Michel Montvert

Sorry, but some of this history sounds like it came from the NOI and it is NOT supported by any evidence. There was no greater "Caucasian" civilization from which all those named sprang. Any connection between the Y-DNA J2 Semitic speakers and the R1a and R1b Indoeuropeans was very ancient. long before farming, and irrelevant. The Indoeuropeans did not come from the Caucasus, but from the steppes. After "Out of Africa" 60k years ago, the people of the Mideast were those who evolved there. They were no longer "Africans", but all qualify as "Caucasoid" regardless of their skin color. The designation is not about color. "Caucasoid" does NOT equal "white". The Mideasterners with whom migrants from the Caucasus (Semitic speakers) and later from the steppes (Indoeuropean speakers) mixed were already "Caucasoid". Of course if you look at southern Arabia (where Africans had migrated) or Lower Egypt (where Eurasians had migrated), you'll see a lot of mixed people, and good luck putting them into a category. The "Caucasian" people were no more savage than anyone else, on the whole. I'd say the Indoeuropeans behaved quite badly, starting with the Yamnaya 6000 years ago. But what we'd call savagery can be found anywhere. Egypt was not the world's first civilization. There were others millennia before, in Africa, in Europe and elsewhere. The world was not civilized by Egypt. That sort of radical diffusionism is very 19th-century and not believed today. Moses was the lawgiver to the Israelites! Nobody else cared, for a very long time. Certainly the Indoeuropeans did not care until much later they were Christianized, in Roman times. Civilization: by 6000 bce there was civilization in Europe, in the Balkans, along the Danube and its tributaries, and along the Mediterranean. Civilization with many towns, extensive trading networks, and a system of writing older than any other known, upon which Sumerian writing was obviously based, since it uses many of the same symbols. This "Old European" civilization was destroyed by the incoming Yamnaya from the steppes, the Indoeuropean speakers. In Africa there was also an extensive society which I know will be before long declared to be "civilization", in the Sahara, growing out of the "African Aquatic". Egypt was great, to be sure, but it was not the first civilization. Both "black" and "white" people had created civilized societies prior to Egyptian Unification (Narmer).

Demosocialism does not require inter-group harmony! And the notion that "race" is of paramount importance is only pertinent in circumstances such as the USA where we have been trained to obsess on race. For most of history. nobody cared about it. And since it's not a valid concept, scientifically, it is really more of a sick fantasy. Race does not exist. Racism does, unfortunately. Check out the rampages of the Kanuri in West Africa. We can find no white people involved in inciting them to the extreme violence they committed against other Africans, unless you want to call Arabs "white". The elites, the rich, do not want to elevate the lower classes regardless of their "race". They've done so when forced democratically. Demosocialism resulted when democracy overwhelmed plutocracy and aristocracy. The rulers are doing what they can to prevent this from happening in the USA. UK has a lot of black people in its population. Yet their demosocialism works fine. And a lot of Pakistanis also. I don't think that is an inevitability, that ethnic or racial diversity inhibits a society from practicing social justice. If this were true then to have decent societies we'd all have to segregate into homogenous groupings. But that ship has sailed... there is extensive diversity in many places. Perhaps one dynamic which works toward what you're saying is that where there is diversity, it is easier for the rulers to divide the working class against itself. Certainly this has happened in the USA, since the 17th century in Virginia, in fact. But that is only one trick in their bag... though divide-and-conquer is a very effective one. to be sure. But there is no hard and fast rule saying that we cannot develop demosocialism in the USA. Hell, if everyone voted, the Republicans could not win an election. There are complex causes for our backwardness. I am not comfortable blaming "racial" diversity for it. In fact democracy comes from the word "demos", referring to a community. The word from which we get demon is daemon. So, democracy means literally "rule of the people". I can find nothing wrong with that concept. Demosocialism does not punish ambition. One can still succeed and do things. It just ensures that there is not an underclass of poor. of disenfranchised, of people without medical care or opportunity. As for differences... we in the USA think that "race" is the ultimate difference. From here we can look at Belgium and think they're all the same people. That is not how they see it. That is our obsession. We were all raised in this society where "race" is made important, artificially, as a means of oppressing us. But that is not objective reality. To the Belgians, a Walloon and a Flemish person are as different as a black and a white in the USA, in the perceptions of the people. We cannot explain or understand Belgium using USA concepts! There is no reason we could not implement demosocialism here. It exists in part, where we have food stamps, Medicare, the ACA, etc. But ours is watered down and so incomplete that it does not solve our basic inequalities. The best politics one could pursue in the USA, in my opinion, is to fight for that, demosocialism for ALL, and it is attainable. But with so many people asleep... we can't accomplish anything.

Perhaps from outside the "white" group it seems that we are all one big family but that is NOT the case. Ethnicity can be far more powerful than "race". Notice how many Germans and French were killed by each other over the centuries. Nobody said, "Oh wait, they're white!" Nobody cared. You cannot say that Belgium is homogenous. It is not. Flemish and Walloons are NOT the same people. Any more than Irish and Scots-Irish in Ulster. Or Serbs and Bosnians. Did the Hutu stop to think, "Wait, these Tutsis are BLACK like us", before killing them with machetes? No. Ethnicity is what mattered. not color. Demosocialism works anywhere. There is no reason the ethnic configuration of a country matters. Where there is RACISM, nothing functions well. Racism is a poison which contorts everything. But even in countries like Spain with multiple languages and ethnic groups, demosocialism works just fine. We need to improve the system in the USA. Demosocialism is the only way. We cannot give up on it because, oh well, we've got too many ethnic groups! That's just laying down for the racist white-rights.

Yes, socialism can mean a lot of things. The good socialism is democratic, not communist (Marxist-Leninist). Some of the demosocialist nations are not homogenous. Belgium has 2 large ethnic groups (Flemish and Walloons) who pretty much hate each other. France and UK and others now have considerable Muslim minorities. It works not only in Nordic countries. ALL the developed world (except the U$A) has demosocialism firmly established. That means all the EU countries plus Canada, NZ, Australia as well as a number of countries not consisting primarily of Europeans: Japan, Singapore, S. Korea, Israel, and the Arab Gulf states, being rich, also have much demosocialism in effect. And I've got bad news for Republicans about demosocialism: IT WORKS!!!

Some have said that welfare in the 30s was designed to help the victims of the very bad depression which was occurring, and that the intention was to help WHITE people. Then in the 60s the Johnson Administration made it far more easy to get welfare, and at some level they decided it was better to have all those poor folks on the dole than to see that they had decent education and jobs. Reagan quickly screwed up the cost of college to get all those pesky minorities and poor whites out of there. An "ankle weight". Oh you got that 100% right!

Well I may be a leftist and all that, but I agree with you here. Making reference to the Maya, from whom I learned some things, they believe in cycles (similar to what Hindus believe) and they believe there are higher powers... and obviously so do I or I'd not have been able to relate at all to what the chimán was telling me. The view is that the deities AND the humans must be involved. Higher power is motivating things, and is opening peoples' eyes, but humans can't just sit around waiting for Jesus to come. We have to act on what we know is right. I think without a doubt Dr. King was accessed by such power(s). He took seriously the notion that "I am crucified with Christ". He died for our freedom, and I mean all of us. In my opinion we all have the obligation Dr. King had, which he felt and articulated, which can be traced to Martin Buber's philosophy that we are obligated by our desire to please God to help our fellows... which of course is precisely what Jesus also said. The "glorious community" Dr. King mentions is this... the community of humans who understand that it is a higher calling to help the unfortunate than to accumulate wealth for ourselves. I say you are doing precisely the right thing by "doing your part until that kind of help comes." That help has come, it is with us now. We can only hope that enough of humanity perceives the imperative and acts accordingly so that we're WORTH saving as a species. Sometimes I wonder...

Amen to that. It is true and well proven that discrimination occurs in housing, employment and lending, not to mention in the behavior of Police. However the picture you paint of how easy whites have it is not the norm. Banks will not give loans without collatoral. And don't forget that many homeless are mentally ill or drug addicts. They need help, not just a job offer. Certainly the wool is being pulled over everyone's eyes, and whites the most, likely. Yes, I also wonder why they don't blame the corporations ravaging the communities, the employers who don't pay enough, and so on. This is why there is nonstop nonsense in the media feeding their fear and ignorance. Listen to Faux News all day and you'll be convinced your problems are caused by 1) immigrants; 2) liberals trying to make your kids trans; 3) black people for existing. They have been well brainwashed NOT to look at the real source of their problems. Some of us (whites) see through the game. Most do not. It is very frustrating, for the non-whites wondering DAMN why don't these fools wake up, they're screwing themselves as they enable the screwing of others, and for the whites who think ourselves smarter than that, WHY won't the others listen? I've got a whole family full of them, virtually all have drunk the Koolaid and never notice that the things they complain about are NOT caused by those they blame for it! Makes me wanna scream.

Yes. In many areas, cops treat white people badly. I used to live in L.A. I learned that if I needed to talk to an LAPD cop, find a black one, because the white and Mexican ones were obnoxious and hostile. I mentioned this to a black friend, and he said, "Oh sure, you're white! The black cops are nice to you! They treat other blacks like dogs!" I came to find out that this was true, that often the black cops were brutalizing black people to impress their white colleagues. If they split the stats for "whites" by socioeconomic level, they would find that the poorer strata have a LOT in common with oppressed non-white groups. In Albuquerque a while back there was a syndrome of cops shooting white homeless people. Very often it is no picnic being white. However, it is in most ways even worse for non-whites, which is why we pale-butts don't get much attention, and why those of us who are aware of this stuff don't push the issue, because we know that blacks, chicanos, etc., have bigger problems to worry about than abused white people. Of course, as always, my opinion is that we ought to all unite around all of this injustice. Many fingers, one fist, and all that... but I'm a naive idealist, apparently.

Yes to the first question. In Jr. High as the loudspeaker announced that Pres. Kennedy was dead, some of the kids were exclaiming, "Good!" Obviously they were reflecting the attitudes of their parents. When Dr. King was killed I was not around people so saw no immediate reactions. I was home when Bobby Kennedy was shot. My Republican mother came to wake me up laughing, "Well, your hero is dead," she said and walked away still laughing. For those in the East back then, things might have seemed all "black and white", but in the West there was activism by chicanos during that period. López Reies Tijerina in NM, La Raza Unida (Corky González) in Colorado, and a lot of action in California, including UFW and the movement which led to the Moratorium and Blow-out in Los Angeles. It is true that the black movement inspired all of that as well as Native activism, but one cannot claim that they had not already been active in the past. But when both civil rights and anti-war movements exploded, obviously there were other interests who said, "Yeah, us too!", and so the end result was the American Indian Movement. a lot of chicano activism, the women's movement, the environmental movement. gay rights movement, and so on. Well... why not? EVERYONE deserves freedom and justice, no? Well, maybe not Donald Trump, but y'all get the idea. Hippies and other longhaired white activists at that time were not as shallow and empty as you indicate. We did not think civilization was collapsing. Instead, we saw that change was at hand and we jumped in to accelerate it. We saw the riots and so on as revolutionary action! That was part of the process of change. We had complete sympathy with the blacks in the inner cities who rioted. We had great esteem and respect for all the leaders of that time, MLK, Malcolm, the Panthers... as well as the other ethnic leaders, César Chávez, AIM, etc. Many of my generation did sacrifice considerably to be in that struggle. Some were killed. The forces arrayed against us were not only Police and legal system, but employers, parents, a lot of people and institutions who did NOT like what we were doing. As criticism, I will say that we were indeed too high, put on too much of a freak show, and we would have done better to be less extreme, less scary to the mainstream, and think about what was effective rather than what was fun and gave us a thrill by scaring our parents (who did deserve it, however). But then among the non-white activists I saw firsthand also a lot of ego and bull$hit which was counter-productive. A lot of posing, dilettantism, weekend warriors and all that, among all ethnicities, white or other. Did anyone learn from our mistakes? I doubt it... I don't want to crap on the younger people, but I'm seeing now little of the mass dedication and energy which was happening then. This is not y'all's fault... the powers that be have manipulated society a lot to ensure that the 60s won't happen again.

Well I for one wholeheartedly agree with that last statement and the entire post. Being unconscious, the unconsciousness of "the people", is the greatest asset the oppressors have. All of us, by which I man all ethnic groups, genders, categories, are being manipulated. It is all very careful and deliberate. I could write a book on this, as i've been consciously observing it for a long time, and noticing how the "system" promotes certain behavior. And like sheep we all fall right into line. Very sad.

Han is the ethnicity of mainstream Chinese. They are the vast majority in China. They speak Mandarin mostly, yes. During the Great Leap Forward especially, minority non-Han people were abused. There were cases of ethnic Korean teachers being pulled out of schools and thrown brutally into the streets for speaking and teaching in Korean. For those in the South., such as in the province of Yunan, things can get quite racist. And then there's Tibet... very sad.

Welfare in the USA is poverty maintenance. It does not provide what a person needs to get a job while also raising a child. If you look at how things are in the superior demosocialist nations (Germany, Japan, Israel, France, UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore, etc.) you can see how society can be structured so that having a child isn't a life sentence of poverty. That's a facile response, simply dismiss politics as a bunch of white men who are alien to the issue. But they are not. You dodged the point, which is that your GOP allies are RACIST to the core, fighting hard to keep black people down, and USING you as a pawn. You and Herschel. Unlike him, you can complete proper sentences, at least. To the point, I say unequivocally, DEMOCRATIC white men are FAR superior to REPUBLIQAN white men, who are fascist traitors, misogynists and racists. And so, "your" white men are festering scum. Check yourself.

China's nasty little secret is that in fact they have a number of minority ethnic groups---not everyone is Han---and those are often severely abused, as we're seeing occur now against the Uighurs. As the Soviet system imposed Russian language and culture on the occupied nations ("Republics"), so the Chinese Communist system has imposed Han identity and culture and Chinese language on the country. Possibly the world's greatest patriarchal crime was that of the occupation of Europe by the Yamnaya, who apparently exterminated most of the Neolithic males and then took the females. They erased societies run by women. egalitarian and relatively peaceful, with their warlord culture, which is sadly still the dominant cultural paradigm on earth today.

Native ancestry of course was all here before Columbus, obviously. African was not, nor European. nor Chinese. nor anyone else, despite all the claims for all of those. I lived among the Maya. They do not look at all African. And their culture is entirely indigenous. NO real anthropologists have seen any legitimate evidence for pre-Columbian contact. The Lagoa Santa fossils were analyzed genetically and found to be entirely of Native American types. No Australians. no Africans. Kennewick also was analyzed morphologically and found to be Native, not European as many claimed. If anyone from another continent had been here there would be something from the following list: 1. evidence of boats 2. outside DNA among Natives 3. crops from elsewhere 4. cultural artifacts from elsewhere NONE of that is found anywhere. Any claims for such are easily debunked as they are imaginary, such as those often cited, von Wuthenau and so on, very old as well as providing NO reliable evidence for any visitations. Keep in mind that those claiming Africans were here also claim that the Hebrews, the Dravidians, the Chinese, the original Europeans, and lots of other people are "really" African, or originally African. In every case there is no evidence for it. The great things done by Africans are to be found amply in Africa. To claim Greece, India, Olmecs, Chinese, etc., is just not real academics, real science. or anything real. And the white racists trying to claim that European Solutreans were in America... equally 100% false.

Your well-prepared posts are prepared for you by the usual misfits. If you think to have any credibility at all, at least change the wording, because much of what you write is lifted directly from Trump or his many demon-possessed supporters. You are a traitor. That's down there with pedophiles.

Sadder yet is a traitor, which is what you are, supporting Trump and his allies who are all our enemies. It is very obvious that your info is being fed to you by the same sources which feed all the Russian disruptor trolls online. You are an active Russian asset disrupting democracy here and that is not a trivial matter. I'd suggest that if you're in the U$A you get onto Travelocity and enter "Moscow" into the search engine. Get moving, traitor. You then posted that to assert that black people were still suffering as under slavery was nonsense. Things are SO much better, you said. Then you turn around and claim that the Democrats are keeping black people enslaved? That is just one example of your idiocy. That racist and disgusting GOP screed about the "Democratic plantation" is typical of their, and your, lies. Republicans support racist Police. Republicans wish to allow businesses and landlords and banks to discriminate freely. They oppose ANY measure which would diminish the effects of racism. YOU are working for the enemies of black people and the enemies of this country. You have to be shameless. Do you utterly lack empathy? I suspect sociopathy is at play here.

Whether or not you really are the person depicted, I know you're being paid in rubles. You reveal yourself as a traitor herein. I advocate that all of you supporting that treasonous insurrection be jailed immediately, if not deported to Russia where you belong. Democrats care about the people, but they are centrist and weak compared to the "Left" in the superior demosocialist nations where the standard of living is better than in the now-2nd-world Reaganomics-ravaged U$A. Business in the U$A is used to being given free rein to commit any abuse that will make them a profit. They mostly lack any conscience. Any sane person is anti-petroleum. That crap is warming the planet and killing people. Wind and solar energy WORK very well, as already well proven. and the costs are dropping all the time. Supporting continued fossil fuel burning is at this point a crime against humanity. Pakistan right now looks like an ocean. Mississippi is heading that way, too. Severe weather just keeps happening and surely you have a facile excuse for it... perhaps BIDEN did it!!! Yeah, that's the ticket!!!

The deal released a lot of Taliban fighters who were instrumental in the rapid takeover. You're talking about a first strike in the context of a conversation about the Taliban? That is hilarious. I recall people claiming that "if we don't stop them in Vietnam, they'll soon be in San Francisco." Right, the Vietnamese had virtually no Navy, but people were made to believe this nonsense. The Taliban is not threatening us. They are threatening the people of Afghanistan. How idiotic that the right will blame Biden for anything. Taliban nutcases do something, it's his fault. I suppose I should blame Biden for getting tendonitis in my ankle. Also the dogs stopped eating their regular food and I'm convinced Biden is behind this... as part of his plot to make us all Chinese Communists, right?

More GOP disinformation. Trump made the deal with the Taliban which enabled their rapid takeover and their terrorist acts as the USA withdrew. To say Biden killed them... that is far beyond ignorant and offensive. It is downright treasonous. Amazing that now the RIGHT in the USA is doing the Islamicists' propaganda for them. I presume you also defend Putin? If the USA were having success in Iraq and Afghanistan. things would be quite different. But the whole mess was a FAILURE! I hate the Taliban as much as anyone, probably, but USA actions in Afghanistan were nothing but a postponement of the inevitable. People are dying in lots of places. I'd like for it to stop. But should the USA occupy every one of those countries? It's a moot point, since that is not even possible. What we have to worry about now in the USA is our own homegrown "Taliban", the MAGAts.

Yes, their language is Carib.

Very interesting things you raise. I could write a book on hippies, as I was among them in the late 60s. It was in part just a fad, a way to be cool, a way to get laid. Many of us were sincere but as I saw it turning to bullshit I left. In fact for decades after that I was mostly around Mexican people, since in California the choice among whites was rednecks, yuppies or hippies and I didn't like any of those 3. The issue of spirits and shamanism also is a long and deep one. I had a spiritual connection with the chimán who taught me, which had begun when I was young. Once when I was 9 yrs old (same year I discovered racism) I had a very intense vision and was then telling everyone that I had to go talk to Mayan people. When I was in Guatemala then, in 1978, the chimán saw me and said, "I knew you were coming, I've been waiting for you." So... ok I'm reluctant to tell much of this because it is not to be spoken of lightly, but that is what happened and obviously there was a reason for it. The effect of that, and of my assimilation of Mexican culture, was, among other things. to increasingly alienate me from my own "white" people in the USA. And it made me tune in to other sources of information and wisdom, and so I began to take very seriously indigenous and traditional voices from Africa, India, and elsewhere. As for Mexicans. you know it depends on the individual. Many are conscious. Many are not. Mexican society is color-coded. to be sure. The average "mestizo" there likely has more Native blood than the average BIA-registered Indian in the USA. And the average common culture in Mexico is very indigenous. I was there in many areas where there were no tourists and out in the country, and one sees this very obviously in the small towns. Keep in mind that people in the USA (gringos) have seen lots of Mexicans and think that Spanish people look like that. In Spain I'd hear USA students expressing amazement that "the people don't look like Mexicans!" They didn't get it. Mexicans are NATIVE, Spanish are WHITE, ok... Mexicans whom gringos think look Spanish often really do not. I am always bothered by the lack of understanding among the various peoples discussed here. Blacks (USA), Mexicans, Indians from the USA, all 3 groups misunderstand each other. Since I'm fairly familiar with all 3, I find myself always having to "translate" between them... translate cultural facts if not language, per se. And whites... well, same as everyone else, it depends if we're dealing with those who are conscious or those who are not. (My generation said "conscious" instead of "woke", right.) I will disagree on the notion of Africans here before Columbus. There is no good evidence for it that any anthropologist recognizes. Van Sertima was academically a farce. And this notion contains the idea that Africans were responsible for Native civilizations, which is just more culture-thieving such as whites did rampantly, even claiming that the mounds in Ohio were built by Romans or Greeks or Basques or anyone WHITE they could think of. But, this is a huge topic and so I leave it with that. I would indeed not mind talking about shamanism or more importantly, said my teacher, to tell to gringos the facts about the Maya. When I say gringos I include blacks... as I've heard Mexicans use the word like that. Not intending any offense... There are some good Youtubes by chimanes, Mayan priests, talking about the Mayan prophetic view of this current time, and the changes coming. They're all in Spanish, but worth hearing. The Mayan calendar has begun a new cycle, and this is a time of transformation. Humans will make their life on earth a complete living hell, or we'll get our shit together and create a system more SANE than the current one based on exploitation and endless expansion.

I was 13. I was a white kid in the suburbs. I liked what Dr. King was doing. My parents did not. What they called "rebellion" on my part had already begun to split us apart. I liked the musicians who played there. I liked the black celebs. And Dr. King made such total sense that his words cut to the center of my adolescent brain. A few months later John Kennedy was murdered. I stood lined up for P.E. in Jr. High in Los Angeles listening to the loudspeakers telling us that the President was dead. The naive belief in our perfect country and great world which they'd inculcated in us in school, that was fading as I woke up to the ambient racism, the hypocrisy... well, this was only the beginning. In 1968, a few months after Dr. King was gunned down. so also was Robert Kennedy. By then Malcolm had also been murdered. That year I graduated high school and stepped out into a revolution, We thought the country was being torn apart. We knew that we had to change it, that in its existing form it was not viable nor worth fighting for. There were a lot of young whites like me resonating positively to Dr. King's message and struggle. We wanted to do something. Now I'm 72. And I want to do something. It is far less clear just what one should do at this point! We do not have a great moral voice like Dr. King informing us. We all know what is wrong... but we'll be lucky if the country has any time to do much of anything but combat the forces of fascism and dictatorship which are gathering and looming on the horizon. I felt that the various ethnic groups involved in this struggle back then were pulling together. We were uniting, getting to know each other. That unity is not as great now, there are many voices of division from right and left. The innocence we had then is gone. Now we're cynical and distrustful of nearly everyone. Shoot, I'd get up and give a speech, and it would be a good one, but nobody will listen. Sometimes I feel sorry for younger people who did not experience what we did in the 60s. Much of it was very bad, but the solidarity, the feeling that we would win, the fervor we had for justice... it was great. Things are going to change. and rapidly, as we move forward. Let's all keep the positive motivation strong in us as we continue to struggle for change. If anyone thought the 60s was a mess, you ain't seen nothing yet!

What you advocate here is precisely what already exists in the other developed nations. It's called demosocialism. A capitalist economy, but with a lot of safety net, and govts who support the interests of the PEOPLE as much as those of capitalists. In the USA we have a system which is corporatist. It's a rigged game. It's anachronistic really, belong to the age of Robber Barons which the Republicans just can't give up. That's what Reagan was about... reversing everything liberals had done since FDR, back to trickle-down and gross inequality as in the 1920s. All we need to do is take a good look at countries like Germany, Denmark, France. Spain, UK, Netherlands. Japan. Israel, Australia, NZ, Canada, Singapore, etc., to see how we could greatly improve the U$A. As for the AA economy... the increased corporatization of our economy has hurt EVERY community. Corporations own all the eateries, stores. everything. There are FAR fewer locally owned businesses than 50 years ago. The economic environment does not favor local economy at all. And the AA community is a special case in that it has been held down perennially, even back when rural communities were prospering (and they are prospering no longer). I'd advocate a rebuilding of infrastructure, economic incentives to create decent stores, jobs, etc... well, that's a whole 'nother long topic. All of it would occur and the country would be better to the extent we adopt demosocialism like the superior nations of the world.

Troy's statement about untapped talent in the ghetto applies not only to gymnastics but to everything. In the inner city, schools are poorer, jobs are scarce, infrastructure is poor, and this was all structured by design in the days of segregation. Since I taught school in such an area I became aware of this in ways that I hadn't learned simply from the ambient progressive information. One could see this globally. Wherever people are poor and kept down (and I firmly believe poverty is entirely a creation of the rich, of the system. The poor themselves do not create it.) their potential is truncated. How much talent is lost in the Mayan community where 4-yr-olds work all day to pick coffee beans. yet the workers are so poor they can't afford to drink coffee? Back to my school... the neighborhood streets run by a gang, poverty and dysfunction rampant, cops who behave like an occupying army. I had 2 kids in my class who were notable, one black and one Mexican, both were geniuses. The black boy, I once said to him, "Look, you make noise all day and refuse to cooperate yet I know very well that you are smart enough that we could put you in high school and you'd be able to do well (this was a 4th grader). You could do very well academically. why not do it?" He grabbed a book, opened it to a page, scanned the page for about 2 seconds, closed the book and gave me a synopsis of what the page said that was as good as any teacher could do. "Damn!" I said, whoops, bad word, but, "Damn, see what I mean? You could fly through high school and college, you're very intelligent." "Yeah who cares," he responded, "already I'm making more money than you make." Of course that path leads to a bullet or a jail cell, I pointed out. He didn't care. The Mexican kid could remember everything ever said in class. I could ask him a question about what I'd taught last week and he remembered every word. I would say to him, "What's 49 times 148?" And he'd tell me the answer before my calculator could. Well, I did home visits at that school, which no teachers do any more, and certainly not in S. Central L.A., but I did since I'd made friends with the gang and had "protection". This kid's house... his mother was in the back room shooting up. The baby was crawling around wailing with about 3 poops in the diaper. The house smelled of urine and beer. The father was in the front yard in a van selling drugs. Now,, let's guess where these 2 ended up. I don't know, but the odds were that they did not do well. THAT is lost talent, lost potential, lost lives in action and 100% due to the lousy environment which was CREATED for them by those in power. I had a professor in grad school at UCLA who'd studied how the S. Central ghetto was created. He traced everything, and the answer? BY DESIGN, by collaboration between politicians, landowners, store owners... red-lining, oh yes, and realtors---homeowner covenants stipulating that when you sell the house, the buyer must be white. How much talent was lost to the USA during Jim Crow days? How many janitors could have been nuclear scientists or great artists? How many potential community leaders are lost to gangbanging and to the victimization which occurs inevitably simply by living in the inner city? Some love to say, "Anyone can make it, it's all up to the individual, nobody is stopping you." Sorry, but the system is stopping people. One's environment does have an effect on one's outcome. I had a friend in Pittsburgh who was descended from slaves which had been owned by my great-great-grandfather in what is now West Virginia, then Virginia. He lived in Homewood (ghetto), his father could never find a good job, sometimes they were hungry, his school was bad, they had only the bare minimum of comforts in their house. I grew up in the suburbs, my dad though a poor hillbilly originally got the GI Bill and went to the university which would not accept blacks at that time, ended up with a white-collar job, we had lots of food, new clothes, books, toys, piano lessons... Walking around the Univ. of Pittsburgh area whites in the street (this was in the 70s) would actually give me CRAP for being with a black person. I once said, "Damn, is it like this all the time?" and he said, "Welcome to our world." I was looking for an apt around Pitt and the landlord while showing the place assured me he wouldn't rent to blacks, so "this place is clean". Must I go on? Once I was there observing, I perceived this racism at every turn, simply by keeping my eyes open. By the way, a realtor in Los Angeles once assured me that I needn't worry, because he wouldn't "rent to Mexicans". This all sounds "systemic" and "institutionalized" to me...

The term "socialist" is used far and wide these days. It can mean almost anything, apparently. RepubliQans claim that the Nazis were socialists. The superior societies of the world are all demosocialist---Germany, UK, France, Denmark, Spain, Israel, Singapore, Australia, Canada, etc.---and so certainly there must be something good about some sort of socialism, judging from the facts at hand. Sadly there are many nefarious forces backing this or that group. We have on the Left George Soros who funds Democratic or progressive activities in various countries. We've not seen anything nefarious about this, as he's supporting liberal causes. not communism. Other forces are less benevolent in their intent. such as those emanating from Russia. These days there are people who work in St. Petersburg, and I don't mean Florida, all over the internet. Russian as well as Chinese influence has been exerted to motivate people to hit the streets, including show up at school board meetings armed to threaten teachers over imaginary "CRT". There were links of that action to Chinese disinformation and disruption online. Fostering discord in the USA, it should be obvious to all, is in the interests of the nations who have hostile intent toward the USA. Chief among those: Russia and China. So it is confusing and one has to be skeptical. The chaotic situation of the 60s was nothing compared to the complex interaction of a million forces on the internet, in a society already far more fractured than it was then.