THE POSTS MOSTLY BY GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION

THE POSTS MOSTLY BY GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION

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Boston artist Steve Mills - realistic painting

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Fox News Makes Excuse for CIA’s Afghan Opium Cultivation


Fox News Makes Excuse for CIA’s Afghan Opium Cultivation

Kurt Nimmo

Infowars.com
April 30, 2010
In an amazing propaganda segment, Fox News’ Gerald Rivera talks with an occupation soldier about U.S. support of the opium trade in Afghanistan. The soldier tells Rivera he does not like supporting Afghan opium production. The U.S., he insists, has turned a blind eye to the cultivation because it is a cultural thing. He’d rather the Afghans grow watermelons.
Is it possible the U.S. will tell the brother of Afghanistan’s U.S.-installed ruler he should get in the watermelon business?
It was reported a few months ago that Ahmed Wali Karzai was on the CIA payroll and intimately involved in the opium trade Fox News and the rest of the corporate media tell us is run by the evil Taliban.
Fox News did not report that before everything changed on September 11, 2001, and before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban had imposed a ban on opium production. This resulted in opium production collapsing by more than 90 per cent. It was the U.S. supported Northern Alliance that came to the rescue and began protecting the production of raw opium.
“CIA-supported Mujahedeen rebels [who in 2001 were part of the Northern Alliance] engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting against the Soviet-supported government and its plans to reform the very backward Afghan society,” William Blum writes in The Real Drug Lords.
Under the interim government of Hamid Karzai, opium poppy cultivation once again began to skyrocket and opium markets were restored. According to the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP), opium cultivation increased by 657 per cent in 2002 in relation to its 2001 level. The UNDCP estimated 2002 opium poppy cultivation would cover an area between 45,000 and 65,000 hectares. Opium cultivation in 2001 had fallen to an estimated 7,606 hectares. According to the UN, in 2006 alone Afghanistan supplied 92 percent of the world’s supply of opium (see Apratim Mukarji’s Afghanistan: From Freedom to Terror, p. 22-23).
“The Golden Crescent drug trade, launched by the CIA in the early 1980s, continues to be protected by US intelligence, in liaison with NATO occupation forces and the British military. In recent developments, British occupation forces have promoted opium cultivation through paid radio advertisements,” Michel Chossudovsky wrote in 2007.
“Respected people of Helmand. The soldiers of ISAF and ANA do not destroy poppy fields,” the radio promo said. “They know that many people of Afghanistan have no choice but to grow poppy. ISAF and the ANA do not want to stop people from earning their livelihoods.” This is basically the same excuse used by the soldier interviewed by Geraldo.
“Senior Bush Administration officials had displayed a complete lack of interest in the Afghan opium problem ever since 9/11,”James Risen writes in State of War. “In fact, the White House and Pentagon went out of their way to avoid taking on the Afghan drug lords from the very outset of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.”
Not mentioned is the fact that more than 95 percent of the revenue generated by opium production is siphoned off to business syndicates, organized crime and banking and financial institutions.
“In many instances, drug money is currently the only liquid investment capital,” said Vienna-based UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa said last January. “In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor.”
Former Managing Director and board member of Wall Street investment bank Dillon Read, Catherine Austin Fitts, has long alleged that the banksters launder imponderable amounts of drug money. “According to the Department of Justice, the US launders between $500 billion – $1 trillion annually. I have little idea what percentage of that is narco dollars, but it is probably safe to assume that at least $100-200 billion relates to US drug import-exports and retail trade,” writes Fitts.
The CIA has long secured the lucrative global drug market for Wall Street and for its own operational “off-the-books” purposes. “The CIA’s operational directorate, in other words that’s their covert operations, para-military, dirty tricks — call it whatever you want — has for at least 40 years that we can document paid for a significant amount of its work through the sales of heroin and cocaine,”Guerrilla News Network reported in an interview with Christopher Simpson.
The CIA has been in the drug running business since the 1950s. In Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Latin America, and Afghanistan, the CIA — also known as the “Cocaine Import Agency” — has remained at the forefront of the international illicit drug trade. The journalist Gary Webb and the San Jose Mercury News tied the CIA and the Contras to a large crack cocaine ring in Los Angeles. Webb paid with his life for revealing this information to the public.
None of this was mentioned by Geraldo Rivera and Fox News. Instead we are told drug dealing in Afghanistan is something engaged in by the evil Taliban (a group of religious fanatics created by theCIA and its partner, Pakistin’s ISI intelligence service).
Not that the Taliban are innocent — they have abandoned their old ways and are now exploiting the opium bumper crop to fund their operations.
“Curbing the Taliban’s multimillion dollar opium poppy business was a major goal of a military operation to seize this former insurgent stronghold,” the Associated Press reported in March. “If they destroy the crops and curb the trade, they lose the support of the population — a problem for which they have no easy solution.”
Support of the population, of course, comes in a far distant second to maintaining the addiction of Wall Street and the CIA to billions of dollars in profit.

'Agent Orange'-the deadly chemical


"Perfectly Safe: It Just Kills Plants ... "
Agent Orange and the Third Generation


By SUSAN GALLEYMORE








CounterPunch , May 29, 2010

Each year for the last five years the U.S. has welcomed a delegation of Vietnamese affected by spraying chemicals in Vietnam three decades ago. The Fifth Agent Orange Justice Tour ended recently. It focused national attention on grass roots and legislative efforts to achieve comprehensive assistance to victims in Vietnam, to the children and grandchildren of U.S. veterans, and to Vietnamese-Americans.
It is not news that American troops fighting for the U.S. military in Vietnam were told by their commanders that the defoliants and herbicides sprayed by the U.S. Air Force were "perfectly safe...[they] just kill plants."
The statistics, while heartbreaking, are, likewise, not news for anyone who pays attention to recent history. From 1961 to 1970 more than 20,000 missions that composed Operations "Trail Dust" and "Ranch Hand" dispersed about 13 million gallons of chemicals over five million acres of Vietnam's forests and agricultural lands; southern Laos and Cambodia were sprayed too.
To the military mind, defoliating was a practical solution that disallowed cover to the enemy. To the corporate mind – Dow, Monsanto, Hercules, Uniroyal, Diamond Shamrock, Syntex Agribusiness, and more than two dozen others – manufacturing chemicals provided good ROI: one gallon of liquid cost $7 back then. Moreover, corporations sped up the 2,4,5T manufacturing process so they could produce more, faster. They ignored the partially catalyzed molecule, dioxin, that was a byproduct of the faster process; it remained in Agent Orange (AO).
Vietnam's dense southern uplands' forests were sprayed with a range of chemicals signified by color-coded barrels: Agents Blue, Orange, White, Pink, Purple and so on. Areas that the C-123 "Provider" airplanes didn't reach – equal to the size of Rhode Island -- were bulldozed with Rome Plows.
Paul Cox was a US Marine fighting along the DMZ for months. Today, he is a civil engineer, a Veteran for Peace member, and a board member of Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign (VAORRC). In a recent presentation in San Francisco, he described the area he fought in at the time as "almost totally denuded from high explosives and multiple spraying sorties; aside from some invasive grass, hardly anything lived, no animals, no bugs, no nothin'. We could operate in the area for days in a row and see no living trees."
Since 1994, the Canadian company Hatfield Consultants has conducted contamination and mitigation work in Vietnam in close collaboration with Vietnamese Government agencies. More than nine projects in twenty provinces have determined levels of Agent Orange/dioxin in soils, food items, human blood, and breast milk. Hatfield also studies the effects of loss of timber that leads to reduced sustainability of ecosystems, decreases in the biodiversity of plants and animals, poorer soil quality, increased water contamination, heavier flooding and erosion, increased leaching of nutrients and reductions in their availability, invasions of less desirable plant species (primarily woody and herbaceous grasses), and possible alterations of Vietnam's macro- and micro-climates.
In short, there is no let up to the devastation wreaked by war's practicality and profit three decades ago.
Consistent determination
Despite VAVA delegates representing three million people when they travel to the U.S., to date U.S. courts have not acknowledged the chemicals' effects on Vietnam or the Vietnamese.
Yet, under U.S. law, veterans who served in Vietnam between 1962 and 1975 (including those who visited Vietnam even briefly), and who have a disease that the Veterans Administration (VA) recognizes as being associated with Agent Orange, are presumed to have been exposed to Agent Orange and are eligible for service-connected compensation based on their service.
The VA’s list of "Diseases associated with exposure to certain herbicide agents" are Acute and Subacute Peripheral Neuropathy,AL Amyloidosis, Chloracne (or Similar Acneform Disease), Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (now expanded to B Cell Leukemias), Diabetes Mellitus (Type 2), Hodgkin’s Disease, Ischemic Heart Disease, Multiple Myeloma, Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, Parkinson’s Disease, Porphyria Cutanea Tarda, Prostate Cancer, Respiratory Cancers (of the lung, larynx, trachea, and bronchus), and Soft Tissue Sarcoma.
Veterans' children born with Spina bifida "may be eligible for compensation, vocational training and rehabilitation and health care benefits." For the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) concluded in its 1996 update to its report on Veterans and Agent Orange – Health Effects of Herbicides Used in Vietnam that there is "limited/suggestive evidence of an association between exposure to herbicides used in Vietnam and spina bifida in children of Vietnam veterans."
A time line, briefly
September 10, 2004: an amended class action complaint was submitted to the U.S. District Court, Eastern District; Constantine P. Kokkoris, represented the victims.
March 10, 2005: in Brooklyn, Judge Weinstein dismissed victims' claims.
September 30, 2005: a Brief was submitted to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York against 36 U.S. chemical companies. The summary by Jonathan Moore states:
The lawsuit...seeks to hold accountable the chemical companies who manufactured and supplied Agent Orange to the government. Contrary to government specifications, the product supplied to the government contained an excessive and avoidable amount of poison...[D]ioxin...was present in the herbicides supplied to the government only because these chemical companies deliberately and consciously chose to ignore then existing industry standards and produce a herbicide that contained excessive and avoidable amounts of dioxin. The presence of the poison dioxin had no military necessity...chemical companies...knew that the more herbicide they produced the more money they would make and the faster they produced it the more they could sell to the government....[T]hey ignored industry standards....
That lawsuit was unsuccessful.
Another try
This year VAVA, Veterans for Peace, and the Vietnamese will begin to apply pressure on Congress to pay the bills for damage done in that country. These groups are drafting legislation that they expect will become a bill that, eventually, addresses this legacy. It consist of four parts:
1) clean up the environment and do no further harm.
2) address the problems of millions ill ...that now extends to three generations.
3) create regional medical centers specifically for victims' children and grandchildren born with the physical deformities and mental illness associated with dioxin.
4) conduct a public health study on the Vietnamese American population in the U.S. to learn if, and if so, how they have been affected by AO sprayed in their homeland. (The assumption is that this population could have a similar exposure to deployed American military personnel).
Personal stories: new every time
If the news about dioxin – and the political and economic wrangling that accompanies it – is depressingly familiar, what is always fresh are the hopeful voices and enthusiastic faces of the VAVA delegates. All suffer grievous disease or deformities yet their spirits and generosity are astonishingly strong.
This year, 33-year old Pham The Minh accompanied the small group. He is the son of a Vietnamese fighter contaminated by Agent Orange in Quang Tri Province where the spraying was most intensive. Minh and and his sister were born after the war with birth defects that signal dioxin contamination.
His is no story of victimization. The man's voice is vibrantly honest and alive as he says, "I grew up with pain in my spirit and in my body...I graduated from university and I am happy to teach English to victims of Agent Orange."
In Minh's city of Hai Phong alone there are more than 17,000 victims with birth defects, most of whom live difficult lives and require constant support from hard-pressed families.
Last year, the delegation was headed by Dang Hong Nhut who suffers from cancer and has experienced multiple miscarriages. Twenty-one year old Tran Thi Hoan accompanied Nhut. Tran was born with one hand and no legs due to her mother's exposure. Despite Tran and her mother both being diagnosed with life threatening and disabling conditions that create severe and life-long hardship, the young woman attends college and is determined to work for a just solution for other Vietnamese families.
The 2007 delegates shared compelling stories too.
Vo Thanh Hai was 19 years old in 1978 when he was employed replanting trees around Nam Dong that had been defoliated by the U.S. Army's spraying operations.
In 1986, Mr. Hai’s wife miscarried. In 1987, their son, Vo Thanh Tuan Anh was born. In 2001, he began episodes of fatigue and dizziness that was diagnosed as osteosarcoma for which he was treated with surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
Their doctor also advised Mr. Hai to have a lump on his own neck examined. Tests disclosed Hodgkins Disease.
Both father and son have difficulty performing routine activities. Mrs. Hoa provides their daily care...which means the family has little regular income.
Nguyen Van Quy served in the Vietnam People's Army from 1972 through 1975. He ate manioc, wild herbs and plants and drank water from streams in areas that had been spayed with Agent Orange. He experienced periodic headaches and exhaustion and itchy skin and rashes.
In 2003, Mr. Quy was diagnosed with stomach cancer, liver damage and with fluid in his lung. His son, Nguyen Quang Trung, was born with spinal, limb and developmental disabilities, enlarged and deformed feet, and a congenital spine defect; he cannot stand, walk, or use his hands.
Mr. Quy's daughter, Nguyen Thi Thuy Nga, was born deaf and dumb and developmentally disabled. Neither child can attend school or work and neither is self-sufficient.
In her presentation in San Francisco, shortly before leaving the U.S. to return home, another 2007 delegate, Mrs. Hong, said how happy she was to have had a chance to visit this country and talk to people she found "very welcoming."
Mrs. Hong had served in the Eastern Combat Zone of South Vietnam as a clerk tailor and medical care worker. In 1964, she was sprayed with Agent Orange while washing rice in a stream. She tried to dive into the water to wash away the chemicals that stuck to her body. Moreover, she consumed contaminated food, wild grasses, and water every day after that.
In 1975 she was diagnosed with cirrhosis and required long term hospital treatment. In 1999 she was found to have an enlarged spleen and hemopoesis disorder. Several tests later uncovered cancer of the left breast as well as shortness of breath, high blood pressure, cerebral edema, breast cancer with bone metastasis, stomach aches, cirrhosis, gall-stones and bladder-stones, varicose limbs, limb-skin ulcer, weak legs and limited range of movement.
Both Mr.Quy and Mrs Hong died shortly after they returned to Vietnam.
Tragedy of such magnitude easily can overwhelm those unprepared to hear it. Yet listening deeply to these personal stories presented in the even-handed, non-blaming manner of the VAVA delegates creates an opening that may allow We, the People to apply pressure on Congress to co-create legislation to alleviate our nation's moral stigma from our actions in Vietnam.
Perhaps the courage of the women in Lan Teh Nidah's poem, Night Harvest can give hope to Americans of peace and reconciliation. These courageous Vietnamese women harvested rice at night to avoid detection by American forces.
...
The golds of rice and cluster bombs blend together.
even delayed fuse bombs bring no fear:
Our spirits have known many years of war.
Come, sisters, let us gather the harvest.
...
We are the harvesters of my village,
...
We are not frightened by bombs and bullets in the air --
Only by dew, wetting our lime-scented hair.
One day, perhaps, we in the United States will acknowledge our responsibilities in Vietnam. For we, too, have known many years of war. Those of us who struggle for peace are harvesters too. Let us accept our history, sew the seeds of peace, and highlight the futile lose/lose proposition that is war.
Susan Galleymore is author of Long Time Passing: Mothers Speak about War and Terror, host of Stanford University's Raising Sand Radio, and a former "military mom" and GI Rights Counselor. Contact her atmedia@mothersspeakaboutwarandterror.org.

Israeli warplanes pound southern Gaza overnight


Israeli warplanes pound southern Gaza overnight

Ma'an News






May 30, 2010


Gaza – Ma'an – Israeli warplanes struck the defunct Yasser Arafat International Airport near Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, early Sunday morning, marking the second day of air strikes.


Locals told Ma'an that F16 planes fired five missiles toward the airport, with no injuries reported.


The Israeli army said Saturday that a projectile from Gaza hit the Askelon shore, with no damage or injuries reported, while a military source said one had landed in the Western Negev, another inside the Strip.


A statement issued by the Israeli army said Israel's air force struck "a terror tunnel in the southern Gaza Strip," which was "intended for infiltrating into Israel and executing terror attacks" against the Israeli army, adding a "direct hit" was identified.


"The strike is in response to the rocket that was fired at Israel and hit the Ashkelon Shore Regional Council on Saturday evening."


On Saturday morning Israeli warplanes launched five missiles at the Gaza International Airport and one missile at a blacksmith workshop in eastern Gaza City, witnesses reported.


An Israeli military spokesperson told media outlets that the air strikes came in response to a homemade projectile fired from the Gaza Strip towards Sderot overnight.


The statement said the Israeli army "holds Hamas solely responsible for terror emanating from the Gaza Strip."

Israel to deploy nuclear submarines off Iran coast


Report: Israel to deploy nuclear submarines off Iran coast

Haaretz






Sunday Times quotes IDF official saying the 3 German-made long range submarines will gather intelligence, act as deterrent and potentially land Mossad agents.


May 30, 2010


Israel is to deploy three submarines equipped with nuclear cruise missiles in the Persian Gulf, the Sunday Times reported on Sunday.


According to the Times report, one submarine had been sent over Israeli fears that ballistic missiles developed by Iran, and in the possession of Syria and Hezbollah, could be used to hit strategic sites within Israel, such as air bases and missile launchers.


Dolphin, Tekuma, and Leviathan, all German-made Dolphin class submarines of the 7th navy Flotilla, have been reported as frequenting the Gulf in the past, however, according to the Sunday Times report, this new deployment is meant to ensure a permanent naval presence near the Iranian coastline.


A flotilla officer told the Times that the deployed submarines were meant to act as a deterrent, gather intelligence and potentially to land Mossad agents.


"We're a solid base for collecting sensitive information, as we can stay for a long time in one place," the officer said.


The flotilla's commander, identified only as "Colonel O," was quoted by the Times as saying that the submarine force was "an underwater assault force. We’re operating deep and far, very far, from our borders."


The submarines could be used if Iran continues its program to produce a nuclear bomb. "The 1,500km range of the submarines’ cruise missiles can reach any target in Iran," a navy officer told the Times.


Apparently responding to the reported Israeli activity, an Iranian admiral told the Times: "Anyone who wishes to do an evil act in the Persian Gulf will receive a forceful response from us."


Last July, defense sources reported that an Israeli submarine had sailed the Suez Canal to the Red Sea last month, describing the unusual maneuver as a show of strategic reach in the face of Iran.


Israel has long kept its three Dolphin-class submarines, which are widely assumed to carry nuclear missiles, away from Suez so as not to expose them to the gaze of Egyptian harbormasters.

USA Elite Don’t Like The American Majority!


Steve Sailer Archive

May 16, 2010

MSM Buries Lead—American Majority Supports Arizona Law. But Our Elites Don’t Like The American Majority.

The Arizona controversy has made clear just how embarrassingly the conventional wisdom-mongers have fallen for their own propaganda and really believe that Hispanics constitute an unstoppable electoral force.
For example, the Wall Street Journal headlined its story on its own poll on May 12:
Well, who wouldn’t be against the Arizona law after all the bad things we’ve heard—over and over—about it?
The WSJ story begins:
"By a two-to-one margin Hispanics are more strongly opposed than Americans overall to the recent immigration measure signed in to law in Arizona that would make it a state crime to reside there illegally.
“Seven in 10, 70%, of Hispanic respondents said they are somewhat or strongly opposed to the law, compared with 34% of all respondents in the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll set for release later today.
“Among Hispanics, 27% are somewhat or strongly supportive of Arizona’s law; that compares with 64% of respondents overall."
Read that again, carefully. The actual main news in the WSJ/NBC poll of 1,000 adults is buried: it’s that the overall American public supports the Arizona law by a 64-34 landslide. (Among those who hold a strong opinion on the subject, the ratio is a comparable 46-24.)
Similarly, a May 13 AP article by Alan Fram on AP-Univision polling began:
"Illegal immigrants are a boon, not a burden to the country, a resounding majority of Hispanics say, according to an Associated Press-Univision Poll that underscores sharp contrasts between the views of Hispanics and others. Most non-Hispanics say illegal immigrants are a drain on society.
“In addition, most Hispanics condemn Arizona's strict new law targeting undocumented immigrants, while only 20 percent of non-Hispanics oppose it."[AP-Univision Poll: Views on Arizona law divided along ethnic lines, May 13, 2010]
Huh? Only 20% of non-Latinos oppose” the Arizona law? Isn’t that the real story?
In journalistic parlance, the MSM is burying the lead.
These kind of articles make sense only if, like many in the Main Stream Media, you assume that Hispanics’ votes are somehow more important than everybody’ else’s.
In reality, each vote (at least for now) counts the same.
And, on average Hispanics vote less often per capita. After all, many are in the country illegally (which doesn’t seem to be that esoteric an observation). And many who have legal residency don’t become citizens. And a large fraction of those who are citizens just don’t bother to vote.
Nor has there been overwhelming evidence that those Hispanics who do vote care all that much about illegal immigrants. A whopping 47% of them voted for Arizona’s Proposition 200 in 2004, for example, in the teeth of anearlier elite hysteria that included the then unborn-again John McCain.
But that hasn’t stopped the media, the Latino elites they interview, the Democrats, and a sizable fraction of GOP top dogs, from trying to reduce the controversy over illegal immigration into an ethnic struggle.
Simple arithmetic would seem to suggest that’s not a winning strategy. In the 2008 Presidential Election, according to the Census Bureau survey non-Hispanics cast 92.6 percent of the vote.
How did the conventional wisdom get so out of touch that these Arizona absurdities were uniformly believed by the press?
In modern America, Latinos often function as a sort of "stage army" for our elites. They want Hispanics to intimidate—by sheer bulk of numbers—the citizenry and make resistance to elite projects appear historically hopeless. The vast and seemingly always increasing quantities of Hispanics can be cited as justification for whatever a person in a position of influence wants to do.
Say you are the President of the United States and you are worried that what you consider your demographicbases"young people, African-Americans, Latinos, and women"—won’t remember to show up to vote in 2010. So pick a fight over a state law and try to turn it into a racial conflict. Anybody who opposes you must be a racist, so you can’t lose, right?
Or say you want a make-work sinecure as an ethnic studies instructor or diversity coordinator. Harp on the existence of nearly 50,000,000 Latinos in the U.S... Claim to be one of their natural leaders. Assert that Real Soon Now they are all going to get around to voting—and that, when they do, they will all agree with you that you should have an easy job.
Say you are a high school administrator who doesn’t like the kind of students who wear American flag T-shirts to school. Well, punish them and blame it on the Latinos. Claim the Mexicans would riot if an American flag were seen on Cinco de Mayo—which is what has just happened at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, California.
I believe that this sort of elite enabling, not Reconquista, is the real political danger that the Mexodus poses to the U.S.
Having followed this issue closely for decades, I've come to the conclusion that there isn't much chance of Mexican elites in the U.S. organizing a powerful Quebec-style separatist movement.
There are two reasons: First, as Barack Obama decided in the 1980s after his lengthy consideration of Louis Farrakhan’s black economic nationalism, there’s no money in separatism. If Mexicans wanted to live in a separate country run by Mexicans, they would live in Mexico.  
Second, Mexicans in the U.S. don't organize much of anything beyond the extended family or neighborhood level (such as a gang). LA Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez noted"For example, in Los Angeles, home to more Mexicans than any other city in the U.S., there is not one ethnic Mexican hospital, college, cemetery or broad-based charity."[Mexican Americans Are Building No Walls, February 29, 2004]
On the other hand, the vast numbers of Mexicans in the U.S. due to legal and illegal immigration, the 1986 amnesty, and their high fertility serve the American left as a sort of mock mob, allowing American leftist elites to intimidate their rivals in all sorts of turf wars.
The American Left claims to have the vast Mexican masses on its side. They will (someday) vote in large numbers—so you'd better surrender now to them (or, to be precise, to their self-appointed leaders and allies).
Much of modern American leftism boils down to encouraging tribalistic attitudes among nonwhites. Clearly, some Mexican students in Morgan Hill’s Live Oak high school interpreted their school’s endorsement of multiculturalism through their own usual gang turf lens. Nor is it surprising that some American students, when exposed to these kind of school-sponsored Mexican assertions of cultural dominance, resist with subversive gestures, such as displaying American flags.
I have long argued that these racially fraught situations are used by upper middle class white liberals as class markers in order to put down their rivals of lower rank.
In California, for example, upper middle class white liberals almost never educate their children in high school classrooms with large numbers of Mexicans. It’s simply not done. 
So if your kid goes to a school where Mexicans are dominant in numbers, and is therefore made uncomfortable by Mexican declarations of ascendancy, then that just shows to the white liberal mind that you and your kid are losers. Obviously, you can’t afford private school or to live in an expensive school district, or you aren’t smart enough to figure out how to manipulate the magnet and charter school rackets in order to get in with the right people.
It's a Perpetual Motion machine: if the elite-subsidized minority tribalism provokes the slightest sign of tribalistic reactions among the people who aren't allowed to express group pride—that is to say, Americans, citizens, whites, etc.—then that can be used to cram more expressions of elite-sponsored minority tribalism down the throats of the people who don't have their own approved tribe.
Wash, rinse, and repeat.
Let's review the common denominators between Morgan Hill’s Live Oak H.S., a very average school, and the recent brouhaha over race and IQ at Harvard Law School, a very exclusive school, where a student was denounced by Harvard LS dean Martha Minow, [Email her] because she had expressed open-mindedness about racial difference in IQ in a private email that was leaked by a romantic rival.
Note that the mere existence of diversity in a school encourages thought crimes about the causes of different average levels of achievement, which can then be denounced in the name of diversity, Martha Minow-style.
For example, in highly diverse public high schools in California, it usually becomes quickly apparent to students that average school performance typically follows a remarkably common hierarchyAsians, then whites, then English-speaking Latinos, then blacks, and finally non-English speaking Latinos. At Live Oak, whites average 799 on California’s API scale, while Hispanics average 622.
It's very hard to remain oblivious to patterns this powerful.
Notice the elegance of the trap, however. If somebody without a privileged identity objects that the main reasonnon-Asian Minorities aren't performing up to the white average isn't “white racism”, it's their own fault—well, that's just proof of their “white racism”. And this shocking revelation of “white racism” therefore justifies evenmore quotas, disparate impact lawsuits, and elite-sponsored multiculti.
And if that encourages white Americans to start wondering whether they need to organize to protect their own rights in these ethnic conflicts, well, that's just more evidence that we need more quotas, etc.
Consequences inevitably flow from this structure of incentives. For example, Mexican and black students tend to develop an ethic of ethnic solidarity that says that the reason they don't do well on average is because they don't try hard to do well. And the reason they don't try hard, they believe, is because they know—as they've been told over and over—that the system is rigged against them by “white racism”.
Elites in the education system encourage this self-destructive mindset with their constant hypersensitivity about theslightest manifestation of white ethnocentrism, such as wearing American flag shirts.
Even mentioning the fact of the obvious achievement gaps is considered treading very close to the line of racism. Since the gaps are so pervasive and persistent, a simple Occam’s Razor explanation is always looming in everybody's minds. So there is much tension and hysteria as everybody tries to avoid letting slip that they have doubts that “white racism” is the only explanation.
Thus, the over-the-top denunciation of the Harvard law student who expressed in a private email the open-mindedness that so many Americans worry that they might accidentally let themselves reveal. By denouncing the crimethinker, they can demonstrate their loyalty to the reigning dogmas.
The other socially acceptable explanation for these gaps in average ethnic achievement is poverty and deprivation. Implication: it can be rectified by massive expenditures of (white) taxpayer dollars.
Doubts about whether more spending will work is evidence of “white racism”. So the cycle starts all over again.
The game is rigged for the Left, so the Left always wins.
At least when crimethinkers back down and apologize. This is the real significance of Morgan Hill. The American students and their parents in behaved in a tactically superior fashion to, say, Larry Summers or James D. Watson—or the Harvard law school student, who immediately crumpled when denounced by Minow. 
Instead, The Morgan Hill Five followed the game plan devised by police officer James Crowley and the Cambridge PD last summer when insulted by President Obama: Never apologize. When the diversicrats like Minow and Obama schedule you for a Two Minutes Hate, do not back down. These incidents are a test of power and courage. Stand tall and make them give in.
When crimethinkers stand their ground, well, then the ground begins to shift under everybody's feet.

P. Buchanan: Remembering Wars and Warriors


Patrick J. Buchanan Archive

May 28, 2010

Remembering Wars and Warriors

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Since America became a nation, four of her greatest generals have served two terms as president: George WashingtonAndrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant and Dwight David Eisenhower.
Not one of these generals led America into a new war.
Washington was heroic in keeping the young republic out of the wars that erupted in Europe after the French Revolution, as were his successors John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
Jackson, arguably America's greatest soldier—who won the Battle of New Orleans, which preserved the Union, and virtually annexed Florida—resisted until his final days in office recognizing the Republic of Texas, liberated by his great friend and subaltern Sam Houston.
Jackson wanted no war with Mexico.
Eisenhower came to office determined to end the war in Korea. In six months, he succeeded—and kept America out of the raging war in Indochina.
Of the men who led us into our 19th century wars—the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War—only one, William McKinley, was a soldier who had seen combat.
McKinley had enlisted at 17. In 1862, he was with the Union army at Antietam, the bloodiest battle ever fought on American soil.
Though derided as having "the backbone of a chocolate eclair" by the bellicose Theodore Roosevelt, McKinleyconfided to a friend before going to war with Spain: "I have been through one war. ... I have seen the dead piled up. I do not want to see another."
James Madison, who took us into the War of 1812, which came close to tearing apart the Union; James Polk, who took us to war with Mexico and gave us Texas to the Rio Grande, the Southwest and California; and Abraham Lincoln, who led the nation in its bloodiest war, were politicians. Lincoln had served three months in the Illinois Militia in the Black Hawk War, but he never saw action.
America was led into the world wars by Woodrow Wilson, a professor, and Franklin Roosevelt, a politician. Harry Truman, who took us into Korea, had captained an artillery battery in France in 1918. John F. Kennedy, who led us into Vietnam, had served on a PT boat in the Solomons. George H.W. Bush, who launched Desert Storm, was one of the youngest Navy pilots to fight in the Pacific war.
While Americans this Memorial Day put flags out for all of their war dead, the arguments do not cease over the wisdom of the wars in which they fought and died.
In the grammar and high schools we attended in the 1940s and early 1950s, they were all good wars, all just wars, all necessary wars. Perhaps that is how it should be taught to America's children.
Yet, if the Revolution was a great and good cause, men fighting for freedom and nationhood, the War of 1812, where we were a de facto ally of Napoleon, seems a less noble endeavor. For among our motives was seizing Canada while the Mother Country was diverted.
Though deplored today, the Mexican War was not an unjust war.
Far from stealing Mexican territory after our victory, we paid for it, and the Mexicans, five years later, agreed to the Gadsden Purchase and offered to sell us Baja California. The greed was in Mexico City.
As for America's Civil War, this quarrel will never end. Did not the South have the same right to secede from the Union as the 13 colonies did to secede from England? Did Lincoln have the right to use blockade and invasion to drive Old Dixie down? His predecessor James Buchanan did not think so.
Was the Civil War essential to ending slavery, when many states had already abolished it by legislation and every nation in the hemisphere ended it without a civil war, save for Haiti?
The Spanish-American War, begun over a falsehood—that Spain blew up the USS Maine in Havana harbor—ended with American soldiers and Marines fighting for years to deny Filipinos the freedom for which our fathers fought in the Revolution. Cuba was liberated, but the Philippines, 10,000 miles from Washington, was annexed. That was an imperial war.
In 1917, we declared war on Germany "to make the world safe for democracy." And our major allies were four of the largest empires on earth: the British, French, Russian and Japanese. We deposed the Kaiser, and got Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and World War II.
As a result of these world wars, all the Western empires fell, and Western Civilization began its inexorable advance to the grave. 
Impending bankruptcy aside, not one Western nation has a birth rate that will enable its native-born to survive many more generations. We did it to ourselves.
About Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan—and the presidents who fought those wars, LBJ, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush—the divisions are still deep and emotions raw. Today is not the time to re-fight them, but to honor and pray for the patriots who, throughout our history, did their duty, fought and died in them. Requiescant in pace.

Senate Rejects Efforts to Secure the Border


ΕΙΝΑΙ ΠΛΕΟΝ ΚΑΤΑΦΑΝΕΣ ΟΤΙ ΤΑ ΛΟΜΠΥ ΤΗΣ ΟΥΑΣΙΝΓΚΤΟΝ & ΤΟ ΔΗΜΟΚΡΑΤΙΚΟ  ΚΟΜΜΑ ΕΠΙΘΥΜΟΥΝ ΤΗΝ ΛΑΘΡΟΜΕΤΑΝΑΣΤΕΥΣΙ ΑΠΟ ΤΟ ΜΕΞΙΚΟΝ ΝΑ ΠΡΟΧΩΡΗ ΑΝΕΞΕΛΕΓΚΤΟΣ ΔΙΑ ΝΑ ΔΗΜΙΟΥΡΓΗΘΗ ΕΠΙΤΕΛΟΥΣ ΣΤΙΣ ΗΠΑ Η 'ΜΗ-ΛΕΥΚΗ ΠΛΕΙΟΝΟΤΗΣ' ΟΠΩΣ ΕΙΝΑΙ Ο ΣΤΟΧΟΣ ΤΩΝ!
May 27, 2010
Senate Rejects Efforts to Secure the Border
The Senate rejected three border security amendments earlier today, May 27, 2010.  Democrats managed to defeat all three measures proposed by border state senators, as they each fell short of the 60 votes required for passage.  These critical amendments would have used unspent stimulus funds to provide funding and personnel to address the increasing violence and illegal immigration on the U.S.-Mexico border.  By rejecting these amendments, lawmakers in Washington proved that they are not serious about securing our borders. 

The first amendment (S.Amdt.4214), sponsored by Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) and cosponsored by Senators Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), John Cornyn (R-Tex.), and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.), would have funded the deployment of 6,000 National Guard troops to support and secure the southern land border of the United States. 

Senators Kyl and McCain proposed an amendment (S.Amdt.4288) that would have provided $200 million for Operation Streamline, a program to prosecute illegal border crossers rather than release them. 

Senator Cornyn’s amendment (S.Amdt.4202), cosponsored by Senators Kyl, Hutchison, and McCain, was a multi-agency border security measure that would have provided $3 billion for the federal, state, and local law enforcement officers who work on the frontlines of the U.S.-Mexico border every day.  The amendment would have funded six important priorities involving border security, which include border security and technology, state and local law enforcement, southwest border taskforces, border enforcement personnel, detention and removal activities, and ports of entry. 
See how your Senators voted on these critical amendments:


Earlier this week, President Obama announced his proposal to provide up to 1,200 members of the National Guard across a 2,000 mile border, which only adds one guardsman for every 1.6 miles of border. Under the President’s plan, if illegal border crossings happen at the same rate as in recent years, there will be 450 illegal crossings for each new National Guardsman. On the Senate floor, Senator Cornyn pointed out that President Obama’s proposal is an unacceptable short-term solution to a long-term problem, stating, “My colleagues keep repeating the White House talking points and congratulating themselves on all they’ve done for border security, but it’s not enough.” 
Senator Kyl slammed today’s votes: “On the heels of the President’s ‘announcement’ to send National Guard troops to the border, it’s unfortunate to once again see actions not matching up with words.  What happened today in the Senate once again demonstrates the federal government’s failure, and apparent unwillingness, to do what is necessary to secure the border.”