Soul of a City

Today marks the anniversary of Katrina's destruction of the Blues City; New Orleans.

In tribute to that great city I am listening to Eric Burdon's Soul of A Man,released in January of this year, it is an aural tribute to the blues of New Orleans where it was recorded. Eric and his band The Animals made blues the soul of their music, ushuring in the British Invasion, more so than better known bands like the Beatles and Stones. The latter who started out in the blues and moved on to Rock n Roll.

What Burdon did for San Franisco in the the sixties with his songs San Fransican Nights he has done for New Orleans with this album of New Orleans Blues/Jazz, that Big Easy Big Band sound.

Eric goes down and dirty on this album, with Kingsize Jones. And does a stunning version of blues classic; Red Cross Store that reminds one of his younger self when he made House of the Rising Sun a top 40 hit.

His song Feeling Blue takes on the prison industrial complex as a new form of slavery, and relates racism to class struggle. Not unlike his work with the Funk Band, War.

There can be no greater tribute to the Soul of A City than this album.

Also See

Music


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Fascism

When civilians are targets of terror attacks these are the actions of fascist groups. Regardless of the cause they espouse. They wish to encourage the State to crack down on democratic dissent and opposition movements. The more repression the greater the public resistance is the misquided ideology behind these attacks. And scratch a fascist group and you will find the State's secret police encouraging them.

The Kurdistan Freedom Falcons claimed responsibility on its web site for Monday's attack. "We have promised to turn ... Turkey into hell. Our principle is more actions, bigger blows," the group said. "The fear of death will reign everywhere in Turkey.

The group had earlier said it carried out a bus bombing that injured 10 Britons and 11 Turks in the Mediterranean resort town of Marmaris on Sunday.

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Homunuclus

Church teaching holds that in-vitro fertilization is morally wrong because it replaces the conjugal union between husband and wife and often results in the destruction of embryos. Artificial insemination for married couples is allowable if it "facilitates" the sex act but does not replace it. The church condemns all forms of experimentation on human embryos.Vatican Critical of Stem Cell Creation

The current pope was once Cardinal Ratzinger the Vatican's chief Inquisitor, yes I know we weren't expecting the Spanish Inquistion.

When the issue of cloning and artificial life was presented for JP2, Ratzinger issued the churches statement on bio-ethics which has not changed since the Rennisance when the Church banned sorcery and the creation of artificial life known as the Homunculus And indeed Ratzinger in his paper, refers to cloning as creating a homonucleus. 21st Century science meets the middle ages.

Does the law permit the ìenhancementî or other manipulation of one's genetic outfit? In this context, the following issues were discussed at the seminar: reproduction techniques in general (the "homunculus issue," see Goethe's Faust 11), special issues of "reprogenetics," cloning (inherently wrong, or open to an evaluation between healing effects and human dignity by way of a rule-and- exception relationship?), disease prevention (MV, cancers), unfairly advantaging certain children in view of a "level playing field" of genetic outfits, right of parents to genetically manipulate their offspring, and liability of parents who do not manipulate.The New Genetics and the Law

The crowning example of alchemical hybris came with the claim of pseudo-Paracelsus in the sixteenth century that he could make a homunculus - an artificial man. Like the gold of the alchemists, which was said to exceed the 24 carats of the best natural gold, the homunculus was supposed to be better than a natural man. Being made in a flask from human semen,
he was free of the catamenial substance that, according to the current theories of generation, supplied the material basis to an ordinary fetus. According to pseudo-Paracelsus, the homunculus was a semi-spiritual being that had an immediate apprehension of all the arts and a preternatural intelligence. In modern terms, the homunculus could be called the perfect test-tube baby, engineered to have the highest possible intelligence quota and aptitude. I have written an article focusing on this topic ("The Homunculus and his Forebears," 1999; see Vita), and have a book focusing on alchemy and the art-nature debate under contract (Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Refashioning of Nature, forthcoming with University of Chicago Press). Newton's Alchemy, recreated

What can we make of his account of the creation of a homunculus, a
miniature human being, in his laboratory? Cloning and genetic engineering are clearly impossible with 16th-century technology. Paracelsus

The invention of hand lenses and the microscope facilitated studies of the chick embryo by Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694), but also gave rise to one of the most profound errors in describing human development, that of the homunculus. This was a miniature human believed to have been seen within the head of a human spermatozoon and which presumed to enlarge when deposited in the female. This was the basis of the preformation theory and was believed by many well into the 18th century.lifeissues.net | When Does Human Life Begin? The Final Answer

Drawing of Human Spermatozoa
1694
The drawing was conceived by Niklaas Hartsoeker not by what
he had seen, but what he presumed would be visible if sperm
could be adequately viewed.

Consider the profound difficulty embryonic development presents to an observer. A complex organism, such as a chick, frog, insect or human, arises in an orderly and magical way from an apparently structureless egg. When embryology was in its infancy in the 17th and 18th centuries, the thought was that no animal could arise from such nothingness. Thus was born the theory of the homunculus: the idea that an infinite set of tiny individuals were contained, one within another, in each egg—or in each sperm (there was vigorous disagreement as to which). Development was seen as the visible unfolding of a preexisting individual. Unhappily for this wonderful notion, in the late 18th century Caspar Friedrich Wolff showed by microscopy that embryos contained cells but no homunculus—there was no preformed entity.
American Scientist Online - In the Twinkle of a Fly

U.S. Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) recently told his fellow Republicans he would advance a two-year moratorium rather than a permanent ban. Ironically, Brownback relayed his intentions while President Bush reaffirmed his opposition to human embryo cloning in a speech delivered by satellite to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis. Bush told them, "We believe that a life is a creation, not a commodity, and that our children are gifts to be loved and protected, not products to be designed and manufactured by human cloning." How did we get so quickly from a few cells in a dish to children? It reminds me of artists' representations during the Middle Ages of the homunculus: an invisibly tiny, fully formed human carried around by the male and then deposited in the female during intercourse. The tiny homunculus would eventually grow into a fetus before it was born. Those were the days before the discoveries of the microscope, sperm and egg. So then maybe Bush and Bevilacqua imagine that people still reproduce with homunculi. Otherwise, describing what we know with absolute certainty are nothing more than single or several cells in a microscopic cluster, resembling the cells inside your cheek, as "children" simply doesn't make any sense! If these men didn't wield so much power, we'd laugh at their ignorance. Stem Cells and Cloning: What Bush Doesn't Know Might Kill You ...

Faust and Homunculus
19th century engraving of Goethe's Faust and Homunculus



Also See

Pluto Gone Dog Gone It

For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing

Magick

Creationism

Catholic


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Champagne Confession

Confessing to a crime you did not commit is good for a free plane flight home, first class, with champagne. To heck with your reputation....Defense: Charges Dropped Against Karr

Also See:

Karr

Mexican Murder Cover Up?

The Real Crime In Canada

Crime Comics

Gothic


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Summerhill

There is a good background article in the Scotsman this weekend on Scotlands own libertarian educator; A.S. Neil and his Summerhill school.

So when a young idealist from Scotland, Alexander Neill, opened a school where attending classes was optional and all the rules were decided in weekly meetings with pupils and teachers having an equal say, it was written off as a short-lived libertarian experiment of the fairly eccentric 1920s. Predictably the Establishment and right-wing press had a field day, deriding Neill as a "corrupting influence" on children and labelling his establishment the "Do As You Please School".

Alexander Sutherland Neill.

Neill's philosophy was simple. He believed that the happiness of the child was paramount and that self-respect and respect for others would result. "There is more true education in making a snowball than in listening to an hour's lecture on grammar," he once said.

Summerhill, the school he established between the world wars, far from being a passing fancy, is still being run to this day in rural Suffolk, with a greater pupil roll than ever, a testament to its progressive founder.

Arguably, outside a few interested circles - education, libertarianism and various branches of psychology - the Summerhill project is little known.

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Pluto Gone Dog Gone It

Which of these would you say is a dog: a German Shepherd or a Chihuahua? This is the kind of question put before delegates of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) General Assembly who powwowed in Prague over Pluto's planet-hood. No wonder hardly 300 of the 2,700 astronomers at the meet even bothered to vote for, or against, stripping the ninth rock from the Sun of its planetary status and making it a 'planet dwarf' instead.Plot against Pluto Hindustan Times

Cute Pluto as a dog....wait he is.
Of course in India Astrology is a science.


"Indian astrology did not include Pluto as a planet and the latest announcement by leading global astronomers after a marathon week-long meeting at Prague yesterday only endorsed the Indian mathematical astrology of Aryabhatta and Varahamihira in the sixth century," eminent mathematical Astrologer Mangal Prasad told today. Aryabhatta, Varahamihira's mathematical science vindicated

And European and North American astrologers have stated they will still keep
Pluto in their charts.

Now of course the naming of planets is older than current industrial science,
it originated in what was once called natural science or as we know it magick.
In particular the naming of things is the source of our power over them, as
Fraser defines it; sympathetic magic.

Astrology and Alchemy are the mothers of the later sciences.
Though dismissed by current empirical materialist industrialized scientism.

But wait didn't this group of astronomers vote on a definition of a planet.
Giving things names. And taking them away.

Hmm what does Fraser say about that in his work on natural magick
the Golden Bough....

UNABLE to discriminate clearly between words and things, the savage commonly fancies that the link between a name and the person or thing denominated by it is not a mere arbitrary and ideal association, but a real and substantial bond which unites the two in such a way that magic may be wrought on a man just as easily through his name as through his hair, his nails, or any other material part of his person. In fact, primitive man regards his name as a vital portion of himself and takes care of it accordingly. Chapter XXII.Tabooed Words

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Historical Amnesia

Best quote on the American position on a Nuclear Iran.....Yet the reasoning of U.S. officials now struggling to deal with Iran's nuclear ambitions is clouded by a kind of historical amnesia,

See

Iran

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Kim Jong il Bush

Only the strong can defend justice in the world today where the jungle law prevails. Neither the UN nor anyone else can protect us. The past history and the present reality show that only a country with its powerful force can defend the national dignity and its sovereignty and independence. It is a day-dream to calculate that our principle will alter due to the change of the world. We have already clarified that we will have no option but to take stronger physical actions should someone take issue with our army's training of missile launches for self-defence and put pressure on it.

Sounds like something George W or John Bolton would say about the UN and the need for America to have the right to pre-emptive self defense in a Post 9/11 world.....but read on.........

The Foreign Ministry of the DPRK is authorized to clarify as follows in view of the grave situation prevailing on the [Korean] peninsula:

First, our Republic vehemently denounces and roundly refutes the UNSC "resolution", a product of the U.S. hostile policy towards the DPRK, and will not be bound to it in the least. Second, our Republic will bolster its war deterrent for self-defence in every way by all means and methods now that the situation has reached the worst phase due to the extremely hostile act of the U.S.


Oh that Kim he is such a clever fellow using American policy and American arguments. And the Americans will denounce North Korea as in violation of international law, kettle, pot, black.

This strategy is based on a conception of preemptive self-defense.10 Preemptive selfdefense,
however, is clearly unlawful under international law.The Myth of Preemptive Self-Defense


Along with this American Defense Policy Kim has made a recent foray into religion, funding a Russian Orthodox Church (from funds given by Russia, gee just like that Katrina disaster relief) and now inviting the American Evangelist of the Hour; Rick Warren to speak at an open air evangelical rally next spring.

Records from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom show that North Korea has one Catholic and two Protestant churches in addition to the new Russian Orthodox church.

Kim is appealing to the Bush Republican base with his policies.
And it is working. Evangelicals break with Bush on North Korea


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McGuinty Corporate Welfare

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you, guess it was a good thing Daltons pal Buzz missed this photo op.....

He left the family Honda at home, but Premier Dalton McGuinty was greeted by more jeers than cheers yesterday in the middle of an Oshawa General Motors assembly plant.This after being named "personality of the year" last week by Foreign Direct Investment magazine, a U.K. business publication, for his astute business acumen and passion for research and innovation.Some workers who joined in the catcalls said they were still angry with the premier for calling a 4,000-strong GM job cut "a little bit of contraction" in the auto industry last November. On hand yesterday to mark GM's plans to relaunch the Camaro, to be built in the plant for the 2009 model year, McGuinty was accused of taking advantage of a photo opportunity.Poor reception for McGuinty at GM

While amongst the right wing business types this corporate welfare is being denounced, quite humourously by Andrew Coyne, as another big tax hand out. Which it is and of course Coyne is right it's to produce the ultimate sixties gas guzzler; the Camaro.

So how come Dalton didn't tie his corporate welfare to production of hybrid and alternative energy automobiles, a green car? Oh because thats the NDP platform.....

Green backs for Green production...what a radical concept, it's called industrial ecology. A better environment plan than going nuke and banning coal...which is the other brilliant environmental policy of the McGuinty team in Canada's industrial heartland.


Also See:

GM

Social Ecology


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Katrina Mission Accomplished

A year after Katrina,just like Iraq, it is Mission Accomplished for the Bush team and their disaster/war profiteer pals....while they blame the victims for fraud.....
A review of congressional testimony and other documents by Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch found a total of at least $136.7 million in corporate fraud in Katrina-related contracts. In addition, government investigators have highlighted contracts cumulatively valued at $428.7 million that they found troubling because of lack of agency oversight or misappropriation.Profiting from Disaster: Greed Has Stallled Gulf Coast Recovery ...


Taxpayers around the nation who urged the federal government to pay for relief and reconstruction after Hurricane Katrina probably didn’t expect their money to be spent on $279 meals and $2,500 tarps. But according to a newly released report, corporations hired by the federal government have not only inflated costs but committed labor abuses and delayed the reconstruction process, making millions while local companies and workers have been left behind. Katrina Recovery Funds Wasted by Contractors, Govt.

Ever wonder what happened to all the foreign donations given to the United States in the aftermath of Katrina? It's not good news. It turns out that, like so much of the federal response to the crisis, the largest influx of foreign assistance to the US in memory was met with foot-dragging and clumsy bureaucracy. None of the donated funds has actually made its way to evacuees. What happened to the foreign cash for Katrina victims?

More Than Half of Congress' Katrina Money Unspent

Katrina Victims See Scant Evidence of Bush Funds in New Orleans


See Internationl Relief scams and scandals plaque the US just as they did the victims of the Tusanami in Indonesia and the earthquake in Pakistan. The difference is that under state capitalist regimes in Asia it is government inefficiency in the U.S. it is just the opposite.

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