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56 comments on The White House: AEI in All Its Glory (SOTU Open Thread 3)

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wimbi on February 1, 2006 - 9:59am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Right.  It is astonishing to me that we in the USA don't often bother to look at all the good stuff being done elsewhere.   And in my travelling days, long past, I also noticed that most of the really smart people in the world not only didn't live in the US, but not even in Europe.  Amazing!
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Don Sailorman on February 1, 2006 - 1:04pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I sometimes wonder if prosperity makes people stupid. Some of the most ingenious solutions to survival problems I found in the poorest, the very poorest hill villages of India--amazingly clever people. The happiest people I know are Jamaicans--live music everywhere, fresh fruit, fresh fish, gardens around shacks in the hills, chickens and goats, export crops of ganja and tourism (Sex workers do very well.), a surprisingly good educational system. Furthermore, I found the average Jamaican cab driver or hotel receptionist to be smarter than the average Harvard MBA. Also, they have a great sense of humor, and surpisingly, most of them do not hate white people--or anybody, except possibly their political opponents.

Violence is low, maybe due to all the ganja, but also each Jamaican male seems to be born with a machete clutched to his fist. Were you to, for example, dishonor a Jamaican man's sister, your life expectancy would be about ninety seconds; everybody knows this, and hence manners are good.

And for food . . . their diet based on rice and beans is way way healthier than what most Americans eat. Because of extended family support, undernutrition and malnutrition is almost unknown in Jamaica; women there live longer than men do in the U.S. Now, if only the price of sugar would rise and help with their horrendous unemployment problem . . . .

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Donal on February 1, 2006 - 3:18pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Naturally there are both good and bad sides of Jamaica.  From what I recall, Jamaicans were the most ruthless of drug dealers, killing entire families of competitors.

Reports say that Jamaica is bleeding to death with more than 1,100 murders recorded last year and 100 tonnes of cocaine trans-shipped to western markets.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1859948.stm

Jamaica, birth place for many in Toronto's black community and, according to police, birth place for the gang culture now taking hold of the city, is an exceedingly violent country. With a population roughly the same as Metro Toronto's, it has about 1200 murders a year, and likely this is an undercount. Jamaica also is home to some hateful social attitudes. A recent popular song there has words about burning alive a 'chi chi man,' the Jamaican expression for a homosexual. So, too, a favored local swear word refers to a woman's menses.

http://www.canadiandemocraticmovement.ca/displayarticle800.html

It is the Jamaica where there have already been some 531 murders for the year by the end of last month, largely related to the frightening "drug culture", spawned by the drug lords operating out of depressed inner-city communities and elsewhere. Among those killed were 10 policemen.

Worried over the record number of murders in any one year -- some 1,131 in 2001 -- and conscious of the influence-peddling of drug barons and gun-runners, the major political parties, the incumbent People's National Party (PNP) of Prime Minister P J Patterson, and the Jamaica Labour Party of Edward Seaga, have signed a historic document for a shared commitment to combat crime at all levels of the society.

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/html/20020805T200000-0500_29984_OBS_FACES_OF_JAMAICA_ON___TH_ BIRTHDAY.asp

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Don Sailorman on February 1, 2006 - 4:21pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
There is a nasty and violent Jamaican drug subculture, but nobody much cares as long as they just kill off one another. The very worst Jamaicans have been exported to Toronto and other major Canadian and U.S. cities--very clever way to get rid of your most troublesome citizens. If you check the non-drug-gang homicides, I think you'll find the rate is about half that of Mexico (again, subtracting off the narco-traffickers) and substantially below that of both Brazil and the U.S. The police in Jamiaca thoughtfully carry long double-barreled 12 guage shotguns; they seldom shoot but almost never miss. I used to live on the South Side of Chicago, near the U. of Chicago, way back in the olden days when Milton Friedman had hair, and the Blackstone Rangers used switchblade knives. Violence in that part of Chicago was 20 to 50 times that of urban Jamaica today (with the exception of a relatively few really nasty neighborhoods of Kingston. Kingston is a pit, and I do not go there--ever).
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56 comments on The White House: AEI in All Its Glory (SOTU Open Thread 3)

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