'As Though Its Body Were By Love Possessed'.

In machinery, the appropriation of living labour by capital achieves a direct reality in this respect as well: It is, firstly, the analysis and application of mechanical and chemical laws, arising directly out of science, which enables the machine to perform the same labour as that previously performed by the worker. However, the development of machinery along this path occurs only when large industry has already reached a higher stage, and all the sciences have been pressed into the service of capital; and when, secondly, the available machinery itself already provides great capabilities. Invention then becomes a business, and the application of science to direct production itself becomes a prospect which determines and solicits it. But this is not the road along which machinery, by and large, arose, and even less the road on which it progresses in detail. This road is, rather, dissection [Analyse] -- through the division of labour, which gradually transforms the workers' operations into more and more mechanical ones, so that at a certain point a mechanism can step into their places. (See under economy of power.) Thus, the specific mode of working here appears directly as becoming transferred from the worker to capital in the form of the machine, and his own labour capacity devalued thereby. Hence the workers' struggle against machinery. What was the living worker's activity becomes the activity of the machine. Thus the appropriation of labour by capital confronts the worker in a coarsely sensuous form; capital absorbs labour into itself -- 'as though its body were by love possessed'.  [3]       

3. 'als hätt es Lieb im Leibe', 'as it's lover in the body',Goethe,  Faust, Pt I, Act 5, Auerbach's Cellar in Leipzig.

METROPOLIS 1927

OBIT FOR FATHER OF AMERICAN MEDICARE

Rashi Fein 
Posted September 17th, 2014 in Uncategorized by Administrator No comments

Mass-Care is saddened by the news that our longtime friend and mentor Rashi Fein passed away on September 8, 2014 at the age of 88 from melanoma. Dr. Fein was a solid supporter of Mass-Care since its founding in 1995. He was a speaker at many events and his writing and his teaching kept generations of Single Payer advocates armed with facts and inspired by his steadfast belief that we can achieve a just health care system if we can generate the political will. As he wrote in his book “The Health Care Mess” in 2005, “Universal health insurance, access, and promotion of health are more than matters of health policy. In a fundamental sense they are matters of social policy and require a social revolution”. Mass-Care is a leader in the current social revolution over income disparity and inequality of opportunity. The goal of this movement is to galvanize a huge coalition of people from all segments of society to bring about progressive policy changes including a universal health care system.
Dr. Fein was a giant in his field of healthcare economics. Throughout his professional life he pursued his conviction that achieving a national healthcare system was the best way to provide affordable quality care for everyone. His core belief in equality and fairness was at the center of his goal for universal health care. He was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the passage of Medicare and Medicaid through his writings, personal contacts, and his work on various commissions under the administrations of President Truman, President Kennedy, and President Lyndon Johnson. It was a major disappointment for him that the passage of Medicare did not lead to further legislation calling for Medicare for all.

Dr. Fein received his doctorate in political economy in 1956 at John’s Hopkins and had a career teaching medical economics at several institutions including Chapel Hill, NC, and Harvard University. A former student of his who is now a Mass-Care activist had this to say about her student days under Dr. Fein’s tutelage. “Rashi, and we were encouraged to address him as Rashi, was always a most informative and compassionate teacher. No question was too simple for him. His passion for universal health care impressed many of us and helped to direct our careers. He was one in a million at the Harvard School of Public Health”. In addition to his teaching he worked on several presidential commissions on health economic policy, and he wrote many articles and published several books dealing with policies on healthcare including “Medical Care, Medical costs: The search for a Health Insurance Policy” 1986, “The Health Care Mess” co authored with Julius Richmond, MD in 2005, and “Learning Lessons: Medicine, Economics, and Public Policy” in 2010.
Dr. Fein and his wife Ruth were married for 65 years and were a team for social justice. We send Ruth and their family our deepest condolences.

For more details about Rashi Fein’s life please see the Boston Globe obituary from Sept. 11, 2014.

Rashi Fein | Dissent Magazine

www.dissentmagazine.org/author/rashi-fein

In part one of this essay (“The HMO Revolution: How It Happened, What It Means,” Dissent, Spring 1998) I explored the rapid growth of HMOs, noted potential ...

Rashi Fein - Project MUSE - Johns Hopkins University

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_health.../24.5fein.html

by R Fein - ‎1999 - ‎Cited by 4 - ‎Related articles

[Access article in PDF]. Changing Perceptions, Changing Reality. Rashi Fein. It should come as no surprise that Americans are deeply troubled about the ways ...

Stories by Rashi Fein - Scientific American

www.scientificamerican.com/author/rashi-fein/

Medical costs are rising rapidly, and millions of people have no health care coverage. The nation urgently needs a universal insurance program

ECONOMICS OF MENTAL ILLNESS—by Rashi Fein. Joint ...

ps.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleID=56441

by SL Buker - ‎1959

ECONOMICS OF MENTAL ILLNESS—by Rashi Fein. Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health, Monograph Series No. 2. Basic Books, Inc, New York.

The Doctor Shortage: An Economic Diagnosis by Rashi Fein

www.jstor.org/stable/3349299

THE DOCTOR SHORTAGE. An Economic Diagnosis. RASHI FEIN. Washington, D. C., The Brookings Institution. 1967, 199 + xi pp. $2.50 (paperback).

The Doctor Shortage. An Economic Diagnosis. Rashi Fein ...

www.sciencemag.org › 29 December 1967

by GJ Stigler - ‎1967 - ‎Cited by 1 - ‎Related articles

Book Reviews The Doctor Shortage. An Economic Diagnosis. Rashi Fein. Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., 1967. 211 pp., illus. $6. Studies in Social ...

Rashi Fein, Economist Who Urged Medicare, Dies at 88
By DOUGLAS MARTINSEPT. 13, 2014

Rashi Fein, an influential economist who strove to bring ethical and humanitarian perspectives to the nation’s health care system and helped lay the intellectual groundwork forMedicare in the 1960s, died on Monday in Boston. He was 88.

The cause was melanoma, his son Alan said.

When Dr. Fein began working on health issues as a young aide in the administration of Harry S. Truman, health care accounted for about 3 percent of the American economy. By the time he weighed in as a respected elder in the field during the debate over President Obama’s health care proposals, the expenditures had risen to 18 percent, an amount roughly equal to the economy of France.

As the money Americans spent on medical care increased, so did the role of economists specializing in health issues. Dr. Fein moved between government and academia, offering research and views on issues like meeting the demand for physicians. During the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, he led a public-private panel to develop ideas for the Medicare legislation, which, along with Medicaid, was signed into law in 1965.Photo

Rashi Fein in 2000. He called for universal health coverage.CreditMichael Fein

Dr. Fein, a proud liberal, regretted that Medicare did not apply to everyone, just as he was disappointed that Mr. Obama’s Affordable Care Act did not consolidate insurance payments under the federal government. A federal single-payer system, he maintained, would be more cost effective and inclusive. The Obama plan, passed by Congress, relies on private insurance.

But Dr. Fein was nonetheless satisfied with incremental progress, Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, chairman of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an interview on Thursday. He quoted Dr. Fein, a former professor of his, as saying, “Getting everybody under the tent is better than standing on principle and not getting anything.”

Dr. Fein regarded both Medicare and the Affordable Care Act as important steps toward the overriding goal of helping “the people who have the least,” Dr. Emanuel said. In his 1986 book, “Medical Care, Medical Costs: The Search for a Health Insurance Policy,” Dr. Fein wrote, “Decent people — and we are decent people — are offended by unnecessary pain and suffering; that is, by pain and suffering for which there is a treatment and for which some (who are affluent) are treated.”

Mr. Fein was born in the Bronx on Feb. 6, 1926. His father, Isaac, was a history professor whose work took him to a chain of cities in the United States and Canada, including Winnipeg, Manitoba; and Bridgeport, Conn. His mother, the former Chaya Wertheim, was a schoolteacher.

Mr. Fein’s son Alan said his father and his father’s younger brother, Leonard — who went on to found organizations to combat hunger — had gotten their zeal for social justice from their parents.

“My preference for a universal insurance program derives from my image of a just society,” Dr. Fein wrote in his 1986 book. “It is an image based on a broadly defined concept of justice and liberty, nurtured by stories my parents told me, the books they encouraged me to read, and the values they expressed. To them, liberty meant more than political freedom; it also meant freedom from destitution — in Roosevelt’s phrase, ‘freedom from want.’ ”

After graduating from Central High School in Bridgeport, Dr. Fein was a Navy radar technician during World War II. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in economics and a doctorate in political economy from Johns Hopkins University.

In 1952, he took a teaching post at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, while working on a Truman administration commission charged with exploring the possibilities for national health insurance.

Six years later, he led a study by the federal Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health, which estimated that mental illness cost the United States $3 billion a year ($24.7 billion in today’s dollars) in treatment costs and lost work years, a small fraction of the estimated costs today.

In 1961, Dr. Fein became a senior staff member on the Council of Economic Advisers under President John F. Kennedy. He studied education issues in addition to helping to write legislation for Medicare. He moved on to the Brookings Institution as a senior fellow in 1963 and remained with it while directing the Medicare panel for Johnson, Kennedy’s successor.

After leaving Brookings, Dr. Fein was a professor of economics at the Kennedy School of Government and the Medical School of Harvard University. He retired in 1999.

In addition to his son Alan, Dr. Fein is survived by his wife of 65 years, the former Ruth Judith Breslau; another son, Michael; a daughter, Karen Fein; and four grandchildren. Another daughter, Bena Fein, died in 1995. Dr. Fein’s brother, Leonard, died in August.

Dr. Fein spoke of the importance of language in describing health care, deriding the term “death panels” that some opponents used in the debate over the Affordable Care Act.

“A new language is infecting the culture of American medicine,” he wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1982. “It is the language of the marketplace, of the tradesman, and of the cost accountant. It is a language that depersonalizes both patients and physicians and describes medical care as just another commodity. It is a language that is dangerous.”

Rashi Fein, 88; economist was an architect of Medicare

By Bryan Marquard | GLOBE STAFF SEPTEMBER 11, 2014





MICHAEL FEIN

Dr. Rashi Fein was a tireless advocate of health care for all.

Rashi Fein was one of the policy architects of Medicare and he remained a lifelong proponent of health care for all. His advocacy never wavered, from his time working for the Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations on through his long tenure as a Harvard economist.

“My first federal job was for a Harry Truman commission on national health insurance,” he wrote in the Globe in 2007. “For more than half a century I have believed and still believe that every American should have full access to needed medical care.”


His beliefs ran deeper than what could be accomplished in a political system that, in his view, seemed only willing to address the complexities of health care when access reached crisis levels, only to become gridlocked by the crisis itself.

“My preference for a universal insurance program derives from my image of a just society,” Dr. Fein wrote in “Medical Care, Medical Costs,” his 1986 book. “It is an image based on a broadly defined concept of justice and liberty, nurtured by stories my parents told me, the books they encouraged me to read, and the values they expressed. To them, liberty meant more than political freedom; it also meant freedom from destitution — in Roosevelt’s phrase, ‘freedom from want.’ ”

Dr. Fein, a professor emeritus of medical economics at Harvard Medical School who formerly served on the senior staff of President John F. Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisers, died of melanoma Monday at Massachusetts General Hospital. He was 88 and lived in Boston.

In August 1964, Dr. Fein wrote in “Medical Care, Medical Costs,” he and the other members of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s task force on health convened to consider the nation’s health care needs.

“During that meeting the president emphasized the importance of a long-term vision,” Dr. Fein wrote. “He did not want us to recommend only what we felt was politically feasible within a year or even within a presidential term. Instead, we were to decide what health measures were desirable for the nation over the next two decades and to recommend legislation that would enable America to fulfill its promise.”

While the proposals Dr. Fein and his task force colleagues crafted helped lead to the creation of Medicare, Johnson made clear that as president, he would do the political heavy lifting. “He reminded us that we were amateurs and he was the professional,” Dr. Fein recalled.

Political strength may have turned Medicare into a reality, but through the years, Dr. Fein watched political paralysis thwart his hopes of turning Medicare into a steppingstone toward universal health care.

“The political process seems unwilling to address the problems that beset us until they become critical and complex,” he wrote in the 1980s. “It is as if simple questions need no answer and complex questions have no acceptable answer. Short of crisis, we need not act, yet in a crisis, we are often paralyzed.”

At Harvard, he was sought out by politicians, pundits, and reporters at every turn in the health care debate, from the failed Clinton plan in the 1990s through President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which fell short of Dr. Fein’s vision of building on his achievement of helping to create Medicare.

“That was a passion that endured for his whole professional life,” said Dr. Fein’s son Alan of Cambridge, who added that “his greatest success was in that field and his greatest disappointment was in that field. We never had national health care.”

In a 1982 New England Journal of Medicine article, Dr. Fein lamented that the language of the marketplace had invaded health care and was poised to shift perceptions, as physicians became “providers” and their patients “consumers.”

“Medical care is not measured solely by the number of fractures set, hernias repaired, and appendixes removed, but also by the amount of comfort, concern, and compassion provided,” he wrote. “I want physicians — as well as more Americans — to speak the language that addresses the unfinished agenda of equity and decency in the distribution of health care.”

Allan Brandt, a history of medicine professor at Harvard Medical School who formerly was dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, said that “unlike some academics, there was absolutely no separation between his values and the programs and policies and social issues that he advocated for.”

Dr. Fein, he added, “had an incredible moral compass. In that sense he set a standard that colleagues like myself try to emulate.”

Born in New York City, Rashi Fein was the older of two intellectually accomplished brothers. Leonard Fein of Watertown, who died in August, was an activist and influential writer about Jews and Judaism.

Their father was a Jewish history professor whose work brought the family to several cities in the United States and Canada. Their mother taught in elementary schools.

Dr. Fein graduated from high school in Bridgeport, Conn., where he also studied briefly at a community college before serving in the Navy at the end of World War II.

After the war, he went to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, from which he graduated with a bachelor’s in economics in 1948 and a doctorate in political economy in 1956. By then he was teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In 1949, he married Ruth Breslau, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins whom he met through Zionist youth organizations.

The family moved to the Washington, D.C., area when Dr. Fein joined the Kennedy administration, and remained when he became a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. In 1968, he took a faculty position at Harvard. For several years, beginning in the mid-1990s, he also chaired the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s National Advisory Committee for its Scholars in Health Policy Research program.

He wrote several books, beginning with “Economics of Mental Illness” in 1958 and concluding with “Learning Lessons: Medicine, Economics, and Public Policy,” in 2010.

“As a teacher he was a source of rock-solid advice in addition to sharing his scholarship,” said Joel Kavet, who had been a student of Dr. Fein’s and spent much of his career as a health administrator and health care planner. “A lot of us who had the benefit of his guidance look back now and among us the comment overall is, ‘He made a difference in my professional life.’ ”

A service was held Wednesday for Dr. Fein, who in addition to his wife, Ruth, and his son, Alan, leaves another son, Michael of Newton; a daughter, Karen of Sandwich; and four grandchildren.

“Someone said to me, ‘The thing about your dad is he was fair,’ ” Michael said. “I thought about that and, aside from his accomplishments and the things he worked on and had done in his life, he was concerned about fairness in the world. Fairness specifically in health care, but he was also very fair in his personal dealings with people.”

Dr. Fein, he said, skillfully mixed intellect with a common touch.

“He made information that was very important, but sometimes very complex, accessible to a variety of audiences in a variety of ways, and across generations as well,” Karen said. “He was good at telling a story in a way that lots of different people could hear it.”

Her father, she added, “was a humble man. We all have egos, but his was minimal at best. For anyone to spend most of his life so passionately trying to make a difference, I think that’s to be lauded.”

Carbon Capture and Storage in the Bakken Shale 

This is a follow up to my article on Carbon Capture and Storage from Monday, consider it the epilogue or post script. I was researching on the Bakken Shale when I had one of those face palm moments. The Bakken is a massive reservoir of oil that stretches from Southern Alberta across Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada to North Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana.

The geology and geography of the regions are similar, the southern prairies in Canada are badlands, arid desert areas from the Rockies to the Dakotas. These are prehistoric regions whose ancient face is for all to see, hoodoos which contain fossils, and thousand year old painting on stone indigenous art, an area that once held oceans, until what is the Pacific Northwest crashed into North America creating the Rockies and folding the earth under the prairies.  The Northern parts of the US states affected are a similar geological and geographic formation. 

The map below shows the extent of the Bakken, the area outlined is the potential Bakken field, the Shale is that area in Saskatchewan yet to be developed, while it is being rapidly developed in North Dakota.,  There is also an Alberta Bakken field which is awaiting development as much as the field in Saskatchewan is.

Last week  Saskatchewan Power announced it was about to put the first North American carbon capture and storage (sequestration is such a mouthful) unit online at its coal fired power plant in the middle of the Bakken Shale.

Since Carbon Capture and Storage is used as a form of fracking by injecting the CO2 into the fractures and depleted oil beds in conventional fields, its use in the Bakken would increase oil

production of this bituminous oil, a form of oil not much different from its oilsands counterpart in Northern Alberta and Saskatchewan.

While we know that CO2 Capture and Storage is used for Enhanced Oil Production (EOP) in old wells, it makes sense for Sask Power to look at getting its final product into the Bakken fields. It  has less bad press than other forms of Fracking have. And don't be fooled by the name  CCS as it is known, full title being CCS for EOP. In this case it would be fracking with CO2 in the Bakken to get the oil out.

With man made CO2 the cost for injection would go down, so that the Bakken becomes easier to access with fracking by carbon dioxide, then with other methods.

WEYBURN-MIDALE CO2 STORAGE & MONITORING PROJECT
SaskPower was a sponsoring partner in the IEAGHG Weyburn-Midale CO2 Monitoring and Storage Project for more than ten years.
This research program, which began in 2000 and was completed in 2012, sought to measure, monitor and verify the CO2 being injected into two depleted oil reservoirs in southeastern Saskatchewan. Cenovus Energy (at the initial time of injection PanCanadian and later EnCana) began injecting CO2 into the Weyburn Reservoir in 2000 to enhance oil production, and Apache Canada began injecting into the Midale Reservoir in 2005.
Both operations have ensured that the injected CO2 has been kept in place; any recycled amounts that come up with the oil are re-injected along with the 8000 tonnes of new CO2 that arrive daily from the Dakota Gasification Company’s coal gasification plant in North Dakota.
Since 2000, some 22 million tonnes of CO2 have been successfully stored underground in these two reservoirs; the research program has successfully demonstrated that the CO2 remains safely underground, and in 2012 provided a publicly available Best Practices Manual to assist other jurisdictions and companies thinking of storing CO2 in similar formations.
Specific data remain confidential to paid sponsors of the Weyburn-Midale Project; however two books are available for scientists and the general public. The first highlights the initial four years of research (2000-2004) and the second is titled Best Practices for Validating CO2 Geological Storage: Observations and Guidance from the IEAGHG Weyburn-Midale CO2 Monitoring and Storage Project. This book examines crucial topics related to CO2 storage including site characterization, measurement, geomechanical and geophysical monitoring, risk assessment, wellbore integrity, and public outreach and communication

 

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF SHALE GAS EXTRACTION IN CANADA

The Expert Panel on Harnessing Science and Technology to Understand 

the Environmental Impacts of Shale Gas Extraction

Potential Health and Environmental Effects of Hydrofracking in the Williston Basin, Montana

From Baghdad to the Bakken

By Laura Gottesdiener October 1, 2014 Home from the oil wars abroad, US service members and military contractors are flocking to North Dakota’s emerging boomtown

"Fueled by advancements in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, the United States has surged past Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the number one oil- and gas-producing country in the world. And perhaps nowhere is this energy revolution more striking than in the dusty North Dakota boomtowns, popularly dubbed 'Kuwait on the Prairie.'"   

SUPPORT INDEPENDENT KURDISTAN 

AND YEZIDI AUTONOMY

Gaza bombings / killings caused you pain.. Because they are Muslim? Yet the killing of Christians, Alevites, Ezidis, Kurds in Iraq in Syria is okay because its Muslims killing / murdering /beheading / raping? ISIS does not represent Islam (I agree!) yet your silence / turning a blind eye, cherry picking which barbaric acts to raise awareness in respect of - is rather telling and extremely worrying!
UK: you were instrumental in the division of Kurdistan, the statelessness, thereafter the oppression & genocide of the Kurds- the largest ethnic minority. You came to our rescue a decade after Sadam chemically bombed us for our oil- if we find vast oil resources in Syria: would you help Kurds fight against ISIS?
TURKEY: for centuries you tried to assimilate us into Turkishness, you said Kurds never existed; that we were all one and same; brothers & sisters? You imprisoned tortured killed us for speaking our own language.. You facilitated arming ISIS, terrorist recruits entered freely into Syria via your borders.. Your hospitals treat the wounded ISIS thugs.. Now you have tanks 'watching' to ensure the safety of your country.. You ask for UN support if ISIS becomes a problem for YOU.. Because if Kurds are killed off; its one less problem?
TURKISH CITIZENS: a park in Taksim / Istanbul caused countrywide outrage last year.. A tree is worth protesting? But not a kurd.. A human?? S/he is not even worth a mention?

The hypocrisy is chilling.. KOBANE IS NOT ALONE!! Unite against ISIS! 'Where there is no reaction 

FOR ANARCHISTS KURDISTAN IS THE NEW SPANISH CIVIL WAR

Why is the world ignoring the revolutionary Kurds in Syria?

Amid the Syrian warzone a democratic experiment is being stamped into the ground by Isis. That the wider world is unaware is a scandal

• l

•                                                                                                                                                                   In 1937, my father volunteered to fight in the International Brigades in defence of the Spanish Republic. A would-be fascist coup had been temporarily halted by a worker’s uprising, spearheaded by anarchists and socialists, and in much of Spain a genuine social revolution ensued, leading to whole cities under directly democratic management, industries under worker control, and the radical empowerment of women.
  Spanish revolutionaries hoped to create a vision of a free society that the entire world might follow. Instead, world powers declared a policy of “non-intervention” and maintained a rigorous blockade on the republic, even after Hitler and Mussolini, ostensible signatories, began pouring in troops and weapons to reinforce the fascist side. The result was years of civil war that ended with the suppression of the revolution and some of a bloody century’s bloodiest massacres.
  I never thought I would, in my own lifetime, see the same thing happen again. Obviously, no historical event ever really happens twice. There are a thousand differences between what happened in Spain in 1936 and what is happening in Rojava, the three largely Kurdish provinces of northern Syria, today. But some of the similarities are so striking, and so distressing, that I feel it’s incumbent on me, as someone who grew up in a family whose politics were in many ways defined by the Spanish revolution, to say: we cannot let it end the same way again. 
• • David Graeber

MARIA GIMBUTAS WAS RIGHT

Relative gender equality' revealed at Çatalhöyük

"There was no leader, government or administrative building; men and women were equal,”

“Thanks to modern scientific techniques, we have seen that women and men were eating very similar foods, lived similar lives and worked in similar works. The same social stature was given to both men and women. We have learned that men and women were equally approached,” Hodder said. “People lived with the principle of equality in Çatalhöyük, especially considering the hierarchy that appeared in other settlements in the Middle East. This makes Çatalhöyük different.There was no leader, government or administrative building; men and women were equal,”

Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic settlement included in the 2012 UNESCO World Heritage list, has attracted thousands of academics from 22 countries to its archaeological works, set to be finished in 2018. The latest headline discoveries at the site indicate that Çatalhöyük was a place of relative gender equality, according to Stanford University Professor Ian Hodder, who is directing the excavations.

I am pleased to see that modern scientific research has borne out Maria Gimbutas thesis that this region during the neolithic was a matriarchal communism with Goddess and god worship.  Families were made up of free relations not arranged marriages or Paterfamilias marriages of cousins. it wasn't even Materfamilias. It was the free association of individuals, to the point that these polyamorous communist families revered their previous families who lived in the same house,  by living with them buried under their homes.

The team has also made important discoveries about social structure through burials at the site. “We have also seen that people who were buried under houses were not biologically relatives or members of the same family. They lived as a family but their natural parents are not the same. Those who were born in Çatalhöyük did not live with their biological parents but with others,” Hodder said. Researchers have also been studying the connections between wall paintings, sculptures and tombs, which allow researchers to develop a better understanding of daily life in the settlement. “We think that artworks were made to get in touch with the dead or to protect them,” Hodder said, stressing that Çatalhöyük’s artwork, like the many wall paintings discovered in houses, was very rich in terms of symbolism. “Another reason why Çatalhöyük is very important is that all wall paintings and objects were protected very well. When you visit Çatalhöyük and go to these houses, you can see both people and belongings of these people. It gives you the impression that your ancestors are still living with you,” he added.

Engels also made this point in the Origin of the Family  about communism being the free association of women and men with women being able to choose their companions. Such blended families as discovered would seem to bear that out. 
The anarchist ideal of free love as expressed by Emma Goldman and others also 
bears a remarkable similarity to the lives spent in Catalhoyk.


The OPUS of Marija Gimbutas

Anatomy of a Backlash: Concerning the Work of Marija Gimbutas 
Charlene Spretnak 

---30---

THE CURRENT CRISIS IN THE MIDDLE EAST 
AND THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM;  KURDISTAN

A Letter I have sent to Her Majesties Loyal Opposition in regards to the Parliamentary Debate On Air Strikes

Dear Mr. Mulcair and Mr. Dewar;

 I am a concerned Canadian who sees the current ISIL Iraq Syria strategy as flawed as do you.

Mr. Dewar you were there, you know who is fighting on the ground and who is not. It is the democratic, progressive Kurds who have overcome forty years of sectarianism to come together to fight ISIL early on, to fight them in Syria as the only opposition we should support in Syria.

They declared a unilateral ceasefire and peace negotiations with Turkey, who has refused to this date to become involved either in the Syrian conflict or the defeat of the ISIL and other Islamic Jihadists. It is the Kurds who stand alone defending embattled Yezidi, Christians, Sufis, and Shia minorities. 

The Yezidi in particular feel strongly about their autonomy in any post ISIL situation, which would only occur if we were to recognize Kurdistan and make that a condition or recognition.

There is no Iraq it is a failed country now, a century after its creation by the British after WWI. There is Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq. In effect in the last twenty years, Kurdistan has come into existence as a political, geographical, historical, economic and military fact.

After  the invasion of Iraq by the US this became even more evident in post Saddam Iraq as the Kurds controlled the North of the country where there is oil. The Shia and some Christians, and Sufi's in the South also have control of oil there.

It is the Kurds in Syria who are our natural Canadian ally, they are pluralistic, secular, social democratic, feminist, and fit Canadian valuesmore than any other group in the region.

Here is the third way, a way to effectively change the military political geographical and historic conditions in the Middle East, recognize or begin talks to recognize Kurdistan with the Kurds, to settle Kurdish and especially Yezidi refugees, to provide military aid as well as humanitarian aid to the joint armed forces of Kurdistan, the Pershmarga.

No one has made this an issue. Because of Turkey and its influence in NATO and hoped for entry into the EU, but that impacts us little we can afforded to make this effort because we are removed from those impediments.

I urge you to please consider that great debate tactic we see so little of in these Yes No debates, the alternative affirmative.

Yes we will support a humanitarian and limited mission to aid the Pershmarga specifically, the Kurds in general and begin Canadian government talks to recognize Kurdistan by giving it limited diplomatic recognition in order to show our seriousness, and to taketheir issue for independence and recognition to the UN, and other world forums during this discussion of Iraq and Syria, because  NO ONE else will.

I have advocated this for the past year in social media, it is at this late hour as we prepare for war that I write you to consider this seriously. It is unexpected, it is a win win for Canada and Kurdistan, it is historic to be the first country to recognize the Kurdish State which is doing its best to defeat the Islamic State in the Levant.

In solidarity,

Eugene Plawiuk

Edmonton East

HEY I GOT A REPLY TO MY LETTER ON KURDISTAN FROM TOM MULCAIR
OF COURSE IT IS BOILERPLATE AND TAKES NO CONSIDERATION OF POINTS I MADE
OFF MESSAGE
NDP on combat mission in Iraq
KURDISTAN

Thomas Mulcair

2:05 PM (45 minutes ago)

to me
Thank you for taking the time to get in touch regarding Canada's role in Iraq.

As you know, just four weeks after deploying Canadian Special Forces to Iraq—with no debate or vote in Parliament—Stephen Harper and his Conservative government are seeking to approve a major escalation of Canada's involvement in that war, with no clear end date.

In doing so, the Prime Minister will be sending young Canadian women and men to fight, and perhaps die, in a foreign war without answering the most basic questions on the nature and breadth of our commitment, such as:

- What are this mission's objectives and how do we define success?
- What rules of engagement are in place to prevent civilian causalities?
- How much will this mission cost?
- How many years are we willing to be embroiled in Iraq?
- How can we effectively contain ISIS without deploying substantial ground forces or expanding into Syria?
- What is our exit strategy?
- Do we have a plan to take care of our veterans after we leave Iraq?

These are not hypothetical questions. Like Iraq, Canada's mission in Afghanistan began with only a handful of Special Forces. In the end, more than 40,000 Canadian soldiers served there over 12 long years—160 would never return home, more than 1,000 were wounded, and thousands more still suffer from PTSD.

Watch my speech here http://tinyurl.com/mk9k8fs to hear more about why the NDP can't support this combat mission.

When George W. Bush gave his now infamous "Mission Accomplished” speech less than two months after his initial invasion, he arrogantly proclaimed that major combat operations in Iraq had ended. But tragically, this was only the beginning of a horrific sectarian insurgency that laid the groundwork for the crisis we see today.

While the name "ISIS” may be new to most Canadians, the group was first formed in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion and has since rebranded itself from "al-Qaeda in Iraq” to the "Mujahideen Shura Council” to "the Islamic State”—and now "the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (Syria).”

Everyone agrees that ISIS' brutal actions utterly shock the conscience, but the lessons of the past decade must not go unheeded in our response to such an evil. Simply put: there is no reason to believe that six months of aerial bombardment will succeed where more than ten years of occupation by the world's largest and most sophisticated military failed.

As author and journalist, Jeffrey Simpson, has noted: "The least that can be said for this mission is that everyone associated with it knows – or should know – that air power alone cannot win a victory, presuming the bombing powers can define 'victory'.”

Mr. Harper insists that this war will not be allowed to become a "quagmire,” but his reassurance is cold comfort given that this is precisely what we've seen in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad in April 2003. The Conservative government's own Foreign Affairs Minister—in a moment of uncharacteristic candor—acknowledged that there are "no quick fixes” in Iraq. He called the fight against ISIS, and groups like it, the struggle of a "generation.” Indeed, that may well turn out to be an understatement.

Terrorist organizations have thrived in Iraq and Syria precisely because those countries lack stable, legitimate governments capable of maintaining peace and security within their own borders. Canada's first contribution should be to leverage every diplomatic, humanitarian, and financial resource at our disposal to strengthen political institutions in both those countries and to respond to the overwhelming human tragedy unfolding on the ground.

It's often said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. That's why Canada, for its part, should be wary of any response that will further destabilize an already volatile region by alienating the very civilians we seek to protect. Peggy Mason, Canada's former UN ambassador for disarmament and special advisor to Joe Clark, has warned that: "Harper's plan to send Canadian warplanes to join the U.S.-led coalition's bombing of Iraq may just make matters worse.”

The struggle against ISIS won't end with yet another Western-led military intervention in Iraq and Syria. It will end by helping the people of Iraq and Syria build the political, institutional, and security capabilities they need to achieve lasting peace themselves. With the credibility Canada gained by rejecting the catastrophic 2003 invasion of Iraq, we are well-positioned to take a lead in this initiative and we should not squander that opportunity.

Again, thank you for your message on this important issue.

Sincerely,

Tom Mulcair, M.P. (Outremont)
Leader of the Official Opposition
New Democratic Party of Canada