LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Same Sex Marriage No Debate

What was missing from the Throne Speech?

Why there was no reference to Same Sex Marriage and its pending demise under the Tories.

But don't worry King Stephen is still straight.

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Stephen and Laureen Harper share a kiss in the rotunda after the Throne Speech was read yesterday.

While there was no mention of abolishing the much-maligned gun registry or holding a free vote in Parliament on same-sex marriage, Justice Minister Vic Toews confirmed they both remain on the government's agenda.Harper's 'clear and focused agenda'

Anyone studying the dynamics of Harper's past election strategy would know that he's developing a formula for handling persistent problems: confront them head on, admit their intractability and then move on. Harper did this in the opening days of the election campaign last December with the same-sex marriage controversy. He said he was against same-sex marriage up front, so his critics didn't say it first. Then it never came up again. HARPER'S OTHER FIVE PRIORITIES

And it still hasn't come up yet.......Which means it was never a priority for Harper merely an issue he could use to get Social Conservative votes.....ever the opportunitst....So Link Byfield and his ilk will have to settle for pictures of Harper kissing his wife, while they cool their heels over his Free Vote on Marriage....And the longer the Tories wait the more entrenched it becomes....clever.....then Harper can say he tried...and when they lose the vote in the house.....we all move on over what has become a non-issue......

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So Long And Thanks For All The Fish

King Ralph has announced his departure, but before the candidates line up at the trough for his job Ralphie boy is still stalling when he will go. End of the year he says, will let you know in the fall, have a good summer. It's going to be a slow de-Klein

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Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Reform Party of Alberta

So what will it take to get Presto Manning to run for Premier of Alberta? Already the old Presto Reform Party backroom boys, Ezra Levant and Farron Ellis are spinning their wheels. They are claiming it will take a new party to replace the Tired Old Tories. Word for word they sound like they met and wrote the same speech for the press.

But an opposition sweep of the polls after Klein isn't likely, said Lethbridge College political scientist Faron Ellis."Every time the Alberta government has changed hands, it's been a new party, not the established opposition, that's done it," Ellis said.

Manning could pursue the Tory leadership. But there is another scenario that is even more intriguing: Manning starting a new party, from scratch, and running not to replace Klein alone, but the entire rotting Tory carcass, 35 years in power. Think about it: Why should Manning seek the Tory leadership? To preside over a tired, ideologically leftist caucus that would resent him as an interloper? To have to defend an arrogant party whose entitlement mentality surpasses even that of the federal Liberals? Why not do what Albertans love to do -- and what Manning himself talked about in 2004 -- start a new party? Manning's already done that twice, and Albertans supported him both times.
King Ralph is dead Ezra Levant Special to the National Post

Eternal optimists they are ignoring the political reality that the only reason the PC's remain in power is that they are fiscal liberals whose power basis fiscally and politically is Calgary and Edmontons ruling classes and who appeal to the rural rump ,the old Socreds,with right wing rhetoric, rhetoric only. When push comes to shove they are push overs as King Ralph has shown time and again.

Dismissing the strong left wing opposition in Alberta as if it doesn't exist, as if the NDP and Liberals are has beens, who just so happened to have won more seats in the 2004 provincial election than predicted.

Dismissing this provinces left wing populist history these Revisionists are now claiming that it will take a NEW right wing party to replace the declining Tories.

Well gee guys there is the Alberta Alliance that is to the right of the PC's and has a sitting member. Even Mr. Right Wing Link Byfield supports them.

Except as usual with Presto's ego a whole new party made out of whole clothe will have to be created.

Please do. It will split the right wing vote and allow the opposition you dismiss to come up the middle.

Don't believe me, read the comments on the idea of Presto as Premier here and here

Also see my previous post: Return of the Socreds

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Levant, Ellis, Klein, Manning, Alberta, PC, Conservatives, Premier, Party, politics, Leadership, election, Reform, Socreds, right-wing

Conservative Broadcasting Corporation

Why is Ezra Levant being used as a commentator on Alberta politics on Don Newmans Politics show on CBC Newsworld. The man is an idiot and does not have the inside dope on the Ralph regime. Why not use the Edmonton Journals Legislative reporter Graham Thompson.

Also in the past two weeks as the Ralph circus was shown on Newmans show, as well as covered by the Duff on CTV, why were Rod Love, Peter Elzinga and other party hacks allowed on both programs as well as Question Period.

They had nothing criticial to say. Zip nada, all was right with the world and Ralph was the greatest. Sheesh talk about ass kissing. That is not political commentary, insight or even news. At least CTV used their own Klein Biographer Don Martin.

So when reporting on news from Alberta for political comments the CBC is sucking up to the right wing rump of the right wing with Levant. Who is NOT a journalist, but a PR flack for the right in the tradition of the Gobbels school.

Welcome to the new remade Conservative Broadcasting Corporation.

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JK Galbraith Speaks Truth To Power

Taming Predatory Capitalism

JAMES K. GALBRAITH

The truths are that egalitarian growth is efficient, that speculation must be regulated, that crime starts at the top and that peace is the primary public good. These truths are poison to predators and are the reason predators have fostered and subsidized an entire cynical intellectual movement devoted to "free" markets made up of a class of professor-courtiers now everywhere in view.

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Ennio Morricone A Fistful of Composer

Who else but famed Movie score/soundtrack composer Ennio Morricone would have a gorgeous Flash home page with great sound. Check it out. Yes it is in Italian. But the sound compostion that is playing in the background will more than make up for the time you spend navigating. It is by far the most stupendous sound I have heard come out of the tiny crappy speakers that are installed in my 19 inch Monitor. Amazing. Do check it out.

Oh and did I mention I am a Morricone fan. The man is a Genius. He is not only a composer of a mammoth collection of movie soundtracks but of Symphonic compositions as well.Morricone in London!:

And I am not the only one who thinks so.

Ennio not only outlasts the lumiére of such scored-film fare but still overshadows both his contemporaries and his bambinos.

His work is beyond just scoring films, without his sound the films are nothing. Whether the haunting echo of the harmoncia in Once Upon A Time In The West, or the strange melodies of terror he evokes for the films of Dario Agenta.

Unlike Gyuri, who becomes increasingly pallid, the film becomes more gray and dark, washing away all color. Its stark scenes of massed prisoners and looming guard towers acquire a bizarre, twisted beauty, which is accented by the haunting music of veteran composer Ennio Morricone.A haunting look at inhumanity and survival

Along with this new movie sound track he has a new collaboration with Ex-Smiths lead singer and now Bryan Ferry knock off Morrissey;

Morrissey Moves on From Miserable, Discovers Libido in New CD

With Tony Visconti producing, Morrissey has essentially made a thoughtful and probing album for adult-contemporary radio.
Musically, Morrissey falters

Considering the spottiness of Morrissey's last few releases, you wouldn't be out of line nursing low expectations for the singer's eighth solo release. Produced by former Bowie/T. Rex collaborator Tony Visconti, recorded in Rome and featuring string arrangements from spaghetti western composer Ennio Morricone, the disc sees the former Smiths frontman not only reinvigorating his sound but coming back to life Ringleader of the Tormentors

It’s on the Ennio Morricone-arranged gospel concerto ‘Dear God, Please Help Me’ though where the intimacy really kicks in, as His Master declares his intent from the off (“There are explosive kegs between my legs”) like some sexually deprived artisan – which many have been led to believe he was for at least two decades – before erupting in magnanimous joy at his success in coveting a relationship at last (“…Now I’m spreading your legs with mine between!”).Morrissey: Ringleader Of The Tormentors

And the Ennio Morricone influence in modern pop rock continues with the release of Muse's new album

Muse To Shock Fans On New Album
Howard has described the album as a "very drastic" mix of musical styles, ranging from "mellow jazz" to "Prince-influenced, groove-based rock weirdness". New song "The Knights Of Cydonia" took inspiration from Italian film composer of such classics "The Good, The Bad & The Ugly" and "The Untouchables", Ennio Morricone,
Muse Hope Fans Aren't Too Shocked By 'Genre-Morphing' New LP

And his influence is felt in the works of the musically adventureous Brit Punjabi Nitin Sawhney

His first album, Spirit Dance (1994), grew from listening to the Bristol trip-hop collective Massive Attack, and realising that "you can incorporate diverse music on one album and make it work". He retains his enthusiasm for Indian classical musicians, including Hariprasad Chaurasia, Ravi Shankar, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Zakir Hussain. Through the films of Satyajit Ray he discovered and was influenced by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, famed for Bengali songs as well as poetry. He also admired Italian composer Ennio Morricone, who revolutionised the spaghetti western with his scores for Sergio Leone's films.

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Monday, April 03, 2006

The Many Faces of Solaris

Stanislaw Lem's most well known novel is Solaris (1961) because it has been the basis of several movies, not because a lot of people have read it.

There are of course the 'Solaris" movies one made in Russia in 1972 by Andre Tarkovsky and the recent American remake in 2002. Lem has been critical of both. While Tarkovsky can be faulted by Lem he himself has been subjected to the Soviet Censors as Lem has.

Tarkovky's earliest film Ivan Rublev has been yet to be released in its full form having suffered the worst excesses of American cut and paste editing as well as Soviet censorship. It is a tale not unlike that of the Wickerman.

But before these two versions of Solaris there were two B Grade movies that were based on Solaris or the theme of Solaris.

The first is Journey to the Seventh Planet. Which was originally made in 1962 not 1959 as mistakenly listed here;

Journey To The Seventh Planet

The United Nations sends a team to explore Uranus and they find a "small Danish village filled with voluptuous women!" Behind this set up though is a force that is using the memories of the crew against them so it can take over their ship and fly back to Earth.

1959, 77 minutes, Widescreen DVD

LEM RIP

Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006)

Ukrainian Science Fiction writer Stanislaw Lem has passed on to the great Solaris. That world of hallucinatory existence which we create with our imaginations.

Now most bios will refer to him as Polish, Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, author of 'Solaris ...which is untrue since he was born in 1921 in Lviv — then part of Poland but now in Ukraine which was, is and always has been part of the Ukraine. It was a much disputed territory between the Polish Imperialists, German Imperialists and Moscow Imperialists over the past 400 years, but Ukraine it is.

Lem was Jewish, as Lviv was the largest Jewish city in the Ukraine or Poland. It was the historic city of Herzel and Bakunin, in their debates over Pan Slavism, liberalism and anarchism.

It was the most European of all East European cities.

Which reminds me of other Great Ukrainian writers who get absorbed by the Imperialists such as Hohol, opps I mean Gogol another Ukrainian writer who was claimed by the Russians through the Russification of his name. He too was an early Sci-Fi writer.

In fact let us remember that Sci-Fi beings in Eastern Europe with the advent of RUR from whence Isaac Asimov gets his theory of robotics.

Lem himself was the originator of the paranoid universe theory, which later became a popular motif for James Blish, Brian Aldiss and of course the ultimate paranoid American Phillip K. Dick.

Lem was an anarchic science fiction writer, opposed to the oppressiveness of Stalinism but equally critical of capitalism. In The Futurological Congress, Mr. Lem created a rollicking satire of a cosmonaut taking part in a congress in Costa Rica

The congress itself is a clash of civilizations between the capitalist and communist authorities, which is overcome when terrorists, anarchists, unleash hallucinogenic drugs into the conference room.

Lem always speculated in the realm of realities being subjective as well as objective, as hallucinogenic realities, virtual realities before their time. His concept of cyberspace as we would call it today, or VR was based on the use of drugs.

His writing is dense , which is typical of Slavic writers, but worth the readers effort. Phillip K Dick in a final moment of hallucinatory madness, the very essence of American Individualist self alienation declared Lem was a collective endeavour by the communists, not a real human being.

Lem inronically praised Dick as the only real science fiction writer in America and he viewed Dick as a religious writer in that earliest of Sci-Fi traditions,Gnosticism. Stanislaw Lem- Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans

It is a razor edged criticism of the genre ghetto in America that was defter than Harlan Ellisons usual bad boy commentary about the same ghetto. The result was that unlike Ellisons stand up comic routines that were all bluff and bluster, Lems critique of the American Sci-Fi ghetto as 'bad writers only in it for the money, cut them to the core and they turned Stalinist on Lem.

His honorary membership in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association was withdrawn in the mid-1970s after he criticized his U.S. colleagues' writing and charged that they were more interested in making money than expanding the genre. He reserved his praise only for iconic sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick.

Lem wrote about madness and alienation, Dick descended into it. Perhaps for all its flaws there is something to be said for the collective social values of the old Soviet Union. And interesting that Lem who faced censorship by the State in Poland then faced censorship by the State of Writers in the USSA.

Lem would have been amused to see his hero Dick turned into the very incarnation of himself as an electric sheep (as in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep the short story that was to become Bladerunner).

(Philip K. Dick Robotic Memorial Portrait
At NextFest 2005) The eerie robotic Philip K. Dick unveiled today at the NextFest 2005 event in Chicago is almost an objectification of Dick's fascination with what really makes people human. The robot was designed to provide a convincing imitation of life, with subtle head movements and facial expressions. The software that gives life to the device is well-stocked with all of Dick's printed works and memoirs. It also has face recognition software and a library of faces; it was capable of recognizing several of Dick's relatives who came to take a look at the project. It includes voice recognition and natural language processing features

Stanislaw Lem - Frequently Asked Questions

Scriptorium - Stanislaw Lem

"If [Stanislaw Lem] isn't considered for a Nobel Prize by the end of the century, it will be because someone told the judges that he writes science fiction," predicted a Philadelphia Inquirer critic in 1983. Lem is arguably the greatest living science fiction writer, and even one of the most important European authors of his generation; yet he commands little critical attention, and has failed to reach discerning American science fiction readers who ought, one would think, to be most interested in him. The reasons for this may be sought, paradoxically, in the high demands he makes of his own work: Lem is a true original, but at the price of being marginal.

We are still waiting for that Nobel Prize.

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Police View This Blog

I have been getting a lot of hits over my story on the Ianerios murder in Mexico, where I claim its a cover up. Mexican Murder Cover Up?

The most recent hit has been from the Peel Police Department. Hey guys anything to help out.

Unfortunately the Peel Police department has about as successful a record as the Mexican police, and they are just about as incorruptible as well. Remember they are police department that dealt with the Homolka/Bernardo murders. Bernardo claims more alleged sex assaults: police

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