Conservative Strip O Gram

The Conservatives have announced a bill to protect women from enslavement and trafficking for purposes of sexual exploitation. The bill will not allow foreign strippers, particularly from Russia, into Canada.

Whew, the women folk feel safer already.

Wait a minute.....

Canadian prostitutes bought, sold and forcibly moved, study shows.
She stands on a street corner in skimpy clothing, shaking from a chill, or more likely from her drug addiction. She was brought here from another part of the province, or possibly from another province.

Her situation, and that of others like her, has drawn no attention. Despite growing awareness of international trafficking of women and children, the trafficking of Canadian-born prostitutes remains invisible.

However, a new study released yesterday says Canadians should not be so smug. Canada is not exempt from the buying and selling of people, the investigators found.

Sex workers say they are moved quietly, put in cars and taken on "road trips." Pimps and traffickers buy bus and plane tickets for them and escort them to their new locations. At times, they are drugged, bound and abducted by rival pimp families or crime organizations, and wake up in new locations across the country.

Canada needs to provide better protection and support for sex workers and deal with "the root causes of trafficking," the investigators say.

See:

The Traffic In Women

Libertarian Challenge of Canada's Prostitution laws

Sex Workers

Legalize & Unionize the Sex Trade

Feminizing the Proletariat

Sex Workers Want A Union

Marx on Bigamy

Whose Family Values?

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Another Canadian Victim of Cancun Drug Wars

Perhaps this will cause Foreign Affairs to finally declare a warning on Mexico for Canadian tourists but don't count on it.

Since we are one of the three amigos of NAFTA, and the secret continental Security Prosperity Partnership of North America, Mexico gets kid glove treatment from the Canadian government. Despite the murders and attacks on Canadian tourists.

Alta. man fights for life after attack in Cancun

The family of an Alberta man severely injured in Mexico suspect he was beaten, while local authorities say the man was involved in an accident.

Jeff Toews, 34, of Grande Prairie, Alta. is now on life-support, according to his brother Murray. He was found early Monday at the Moon Palace Golf and Spa Resort in Cancun.

"He received serious head injuries, four blows to the head and he's been beaten very bad on his back," Murray Toews said by phone.

Once again the corrupt Mexican provincial regime in Cancun covers up the results of the drug war to keep the tourista bucks flowing. And like other recent Canadian deaths in Cancun the Attorney General claims the deaths as accidents.

"They're playing typical tourism crap. Like it happened to other Canadians, it's just always an 'accident.' Nobody's seen nothing and no witnesses, of course."

However, Bello Melchor Rodriguez y Carrillo, attorney-general for the state of Quintana Roo, dismissed the claim.

"He wasn't beaten. He fell from a second storey of the hotel where he was staying," he told the Canadian Press. "That's the report that we have from the security guard from the hotel, and the report we're getting from the hospital too."

Carrillo has also overseen the controversial Ianiero case, the Canadian couple murdered at another Mexican resort. He has blamed two women from Thunder Bay, Ont. for the killings, despite heavy criticism.

Cancun is more dangerous to Canadians than Israeli or Lebanese beach resorts. But we have a warning for the latter. Cancun and Acapulco are the centers of the drug cartel wars, which have taken more Canadian lives than the Israeli/Lebanon war.

Toews is the latest case of a number of Canadians injured or killed while vacationing in Mexico:

• Domenic and Nancy Ianiero, of Woodbridge, Ont., were staying at the luxury Barcelo Maya beach resort near Cancun when they were found with their throats slashed on Feb. 20, 2006. The murder remains unsolved.
• Another Woodbridge resident, 19-year-old Adam DePrisco, was killed outside an Acapulco nightclub last January. Local authorities said he was the victim of a hit-and-run, but relatives say the teenager was beaten to death.
• In February, Rita Callara, 55, and a Canadian man, both from the Niagara Falls region, were each shot in the leg after a gunman fired a semi-automatic weapon at the Casa Inn hotel in Acapulco.

The same weekend the Canadian tourist was attacked this happened; Gunmen attack police chief in Cancun beach resort Coincidence? I think not.

While not apparently connected to the death of the Canadian tourist, it reflects the dangers of the drug wars occurring under the surface in the land of umbrella drinks, sun and surf.

Zeta Mercenaries Attack Troops In Mexico
In the real city of Cancun -- rather than the "Hotel Zone" -- the chief of police was ambushed with his entourage. His bodyguard was killed and others wounded. He survived.

Some sources estimate 900 people have been murdered since the beginning of the year in Mexico in drug-war violence but that is not confirmed. The AP reported that figure from the Mexico City magazine, Milenio. The government does not confirm any figure.

Mexico: The Price of Peace in the Cartel Wars

This current cartel war is being waged not only for control of the smuggling plazas into the United States, such as Nuevo Laredo, Mexicali and Tijuana, but also for the locations used for Mexico's incoming drug shipments, in places such as Acapulco, Cancun and Michoacan, and for control of critical points on transshipment routes through the center of the country, such as Hermosillo.

While there has always been some level of violence between the Mexican cartels, the current war has resulted in a notable escalation in the level of brutality. One significant cause of this uptick is the change in the composition of the cartels' enforcement arms. Historically, cartel leaders performed much of their own dirty work, and figures such as Cardenas and Ramon Arellano Felix were recognized for the number of rivals they killed on their rise to the top of their respective organizations. In the recent past, however, the cartels have begun to contract out the enforcement functions to highly trained outsiders. For example, when cartels such as the Tijuana organization began to use active or retired police officers against their enemies, their rivals were forced to find enforcers capable of countering this strength. As a result, the Gulf cartel hired Los Zetas, a group of elite anti-drug paratroopers and intelligence operatives who deserted their federal Special Air Mobile Force Group in 1991. The Sinaloa cartel, meanwhile, formed a similar armed force called Los Pelones, literally meaning "the bald ones" but typically understood to mean "new soldiers" for the shaved heads normally sported by military recruits. Although the cartels had long outgunned Mexican police, these highly trained and aggressive enforcers upped the ante even further, introducing military-style tactics and even more advanced weapons.

The life of a Mexican drug cartel enforcer can be exciting, brutal -- and short. Los Zetas and Los Pelones are constantly attacking one another and some members of the groups even have posted videos on the Internet of them torturing and executing their rivals. Beheading rival enforcers also has become common. The current cartel war has proven to be a long and arduous struggle, and there has been heavy attrition among both organizations. Because of this attrition, the cartels have recently begun to bring fresh muscle to the fight. Los Zetas have formed relationships with former members of the Guatemalan special forces known as Kaibiles, and with members of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) street gang.

It is this environment of extreme and often gratuitous violence -- killings, beheadings and rocket-propelled grenade attacks -- that has sparked Calderon's actions against the Gulf cartel. Why he is focusing specifically on the Gulf cartel is unclear, though it is possible the government has better intelligence on it than on the others. Or perhaps it is because the Gulf cartel has a more centralized command structure than does Sinaloa, which is a federation of several smaller cartels. Of course, the Gulf cartel itself has argued that the Calderon administration is on the Sinaloa payroll and is being used by Sinaloa to destroy its rival. Another possible reason is that taking out Los Zetas -- who have become emblematic of extreme cartel violence -- would be a major accomplishment for the new president.

See:

Mexican Murder Cover Up?

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Because They Ain't White

Terror victims receive little government aid: report

While the old Reform Party and its incarnations as the Canadian Alliance and now the Conservative party of Canada, made victims rights a key in their law and order platform, the majority of the victims lobby are of course white. And they speak English. Others need not apply.

Especially those who face state terror. Which was why Maher Arar had to sue the Canadian Government.



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Canadian Shooters Use Long Guns

Revisiting A Canadian Tragedy

As America grieves the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre, we take you back to 1975, when a shooting spree at a school in Brampton, Ontario, shocked the country. We bring you eyewitness accounts, and we'll find out what we've learned.

CBC Sun Day report ran this amazing piece of forgotten history. I left the following comment on their web site;

"I too did not know about the Brampton tragedy and I thank you for using this opportunity to present this in light of the Virgina Tech massacre. I note that the comment made by Carole MacNeil was that the first such shooting in a school occurred here in Edmonton in 1959. "

The situation between these high school shootings and the later Taber, Dawson and Virginia Tech massacres show we do not have enough psychological counseling prior to such incidents, rather we provide it after the fact.

The other point to remember is that so far all the shootings in Canada including Edmonton, Brampton, the Lapine shooting in Montreal, the Taber shootings, and Dawson College, unlike the situation in the U.S., were all done using long guns, rifles.

The same long guns that the Harpocrites don't want registered. Because after all law abiding duck hunters and farmers use them too.

Tags

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Dirty Laundry Business as Usual

You could say Casino Capitalism is criminal capitalism or rather all capitalism is criminal......

The Financial Times has named Capitalism’s Achilles Heel (Wiley, 2005) by Raymond W. Baker as one of the best business books of the year.

“Books that deal with the darker side of business can disturb and entertain in equal measure. In Capitalism's Achilles Heel (Wiley Pounds 16.99), Raymond Baker reveals the methods by which corrupt governments and crooked executives - as well as terrorists - move money through the global financial system. The book even includes a ‘Dirty Money User Guide’ - alas more appealing to aspiring fraudsters than reforming policymakers.”

For over forty years in more than sixty countries, Raymond Baker has witnessed the free-market system operating illicitly and corruptly, with devastating consequences for scores of fragile nations. Now, in Capitalism’s Achilles Heel, Baker—the internationally respected authority on money laundering, corruption, and development issues—takes you on a fascinating journey that winds its way across the global free-market system and reveals how dirty money, poverty, and inequality are inextricably intertwined.

You’ll discover how little illicit transactions lead to massive illegalities used by drug kingpins, racketeers, terrorist masterminds, and multinational corporations. You’ll learn how staggering global income disparities are worsened by the illegalities that have come to permeate international capitalism. And you’ll see how distorted philosophical underpinnings appear to justify flaws in the practice of capitalism.

Selling the biggest lie of them all – Capitalism

Review: Gangster Capitalism – The United States and the Global rise of Organized Crime by Michael Woodiwiss

The spirit of graft and lawlessness is the American Spirit.
– Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities, 1902

‘Gangster Capitalism’ documents the lie in all its sordid details from the days of the ‘Robber Barons’ through to the ‘War on Terror’ and all the stops in-between, the ‘War on Communism’, the ‘War on Drugs’. Between them, they are responsible for an assault of unparalleled brutality that is global in scope and a lie that has been so successfully sold, it has dragged much of the planet into going along with it.

From the United Nations to so-called independent states, all have been bribed, blackmailed, threatened or finally invaded/occupied into participating in the various ‘wars’ the US is waging, ultimately to the benefit of capital. That all of it has been done in the name of ‘morality’, mostly of a Christian flavour, is perhaps what makes it all so sordid, so disgusting and hypocritical.

There is a direct relationship between the extermination of ‘inferior’ peoples and the crimes of the Gangster Capitalists, from the owners of the plantations, to those who built the railroads that opened up the interior of America, to those who built the stockyards of Chicago, the auto plants of Detroit that consumed the immigrants in their millions and co-opted them into swallowing the ‘American Dream’.

‘Gangster Capitalism’ does one heck of a job in documenting the process, indeed it is relentless in its exposure and all the while revealing the underlying motivations; power and control by the few over the many. Underpinning the process has been the use of a twisted Christian ‘morality’ that in reality justified a system of exploitation that is unparalleled in history. And, Woodiwiss emphasises the role that race plays in the process, something that cannot be stated too strongly if we are to understand why US capitalism has been so successful at persuading so many to go along with the lie.

Gangster Capitalism: The United States and the Global Rise of Organized Crime

The title of Michael Woodiwiss's book plays on the term "gangster capitalism." It asks the question: Are there gangsters who are capitalists? Yes, indeed, is Woodiwiss's answer. But it also raises the more important question: Are capitalists gangsters? His answer is a resounding affirmative.

The Enron Stage of Capitalism

In much simplified terms, the thesis is that the pursuit of profit has gone too far. Specifically that we have now entered a new, and worse, stage of capitalism where elements of the public good (by which the book means healthcare, water, power and others) are being privatised and sold to corporations who care more about profit than the welfare of the population. The two really damming parts of the thesis are that (1) the privatisation is often occurring under coercion - threats from the US military machine, and (2) the rich nations set the rules to favour the rich (consider which organisations have international power, and which nations control them). The bottom line is that the rich corporations have found a new way to exploit the poor (even in the 'overdeveloped' world the poor are exploited - their standard of living is allowed to increase slowly, but the majority of the gains go to the few). The pursuit of profit has become so all encompassing that little else matters (particularly not morality).

We Can No Longer Afford Vulture Capitalism

Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain

See:

Casino Capitalism

Are Income Trusts Money Laundering

Calgary Fraud Funds Dubai Boom

The New Market States

Criminal Capitalism Redux

Unproductive Capital

CEO

Stock Options

Corporate Crime

White Collar Crime

Criminal Capitalism

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You Talkin' To Me

The emotional plague continues to reveal itself in America where Gore Kulture meets everyday life.

"You talkin' to me?" Alone in his apartment, Travis postures and practices his moves in front of the mirror.


A picture from Kimveer Gill's Blog The Dawson College killer.

Could "Ismail Ax" Be A Part Of This Picture (NBC)

For two days the world has been searching for the meaning of the phrase "Ismail Ax."
Those two words, written in red ink on one arm of Cho, the 23-year-old Virginia Tech student behind the campus shooting spree which killed 32 students, set off a massive Internet hunt by the public Tuesday for clues to what might have motivated the nation's worst mass killings.

And today a theory has emerged proposing an answer which shows the killer's sick sense of humour - that it is a web language term used to signify a query.

Cho was a keen internet user who dubbed himself "?" in email and web conversations.

A web-savvy source told The Daily Telegraph Online today Ismail is a term used in text tagging - a way to tag words for searchability online.

"He was already known for signing his name as a question mark," the suorce said. "And the meaning of this tag represents question. The name Ismail itself represent question."

One of the photographs in the Virginia Tech killer's "multimedia manifesto" may have been inspired by a bloody South Korean movie.

"Oldboy," from the respected director Chan-woo Park, is about a man unjustly imprisoned for 15 years. After escaping, he goes on a rampage against his captor. In one scene, he dispatches more than a dozen henchmen with the aid of a hammer.

In the package of materials that Cho Seung-Hui sent to NBC News, one photo shows the killer brandishing a hammer in a pose similar to one from the film.

"Oldboy," the second film in Park's "Vengeance Trilogy," won the Gran Prix prize at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.

The connection was spotted by Professor Paul Harris of Virginia Tech, who alerted authorities, according to London's Evening Standard. The similarities have prompted speculation, especially in online forums, that Cho's entire massacre may have been inspired by "Oldboy.

Dr. James Gilligan, who has spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts, and as a professor at Harvard and now at N.Y.U., believes that some debilitating combination of misogyny and homophobia is a “central component” in much, if not most, of the worst forms of violence in this country.

“What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal,” he said, “is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.”

"We see that the compass of the emotional plague coincides approximately with the broad compass of social abuse, which has always been and still is combatted by every social freedom movement. With some qualifications, it can be said that the sphere of the emotional plague coincides with that of "political reaction" and perhaps even with the principle of politics in
general. This would hold true, however, only if the basic principle of all politics, namely thirst for power and special prerogatives, were carried over into those spheres of life which we do not think of as political in the
usual sense of the word."

"Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think and act generously, kindly, and helpfully, in accordance with the laws of life. This natural attitude, fundamental to healthy children as well as to primitive man, inevitably represents a great danger in the struggle for a rational way of life as long as the emotional plague subsists, because the plague-ridden impute their own manner of thinking and acting to their fellow men. A kindly man believes that all men are kindly, while one infected with the plague believes that all men lie and cheat and are hungry for power."

The Emotional Plague /Listen Little Man by Wilhelm Reich
"

See:

Nazi Gay Killer Wanted to be a Cop

The Real Crime In Canada

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The God Eaters

Among the Cannibal Christians, by Earl Lee.
Did the early christians take the command, "Eat of my body," just a bit too literally? And just what did the "Body and Blood of Christ" really consist of? For evidence that the attitude of the early christians toward mind-altering substances was a wee bit more liberal than that of their brethren today, check this out.

Christian Cannibalism
(Communion, Eucharist)

“Jesus said, ‘Blessed is the lion which becomes man when consumed by man; and cursed is the man whom the lion consumes, and the lion becomes man.’” (The Gospel of Thomas)

"If, however, you (Christians) bite and devour one another, take care that you (Christians) are not consumed by one another." (Paul, Ga 5:15)

Christianity is the literal and symbolic consumption of the man god, the human sacrifice meant to atone for humanities original sin. Thus it was to be the final sacrifice to end religions based on sacrifice. Or it was supposed to be. However since then the sacrifice continues to be celebrated with ritual consumption of the god, and the sacrifices continue to be made in the gods name.

As repulsive as the notion may seem, it is a fact that "theophagy"--the technical term for the consumption of a god's body and blood--has been considered a religious experience worldwide for thousands of years. While certain cults/religions may think that they invented the concept of the Eucharist, and that the Eucharist has nothing whatsoever to do with cannibalism, the ritual of sacrificing a god or goddess and sharing his or her blood and body as a sacrament is an act found throughout the ancient world. The only thing so-called modern religion has done is to maintain the form of the Eucharist in a symbolic rather than literal sense, and for that perhaps we should be grateful.

The success of Christianity as a religion in ending cannibalism and human sacrifice is because it incorporates them as symbolic instead of actual practices in their rites.

In fact, the spread of Christianity is believed to have significantly diminished cannibalism worldwide.

An early example is J. A. MacCulloch in the year 1932. He discusses all possible theories
why cannibalism decreased in many places. In this context MacCulloch mentions the
“presence of a higher developed civilisation and especially a higher developed religion”.
He hints at the fact that Islam made an end to cannibalism in North- and East Africa and
only at the end, so to say, casually concludes: “Christianity together with other European
civilising influences has put an end to it (to cannibalism), that is in many parts of South
America, New Zealand, on many islands of the South Pacific, the former center of
cannibalism and in many parts of the African continent”.

Apparently the value principle takes precedence over the exchange principle. (The cannibal may kill his enemy because he sees him as food.) It is important for the Christian, however, to note that the basis for definition of value can differ. The Christian "cannibal" loves his enemy because he sees him as a human soul. Such a perception is difficult to make, however, unless there is a more abundant food supply.

Lestringant's point about cannibals, in the plural, is that anthropophagy (the practice of eating human flesh) does not equal cannibalism. He objects both to the reduction of the cannibal to the anthropophagite, and to the association of all anthropophagous rituals (not the least of which is the Christian Eucharist) with cannibalism. Cannibals demonstrates that, from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the identities of cannibals and the meanings of cannibalism were multitudinous and uncertain, and the figure of the cannibal was employed by European authors toward various rhetorical and didactic ends. By the nineteenth century, however, the identity and qualities of the cannibal had been reduced to a wholly non-European savage, who possessed "natural" appetites for human flesh and engaged in "primitive" cannibalistic rites. Montaigne's noble Brazilian cannibals, whose loquacity had dazzled the king's court in 1562, were replaced by hairy and lubricious African savages, whose nineteenth-century performances in two-bit colonial sideshow filled the likes of French novelist Gustave Flaubert with dread and disgust.

The term "cannibal," Lestringant reminds us, was invented by Christopher Columbus upon his 1492 arrival in Cuba. The word was a corruption of "Caribs," the enemies of the peace-loving Arawaks who welcomed the Italian captain. In the coining of canibal, Columbus created a portmanteau word by joining canis (the dog-headed cynocephalous of Pliny) with bal (belonging to "the lordship of the Great Khan"). On his second voyage, Columbus discovered the remains of cooked human flesh in a recently abandoned Carib village on Guadeloupe. Thus, Columbus's canibals came into being, an impossible combination of dog-headed and human flesh-eating descendants of the Great Khan. Although the canine and Asiatic genealogy was soon put behind, the "monstrous table manners" (p. 17) of the cannibal swiftly and tenaciously captured the imagination of Europeans.

Although colonial records are replete with references to "cannibals," consider the historical context. A 1503 decree from Queen Isabella of Spain, during the heyday of Spanish colonial conquest, allowed the enslavement of cannibals.

The edict, Whitehead says, "created quite a strong interest in 'discovering' cannibals in the New World. Then you wouldn't even have to observe the minimum notion of human rights they would get as human beings and as God's subjects. It demonized the native population, and legally produced an economic benefit."

So during the first 100 years of colonization of the vast Spanish New-World dominion, you could make good money by branding someone a cannibal. Indians were plantation slaves until about 1600, when legions of African slaves arrived. (Over the past quarter-century, some anthropologists have used this history to question the very existence of cannibalism. In their view -- see "The Man-eating Myth..." in the bibliography -- all evidence for cannibalism is so sketchy or biased as to be incredible.)

The accusation of blood libel begins with Christianity. It was first applied against the early Christians by the Romans. The Christians in Europe would later use this same accusation against Jews. Despite human sacrifice being a sin in the Old Testament; the Hebrew Bible strictly prohibits human sacrifices (e.g., Lev 18:21, 24-25; Deut 18:10; Jer 7:31, 19:5; Ezek 23:37,39).

In the early centuries of Christianity, the church existed under the Roman Empire, which granted its subjects freedom in some issues, but demanded conformity to its own ideals in others. Romans commonly thought Christians strayed from certain core morals of the state, summarized by three widespread stereotypes — that Christians practiced atheism, cannibalism, and incest.

As for cannibalism, Romans were appalled to hear that Christians ate the body and drank the blood of their Lord. The "rumors grew to absurd proportions," historical theologian D. Jeffrey Bingham writes. "Christians were even accused of eating infants."

The charges of incest and cannibalism arose from the fact that only the baptized were permitted to attend the Eucharist. What, therefore, was done in secret by such people was quite likely, in the pagan's mind, to be immoral. Moreover, the fragmentary knowledge which the pagan gained by hearsay about the meaning of the Lord's Supper—eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ—quickly led to the suspicion of cannibalism; while the Christian emphasis on love and brotherhood was easily distorted into a cloak for incest.

Ancient History Sourcebook: The Ritual Cannabilism Charge Against Christians

Now the story about the initiation of young novices is as much to be detested as it is well known. An infant covered over with meal, that it may deceive the unwary, is placed before him who is to be stained with their rites: this infant is slain by the young pupil, who has been urged on as if to harmless blows on the surface of the meal, with dark and secret wounds. Thirstily - O horror! they lick up its blood; eagerly they divide its limbs. By this victim they are pledged together; with this consciousness of wickedness they are covenanted to mutual silence.

From Minucius Felix, Octavius, R. E. Wallis, trans. in The Ante-Nicene Fathers
(Buffalo, N. Y.: The Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887), Vol. 4, pp. 177-178.

Cannibals and Christianity

A strange relationship has developed between Christianity and cannibalism over the centuries. Christianity is a faith that believes in one god, believes in forgiveness and being kind to one’s neighbour. However there is firm evidence that believers in this one faith became at times a believer of eating one’s enemies. For example Syrian crusaders 1000 years ago reverted to cannibalism due to their Christian beliefs.

A report found that was written by a Christian leader Rudolph Caen about the village of Maarra stated:"Our troops boiled pagan adults in cooking pots; they impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled."

The Blood Libel is still with us today applied to other religions in competition with Christianity.

Increasingly since 1970 fundamentalist Protestant sects, almost exclusively from the United States, have taken up the strong battle against Voodoo, accusing it of devil worship, suggesting cannibalism and demanding of converts a complete separation from their Voodoo connection.

Easter then is the celebration not only of death and resurrection but of consumption of the flesh and blood of the sacrificed god as a Passover feast. The ancient pagan tradition of eating corn or other forms of bread as the body of God is present in the Passover feast and later in the Easter feast of the Body and Blood of Jesus.

The Bible is the source for all things Christian.

Does it mention Easter?

Yes.

Notice Acts 12:1. King Herod began to persecute the Church, culminating in the brutal death of the apostle James by sword. This pleased the Jews so much that the apostle Peter was also taken prisoner by Herod. The plan was to later deliver him to the Jews. Verse 3 says, “Then were the days of unleavened bread.” The New Testament Church was observing these feast days described in Leviticus 23. Now read verse 4: “And when he [Herod] had apprehended him, he put him in prison, and delivered him to four quaternions [sixteen] of soldiers to keep him; intending after Easter to bring him forth to the people.”

Is this Bible authority for Easter?

This passage is not talking about Easter. How do we know? The word translated Easter is the Greek word pascha (derived from the Hebrew word pesach; there is no original Greek word for Passover), and it has only one meaning. It always means Passover—it can never mean Easter! For this reason, we find a Hebrew word used in the Greek New Testament. Once again, this Hebrew word can only refer to Passover. And other translations, including the Revised Standard Version, correctly render this word Passover.

Instead of endorsing Easter, this verse really proves that the Church was still observing the supposedly Jewish Passover ten years after the death of Christ!

What About the New Testament?

If the Passover was instituted forever, then New Testament instruction for its observance should be clear. This instruction is found in I Corinthians 5:7-8: “Purge out therefore the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, as you are unleavened. For even Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us: Therefore let us keep the feast (of unleavened bread, which always followed Passover, as explained above)…”

Christ, as the Lamb of God (John 1:29; Acts 8:32; I Peter 1:19; Rev. 5:6), replaced the Old Testament lamb eaten on Passover evening each year. The New Testament symbols of the bread and wine were instituted so that Christians could eat the body and drink the blood of Christ, the true Lamb of God. Jesus’ sacrifice replaced the need to kill a spring lamb. Luke 22:19 shows that Jesus substituted the bread and wine to be taken annually in commemoration of His sacrifice for the remission of our sins—both spiritual and physical.

Christian Cannibals

Even if you still stubbornly cling to the belief that the Eucharist represents only a symbol of eating flesh and drinking blood, that still makes you a cannibal, if only a symbolic cannibal. If you partake in communion as a metaphorical representation of eating Christ's body, then that still makes you a metaphorical cannibal. You simply have no easy out of this predicament as a symbolic cannibal sits as a subset of cannibalism.

Communion: Ritualized Cannibalism

From such a beginning, thousands and thousands of years ago, there developed and evolved basic ritualistic behavioral patterns, and mythological motifs, or themes, that have spread by a process of diffusion from, at least, the Neanderthal period through Cro-Magnon caves, and into the Christian churches and cathedrals of 20th-century America.

One of the more obvious of these is the "sacred meal" or ritualistic cannibalism. We still practice this ritual today in the Protestant and Roman Catholic communion, where we eat the body and drink the blood of the divine leader.

The Christian church calls it "communion," or "taking communion." The communicant eats and drinks, symbolically or literally, the flesh and blood of the divine "leader." The traditional invitation to Communion, spoken by the presiding clergy, is this: "Take, eat, this is my body . . . this cup is the new covenant is my blood . . . drink."

Eating a body and drinking blood is a cannibalistic theme, no matter how hard the clergy try to water it down, or theo-babble around it by calling it "only symbolic" cannibalism. In the 9th century, the clergy said that God made the flesh of Jesus only look like a wafer so as not to upset the worshipers. They were really cannibals, but they didn't have to face up to it, admit it, or be vividly aware of it.

And the blood libel about Christian Cannibalism continues even now, except the blood libel is used against liberals and Catholics. So it is not all Christians that are cannibals just those that are Catholic. Which is rather ironic considering it was the Catholic Empire that declared those it colonized cannibals.

Published 13 April 1998 in the News & Record (Greensboro, NC)

Could Clinton actually be a cannibal, too?

I have a problem with President Clinton's recent trip to Africa.

As a Republican who was raised blue-collar, union, and Southern (Do I have to say Democrat?), I'm not surprised that the president would make politically motivated blanket apologies for historical transgressions for which no one living is responsible. I'm not perturbed that while he was apologizing for our ancestors' wrongdoing that he didn't call on his African hosts to apologize for their ancestors' complicity in the slave trade as well.

As an atheist who was raised as a Protestant, I'm not upset that the president took Holy Communion while in South Africa, or that he, as a Southern Baptist, did so inappropriately in a Catholic church, or even that he, as a political partisan, did so as a shameless photo op.

The problem I have with the president's participation in this sacrament involves the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation. By this doctrine, the bread and wine retain their appearance but miraculously become the actual body and blood of Christ upon their consecration. Persons who participate in the Catholic Eucharist do so believing that they are eating real human flesh and drinking real human blood.

As if being an inveterate liar, an unapologetic draft dodger, and a self-confessed adulterer weren't bad enough, I am absolutely horrified to learn that Bill Clinton is also a cannibal.

James M. Wallace
Greensboro

Documents selected as Scripture

The Scriptures, too, are testimony by the early Christians. In 1 Cor 10:16, St. Paul states: "The chalice of benediction, which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? And the bread, which we break, is it not the partaking of the body of the Lord?" In the next chapter, he draws the same association we find in the Didache and elsewhere, i.e. the need for purity in receiving the Eucharist. First, Paul narrates the meal with Jesus: (11:24) "And giving thanks, broke, and said: Take ye, and eat: this is my body, which shall be delivered for you: this do for the commemoration of me." Likewise with the chalice; then Paul states (11:27) "Therefore whosoever shall eat this bread, or drink the chalice of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and of the blood of the Lord." So we find that the early letters and documents, as well as the letters that became Holy Scripture among Christians, appear strongly to affirm a belief in what is today called by many the Real Presence, a summary term that refers to the notion that Jesus Christ is "really, truly, and substantially present" in the Eucharist.

Over the centuries

Christian documents show that this dogma was maintained with the passage of time. From Origen, c 244: "[W]hen you have received the Body of the Lord, you reverently exercise every care lest a particle of it fall..." (Jurgens §490). From St. Ephraim, ante 373: "Do not now regard as bread that which I have given you; but take, eat this Bread, and do not scatter the crumbs; for what I have called My Body, that it is indeed" (Jurgens §707). From St. Augustine, c 412: "He walked here in the same flesh, and gave us the same flesh to be eaten unto salvation. But no one eats that flesh unless first he adores it; and thus it is discovered how such a footstool of the Lord's feet is adored; and not only do we not sin by adoring, we do sin by not adoring" (Jurgens §1479a). At the Roman Council VI, 1079, Berengarius affirmed: "I, Berengarius, in my heart believe and with my lips confess that through the mystery of the sacred prayer and the words of our Redeemer the bread and wine which are placed on the altar are substantially changed into the true and proper and living flesh and blood of Jesus Christ, our Lord..." (Denziger [Dz] §355). In a discussion of the form of consecration (the word now used to refer to the blessing given by Jesus), Pope Innocent III states (1202) "For the species of bread and wine is perceived there, and the truth of the body and blood of Christ is believed and the power of unity and of love.... The form is of the bread and wine; the truth, of the flesh and blood..." (Dz §414-4). The dogma was affirmed repeatedly by the Roman Catholic Church and within Roman Catholic theology, e.g. at the Council of Lyon, A.D. 1274 (Dz §465); by Pope Benedict XII, 1341 (Dz §544); by Pope Clement VI, 1351 (Dz §574a); at the Council of Constance, 1418 (Dz §583); at the Council of Florence, 1439 (Dz §698); by Pope Julius III at the Council of Trent, 1551 (Dz §874); by Pope Benedict XIV, 1743 (Dz §1469); by Pope Pius VI, 1794 (Dz §1529); and by Pope Leo XIII, 1887 (Dz §1919), inter alia. Other examples can be found to flesh out any interim.

And we would not be forgiven if we didn't round our post with some Crowley.

THE GODEATER
1903
<<1.>>
[The idea of this obscure and fantastic play is as follows: By
a glorious act human misery is secured (History of Christianity).
Hence, appreciation of the personality of Jesus is no excuse for being a Christian.
Inversely, by a vile and irrational series of acts human happiness is secured (Story of the
play).
Hence, attacks on the Mystics of History need not cause us to condemn Mysticism.
Also, the Knowledge of Good and Evil is a Tree whose fruit Man has not yet tasted: so
that the Devil cheated Eve indeed; or (more probably) Eve cheated Adam. Unless (most
probable of all) God cheated the Devil, and the fruit was a common apple after all. Cf. H.
Maudsley, "Life in Mind and Conduct."]

See:

Pagan Origins of Easter

Passover Song

Palm Sunday April Fools Day

Judas the Obscure



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Jesus, Gnostic, Gospels, Easter, Passover, cannibalism, God Eater, Christianity, gnostic

Gore Kulture

No not Al Gore.

Gore as in Grand Guignol as in a specific sub genre of horror movies; slasher films, blood and guts movies like Saw, Hostile, etc.

The Peculiar Charms of the Grand Guignol

by Gideon Lester

"At one performance, six people passed out when an actress, whose eyeball was just gouged out, re-entered the stage, revealing a gooey, blood-encrusted hole in her skull. Backstage, the actors themselves calculated their success according to the evening's faintings. During one play that ended with a realistic blood transfusion, a record was set: fifteen playgoers had lost consciousness. Between sketches, the cobble-stoned alley outside the theatre was frequented by hyperventilating couples and vomiting individuals."

-- Mel Gordon, The Grand Guignol:
theatre of fear and terror.

We can go back to Shakespeare to find the first real case of Grand Guignol in theatre;

Titus Andronicus is a play with "14 killings, 9 of them on stage, 6 severed members, 1 rape (or 2 or 3, depending on how you count), 1 live burial, 1 case of insanity and 1 of cannibalism--an average of 5.2 atrocities per act, or one for every 97 lines."

We seem to have moved from a rash of horror films to gore films in four short years. The gore phenomena is specific to the current mass culture we are experiencing.

We have seen an increase in horror films, just as we did during the depression and again during the Viet Nam war, horror films reflect the need for social catharsis during times of cultural stress.

The Gore film on the other hand was an underground phenomena, much like Grand Guignol. It first appeared not in film but in the fifties as crime and horror comics.

It existed since the early sixties, as a b-film phenomena in particular the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis, but became popular in the eighties with the works of Stuart Gordon and Sam Raimi. It expanded in the nineties with the work of Clive Barker, in particular the Hellraiser series, now coming to the small screen as a computer game.

But these were horror movies, there was gore, but there was also humour, atmosphere, the gore was incidental, there to frighten you as much as the thing that jumps out of the dark.

But today the movies are Gore for gore's sake. In that they hearken back to Herschell Gordon Lewis work and Romero's Night of the Living Dead. But unlike them they are major studio releases, a popular film phenomena on the big screen and the producers of the goriest of the gore films; Saw I, II and III are Canadian.

It is reflective of the current social crisis of sociopathology that is in the headlines. Man kills and BBQs girlfriend

Take for instance the Picton murder case and its Edmonton counter part the serial killing of prostitutes, or this recent Edmonton case that was in the news for weeks;

Michael Briscoe, acquitted in the rape and murder of Nina Courtepatte, is haunted by his failure to intervene and try to save her when she was brutally attacked 2 years ago

Edmonton, with its record-high murder rate, is quickly losing its reputation as a safe city.

But it's not just the creeping crime wave that's spooking people. It's the grim reality that we are now known for one of the most odious killings in the country.

Malls are supposed to be places where young people hang out, shop and flirt - not where a strikingly pretty 13-year-old girl is chosen at random to be raped and slaughtered for kicks.

I fear we are raising a society of sociopaths - kids who are so adrift, amoral and inured to violence that they have become completely indifferent to evil. They are drawn to it, it seems, out of twisted curiosity and sheer boredom.

How else to explain how a group of young people could lure Nina Courtepatte from West Edmonton Mall on the pretext of inviting her to a party, only to rape her and beat her to death on a golf course?

Brutality, savagery, gore, and cannibalism all underlie Grand Guignol and the Gore film today, as it does the headlines in your daily paper.

AN ALCOHOLIC who strangled his friend and then told police he did it so he could be sent to prison to exact revenge on a cannibal killer who murdered his girlfriend, was yesterday jailed for life. Alan Taylor said he never got over the murder of Julie Paterson, who was beheaded and partially eaten by psychopath David Harker in 1998.

New Delhi, Mar 22: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Thursday gave a clean chit to Mohinder Singh Pandher, co-accused in the gruesome Nithari serial killings in the outskirts of Delhi. CBI blamed his servant for the macabre killings and also confirmed cannibalism in him. It said Pandher's servant Surinder Koli was a psychopath and blamed him for the killings

A religious cult leader who raped, murdered and ate at least three women in Papua New Guinea has been captured by a group of villagers.

Steven Tari, 35, who called himself the "black Jesus" was beaten by locals from the village of Matepi before being handed over to police.

The failed bible student had gathered around six thousand followers as he travelled through mountain villages promising disciples gifts from heaven if they joined his congregation.

But communities discovered he was indulging in cannibalism, sacrificing young women, drinking their blood and eating their flesh.

The Gore phenomena begins with Slaughter of the Lambs, and its overwhelming popularity. It is about the brutality of a serial killer who skins his victims, and the anti-hero is a cannibal; Dr. Hannibal Lecter. It coincides disturbingly with pig farmer Robert Pictons brutal murder and dismemberment of women in Vancouver, and its implication of cannibalism.

The disturbing fact is that our fascination with the Picton case is the same as our fascination with Dr. Lecter. Cannibalism being the final taboo leading to the mass media phenomena of Hannibal the Cannibal.

I'm not alone in my fascination with cannibalism — why else would there be five Hannibal Lecter movies? Soylent Green is made of people; the living dead will eat your brains at any time of dawn, day, or night; and the biggest blockbuster of 2006, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, featured droves of flesh-hungry islanders.

In fact cannibalism is American as Apple Pie. Even before the infamous Donner party case, the founders of America engaged in cannibalism and capitalism.

Jamestown aims for historic reign over Plymouth

JAMESTOWN, Va. -- The first permanent English settlement in North America has more personality than many other historic attractions.
Capt. John Smith, the pint-sized adventurer, left a breathless narrative of his exploits.
Commerce took root here, and so did tobacco and slavery.
Then there was the cannibalism.
Still, as the country prepares to commemorate Jamestown's 400th anniversary in May, many see this swampy outpost on the James River only as a coming attraction to the Pilgrims' arrival at Plymouth Rock about 13 years later.
New Englanders, for example, point to the Thanksgiving feast, the Pilgrims' pure pursuit of religious freedom and the Mayflower.
Jamestown, on the other hand, "is the creation story from hell," Karen Ordahl Kupperman writes in her new book, "The Jamestown Project." Conflict, disease, horrific killings and starvation are all part of the back story of Jamestown, founded in 1607 as a business venture.
But if not for Jamestown, scholars say, there may not have been a Plymouth, and we all might be speaking Spanish. The Spanish, intent on spreading Roman Catholicism, were turned away twice from the nearby Chesapeake Bay during the early years of the Protestant Jamestown settlement.
"There's no question that Jamestown throws down the gauntlet to the Spanish," said James Horn, who wrote "A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America."
Now, during an 18-month commemoration, Jamestown finally could outshine Plymouth and fully embrace what historian and writer Nathaniel Philbrick calls its proper claim as "the rightful birthing ground of America."
"Not only was the [Jamestown] settlement found more than a decade before, but the colony that developed from those beginnings was, in many ways, more quintessentially American since it was all about making money," said Mr. Philbrick, the author of "Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War."

Another gore phenomena in media is the popularity of the Zombie. Zombie parties are occurring across North America. In Edmonton there is a Zombie club of folks who dress up in gory zombie costumes and wander the streets groaning and moaning.

At the University of Alabama they are offering a course on Zombies.

Do you hope that when you die, your corpse will return to life and shamble around, wreaking havoc? Have you ever wanted to taste human flesh? Or do you just want to be able to live your life without that crippling fear of someone eating your brains?

Those who said yes to any of those questions will find a kindred spirit in Sean Hoade, a UA instructor currently teaching creative writing, literature and English. In May, during the interim, he will be teaching EN 311-001, titled, Zombies! The Living Dead in Literature, Film and Culture.

Hoade said zombies are the perfect choice because they are the ultimate metaphor for human life.

"Anything that you look at," Hoade said, "the way we know people by sight but don't really know our neighbors ... race relations and class warfare - all of that is reflected in zombies. And that's why they've become so incredibly popular. [There are] zombie movies, zombie books, zombie graphic novels, so I think that it's only right for the English department to offer a class looking at all things zombie."

Hoade said the class will also discuss what zombies being reanimated corpses indicates about people's fears.

"Death is so sanitized now that [even] being around a dead body that isn't reanimated is incredibly spooky. So we're going to look at how the fear of the zombie is actually a fear not just of death, because we're all afraid of death, but a fear, actually, of the dead also."

The class won't strictly focus on the intellectual aspects of zombies. Students will also be able to participate in a variety of zombie-related activities.

"We're going to engage in mock cannibalism," Hoade said. "We're going to [have] human-flavored tofu. It's based on what people who had to resort to cannibalism, like the Donner party and that plane crash and things like that, what they said human flesh tastes like.

"I ordered putrescine, which is the chemical that dead things give off," he said. Putrescine, which is a chemical compound used by the body for cellular division, is responsible for the smell of rotting flesh.

"We're probably going to do a zombie walk, which is we're all going to get made up as zombies and walk around campus and terrorize it. I'll have to see if that's allowed. We're also going to eat Jell-O brains. [The purpose of the activities are] just to try to get into the zombie mindset ... We might go over to the graveyard and lie down on the graves."

Zombie mindset? Zombies have no brains, no minds, thats why they eat brains, they lack intelligence. Just like the folks at PETA.

The folks in charge of PETA love all of God's creatures—with a few notable exceptions. Asked by BlackBook whether the animal-rights group opposes human cannibalism, Dan Mathews, the group's outrage-provoking vice president, quips, "No, as long as the person being eaten is Anna Wintour." It's far from the first time PETA has gone after the Vogue editor in chief, whom it accuses of doing more than anyone else to keep the wearing of animal pelts in style.

The aristocracy has a history of fascination with death and haute coutoure, they go together like art and suicide.

WHEN Victoria Beckham heard that the flamboyant fashion guru, design muse and socialite Isabella Blow had attempted to kill herself in 2005 by throwing herself off a bridge in London, she remarked, "What genius!"

After school, Blow lived in a squat in London and took cleaning jobs. Then she went off to New York, where Brian Ferry, an old friend - introduced her to Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Blow hung out with artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, who wanted to know her when he saw she was wearing one pink and one purple shoe.

But for all the name-dropping, there have been two main role models in Blow's life. The first is the Duchess of Windsor, of whom a stylised portrait hangs in her hallway. "Wallis was ugly, like me, but she made the best of herself. I wish I'd lured a king." The other is Blow's aforementioned flesh-eating grandmother, Vera Delves Broughton, a photographer, explorer and big-game fisher. Until recently she held the record for catching the biggest fish in European waters (a tuna, which took 16 hours to reel in).

As for the cannibalism, Blow explains, "She was once in Papua New Guinea. She had some dinner and said, 'God, that was delicious. What was it?' It turned out to be a poor local tribesman who had been grilled up. In her Who's Who hobbies, my grandmother listed 'Once a cannibal'. Ha, ha! I'm so like her. Very wild!"

Christianity itself is based upon the disturbing concepts of cannibalism of its God and the idea of the Living Dead; the resurrection.

Or was Pope Benedict biding his time? Last week he published an Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist, Sacramentum Caritatis — The Sacrament of Love. In part it is a summary of the conclusions of the Synod of Catholic Bishops held in Rome in October 2005 — the start of the liturgical Year of the Eucharist promulgated by his predecessor, Pope John Paul II — and as such carries the authority of the whole Church. But it is also a theological tour de force showing the clarity and cogency that are particular to the writings of Joseph Ratzinger.

Sacramentum Caritatis opens with a lucid exposition of the Catholic belief on the Eucharist. The priest’s words of consecration during the Mass turn bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ — a transformation Pope Benedict describes as ‘a sort of “nuclear fission” which penetrates to the heart of all being, a change meant to set off a process which transforms reality, a process leading ultimately to the transfiguration of the entire world’.

This belief, with its connotations of cannibalism and human sacrifice, has always been hard to take. Even in Christ’s lifetime, many of his disciples, according to Saint John, regarded the idea as ‘intolerable ...and stopped going with him’. It was a defining bone of contention between Catholics at the time of the Reformation. Luther downgraded the change from transubstantiation (the bread and wine become the flesh and blood of Christ) to consubstantiation (bread and wine remain bread and wine but co-exist with the flesh and blood of Christ), and Calvin disbelieved it altogether.

The recent rash of zombie and gore films reflect a culture inundated with death. Senseless death, be it wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and through out the middle east, vast unimaginable death from starvation, mass rape and murder in Dafur, or disasters such as Tsunamis , hurricanes and earthquakes that slaughter thousands and decimate cities.

Our fears of death and the unknown are now amplified by our fear of pain. Gore movies are about pain. Blood and guts, yes but the Saw phenomena is about pain, torture and self inflicted pain.

It is Abu Gharib and Gitmo brought to the large screen. We know not what torture Arar Mehar went through, or those held in CIA black prisons. But when we watch Saw we get a gleaming, an inkling of what it feels like to be held incommunicado and tortured. For no good reason. What does the torturer want? Like those held in sensory deprivation in Gitmo, we do not know.

The horror film since its origins in the silent era was fear of the other, the monster. Today with the advent of the Gore film, the monster is us. We suffer the emotional plague of isolation and alienation in a capitalist culture out of our control and dashing headlong into oblivion.

See

Gothic Capitalism Redux

Jack the Ripper

Emotional Plague

Rape

Serial Murder

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horror,, gore,, horror films,, Zombie,,crime, women, Canada, Supreme Court of Canada, crime