An outbreak of a mysterious virus has not deterred millions of people in China from packing into crowded trains as they head home for the Lunar New Year.

Read here: http://u.afp.com/3ZXy

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A mysterious SARS-like virus has killed a third person, spread around China and reached South Korea, authorities said Monday, fuelling fears of a major outbreak as millions begin travelling for the Lunar New Year in humanity's biggest migration.

UPDATE SIX DEATHS SO FAR

Read more: http://u.afp.com/3Zn8

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A mysterious SARS-like virus is spreading around China, fuelling fears of a major outbreak.

The new coronavirus strain was first discovered in Wuhan. The central city, with 11 million inhabitants, serves as a major transport hub, including during the annual Lunar New Year holiday which begins later this week and sees hundreds of millions of Chinese people travel across the country to visit family.

Full story: http://u.afp.com/3ZWL

Serena Williams voiced concern over pollution from bushfire smoke at the Australian Open, saying that lung problems in the past could make her more vulnerable.

Read here: http://u.afp.com/3ZBT

One of five sick and starving lions held at a park in Khartoum, Sudan, has died.

A campaign under the hashtag #SudanAnimalRescue calling for help to save the lions is growing.

Full story: http://u.afp.com/3Z6p

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Sudanese citizens and activists have launched a social media campaign to save five lions from starvation at the Al-Qureshi park in an upscale district of the capital Khartoum.

"I was shaken when I saw these lions at the park... their bones are protruding from the skin," wrote Osman Salih on Facebook as he launched an online campaign under the slogan #Sudananimalrescue

African lions are classified as a "vulnerable" species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Their population dropped 43% between 1993 and 2014, with only around 20,000 alive today.

Full storyt: http://u.afp.com/3Zmh

  

A malnourished lioness sits in her cage at the Al-Qureshi park in the Sudanese capital Khartoum on January 19, 2020. Sudanese citizens and activists have launched a social media campaign to save five lions from starvation after complaints that they were not receiving their daily quota of meat. ASHRAF SHAZLY

A movement to save a group of malnourished and mistreated lions in Sudan has gone global. The hashtag #sudananimalrescue began trending over the weekend after photos emerged showing the lions at Khartoum's Al-Qureshi Park.

Activist Osman Salih posted images of the big cats on Saturday, writing in a Facebook post that "seeing these animals caged and be treated this way made my blood boil."

Some of the lions were mere skin and bones, while others appeared to have untreated conditions such as wounds on their faces. One lion is believed to have died on Monday, according to Salih

"I regret to inform you that the sick female lion has died," Salih said in a post. "The other female is getting better and the male is OK."

An official confirmed the news of the lion's death to AFP. Park officials blamed Sudan's economic crisis for the lions' poor treatment and say they have gone weeks without the proper amount of food and medication. Some lions are believed to have lost more than two-thirds of their body weight.

A group of activists came to the park on Saturday after seeing Salih's social media post. Salih suggests bringing food directly to the lions rather than donating to Al-Qureshi.

According to the World Wildlife Foundation, African lions are a vulnerable species, with just 23,000 remaining. Their numbers have plummeted 40% over the last three generations, WWF claims.

Protest-themed Lunar New Year fairs spring up across Hong Kong to raise money and morale for the city's pro-democracy movement.

Full story: http://u.afp.com/3Z6z

The Devil Is A Woman

Say I have heard that before....I came across this linked to my post on Satan. Lucifer is a woman, or perhaps a divine androgen according to Albert Pike.

IS Satan Really a Woman?
Stunning new evidence says the Prince of Darkness may be a Princess
By Mike Foster

Bonn, Germany-Is Satan really a woman? That intriguing question was
posed at a recent theological conference here-and surprisingly, more
than a dozen TOP BIBLICAL SCHOLARS who were gathered together at the
international event agreed that the Evil One is indeed FEMALE!
“Lucifer has many characteristics usually considered feminine and is
usually depicted consistently in the Scriptures as a manipulative,
sensual, and alluring,” says Rev.Werner Priebe, a leading Lutheran
minister from Hamburg whose lecture entitled "The Devil is a Woman”
sparked the discussion.

“What’s more, eyewitness evidence drawn from encounters with the
Devil over the centuries clearly indicates that the so-called Prince
of Darkness is in fact a princess.”

The Old Testament never explicitly identifies Satan as a male...
“As shocking as this may sound, the so-called war in heaven between
G-d and Lucifer may have simply been the start of the battle of the
sexes.”

Most of our images come from Hollywood movies…
But Rev.Priebe says the image is all wrong and offers several pieces
of evidence for hid theory:

1. The OT NEVER specifies Lucifer’s gender.”In Genesis, the Devil is
referred to as the serpent and in Job, as Satan.The terms “he” and
“him” are not used,”notes the minister.

2. In recently completed translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Satan
is repeatedly called”SHE”, and the “Temptress.”This proves that the
early Jews and Christians understood that Lucifer was a FEMALE,”
says the Rev.Priebe.”The confusion must have developed in latter
centuries."

The Mass Strike

I have often called for the General Strike, today I must say that this has failed because of its specificity to a particular class action rather than a mass action. Thus in light of the mass protests currently occurring both in the Middle East and in Europe we need the call for the Mass Strike, of all citizens, not just a General Strike of the employed.

Class Consciousness in the Mass Consumer Culture of Advanced Capitalist society see itself as the Middle Class not working class.

The mass strike is the first natural, impulsive form of every great revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and the more highly developed the antagonism is between capital and labour, the more effective and decisive must mass strikes become. The chief form of previous bourgeois revolutions, the fight at the barricades, the open conflict with the armed power of the state, is in the revolution today only the culminating point, only a moment on the process of the proletarian mass struggle. And therewith in the new form of the revolution there is reached that civilising and mitigating of the class struggle which was prophesied by the opportunists of German social democracy – the Bernsteins, Davids, etc. It is true that these men saw the desired civilising and mitigating of the class struggle in the light of petty bourgeois democratic illusions – they believed that the class struggle would shrink to an exclusively parliamentary contest and that street fighting would simply be done away with. History has found the solution in a deeper and finer fashion: in the advent of revolutionary mass strikes, which, of course, in no way replaces brutal street fights or renders them unnecessary, but which reduces them to a moment in the long period of political struggle, and which at the same time unites with the revolutionary period and enormous cultural work in the most exact sense of the words: the material and intellectual elevation of the whole working class through the “civilising” of the barbaric forms of capitalist exploitation.

CONAN THE UKRAINIAN

STUDENT 1981 September  via @internetarchive

BLAST FROM THE PAST A BOOK REVIEW BY
EUGENE PLAWIUK

#CONAN THE #UKRAINIAN
By Way of An Introduction

The Internet Archive can be a terrible place or a great place depending on what is preserved there. In my case a number of articles and publications I have done in print and on the net have been preserved there apparently by some folks other than me. 

If you don't know it you should it is both a Memory Hole for archiving old internet sites since the beginning of Internet time including BBS times (Beginner Basic Sites)*

It is also the repository for digitized manuscripts from Microsoft and Google book projects. It includes digitized newspapers, old left wing and right wing hard to find and sometimes censored materials, for instance it has had the Anarchist Cookbook for download almost since its inception

You may have heard of it in the news because once Trump was elected POTUS they declared their intention to create a mirror site in Canada and to act as a depository in Canada for all the science records the Trump administration was ordering destroyed, following in the conservative footprints of our very own PM Harper. Now he is gone and the Natural Governing Party; the Liberals are back leading our social  democracy.

So I was searching the Internet Archive for an article of mine I know was preserved there when I came across this little gem from when I had just graduated from U of L and was working for the Department of Advanced Education and Labour under the Lougheed Government. 

STUDENT was the voice of SUSK the Ukrainian student union of ethnic Ukrainian Canadian Students, supported on campus by the Ukrainian Nationalist business association  KYK and the Catholic and Orthodox Churches Whats ironic is that this issue is one of the most Left Wing ever
and it covered the Crisis in the Ukraine and Eastern Europe from a Marxist Anarchist and Trotskyist analysis, the Left had taken over Student and SUSK.  I had been writing articles for them since the Left Wing Swing in 1979. 

I have also always been a comics fan, or as I spelled it in the article Comix, the Underground comics version of the spelling since I was kid. It is a big thing now, then it was a ghetto for nerd like science fiction, and I helped found the Edmonton Comic Arts and Science Fiction Society.  See Dr. Robert Runte's underground history of the Sci Fi community in Canada. We managed to publish two sets of fan journals, for Sci Fi and Comics which we published quarterly for two years.

This was just before I left for university, having been out of school and working since I was 16 I could apply as a mature adult student without requiring a High School diploma. It was then I began writing for Student as well as being an editor at the U of L student paper The Meliorist.

This article originates in my interest in Ukrainian history which I was doing independent research and self direct study on as part of my BA in History. This article about Conan's probable origins in the Ukraine are common knowledge now, and little disputed but such was not the case when I first published this.

                                                               --------------------------

Comics, cartoons, and comic books, are the last vestiges of the 'pulp' medium. Be they black and white or in full color, the paper they are printed on is characteristically grainy and full of cellulose chunks. Their content can range from funny animals to outer space, from true love to wizards battling dragons. In short, the subject-matter is only limited by one's imagination.

The genre of 'barbarian' comix is as old as Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan stories from the Golden Age of comix (1940s-1 950s). In the early seventies Marvel comix (the originators of Spiderman, The Fantastic Four, Captain America, etc.) launched the prototype of the adventure barbarian comic with a publication entitled Conan. It was an immediate success, mainly because of the artwork.

Conan's illustrator, Barry-Windsor Smith, introduced a new wave of seventies' art into comics while maintaining his own distinct style. Essentially, he struck upon the novel idea of creating as his main character a noble savage in a romanticized neo-classical setting. Smith stayed on for the earliest issues but later quit, because of disagreements with Marvel. He then set up his own fantasy-art workshop which is named The Studio. But Conan continued and has since spawned not only a series of imitators, but an entire genre of comics. It is not. however, the graphics but the storyline of Conan and that of a recent genre competitor, Arak the Thunderer (put out by Marvel's long-time competitor, D.C. Comics), that interests me most about this rich vein of popular literature.

Conan the Barbarian, is a Cimmerian. a mythical nationality that his author, Robert E. Howard, fabricated. In fact, Howard invented an 'alternate world' based on old myths and ancient history, populating it with Nubians, Cossacks, Ethiopian Pirates, Vikings and other peoples modelled on ancient Egyptian, Pict, Celtic and other sundry sources. Basically, the alternate world is centred in the Middle East, though it stretches from continental Europe to Mongolia and fhng of the Orient. Cimmeria is located in an area that is in the vicinity of the Crimean basin.

Significantly, some of Conan's first encounters read as if they were from a page of Ukrainian history. As a travelling mercenary in the Cossack tradition, Conan fights with Vikings from the northern regions and with alternate world Cossacks. At one point of the series, extending over several issues of the comic, Conan actually leads a group of Cossack bandits. Conan is modelled after Cro-Magnon man, but with an elevated sense of morality and principle; he robs from the rich, saves women in distress, and battles evil sorcerers.

Some of the most interesting of the stories in the Conan series have explored the dilemma that Conan faces when he encounters women mercenaries who are his fighting equals. Belit, the Pirate Queen of the Shemesh coast, and a fellow mercenary named Red Sonya are two such 'problematic' women in Conan's fantasy life. Red Sonya will not allow any man to touch her body unless he first defeats her in combat, which no man has yet proven capable of doing. The spectacle is an intriguing one: Cro-Magnon man meets Amazons who drink, fight, swear, and plot as well as he does. And how does Ukraine fit into all of this?

Well, not only is it the region from which Conan originates, but bordering countries in the alternate world border popular descriptions of Rus and prehistoric Ukraine. Of course, this is never mentioned directly, but the symbolism of Conan and the Cossacks plundering fat city merchants and fighting oppressive tyrants places Conan well within the tradition of popular 'bandit' folklore that is widespread among the Slavs. Arak the Thunderer is another interesting innovation in barbarian comics. Created by ex-Marvel writers and artists now employed by D.C. Comics, it is a newcomer on the market, its first issue having been released only two months ago. Ibwas initially previewed in another D.C. comic, Warlord #48.

In Arak the Thunderer we have a different twist, as the barbarian is an American Indian who is lost in ancient Europe. In the story we find Arak battling Vikings over amber, a gem that has very strong associations with Ukraine, where it is found in large quantities. The amber is being protected by a living dragon made of the same mineral. Add one sacrificial victim and a local priestess who speaks strangely familiar words — Volos, Kupala. Dziewanna — and we have a comic that reads like a story from the Book of Vies' In this case, however, our hero discovers that the female victim hardly needs rescuing, as she is protecting the sacred amber and controls the dragon, having tricked the Vikings and Arak into thinking otherwise. As it turns out our heroine is not just a priestess but a local goddess of the forest, who "bends tall treetops like stalks of grain!"

Although Ukrainian themes are only implied in these alternate worlds of the imagination, their presence is unmistakable No doubt, they can'probably be discovered buried within many other sources of popular culture. It just takes a critical eye to see the role of comics and other pulps in expanding the geography and the ethnicity of characters in fiction. D.C. Comics, no'doubt has discovered how popular Conan and Arak the Thunderer really are they appear appealingly different to an americanized audience Moreover, the possibility certainly exists that someday the pulps will draw upon actual events from Ukrainian history as the basis for their stories, as both its prehistoric and modern past are ideally suited to the 'barbarian-bandit' genre.

*Yes I know that BBS stands for Broadband Basic Service

CAPITALISM IS A JUNKIE

The social history of addiction is the social history of capitalism. It is the first form of consumerism that would later dominate the post WWII culture of American and European capitalism.

The fact is that capitalism is itself an opiate, in that it requires greater and greater doses of profit to continue. Each new level of profit taking gives less satisfaction than the previous. 
It is an amphetamine in that it requires faster and faster production on a mass basis in order to meet its insatiable appetite for profits. It requires faster and faster methods of accumulation in order to offset the empty feeling left as each quarterly profit increases over the last or last years.

Marx called this the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, or in short the falling rate of profit. And it is exactly the same as the drug addicts need for more in order to meet the same level of high.

I was reminded of this with the following news item

U.S. 'addicted to monetary heroin,' headed for a crash: Schiff

  CEO of Euro Pacific Capital Peter Schiff told CTV’s Canada AM on Thursday.                               “If you look at the fundamentals, if you look at the contracting labour force, the declining use of energy, the explosion of poverty in America, and income inequality, the record numbers of food stamps and disability, all the part-time jobs that are now replacing the full-time jobs that we’ve lost, all of this is consistent with a shrinking economy. But the government won’t admit it,” Schiff said.

  One authority on Junkies, the beat writer William Burroughs understood this and described it in his early novels Naked Lunch, Nova Express and the Ticket that Exploded. Capitalism produced the junkie,  the addicted personality, the hoarder, etc  as the result of mass consumption. They are the flotsam in the modern world of mass consumption. 
And they are the ultimate consumer.

 If drugs weren't forbidden in America, they would be the perfect middle-class vice. Addicts would do their work and come home to consume the huge dose of images awaiting them in the mass media. Junkies love to look at television. Billie Holiday said she knew she was going off drugs when she didn't like to watch TV. Or they'll sit and read a newspaper or magazine, and by God, read it all. I knew this old junkie in New York, and he'd go out and get a lot of newspapers and magazines and some candy bars and several packages of cigarettes and then he'd sit in his room and he'd read those newspapers and magazines right straight through. Indiscriminately. Every word. 

 Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 36, William S. Burroughs

What I found interesting is that Burroughs long considered an out there fringe writer, even more so after David Cronenberg's movie version of Naked Lunch, was compared with the Marxist Humanist; Frankfurt School for his analysis of the cultural addiction capitalism creates. And this should not be much of a surprise since they are writing in the era of the end of the greatest war humanity has ever experienced, the end of communism and the end of unregulated capitalism, in a time of technological and production advances made possible by the very same war. The Frankfurt School looked at the creation of this modern capitalist culture and its impact on the socio-psychology of human beings in much the same ways Burroughs does.

RealityStudio » “Giving Away the Basic American Rottenness”

 Both the Frankfurt School and Burroughs perceive an “ethical crisis” in western societies which was particularly manifest by the time of the Second World War. Both also see failings and weaknesses inherent in post-enlightenment republics and both reject the resurrection of old philosophical or religious traits as a solution to either of these problems. Central to the critique of the Frankfurt School is the reduction of human thought to the status of a mere “tool”. Thought is instrumentalized — “subordinated like a tool to whatever end it is expected to serve” — and the “ends” of thought are not questioned. The manifestations of this in fields of science are shown in Naked Lunch: science in Naked Lunch is always shown as something dominated by other forces and other interests, and scientific thought and practice is increasingly instrumentalized.1

It is not only the result of capitalist development that creates a market for addiction, it is the very condition of the creation of capital that results in addiction. During the earliest years of capitalism in England saw streams of disenfranchised rural labourers moving into London's working class ghettos ending up unemployed, or employed in drudgery and addicted to Gin. 

Gin being by far the worst of the alcoholic beverages consumed in this period, cheap and potent it was a newer brewing chemistry that allowed for fast produced Gin to dominate the marketplace in London over its historic rival beer. 

E W PLAWIUK 2020