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Brevis esse latoro obscurus fio

The article for which the commentary belongs can be found after the commentary, or one can click here.

<sarcasm>If race is not genetically determined then…</sarcasm>

Its interesting that the work contradicts recent words from the left, and yet, by the time they get to the bottom of the article, they have reapplied “adobo ideology” (makes every idea taste better, even the bad ones). It’s like having tinted glasses on all the time in a pattern of mottled and overlapping colors. Looking at the world through that, it’s no wonder that they don’t have, or develop, a consistent view of the world.

We are defined by the information in the genome, expressed through the structure of cells (which pass on more than just genes), and the potential information that the genome can reach and incorporate. The nurture nature debate is a false argument, in that we are a species whose definition allows for adaptability after conception. Not everything has that ability, but most life does to some degree, and not just for things like injuries. It’s how we adapt over time, and if conditions didn’t change enough, we would stagnate, like the shark, coelacanth, alligators, and crocodiles.

The last examples (alligators and crocodiles), determine sex by temperature in the environment as eggs mature. Their genetic coding lets conditions in the environment determine outcomes. Human genomes sexual determination is through X and Y parings. Both systems are defined by their genomes. One of the two reads world conditions and acts on it; the other relies on random determination.

So all our adaptability, is programmed in, so that we are responsive to things in which being adaptable, allows for greater success in the real world. This muddies our view of the world. We forget that in the absence of our intelligence we wouldn’t be trying to short the system for faster gain, by making judgments outside of reality, and then imposing forces to create an outcome.

Nature, nurture, its 100% both. The result is the synergy of a systems operating in the real world, and the system has such great variability, that even if there are two or more exact copies of the machines blueprints, no two machines turn out exactly the same as no two experience exactly the same in life adaptable pressures. However, this same great variable system is limited; its qualities don’t spontaneously arise across an entity at once, but travel through lineage and either get folded in, or folded out.

Then the mixes of qualities get tested in the crucible of life in the real world, and if it does well, the entity and its group have more kids, and humans develop forward into better and better creatures. If it’s not tested, or the test is shorted out (redistribution), then Neanderthals could have become dominant over the newer smarter humans, as such would make the Neanderthals succeed more than the newer ones who are denied the fruits of their labors. In this way, if the condition can be maintained, Neanderthals would have developed into a parasite of modern man.

What does this mean for traits? Traits can’t happen everywhere at once (if they are simple, they can happen in more than one place at different times, but traits are a product of lineage and a tiny bit of random changes allowed), and so an adaptable trait has an event horizon having to do with location, opportunity, desire, and actual outcomes. Also if there are too many trait differences then mixing them up causes more harm than good (rather than more benefit than bad as in hybrids). So different lineages are forced to forever diverge, partial diversions are race, wider diversions are species, etc.

A person outside the event horizon for red hair will not be able to have red hair unless they are in some event horizon that has a mutation for red hair that is not part of the mutations that make red hair happen today. Red hair is now known to be tied to and is an outward indicator of the inside chemical fact, that red heads are more insensitive to anesthetic – a division of a group, with separate qualities, that others don’t have, is a race, and races overlap, they are not mutually exclusive like species. Race is the engine of human advancement through divergence and recombination’s as they spread out, develop, and then recombine. This quality of red heads proves the position that qualities, like intelligence, sensitivity to light, sensitivity to chemicals, age, and everything else, moves through lineage in chunks and groups.

This truth applies to EVERY quality that makes a living being what they are. A genome is a unique definition that exists to test itself in its time, never ever to be repeated ever again in eternity. How do I know that? Well the human genome is 3.5 billion sequences long, and each position can hold one of four values (actually there are a few other rarer ones, but for the sake of this four will do). So the actual ‘potential’ of the information string is 3,500,000,000 raised to the fourth power a number that is a 1 with around 38 zeroes after it. And all they need is one SNP difference to be a unique person, and have a different mix of qualities. Each of us actually has thousands of these differences, and since the input of the next cell division is the output of the prior cell, these differences actually multiply outward even more than just the number with 38 zeroes after it. Each of us truly touches the infinite.

No two groups that are isolated from each other for a period in time will develop the same way. They will develop different advantages, and these advantages will affect what other qualities in the future are considered advantages. So having hooves will prevent one from developing a huge technological society, the advantage of hooves, denies the other advantages as it limits options. Being too smart is just as bad as being too dumb, and both are extremely contextual when one wants to determine and decide such an arbitrary personal judgment as to what’s ‘best’.

The biggest lesson we can learn from the article below is that what you THINK you are, has a great bearing on your life and even your whole family’s life and lineage, IF YOU LET IT. Myths can act on mind, and mind can make them real (through abstraction). Thoughts become real in actions. In the real world, not academia, or the sheltered inner world of the intelligentsia, the race doesn’t always go to the qualities that we often think are deciding factors in the controlled environments we create for ourselves (if they did, then one could ignore all forms of betting).

This is because our thoughts are a model of the world we operate in, not a true representation of it as we automatically believe it is, and some models are better than others. The more the model is tested in the real world the more effective it is, and life is a model that gets tested in the real world with deadly consequences. Adopt the wrong model, and you adopt a way of looking at the world that either increases or decreases your abilities in that world – regardless of the vanities that the false intelligentsia holds up as good – only what works in the real world, really counts. Not all models of thought are equal. So what model we adapt for ourselves, our framework for looking at the world is important for how we move through the world, and race and our beliefs about race then become important. Whether the model is valid or not. And given that we all don’t have the same exact model, even if given a false one, the same juggling of ideas happens because each of our minds and its adaptable view is defined by our genes in context with our experiences (a model can appear to work because a person who claims to follow it actually doesn’t, and so others will be tricked into lower productivity, while the other seems to make it work).

The smartest have problems for being too smart, just as the dumbest have their problems too. Different qualities are mixed up in different races, because they couldn’t have spread into or out of those races until today, when we are mixing things up in a way that has NEVER happened before in the history of life.

Whether you’re a Neanderthal on your mother’s side is not relevant (and not actually possible) unless you believe you are, and then imagine that defines you, then imagine the limitations of the definition rather than test those limitations to see if they are REAL. Nothing defines you other than your attempt to traverse the world successfully with the real abilities you have, and then pass on your winning genes. Nothing gives you that chance, but freedom to succeed and freedom to fail and see what those skills and abilities mixed up in you can do. Otherwise you’re not succeeding in the real world, but succeeding inside an artificial construct. If that construct fails, so do all the creatures made to live in it.

The issue isn’t that everyone that has a specific quality wins, for that is not true. The issue is that everyone has to find their winning qualities, even if those qualities are lesser than others, and then realize that a homogenous herd of animals all the same could never have such a world with so many wonderful things and so many opportunities for everyone of every level (if not held back by our own governance). They may not be the best hunter, but in a world where the best hunter shares what they have with others that do lesser things in exchange for being a better hunter, it’s no longer only what you can do.

In a common collective, there isn’t such room for such diversity (despite the myth), and in a world where all diversity is treated the same, diversity dies. It no longer becomes a valuable selector. Just as we no longer need an appendix, if we no longer select some diversities as better than others, then the engine that creates new ones dies out as the issue is no longer a point of selection. In this way, life teases out colors from mottled gray. For if there was no distinction of color between red blue and yellow, the world becomes shades of drab gray. If there is no distinction between good and bad, the two melt together into gray.

So our beliefs in what we are can seriously change how we behave, and how we succeed in the world. The inner city youth that believes that he is stuck somewhere IS stuck there in a cage of his own making, or societies making if it tells them the same messages. Replacing false ideas with ideology is replacing bad with worse, as the beliefs make us all gray, it buries what and who we are in favor of a homogeneous herd like result.

If we believe all things are equal, then we no longer believe that one thing is better than another, and then no longer differentiate. And if we don’t differentiate, we don’t develop, we stagnate. This is basic to the system of life. What we choose to ignore, we become blind to, and we no longer use as a method to find our best direction in life. If I can’t say that I can juggle better than most others, then I can’t be a juggler. What’s even more interesting is that in that world, we lose the pleasure of being an audience and entertained! For what would such be if someone came out and did nothing special?

The article below hints at so many things towards issues like this, but it also shows how ideology is crossing the wires and turning the real celebration of diversity into a lip service that accomplishes the opposite, and yet accentuates not positive differences, but only negative ones.

These people can no longer look at the information naked and in the clear, and not try to impose an ideological framework or cast into a preferred framework. If they had many ideologies/frameworks they could see in the clear, because they could play with frameworks and separate the real from the fake through comparisons (like being able to construct a true image from separate photos of one color). This is why an ideology does not allow other ideas to exist for its structure is established before those ideas are fixed, making any idea that doesn’t fit, a threat.

Their minds then are limited to only the answers that are reachable in that framework. Which is why ideology twists contorts and bends to explain things, its model is fixed and imposed arbitrarily, and this forces everything to adapt to the model, rather than the harder way of finding a model that explains the data, and constantly evolve that model to be more and more accurate. Since our perception reality is forced to adapt to the ideology (since reality doesn’t adapt), the ideology has no impetus for change, and in fact, must prevent change to remain what it is (just as speciation must stop so that a hippo doesn’t become a whale).

The longer the ideology exists, the farther and farther the individual that incorporates it must take their mind from the real world (if they are sincere to the ideology and not a heretic), and the deeper they have to move into a dysfunctional world in which facts bend like taffy so that they can be fit into the static model. We lose the mental advantage of adaptability in life. Ideology becomes operationally equivalent to instinct, and our actions become fixed and programmed, without the benefit of reason. Instinct can make an animal run off a cliff, when reason would make it stop, which is why higher order animals have some reasoning ability outside of sheer panic.

Shoving everything into a preconceived and proffered framework puts everyone in a mental lockbox. So rather than free us, ideology imprisons us, and stagnates us from moving through the world, just as surely as a prison and its bars keep one from moving through the world. If a thought is not allowed to occur to you, then how can you realize what stems from those thoughts? Our myths no longer work, they no longer reduce the immense complexity of the world in a useful way, and they change into mental prisons, in which we no longer are free.

In a serious way, Erin Harper has discovered that the truth can set you free, however, no sooner had she tried to fly, then they clipped her wings by trying to shove what they discovered into the preconception of the ideological, rather than the real. They refused to accept that a fact may challenge the validity of the mental model they have accepted as a guide through life, and then force a change to the ideology. While desiring the change of improvement, they are forever locked away from it.

Race does exist, because traits don’t get passed on singularly, they get passed in groups, and if a group with a skin color was more successful than a group with another skin color, then not just the traits of skin color get passed, but other traits that are common to the lineage of that group also get passed. That is unless these lineages mix, as with Erin Harpers lineage, and share the genes in their offspring in some new mix. If they don’t, then they will be tuned to the world that imposes restrictions to them, and juggles costs. Mental ability and other qualities come at a cost. A benefit that costs too much isn’t a benefit, and some benefits, like intelligence are very expensive, and so get pared down when too costly.

In the framework of this ideology is its own vanity that causes this problem. An ideologies origin vanity is that intelligence is the overwhelming benefit, and so from intelligence comes the model, and the model is everything, or it would have to deny that intelligence is everything.

That the more intelligence you have the better it is without end. The manipulations of the intelligentsia (pretenders to intelligence), are only saying that all intelligences are equal so that they can claim to be just as smart as someone who is intelligent (and have bad ideas presented as options and their bad ideas not be denied as such).

If they are equal, then we have to listen to clever people over intelligent people. No longer can someone show that a person is not as smart as they are, and that their facts and the ideas that stem from them should be proffered as having more merit over facts that stem from the ideology. In this way, an uneducated opinionated person who is clever can appear as knowledgeable, or more knowledgeable, than a much more educated person (especially to those that have to depend on such education). What’s worse is that they adulterate the minds of those who come to them to learn.

Some groups are smarter than others, and most of the time, the rest of the world spends a lot of time limiting their advantages, just as a girl that harasses another girl into a mental ward takes the other girl out of the competition. In this way, the Jews are hated in the west, and in the same way, the Chinese are hated in the east.

They never take their ideology to the next level and make it consistent, as that would allow it to evolve into something that they didn’t preconceive, and therefore they can take credit and power for it. It makes for unpleasant cognitive dissonance to those who are intelligent, not intelligentsia.

As an example: ‘Race doesn’t exist’

If race doesn’t exist, then how can you give entitlements for it?

It exists, because we act like it exists. In this way, a large population of peoples, like the Spanish are considered a minority, though they exist literally in the tens of millions, but Latvians, who don’t number more than a few million world wide, and less than 200,000 of them are not considered a minority (Chinese, the most populous group on the planet, are minorities in this model).

In this system the smaller group that is not the numerical minority has to fund the larger groups entitlements, because the larger group has the preferred ideological skin color that the model says must be rewarded. Since the model is fixed and not contextual, it will never be adjusted. So the eventual benefits will accrue till there are only minorities that are defined by skin color having nothing to do with their numerically dominant numbers (cognitive dissonance again).

Who says race isn’t real or doesn’t confer advantages over others in the real world? They have the genetic quality and in our real world it confers an advantage – that’s all that nature ‘cares’ about. We select for blue eyes, we get more blue eyes till blue eyes are dominant. So selecting for race just makes one race more operationally dominant in the world. As long as the state exists to twist the knobs and apply false pressure based on visual skin color, we will be driven off track from what works in the real world and the more we become prisoners of the contrived and invented realities we construct.

If race didn’t exist, then how could she now consider that she isn’t of one race (black), but now belongs to a new group of races (Eskimo)? Race doesn’t exist, so then she isn’t either of them. Note that their intelligence has been cut off, and so they no longer feel the cognitive dissonance of getting to the assertion that there is no race, by illustrating that a person who believes their skin color denotes race, has a false belief as to what race they are, that is corrected by genetically determining their RACE.

Can we honestly sit there and say that we can’t tell Eskimos from Africans? However when we create a human equivalent of a mutt, can we always tell the source of parentage? No, the qualities get mixed, and so the qualities that were unique to a race and come with the race, get mixed and so the new person shares them, and they may be separated from race, or they may remain. Without the original races, there would be no mixing of these superior qualities from different areas and lineages, and there would be much less Darwinian progress and adaptation in our slow mating species as we share the qualities, and NATURE not ideology, decides which of them are better, by our children, and our children’s children’s success.

[A large part of this comes from a very ingenious abuse of immerging information in genetics, and using our ignorance to get the first word in on a subject to attempt to insure that the outcome is what they want. This is shoving the data into a model (ideology), to control the thoughts of those who subscribe to the model as their myth for navigating the world. By doing this, they slow down progress, and control outcomes, as the real information, and the real view, is totally obfuscated and skewed, and remains so till a long process of weeding out the lies (after all, hasn’t anyone noticed that they are telling us what’s there before the researchers have found out?), and correcting the falsehoods. In this way, Lysenkoism destroyed Russian genetics, and in this way, they are going to destroy clear progress by preloading the outcomes before we get the information. This because they made the mistake of tying their validity to a false assertion in biology based on nothing but the fact that this assertion is more mentally appealing to compassionate people, and so makes a nice tool for sociopaths to manipulate the groups into the leader’s desired outcomes over the public’s desires that they are supposed to serve].

<sarcasm>There must be a defect for insensitivity to cognitive dissonance</sarcasm>

DNA analysis unlocks students’ pasts

For most of her life, Georgia State doctoral student Erin Harper thought of herself as African-American with French ancestry.

But through a DNA analysis project in her biopsychology class last spring, Harper learned her ancestors traveled out of east Africa, through Asia and over the Bering land bridge to what is now North America, a lineage often carried by Eskimos.

“My family and I were in disbelief, and kind of amused,” Harper said. “We were like, ‘Eskimos, what?’ But it made me want to know more and dig even deeper into my ancestry.”

Harper is not alone. Many Georgia State students who participated in the project had similar reactions when they received answers to such basic human questions as, “Who am I?” and “How did I get to where I am today?”

Next week, biopsychology professor Scott Decker will invite a new class of students to participate in the project and learn about their collective ancestry. The exercise not only teaches students the complexities of DNA, evolution and human migration, but it also can change their perspective on race, Decker says.

“What this project says is, ‘Race doesn’t exist,’” he said. “Any observable differences between us are climatic adaptations. We all have the same emotions, thoughts and decision-making processes.”

Using a DNA collection kit, Decker’s students will scrape their cheek cells and send samples to be compared against the largest DNA database studying human migration ever assembled.

Launched in 2005, National Geographic and IBM are collecting and analyzing DNA from people across the globe for their Genographic Project, which attempts to fill in the gaps in the knowledge of how the human species migrated out of Africa to populate the planet.

Once students get their results and learn their genetic journey, they will research the paths their ancestors took and reflect on how it compares to what they know about their personal histories. The students’ DNA will be voluntarily submitted to the Genographic Project, adding another piece to the puzzle of human migration. Decker will also use his students’ reactions in his research on how genetic results impact views of race.

“By giving students this information – tangible evidence – it changes their attitudes on diversity,” Decker said. “It brings history to life.”

Source: Georgia State University

While the lineage of a single person can seemingly be tracked back like the branches of a tree, a tree is not a valid representation of this. The process of sexual mating is more akin to shuffling cards, so while an entity can track a line back, at each level of the system the qualities are being shuffled. in this way, we are all descended from one person at the same time we are also descended from ALL the singular people with a quality improvement that was incorporated by this shuffling at a new level.

To have a better mental image of what’s REALLY going on, imagine that each person is kind of like a deck of cards. And everyone that grows up isolated from other groups, mixes their cards with the local group in one shuffle and divides (new decks are made by doing this process over, as the original decks are copied, not used up).

Eventually the traits, the suits and values, get homogenized and end up like a Lagrange point orbiting the mean. Every so often a new quality is created, or adjusted or removed, and the benefit either moves through the local group of cards, or it doesn’t.

Every deck is maintained at 52 cards. If you start off with homogenous decks of only one suit and value and if you come up with some sort of rule that says decks with an odd score get removed, and decks with even scores remain. After lots of sorts and selections, the decks would become almost all even or odd in value, but not completely even or odd internally. There will be a mean that they orbit around, and a few experimental outliers, that are individuals testing new waters

If they succeed then they will mate and the group will eventually have the quality they have. if they fail, the quality disappears till it pops up and is tested again in another mix, and another context. if he is successful and that success is transferred to another, they will develop into host and parasite. Or the level of success will be attenuated to the point that it disappears as if the quality was bad, even if its amazingly good – like intelligence.

Now imagine that happens over many groups of cards each with a unique color for their decks. These are races, and when a deck travels from its home area, it then is being tested in a new context.

If the invading deck has better qualities, it will end up dominating. If not, it will fade. The thing is that the dominating quality doesn’t actually remove the other race!!! So the idea that successful whites would remove the Africans is not possible, as long as they intermingle. The new race may be white in skin, but it will be made up of the amalgam of the best of those that came before. Once the two mix, even with one unknown individual (like the Eskimo in her line), exterminating all the qualities of that race becomes impossible, unless you hunt down everyone that incorporates a unique quality from that race, and all races create unique qualities that they later share when conditions change and they mix.

So in order to exterminate the Africans in truth, or the jews, or the Chinese. One would have to actually determine which qualities proginate in that racial group in time, and then hunt out any individual with any quality

If one looks at the math of mating, and successful fecundity, it becomes impossible to do. The great Khan had 16,000 women in his harem, and so a majority of an area share a partial mix of genetic qualities that converged in khan. But they are also a mix of all the other qualities that came before and after khan, depending on the individual. So even if you remove all the Chinese, as long as this mixing happened and that individual doesn’t have the key quality that is being used in some way to tag and remove them, the contributions of the semi isolated group in time (race), are not erased. The system is much more robust and complicated than current ideas today can describe which is why they are changing.

But having an ideology prevent that evolution of ideas, causes us to become throwbacks, just as the coelacanth, the shark, and the crocodile are. however, if our environmental niche does not stay as stable as theirs for as long, we will end up the way of the dinosaurs, as their niche didn’t stay stable long enough for them to continue, and they didn’t change fast enough to adapt and remain the same as they are. they are still here, but in other forms.

Ideology is stagnation. Races do exist, but our definition and model are wrong, so what we are always discussing is actually not race (but the lineage of an outward quality and the qualities that move with that through time). technically its hard to deny something that one hasn’t yet defined, and Race is not really defined in a way that fits REALITY, but is instead defined to fit the mental model we are carrying that simplifies the world.

Ok, to finish this long lesson, now take two colored decks, and basically fold a red deck into a blue deck, and cut them in half… You just did what genetics does.

Yes you can track the LINEAGE of a particular quality, like the color of the cards, or a specific suit and value, but the individual is an amalgam of all the lineages quality trees summed together!

The model they are working from is wrong, and so it is allowing them to imagine a condition that just doesn’t exist. They have to preferentially throw out information and have thrown out the most important. They have sawed off the corners so that the square peg (data) can fit in the round whole rather than make the hole (model) larger or of a different shape.

That these qualities have lineages of their own that stretch back to the progenitor individual is a more accurate picture, and that each of us are a sum of all these lineages in a bundle.

Having this bad model though has resulted in a lot of faulty thinking because ideologists believe their fixed model is akin to the model tools that scientists use. their view is Confucian, in that the model constrains us like ritual, to a safe zone, and fears the real complexity that threatens it that is loose in the world.

It seems to resemble scientific models, but it does not have the adaptability, the variability, the willingness to be discarded, as well as other qualities that a true scientific model has. Rather than be the fountainhead of all ideas and the wellspring of knowledge, it’s the opposite of that, which is why every culture that adopts a fixed ideology, stagnates, as it must. Precisely because it’s not what it pretends or imagines itself to be.

Being set up as the font of all information, and so all must stem from that, serves the ideological model better than the truth does, and so we suffer in favor of ideology, rather than the ideology suffers in favor of us. The ideology then is forced to act like the police and make sure that its there everywhere when there is the potential for a thought crime that might take someone outside of their preferred model and out of the control of the people who define that model. Or it changes the model, and takes the power out from under those same people and grants it to those of more merit instead.

We are in bigger trouble than we want to or are willing to admit.

This just out of the San Francisco Chronicle, a former contributing reporter, who is now an EDITOR, steps up to the plate to comment on celebrity, propaganda, Oliver stone, rules for dictatorial construction, and so forth. ALL in one paragraph, if you can believe it.

While its an interesting smorgasbord response, the key lines I am interested in are the ones as to Venezuela’s President Chavez, and what does it mean for an EDITOR to make such statements. Do remember that an editor has the ability with a stroke of a pen to make the truth false, and the false truth. This practice can be one of intrigue, or it can be the work of a useful idiot or maybe the harmful side effect of a person in power with an ignorant education expressing. In any case the key point here is whether an EDITOR who doesn’t know the facts, is a person who should be an editor.

Lets examine the key statements:
(the full source can be found here)

In its unequivocal naming of Chavez as dictator on A1, either “Pop Culture” man Peter Hartlaub or his equally biased Chronicle editor, doesn’t quite understand that Venezuela’s President Chavez was democratically elected, and that dictators don’t lose constitutional referendums.

Just to get things out of the way, Hartlaub’s piece was a bit tongue in cheek in that he is noticing that many actors, not just Sean Penn have been reinvigorating their lives and perhaps careers by making associations openly with communists.

The Hartlaub piece can be found here.

The piece starts out about Brittany spears actions and then slides into the fact that d-list actors are heading to Hugo Chavez for reasons he claims is about their careers, which is less nefarious than they might agree with Chavez.

Haurtlaub points out Naomi Campbell interviewing him, Danny Glover who is friends (and for whom Chavez is funding two films), Oliver stone, Sean Penn, and Barbra Walters. The list is by no means comprehensive as it leaves out people like Cameron Diaz, but then again, she isn’t D-list yet.

Anyway, the piece is totally tongue in cheek and makes some interesting points as to the fact that these people have social influence and who they tend to visit, or hang out with, does have an effect as to whom they may support or copy.

Even Joe Kennedy after all isn’t immune to helping communists bribe the poor in the US.

But back to Sean Penn since it was his assertion that he wasn’t visiting a dictator as a friend, but as a journalist. Adding the aside that sounds like “besides he isn’t a dictator”, justifying the point that dictator’s aren’t elected or lose referendums. So in essence by that false rule, he is not friends with a dictator.

Given that all discussions on the internet degrade to mentioning Hitler, I will start with him and get him out of the way. Hitler was elected to office, and lost many points until he was able to consolidate power and restructure things. it takes a huge ignorance of history to understand that in the beginning years Hitler was not seen as the monster that everyone takes him for today. Hindsight after all is 20/20 most of the time.

Here is what they (Nazi’s) had to say about it: Electing Adolf Hitler Führer by Rudolf Hess

The Führer said more often than in the past: “The others can do what they want. When an idea is right, when it is fought for consistently, when the movement that fights for it is well organized, and when the leadership is determined to go its way regardless of the difficulties, one day with mathematical certainty it will be victorious! The longer they succeed in holding back our victory, the more powerful it will be! It will fall into our laps like overripe fruit!”

These words from the decisive year 1932 explain the sudden and total National Socialist seizure of power in 1933, which so surprised the rest of the world.

So the grabbing of power was a surprise, though anything that is unexpected is a surprise. By that truth, if Sean doesnt expect the inevitable, it will be a surprise (to him, but not everyone else). For more than 14 years things didnt go Hitlers way, then Hitler WAS elected in a fashion, but also didn’t have the majority. That like Chavez, he was put up as the person of choice to make the changes to the state. For us that know our history, we do not doubt that if chavez had won outright, that he would have floored the pedal to socialist changes, as it is, it only caused him to slow down, but not stop.

To quote Hess in the same speech “My fellow German citizens! You will vote yes for Adolf Hitler!”

So not only were the Nazi’s elected in some fashion, they were also leftist, and socialist. Which is why Stalin and Hitler colluded to start WWII (birds of a feather. Both were cannibals that thought that after the work was done one could devour the other). Socialists are cut from the same cloth; ALL of them wish to steal money from some to redistribute it to others. ALL of them desire to use the monopoly power of the state to change things as they wish, and with little regard for what the public wants (socialism dictates). The major difference is that Fascists allow private property and controlled ownership of business, and full socialism allows none of that and puts ultimate power in the hands of an elite feudal few. (Anyone care to expand on the National Socialist Green Party?)

Anyway, Hitler was not the only one that rose to power through the ballot box. We could go through the history of Charles Taylor of Liberia. Liberia, was established as a United States colony to be a homeland for freed slaves (Sierra Leone was established by Britain for the same purpose), became independent in 1847. a small number of African Americans held power till 1980, when Samuel Doe led a VERY bloody coupe.

Doe pretty much executed any rivals, and then recruited Charles to his administration. Charles wanted more, and so he made alliances with other countries, even as far away as Taiwan. On Christmas eve he launched his insurrection. His group split and a part lead by Prince Johnson, caught up with Doe, and basically pulped him. for more than five years there was serious back and forth killings and more.

Here is the key part. In 1994, the Abuja peace accords happened, things settled. Taylor became defacto ruler, and in 1997 he held elections. Which were considered nominally free and fair, but distorted it with actions. In any rate, Taylor won, and for a long time had rule.

The US helped create a war there, they froze tailors assets in 2004 (George Bush did), and his friends and family. He was eventually brought to trial for war crimes and such. Eventually he was out and a woman was elected into office.

There are others too. Julius Caesar was an elected dictator, and in a way so was Napoleon. The key that Sean and others miss is that a monarch or dictator CAN be elected. Chavez’s democracy is like the neo-soviets democracy, its sovereign democracy, not a federalist republic like the US. Though I would suspect that such distinctions are lost on someone like Sean who is now a journalist because he has access through his fame, and not access through his knowledge and journalistic abilities.

Sean only has to look at a dictionary to find out that how a dictator gets into office is not a key part to the definition of a dictator.

Let’s take out a dictionary and see if Chavez fits the description, or if Chavez current actions are ones that would lead to a final situation that matches the definition.

dic•ta•tor a person exercising absolute power, esp. a ruler who has absolute, unrestricted control in a government without hereditary succession.

Bout the only point that leans towards Sean is that he doesn’t yet have “unrestricted control”, but that’s just a temporary situation as its existence depends on the changing of things in the state from what they were to what they need to be.

Technically that definition would make Kim Jong II not a dictator but a kind of administrative monarch, but it does not absolve Chavez, who has showed that he can dissolve and take over any entities he wants, like oil or banking.

The key here is that Sean didn’t do his homework. Sean doesn’t know his history, not even the history of the man and the country he is writing about (that makes what kind of journalist?). Does he remember that Chavez first tried to take over in a coupe in 1992? When that didn’t work, he went about stealing the country through manipulation elections and public opinion. This coupe failed, and then he spent a few years in prison (like Hitler, like the communist revolutionaries, like napoleon, etc). Trying to take the country militarily through a coupe is not the actions of a person wishing to be an elected official. He became an elected official after prison, just as Hitler became an elected official after his first coupe failed.

In early 2007 Venezuelans parliament (national assembly) handed Chavez such power in the “enabling act”. Once parliament did that, Chavez did have complete control, which is a defining point of a dictator, and which elections are not. What he wanted was the people to side with that control, and so a vote was called to create the semblance of desire. However, there was actually no need to call that vote other than political games (which ended up backfiring).

To quote wiki on the act:

In Venezuela, enabling laws allowing the President to rule by decree in selected matters have been granted to Carlos Andrés Pérez (1974),[1] Jaime Lusinchi (1984)[2] and Ramón José Velásquez (1993)[3]. In mid 2000 a similar law enabled Hugo Chávez to legislate on issues related to the economy, reorganization of government ministries, and crime for one year. Chávez did not take advantage of this act until shortly before its expiration, when he passed 49 decrees in rapid succession, many of them highly controversial

What is rule by decree? Why it’s dictatorial rule and his 49 decrees is what allowed him to cement his power. Now his work is towards making it last permanently.

It was Chavez SECOND attempt to get such a law passed again that Sean looks to as proof that he is not a despot. But that shows a complete naiveté. What looks to Sean as a state working and Chavez obeying can also be seen easily as a person full of themselves (like a dictator) thinking that the people are on their side. It’s a miscalculation, not an example of a “system that works”.

Reading the words from socialist workers party in the UK:
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=13919

“Fatherland, socialism, or death.” With these words, Hugo Chavez just over a year ago took the oath as president of Venezuela following a triumphant re-election campaign.

By the logic of this oath, Chavez’s announcement last week that he was slowing the pace of his “Bolivarian revolution” is cause for alarm. “I’m forced to reduce the speed of march,” he said.

This move follows the government’s defeat in the referendum of 2 December on its proposed new constitution.

So Chavez is recognizing that when one is starting a dictatorship, which if one moves too fast, then one can lose the dictatorship they are creating. That taking votes when the results are not truly known, are too dangerous as they give fuel to the citizens to realize what’s at stake (something that winning an election lets the air out of).

The fact that the people might just revolt if they figure out what Chavez is actually doing, or what the end result would be, is a real concern.

But listen to what the socialists themselves say as to the result of the vote:

The referendum result wasn’t really a triumph for the right. The No vote was only 200,000 votes more than those received by their defeated candidate in the last presidential election.

The real problem was that the Yes vote was three million lower than Chavez had won in those elections.

Stephanie Blankenburg, an adviser to the Venezuelan government, writes in the New Statesman, “The result of 2 December was essentially a protest vote by the ‘Chavista street’ against the ‘Chavista elite’.” Discontent at food shortages, inflation, and corruption led a large section of Chavez’s base to stay away from the polls.

His U-turn is intended to acknowledge this discontent.

So Chavez barely lost (and if he didnt lose, I am sure that Sean would have a different false rule to extend). It’s also intended to make sure that those who are backing him in taking control continue to do so. After all, building a dictatorship like his heroes, is not at all easy or the same as being elected, then working the lecture circuit and books.

One only needs to read the article from Reuters on Jan 11 2008 to see what the intentions are: Venezuela’s Chavez mulls 2010 vote to keep power

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Friday floated the idea of calling a new referendum in 2010 on allowing him to run for re-election indefinitely after he lost a similar vote in December.

In an unprecedented defeat for Chavez, Venezuelans narrowly rejected on December 2 a constitutional overhaul that included enshrining socialism as a state goal and granting him the right to stay in power as long as he kept winning elections.

In a state-of-the-nation speech on Friday, he said he might call another referendum in two years specifically on whether he can run to stay in office beyond his current term that ends in 2013.

So basically he will wait two years… consolidate his power… create the networks to insure the outcome, and then do it again.

I guess only Sean Penn is confident that the outcome will not be a dictatorship. If he doesn’t win, he stays in office. If he wins, he stays in office forever. he spends an inordinate amount of time trying to restructure the state to allow him permanent power and complete rule by decree. Am I missing something?