B-Day

I got a reminder notice today from the nice folks at Blog.ca.

Happy Birthday plawiuk,

today is your birthday and we wish you a day filled with your favourite things, with sunshine and laughter and lots of good cheer.

How about writing something about your birthday in your blog? Your friends and the blog.ca community will certainly be glad to hear about how you have experienced this special day.

Just log in http://www.blog.ca/login.php to write a post on your blog to your friends or to the whole blog.ca community .

We wish you all the best and are looking forward to seeing you again soon.

Your blog.ca-team

As if I would forget. And since they asked me to post about my birthday well shucks who could resist. Here is my post..... from last year; Today In History.

Modest ain't I.


And here are two versions of Beatles doing Happy Birthday. I like the second one best. Both are rockin'. The original Happy Birthday song was called Good Morning To You.


Happy Birthday - The Beatles






Birthday by the Beatles
From The White Album

,


Unfortunately these guys forgot about me;

December 1 Birthdays in History - December 1 Deaths - December 1 Events

And I didn't make the news like these folks.

Today in 1982 Michael Jackson released his autobiographical video;
" I am not like other guys' Narrated by the great Vincent Price. It created the culture of mass music videos.

And of course Birthdays are a pagan celebration.

Birthday

It is thought the large-scale celebration of birthdays in Europe began with the cult of Mithras, which originated in Persia but was spread by soldiers throughout the Roman Empire. Such celebrations were uncommon previously so practices from other contexts such as the Saturnalia were adapted for birthdays. Because many Roman soldiers took to Mithraism, it had a wide distribution and influence throughout the empire until it was supplanted by Christianity. The Jewish perspective on birthday celebrations is disputed by various rabbis.

Celebration of birthdays is not universal. Some people prefer name day celebrations, and Jehovah's Witnesses do not celebrate either, considering their origins to be pagan festivals along with Christmas and Easter

And I have that statue of Mithras at home...coincidence? I think not.

Also 'coincidentally' Mithras shares the same birthday as Jesus, as does Krishna and Horus. Since it is the Sun's Birthday.

They are after all Sun Gods.



And don't forget today is World AIDS Day. I noticed a lot of Harpocrites were not wearing their red ribbons this week neither in the house or while doing interviews on Mike Duffy.

Hmmm.....I guess for them it is still a Gay Disease,

despite evidence to the contrary.

Harper also can focus more attention on AIDS in Canada, where more than 62,000 people are living with HIV/AIDS. New infections are often among young people, especially girls 15 to 19 years old.

But at least one Cabinet Minister was wearing his Red Ribbon...why am I not surprised?




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Eugene Plawiuk, December 1, December 1, 1954,12/01/54,born today, today in history, Sagittarius, horse in Chinese Astrology

Tainted Trial

These guys were not just acquitted they were declared innocent. Something the court did not do for Stephen Truscott.

Superior Court Justice Mary Lou Benotto ruled yesterday that New Jersey-based Armour Pharmaceutical Co. and the four doctors, including a former top Canadian Red Cross official, behaved responsibly in distributing HT Factorate.

"There was no conduct that showed wanton and reckless disregard. There was no marked departure from the standard of a reasonable person," she told a packed University Ave. courtroom. "On the contrary, the conduct examined in detail for over 1 1/2years confirms reasonable, responsible and professional actions and responses during a difficult time.

"The allegations of criminal conduct on the part of these men and this corporation were not only unsupported by the evidence, they were disproved," she said. "The events here were tragic. However, to assign blame where none exists is to compound the tragedy."

While in other countries corporate officers and politicians went to jail over the tainted blood scandal in Canada the government passed legislation to forgive government ministers and politicians and bureacurats responsible for the tainted blood scandal. So the Judge ruled accordingly. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. And the rest of us be damned.

In his 1997 report on the country's tainted blood scandal, Justice Horace Krever strongly criticized Canada's reaction to the AIDS crisis. Krever said the decision by Red Cross officials to exhaust their supply of untreated blood products before switching fully to safe heat-treated concentrates in 1985 was especially careless.

Victims of tainted blood reacted with seething disbelief. "People were infected and people died," John Plater of the Canadian Hemophilia Society said outside the courthouse, his voice rising in anger.

"How that could possibly be considered reasonable behaviour is beyond us."

Mike McCarthy, who contracted hepatitis C from tainted blood, went further, saying the judgment was a "miscarriage of justice." He called on the Crown attorney to appeal the acquittals.

But David Scott, a lawyer for a senior Health Canada official who was acquitted, said "these charges should never have been laid. It was a mistake from the beginning and people's lives have been brutally affected by them."

Eddie Greenspan, lawyer for the former head of the Red Cross blood program, described the ruling as "absolute vindication and complete exoneration" on a scale that is rarely seen.

"The bottom line is that there was no criminal conduct by anyone who was in charge. The bottom line is that Canada was well served by people who made these decisions."

Defence lawyers said that, given the exoneration, they will seek to have the legal fees of the accused reimbursed and may even launch lawsuits for malicious prosecution.

Proving once again that the courts in Canada uphold the state and business interests against the public interest.

In our free enterprise system, there is no legislation to oblige an employer to remain in business and to regulate his subjective reasons in this respect . . . . If an employer, for whatever reason, decides as a result to actually close up shop, the dismissals which follow are the result of ceasing operations, which is a valid economic reason not to hire personnel, even if the cessation is based on socially reprehensible considerations.

If Conrad Black had been put on trial in Canada he would have been acquitted.



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Canada,Mary Lou Benotto, Regulation, Lord-Black, crime, corporate-crime, corporation, Armour Pharmaceutical Co, Conservatives, Liberals, Canada, politics, Krever, Conservatives, AIDS, Tainted Blood, red cross,

Curses!

It appears though that Wicca has made it into the Big Leagues in America. As in Major League Baseball. Not so strange since most sports types are superstitious and after all witchcraft and magick is commonly used in Soccer.

Garner can’t find right voodoo doll

Looking for a way to slow down Chicago Cubs ace Carlos Zambrano, Houston Astros manager Phil Garner decided to try voodoo.

“I’m confused,” Garner told Chicago’s Daily Southtown. “I went online and looked for my voodoo guy and I’m going to have to pick one and try to get it. Most of these curses are against lovers … I’ve got to find one that puts a curse on a baseball player.”

Of course there are other ways to curse a ball player.

“It wasn’t voodoo. I stayed away from the voodoo. I can’t go into the details. I’ll just have to tell you Wicca (a form of witchcraft),” Garner said to the Houston Chronicle, explaining his latest plan.

But Voodoo ain't Wicca. The former does claim on occasion to use curse magick the latter says it doesn't.


Voodoo is Black Magick, as in originating in Africa, while Wicca claims to be White Magick, as in Eurocentric.

A Witchcraft suppression bill, currently being drafted by the Mpumalanga legislature, has struck fear into the hearts of South Africa's witches, who fear the dark days of medieval witch-hunts may soon return.

The bill, leaked in June to the South African Pagan Rights Alliance (Sapara), threatens to undermine the freedoms and rights of a religious minority by criminalising and prohibiting their right to exist and practise their religion, says Sapra convener Damon Leff.

The draft, titled the Mpumalanga Witchcraft Suppression Bill 2007, states in its introduction that it is "to provide for the suppression of witchcraft in the province".

In Chapter 6 it states any person who "professes a knowledge of witchcraft or the use of charms" or "for gain pretends to exercise or use any supernatural powers, witchcraft, sorcery or enchantment" shall be guilty of an offence.
One of the major causes of the Western pagans' upset, according to Leff, is the failure of the bill to recognise the doctrinal and ethical gap between Western pagan and some forms of traditional African witchcraft.

And according to Vos, by lumping the two religions together the bill has overlooked how differently they approach the issue of ethical responsibility.

"While in rare cases (some in Mpumalanga) murder has been committed to get hold of human tissues, such as hearts and genitals for muti practices, the furthest a Western pagan would go is to collect human hair and nail clippings," he claimed.

Another serious criticism Western pagans in the country harbour is the bill's stereotyping of witches and witchcraft as being harmful and dangerous to their community.

The bill defines witchcraft as "the secret use of muti, zombies, spells, spirits, magic powers, water, mixtures, etc, by any person with the purpose of causing harm, damage, sickness to others or their property".

Leff has asked the Mpumalanga advocates to replace it with the definition: "a religio-magical occupation that employs the use of sympathetic magic, ritual, herbalism and divination".

AIDS, Witchcraft, and the Problem of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa

As an epidemic of AIDS sweeps through this part of Africa, isidliso is the name that
springs to mind amongst many in the epidemic’s path. To the extent that this occurs, the epidemic of HIV/AIDS becomes also an epidemic of witchcraft. But the implications for a witchcraft epidemic are quite different from those of a public health crisis, at least as such things are conventionally conceived in western discourses of social and political management.

In this paper I will examine some of the implications of interpreting HIV/AIDS
infection as witchcraft and ask what they might mean for the legitimacy of public power in post-apartheid South Africa. For when suspicions of witchcraft are in play in a community, problems of illness and death can transform matters of public health into questions of public power, questions relating to the identification and punishment of persons deemed responsible for bringing misfortune to the community, that is: witches.

So instead of using pins in dolls to curse his opponent perhaps Garner should have found a witch who was good at casting Lucky Mojo Spells.

Like this guy.

Wiccan Wins Lottery

Wiccan instructor Elwood "Bunky" Bartlett says a New Age book store made it possible for him to become an overnight multi-millionaire.

The Maryland accountant, who claims to hold one of four winning tickets sold for Friday night's estimated 330 million dollar Mega Millions jackpot, says he made a bargain with the multiple gods associated with his Wiccan beliefs: "You let me win the lottery and I'll teach."

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Huston Astros, MLB, baseball, Phil Garner, USA,
sports, , witchcraft, magic, magick, South Africa, sorcerer, rituals, AIDS, superstions,