Thursday, August 24, 2006

Tories Green Petro Plan

So where does the Harper Government launch its secret meetings on its Green Plan? In Alberta. And who do they invite? Big Oil and Big Business.

Tories' proposed environmental plan to include strong links to US
The Harper government is developing a major environmental plan that would involve stronger co-ordination with the United States on key aspects of air pollution and climate change policy, CanWest News Service has learned.

In a meeting with Alberta industry representatives last week, senior government officials delivered this message during an eight-slide presentation outlining the highlights of a comprehensive green plan expected to be announced next month. The officials from the office of Environment Minister Rona Ambrose and her department also discussed changes to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act to allow federal ministers to transfer powers to the provinces to enforce regulations.

''They clearly indicated this was something they were doing work on,'' said Pierre Alvarez, president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, who attended the meeting. ''It's something that we have been asking for at both the federal and provincial level for years now.''

Who don't they invite....Critics frozen out of Tory environmental briefing

The Harper Green plan is all about Greenbacks.
Tories Put Endangered Species at Risk

Allowing provinces to enforce the rules, oh please gimme a break, they don't enforce the existing rules.
Verbena for Ambrose

Nor does the Environment Minister."No Threat" to Spotted Owls in Canada, says Environment Minister

Also See:

Environment

Kyoto

Green

Oil

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CMA are Businessmen


MD group happy with CMA president Of course they are Doctors are businessmen. Real reform of Public Healthcare in Canada will only occur when they are put on salary like other healthcare workers, as I have said before.

Also See:

Healthcare

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Fighting For Democracy

So what happened to freedom of speech we are supposedly fighting for in Afghanistan, only a day after various pro-war bloggers in Canada wrote about a Canadian Forces blogger, his blog has been censored by the Canadian Military. So much for democracy.

Matt In AfghanistanThe life of an undergrad in a very big desert can be officially listesd as MIA thanks to censorship by the Canadian Military brass. Click on it and see for yourself.

Kinda reminds me of this 'democratically elected' guy
who is allowed to Blog but bans others from blogging.




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Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Kenney is A Funny Guy

Meanwhile, Conservative government spokesman Jason Kenney compared Hezbollah to the German Nazi party yesterday and said Canadian opposition MPs are providing political cover to the banned organization.

This is funny coming from the guy who defended Franco and Hitler in the House of Commons during the debate on the private members bill to end the declaration of Candadian Veterans of the Spanish Civil War as being illegal and not recognized as Veterans.

Mr. Jason Kenney (Calgary Southeast, Ref.): Mr. Speaker, I too am pleased to rise to speak on Motion No. 75. I wish to commend my hon. colleague from Kamloops for having brought this motion before the House even though I disagree with it in principle and will vote against it.
On the other side, it was not simply a uni-dimensional coalition of fascists supported and motivated by Adolf Hitler. Indeed the German and Italian fascists supported elements of the Phalangist cause, but there were democrats, monarchists, catholics and others who opposed the Republican cause because they saw it as an encroachment of a foreign tyrannical political movement, communism, and its threatened imposition on Spain.

As usual with right wingers Kenney sees communism as a greater threat than Fascism.

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Portrait of the Artist As Jack the Ripper


Being a heresiologist I research conspiracy theories and historical who dunnits, one of the cases that will probably never be solved is Jack the Ripper. Who is back in the news this week.

It seems that crime author Patricia Cromwell has hypothesized that Jack
was the artist Walter Sickert, and is donating her collection of Stickland paintings to the Fogg Museum....which seems an appropriately named art gallery... Her theory and her collection of painitngs is not without controversy since Sickert is a well known painter, and it is alleged that in her forensic research she destroyed one of his paintings.

Cornwell was drawn to the idea that Sickert, noted for his scenes of London life, might have been the Ripper because he painted macabre scenes and was interested in the murders.

She bought the Sickerts largely to try to prove that he was the murderer. Cornwell used DNA testing on the paintings to compare it with DNA on what were, allegedly, letters from the Ripper, but to no avail.

Among the paintings Cornwell is giving is Putana a Casa, a picture of a prostitute, that she said “resembled mortuary photographs of (Ripper victim) Catherine Eddowes and is suggestive of the mutilation to the right side of her face”.

More than 170 names have been put forward as the Ripper, including the Duke of Clarence, Montague John Druitt, a barrister who killed himself just after the last murder, and Michael Ostrog, a Russian thief.

Cornwell gives away £3m art of ‘the Ripper’

A conservator from the center traveled with Ms. Cornwell to London last October, where they viewed and scanned correspondence allegedly written by Jack the Ripper. Research on Sickert and Ripper letters was later conducted at Harvard. A spokesman for Harvard University Art Museums confirmed to the newspaper that “although no conclusions have been drawn, the Straus Center compared Sickert’s paintings and prints to the Ripper letters.”

Ms. Cornwell’s identification of Sickert, who was 28 in 1888, as Jack the Ripper has caused a storm in the art world. The theory has been vigorously rejected by Sickert specialists, including Matthew Sturgis, the author of a definitive biography of the artist.The Chronicle: Daily News Blog: Harvard to Get Paintings by Artist

Mornington Crescent nude, contre-jour is one of a series of works that Sickert painted following the murder of a prostitute in Camden Town, the rough North London neighbourhood where he lived and had a studio. It has been argued that the real subject of this work is in fact the effect of natural light. The French term contre-jour means lit from behind that is, almost producing the effect of a silhouette.

Walter SICKERT | Mornington Crescent nude, contre-jour
Enlarge



As I said it is unlikely we will ever know conclusively who Jack was.

And one my favorite writers Colin Wilson, no less a controversial literary figure, has his own theories on who Jack was. In his history of criminology and in Order of Assassins: The Psychology of Murder he points out that Jack is the first 'public' lust murder and the first serial killer, who is identified as such in the press of the day.


As Wilson describes it, Faculty X is the opposite of the normal, dulled state of consciousness. It is our potential to grasp, with an incandescent brilliance and intensity of focus, the actuality of the world, including the reality of other times and places. “Our preconceptions, our fixed ideas about ourselves,” as Wilson puts, “means that we remain unaware of this power.” We trudge along, not engaging the full power of our mental abilities.

Most of us have had similar insights, often while recovering from a bad cold. But the contrast between mental states hit Wilson like a bolt of lightening. In his recent memoir, he writes, “The basic aim of human evolution, I decided, is to achieve Faculty X.”

A few artists are able to summon Faculty X at will. But so, in rather less creative form, do psychopathic killers. For that is the stranger side of Colin Wilson’s work — the part overlooked by The Times, for example, which repeated the standard Wilsonian claim that he was a philosopher of optimism.

Cheerful as that may sound, a very large part of his work over the years has consisted of books about serial murders. They, too, are Outsiders — in revolt against “a decadent, frivolous society” that gives them no outlet for the development of Faculty X. Such an individual “feels no compunction in committing acts of violence,” as Wilson explains, “because he feels only contempt for society and its values.”

These quotations are from his book Order of Assassins: The Psychology of Murder (1972), but they might have been drawn from any of dozens of other titles. Beginning with the Jack the Ripper-sque character Austin Nunne in his first novel, Ritual in the Dark (1960), Wilson has populated his fiction with an array of what can only be called existentialist serial killers. Inside Higher Ed :: A Killing Concept

Following along Foucualts thesis on Sexuality, that sexology developed and contributed to sexual identity and identification of sexuality, including fetishes, upon the publication of texts on sexuality in the 19th century, in particular Kraft Ebbings classic work; Psychopathia Sexualis. In other words the rise of publishing, books and newspapers, created and abetted the rise of the Lust Murderer and Serial Killer of the Victorian and Edwardian world.

The Lust murderer and Serial Killer is still with us today, increasingly so, thanks to alienation of the individual in mass culture of the Metropolis. In fact what made Jack so archtypical was both the mass media and the urban culture of London. What began as a form of sexual deviance; lust crimes; lycanthropy, vampirism, and violent Sado-Masochism,became a social deviance of urban culture.

Jack wanted publicity for his crimes. This has become the modius operandi of serial killers in North America, from the Black Dahlia Case to the Zodiac Killer.

It is not the case with real lust murderers like the Ukranian Vampire, and the cannibalistic Jeffery Dahlmer whose murders were conducted without publicity.

These Jack the Ripper like serial killings are conducted not only out of misplaced passion; lust but in hopes of fame. On this Wilson and Foucualt agree, it is about Power and the Appearance of Power.

Also See:

John Mark Karr's Fantasy

Mexican Murder Cover Up?

The Real Crime In Canada

Crime Comics

Gothic



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Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Dark Matters


When is proof not proof....when it is provided by 'empty space'....like Dark Matter.
Using a host of telescopes, researchers focused on the collision between two galactic clusters. They found that most of the gravitational pull from the aftermath of the encounter comes from a relatively empty looking patch of sky, a strong suggestion that there is something more there than meets the eye.
Astronomers offer proof of unseen 'darkmatter'

Since you cannot have a nothing, or empty set, all is Aleph. א

Ok kiddies that's your math lesson for today, with just a hint of Kabbalah.

Also See

Space




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Liberal Anti-Semitism

There is a big controversy over Anti-Semitism occuring in the Liberal Blog-o-sphere. It was kicked off by Jason Cherniak, and includes a chorus made up of 'real liberals' like Warren Kinsella , Small Dead Animals, and Angry In The Great White North.

It appears that Jason is leading a blog purge of Liberal campaign workers and MP's who have dared to question Israel's actions and the Israel lobby in Canada.

Amidst all the sturm and drang over anti-semitic comments I wonder if this qualifies as being anti-semitic, by Jasons standards; "
nutbars like Jewish Women Against the Occupation."


Also See:

Israel

Lebanon

Zionism

Kinsella




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John Mark Karr's Fantasy

Having posted already about the media frenzy over JonBenet Ramasy where her family was put on trial and found guilty, now we have a similar frenzy over the fantasy confession of John Mark Karr, a pedophile who has a propensity towards studying child rape/murder cases. His confession smelled fishy from day one.

Karr had moved to Petaluma, Calif., the city that had been gripped by the 1993 abduction and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas. According to his brother Nate, by that time Karr was working on a book about men who commit sex crimes against young girls and was preoccupied with the murders of Klaas and Ramsey.The Man Who Says He Did It

Steve Janke has suggested that he was fleeing Thailand and confessed in order to avoid Thai jail. While like Steve I think his confession is less than genuine and a cover for attention, I don't think it has anything to do with avoiding Thai jail.

Child sex exploitation is a major tourism industry in Thailand
, so his being arrested for this is unlikely. Rather I think the cooperation of the Thai police was given to take heat off their failure to do anything about the child sex industry in their country
.

I think that this is his chance for fifteen minutes of fame. As someone who exploits children he is at it again using the JonBenet case for his necrophillac fantasy, knowing it would create a media frenzy getting him the fame and fortune that other child killers he studied, got. Truly this guy is one sick puppy.


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Harpers Failed Promises

King Stephen is supposedly an economist so this should come as a shocker, or not....Inflation slips in July, but GST impact is minimal yep that's a failed promise, the GST tax cut had no economic impact.....

However a Conservative goverment success is one that rewards it's friends....
Big banks expected to report solid gold earnings

Bay Street gets the cream while main street gets the manure.

Another failure is
Don't hold your breath on wait-time promises

What was that about promise made promise kept?


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Monday, August 21, 2006

Death Of The Family Store

Andrew Young the former UN Ambassador and Mayor of Atlana, apologist for NIKE and big business sweat shops in the U.S. has lost his job at Wal-Mart. For making racist comments, but the reality is that his essential point is true.....In the interview, published Thursday in The Los Angeles Sentinel, a weekly, Young said Wal-Mart should displace mom-and-pop stores in urban neighborhoods.

Capitalism essentially replaces small self employed business with large corporate monopolies. The small self employed farmer and business owner are inefficient producers, whose existence is temporary in the expanding capitalist economy. Corporate farming replaces the inefficient deficit financed family farmer, managing many farms as Archer Daniel Midlands (ADM) does. The local corner store is replaced by the big box mall store, like Wal-Mart, which pays its workers the same as small business, while taking advantage of large scale warehousing and logistics to purchase goods and distrbute them cheaply.

Andy Youngs attack on 'Jews, Korean and Arabs' is typical of some Afro-Americans conspiracy mythology, that immigrants are to blame for their problems. American Blacks have been subjected to competition for work, housing, etc. with new immigrant populations, by the American ruling class. It has allowed that Ruling Class to appeal to their former slaves as being more 'American' than the foreigners, while assimilating immigrants, especially those from Europe, as being 'Whites'.

The attack on other visible minorities such as Jews, Koreans and Arabs, is the attack on the shop keepers who service the ghettos, and who are seen by their neighbours as having some sort of unfair advantage over the indigenous American population. As if they moved there deliberately to exploit the black population, when in fact they share, and have shared the same ghetto existance.

"You see those are the people who have been overcharging us," he said of the owners of the small stores, "and they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they've ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it's Arabs."

It is racism borne of jealousy, the mistaken belief that the immigrants in the community have an advantage over the indigenous population, that is the Afro-Americans. It is nothing less than good old fashioned American nativism.
And is no less racist than the current White American nativist attacks on latino immigrants.

Also See:

Immigration


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