More Shills For Big Oil

Add Link Byfield to the list along with Ralph Klein and Ezra Levant of those who don't believe Albertans deserve a fair share for our resources. Heck I say we should charge 100% royalties on our resources. Given that I am a socialist after all, most Albertans being reasonable folks like the Royalty Report.

And Link, like other conservatives of his ilk, always dismisses the fact that some of those resources also belong to the First Nations.

Funny thing though his announcement at the first meeting of his new political party fell flat amongst the severely normal Albertans that were there.

A townhall meeting by Alberta‘s newest political party was marked by bickering among the 60 people who attended over whether the province should increase energy royalties.

The fledging Wildrose Party has yet to gain party status or adopt policies, but called the meeting to talk about a government-appointed review panel‘s call for a 20 per cent hike in royalties.

Senate nominee Link Byfield chaired the meeting and denounced the proposed royalty increase, saying it would force energy firms to curtail exploration, resulting in thousands of job losses.

But others at the meeting disagreed, arguing that energy companies earning record profits can afford to pay higher royalties and that other countries are getting a larger take from their resources.

The crowd included former supporters of Alberta‘s governing Progressive Conservatives and some who had been members of the Alberta Alliance Party, which holds one seat in the legislature.

Byfield says putting an extra $2 billion in the hands of Premier Ed Stelmach‘s government would simply generate more waste, while leaving this money in the oilpatch generates jobs and prosperity.

EDMONTON/630 CHED - A townhall meeting called by a hopeful new political party brought in a few dozen people, and they weren't all on-side.

Even after the microphones were turned off, people kept up the debate. The Wildrose Party is yet to be officially registered in the province, but called a town hall to talk about why royalty rates need to stay where they are.

we seem to have the assumption that that money's going to go to us," said the party's executive director, Link Byfield. "I mean, how foolish can you be?"

Byfield talked to the small crowd about driving Alberta's economy with prosperous energy companies, and how a proposed hike in royalties would drive out investment. More than a few people taking to the mic were against that idea though, and were for the report recently released which calls for Albertans to take a larger share of oil and gas profits. (js, jk)

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A Contient of Children

If the Harper Government is so concerned about ending; violence against children, their exploitation and impoverishment, then its abandonment of the former Liberal government focus on African Aid is the biggest moral betrayl of those aims.

Because at the beginning of this century, seven years ago, one in two Africans were under 18. In other words 50% of the continent is populated by children. Many of them war children.

And as he made clear at the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday Harpers development and foreign aid focus is not Africa. He has abandoned the continent of children for a policy of neo-liberal colonialism in this hemisphere.



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Thoughtful

Fellow blogger thoughtinterrupted was kind enough to redo my CBC/Ezra ad.






Thank you for the much better designed ad. I have replaced my crude one on the sidebar.

She comments on yet another dreadful appearance of this opportunist self promoting partisan of the right on Don Newman's Politics on CBC yesterday.

And Ken Chapman another thoughtful Alberta blogger concurs.

Expand your Alberta based Rolodex Mr. Newman and do the province - and the country a favour.

But is CBC listening?

Well Ezra is apparently, since as thoughtinteruppted points out, he finally mentioned the Alberta NDP, who have four seats in Redmonton.

Levant proclaimed that after Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach, by having commissioned a panel of mostly pro-business types including one former Fraser Institute associate to review Alberta’s energy royalties, has become so far left that “everyone” in Alberta is “wondering when we elected Brian Mason and the New Democrats”.

Business type's, Fraser Institute alumni are left wing? Give your head a shake, Mr. Newman. Is this the kind of politically challenged comment you would accept from someone talking about Ontario or Quebec or heck even Newfoundland politics? I think not. This would be like having Kate from Small Dead Animals comment on Saskatchewan politics.

Uh oh maybe I shouldn't have mentioned that, it might give the Politics producer ideas, since the CBC has already bowed to right wing pressure for political correctness by having Ezra on, to try and show they are not liberal lefties.

As for Ezra's comment itself he is shilling pro-bono for Big Oil, repeating comments made by Ralph Klein. They are the only ones in Alberta upset over the royalty report. Albertans support our ownership of our own resources, a key plank of the right in fact, that socialist idea that the resources belong to the people, not big oil. And that they should pay us for the privilege of processing them.

Perhaps Ezra ever the opportunist hopes to get some cash injected into his fiscally challenged Western Standard from the oil boys. Watch for an WS email ad solicitation campaign to target oil companies.


SEE:

Conservative Broadcasting Corporation


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Devil Made Him Do It

A bible written with the devils help. And the devil appears to wear a diaper. And bears an uncanny resemblance to the Predator.



I guess they covered him up so that the bible would be the biggest object.

Codex Gigas, also known as the Devil's Bible - a medieval manuscript said to have been written 800 years ago with the devil's help - has returned to Prague after an absence of 359 years

The priceless piece, considered the biggest medieval book, was taken from the Prague Castle by Swedish troops at the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648. It is in Prague on loan from Sweden's Royal Library in Stockholm. It was put on display last week under high security at the Czech National Library.

According to myth, a Benedictine monk promised to write the book overnight to atone for his sins. When he realized the task was impossible, he asked the devil for help. The page with the illustration of the devil is the one visitors see.

The manuscript was likely written by one monk from the Benedictine monastery in Podlazice located some 100 kilometres east of Prague sometime at the beginning of the 13th century, said Zdenek Uhlir, a specialist on medieval manuscripts at the National Library.

It contains "a sum of the Benedictine order's knowledge" of the time, including the Old and New Testament, "The War of the Jews" by the first-century historian Josephus Flavius, a list of saints, or a guideline how to determine the date of Easter, Uhlir said.

"I would estimate it took him between 10 and 12 years to write," he said about the piece, which weighs 75 kilograms. Originally, it had 640 pages, of which 624 survived in relatively good condition, he said.

With the publication of the War of the Jews in this bible one has to ask if it is the original or the latter Christianized account. For if it is the latter, which I suspect it is, being it was originally of Slavic origin and it was in circulation at the time of writing of this bible. If it is then like the grain of sand in the oyster, this maybe another example of the origin of Antisemitism within Christianity in Medieval Germania and Eastern Europe.

In 93, the Jewish historian Josephus published his work Antiquities of the Jews. The extant copies of this work, which all derive from Christian sources, even the recently recovered Arabic version, contain two passages about Jesus.

"The problem here is that Josephus' account is too good to be true, too confessional to be impartial, too Christian to be Jewish." Three passages stood out: "if it be lawful to call him a man … He was [the] Christ … for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him." To some these seem directly to address Christological debates of the early 4th century. Consequently, some scholars regard at least these parts of the Testimonium as later interpolations.

The entire passage is also found in one manuscript of Josephus' earlier work, The Jewish War, in an Old Russian translation written c.1250. Interestingly, the passage dealing with Jesus is not the only significant difference from the usual collations; Robert Eisler has suggested that it was produced from one of Josephus's drafts (noting that the "Slavonic Version" has Josephus escaping his fellow Jews at Jotapata when "he counted the numbers [of the lot cast in the suicide pact] cunningly and so managed to deceive all the others", which is in striking contrast to the conventional version's account:

"Without hesitation each man in turn offered his throat for the next man to cut, in the belief that a moment later his commander would die too. Life was sweet, but not so sweet as death if Josephus died with them! But Josephus - shall we put it down to divine providence or just luck - was left with one other man....he used persuasion, they made a pact, and both remained alive.

The fact is that this 'Old Russian translation' coincides with the publication date of the Devils Bible which would have been available for translation from Latin at the time. And Prague was home to many Jews at the time. Thus our Benedictine monk would have been familiar with the Jews of Prague. And at the time of this bibles publication the Jews were being subjected to the Blood Libel campaign across Europe.

With the inclusion of Josephus perhaps it was not Satan who helped the priest but since this versi0n of his text is Anti-Semitic it may be that by including a history of Jews in the bible to prove Jesus existed the author considered that he was making a compact with the Devil. When this bible was written Jews were seen by Medieval Christians as demons, devils, dragons, etc. all in league with the coming Anti-Christ.

During the crusades, Ethiopians, Jews, Muslims, and Mongols were branded enemies of the Christian majority. Illustrated with strikingly imaginative and still disturbing images, this book reveals the outrageously pejorative ways these rejected social groups were represented--often as monsters, demons, or freaks of nature. Such monstrous images of non-Christians were not rare displays but a routine aspect of medieval public and private life. These images, which reached a broad and socially varied audience across western Europe, appeared in virtually all artistic media, including illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, sculpture, metalwork, and tapestry. Debra Higgs Strickland introduces and decodes images of the "monstrous races," from demonlike Jews and man-eating Tartars to Saracens with dog heads or animal bodies. Strickland traces the origins of the negative pictorial code used to portray monsters, demons, and non-Christian peoples to pseudoscientific theories of astrology, climate, and physiognomy, some dating back to classical times. She also considers the code in light of contemporary Christian eschatological beliefs and concepts of monstrosity and rejection. This is the first study to situate representations of the enemies of medieval Christendom within the broader cultural context of literature, theology, and politics. It is also the first to explore the elements of that imagery as a code and to elucidate the artistic means by which boundaries were effectively blurred between imaginary monsters and rejected social groups.

Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003. 336 pp.

This book is the history of an imaginary people -- the Red Jews -- in vernacular sources from medieval and early modern Germany. From the twelfth to the seventeenth century, German-language texts repeated and embroidered on an antisemitic tale concerning an epochal threat to Christianity, the Red Jews. This term, which expresses a medieval conflation of three separate traditions (the biblical destroyers Gog and Magog, the 'unclean peoples' enclosed by Alexander, and the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel), is a hostile designation of wickedness. The Red Jews played a major role in late medieval popular exegesis and literature, and appeared in a hitherto-unnoticed series of sixteenth-century pamphlets, in which they functioned as the medieval 'spectacles' through which contemporaries viewed such events as Turkish advances in the Near and Middle East. The Red Jews disappear from the sources after 1600, and consequently never found their way into historical scholarship.

The Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age; 1200-1600.


Blood, Jews and Monsters in Medieval Culture

The Monstrous Middle Ages

Josephus was a reliable historian and historical source so attempts to reinterpret him as a 'Christian' would give veracity to revisionist claims of biblical authors like that of the Codex Gigas. This bible then is probably the original source of the pseudo-Josephus, the so called Christian Jospehus.

Some Biblical literaltists, including followers of St. John of Chrysostom who was revered by the Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Church was a notorious anti-Semite, interpret this as being proof that Jesus existed, and that all biblical miracles and prophecies were fulfilled by the fall of the Second Temple. Thus there was no need for the continuation of the Jewish religion it had been superseded by Christianity. Thus if you eliminate their religion you effectively eliminate the Jews.

Thus this Devils Bible is devilish because it includes a historical text by a Jewish historian. It is devilish work because it revises his writings to make him appear as a convert to Christianity.

Recently a tunnel described by Josephus has been discovered in old Jerusalem and earlier this year King Herod's tomb was discovered, as described in the War of the Jews.

Under threat from Romans ransacking Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, many of the city's Jewish residents crowded into an underground drainage channel to hide and later flee the chaos through Jerusalem's southern end.

The ancient tunnel was recently discovered beneath rubble, a monument to one of the great dramatic scenes of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D.

The tunnel was dug beneath what would become the main road of Jerusalem, the archeology dig's directors, Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa and Eli Shukron of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said Sunday. Shukron said excavators looking for the road happened upon a small drainage channel that led them to the discovery two weeks ago of the massive tunnel.

As the temple was being destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, people took shelter in the drainage tunnel and lived inside it until they fled Jerusalem through its southern end, according to Josephus Flavius, a first century historian who wrote "The War of the Jews."

An Israeli archeologist walked in a tunnel discovered near Jerusalem's Old City. (emilio morenatti/associated press)

Lost, Then Found: Herod’s Tomb
By Mike Nizza

For decades, archaeologists looking for the tomb of King Herod have focused on one site in particular, based on an account in the first volume of “The Wars of the Jews,” written by the first-century historian Flavius Josephus.

Josephus wrote that a 25-mile funeral procession for the Roman Empire’s man in Judea and the great builder of Jerusalem ended at “Herodium, where he had given order to be buried,” according to a translation at The Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Instead of continuing on about the procession’s final steps, and perhaps revealing further clues about the tomb’s location, the historian evidently considered the chapter done with the next sentence.

“And this shall suffice for the conclusion of the life of Herod,” he wrote.
The omission sets up what The Los Angeles Times has called “one of the Holy Land’s greatest archeological mysteries.”

Chasing that mystery and others for the past 35 years has been Professor Ehud Netzer of Hebrew University.

Today, he was finally able to announce an answer: The tomb was on the northeastern slope of Mount Herodium, a site that his team has been excavating since last summer.

Herodium, which Mr. Netzer called “the most outstanding among King Herod’s building projects,” may have been best described by Josephus in an earlier section of “the War of the Jews:”

Joseph Atwill contends that Josephus proves that the Jesus mythos was developed by the Roman Empire in its dying days to create a new state religion. One that of course was based on divorcing Jesus from his Jewish roots. And thus an attempt to destroy the Jewish Messianic movements, which themselves were militantly anti-Rome.

Caesar's Messiah - The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus

Joseph Atwill makes the incredibly compelling case that the Christian Gospels were actually written under the direction of first-century Roman emperors. The purpose of these texts was to establish a peaceful Jewish sect to counterbalance the militaristic Jewish forces that had just been defeated by the Roman Emperor Titus in 70 A.D.

Atwill uncovered the secret key to this story in the writings of Josephus, the famed first-century Roman historian. Reading Josephus's chronicle, The War of the Jews, the author found detail after detail that closely paralleled events recounted in the Gospels.

Atwill skillfully demonstrates that the emperors used the Gospels to spark a new religious movement that would aid them in maintaining power and order. What's more, by including hidden literary clues, they took the story of the Emperor Titus's glorious military victory, as recounted by Josephus, and embedded that story in the Gospels - a sly and satirical way of glorifying the emperors through the ages.

Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus

Joseph Atwill

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1569754578

Feb. 2005

Condensed blurb:

>>The Christian Gospels were written under the direction of first-century Roman emperors. The purpose of these texts was to establish a peaceful Jewish sect to counterbalance the militaristic Jewish forces that had just been defeated by the Roman Emperor Titus in 70 A.D. The key to this story is in the writings of Josephus, the first-century Roman historian. Josephus's chronicle The War of the Jews parallels events recounted in the Gospels.

>>The emperors used the Gospels to spark a new religious movement that would aid them in maintaining power and order. By including hidden literary clues, they took the story of the Emperor Titus's glorious military victory, as recounted by Josephus, and embedded that story in the Gospels - a sly and satirical way of glorifying the emperors through the ages.

The Roman Origins of Christianity

Book by Joe Atwill

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0974092800

July 2003

Publisher: Joe Atwill

ISBN: 0974092800

http://www.joeatwill.com -- "...the Roman Emperor Titus Flavius created Christianity to replace the Jewish Messianic movement that waged war against the Empire with a pacifistic, pro-Roman religion. Titus also designed the story line of Jesus' ministry in the New Testament as a satire of his military campaign through Judea so that posterity would learn that he had invented Christianity and recognize his genius. Though the New Testament had always been seen as a religious document it is actually a monument to the vanity of a Caesar."

SEE:

Kabbalistic Kommunism

Gnostic Easter

Pauline Origins of Social Conservatism

Snake Oil Saint

Judas the Obscure

Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani

Bulgarian Women Abused

Tags
Jews as devils, Satan, Anti-Christ, Josephus, The War Of The Jews, Anti-semitism, Devils Bible, Christian, Gigas Bible, religion, Jews, medieval, Prague

unintended consequences

One of the funny unintended consequences of the article below is the RONA ads which play on the CFL games, which show an American football field instead of a Canadian one. You can tell from the hash marks.

Sheesh such a tiny detail could be disastrous for the renaming of the Grey Cup to the Rona Cup.

"As soon as 2008 you could see players competing in the Rona Grey Cup or the Ford Grey Cup," said one high-ranking league source. "It's for sale and the league will be pushing ahead with this."

And some sponsorship experts say the CFL may be risking more than it realizes by selling Grey Cup naming rights.

After their 1953 inception, the league's most valuable player awards were called the Schenleys until 1989, when sponsor Schenley Canada Inc. cut its ties to the league. The awards have had multiple sponsors since but are no longer as well known.
"The league has to ask itself, at what price do you sell your soul?" said Stellick. "The Grey Cup really is the soul of that league."

The more serious consequences are that a regulation that benefits the bank accounts of broadcasters does nothing for Canadian production. And of course the usual suspects will cry for the elimination of the CRTC because of this.

The right to insert Canadian commercials into U.S. broadcasts when shows air at the same time on both sides of the border is worth more than $200-million to the industry.

Such provisions were initially contemplated to give Canadian networks revenue that could be used to fund Canadian productions, including news, drama and comedies. But the report argues simulcasting has instead created overwhelming financial incentives to run U.S. programs in prime-time, since the networks can earn more ad revenue from American shows, which draw much higher ratings.

As a result, Canadian content is being marginalized to Friday and Saturday nights, or to the summer, when audiences are smaller. The report doesn't suggest killing simulcast rights, but the authors wonder if networks should be required to show a certain amount of domestic programs on weeknights.

"It's a great example of an unintended consequence of a regulation," Mr. Dunbar said in an interview. "We have all kinds of incentives for producing Canadian content, all kinds of subsidies for producing Canadian content, and then it's not really getting shown at a time when Canadians are watching television in large numbers. ...We are not saying abolish the rule.

SEE:

Death of Channel Ten

CRTC vs The Public Interest

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Americans Recognize Canada

The loonie has drawn the positive attention of some American's. The folks who normally pay little attention to their northern neighbours, being more concerned with their relations in Mexico.

However in the comments section of this item on global oil prices in the Houston Chronicle I found this;

Canadian money is worth the same as the dollar right now, and people are predicting it will get stronger due to their strong economy. Universal health care. Lower crime. Hmmm, what are they doing right?

Shucks just being our socialist selves.

Of course he might be a Canadian because he posted a link to this Macleans cover in his comments on an item on Iraqi refugees being allowed to enter the U.S. His comments seem far too 'liberal' to be American.




Of course with a cover like this the U.S. media, pundits and bloggers picked up on it pretty quickly. So he might be American.

Ouch! Supersize that ouch!

The headline on the cover of the October 1 issue of Maclean's, Canada's leading newsmagazine, reads: "How Bush Became the New Saddam." The cover story to which it refers, penned by reporter Patrick Graham, summarizes "the brutal realities and strange alliances of the desperate U.S. mission" in Iraq.

Canada's Maclean's: Bush Is the New Saddam

Maclean's cover featuring Bush dressed as Saddam causing flap in US

Bush as Saddam magazine cover stirs controversy

Cover of Canadian news mag shows Bush's head on Saddam's body

Watch for the right wingers to go ballistic over this south of the border. Heck this is even more nasty than MoveOn.Org's ad on Patreaus.

The irony is that Macleans is a full of right wing conservative mouthpieces.

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U.S. Threat To Ahmadinejad

The U.S. media is creating a storm of sturm and drang about the Iranian Presidents visit to the U.S. and his debate at Columbia.

Turning Ahmadinejad into Public Enemy No. 1
Demonizing the Iranian president and making his visit to New York seem controversial is all part of the neoconservative push for yet another war.

There was joy in mudville when NYC cops, NY Port Authority and firemen rejected his attempt to place a wreath from the Iranian people at the WTC memorial. Though they probably would have objected to former mayor and Republican Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani doing it as well, something the media did not point out in there stories.

Mr. Ahmadinejad (whose government is, according to the State Department, one of the world's leading state sponsors of terror) was rebuffed in his attempt to visit "Ground Zero," where the World Trade Center towers were destroyed on September 11. That decision was certainly appropriate. While a New York City Police Department spokesman tersely cited "security reasons" for rebuffing Mr. Ahmadinejad, the real reason why he is being kept away is the eminently justified moral outrage of the American public. To permit a man whose government funnels hundreds of millions of dollars annually to Hezbollah and Hamas, who is providing weapons to Iraqi Shi'ite militias and Sunni insurgents that are being used to kill and maim American soldiers; who has given refuge to al Qaeda terrorists; and who is funneling weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan to visit Ground Zero would be an obscenity. This would be spitting on the graves of thousands of innocents murdered six years ago by the jihadists who are Mr. Ahmadinejad's ideological soulmates.

It seems they seem to have confused Iran with Saudi Arabia. None of the hijackers were Iranian. They were Saudi's, whom the U.S. still maintains as a bulwark Sunni State against Iran and the Iraqi Shia. And al-Qaeda has not been linked to Iran except in the imaginations and wishful thinking of the American right.

They deliberately overlook the fact that the Iranian people mourned with America after 9/11.

As part of the day of mourning, people everywhere observed minutes of silence. In Iran, 60,000 stood silently in Tehran Soccer Stadium, honouring a country their leaders have called The Great Satan.

That the U.S. media and the White House rejected even this symbolic overture shows just how intolerant and stupid they are. At least some conservative pundits got it but of course they were on liberal PBS.

As John McLaughlin took pains to point out it is not up to local cops, municipal service employees, or even state governments to determine international protocol that is a federal government responsibility one Bush shoved off onto New Yorkers.

He asks pointedly what right thinking states rights conservative would allow such a violation of that much honoured principle of American federalism. Should the case be reversed they would be outraged.

Further the disinformation machine of the American empire has been working overtime attempting to paint Iran as America's next big enemy. Even on the eve of the Iranian Presidents visit to the UN the U.S. military makes sure Iran stays in the headlines.

US Military Says Iranian Officer Under Arrest in Northern Iraq

Iran smuggling missiles into Iraq: US military

Afghan weapons came from Iran, US general says

The media and right wing pundits have further painted Ahmadinejad as a Hitler and a Madman. Terms that dehumanize him and of course make him a target of American wrath and loathing.

Protests against Ahmadinejad's visit to New York began even before the Iranian president had landed.

A group of about 40 elected officials and civic leaders gathered on Sunday outside Columbia University, where Ahmadinejad was scheduled to speak on Monday.

Some carried placards with slogans such as "Don't give a platform to hate" and "Go to hell" while denouncing Ahmadinejad as a "Hitler wannabe" and a Holocaust denier.

"There is no excuse to invite this madman, this little Hitler," Dov Hikind, a New York state assemblyman, said.

Something they can't do with Osama bin Laden the real object of their hate, because, well he ain't addressing the U.N. and they can't find him.

The worry here, and I think it is a serious one, should be; how secure is President Ahmadinejad in visiting New York?

By dehumanizing Ahmadinejad and making him the target of their wrath, he becomes an actual target when he lands on American soil today.

With all the right wing gun toting nut bars in the U.S. who have a penchant for assassination of presidents, rock stars, mass shootings in schools, workplaces, restaurants, and bombing of government buildings, I think there is a potential threat to the President of Iran.

With the jingoist media and right wing pundits and bloggers whipping up hysteria about his visit it leaves an opening for a self righteous self deluded nut to try and take him out. After all it happened to both Kennedy's and this is New York where Lennon was killed.

America is not a secure nation. It is a country of gun nuts. And many of those gun nuts have a simplistic right wing ideology; America right or wrong. And they believe America has the right to attack its enemies, and they believe a preemptive strike is self defense.

If some nut would take out his classmates for his feeling isolated on campus, what chance is there some fan of Fred Thompson or Joe Lieberman or heck even Glen Beck might decide to eliminate the world of this threat to America.

From their comments and those of their ilk they would probably applaud such an act.

The White House has set up all the conditions for war with Iran, the assassination or attempted assassination of Ahmadinejad would assure them of that wish.

Iranophobia hits Ground Zero
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

In the run-up to Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's visit to the United Nations in New York next week, the Iran-bashing sentiment in the US media has escalated to new, unprecedented levels, with presidential hopefuls such as former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, adding fuel to the fire with their increasingly incendiary rhetoric against Iran.

Thus, whereas Romney has written to the UN requesting
Ahmadinejad's arrest on arriving on US soil, citing the Geneva Conventions, Giuliani has used his European tour to second the warmongering sentiment of French leaders, promising to set Iran back "five to 10 years" if it refuses to comply with demands that it suspend uranium-enrichment activities.

And as for the US media, in their seemingly stiff competition on who will win the Iran-bashing trophy, New York's Daily News was the winner, with its full-front-page photo of Ahmadinejad circled in red with the accompanying write-up that he should "go to hell" for daring to request a visit to the former site of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers in New York known as Ground Zero. [1] Another New York daily, Newsday, has been equally venomous, referring to Ahmadinejad as a "madman".


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Blackwater On YouTube

I look forward to seeing this on Youtube.

Iraqi investigators have a videotape that shows Blackwater USA guards opened fire against civilians without provocation in an incident last week in which 11 people died, a senior Iraqi official said Saturday. He said the case had been referred to the Iraqi judiciary.

While the U.S. government might want to look at Blackwater instead of Iran for weapons smuggling into Iraq. Oh yes and ask them about the tons of missing weapons that they were supposed to be guarding.

Feds probe whether Blackwater smuggled weapons into Iraq: Federal prosecutors are investigating whether employees of the private security firm Blackwater USA illegally smuggled weapons into Iraq that may have been sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, officials said Friday.

File this under oops we spoke to soon.

Iraq says won't move to expel Blackwater: "If we drive out or expel this company immediately there will be a security vacuum that will demand pulling some troops that work in the field so that we can protect these institutes," spokesman Tahseen al-Sheikhly, speaking through an interpreter, told a news conference.

SEE:

Sounds Familiar

Moral Turpitude Is Spelled Blackwater



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Body Shop Loses Founder

Somehow the passing of Anita Roddick, the founder of Body Shop went without much notice in the progressive blogosphere. She was 64 and suffered from a brain hemorrhage a week ago, after discovering she had Hep C. She and her Body Shop were a modern version of Robert Owen in the age of globalization. She took campaigning for fair trade policies empowering farmers in the third world, to end animal testing, to support the Angola 3 in the U.S.

In fact she shared much in common with Owen.

Robert Owen (1771-1858), social and educational reformer, remains a controversial and enigmatic figure. Having profited enormously from enterprise in the early Industrial Revolution he set about trying to remedy its excesses through environmental, educational, factory and poor law reform. Synthesizing reformist ideas from the Age of Enlightenment and drawing on his own experience as an industrialist he constructed A New View of Society (1816), a rallying call for widespread social change, with education at its core. New Lanark, the test-bed for his ideas, became internationally famous.

She will be sadly missed. As they say success breeds success and her making Body Shop not just a business but a global effort to ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism for this she will be remembered and her organization will continue to contribute to the betterment of humanity.

Those on the right who dis fair trade continue to miss the point that Anita and other Owenite capitalists have always made, capitalism is supposed to make life better for people. The right wing of course espouses this theory, a hand up instead of a hand out, but of course that is just a platitude to justify rapacious speculative casino capitalism.

Anita is one of many capitalists who used their business acumen to do just that to use their wealth to aid in social development and not just to make more money for its own sake. That was what made her wealthy, the good works she did, not the money in her bank account.

Dame Anita Roddick dies aged 64

Dame Anita brought ethically-sourced products to the High Street

Founder of ethical cosmetics firm Body Shop, Dame Anita Roddick, has died at the age of 64.

Her family said in a statement she suffered "a major brain haemorrhage" at 1830 BST at St Richard's Hospital in Chichester, West Sussex.

Her husband, Gordon, and daughters Sam and Justine were all with her.

Dame Anita set up the first Body Shop in Brighton in 1976. She pioneered cruelty-free beauty products and turned them into a highly profitable business.

In February she announced she had contracted Hepatitis C from a blood transfusion in 1971.

She had been taken to hospital on Sunday evening after she collapsed complaining of a headache.

The founder of the Body Shop, famous for her determination to combine social campaigning with business success, has a new mission. Facing her own battle against liver disease, she's determined to win this fight, too

Anita Roddick embarked on a new campaign last week - in an intensely personal fashion. Rather than watching the creator of the Body Shop talking aloe vera with Guatamalan tribes, we are now witnessing her as the campaign chief for hepatitis C. She was diagnosed with the disease three years ago, but decided to go public as her health worsened; she has cirrhosis of the liver and will need a transplant.

her new mission to rid the UK of its 'air of indifference' towards hepatitis has all the hallmarks of a classic Roddick campaign. For starters, she wants to know why the government spends £40m a year promoting the switch from analogue to digital television and just £2m on her disease. It's another example of Roddick turning personal questions into political activism.

The Body Shop was famously born out of pure necessity of supporting two children during Gordon's equine adventure. In 1975, Roddick began cooking up moisturisers from Bedouin recipes in her Brighton kitchen, opening her first shop in the Lanes in 1976.

She once said: 'How can you ennoble the spirit when you are selling something as inconsequential as a face cream?' But there was a certain inevitability that the young woman who blagged a £2,000 bank loan pitching up in a Bob Dylan T-shirt would end up retailing soap from her soapbox.

In 1985, Roddick used the shop windows of her by-now burgeoning Body Shop business to promote Greenpeace's Save the Whales campaign. It was the first explicit tie-in between products and causes. Mango butter, jojoba cleanser and brazil nut conditioner were to become inextricably entwined over the next decade with staving off destruction of the rainforest, preserving the Human Rights Act, resisting nuclear power, sticking two fingers up at corporate greed and promoting pacifism.

Roddick is routinely considered to be the originator of almost all the different facets of ethical consumption and business, but she was certainly an important pioneer of fair trade in the UK. Instead of buying ingredients such as brazil nuts for shampoo from commodity markets, she went straight to the source and set up development projects all over South America and Africa. The overriding message was that a business could be good and consumers could be a force for change. 'If Anita can whip up an empire, you can too,' ran a Body Shop slogan of the time.

More than three decades later, the company has around 2,000 stores in 50 countries; it was bought by France’s L’Oreal Group in March 2006. Roddick claims on the company’s Web site, “I haven’t a clue how we got here.”

The Body Shop’s success has stemmed from the growing numbers of middle-class, ethically conscious people who pine for organic food and Fair Trade products, along with a combination of first-mover advantage and consistency in branding and reputation.

There was some anger from Roddick’s admirers last year when the Body Shop was acquired by L’Oreal. Many feared the company’s standards would be compromised, and that the $204 million return for her and her husband’s 18% stake suggested Roddick was abandoning her by-then iconic business.

But she defended the decision, saying that “the campaigning, being a maverick, changing the rules of business. It's all there, protected. It's not going to change – that's part of our DNA." (See: “ Roddick Promises No 'Selling Out' In L'Oreal Sale”)

Earlier this year, she wrote in Newsweek that she had sold the Body Shop so that she could dedicate her time to radical causes; she also said that she regretted taking the company public in 1984 because it had led to a loss of some control.

After selling the business but staying on as an arms-length consultant, Roddick turned her back on the world of commerce and focused on giving away her more than $100 million fortune to charity – saying she didn’t want to die rich – and campaigning.

Up until Sept. 7, she regularly updated her blog, anitaroddick.com, focusing on developments in human rights and globalization, an area where she said the developing world had been grossly shortchanged.

Roddick viewed her illness with characteristic aplomb: “Many people have spoken of my ‘bravery’ in going public with my illness – pish. It shouldn’t take bravery to live life openly despite illness, although our developed world, with its deep fear and denial of mortality, often demands it.”

Aside from the frank expression of her beliefs, Roddick will be remembered for having helped reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable: commerce and social activism. Though the latter seemed to clearly be where her heart was, she still managed to cultivate a phenomenally successful business and become a millionaire, while reminding everyone that, “businesses have the power to do good.”

Comments on Anita and her impact are posted on her website.

Dame Anita Roddick, our founder, has died at the age of 64. She died at St Richard's Hospital in Chichester, West Sussex, where her husband, Gordon, and daughters Sam and Justine were all with her. "All of us in The Body Shop family are deeply shocked and saddened to hear the news about Anita's passing away. Anita was not only our Founder but she was also the heart and passion of The Body Shop and with her we achieved so much, whether on animal rights, human rights, Community Trade, or through the founding of organisations like Children on the Edge. It is no exaggeration to say that she changed the world of business with her campaigns for social and environmental responsibility. But for everyone who knew Anita, it was about much more than that: you couldn't help but be inspired by her love of life, her vision of the world and her passion for changing it. Anita leaves us with an enduring legacy which will long guide the affairs of The Body Shop. Our heartfelt condolences are with the Roddick family at this sad time." Adrian Bellamy Chairman, The Body Shop, Canada

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Mime Silenced

There is an eternal silence in the world of Theatre today.

Good night gentle clown.

Marcel Marceau, Famed French Mime, Dies

Marcel Mangel (March 22, 1923 – September 22, 2007), better known by his stage name Marcel Marceau, was a well-known mime, among the most popular representatives of this art form world-wide. He was said to be "single-handedly responsible for reviving the art of mime after World War II."

Mime originated out of the old folk pagan traditions of clowning and mummery, which are still alive in Newfoundland and once were practiced by the Ukrainian diaspora community in Western Canada.

The performance of pantomime originates at its earliest in ancient Greece; the name is taken from a single masked dancer called Pantomimus evolved. It was , although performances were not necessarily silent. In Medieval Europe, early forms of mime such as mummer plays and later dumbshowsJean-Gaspard Deburau in early nineteenth century Paris who solidified the many attributes that we have come to know in modern times -- the silent figure in whiteface

Clowning around is joyful anarchy.


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Marcel Marceau, mime, theatre, France, clown, mummery,