away to him every year.
If you are not upset by this, your tea is weak, man. Weak.
–http://www.JuanCole.com
American Citizen Killed by Israeli Navy
http://www.juancole.com/
>rehabilitate Hitler, but I cannot agree
Patrizia, as an ethnic German I want to tell you this: Germany was pushed into a corner by the WWI victors, and they did elect a demagogue, but had they known he’d lead them into a catastrophic war in which 9 million of them were killed, uncounted millions wounded and crippled, most of the country demolished, their liberties abolished, and half the country given to the Russians — they would’ve murdered him on sight. And this is just a tip of the iceberg — don’t forget the deaths and suffering of tens of millions of others, and enslavement of half of Europe by the communists. Hitler was indeed a satanic monster, an insane misfit and the biggest disaster of modern history.
What’s wrong with you that makes you disregard all this? Just imagine the pain, loss, misery and suffering YOU would experience if you were being brutally murdered, losing your family/children, your property, etc. And now multiply that by 30-40 million (the dead, wounded, displaced, parents of perished children etc), and imagine the magnitude of THAT pain. All thanks to Hitler and his minions. Still think he was a good guy?
Yet Hamas rewrites their charter
==========================
Charter schmarter … don’t make me laugh.
“Charter schmarter … don’t make me laugh.”
Patriot Act, schmatriot act … just written words.
Silly huh? Name one Black, Hispanic, or Asian socio-economic group that Kunstler bashes. The man is Anti Rural White. He hates them just as his fellow tribemen hated the Russian Peasants. He also doesn’t like many of the nouvea rich of America. But at least that jives with his overall idealism. The hatred of the Poor Whites is a horrible blot on his character.
>The hatred of the Poor Whites is a horrible blot >on his character.
Vlad, we’re making progress here. So you recognize that hatred is a character flaw. How do you feel about your hatred of non-whites? And also your hatred of whites who you perceive to be your ideological foes — liberals, jews, young whites who like rap music and wear low-hanging pants (you called them Apes on several occasions), etc.
With respect to Kunstler, he doesn’t hate them, he just bashes them out of his cultural bias, which is shared by millions of urban/northern whites. You have an agenda, so you portray it in racial terms. Maybe you’re doing it deliberately, or maybe your perception of reality is so skewed that you can’t make impartial/fair observations.
Bias is one thing, hate is an altogether another dimension of human faults, one that corrodes your soul… I think, perhaps, you may be sincerely attributing hate to other people (jews, blacks, etc.) because this is how you feel and you can’t conceive that people’s behavior is motivated by something other than hate.
I spent considerable time among people in old Europe who have deep-seated ethnic, cultural, racial and religious biases (also regional and linguistic), and let me tell you — it ruins the joy and pleasure of life for all of them. As you said, it’s a big blot on human character.
There is no reference system, there are only fairytale models of the world in the controlled environments of minds. A consensus of what the world is, is produced by sheer numbers, not by reality which is non-existent, if everyone thinks hitler is right then they all become nazis. The world is nothing, has no direction or meaning, only that direction that we force it to have until our mostly wrong model of it fails: then another model will take hold, a consensus will be built and the cycle repeats.
Think when everyone was buying homes and the prices were always going up, it seemed like a law of physics until it failed. Subprime loans, housing bubble, etc.
Everyone can be seen or defined as evil or good according to the models we have all been brainwashed with, there will always be conflict as a result of competing models that are all wrong and false: not because there is a right model, but because our minds are arbitrary constructions programmed according to arbitrary pain/pleasure circuits by evolution, that create arbitrary laws, and arbitrary societies and groups and group interactions. The world is independent of our minds, has nothing to do with it, our minds are always wrong.
JHK thinks that the suburbs are evil, and anyone driving a SUV is evil, that there is a “better” world. He is deluded, we need trillions of cars, trillions of jets, we need complete mass pollution by every kind of wild chemical producable, because pollution doesn’t even exist, it is only a different from of the same energy, and with the new artificial bacteria that have been recently invented, they can clean it all up in a jiffy.
we need free salaries, cheap rents because this economic system has generated and keeps on generating and especially KEEPS ON INCREASING EXPONENTIALLY, EXCESS CAPACITY in all productive endeavors . And huge BUS systems, luxury BUSES with rolls royce suspensions, private compartments, silent inside and out all across the USA suburbs.
And buying homes is retarded. RENT.
Diogen
I am far from saying that Hitler was a good fellow, I just wanted to say he was not the only bad guy in History.
I am Italian and live in Quedlinburg Germany, ex DDR.
I saw what the English and Americans did in Dresden (not only there), just a few days before the war ended, when the war was actually finished if not on papers.
I understand hate and retaliation, but I do not think it just.
Two Bads do not make a Good.
If you want to condemn you should be clean.
What Hitler did with the jews was what others before him did in History.
Latins first who lived making wars and occupying other people´s land, stealing and killing.
Europeans in America, killing the locals and stealing the land.
The British in India and Australia.
For not talking about South Africa and last (but not the last) Israeli in Palestina.
All in the name of civilisation, against terrorism or with other nice excuses, but for the same old reason.
>he was not the only bad guy in History.
Meine liebe Freundin, Ich bin der gleichen Meinung 🙂
Yes, I agree entirely, history is full of deranged killers. Sad thing about Hitler’s (and company) responsibility for the deaths of 9 million Germans is this: the German people had the best scientists, engineers, physicians, researchers, authors, musicians, etc. in the world at that time. How many of those 9 million dead would have made great contributions to our civilization? And what about all the Russians, French, English, Americans and all the others, senselessly butchered. I guess Hitler is different from all the other killers in history because he subverted an enlightened people during an enlightened age. Stalin did the same, but Stalin’s country had no claim to enlightenment in the way Germany did at the time. And for that, Hitler bears much heavier responsibility, comparable to Napoleon.
You are really such a silly romantic.
….but then, who can tell if you are serious or not, since you admit to posting things here you don’t believe.
Dale and Asoka, could it be that you’re BOTH right? Reality is too complicated for a single point of view, and reality is such that often even conflicting points of view are true. So, stop bickering, shake hands, and congratulate each other on your insights!
He also doesn’t like many of the nouvea rich of America. But at least that jives with his overall idealism.
=====================
nouveau riche
jibes Definition: to be in harmony or accord; agree: Example: The report does not quite jibe with the commissioner’s observations.
(jive is black english slang meaning: insincere, pretentious, or deceptive as in much of what Asoka writes. The difference with Asoka is that his jive talk has the appearance of erudition.)
diogen said: “So, stop bickering, shake hands, and congratulate each other on your insights!”
dale, I virtually shake your hand and congratulate you on your insights.
qshtik, I virtually shake your hand and congratulate you on your grammatical erudition.
diogen convinced me to do this.
Asoka, you thus prove you’re a Peacemaker 🙂
And inject a refreshing doze of humor just when we need it most!!! I also offer you a cyber handshake 🙂
dale said: “You are really such a silly romantic.”
Guilty on both counts: silly and romantic. Me and Tom Jefferson. We, Tom and I, hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Life is too short to be bickering instead of pursuing happiness.
diogen said: “Asoka, you thus prove you’re a Peacemaker 🙂
I certainly feel blessed. Thank you for changing my mind. Yesterday I was wallowing in a cesspool of bickering, and today I feel free of all that, thanks to your gentle intervention.
Tom also said that Blax were utterly inferior and should be sent back to Africa pronto before they ruined our gene pool.
Hatred of the wrong people or anybody for the wrong reason is a flaw. But to just condemn all hatred is just silly – it’s impossible in any case and just makes one a hypocrite and a wuss. To be meaningful, social policy or moral injunctions have to be withing the realm of the possible. You expect men to be angels – the heresy of chilliasm. And as Dostoyevsky points out, men who set out to be angels tend to end up as devils.
Your ethic is a bastardized ammalgam of Christianity and Marxism. True Christian brotherhood begins with your own kin and then spreads to fellow Christians – food, money, jobs, smiles, everything. Only then does it consider the possibility of others. Historically, this meant putting a dollar or two in the collection basket at church for the missions. Paltry? Flimsy? Hardly. It changed the face of Africa until now they are spreading over the Earth like a plague. Obviously some Old Testament realism has to take over in regards to the dark ones. Even Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself”. How is letting millions of aliens take over our lands loving ourselves?
Besides Old Testament teachings on fertility and property – we could also learn from Sociobiological tenets – also known as the law of amity and enmity. We love those genetically like us and hate or ignore those unlike us. It’s low level stuff, but we mustn’t be afraid to be low sometimes. The Earth is holy too as Asoka says. Humility is etymologically related to the Earth or hummus. And a stairway a mile high would begin with the first few low steps. Take them away and the whole thing crumbles.
The Dalai Lama was amazed when his Western disciples told him that Westerners often don’t like themselves. He was at a loss for words – a rare occurence. The whole Tibetan Ethic of love begins with loving the self just as in Christianity. Take that away and the whole edifice crumbles.
(Yes, I know it’s long, but it’s my only post this week, so man up.)
DOING MY MORNING YOGI
It’s a southern slur on yoga, the kind that makes Jim Kunstler crazy, like turning “Opera” into “Opry.” But it’s what I realized I was doing in the blackberry patch this morning at seven thirty: a stretch to the right, a squat, a stretch to the left, hold it there aaand breathe deeply. The isometrics were intense. And so were the thorny canes digging into my shins.
Just then Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit blared from the window of a white 30-something commuter, “I’m go’n do things MY way, it’s MY way, my way or the highway!”
I couldn’t help but chuckle, thinking about the guy waking up to an alarm clock, shaving, showering, maybe ironing (god help us), and commuting to work to sit in his cell block, er, cubicle…pod…thingy. I worked in one of those once, a few years ago, made good money too. But “doing things my way” wouldn’t exactly be an accurate description of that life.
I squatted in the early morning haze, still smiling, just starting to break a little sweat from the high humidity. Here I was, like Yogi bear, doing my morning yogi in the briar patch.
“Lots o’ blackbeeries down ‘er?” an old black man shouted from his pickup.
“Tons! More than we could both pick today!” I answered.
“Whatcha got down there? Blackberries?” asked another older black fella a couple cars in front of the other.
“When you get done with what you’re doin’, come help me pick ’em!” I yelled back at him.
He said he would, but he wasn’t there when I left.
I’m not sure they knew what to make of a 30-something cracker like me, in his broad-brimmed straw hat, thigh-deep in the stickers at a major intersection at 7:30 on a Friday morning, but they both smiled a little smile that usually goes with good memories.
The white folks passing by, they just assumed I was some kinda wingnut hippie, and rolled their eyes. Least that’s what I hope they were assuming. Too many resources left to exploit to be messin’ ’round in the briar patch I guess.
I was pushing a gallon of berries by now, and needing to move to a new spot, trying to talk myself out of picking more. But I couldn’t help myself, I just ate more now than I had been earlier as the space in the basket dwindled.
“I’m go’n do things MY way! It’s MY way, my way or the highway!” Here came another Fred Durst disciple, loudly proclaiming his autonomy as he marched in step to the beat of the formal economy.
I realized it was probably time for me to go MY way on that note, and my way lead to the breakfast table and a pint of cream to soak blackberries in with my wife and daughter.
After I finish jotting this little story down, I’m going to go get a bar-b-que goat sandwich from Joe Bear near my house, go collect another trunk-full of rocks to finish lining the edge of my blueberry patch with, build a garden gate, and unload a big straw delivery before dinner this evening. My garden is coming right along. I’ve planted about 35 new edible and medicinal herbs and one good looking little loquat tree, since I was here last.
Hope you all are well. Have a great weekend!
Tripp out.
a refreshing doze of humor
===========================
dose
Can we change the subject,more towards the current problems not what happened 70 years ago,now that the the brain damaged had their say about Hitler and the Nazis(again)?This blog is sounding like a leierkasten,we have heard it all before.
Behold…
Published on Friday, June 4, 2010 by the San Francisco Chronicle
Behold Our Dark, Magnificent Horror
by Mark Morford
There is, you have to admit, a sort of savage grace, a tragic and terrible beauty, to the BP oil spill.
Like any good apocalyptic vision of self-wrought hell, the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history has its inherent poetry. You see that creeping ooze of black, that ungodly wall of unstoppable darkness as it slowly, inexorably invades the relatively healthy, pristine waters adjacent, and you can’t help but appreciate the brutal majesty, the fantastic, reeking horror of this new manifestation of black death we have brought upon ourselves, as it spreads like a fast cancer into the liquid womb of Mother Nature herself.
Really, it’s not just the incredible photographs of the spill that are, in turns, heartbreaking, stunning, otherworldly and downright Satanic in their abject revulsion. It’s not just the statistics that tell us how many millions of gallons might ultimately be spilled, or the stunned scientists who can only hypothesize how this unprecedented catastrophe might affect the fragile food chain and distress the ocean’s ecosystems at the very root level.
It’s not even the endless, heartrending tales of livelihoods lost, industries destroyed, coastlines ravaged or wildlife killed. The fact is, any one of these aspects alone is enough to poison your soul for as long as you wish to wallow in that murky state of fatalism and doom. It is nothing but bleak.
I think the most disturbingly satisfying thrill of this entire event — and it is, in a way, a perverse thrill — comes from understanding, at a very core level, our shared responsibility, our co-creation of the foul demon currently unleashed.
What a thing we have created. What an extraordinary horror our rapacious need for cheap, endless energy hath unleashed; it’s a monster of a scale and proportion we can barely even fathom.
Because if you’re honest, no matter where you stand, no matter your politics, religion, income or mode of transport, you see this beast of creeping death and you understand: That is us. The spill may be many things, but more than anything else it is a giant, horrifying mirror.
Do you wish to try and deflect it? Lay responsibility elsewhere? Really? We can’t quite blame an “act of God,” as we would for some sort of hurricane or tsunami inflicted upon meager humankind by an angry deity, punishing us all for being too war-like, violent or perhaps naïve enough to want to enjoy the sunshine for five goddamn minutes before He decided He’d better kill some people lest we forget who’s in charge.
We cannot blame evil terrorists, some cluster of swarthy foreigners who hate our shopping malls and secretly envy our Porsche Cayenne’s. Nor can we blame the spill on some sort of nefarious conspiracy, a secret act wrought by devious agents in black helicopters designed to destabilize the U.N. and induce universal mind control — unless, of course, you’re getting a little desperate and don’t get outside much, in which case, you absolutely can .
Finally (and a bit shockingly), I’m not hearing Pat Robertson or any of his cretinous cult of apocalypticans blame the gays, or voodoo, or anal sex, or reality TV for what’s happening in the Gulf. Oil is, after all, completely non-denominational. It mocks all religions equally — except, of course, the only one that really matters: capitalism.
This is how you know this is one of the more universally damning disasters of our time: No one really seems to know how to process it, much less react. The GOP is backtracking like terrified hyenas from Sarah “Queen of Duh” Palin’s “drill baby, drill” mantra/ass tattoo, as suddenly the incessant Republican wail for more oil exploration, more drilling, more tax cuts for oil conglomerates don’t just reek of the usual inbred cronyism; they reek of death and destruction the likes of which the country has never seen.
On the other hand, hardcore lefties are going mad with desire that the disaster will lead to the immediate imprisonment of every BP employee worldwide, as if BP is somehow any different than any other oil titan raping the planet right now (hi, Alberta’s oilsands). Hardcore lefties would also appreciate it if Obama would use the disaster as a surefire excuse to instantly change the entire course of energy history by immediately shutting down all 48,000 oil wells in the Gulf and hand every American a bicycle and a solar panel. See? All better.
Sure. As if oil wasn’t woven like oxygen into every single aspect of American life, as if fully 30 percent of domestic transportation fuel didn’t come from the gulf, as if shutting down a fraction of those wells wouldn’t re-devastate the economy, as if petroleum and coal weren’t powering the very energy plants that deliver the electricity that charges the iPhones that allows everyone to Tweet their angry complaints through all the various energy-sucking server farms the size of a small country.
Truly, BP is behaving no better or worse than any other corporate spawn of Satan would in a similar situation. What’s more, if you don’t think every oil company on earth is right now kneeling before Beelzebub in gratitude that it wasn’t one of their own wells that exploded, you haven’t been paying attention.
That said, after all is said and done, it’s gloomily nice to think our darkest disaster in a generation could somehow ultimately improve our attitudes, change our behavior, lighten our violent treatment of the planet. As someone recently noted, the BP spill isn’t Obama’s Katrina, it’s actually Big Oil’s Chernobyl. Meaning: a disaster so appalling and devastating it might very well alter the industry and change the course of our energy policy forever.
Is it possible? Or, more accurately, are we even capable of such a shift? Is there any silver lining to be found in that black and greasy gloom? This is, perhaps, the most imperative question of all: If we can produce a demon of such extraordinary scale and devastation, can we not also somehow create its exact opposite? Let us pray
If it’s any kind of perverse consolation, one might find somewhat comforting the observation that China’s blind parroting of U.S. consumerism and market economy is also having very destructive, deleterious effects on Chinese culture, civilization.
“Humanity is destroyed by the Eye of Ra.” (“Egyptian Myth”, by Geraldine Pinch, p. 94).
The Eye of Ra/Horus appears on the back of the U.S. dollar.
Vlad, here is an article from today’s NYTimes that contains some interesting racial intermarriage stats. Of the races that intermarry with blacks whites do so the least frequently.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/us/04interracial.html?ref=us
I believe Jim’s remarks about the NASCAR events are only trying to show that life goes on as usual,even though the Gulf fiasco and financial disaster really calls for a national emergency.
Never in America’s history has there been a need for a dictator,yes like Hitler,that puts America first and cleans up America,that has become a pig sty of criminals.
As I see it the first thing needs to be done is freeze all assets of BP and Exxon,including the assets of of the criminals at the top.These so called business men need to be held without bond,with evidence like that,there is no need for shyster lawyers.People like that should not have the right of constitutional protection after they made such a mockery of it and show contempt for the law.All privatization needs to be reversed,no more toll roads, then selling them to India.The wall street casino continues to leech and steal the Public’s property,it needs to be shut down until new iron clad rules are made and enforced.
Clean up crews need to be paid a decent wage,out of the dividends of Exxon and BP,sorry charley,no fat checks until this mess is cleaned up.All public utilities go back to the rightful owner,the Public.All dual passport owners leave our country immediately,without the loot.All illegals immediate deportation,sorry
millionaires and billionaires no more cheap maid service,and since it is impossible for anyone to become so wealthy ,working for a living,it is also good-by for you,without the loot.Of course the death penalty is necessary for the crooked banksters and drug king pins.The illegal entry into our country could be solved by a couple boxes of shot gun shells,word will get around in a hurry.
The useless eaters and prolific breeders will have their job assigned(on a field or quarry),before they get their first meal.No more school busing,we can do the job with half the buses,having bus routes and stops,it’s your responsibility to get your little snowflakes to the brainwashing and
Dumbing down place,called a school.The only sport for the kiddies will be their one or 2 mile walk to the nearest bus stop.No more multimillion dollar libraries and school palaces,complete with carpeting,AC,pools,spas and sport facilities!
well,anyway,I think you get the idea.
th
“You apparently also missed the footage of the boaters beating the crap out of the soldiers on board that boat with pipes as they landed. ”
Oh, I guess the footage I saw was of a boat full of peace activist in INTERNATIONAL waters being shot at by Isralie navy boats while Isralie military units were dropped by helicopter, heavily armed with automatic weapons and wearing kevlar vests and helmets.
And the people the dropped in on were wearing life vests and trying to fend the Isralies off with mop & broom handles.
If any Isralie solder would admit that the had “the crap” beat out of them, then they might have the smallest excuese for self defense.
Oppps…. it was just murder of innocent civilians after all. Just more of the same from the New Isralie Nazies. They have become what they hated…
Say, did you know that Florida has black sand beaches…..
The Chinese characterize the international economy as an economy of “Neo-colonialism”, in which multinational corporations view countries as places to loot and plunder. Under corporate “neo-colonialism”, multinational companies view the U.S. no differently from Central America or Africa.
Philski,
Thanks for posting that article; hope it gets around.
Perspective is so terribly important, isn’t it?
It could be worse…much worse….
Foxconn workers say ‘meaningless’ life sparks suicides
AFP/Getty Images
Chinese workers assemble electronic components at the Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn’s factory in Shenzhen, in the southern Guangzhou province.
Bloomberg News · Wednesday, Jun. 2, 2010
Ah Wei has an explanation for Foxconn Technology Group Chairman Terry Gou as to why some of his workers are committing suicide at the company’s factory near the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.
“Life is meaningless,” said Ah Wei, his fingernails stained black with the dust from the hundreds of mobile phones he has burnished over the course of a 12-hour overnight shift. “Everyday, I repeat the same thing I did yesterday. We get yelled at all the time. It’s very tough around here.”
Conversation on the production line is forbidden, bathroom breaks are kept to 10 minutes every two hours and constant noise from the factory washes past his ear plugs, damaging his hearing, Ah Wei said. The company has rejected three requests for a transfer and his monthly salary of 900 yuan (US$132) is too meager to send home to his family, said the 21-year-old, who asked that his real name not be used because he is afraid of his managers.
At least 10 employees at Taipei-based Foxconn have taken their lives this year, half of them in May, according to the company, also known as Hon Hai Group. The deaths have forced billionaire founder Mr. Gou to open his factories to outside scrutiny and apologize for not being able to stop the suicides. Mr. Gou built his company into the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer and now clients from Apple Inc. to Hewlett-Packard Co. are probing the company’s working conditions.
Steve Jobs, Apple’s billionaire chief executive, who depends on Foxconn to make the iPhone and iPad, said the suicides are “very troubling.”
‘All Over This’
“We’re all over this,” said Mr. Jobs, speaking this week at a technology conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. His company does one of the best jobs inspecting suppliers, he said, adding the company is “not a sweatshop.”
Foxconn’s Longhua complex outside Shenzhen spans three square kilometres and is criss-crossed by tree-lined streets with a water fountain at the center of the facility. Workers wearing polo shirts emblazoned with “Foxconn” in Chinese characters over their hearts walk along the streets. Men wear blue, women wear red. Security personnel wear white. The complex boasts its own hospital, a collection of restaurants and a swimming pool surrounded by palm trees.
The workers, 86% of whom are under 25 years old, live in white dormitories with eight to 10 people sleeping in a room. The living quarters have stairs running up the outside walls and the company has begun covering them with nets to prevent people from jumping.
12-Hour Stand
Inside the compound, at a factory devoted to computer motherboards, rows of young men and women stand at assembly lines, their feet shod in blue slippers and white caps on their heads. The smell of solvent hangs in the air. About 80% of the front-line production employees work standing up, some for 12 hours a day for six days a week, according to Liu Bin, a 24-year-old employee.
“It’s hard to make friends because you aren’t allowed to chat with your colleagues during work,” Mr. Liu said at Shenzhen Kang Ning Hospital where he was seeking help for insomnia. “Most of us have little education and have no skills so we have no choice but to do this kind of job. I feel no sense of achievement and I’ve become a machine.”
The company provides counselling for workers such as Mr. Liu, according to supervisor Geng Yubin. Geng, who has worked six years at Foxconn, says between 30 and 50 workers come to him daily for advice on their personal lives. Common problems are homesickness, financial woes, lovers’ quarrels and spats with co-workers, Mr. Geng said.
Without Direction
“For many of the young people who are here, this is the first time they’ve been away from home,” Mr. Geng said. “Without their families, they’re left without direction. We try to provide them with direction and help.”
Tian Yu fit Mr. Geng’s description. Tian, 18, left her parents and a life of growing sweet corn and rice in Hubei province, central China, to find a job in Shenzhen after graduating from high school, her father, Tian Jiandang, said. She was isolated and without friends at work, Mr. Tian said. She worked at Foxconn for about a year.
On March 17, she jumped from the fourth story of her dormitory in the Longhua complex. She survived and was in a coma for almost two months. Her father still doesn’t know why she jumped and is afraid to ask because he thinks it will upset her, he said in an interview by her hospital bed. Foxconn is paying for her medical care.
Puzzled
The suicides and how to stop them mystify Mr. Gou.
“Are we going to have this happen again?” said Mr. Gou, speaking on May 27 when he opened the factory to the largest media gathering in company history. “From a logical, scientific standpoint, I don’t have a grasp on that. No matter how you force me, I don’t know.”
Less than a day after Gou made the remarks, a 23-year-old Foxconn worker jumped to his death, according to the Shenzhen police. Another worker slit his wrist and was hospitalized.
Born October 8, 1950, in Taipei to parents who emigrated from China’s Shanxi Province, Mr. Gou formed his company in 1974 with US$7,500. Over 36 years, he transformed the supplier of plastic television knobs to the maker of iPhones and Sony Corp. PlayStations. Hon Hai Precision Industry generates more revenue each year than Microsoft Corp., Apple and Dell Inc.
His net worth reached US$5.9-billion this year, according to Forbes Magazine. He owns 10.8% of the company as its largest shareholder, according to Bloomberg data. Hon Hai Precision has dropped 21% so far this year.
Gou’s Success
The basis of his success is clear, according to Pam Gordon, founder of Technology Forecasters, a market research firm specializing in contract manufacturers and supply chain.
“It’s the prices,” said Ms. Gordon. “Their prices are lower for high-quality work.”
Mr. Gou says he’s proud of what he’s accomplished at Longhua.
“I came here more than 10 years ago to this piece of fallow ground, this mountain,” Mr. Gou said. “We brought some colleagues and step by step we built it up.”
Mr. Gou’s ambition and discipline come through in his interactions with subordinates, according to people who have worked with him. He can talk for hours without notes and remembers product plans in minute details, according to six people who’ve attended meetings with him.
In a session Mr. Gou held in the second quarter of last year with about 200 managers and engineers to discuss the future of the company’s mobile-phone business, the chairman peppered division vice presidents with questions on progress reports, said three people who attended the gatherings and declined to be named because the event was not public.
Executive Punishment
At the same meeting, Mr. Gou ordered a senior vice president who could not respond in enough detail to stand before the group for 10 minutes as punishment, three of the people said.
Foxconn won Apple’s order to make the iPhone after Mr. Gou ordered the business units that make components to sell parts at zero profit, according to two people familiar with the plans who declined to be named because the details are not public.
Foxconn’s labour policies and practices are in line with industry standards and are regularly reviewed by government authorities and customers, it said in an e-mailed response to questions. Foxconn declined to comment on Mr. Gou’s management style.
Because Mr. Gou is willing to forgo margins to win orders, clients like Apple and HP are able to boost their own profits, said Daniel Chang, who rates Hon Hai Precision “outperform” at Macquarie Group Ltd. in Taipei. Hon Hai Precision had an operating margin of 4.3% last year, compared with 27% for Apple and 9.6% for HP, Bloomberg data shows. The company’s net income jumped 37% to NT$75.7-billion (US$2.3-billion) in 2009, its second-best year on record.
Fundamental Problem
“The fundamental problem for Foxconn and other Chinese factories is that their business model relies on a low-cost workforce sourced from rural areas of China,” said Pun Ngai, a professor of applied social sciences at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. “Due to its size, Foxconn has to be that much tougher than other factories, and has to become more emotionally detached from its employees than others.”
In addition to Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, the world’s largest and third-largest personal-computer makers, have begun investigations of Foxconn. Dell spokesman Jess Blackburn and Hewlett-Packard spokeswoman Shelby Watts declined to comment on the status of the investigations.
Apple and other computer makers should emulate American toy makers, who faced a similar predicament, according Gene Grabowski, who chairs the crisis and litigation practice at Washington-based Levick Strategic Communications, a public relations firm in Washington.
Lead Paint
After Chinese suppliers for Mattel Inc. were found to be allowing lead paint into products sold in the U.S. in 2007, the company sent inspectors to watch over the plants and invited the media to monitor improvements.
“Apple is especially vulnerable because Apple’s computer buyers tend to be more socially aware,” said Mr. Grabowski. “They care about computers, they care about the environment, they care about working conditions.”
For the group’s more than 800,000 employees in China, Foxconn’s success also provides a livelihood. One of them, 30- year-old Chen Zhonglei, said the suicides are due to the immaturity of the workers and not the company’s policies.
“These young workers coming in now are not as ready to take on hardship as much as I was when I arrived,” Mr. Chen said. “Psychologically they’re more fragile. These new workers need to come in with an idea about what they want to get out of working here.”
Best Conditions
Foxconn’s working conditions are among the best in China, said Huang Ping-der, an associate professor of Business Administration at Taipei’s National Chengchi University. The recent suicides in China have highlighted weaknesses in the company’s management structure, he said.
China had a suicide rate of 16.9 people out of 100,000 taking their own lives in 2004, according to estimates from the World Health Organization.
Foxconn raised pay for workers by 30% to 1,200 yuan from 900 yuan a month, spokesman Edmund Ding said Wednesday. The additional money may not be enough to stem the suicides, according to Xiao Qi, a college graduate who works at Foxconn in product development. He earns 2,000 yuan a month, yet gets no joy from his job, he said.
“I do the same thing every day; I feel empty inside,” said Xiao, who said he has considered suicide. “I have no future.”
Bloomberg
>Foxconn … ‘meaningless’ life sparks suicides
textbook symptoms of run-away industrial societal malaise — alienation, hopelessness, loneliness, and ultimately loss of interest in life itself… They are paying a very high price for their newly-found industrial riches… not to mention the harm to their corner of the Earth… where will it all end…
BTW, hello bro Diogenes
Hi.
This is my first post. People should find this site interesting:
http://www.politicalcompass.org/
The routine left (socialist collectivist) vs right (free market capitalist) approach is insufficient to depict people’s political phylosophies. Another axis, from extreme authoritarianism (top down leadership) to libertarianism (grass roots autonomous orientation) is needed.
I scored:
Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: -5.62 (far to the left)
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.08 (and modertately anti-authoritarian)
which is pretty close to Nelson Mandela Actually.
See the follow-up page to the test:
http://www.politicalcompass.org/test.
Thanks.
Geoff
I found this fascinating:
http://www.indolink.com/displayArticleS.php?id=102107104132
South Asians have Low IQ; Limit Immigration, says Canadian Academic.
By Francis C. Assisi
Canadian psychology professor John Philippe Rushton has recently claimed that South Asians “aren’t that Intelligent (on average)” and that “mass immigration from the region is very likely to lower the average IQ of the receiving Western countries, and consequently be dysfunctional.”
Rushton, a psychology professor at the University of Western and is well known for his controversial work on intelligence and racial differences. His article appeared in the anti-immigration site VDare on September 26, 2007 (http://vdare.com/rushton/070926_indians.htm)
[This part here is key!]
He writes: “East Asians (Chinese, Japanese and Koreans) obtain the highest mean IQ at 105. Europeans follow with an IQ of 100. Some ways below these are the Inuit or Eskimos (IQ 91), South East Asians (IQ 87), Native American Indians (IQ 87), Pacific Islanders (IQ 85), and South Asians and North Africans (IQ 84). Well below these are the sub-Saharan Africans (IQ 67), the Australian Aborigines (IQ 62), the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, and the Pygmies of the Congo rain forests (IQ 54).”
IQ tests constructed in Western Europe and North America and standardized with an average IQ of 100. The “normal” range goes from “dull” (IQ around 85) to “bright” (IQ around 115). IQs of 70 suggest handicap, while IQs of 130 and above predict giftedness.
Rushton goes on to explain: “Even a few years ago, news of drastically lower mean IQs for any population group—as low as 70 to 85 in Africa—would have been considered not only an absurdity, but also an injustice. Yet new empirical work continues to show a world IQ average of 90. It continues to show that mean IQs of 70 are found routinely in sub-Saharan Africa and that mean IQs of 70 to 90 are typical of many other regions of the world. Outside of European and East Asian populations, an average IQ as high as 100 is seldom found.”
[One should read the whole article.]
Notice how these international iq variations correspond nearly exactly to those nations economic performance and general level of development. Note in particular how one should not expect much from the gibbering morons populating sub-Saharan Africa. They were born to dance not to think!
This is disastrous!
“Tellingly, blacks and whites remain the least-common variety of interracial pairing. Still, black-white unions make up 1 in 60 new marriages today, compared with fewer than 1 in 1,000 back when Barack Obama’s parents wed a half-century ago.”
Black-white race-mixing should be guarded against. Black genes are dominant and their moronic tub-thumping criminal ways are an insidious polution in the white population. The maintenance of a black-free gene pool in this population is essential to protect it from debasement. The one-drop rule was largely enacted to increase slave-holders property but it also serves well to protect the European-Americans from such contamination. Unfortunately, the children of such unions must be discarded into the dung heap of the black population much as when a small amount of botulism toxin ruins a perfectly good can of beans, it must be cast asside.
Well, this article also made the point that combining the more than 1 out of 5 black men who marry outside their race with the prison population (maybe 1/4 of the black male population, noting the commonly accepted statistic that there are more black men in prison than who graduate from college), shows why black women have such a hard time finding a suitable black male to marry. As a race of criminals of inferior intelligence (Even the African-American population which is highly mixed has an average iq of 85 while that of sub-Saharan Africa is less than 70. See above.), the cell block is a much more appropriate place for these high-testosterone low-iq individuals with which the black race abounds than a 4-year college environment wherein I have read the average iq (of graduates?)is generally 118 in the states.
PS
Awhile back someone said that Jaego Scorze was like a bird, the last of his kind, awaiting the arrival of members of his flock which would never come. Well, though I lack the jodspurs and riding crop and am related through my mother’s mother’s father to the Levine line, I believe I can do a good stand-in for VK. The pipes have sounded and I have answered the call.
yes, ‘as ye sow……..’
and what was significant about china, the devaluing of life, horrid govt, legal infanticide has increased in the west.
not fer nuthin that taiwan was kicked out of the un and red china brought in. then clinton gave it most fav nations status, spelling the end of the middle class here [?].
the chinese are so silly as to think they can eat beef and motor like the usa….but chindia is 3? billion, or close to it.
‘very destructive, deleterious effects on Chinese culture, civilization’
actually i think it died with Mao…he killed off the people, trees, dogs even!
not content to destroy his own country he went after the mostly peaceful peeps of tibet.
willie nelson
ozamotli
elnorte
rally/ concert for illegals ‘rights’
Hail and well met. It was Comrade Dale who so described me – but I don’t remember the bird thing. As I remember it, he had me waiting on a magnificient one story garage balcony that I had built (I lived in my mother’s garage) waiting for the comrades who would never come. But Comrade Dale is wrong: we are millions becoming tens of millions. And the Evil Plans the Globalists have for our demise will come to naught.
Yup IQ really isn’t everything. This sad article describe exactly what our Libertarian friends would perpetrate on us if they got the chance. The graceful combination of socialism and capitalism that helped Germany rebuild again and again is the best way for the West and maybe for the East as well. The Socialism has to be kept under control though. Otherwise people pay so much in taxes that they become depressed. It can become so bad that not working is just as profitable as working. And of course, any sucess presupposes a fairly homogenous population – no Muslims with four wives each with 10 kids all on the dole.
I saw this video linked to on a humor site and immediately thought of James’ phrase, “a nation of overfed clowns walking around in clown clothes,” although I’m paraphrasing, not direct quote:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si9-GHToo2o
Apropos of the latest slush of vitriol above me, the clowns in that video are Caucasian, but I think it’s pretty clear that everyone’s IQ plummets when their education is castrated and warped for corporate needs, when their starving psyches are soaked with juvenile spectacle, when their basic human rights and dignity and potential as human beings has been systematically strip-mined out of their brains by an empire of corruption and the machinations of utterly vile, noose-worthy men.
“potential as human beings has been systematically strip-mined out of their brains by an empire of corruption and the machinations of utterly vile, noose-worthy men.”
Kanomi, so often it’s their PARENTS who destroy their potential as civilized people — I hate to tell you how many times I’ve seen the parents let their little kids sit on the couch and stare into the tube for HOURS on end (either TV or video games) watching really toxic stuff on the screen, sometimes watching with them, other times abandoning the kids to TV. And I won’t even mention the example/enculturation the parents provide to those kids… Vlad referred to them as White Apes (no offence to the Apes)….
Q,
In these parts (S. Ontario) inter-racial marriages were very uncommon 30-40 years ago. I don’t have any stats but nowadays if you see an Asian chick with a guy I think it’s even odds that he’s caucasian. The rate of inter-racial marriage looks to me to be high between Asian women and white men. The women look to me to be mostly born here or raised here by the way they speak English and the way they look (taller, heavier than Asian raised). You see a fair number of mixed race kids.
Ten years ago you never saw black chicks and white guys hooking up but nowadays you do see it. It’s not nearly as common as white/asian but much more common than even a short time ago. My theory is that black people are moving up the socio-economic ladder and are not as socially segregated as they used to be. So I think as a consequence blacks and whites are seeing each other as potential mates. Never under-estimate the power of libido in human affairs.
I think that blacks are seeing doors open for them and are taking advantage of the opportunities. A question of aspirations I think. Twenty five years ago I think if you asked a black high school kid if hey could see themselves in a professional occupation they would scoff. I think not so much nowadays.
The one thing you rarely see is East Indian/White marriages. Don’t know why that is. I think it’s because South Asians haven’t been here for all that long in big numbers. One or two generations from now when they’ve been submerged in the dominant culture like other waves of immigrants I think it will be much more common.
Barbeque goat? I didn’t know it would be good that way. Have you ever cooked it?
We’ve never cooked goat at home but we’ve gotten it at a Jamaican takeout. A bud of mine is from Somalia and we go occasionally to a Somali joint. Both the Jamaican and Somali goat is stewed. Really good stuff. The Jamaican is curried and the Somali I have no idea but it’s really spicy.
Vlad I wouldn’t get too stressed about NE Asians. They’re hard working, bright and all that but I don’t think they’re all THAT bright. China is a harsh place and it didn’t have to be that way. There’s 1.3 billion people there and a billion of them live in abysmal conditions. No Chinese has the liberties that we have. Not exactly a work of genius in other words.
Okey-Dokey, dwellers in the all-white, all right ghetto…
The reason for mixing up human genes is diversities for purposes of survival (as in any species). Conclusive studies have shown that it’s an olfactory-driven deal (my, how NATURAL!); we can actually smell those who are the most un-like ourselves (genetically), and we find them the most attractive.
Sorry, but you’re fighting your own [natural survival] instincts when you focus on skin-shading for its’ sake alone. Witness the royals descent into imbecility and other fun stuff, by way of only mating with “their own kind”. Think that the modern versions had “thought” this out (or were advised) that it might be best to start mingling with “commoners”?
BTW, I think you’ll find that your lilywhite community’s IQ will drop considerably when the food shortages kick in (not to mention the genetic rigidity). Growing brains need proper (and diverse) nutrition. Sorry, again. I see madness ahead.
I agree that in-breeding is unhealthy. I think that skin tones are partly an evolutionary product of climate and sunlight ie the need to metabolize vitamin D vs the need to protect the skin from UV. I think that other racial characteristics are products of historical accident, sexual selection, local conditions.
My wife is Chinese. From knowing her, her family, friends and a fair number of Asians that I’ve worked with over the decades I’ve seen nothing that would indicate any superiority of asians over whites or vice versa. It’s admittedly a small sample but I think I’ve seen enough. I’ve seen brilliant as well as totally screwed up, dysfunctional and imbecilic in both races. I’ve worked with a fair number of east Indians and Blacks also. Same goes for them.
I think that attraction is visual as well as olfactory. For one thing, guys by nature, like novelty. I can’t speak for women. Maybe some women readers can weigh in. All the time I hear that for women the issue of attraction is “complicated”. Maybe in an anonymous forum we can hear hear why it is so. What do women want? From a young age I’ve had either a girlfriend or a wife and I’m getting old and I still don’t understand it.
I get the feeling that for the past 2.5 million years, since creatures that are recognizably human have walked the earth, men and women have been talking past one another and after all this time we still don’t comprehend one another’s nature.
Ok.
Have heard that modern woman (Eve if you like) evolved first around 200,000 years ago and then modern man Adam evolved much later in response to her, maybe as late as 60,000 years ago. Read Sex, Time, and Power for example. One of the key ideas expressed therein is that through aligning her fertility via the cycles of the moon, woman discovered deep time which gave he some control over sex so that men had to learn how to relate to her, to seduce her, to nurture her. Men took that knowledge of time and discovered their own mortality which unnerved them. Even now you will find that men — particulary the strong, confident, ambitious kind — are more troubled by the idea of their passing than women tend to be. Thus men were inspired by this awareness of their mortality to leave heirs. I find that having children (though my first has a Taiwanese mother my second who is expected in the fall has a mother of Slavic, Baltic, and Germanic background) feels a lot like ensuring one’s own survival. It really is a very similar feeling. Men were also driven to develop empires and leave monuments largely to assauge their fear of death and leaving the world without a trace and also to satisfy their craving to be important.
On another note see the following site for information on the relative intelligence of European populations:
http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/iq_matters/
At first glance it is obvious that the trouble folk in southern Europe have somewhat lower iqs than the more mechanically inclined and disciplined northerners. Have read that the Scotts as well as the Irish have iqs somewhat less than the European median of 100. That explains some of the absurd behavior of the western Celts, notably their fractionness, lack of foresight, proneness to fantastic notions, being enthralled to their addictions, and various outdated customs in a hide-bound fashion. Note also that the east Asians are smarter than the average European by about 5 or 6 points which is less than the amount by which some European populations are less intelligent than the European median, Serbians with a median iq of 89 for example. You may not notice in conversation that the East Asians are smarter because like most mongoloid populations there strengths are in certain non-verbal areas. Have read that the oriental’s score about a half a deviation above the white mean in certain such areas of non-verbal, perhaps spatial or mathematical intelligence.
IQ Matters
By
Robert E. Reis
The following is a summary of we know about the distribution of intelligence as measured by IQ tests among the genetic clusterings of humankind.
The European genetic clustering wherever it lives has a median IQ of 99.
There are however studies that show that some European peoples have somewhat lower median IQ’s. Portugal, Ireland, and Lithuania have median IQ’s in the low 90s. The median IQ’s in Southeast Europe are also lower: Romania 94, Bulgaria 93, Croatia 90, Serbia 89, Greece 93, and Turkey 90.
The East Asian genetic clustering gets higher scores on IQ tests than the Western populations these tests were standardized on. The median IQ in Japan, China, S. Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan is 105.
East Asian children adopted by families of the European genetic clustering show higher median IQ’s than the nonadopted children of families of the European genetic clustering.
The jury is still out about the relative IQ’s of East Asians and Southeast Asians.
The South Chinese often do better than members of the European genetic clustering. Filipinos don’t do as well. Within Malaysia, the Chinese test much better than the Malays. Within Southeast Asia, the overseas Chinese do much better economically than the Malays.
The Middle Eastern genetic clustering of the non-European genetic clustering of the Caucasian genetic clustering has a median IQ score between 82 and 86.
It is noteworthy that between 20 to 50% of marriages in the Middle East are between cousins, whereas fewer than 1% of the marriages of members of the European genetic clustering are between cousins. Studies show that cousin marriages cost IQ points.
I met an Eskimo in Arabia. She was extremely bright. This is not strange.
Members of the Arctic genetic clustering have been living a primitive hunter-gatherer life for thousands of years. Unlike hunter-gatherers living elsewhere, they do well on IQ tests. They are the third most intelligent genetic clustering with a median IQ of 91.
Arctic people, East Asians, Australian Aborigines and American Indians all have an elevated visual memory IQ.
I have never met an Australian Aborigines.
They have the smallest brains of any living population, but the parts of their brains devoted to vision is much larger that those parts devoted to vision in members of the European genetic clustering. Their median IQ is only 62, but their visual memory IQ is 119.
The nearby Australoids living in New Guinea have a median IQ of 63.
The Polynesian genetic clustering divides into Maoris with a median IQ of 90 and the non-Maoris with a median IQ of 85.
The Amerindian genetic clustering has a median IQ of 86.
Mestizos, Hispanic people of mixed Amerindian and European descent, have a median IQ of 89 in the United States but a median IQ of 94 in Mexico.
One researcher has found a correlation of .96 between the Gross Domestic Product-per-capita of South American countries and the percentage of the population that are members of the European genetic clustering of the Caucasian genetic clustering.
Sub-Saharan Africans living in Europe, the United States and Canada have median IQs of 85 to 87. Sub-Saharan Africans living in Latin America and in the Caribbean have a median IQ of 71. The Sub-Saharan Africans living in Africa have a median IQ of 67.
The latest international evaluation of math and science performance of eighth graders showed almost no overlap between the scores of East Asians and Sub-Saharan Africans.
The most likely explanation for the difference between the IQs of Sub-Saharan Africans living in White countries and the Europeans is mainly genetic. The difference between the IQs of Sub-Saharan Africans living in Africa and Sub-Saharan Africans living in White countries is largely because of environmental factors.
I was astounded to learn that breast-feeding dramatically improves IQ scores. Three times as many White American mothers breast-feed compared with African-American mothers.
.
There have been a few IQ studies of Bushmen and Pygmies.
The median IQ of the Jewish genetic clustering of the Middle Eastern genetic clustering living in Israel is 95. Forty percent of Israeli Jews are Ashkenazi. Ashkenazi Jews have a higher median IQs. Sixty percent of Israeli Jews are not Ashkenazi and their median IQ is lower.
Brain size is important. The median IQs scores of genetic clusterings is closely correlated to median brain size. East Asians and Europeans have much larger heads than Africans in proportion to their body sizes.
The EQ, Encephalization quotient, brain size controlling for body size, is correlated to intelligence among all primates. Rhesus monkeys have an EQ of 2.10, chimpanzees 2.60, Australopithecus 3.70, Homo habilis 4.30, Homo erectus 5.00, and the average modern human 7.5.
IQ tests have been proven reliable over time. IQ tests given in various nations many years apart have
yielded similar results.
Do IQ tests predict the same real world results across national and genetic boundaries?
IQ tests correlate from .8 to .9 with the outcomes of international scholastic examinations. In fact the countries with the highest median IQs do even better than expected on international scholastic examinations. The countries with the lowest median IQs do even worse on international scholastic examinations.
IQ matters economically. South Korean is a high median IQ population nation. Ghana is a low median IQ population nation. The Philippines is an in-between median IQ population nation. Ghana and the Philippines are resource rich nations, South Korean is not. In the 1950s they were all equally poor. Economists were predicting that Ghana and the Philippines were going to become wealthy and that the South Koreans were doomed to poverty. IQ trumped resources.
This article is based on an extensive review of Richard Lynn’s Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis which appeared on the geneexpression website on Wednesday, February 01, 2006.
Posted by Robert Reis on Thursday, October 11, 2007 at 10:48 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
For those who missed this event altogether or barely heard about it.Remember,no riots,no looting etc.I wonder why?
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=pFjaQoOdjvI
‘In these parts (S. Ontario) inter-racial marriages were very uncommon 30-40 years ago’
duuuu…..how many asians/blacks were in canada in 1960?
by 1980 i heard the muslim/asian invasion was well under way!
‘was astounded to learn that breast-feeding dramatically improves IQ scores. Three times as many White American mothers breast-feed compared with African-American mothers
duu..its not that breast milk increases IQ but that cows milk and a plastic nipple decrease IQ!
like being raised in a drab orphanage wouldnt stimulate intelligence.
‘IQ matters economically. South Korean is a high median IQ population nation. Ghana is a low median IQ population nation’
do you have any idea of how much $ the USA has given to south korea?
how much welfare has ghana gotten?
and korea like japan and china protect against invaders and ‘ free trade’…
china isnt strapped by the federal reserve the way the us is to the banksters.
Immigration Check Point
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gkBP2RCbo4
You’re all over the place man. If you valued our culture then you would value our genotype which created it. Can you prove your unspoken, implicit, and totally irrational premise that the genotype is only physical? That it has no effect on mentality and character – even though the brain is physical? And even though we see such varying character traits in the different “races” of cats and dogs? Can you prove that man is a “blank slate” at birth ready to be programmed by the psych-technicians called teachers?
You have not proved any of this and you cannot. But what we believe has been proven in the laboratory and more importantly – in the laboratory of life. What you believe, the malleability of man, has been disproven in the laboratory and the laboratory of life.
The greatest weapon of the East Asians against the White Man is their women. And you were conquered. I can’t blame you – they are on the average, far lovelier than our heavy, clumpy peasant women. Certainly our lovelies are their equal – but there are far fewer of them and most of them are in the sterile upper classes.
Because so few Whites are being born, I’ll have to forgo any Chinese girlfriends in this incarnation and do my racial duty. I’ll probably end up with some heavy, middle aged, tatooed, Nazi biker chick who thinks she’s still 19. I’ll just have to look at the floor and think of Germany until the process is completed.
All this BS about race etc. we are infinitely programmable machines, we can be programmed to act and behave in any possible way. Foxconn workers are programmed as robots and are doing a good job, are happy.
On a side note, minimum wage in developed Western or western like countries US, EU, JAPAN, South Korea, etc. is from 700 dollars to 1,200 dollars a month. Now take away 500 dollars a month rent for one bedroom house, 500 dollars for food and car, plus some extra obligatory expenses and westrn factory workers are probably making minus 200 to minus 300 dollars a month. So Foxconn workers have at least 100 dollars still available for free money at the end of the month, western workers have a debt of 200 to 300 dollars at the end of the month if they at least want to keep on eating.
Chinese workers are richer than western workers, but western workers are always blamed of being too rich, for making salaries that are 10 times chinese workers. And in fct only the minimum wage is and will be offered to western workers for this or else they are not “competitive”. Beware, the worldwide avarage going salary will end up being 400 dollars a month. Adapt.
What a rip off…
I’ve always liked Jim’s refreshing antidotes
to the goofy “It’s morning in America” types
who haven’t stuck their ass out of the house
since 1978. Therefore, they haven’t seen much
of our crop of 200-pound 18-year-old girls with
staples in their faces or tried to drum up
conversations in public venues. It’s tough.
If it’s a cafe then you don’t dare bother
the laptop people!! If it’s a bar, you’re
now dealing with “ugh” level intellects.
Kafka had it easy.
We’ve become a CAN’T-DO nation. Most teachers
don’t have the cahones to guide young people
though it’s much tougher since the parents
aren’t doing it either. You can literally
feel the ANGST in the air which, paradoxically,
makes a lot of people party louder, longer,
and later than ever. There’s a sense that
the statistical legerdemain of the fake
recovery has run its course and now we all
have to be grown-ups again.
We don’t have the cathedrals, promenades, town
squares, and ancient building aesthetics of
Europe which, at least, give them SOME solace
as the global Dark Age advances. What musical,
artistic, or architectural wonders do Americans
have to look at in their “Development-World”
sterile hyper-mod houses??
These little things don’t seem to matter when
we’re all flush with gruesome gains on the
NYSE but on the way down, all those little
things that never counted suddenly are the
ONLY things that count … and they aren’t there.
Eleuthero
Because Chinese workers and similar worldwide don’t have to pay for room and board, the house and food is for free, company paid. Way to go, at least they would offer the same in the “rich” west…
Is there a Doctor in the forum? Someone please give Jim a prescription for an antidepressant. I have included Kunstler in my readings after The Long Emergency, but the worm’s-eye view is so chronic, he seems like a whiner. Is it ALL bad, Jimbo?
“There’s a sense that the statistical legerdemain of the fake recovery has run its course and now we all have to be grown-ups again.”
“Grown up” is when you can look at 10 consecutive months of positive economic data and admit the recovery is NOT “fake”
Sometimes I think people secretly want to go back to the failed Bush years that resulted in LOSING 700,000 jobs a month.
The sophist responds:
“Grown up” is when you can look at 10 consecutive months of positive economic data and admit the recovery is NOT “fake” ”
Ok. Well, the stock market has done relatively well, but a lot of folks have been unemployed a long time. The number of long-term unemployed is at least the highest it has been since the 30’s I believe. The official unemployment rate is about 9.7%. Also incomes adjusted for inflation have not come up much. When you add in the increases in costs of living they have actually come down for most Americans since 1970. The wealth has not trickled down, but has rather become more concentrated among the executives, hedge fund managers, leading investors etc which is a fraction of the top 1% of the population.
“Your second sentence is pure rhetoric:
Sometimes I think people secretly want to go back to the failed Bush years that resulted in LOSING 700,000 jobs a month.”
Anyway, Ass-Sucka, reading your posts over the past several months has really raised my blood pressure, you miscegenation-espousing spin-doctoring, swill-shoveling, patron of hypostry, and sophist. Get your sorry hiney back to the bayoux, you sweet-talking demon-spawn with honey dripping from your forked tongue.
This next link shows how when compared to distant populations, one’s own ethnic group are in effect as closely related as brother and sisters in comparison. By supporting one’s own kind, one preserves one’s genes that are outside of one’s body. Loving a beautiful woman (of one’s own ethnic group or close) is just like that.
Geoff
http://vdare.com/rushton/090820_ethnonationalism.htm
J. Philippe Rushton Archive Email a Friend…
Printer Friendly Version…
August 20, 2009
Shared Genes: The Evolution of Ethnonationalism
[This piece was submitted to Foreign Affairs, which rejected it Email them.]
By Professor J. Philippe Rushton
Jerry Z. Muller a professor at Catholic University, (“Us and Them,”, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2008, and “Replies,” July/August 2008) argued that the power of ethnic nationalism “will drive global politics for generations to come” because it “corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit,” which often manifests in the “need for each people to have its own state.” His essay provided a valuable corrective to the position that ethnic identity is a mere social construction that globalization will steadily eradicate.
But Muller’s argument would have been strengthened by understanding why people prefer genetic similarity in others.
Ever since the 1994 publication of The History and Geography of Human Genes by Stanford University geneticist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, it has been possible to measure genetic distances between population groups in terms of family equivalents. Anthropologist Henry Harpending showed that against the background of worldwide genetic variance, the average similarity between people within a single population is the same as that between half-siblings. Political scientist Frank Salter calculated that compared to the Danes, any two random English people have a kinship of 1/32 of a cousin. Two English people become the equivalent of 3/8 of a cousin by comparison with people from the Near East, 1/2 cousin by comparison with people from India, half-siblings by comparison with people from China, and like full-siblings compared with people from sub-Saharan Africa.
Thus, the aggregate of genes people share with co-ethnics dwarfs those shared with extended families. Rather than being a poor relation of family nepotism, ethnic nepotism is virtually a proxy for it.
The pull of genetic similarity explains why members of ethnic groups move into the same neighborhoods, join together in clubs and societies, and are prone to develop ethnocentric attitudes toward those who differ in dress, dialect, and other appearance. In The Ethnic Phenomenon (1981), by Pierre van den Berghe, a sociology and anthropology at the University Of Washington, found that even relatively open and assimilative groups “police” their boundaries against invasion by strangers using cultural “badges” to mark group membership, such as scarification, linguistic accent, and clothing style. Another study calculated coefficients of consanguinity within and between Eskimo tribes in the Hudson’s Bay region of Canada and found prosocial behavior such as wife exchange, and anti-social behavior such as genocidal killing during warfare, followed lines of genetic distance, albeit mediated by ethnic badging such as dialect and appearance. [A study in the evolution of ethnocentrism, by C. J. Irwin, in The Sociobiology of Ethnocentrism, 1987]
From an evolutionary perspective, the reason why people construct ethnic identities and engage in ethnic nepotism is that by doing so they increase the survival of their genes. Central to discussion is the concept of inclusive fitness.
As Richard Dawkins explicated in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, it is genes that survive and are passed on across generations. Some of the individual’s most distinctive genes will be found in fellow ethnics as well as in offspring, siblings, nephews, cousins, and grand-children. By benefiting extended kin, people benefit copies of their genes.
Of course, altruism has always posed a conundrum for Darwinism. How could altruism evolve through “survival of the fittest” if altruism means self-sacrifice? If the most altruistic members of a group sacrifice themselves for others, they will leave fewer offspring to pass on the genes that made them altruistic. At first glance, it would seem that altruism could not evolve, while selfishness would.
Yet altruism is common in all animals, even to the point of self-sacrifice. When bees defend their hive and sting intruders, the entire stinger is torn from the bee’s body. Stinging an intruder is an act of altruistic self-sacrifice. In ants, if nest walls are broken open, soldiers pour out to combat foragers from other nests; at the same time, worker ants repair the broken walls, in the process leaving the soldiers outside to die.
Evolutionary psychology answers the Darwinian conundrum. From an evolutionary point of view, an individual organism is only a vehicle, part of an elaborate device, which ensures the survival and reproduction of genes with the least possible biochemical alteration. So even when an altruist sacrifices its life for its kin, it ensures the survival of common genes. In this case, the vehicle has been sacrificed to preserve copies of its precious cargo.
Patriotism is traditionally seen as a virtue and extension of family loyalty, typically preached using the terminology of kinship. Nations are referred to as the “motherland” and “fatherland,” while members call each other “cousin,” “brother,” and “sister.” Although ethnic groups and nations appear and disappear, they break-up and coalesce anchored in the reality of socially perceived biological descent.
While descent often has an element of fiction, pure fiction seldom flies. When resources are plentiful, conflict is minimal. As resources become scarce, individuals compete more intensely, and they do so in groups of extended kin. Ethnic hatred and warfare are the “dark side” of human altruism.
Genetic distance studies have confirmed (and disconfirmed) many ideas about people’s origins. For example, in the case of both the Indian caste system and the Jews, traditional views have been confirmed.
Even though they have been scattered around the world for two millennia, Jews from Iraq and Libya share more genes with Jews from Germany, Poland, and Russia than either group shares with the non-Jewish populations among whom they have lived for centuries. Israel is a new state, yet one which is built on an ancient tradition of ethnicity and nationhood.
Some Jews have greeted the genetic “validation” positively because it affirms the organic nature of the Jewish people. It is also recognized as a two-edged sword that could be invoked to claim “conspiracy” from certain quarters.
Hindu nationalists have expressed similar mixtures of feelings. While pleased to confirm “Aryan” origins, they fear a backlash over elitism and exclusivity.
Surveys carried out by political scientist Robert Putnam suggest that too much ethnic diversity seriously undermines the trust and social bonds within a community. The more diverse a community, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust others, from next-door neighbors to local governments. Individuals become more wary even of members of their own ethnic group, as well as people from different backgrounds. People like to live within a “comfort zone” of others like themselves.
Other surveys show that, in multiethnic countries, people prefer same-race health providers and perceive them as more trustworthy. On the positive side, research with adolescents has shown that ethnic pride helps teenagers maintain confidence when faced with stress.
The pull of genetic similarity has been demonstrated to occur not only in large groups, both national and international, but also in dyads such as marriage partners and friendships. Of all the decisions people make that affect their environment, choosing friends and spouses are among the most important.
Reviews of the literature consistently show that spouses and best friends are most similar on socio-demographic variables such as age, ethnicity, and educational level (r = .60), next most on opinions and attitudes (r = .50), then on cognitive ability (r = .40), and least, but still significantly so, on personality (r = .20) and physical characteristics (r = .20).
Studies of adoptees, and of monozygotic or MZ twins (who share 100% of their genes) and dizygotic or DZ twins (who share 50% of their genes), show the human preference for similarity is heritable. Psychologist David Rowe studied similarity between best friends in several hundred twin pairs. He found not only a genetic contribution to antisocial behavior, but that adolescents genetically inclined to delinquency were genetically inclined to seek each other out as friends.
A study of adopted and non-adopted siblings found that whereas biological siblings (who share genes as well as environments) had friends who resembled each other, adoptive siblings (who share only environments) had friends who were not at all similar to each other.
A 2005 study of twins in Psychological Science [PDF]looked at spouses as well as best friends. All the respondents completed questionnaires measuring their personality and social attitudes. The results showed: (a) friends and spouses were about as similar as siblings (r = .25), a level of similarity not previously recognized; and (b) MZ twins chose more similar friends and spouses to their co-twin than did DZ twins. People’s choices were found to be over 30% heritable.
A genetic contribution to mate choice has been shown by similarity being more pronounced on the more heritable attributes within sets of homogeneous traits. In a study of physical characteristics, people had chosen their spouses more on the basis of the more heritable features such as middle-finger length (80% heritable) than on the less heritable features such as upper-arm circumference (50% heritable).
In a study of personality and leisure time pursuits, spousal similarity was greater on the more heritable items such as enjoying reading (41% heritable) than on the less heritable items such as having many different hobbies (20% heritable).
In a study of cognitive ability, spousal resemblance was greater on the most heritable of 26 subtests. Other studies found that degree of genetic matching not only predicted the occurrence of marriage but also its stability and happiness.
Even when people marry across ethnic lines, they prove rather than disprove the rule. One analysis of the large Hawaii Family Study of Cognition found that spouses who married across race were more similar to each other in personality than those marrying within race. The researchers suggested that couples “made up” for their dissimilarity on the racial dimension by choosing spouses more like themselves in other respects.
Conclusion: the reason people engage in ethnic nepotism, as well as marry similar others, and like, make friends with, and help the most similar of their neighbors, is that doing so benefits copies of their genes.
The sense of a common ethnicity remains a major focus of identification for individuals today. It is no more likely to diminish in the future than is that of the family.
Genetic similarity theory explains why.
J. Philippe Rushton (E-mail him) is a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. and the author of Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective. His most recent work on the evolution of ethnonationalism appeared in Nations and Nationalism (2005) and the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society (2009).
Will someone please direct me to JHK’s “Clusterfuck Nation”? I seem to have wandered into the neo-nazi eugenics forum. Gott mit uns, anyone?
“Anyway, Ass-Sucka, reading your posts over the past several months has really raised my blood pressure…”
treebeardsuncle, if you have been reading my posts you must know I do not engage in ad hominem attack so I will not respond in kind to your insults.
I am, however, concerned about your blood pressure. The lovastatins prescribed by doctors may have a negative effect on your liver. There is a naturally occurring lovastatin-like herb called Chinese Red Yeast which may help lower your blood pressure.
Take care of yourself.
The effects of Chinese red-yeast-rice have been established scientifically. You can read about it here:
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 1999 Feb;69(2):231-6.
Cholesterol-lowering effects of a proprietary Chinese red-yeast-rice dietary supplement.
Heber D, Yip I, Ashley JM, Elashoff DA, Elashoff RM, Go VL.
Center for Human Nutrition, Department of Medicine, UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1742, USA.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9989685
There weren’t that many non whites in Canada in 1960 aside from Aboriginals but by 1975 there were quite a few. The university I attended was full of Chinese and and there were also a fair number of east Indians.
The Chinese included a lot of students from Red China. It was interesting to watch them. You couldn’t miss them, they wore green or blue or grey Mao type clothes. They were like fish out of water. At the time China was just ending the insanity of the Cultural revolution and we were just coming out of the 1960s era of social and campus unrest. The society they would have grown up in could not have been more different from ours. They seemed to be bug-eyed half the time at the things they were seeing. I think that they carried a lot of what they saw and learned back to China and that laid the ground work for the subsequent reforms we’ve seen the past 25 years.
Nine Turkish men on board the Mavi Marmara were shot a total of 30 times and five were killed by gunshot wounds to the head, according to the vice-chairman of the Turkish council of forensic medicine, which carried out the autopsies for the Turkish ministry of justice today.
The results revealed that a 60-year-old man, Ibrahim Bilgen, was shot four times in the temple, chest, hip and back. A 19-year-old, named as Fulkan Dogan, who also has US citizenship, was shot five times from less that 45cm, in the face, in the back of the head, twice in the leg and once in the back. Two other men were shot four times, and five of the victims were shot either in the back of the head or in the back, said Yalcin Buyuk, vice-chairman of the council of forensic medicine.
The findings emerged as more survivors gave their accounts of the raids. Ismail Patel, the chairman of Leicester-based pro-Palestinian group Friends of al-Aqsa, who returned to Britain today, told how he witnessed some of the fatal shootings and claimed that Israel had operated a “shoot to kill policy”.
He calculated that during the bloodiest part of the assault, Israeli commandos shot one person every minute. One man was fatally shot in the back of the head just two feet in front him and another was shot once between the eyes. He added that as well as the fatally wounded, 48 others were suffering from gunshot wounds and six activists remained missing, suggesting the death toll may increase.
The new information about the manner and intensity of the killings undermines Israel’s insistence that its soldiers opened fire only in self defence and in response to attacks by the activists.
“Given the very disturbing evidence which contradicts the line from the Israeli media and suggests that Israelis have been very selective in the way they have addressed this, there is now an overwhelming need for an international inquiry,” said Andrew Slaughter MP, a member of the all party group on Britain and Palestine.
Re this business about IQ.
Vlad and I have had discussions about this in prior posts. I think that there is intelligence you can measure via IQ tests and intelligence you cannot. I used the example of my father who got only 5 years of formal education, came to Canada semi-literate. He has never read a book, will never likely read a book and could not read an IQ test. Yet he has skills that I can only dream about.
If my father were dropped naked into a forest hundreds of miles from civilization I am telling you he would not only survive, in six months he would have a farm up and running and have the ability to feed a family of four. You would want him with you if you were in a desperate survival situation but you would not want someone like me. You cannot measure in an IQ test the kind of intelligence that my father has.
All my relatives of my parents’ generation were like my father ie semi-literate, partially educated. But like my father they had qualities you can’t measure. Me and ALL my cousins that were born in Canada and the US (and some that stayed behind in Italy) are university educated professionals employed in fields like medicine, engineering, architecture, industrial design, finance (like me). Me and all of my cousins were top of the class. All of our parents came from situations of extreme deprivation and poverty, all of them were half starved and stunted and none of our parents would have scored well on IQ tests. When they came to this continent they were dismissed as being fit for only for the hardest, dirtiest manual labour.
Yet look at us one generation later. That’s why I think IQ tests have some utility in measuring a person’s ability but the utility is limited. I think early home and school environment is critical in how well a person performs on IQ tests. How well a person eats, the quality of his medical care I think are also critical. We were blessed with parents that took care of us and school teachers that knew talent when they saw it and who didn’t dismiss us despite our lowly beginnings as kids of dirt poor immigrants.
Yep,Ozone,we are back at the Nazis,only this time we are talking about the Ashkenazis.
Those are good points cash. However, your people are smart Europeans, from Italy, not folks from Asia and Africa.
Geoff
Vlad, I don’t think man is a blank slate. I agree that genetics is important in what you become but I don’t think it’s the be all and end all. IMO I think that abilities are pretty evenly spread among racial groups. You state that I can’t prove anything of what I think. Well, put it this way: I believe the evidence of my own eyes. You would likely regard that as inadequate but, from my own perspective, I’ve been around, I’m no spring chicken.
Plus, people have told me (and they weren’t saying it as a compliment) that I’m cynical, skeptical, insubordinate and arrogant. Belief doesn’t come easily to me nor does trust. My bullshit detectors are twitchy in the extreme.
Another thing: I think that we can’t judge racial superiority/inferiority based on where we are now in history. We’ve had this discussion before also. I used the example of non white, non Europeans living in highly developed agrarian societies thousands of years before white Europeans ie with irrigated fields, temple complexes, mathematics, writing etc. I don’t think it was because of the genetic or racial superiority of non whites. As we discussed I think they got a leg up because their physical environment was more favourable to producing cereal crops than was Europe.
Also, when Europe was suffering through its Dark Ages after the fall of Rome people in other parts of the world were living in glittering civilizations. I don’t think you can attribute the fact that Europe at the time was a fly blown craphole to white racial inferiority.
Civilizations have their ups and downs. Right now ours is dominant and has been for centuries but I would be very hesitant to attribute that to racial superiority. We can see where things are going for our civilization/culture and I don’t think it’s going well. I think both you and I mourn that fact.
Take a look at
http://www.vdare.com/pb/time_to_rethink1.htm
and
http://www.vdare.com/pb/time_to_rethink2.htm
on the promises and perils of immigration, particularly for a country and population receiving too many immigrants of the wrong kinds too fast.
Note in particular the following:
“At a Cabinet meeting today, Attorney General William P. Barr said nearly one-third of the first 6,000 [Los Angeles] riot suspects arrested and processed through the court system were illegal aliens, according to a senior Administration official. Barr has not proposed any special effort to have them deported, a Justice Department spokesman said.”
—Washington Post, May 6, 1992
Now, let’s ge honest about who those illegal immigrants are, they are Mexicans, and other central Americans — fat, stupid, criminal, and good for little other than menial jobs.
http://vdare.com/rushton/080616_lynn.htm
Note in particular that these ugly fat low-class criminal mentally-below-average Latinos have iqs comparable to that pathetic backward race of American Indians.
“In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray found that the average IQ for African Americans (85) is lower than for Hispanic (89), White (103), East Asian (106), and Jewish Americans (113).”
…
In Canada too, there is an IQ hierarchy: Jews (109), East Asians (101), Whites (100), Amerindians (89), and Blacks (84).
Note that IQ difference are hereditary and thus just as for individuals, there are differences for populations and nations that persist through time.
This should be celebrated and taken advantage of.
The use of medical science to in anway ameloriate this (other than providing adequate nutrition and breast feeding and healthful environments) should be opposed.
back in 89? HK went into red chinese hands.
it was then many bought their way into canada?
if you had a million$ theyd let you in? yes?
pops,
tell that to the LA Times!
‘I think that they carried a lot of what they saw and learned back to China and that laid the ground ‘
THINK?
Read johnsons books:
‘ perfectly legal’ and ‘free lunch’
….how they bought/made a monopoly on a critical item for [guided missles?], doped iridium or something.
think,,,you know.
“Because so few Whites are being born, I’ll have to forgo any Chinese girlfriends in this incarnation and do my racial duty. I’ll probably end up with some heavy, middle aged, tatooed, Nazi biker chick who thinks she’s still 19. I’ll just have to look at the floor and think of Germany until the process is completed.”
Vlad my man, you have it ass backwards, as usual. You need to find a heavy, tatooed, Nazi biker chick who IS 19, if you want to procreate. Of course in your case she will also probably be cranked out of her mind, but the sex will be the best ride of your life, man, she will buck you like a bronco, shake you from side to side,and throw you to the ceiling, catch you between her legs and do it all over again, all night long.
Sheesh, man, you don’t know what your missing.
So, ok, the kids may be a bit brain damaged at birth, but by then, so will you, so it wont matter. Just be a nice happy family of crackers living in a trailer somewhere.
And obviosly 8M don’t read, or he missed the part about the “happy” Chinese workers KILLING THEM SELVES. Gee, don’t sound too happy family to me.
I’d guess that he is smoking the crank too, boy, that pipe sure rots the brains….
But say, did you know that Florida NOW has black sand beaches, just like Hawaii, but without the volcanos? Get on DOWN there!!!
Howdy Asoka, Your recommendation concerning red yeast rice is valid up to a point. I have been taking it for about 4 years (my doctor recommended it as the commercial statins caused me harm) the reason it has similar effects to commercial statins is because lovastatin (patented) and monacolin K in red yeast rice are identical. To sell red yeast rice in the US the FDA (in compliance with drug company requirements) requires the monacolin in red yeast rice to be no more than 0.4% of which the K variant will be about half or 0.2%. I became aware of this BS when I procured a kilo of the red yeast rice powder in bulk so as to fill my own capsules or cook with it. The company very dutifully informed me that they were within FDA requirements of 0.4% which led me to email them with an inquiry as to the percentage of monacolin in the Chinese red yeast rice as prepared in China. That touched a nerve as I had a response literally within minutes questioning my question. There then followed a series of emails forth and back which led me to believe that they were concerned that I either worked for a drug company, the FDA or was perhaps an undercover operative attempting to jeopardize their continued operations within the US.
I continue to take it banking on the placebo effect more than the beneficial effects of the minuscule quantity of monacolin K.
SNAFU
What a lovely piece of writing. This morning I woke up and after the past month of horrors and idiocy I felt utterly alone. The thought occurred to me that I would have a cup of coffee and a few slices of nicely buttered toast, then take a long, warm, scented bath, put on something light and pretty, play a Deva Premal CD and hang myself.
I no longer understand much of this country, most of its people and its bizarre political system, in which the moron with the most money almost always wins and corporations have the final word. Eight years of an utter idiot in charge, who led us into a completely insane “war”, has not taught anyone anything. Almost 5000 of our youngest dead so far. “So? So what? Go fuck yourself”, as that sinister Cheney would say.
Utterly uneducated, non thinking or reading people without an original thought in their heads, like grease in a foul soup, rise to the top and voice banale opinions which are repeated by everyone: people like Beck, and Palin, and Lush and Bill, and that woman in Nevada who is a bircher and is afraid of chloride and wants the prohibition back. In NEVADA!!!.
Racism, always barely under the surface, has raised its ugly fork tongued head, as if the “affrontery” of a black man in the white house, finally is enough reason to start openly discussing the validity and possible repeal of the civil rights act. And everything that was set up to go horribly wrong in the eight years of “W”, now is blithely blamed on Obama. I don’t envy him, but I think he doesn’t have a chance. Never did. He’s the scapegoat for four years, until they have rustled up a new manageable twit.
I have been scratching my head lately and wondering: who are these people, these teabaggers, these libertarians, these misanthropes who would not want a child to have health care, or enough to eat? And where are the people like me? Who are for social justice and know the difference between it and socialism?
So here I am. And I found your essay, and I feel less alone. A last voice of sanity in this oil soaked morass. I have rolled up the noose and shall just sit it out. Nothing will change, only for the worse, but I won’t let the bastards get me down!
Thank you!
Its a while later and this BP thing is now a memory in the past for the US. I agree that the US is a ridiculiose place.
I do not agree with some of the comments here I think some people are kidding themselves to be honest!
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the Wednesday Trulia website announced a higher than expected $ 17 IPO pricing,follow this cost the real estate search site apt rise 102 million dollars. Earlier this month Trulia initial public offering of the pricing coverage set apt 14-16 U.S. dollars per share. Offering access to the income of the vast majority will be classified as a company whatever some early investors apt sell holdings. The Trulia listing to follow the pace of its main competitor Zillow, the two companies are betting the real estate mall ambition amend which want attract more buyers plus sellers to enter the market U.S. housing starts rose 2.3% among August, a seven.8% addition amid existing family sales. Zillow share spend rose 33%, since the public offering amid July last annual afterward near Wednesday apt near along $ 45.55 per share. Despite Trulia abatement in losses among the past five years, the company’s current financial situation is still worrying. The site last annual a detriment of $ 6.2 million plus $ 7.six million detriment within the six months ended June 30, Trulia reports among the 1st six months of this daily the independent visits apt 22 million, with more than 360,000 athletic real estate users, of which 6% of paid subscribers. Trulia Thursday longing be listed for trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
Financial Times: Russian fuel to quest $ 15 billion of financing the acquisition of the equity of TNK-BP
Reuters: Blackstone Group, a $ 2 billion acquisition of the Vivint company
Blackstone Group agreed apt acquire home agitate system suppliers more than $ 2 billion The Vivint enterprise bet more families in North America ambition install the company’s alarm air conditioning plus energy treatment systems. As part of the handle Blackstone Group longing take over Vivint the subsidiary VivintSolar plus the 2GIGTechnologies this transaction ambition be completed by the annihilate of the anniversary The Vivint corporation was established amid 1999 onward Todd ? Peterson, has grown rapidly among the past 13 years, successfully dodge several major acquisitions. Vivint has 60 million customers among the United States plus Canada, the main provider of the family of intelligent systems, including alarms,atmosphere conditioning plus energy management services, the company’s treatment owns half of the company’s equity,and the additional half owned along Goldman Sachs Group, investment corporation JupiterPartners and PetersonPartners always the treatment crew longing stay aboard then the acquisition. Vivint CEO, said, Telecommunications: Goldman Sachs CEO criticized the austerity policy apt smother the U.S. economy
Goldman Sachs Group Lloyd ? Blankfein, Chairman plus CEO of the Canadian Club surrounded Toronto lecture the opposition among the short term implementation of austerity policies. Lloyd ? Blankfein said the United States tin never rely on the austerity policies to realize higher gross maid production (GDP), he likewise opposed the introduction of afresh economic incentive sort as the poise canvas of the U.S.administration have noxious consequences, he believes the United States guarantee apt the market that tin cope with the long-term economic problems. Blankfein said,meantime the epoch of the Bush administration’s impose cuts expire in the meantime a comprehensive cost-cutting policies began to take attain economists warned that, unless the United States Congress apt acquaint a difference,or the monetary austerity ambition navigate to the fragile U.S. economy into recession afresh
Wall Street Journal: ??? release Heineken acquired APB transactions
after two months of stalemate, Thailand the Regal ??? Wednesday Heineken ambition no longer discourage invested $ 4.five billion acquisition of the APB equity transactions.??? with Heineken accession ambition guarantee that this accession to obtain enough of the shareholders’ acceptance on September 28. Asia Pacific Breweries production of regional beer brands including Tiger plus Bintang, Heineken beer amid some Asian markets. The Asia-Pacific malt is a joint adventure of Heineken plus Singapore Frasers Group.??? Frasers Group shares are held through its subsidiary Thai winemaking and TCCAssets of,plus has yet begun the Group’s holdings of shares. Last week, he command $ seven.2 billion acquisition of Frasers Group. Singapore enterprise currently controls a 40% peg of the APB. However,according to Wednesday’s accession Heineken Asia Pacific Breweries acquired ??? With Frasers Group held a 30% peg over 1.6 billion U.S. dollars surrounded cash dividends.
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