The Song Remains The Same

Hitler and the socialist dream

He declared that 'national socialism was based on Marx' Socialists have always disowned him. But a new book insists that he was, at heart, a left-winger

George Watson
Sunday, 22 November 1998

In April 1945, when Adolf Hitler died by his own hand in the rubble of Berlin, nobody was much interested in what he had once believed. That was to be expected. War is no time for reflection, and what Hitler had done was so shattering, and so widely known through images of naked bodies piled high in mass graves, that little or no attention could readily be paid to National Socialism as an idea. It was hard to think of it as an idea at all. Hitler, who had once looked a crank or a clown, was exposed as the leader of a gang of thugs, and the world was content to know no more than that.

Half a century on, there is much to be said. Even thuggery can have its reasons, and the materials that have newly appeared, though they may not transform judgement, undoubtedly enrich and deepen it. Confidants of Hitler. such as the late Albert Speer, have published their reminiscences; his wartime table-talk is a book; early revelations like Hermann Rauschning's Hitler Speaks of 1939 have been validated by painstaking research, and the notes of dead Nazis like Otto Wagener have been edited, along with a full text of Goebbels's diary.

It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too. The title of National Socialism was not hypocritical. The evidence before 1945 was more private than public, which is perhaps significant in itself. In public Hitler was always anti-Marxist, and in an age in which the Soviet Union was the only socialist state on earth, and with anti-Bolshevism a large part of his popular appeal, he may have been understandably reluctant to speak openly of his sources. His megalomania, in any case, would have prevented him from calling himself anyone's disciple. That led to an odd and paradoxical alliance between modern historians and the mind of a dead dictator. Many recent analysts have fastidiously refused to study the mind of Hitler; and they accept, as unquestioningly as many Nazis did in the 1930s, the slogan "Crusade against Marxism" as a summary of his views. An age in which fascism has become a term of abuse is unlikely to analyse it profoundly.

His private conversations, however, though they do not overturn his reputation as an anti-Communist, qualify it heavily. Hermann Rauschning, for example, a Danzig Nazi who knew Hitler before and after his accession to power in 1933, tells how in private Hitler acknowledged his profound debt to the Marxian tradition. "I have learned a great deal from Marxism" he once remarked, "as I do not hesitate to admit". He was proud of a knowledge of Marxist texts acquired in his student days before the First World War and later in a Bavarian prison, in 1924, after the failure of the Munich putsch. The trouble with Weimar Republic politicians, he told Otto Wagener at much the same time, was that "they had never even read Marx", implying that no one who had failed to read so important an author could even begin to understand the modern world; in consequence, he went on, they imagined that the October revolution in 1917 had been "a private Russian affair", whereas in fact it had changed the whole course of human history! His differences with the communists, he explained, were less ideological than tactical. German communists he had known before he took power, he told Rauschning, thought politics meant talking and writing. They were mere pamphleteers, whereas "I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun", adding revealingly that "the whole of National Socialism" was based on Marx.

That is a devastating remark and it is blunter than anything in his speeches or in Mein Kampf.; though even in the autobiography he observes that his own doctrine was fundamentally distinguished from the Marxist by reason that it recognised the significance of race - implying, perhaps, that it might otherwise easily look like a derivative. Without race, he went on, National Socialism "would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground". Marxism was internationalist. The proletariat, as the famous slogan goes, has no fatherland. Hitler had a fatherland, and it was everything to him.

Yet privately, and perhaps even publicly, he conceded that National Socialism was based on Marx. On reflection, it makes consistent sense. The basis of a dogma is not the dogma, much as the foundation of a building is not the building, and in numerous ways National Socialism was based on Marxism. It was a theory of history and not, like liberalism or social democracy, a mere agenda of legislative proposals. And it was a theory of human, not just of German, history, a heady vision that claimed to understand the whole past and future of mankind. Hitler's discovery was that socialism could be national as well as international. There could be a national socialism. That is how he reportedly talked to his fellow Nazi Otto Wagener in the early 1930s. The socialism of the future would lie in "the community of the volk", not in internationalism, he claimed, and his task was to "convert the German volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists", meaning the entrepreneurial and managerial classes left from the age of liberalism. They should be used, not destroyed. The state could control, after all, without owning, guided by a single party, the economy could be planned and directed without dispossessing the propertied classes.

That realisation was crucial. To dispossess, after all, as the Russian civil war had recently shown, could only mean Germans fighting Germans, and Hitler believed there was a quicker and more efficient route. There could be socialism without civil war.

Now that the age of individualism had ended, he told Wagener, the task was to "find and travel the road from individualism to socialism without revolution". Marx and Lenin had seen the right goal, but chosen the wrong route - a long and needlessly painful route - and, in destroying the bourgeois and the kulak, Lenin had turned Russia into a grey mass of undifferentiated humanity, a vast anonymous horde of the dispossessed; they had "averaged downwards"; whereas the National Socialist state would raise living standards higher than capitalism had ever known. It is plain that Hitler and his associates meant their claim to socialism to be taken seriously; they took it seriously themselves.

For half a century, none the less, Hitler has been portrayed, if not as a conservative - the word is many shades too pale - at least as an extreme instance of the political right. It is doubtful if he or his friends would have recognised the description. His own thoughts gave no prominence to left and right, and he is unlikely to have seen much point in any linear theory of politics. Since he had solved for all time the enigma of history, as he imagined, National Socialism was unique. The elements might be at once diverse and familiar, but the mix was his.

Hitler's mind, it has often been noticed, was in many ways backward-looking: not medievalising, on the whole, like Victorian socialists such as Ruskin and William Morris, but fascinated by a far remoter past of heroic virtue. It is now widely forgotten that much the same could be said of Marx and Engels.

It is the issue of race, above all, that for half a century has prevented National Socialism from being seen as socialist. The proletariat may have no fatherland, as Lenin said. But there were still, in Marx's view, races that would have to be exterminated. That is a view he published in January-February 1849 in an article by Engels called "The Hungarian Struggle" in Marx's journal the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and the point was recalled by socialists down to the rise of Hitler. It is now becoming possible to believe that Auschwitz was socialist-inspired. The Marxist theory of history required and demanded genocide for reasons implicit in its claim that feudalism was already giving place to capitalism, which must in its turn be superseded by socialism. Entire races would be left behind after a workers' revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age; and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history.

That brutal view, which a generation later was to be fortified by the new pseudo-science of eugenics, was by the last years of the century a familiar part of the socialist tradition, though it is understandable that since the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945 socialists have been eager to forget it. But there is plenty of evidence in the writings of HG Wells, Jack London, Havelock Ellis, the Webbs and others to the effect that socialist commentators did not flinch from drastic measures. The idea of ethnic cleansing was orthodox socialism for a century and more.

So the socialist intelligentsia of the western world entered the First World War publicly committed to racial purity and white domination and no less committed to violence. Socialism offered them a blank cheque, and its licence to kill included genocide. In 1933, in a preface to On the Rocks, for example, Bernard Shaw publicly welcomed the exterminatory principle which the Soviet Union had already adopted. Socialists could now take pride in a state that had at last found the courage to act, though some still felt that such action should be kept a secret. In 1932 Beatrice Webb remarked at a tea-party what "very bad stage management" it had been to allow a party of British visitors to the Ukraine to see cattle-trucks full of starving "enemies of the state" at a local station. "Ridiculous to let you see them", said Webb, already an eminent admirer of the Soviet system. "The English are always so sentimental" adding, with assurance: "You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs." A few years later, in 1935, a Social Democratic government in Sweden began a eugenic programme for the compulsory sterilisation of gypsies, the backward and the unfit, and continued it until after the war.

The claim that Hitler cannot really have been a socialist because he advocated and practised genocide suggests a monumental failure, then, in the historical memory. Only socialists in that age advocated or practised genocide, at least in Europe, and from the first years of his political career Hitler was proudly aware of the fact. Addressing his own party, the NSDAP, in Munich in August 1920, he pledged his faith in socialist-racialism: "If we are socialists, then we must definitely be anti-semites - and the opposite, in that case, is Materialism and Mammonism, which we seek to oppose." There was loud applause. Hitler went on: "How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-semite?" The point was widely understood, and it is notable that no German socialist in the 1930s or earlier ever sought to deny Hitler's right to call himself a socialist on grounds of racial policy. In an age when the socialist tradition of genocide was familiar, that would have sounded merely absurd. The tradition, what is more, was unique. In the European century that began in the 1840s from Engels's article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist, and no exception has been found.

The first reactions to National Socialism outside Germany are now largely forgotten. They were highly confused, for the rise of fascism had caught the European left by surprise. There was nothing in Marxist scripture to predict it and must have seemed entirely natural to feel baffled. Where had it all come from? Harold Nicolson, a democratic socialist, and after 1935 a Member of the House of Commons, conscientiously studied a pile of pamphlets in his hotel room in Rome in January 1932 and decided judiciously that fascism (Italian-style) was a kind of militarised socialism; though it destroyed liberty, he concluded in his diary, "it is certainly a socialist experiment in that it destroys individuality". The Moscow view that fascism was the last phase of capitalism, though already proposed, was not yet widely heard. Richard remarked in a 1934 BBC talk that many students in Nazi Germany believed they were "digging the foundations of a new German socialism".

By the outbreak of civil war in Spain, in 1936, sides had been taken, and by then most western intellectuals were certain that Stalin was left and Hitler was right. That sudden shift of view has not been explained, and perhaps cannot be explained, except on grounds of argumentative convenience. Single binary oppositions - cops-and-robbers or cowboys-and-indians - are always satisfying. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was seen by hardly anybody as an attempt to restore the unity of socialism. A wit at the British Foreign Office is said to have remarked that all the "Isms" were now "Wasms", and the general view was that nothing more than a cynical marriage of convenience had taken place.

By the outbreak of world war in 1939 the idea that Hitler was any sort of socialist was almost wholly dead. One may salute here an odd but eminent exception. Writing as a committed socialist just after the fall of France in 1940, in The Lion and the Unicorn, Orwell saw the disaster as a "physical debunking of capitalism", it showed once and for all that "a planned economy is stronger than a planless one", though he was in no doubt that Hitler's victory was a tragedy for France and for mankind. The planned economy had long stood at the head of socialist demands; and National Socialism, Orwell argued, had taken from socialism "just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes". Hitler had already come close to socialising Germany. "Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a socialist state." These words were written just before Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union. Orwell believed that Hitler would go down in history as "the man who made the City of London laugh on the wrong side of its face" by forcing financiers to see that planning works and that an economic free-for-all does not.

At its height, Hitler's appeal transcended party division. Shortly before they fell out in the summer of 1933, Hitler uttered sentiments in front of Otto Wagener, which were published after his death in 1971 as a biography by an unrepentant Nazi. Wagener's Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant, composed in a British prisoner-of-war camp, did not appear until 1978 in the original German, and arrived in English, without much acclaim, as recently as 1985. Hitler's remembered talk offers a vision of a future that draws together many of the strands that once made utopian socialism irresistibly appealing to an age bred out of economic depression and cataclysmic wars; it mingles, as Victorian socialism had done before it, an intense economic radicalism with a romantic enthusiasm for a vanished age before capitalism had degraded heroism into sordid greed and threatened the traditional institutions of the family and the tribe.

Socialism, Hitler told Wagener shortly after he seized power, was not a recent invention of the human spirit, and when he read the New Testament he was often reminded of socialism in the words of Jesus. The trouble was that the long ages of Christianity had failed to act on the Master's teachings. Mary and Mary Magdalen, Hitler went on in a surprising flight of imagination, had found an empty tomb, and it would be the task of National Socialism to give body at long last to the sayings of a great teacher: "We are the first to exhume these teachings." The Jew, Hitler told Wagener, was not a socialist, and the Jesus they crucified was the true creator of socialist redemption. As for communists, he opposed them because they created mere herds, Soviet-style, without individual life, and his own ideal was "the socialism of nations" rather than the international socialism of Marx and Lenin. The one and only problem of the age, he told Wagener, was to liberate labour and replace the rule of capital over labour with the rule of labour over capital.

These are highly socialist sentiments, and if Wagener reports his master faithfully they leave no doubt about the conclusion: that Hitler was an unorthodox Marxist who knew his sources and knew just how unorthodox the way in which he handled them was. He was a dissident socialist. His programme was at once nostalgic and radical. It proposed to accomplish something that Christians had failed to act on and that communists before him had attempted and bungled. "What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish," he told Wagener, "we shall be in a position to achieve."

That was the National Socialist vision. It was seductive, at once traditional and new. Like all so- cialist views it was ultimately moral, and its economic and racial policies were seen as founded on universal moral laws. By the time such conversations saw the light of print, regrettably, the world had put such matters far behind it, and it was less than ever ready to listen to the sayings of a crank or a clown.

That is a pity. The crank, after all, had once offered a vision of the future that had made a Victorian doctrine of history look exciting to millions. Now that socialism is a discarded idea, such excitement is no doubt hard to recapture. To relive it again, in imagination, one might look at an entry in Goebbels's diaries. On 16 June 1941, five days before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Goebbels exulted, in the privacy of his diary, in the victory over Bolshevism that he believed would quickly follow. There would be no restoration of the tsars, he remarked to himself, after Russia had been conquered. But Jewish Bolshevism would be uprooted in Russia and "real socialism" planted in its place - "Der echte Sozialismus". Goebbels was a liar, to be sure, but no one can explain why he would lie to his diaries. And to the end of his days he believed that socialism was what National Socialism was about.

The Lost Literature of Socialism by George Watson is published by Lutterworth, pounds 15

Quote of the Whenever #7

"Also I will note that it is pretty darn hard to shoot someone repeatedly until they die of accute lead poisoning if you do not have a gun." -TheOtherRyan, TSLRF

Quote of the Whenever #6

"I finally figured out why men don't ask for directions. They ask women."
-Mom

QoTW #5

"You can't fix stupid, apparently, but you sure as Hell can get them bused to a protest." -Bob Owens, at Confederate Yankee.

Quote of the Whenever #4

"Note to Americans: this is precisely how European Elites work. They say mean things about you until you tell them that they're the prettiest girls at school, then you're like BFF!"
-Bore Patch

Zombie Watch #5

http://www.reuters.com/article/wtUSInvestingNews/idUSTRE57O5AA20090825?sp=true


"Zombie suppliers" haunt manufacturing sector

By James B. Kelleher - Analysis

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Think this downturn was rough on manufacturers?

Some analysts believe the sector's woes may worsen when demand for industrial products rebounds -- and manufacturers discover key suppliers cannot rebound with them because they are effectively -- but not yet officially -- out of business.

Call them zombie suppliers. Analysts say the speed with which major manufacturers cut output in this recession put unprecedented strain on thousands of small manufacturers that supply the industry with critical parts.


That has left the supply chain with an unknown number of suppliers who are dead but do not know it -- companies so undercapitalized and overleveraged they will never raise the money they need to get their idle plants running again.

"Their lenders are going to say, 'Sorry, we're not going to increase our exposure with you because we don't know if you're going to make it or not," says Bill Diehl, the chief executive of BBK, an advisory firm that does supply chain risk analysis.

And that, of course, would be a horror show for the publicly traded manufacturers that rely on these suppliers. It could leave them scrambling to secure components once the recovery starts -- and missing some of the rebound's benefits.

"That's the bigger risk," says Craig Giffi, the head of Deloitte's U.S. consumer and industrial products practice. "They could be left unable to capture the upturn."

NEW PARADIGM

In the past, suppliers were often initially insulated from the effects of industrial cycles because their big customers were slow to cut production -- because they believed the downturn would be brief or because slow internal processes made quicker cuts impossible.

But the industry's move from mass production to a build-to-order paradigm, and the outsourcing of many parts once produced in-house to outside suppliers, have changed all that.

That is a big reason why U.S. industrial output tumbled at a record rate in this downturn. Sure, demand evaporated last fall after the collapse of Lehman Brothers essentially paralyzed the credit markets. But manufacturers also reacted differently than they had in the past, immediately shutting down production at their own plants -- and, by extension, those of their just-in-time suppliers.

"It's never happened this fast before," said Alex Blanton, an analyst at Ingalls & Snyder who has covered manufacturing since the 1970s.

The sector, in other words, is in uncharted territory. So concerns are high. "When you take 50 to 75 percent out of your purchases overnight ... you can inflict terrible, permanent damage on your supply base," says Eli Lustgarten, an analyst at Longbow Research.

During a recent meeting with analysts, Gerard Vittecoq, Caterpillar Inc's (CAT.N) production guru, acknowledged that the company was already seeing "a lot of disruption with suppliers going bankrupt or having difficulty" -- and the Peoria, Illinois-based company is still largely cutting output.

DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL

The banking industry's troubles are adding to the uncertainty. Diehl at BBK believes many lenders, overwhelmed by the woes of consumer borrowers, have resisted foreclosing on distressed commercial borrowers -- provided they keep their heads down and do not come looking for help.

"Lenders don't want to have to pay the property taxes and everything else associated with keeping that stuff up once they foreclose," he says.

"So as long as the borrower isn't trying to request additional funding, they've basically been sitting still, even with borrowers who are in default, hoping that the market would come back and some of them will be able to survive."

Giffi at Deloitte agrees. He says that "bankruptcy statistics aren't indicative yet of the weakness that we're seeing in a broad base of suppliers.

"Until those companies have to produce something -- and to secure raw materials, to make a part, to hire more workers -- no one will know how weak their balance sheets and credit positions really are."

CONCERNS OVERDONE?

To be sure, not everyone thinks the industry is on the verge of a "Night of the Living Dead"-like supplier nightmare.

An analysis by the financial information company Sageworks of the quarterly balance sheets of more than 1,000 small manufacturers -- the kind that often produce parts for larger companies -- found surprising signs of health.

While the analysis found that average profit per employee had tumbled nearly 50 percent at small manufacturers over the past year, other financial metrics have improved. The average quick ratio, for instance, a rough-but-reliable indicator of a company's ability to pay its bills, rose to 1.7-to-1 from 1.4-to-1 over the last year. Any ratio above 1-to-1 is considered healthy. And cash as a percentage of total assets has also improved.

That leads Melinda Crump, a Sageworks spokeswoman, to declare suppliers "may have a fighting chance" -- especially if the economists are right and the rebound turns out to be a slow, U-shaped affair rather than a rapid, V-shaped uptick. That, Crump says, would allow companies with low production levels "to rebuild economies of scale instead of being part of an overwhelming wave hitting the banks for large sums."

But no one denies that some suppliers will never return, no matter what shape the recovery takes.

"The robustness of the supply chain won't be the same," says Lustgarten. "You're going to lose some of the marginal players and manufacturers that aren't thinking about that right now will probably be facing some difficulties in the upturn."

(Reporting by James B. Kelleher, editing by Matthew Lewis)

Sorry to take so long between posts, I am lazy moved and have been busy with a bunch of other stuff.

Moved into the same apartment complex as my Dad and Sister, although I'm living upstairs. Living upstairs is really nice. I have a better view, and I don't have to worry as much about thieves. Crooks are basically lazy, so they're a lot less likely to hit an upstairs apartment. If they did, they'd have to haul stuff up and down the stairs, and lemme tell ya, moving shit up and down stairs is a killer bitch. That's the one downside to living upstairs. However, I think everything else makes up for it. Especially the part about upstairs being more zombie-proof; just block off the stair cases and you're good to go stay.

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Got my tooth pulled, and it's healing up fairly nicely. I think. I mean, it's not something I've had done before, except for my wisdom teeth, and those were sewn up after being removed.

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Got my school money in, and have been putting stuff back towards preps. I got a bunch of things for my BOB, but I'll detail that in a later post.

For the AR, I rounded out my magazine collection, got 200 rounds of practice ammo, a few bandoleers to hold it all, and a surefire weaponlight.

I bought ten ounces of silver to put away. I know it's not much, but it's a start. I plan on buy about 5 ounces each month as a form of savings.

I ordered a solar charger for all our battery needs. A solar charger plus rechargeable batteries is a good combo for post-hurricane times. Still need to get a coleman stove and lantern, though.

The biggest surprise I got in all this was when my sister actually got enthusiastic that I was making her a BOB. She wants a full pack and not the the buttpack full of items that I had been collecting for her. She's even been making suggestions.

--------------------------------------------

Anyway, most of the preps were BOB-related, so I'll have to talk about them in that post I promised about my BOB.

Zombie Watch #4

http://blogs.moneycentral.msn.com/topstocks/?fpn=Zombie%20stocks%20make%20a%20killing>1=33009

Zombie stocks make a killing
Posted Sep 24 2009, 02:13 PM by Kim Peterson

Traders are hot on zombie stocks these days, trying to make a buck from companies everyone else has written off as dead.

Washington Mutual went bankrupt, but its stock is suddenly smoking -- gaining 64% Monday, the Los Angeles Times reports. No one really thinks the company is going to magically return to life soon, but investors are hoping even a tiny uptick in the share price will bring profits.

Remember Lehman Brothers? Shares of the bankrupt bank have quintupled in the last four weeks, the Times reports. And General Motors -- or, should I say, Motors Liquidation Co. (MTLQQ) -- has seen shares more than double.

It's a dangerous game, playing around in these stocks that common sense would tell you to stay away from. So who's dabbling in the dead?

Experts tell the Times that aggressive day traders are likely to blame. They're snapping up enormous volumes of the shares, looking for something as small as a 1-cent increase on a 1 million share block.

The economy has devastated some of the market's best-known names, creating a new breed of what the Times describes as "blue-penny stocks" (a blue-chip that has become a penny stock).

"You look at this using conventional valuation metrics and it makes no sense," one equity risk manager told the Times. "There's suddenly a huge potential for profit in these essentially worthless companies."

About Time, too.

Louisiana's Second Amendment Sales Tax Holiday Announced

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Hope my school money is in by then. :D

Quote of the Whenever #3

"I’ve learned, unfortunately, [that] relying on the general intelligence of the human populace is one hell of a leap of faith."
-Robert, Keep Texas Zombie Free

Britain's Nanny State Boomerangs On British Embassies

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090813/od_afp/britaintraveldiplomacyoffbeat_20090813081901

British embassies tired of bizarre requests

LONDON (AFP) – Help! I've just had my breasts enlarged and I don't like the new size. British embassy -- sort out my boobs!

Along with tips on jam-making and how best to discipline naughty boys, these are just a few of the bonkers requests being fired at British embassies around the world, the Foreign Office said on Thursday.

The country's 261 diplomatic missions across the globe are getting fed up of bizarre demands for help from Brits abroad, some of whom seem to think the British embassy is an agency for finding lost sunglasses and paying bills.

"If you have a serious problem abroad -- maybe you've been involved in an accident, have lost your passport or are a victim of crime -- we can help you," said Juliet Maric, the British Consul in Alicante on the Spanish east coast.

"But we can't tell you who is allowed to use your swimming pool, pay your taxi fares for you -- or do anything about the exchange rate.

"We regularly get enquiries from people who think we're a one-stop-shop for any problem they might encounter while abroad; this can be frustrating as we need to focus resources on the serious cases that we're there to help with."

One lady, unhappy with the size of her newly-boosted breasts following surgery, asked if the embassy could help.

A mother asked the Florida consulate to help her teenage son pack his suitcase and give him a lift to the airport as he was feeling unwell.

One person called in consular assistance to find out what ratio of fruit to sugar should be used when making jam.

A holidaymaker in Italy asked the embassy where a particular brand of shoes could be bought.

Other requests have included asking for embassy staff to pay a bill when a credit card had "maxed out" and a traveller asking "Can you tell me how to make my naughty son behave?"

"Our embassies are not there to provide weather reports or give advice on unruly children," said consular affairs minister Chris Bryant.

"It's important that British nationals understand what the Foreign Office can and can't do for them."

---

Britain should not be surprised by this. This is what happens when you run a Nanny State: people will treat you like you are their nanny.

Quote of the Whenever #2

"When your opponent comes out and states clearly that he opposes you, regards you as the enemy, and will work actively and purposefully against the things that are important to you…rejoice! He has made your decisions easier."

-Commander Zero, Pocket radio, politics, gardening

Hardball?

Watch this clip:






Now watch this one:





This had me screaming at my computer monitor. "He's never said that"?!?!
What a liar! That's exactly what I posted in the comments, too. Someone else replied that what he was saying in the clip is that THE PRESIDENT has never said he wanted a single-payer healthcare system.

Technically, that's correct. PRESIDENT Obama never said that; SENATOR Obama did.






Hiding behind these kind of semantics would make even a used-car salesman feel shame.

Hardball? More like Sleazeball...

Zombie Watch #3

http://scienceblogs.com/zooillogix/2009/04/zombie_spiders_return_from_the.php

Zombie Spiders Return from the Dead to Haunt Your Dreams
Category: spider • zombie
Posted on: April 28, 2009 6:06 PM, by Benny Bleiman

So you start out with a simple experiment, so simple in fact, that it sounds like Andrew and I came up with it when we were seven: How long do different species of spider survive underwater? You take 120 wolf spiders of three different species that live in marsh lands, and you submerge them underwater until they drown. Simple enough. Some live 24 hours, some 28 hours, and some 36. Ok, that's a long time, but it makes sense as these creatures live in marshes so they must have adapted to survive submerged for extended periods of time. It is then, however, that things take a turn for the horrifying.

As you're weighing out the dried out spider corpses, you notice that some of them start twitching. Then more and more begin twitching. Then all of a sudden, most of them are alive again. Not only are they alive, but they have grown to five times their normal size, have become exponentially more aggressive, and violently attack your entire research staff.

While the last sentence of that previous paragraph was not, not false, the rest is completely true. Researchers at the University of Rennes in France had just this experience recently when conducting just such an experiment. It turns out the marsh dwelling wolf spiders are able to put themselves into comas, effectively changing their metabolic process to no longer require air, in order to survive long periods underwater.

"This is the first time we know of arthropods returning to life from comas after submersion," Julien Pétillon, one of the lead researchers told National Geographic.

Quote of the Whenever #1

"Being a danger to your government is, dear readers, the very essence of a Free People."
-Clifford, over at http://redstickrant.blogspot.com/

Zombie Watch #2

Swine flu: Mexico City becomes 'strange zombie city' as residents hide behind doors
The normally bustling streets of Mexico City were virtually empty yesterday, with millions preferring to stay in their houses rather than risk contagion from the killer swine flu.



By Ioan Grillo in Mexico City

Published: 11:10PM BST 26 Apr 2009



A mixture of fear, suspicion and frustration set in across the country as the death toll from swine flu rose and the government took an increasingly tough position to stop it spreading.
Many of those who did venture out wore the blue face masks that were being handed out by soldiers at check points along the main avenues.



"It's like we're in a strange zombie movie or something," said Gerardo Garcia, a 23 year old student, hurriedly stocking up with groceries.


"You don't know who could be carrying this plague so it is best to just keep behind closed doors as much as possible."


A shutdown of all schools, universities, museums and theatres was extended to bars and discos, which the government decreed they could forcibly close if they did not shutter their doors voluntarily.


Sunday Masses normally celebrated by millions in this strongly Roman Catholic country were also cancelled - the first such closure since Mexico's religious wars of the 1920s.
Health workers on the ground were overwhelmed with people reporting the key symptoms of the epidemic such as coughs, aching muscles and diarrhoea - although many may have had traditional forms of flu.



In total, 1,300 people were fighting the virus in hospital beds across Mexico with as many as 81 people dying of the disease.


Feelings of anxiety also swept through the 1,000 strong British expatriate community in the city.


Bar owner Umair Khan, 35, of Wembley, London, said he was getting increasingly worried seeing how events were developing.


"Originally, I wasn't in a major panic. But now that everything is shutting down it shows how serious it is," Khan said. "I have been here for 11 years and I have never seen anything like this."


Mr Khan said he shut his business - A British-style pub called the Black Horse - on Saturday after the government decree.


"It's a loss of money but you can't be angry about it," he said. "The last thing I would want is for someone to die after getting sick in my bar."


School teacher Gavin Judd, 38, from Birmingham has also been given a holiday from work.
"My plans are to avoid to going out as much as possible," he said. "If this is serious enough for the government to shut my school then I think it is a very real threat."


Mr Judd said he had no immediate plans to leave Mexico City, but said he will go if the government continues the school shut down until the end of the summer.


However, some others were taking the threat less seriously.
Hugh Carroll, a 56 year old investment broker from Glasgow, said he was unconcerned about the virus.
"I'm not worried in the slightest. It's probably been over exaggerated," he said. "Most people here don't trust what the Mexican government say and I don't believe them either."
Mr Carroll said he had not heard the declarations from the World Health Organization. He planned to go out and meet friends as usual.


Some Mexicans shared this disbelief, alleging it could be some kind of government conspiracy.
"It's probably all just made up to keep our minds off the global recession," said Roberto Santino, a 60-year-old building site foremen. "Our government has been using these tactics for years."
Mr Santino claimed new government powers to fight the virus - including the power to search suspects and houses - were just an excuse to trample on people's rights. Another conspiracy theory was that warring drug cartels, who killed eight civilians in a grenade attack in September, could be behind the misery.


"Who knows what is going on. Are the narco cartels using a secret weapon?" asked Lionel Trujillo, a 42-year old salesman, nervously fingering a surgical mask covering his mouth and nose.


Those at health centres showed more frantic worry.
At the Santiago Acahualtepec public clinic in Mexico City's working class Iztapalapa neighbourhood, a queue of patients, mostly clad in face masks, packed out the waiting room and stretched into the street.


"My daughter started showing signs of the sickness overnight - her temperature has shot up and she has been in a lot of pain," said Maria Angeles Garcia, a 33-year old teacher, waiting anxiously to be seen. "I am just praying that she does not have this plague."

Zombie Watch #1

http://www.inteldaily.com/news/173/ARTICLE/8827/2008-11-24.html

This was something I started a while back, and am now reposting here. That's why the article is from late '08 instead of something more recent.

Zombie Economics: Super-inflation snap-back will occur six to eighteen months from now

By James Kunstler


(Kunstler) -- Though Citicorp is deemed too big to fail, it's hardly reassuring to know that it's been allowed to sink its fangs into the Mother Zombie that the US Treasury has become and sucked out a multi-billion dollar dose of embalming fluid so it can go on pretending to be a bank for a while longer. I employ this somewhat clunky metaphor to point out that the US Government is no more solvent than the financial zombies it is keeping on walking-dead support. And so this serial mummery of weekend bailout schemes is as much of a fraud and a swindle as the algorithm-derived-securities shenanigans that induced the disease of bank zombification in the first place. The main question it raises is whether, eventually, the creation of evermore zombified US dollars will exceed the amount of previously-created US dollars now vanishing into oblivion through compressive debt deflation.

My guess, given the usual time-lag factor, is that the super-inflation snap-back will occur six to eighteen months from now. And the main result of all this will be our inability to buy the imported oil that comprises two-thirds of the oil we require to keep WalMart and Walt Disney World running. At some point, then, in the early months of the Obama administration, we'll learn that "change" is not a set of mere lifestyle choices but a wrenching transition away from all our familiar and comfortable habits into a stark and rigorous new economic landscape.

The credit economy is dead and the dead credit residue of that dead economy is going where dead things go. It came into the world as "money" and it is going out of this world as a death-dealing disease, and we're not going to get over this disease until we stop generating additional zombie money out of no productive activity whatsoever. The campaign to sustain the unsustainable is, besides war, the greatest pitfall this society can stumble into. It represents a squandering of our remaining scant resources and can only produce the kind of extreme political disappointment that wrecks nations and leads to major conflicts between them. I don't know how much Mr. Obama buys into the current adopt-a-zombie program -- his Treasury designee Timothy Geithner was apparently in on this weekend's Citicorp deal -- but the President would be wise to steer clear of whatever the walking dead in the Bush corner are still up to.

All the activities based on getting something-for-nothing are dead or dying now, in particular buying houses and cars on credit and so it should not be a surprise that the two major victims are the housing and car industries. Notice, by the way, that these are the two major ingredients of an economy based on building suburban sprawl. That's over, too. We're done building it and the stuff we've already built is destined to loose both money value and usefulness as the wrenching transition goes forward.

All this obviously begs the question: what kind of economy are we going to live in if the old one is toast? Well, it's also pretty obvious that it will have to be based on activities productively aimed at keeping human beings alive in an ecology that has a future. Once you grasp this, you will see that there is no reason to despair and more than enough for all of us to do, so we can recover from the zombie nation disease and get on with the next chapter of American history -- and I sure hope that Mr. Obama will get with the new program.

To be specific about this new economy, we're going to have to make things again, and raise things out of the earth, locally, and trade these things for money of some kind that we earn through our own productive activities. Don't make the mistake of thinking this is optional. The only other option is to go through a violent sociopolitical convulsion. We ought to know from prior examples in world history that this is not a desirable experience. So, to avoid that, we really have to put our shoulders to the wheel and get to work on things that matter, and do it at a scale that is consistent with what the world really has to offer right now, especially in terms of available energy.

In my view -- and I know this is controversial -- a much larger proportion of the US population will have to be employed in growing the food we eat. There are many ways of arranging this, some more fair than others, and I hope the better angels of our nature steer us in the direction of fairness and justice. The prospects of a devalued dollar imply that we very shortly will not be able to get the all the oil-and-gas based "inputs" that have made petro-agriculture possible the past century. The consequences of this are so unthinkable that we have not been thinking about it. And, of course, the further implications of current land-use allocation, and the property ownership issues entailed, suggests formidable difficulties in re-arranging the farming sector. The sooner we face all this, the better.

As the fiesta of "globalism" (Tom Friedman-style) draws to a close -- another consequence of currency problems -- we'll have to figure out how to make things in this country again. We will not be manufacturing things at the scale, or in the manner, we were used to in, say, 1962. We'll have to do it far more modestly, using much more meager amounts of energy than we did in the past. My guess is that we will get the electricity for doing this mostly from water. It may actually be too late -- from a remaining capital resources point-of-view -- to ramp up a new phase of the nuclear power industry (and there are plenty of arguments from the practical and economic to the ethical against it). But we have to hold a public discussion about it, if only to clear the air and get on with other things, namely the new activites of alt.energy. But I would hasten to warn readers (again!) that we'll probably have to do these things more modestly too (don't count on giant wind "farms"), and that we are liable to be disappointed by what they can actually provide for us (don't expect to run WalMart on wind, solar, algae-fuels, etc).

In any case, we're not going back to a "consumer" economy. We're heading into a hard work economy in which people derive their pleasures and gratification more traditionally -- mainly through the company of their fellow human beings (which is saying a lot, for those of you who have forgotten what that's about). Our current investments in "education" -- i.e. training people to become marketing executives for chain stores -- will delude Americans for a while about what kind of work is really available. But before long, the younger adults will realize that there are enormous opportunities for them in a new and very different economy. We will still have commerce -- even if it's not the K-Mart blue-light-special variety -- and the coming generation will have to rebuild all the local, multi-layered networks of commercial inter-dependency that were destroyed by the rise of the chain stores. In short, get ready for local business. It will surely be part-and-parcel of our local food-growing and manufacturing activities.

I hate to keep harping on this -- but since nobody else is really talking about it, at least in the organs of public discussion, the job is left to me -- we have to get cracking on the revival of the railroad system in this country, if we expect to remain a united country. This is such a no-brainer that the absence of any talk about it is a prime symptom of the zombie disease that has eaten away our brains. Automobiles (the way we use them) and airplanes are utterly dependent on liquid hydrocarbon fuels, and you can be certain we'll have trouble getting them. You can run trains by other means -- electricity being state-of-the-art in those parts of the world that do it most successfully. I know that California just voted to create a high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It's an optimistic sign, but it shows more than a little techno-grandiose over-reach. High speed rail would require a mega-expensive re-do of the tracks. We need to scale our ambitions for this more realistically. California (and every other region of America) would benefit much more from normal-speed trains running every hour on the hour on tracks that already exist than from a mega-expensive, grandiose sci-fi program that might not get built for ten years. The dregs of the Big Three automakers can and should be reorganized to produce the rolling stock for a revived railroad system.

Even amidst the financial carnage underway right now, the public is enjoying a respite from high-priced gasoline, but it is due to be short-lived. As I've already said, we are in danger not just of oil prices going way back up again, but of losing access to our supplies from the exporting countries. In other words, we're just as likely to face shortages as high prices, and soon. Oil shortages are certain to produce a political freak-out here unless we get our heads screwed on right -- and this means that Mr. Obama had better prepare quickly for a comprehensive action plan in the face of such an emergency (which has to include a robust public information initiative).

In the meantime, Mr. Obama must dissociate himself from all activities aimed at the care-and-feeding of zombies. Mr. Obama is correct that there is one president and one government at a time, and since this is the case in reality, he must avoid being contaminated by the choices they make as their clock ticks out. Obviously, world markets might be more disturbed if Mr. Obama were to step up and actively contradict everything that is being done to cultivate zombies right now. He is in a very delicate position. But being a man of intelligence and sensibility, he may successfully navigate this rough passage.

That this melt-down is building straight into the Christmas holidays is one of those accidents of history that leaves one reeling in wonder and nausea. The cable networks better be prepared to bombard the public with round-the-clock showings of It's A Wonderful Life, because they're going to need all the moral support they can get as zombies stalk through the silent night, holy night.

Health Care

"Health Care Is A Right" is what I keep hearing. Well, so is owning a gun, but that doesn't mean the government should start handing them out.

The Obamatons keep going on about insurance companies denying people coverage for a pre-existing condition. Duh. Insurance companies make money by having lots of people who don't need treatment paying just in case one day they do.

If the insurance companies are forced to begin providing coverage for people who are already sick, then their costs will go up. In order to stay solvent, the companies will have to raise the rates on everyone.

Also, if you no longer have to buy coverage before you get sick anymore, who's going to buy health insurance at all? Why pay a monthly premium when you can just wait to get sick or injured and then get insurance?

Holy sh*t, my first post! Whoohoo!
*ahem*Ok, now that that's out of my system, where to start?

Why did I create this blog?
I have a lot of thoughts on survival, politics, and law; and needed somewhere to put them other than my head. Twitter is too short for my ADD moments, and other sites I might use seem too clunky. Most of the blogs I read regularly are on Blogspot, so I decided to give it a try.

Who Am I?
I'm a mid-twenties college student who grew up on welfare, and wants to get off the system. When I turned 18, I had a choice of either entering the workplace and immediately earning about twice what I had been getting on welfare(very tempting), or sticking with being poor for a couple more years and go to college. After college, of course, I would(hopefully) make much more money.

Politics
I've held for a long time now that in part of being a good person meant being a good citizen. Because of this, I have had an interest in politics since before I turned 18.
I have slight libertarian leanings, but at the end of the day I am a conservative; I believe in the principles that the Republican party gives lip service to.

Law
My study of politics has naturally turned to law. After all, laws are simply a codified version of what behavior a society expects people to follow, and politics is the discussion of said behavior. I've decided to work in Constitutional law someday, and so at the moment I am pursuing an Associate's degree in Criminal Justice. I'll later move on to a Master's in Law, and then actual law school.*exhausted yay*

Survival
I've been interested in survivalism for a couple of years now, ever since the recent zombie fad coincided with the aftermath of Katrina. Sitting around the coffee shop near the bookstore with my friends and discussing what our 'zombie plan' was, then going home and watching more news about Katrina made me realize that a survival plan for one disaster could readily be applied to others.