NDP Green with envy

James Laxer says that the NDP is strategically challenged, and that challenge has gotten more serious as the Green Party showed it was a real national party this weekend, and elected as its Leader policy savvy media darling Elizabeth May who will give Jack a run for his moustache.

You see the NDP weakness is its relationship to the Liberals, fighting over 'progressive' votes, according to Laxer.

According to Nick Nantos of SES polling, in 2004 the Greens took votes from the NDP, in 2006 from the Conservatives. If they can don the mantel of the party of change, then they will be where the New party was when it was created.

They pose an electoral challenge as the new kid on the block able to mobilize discontent that got the Conservatives votes as agents of change. That change has been to hard a right shift for Canadians. Laxer suggests the NDP attack the Conservatives, leaving the way open for a Liberal minority government.

The Greens if they listened to Nick, would know that their best bet is to be a party of parliamentary reform, change the system wholesale, which will appeal to the old Reformers in the Conservatives and the old new lefties in the NDP. But that will only work if they don't mimic the platform of the NDP.

With Elzabeth May taking a page from Jack, and stating she will be sitting in the Public Gallery and available for media scums chances are good that between now and the next election, the Green Party profile will increase. It worked for Jack and the PM at the time had not locked out the media from access.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Layton, NDP, Green, Party, Canda, Poltiics, ElizabethMay, Laxer

Softwood Republican Slush Fund

Just how deeply King Stephen's nose is up the arse of King George can be found in the missing $1 billion dollars that remains in the U.S. if the Softwood lumber deal goes through. Half of it goes to the White House as a slush fund for the upcoming election. Even the Liberals, for all their sins, never funded the Democrats with stolen Canadian money.

It should be of great interest and concern to all Democrats and to all Americans that Canada has apparently become the primary financier of Republican election campaigns in the upcoming November elections

Also See

American Exceptionalism

Softwood

Free Trade



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Harper, Emerson, softwood, US, NAFTA, free-trade, lumber, duties, taxes, Canada, B.C., Ontario, Quebec, mills,
Repbulicans, Repulican, Party, Bush, White, House

The Vampire Party

Funny comment by SES pollster Nick Nantos at the Green Party convention this weekend. He stated that the Liberal party should never be underestimated since it has successfully arisen after being declared dead; "just like a vampire".

Hey thats a great way to appeal to the 'youth', the Liberals party like Goths.


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Liberals, Goth, Vampire, Canada, politics, Polls, Nantos, SES

Only Christians Are REAL Women

The misappropriately titled REAL Women of Canada is a self avowed group of Christian women, fundamentalist Christians to be exact. White Whing Conservative Christian women to be more exact.

Along with attacks on unions, gays, pro-choice advocates, and anyone whose values are not theirs, read pluralistic secular progressive and classical liberal, they were created to attack feminism and feminist gains for women.

Of course they are only several centuries late since the feminist movement began with the classical liberal work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstoncraft written in 1792!

Mary was married to anarchist Willam Godwin, mother of the author of Frankenstein; Mary Wollstonecroft Shelly. And she was an intellectual partner of liberal author J.S. Mills.

REAL Women have always viewed themselves as good old girls, the ladies auxilary of the right wing neo-cons. For women who say that a womans place is in the home, they sure do alot of public bitching about the State replacing the Church as the source of social services.

They have launched a campaign to end funding for the Status of Women. As usaual, its an annual event for this small vocal minority. It's an old war, as Marriane Faithful would say, between those who advocate for womens rights, and those who advocate for christian rites.

Joined in this oppurtunistic campaign to get the Harpocrites to end funding for Status of Women is the right whing blogosphere, with the usual comments from both men and women in that small minded community saying that Feminists don't speak for them.

And the usual smear campaigns about radical feminist groups funded by Status of Women, radicals like LEAF which represents women lawyers. Or those radicals in the Aboriginal movement, the women adovactes who are fighting for their rights against the family compacts of Department of Indian Affairs approved Chiefs who dominate the Aboriginal Political community. Opps the right wing usually likes these women.

Ah well consistency is the hobgoblin of the little minds on the right. Caus one of the arguements REALwomen and their ilk use is that THEY don't get funded by Status of Women. So no womens groups should. They are NOT arguing that taxpayers should NOT pay for womens organizations to lobby the government, just that they don't get funded by the State. And that's not fair. Yep consistency is the hobgoblin.....

You would think that since the Churches are tax free and lobby on behalf of REAL Womens political agenda this would suffice as ripping off taxpayers. But REAL Women wants to rip you off twice. And then if that isn't enough wishes to end lobbying that would counter their taxpayer funded lobbying efforts.

P.S. the Housewife on the magazine cover is probably an Irish maid. The bourgoise housewife MANAGED the home, like her husband the boss at work managed his workplace.

Also See:

Who Speaks For Canadian Women

Catholic Hajib

New Age Libertarian Manifesto

Grandmother of Second Wave Feminism Dies

The Real Crime In Canada

The Sanctity of Marriage Debate

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
SOW, StatusofWomen, Canada, REALwomen, Christians, Feminists, feminism, Poltics, Harper, PM, Conservatives, neo-cons, lobby

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


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Katrina, Eric, Burdon, Animals, RocknRoll, Sixties, NewOrleans, Hurricane, Blues

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.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Kurd, Kurds, Kurdistan, Turkey, Bombing, terrorism, secretpolice, dissent,

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


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
stemcell, cloning, homonuclus, Catholic, bioethics, Bush, Paracelsus, Alchemy, science, ,

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


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Janke, AngryIntheGreatWhiteNorth, JonBenet, Ramsey, Karr, murder, childexploitation, Thailand, Boulder, Colorado, childmurder, serialkillers, pedophiles,

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.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Scotland, Summerhill, A.S.Neil, libertarian, education, libertarian-education, childcentrededucation, children, school, schooling

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

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Golden, Bough, Fraser, magic, magick, sympatheticmagic, Pluto, IAU, name, planets, namingplanets, space, solarsystem