Wednesday, December 13, 2006

BM Bitch Slaps PM

Mr. Green Says Clean Up Your Act

The government's Clean Air Act must be beefed up if the Tories hope to win over crucial middle class voters, former prime minister Brian Mulroney says. In an interview with CBC News, Mulroney, who was recently awarded the title of the greenest prime minister in history, described the act as the beginning of a plan and said to capture the imagination of voters, it needs more work before the next election.

It needs work is an understatement, but with the help of the NDP a real Green Plan might emerge from the all parlimentary committee in February. Of course not if you have idiots like this saying Global Warming is no problem.


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Environment


Ambrose



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Company In Hell


Its an interesting coincidence (there is no such thing as a coincidence) that Augusto Pincohet and Milton Friedman passed away less than a month apart. Considering their destruction of the Chilean economy, for the sake of he Chicago schools neo-liberalism I wonder if they will meet in Dantes fourth circle of hell, Avarice.


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Chile


Left Wing Pragmatism

Latin America




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Happy Birthday Mozart


Mozart's year-long 250th birthday party is ending on a high note with the musical scores of his complete works available from Monday for the first time free on the Internet.

The International Mozart Foundation in Salzburg, Austria has put a scholarly edition of the bound volumes of Mozart's more than 600 works on a Web site.


Mozart was a Freemason. And a composer of 'popular' music for the masses.

No it ain't hip hop, but it ain't stuffy aristocratic syncophany like
Antonio Salieri produced.


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Freemasonry

Music

Freemasons


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Alcoholism Is Colonialism

Many of our urban poor in Western Canada are displaced aboriginal peoples driven to drink thanks to poverty and the wretched history of White Folks poisioning them with firewater.

One recipe used at "Fort Whoop-Up", for example, called for: (a) 26 ounces of whisky, (b) one pound of chewing tobacco, (c) one bottle of ginger (size not given, assumed to be about eight ounces), (d) a handful of red pepper, (e) a quart of molasses and believe it or not (f) a dash of red ink. Mixtures such as this became increasingly popular among the Indians, who became so addicted that they would trade all of their possessions for a cup or bottle."

Without political and economic autonomy, discriminated against for jobs, housing, etc. they are forced to drown their trail of tears in alcohol or worse. What was stolen from them over 100 years ago remains stolen, and all they are left with is the poison of colonialism.

Today the same problem exists for the San People of the Kalahari desert. The direct result of British Colonialism and its treatment of indigenous peoples in Africa and Canada, and other Commonwealth colonies.

And forget blood diamonds, all diamond production, even that now occuring in Canada's North, is on aboriginal lands. And the indigenous peoples are displaced for the profits of the big Diamond bosses. All diamonds are blood diamonds in one form or another.

Potent beer cold comfort for Bushmen

Kaudwane, Botswana - It's early afternoon in this Bushmen settlement in the Kalahari desert and everyone is drunk.

Removed from their ancestral land by the government, Botswana's Bushmen, also known as San, are unable to hunt or gather wild berries and have little else to do but drink potent fermented barley beer.

"I suffer here. I want to go home, where I know where to find plants to eat and eland to hunt," said 61-year-old Letshwao Nagayame at this bleak resettlement camp about 200km north of Botswana's capital, the smell of alcohol wafting as he speaks.

"Here all we do is drink - this beer, it will finish us."

Botswana's High Court will on Wednesday decide if Nagayame and some 1 000 other Bushmen - one of the world's last surviving hunter-gatherers - can return to the land where their ancestors speared wild game and foraged for wild plants for 20 000 years.

In one of Africa's most high-profile land disputes, the Bushmen say the government illegally forced them off protected hunting grounds in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) in the late 1990s and early 2000s to make way for diamond mining.

Botswana, a sparsely populated country next to South Africa and the world's biggest diamond producer by value, has been lauded as an African success story.

But its democratic credentials have come under scrutiny in recent years amid charges it has mistreated the Bushmen and stifled critics.

The southern African country's British colonial rulers set aside the vast reserve in central Botswana - one of the continent's biggest - as a sanctuary for the Bushmen in 1961.

Survival says De Beers, whose joint venture with the government mines the bulk of diamonds in Botswana, is eyeing the reserve for precious gems but the world's biggest diamond miner says it has no such plans.

Survival insists it does not oppose mining, but that the Bushmen must control their land.

The government has resettled about 2 000 Bushmen since the late 1990s and says all but about 24 had voluntarily left the reserve. About half of southern Africa's 100 000 surviving Bushmen live in Botswana.

See:


DeBeers versus the Bushmen






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Pour Me One

Beer from 1869 that can be guzzled

London, Dec. 10: It was brewed in the year that the Suez Canal opened, Charles Dickens embarked on one of his last literary tours and the Cutty Sark was launched in Scotland.

But the recently-discovered cache of 1869 ale should have been undrinkable, given the conventional brewing wisdom that even the best beers are supposed to last no more than a couple of decades. Beer experts, however, say the 137-year-old brew tastes “absolutely amazing”.

The Victorian beer was part of a cache of 250 vintage bottles found in the vaults of Worthington’s White Shield brewery in Burton-on-Trent.

The bottles will not be sold and have yet to be valued.

According to Steve Wellington, Worthingon White Shield’s head brewer, said: “It was always rumoured that there were some vintage beers on site but no one had bothered to taste them because it was assumed they would not be drinkable.

“Uncovering such an interesting collection is fantastic, the most exciting discovery ever made in British brewing. I assumed they would taste awful. But they had the most astonishing, complex flavours.”

The bottles were sealed with corks and wax and stored in even, cool temperatures, in the dark and placed on their side to stop the corks drying out.



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Day Light


Not since the infamous Jet Ski photo op has Stockwell Day faced such a backlash of well deserved laughter and criticism for his blog comments on Global Warming that I posted here.

Critics slam Day's tongue-in-cheek climate quip
Canada.com - 17 hours ago
OTTAWA - A senior federal Conservative cabinet minister is being compared to the fictional, stone-aged Flintstone family, after publishing a newspaper article that jokingly questions whether climate change is happening.
MP steamed by Day's blog joke 'begging for Big Al's Glacial Melt' Ottawa Citizen (subscription)
This Day gets coldGlobe and Mail


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Environment

Stockwell Day


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,


Hysteria

People who suffer from what was once called "hysteria" show altered patterns of brain activity connected to their symptoms, researchers reported Monday.

Though hysteria is now known by the kinder name "conversion disorder," its unusual features haven't changed. Sufferers have neurological symptoms, ranging from numbness in a limb to paralysis, memory loss and seizures, that cannot be traced to any known medical problem.

Conversion disorder is so named because it's thought that people "convert" a psychological distress into a physical symptom -- though it's not under their conscious control. Freud himself coined the term.

Now the new study, published in the journal Neurology, offers brain evidence that "validates" the general Freudian view of the disorder, said study co-author Dr. Anthony Feinstein of the University of Toronto in Canada.

Using brain imaging called functional MRI, he and his colleagues found that three women with conversion disorder showed an unusual pattern of brain activity related to their symptoms.

All of the women had sensory conversion disorder, which involves a loss of sensation in a limb. Each had numbness in one hand or foot that could not be traced to any physical problem.


Hysteria was dismissed in the 19th and early part of the 20th Century as a mental problem of women. Note in this article it begins speaking of 'people', but in the end all of the patients studied were 'women'.

Until Freud diagnosed it as a neurological disorder, doctors considered it a 'womans problem' , that is they dismissed it as illogical and a fantasy. The result was being women, and having a womans problem, (hysteria does not exist among men) the best way to treat it was to remove the source of the problem.

What makes women different from men, well the uterus. So they invented an incredibly nasty form of surgical torture called hysterectomy. Which they still use today, and again for dealing with what male doctors assume are womens mental illusions and delusions; menopause.


Hysterical History

"Ancient Greeks and Egyptians believed female hysteria (uppityness) was caused by a disgruntled meandering uterus, or hysteria. Hysterectomies were performed to rid hysterical women of their nomadic reproductive organs."
-- from Hysteria, "suffering uterus"

Hysteria has an ancient and notorious history. It was first diagnosed in ancient Greece. The term hysteria is a word whose root origins (hystero) entered our language from the Greek word for womb. Since Hippocrates' day women were believed to suffer from "womb furie" or "uterine displacement". The medical texts explained that the standard treatment was the manipulation of the genitals to orgasm, resulting in contractions and release of fluid from the vagina.

"The ancient Greeks accounted for the instability and mobility of physical symptoms and of attacks of emotional disturbance in women, when these were otherwise unaccountable, by a theory that the womb somehow became transplanted to different positions. This "wandering of the uterus" theory gave the name hysteria (Greek hystera, "uterus") to disease phenomena characterized by highly emotional behavior. During the Middle Ages hysteria was attributed to demonic possession and to witchcraft, which led to persecution."1

"There had always been in Western medicine since the time of Hypocrites a belief in this disease called 'hysteria', which means womb disease, that was caused by the uterus complaining about neglect. Plato tells us that the uterus is an animal within an animal and that it gets out of control and you have to appease it supposedly. The way that you did this was that you would massage the vulva which was thought to be a part of the uterus - anatomy knowledge was a little thin in these days - and you would produce a crisis of the disease, like the birthing of a fever, it was called the 'hysterical paroxysm', and there would be contractions and lubrication and then the woman would feel better for a while."
-- Rachel Maines: from an interview with Phillip Adams on Radio National's with Rachel Maines, author of The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction

Hysteria became somewhat of a paradox, believed to be caused by a lack of sexual intercourse and/or sexual gratification. This view was fostered throughout Western history by the medical establishment whose misconceptions had been passed down by the beliefs of the Church, that is, that female sexuality was "the source of all evil".

"The curse of menstruation, first inflicted upon Eve as a result of her fall from grace, came to be seen as another badge of infamy, born conspicuously by all womankind."
-- Carole Rawcliffe, Medicine & Society In Later Medieval England


The ideology of the patriarchal canon has traditionally believed women to be more susceptible to madness as a result of their sexuality. During the Victoria era women were not considered "sexual" beings. Female sexuality was thought shameful, was feared and highly misunderstood. Historically, women "suffered from a lack of sexual satisfaction" , according to Dr. Maines, because they were only supposed to be satisfied by missionary-style coitus alone. It has been proven today, through studies on sexuality that two-thirds of women do not reach orgasm by sexual intercourse alone. Yet, religious decrees and the prevailing socio-cultural taboos discouraged masturbation or "self-exploration/abuse". Masturbation was widely thought to be a sin causing afflictions just as bad or worse than "hysteria". Women had no way to find relief. Bed rest and laudanum were prescribed and foul douches, bath regimes and bland diets were recommended. All sources of mental excitement was to be avoided.

Dr John Studd - Hysterectomy

This condition is mentioned in the fourth century BC by Hippocrates but became a medical epidemic in the nineteenth century. Victorian physicians were aware of menstrual madness, hysteria, chlorosis, ovarian mania, as well as the commonplace neurasthenia. In the 1870's Maudsley[2] , the most distinguished psychiatrist of the time, wrote " . . . The monthly activity of the ovaries which marks the advent of puberty in women has a notable effect upon the mind and body; wherefore it may become an important cause of mental and physical derangement . . ." This was somehow recognised, rightly or wrongly, to be due to the ovaries and bilateral oophorecotomy - Battey's operation[3] - was performed in tens of thousands of women in North America and Britain. Longo[4] , in his brilliant essay on the decline of Battey's operation, posed the question whether it worked. Of course they had no knowledge of osteoporosis and the devastation of long-term oestrogen deficiency, therefore, on balance the operation was not helpful long-term but probably did, as was claimed, cure the "menstrual/ovarian madness". The essential logic of this operation was to remove cyclical ovarian function but happily this can now effectively be achieved by simpler medical therapy. Only in 1931 was the phrase 'premenstrual tension' introduced by Frank [5], who described 15 women with the typical symptoms of PMS as we know it. Greene and Dalton extended the definition to 'premenstrual syndrome' in 1953[6] , recognising the wider range of symptoms.

Hysterectomy Hysteria: Or…How to Hang On to Your Uterus


magine you were unlucky enough to be a menopausal woman in the mid- to late-1800s, perhaps with irregular painful periods, hot flashes and symptoms of depression. You most certainly would have been diagnosed with “hysteria,” a catchall diagnosis with a misconception at its foundation: that the uterus (Latin hystera) was the origin of women’s physical maladies and psychological “neuroses.”

The cure, then, for this distress was hysterectomy — surgical removal of the uterus, cervix and ovaries. Perfected in the 1870s, hysterectomy was eagerly adopted by doctors as a quick fix for a variety of women’s problems.

If you think that modern doctors in the late 20th century would surely have jettisoned these old-fashioned misogynist ideas, you’re wrong. At a 1971 meeting of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the prevailing attitude toward the uterus was summed up by Ralph W. White, M.D.: “It’s a useless, bleeding, symptom-producing, potential cancer-bearing organ.”

But things are better now in the 21st century, right? Think again. Hysterectomy is still the second most commonly performed surgery in the United States (after cesarean section). The most frequent recipients are women just approaching menopause, ages 40 to 44.

In 1988, the American Medical Association got curious, did a study and found that about 50 percent of the 700,000 annual U.S. hysterectomies were unnecessary. Perhaps more accurate than the AMA’s conclusion, the experience of the Hysterectomy Education and Resource Services organization reveals a much more chilling reality: Of the 110,000 women HERS has counseled and referred to board-certified gynecologists for second opinions, 98 percent of them discovered they didn’t need a hysterectomy after all! The lesson? Get a second opinion, and educate yourself about tests, such as laparoscopy and ultrasound, that can determine whether you really need a hysterectomy.

A hysterectomy is the second most common surgery among women in the United States. (The most common is cesarean section delivery.) Each year, more than 600,000 are done. One in three women in the United States has had a hysterectomy by age 60.


You're about to undergo one of the most common – and thus one of the best understood – of all inpatient procedures. Each year, in fact, about 60,000 Canadian women have a hysterectomy. Operative techniques and aftercare treatments have been perfected over the course of a century, while more recent advances in antibiotics and anesthetics have all helped, tooT he opinion of doctors may differ from practice to practice, and from country to country. Interestingly, in the U.S. about one third of all women undergo hysterectomy before they reach 65; in Sweden and in England, however, that figures drops to only 17%.


Hysterectomy hysteria - avoiding unnecessary surgery

Not so long ago, Mary (whose name has been changed), a 43-year-old librarian, agreed to have surgery to remove the fibroids in her uterus. Her doctor said be would remove the fibroids but leave her uterus and ovaries intact unless he found something "dramatic," such as cancer, which he believed she might have.

"Congratulations," the doctor told Mary just after she awoke from the anesthesia. "You don't have cancer." But what she also didn't have were her ovaries and uterus, which were removed, she says angrily, against her will.

The surgery, a hysterectomy, has left her with pain and medical expenses totaling more than $60,000. "I feel as if I've been living in the hospital," says Mary, who is now suing her doctor for malpractice. "And despite all that's happened to me, nothing serious has been done to this doctor. He's still practicing."

While Mary's situation is extreme and smacks of the involuntary sterilization inflicted on poor women of color in the South as late as the 1960's, experts estimate that every year hundreds of thousands of women undergo hysterectomies unnecessarily. According to a Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois survey of nearly 6,000 hysterectomies, one third of the operations examined were performed unnecessarily. And the July edition of Consumer Reports claims that 27 percent of all hysterectomies are unnecessary.


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Feminism

Women

Health

Freud

Psychiatry



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Elizabeth May Catholic Grrl


Elizabeth May the leader of the Green Party stuck her foot in it big time. A side comment during the London Byelection has led to much debate over the Green Party leaders position, wishy washy at best, on a womans right to choose and how she feels queasy about abortions. What folks keep forgetting is that Liz is a Catholic.

And no matter how 'progressive' she is, and considering the right wing economic policies of the Greens, and their new right wing leadership, that designation is questionable.

She is influenced by her upbringing and the Catholic teachings she embraced, no matter how 'progressive' they appear.

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Elizabeth May

Abortion




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Income Trust Payback

Conservatives, conservative pundits, and Blogging Tories have been cheering Industry Minister Maxime Bernier's autocratic decision to politically interfere directly in a CRTC decision, regarding eliminating the price caps that the two Big Telco Monopolies can charge, Telus and Bell.

How does this increase competition? It doesn't. Note the highlights in the excellent article below by Timothy LeRiche of the Edmonton Sun (note folks the right wing Edmonton Sun). It allows the big Telcos to drop their prices in areas where they are a virtual monopoly. How does that help competition? It doesn't it merely insures and increases their monopoly.

How come the BT and other conservative cheerleaders miss this point. Hello,can you say monopoly. Supposedly our Tory government and their cheerleaders in the press and blogosphere hate monopolies.What they hate is public ownership like the Wheat Board, they hate medicare, because they are State Monopolies. But they love private monopolies. Go figure.

How will this help Vonage, or the cable companies that are the real competiton to Bell and Telus. Well it won't. Will it mean lower prices for you and me, well perhaps as Telus and Bell lowball their bids to gain more market share. But as always with lowballing, it ends up after the initial honeymoon, the prices go up, and up, and up.....


Ringing in new firms?
Further federal phone deregulation could see new Alberta companies in 2007

Spring may bring new competition for phone services in Alberta as a result of federal moves yesterday, a Telus spokesman said.

The federal government said yesterday it was poised to further deregulate phone services in regions where competition is already at work.

In Alberta's urban areas, incumbent Telus already battles against the likes of Bell, Primus and Shaw.

"We've been prohibited from competing on an equal playing field with those companies," said Jim Johannsson of Telus. "We've been subject to something called a price cap regime, which means we can't modify the price we charge for local services. Whereas our competitors are free to price their services below market."

Phone service is regulated by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), and part of its mandate is to ensure consumers have affordable access to residential service.

It had put in place price ceilings and floors on how much Telus and Bell and other telephone giants could charge in markets where they controlled more than 75% of the local phone game.

Industry Minister Maxime Bernier said yesterday the Harper government intends to reverse the CRTC stance regulating local services.

"It's a positive step," said Johannsson. "Telus will be able to put its best offers forward to its best customers."

Critics have slammed the idea, warning it could drive up prices in areas where competition is weak.

But consumer groups and the small local-phone players say there is no real competition in the local phone market.

They fear that the bigger companies will simply drive down their prices in order to stave off the competition, and then raise prices.


What bugs me is that the Conservative government isengaging in direct political interference in the CRTC.

While claiming to be in the best interests of competition and consumers it is actually a kick back to the two Telco's for having been good boys and not protesting the governments plans to tax income trusts.

Both Telus and Bell were named by Finance Minister Flaherty as being one of the reasons he was forced to say Boo on Halloween to further expansion of Income Trusts in Canada. And scared the bejesus out of the marketplace with his Frankenstien like announcement that yes the Tories were about to break an election promise and TAX, yes Tax the Income Trusts.

Hey that's not just a broken promise that is a break with the very core ideology of our Neo-Con Government which is all about tax cuts. Well it was until Halloween now they are all about Tax Fairness, adopting the platform of the NDP. Anyways since that fateful day, the Tories have been doing backflips to help out the big corporations that were about to become trusts.

Not only does this interference in the market place give a big kick back to the Telcos but Multiculturalism Minister Bev Oda has given Encana, the other big corporation that was planning to become an Income Trust, a kick back.

Plans are afoot, yet not officially announced ,to move the National Portrait Gallery to Calgary, not exactly the Nations Capital except in its own mind, where it will be built as a P3 in partnership with Encana. What does Encana get for its investment, as I said here before, probably naming rights and long term leasing arrangements, which is money in their pockets.

The Conservatives are making up to the big Three Companies that were directly affected by their Income Trust announcements by putting more of your money and mine in their pockets.


See

Phone

Income Trusts

Encana

Telus

Monopoly



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Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Chuck Jones Explains It all

Thumbing through the Edmonton Sun I came across this article on pop culture icons of Christmas....

Four decades later, animated treasure's still got spirit

By BILL BRIOUX, SUN MEDIA

Why, after 40 years, do the Grinch, Charlie Brown and Rudolph stay at the top of our annual Christmas lists?

Did Christmas end in 1966?

They all premiered during my "wonder years," when I was seven, eight, nine. Back then, you believed in Santa Claus.

Are these holiday shows that won't go away just more evidence of Boomers imposing their cherished kiddie culture on future generations? Perhaps, except today's children seem just as enchanted by Rudy, Chuck and the Grinch as I ever was. Christmas might not come from a store, as the Grinch discovers, but it seems to belong to a simpler, hand-crafted age.

With all the advances in computer-generated animation, you'd think a Merry Shrek-mas would have run Rudolph and his clunky stop-motion pals out of town by now, or that The Simpsons would have supplanted Snoopy each December. Instead, eggnog and Yule log still equal analogue. There's nothing Ho-Ho-Hi-def about Christmas on TV

.Bill asks an important question why are these classic cartoons, each of which is actually only a half an hour in length, still so popular, so captivating? Well Chuck Jones the illustrator, animator, and Director of the Grinch, and many a Bugs Bunny cartoon, provided the answer back in the early 1970's.

I was a founding member of the Edmonton Science Fiction and Comic Arts Society, and early on in our existence we showed old classic Sci-Fi and Horror films; Cabinet of Dr. Calgrari, Metropolis, Nosfertatu, and classic Bugs Bunny Cartoons, etc. Stuff we had all heard and read about and never actually seen.

So we subjected Edmonton to our tastes in movies and sci fi. Anyways we lucked out and were able to book Chuck Jones to come to Edmonton and speak on the history of Cartoons, they were never called 'toons then if anything Chuck called them animations, or animated art. Emphasis on the 'art'.

The secret was revealed to us pasty faced SF geeks in awe of the Great One. Chuck brought his own collection of great old Warner Brothers Classics, Looney Toons, Bugs, the whole raft.

In a two hour lecture worth every cartoon he showed, he talked about the studio system, the gang that made the cartoons, the whole culture of animation in the fifites and sixties.

And two points stood out.

One the Warner Brothers Studio system allowed Chuck and the gang the
autonomy to make cartoons, cause Warner was clueless about their animation studios. Jim Warner actually thought they made Mickey Mouse.

Hence the wonderful parody of him in the classic Daffy Duck as the Scarlet Pumpernickel, where he presents his story line to Warner, who is a shadowy figure offstage.

Daffy and the Bugs gang, including Jones and the whole Warner Brothers animation studio, were slagging the boss on celluloid that would live forever.

This was the era of Sesame Street, of 'childrens' programing on TV, where upon liberals would put into practice the latest childhood development theories and subject us to them. Chuck hated that crap. And said so.

For Jones and the whole Bugs crew, Tex Avery, Bob Clampet, Fritz Ferleng, and the man of a thousand voices; Mel Blanc, at Warner Brothers, some of the most brilliant animators America has ever produced, the whole point of their comedy was that THEY WERE NOT WRITING FOR CHILDREN. Full stop. Period. They were writing and illustrating the comedy routines for themselves, to crack each other up, if they succeeded, the joke was put onto celluloid forever.

They were not talking down to their audience, because they were the audience!

If a joke did not crack them up it didn't go in. Thus the Studio system allowed them to produce adult humour that would live forever, because they were exiled to the back lot at Warner Brothers.

It allowed Jones and company to change our popular culture forever. We learned
the joys of classical music and Opera, surrealism in art, popular jazz, and that real comedy could have no dialouge except for;

Hello My Baby, Hello My Darling, Hello My Ragtime Gal, RRRRRIBBITT. As we learned from Michigan J. Frog.

These were Cartoons for Adults. If children understood them great, a bonus, but they were cartoons made for Adults by Adults.

And the result was generation after generation of children who learned the secret meaning behind these amazing cartoons. That the humour and meaning was layered, that it meant one thing when you were five, another when you were, ten , and another when you were twenty.

And so we watched Adult cartoons, aimed at adult cinema audiences, since Looney Toons began as a serial cartoon to introduce the main feature picture in movie theatres.

By the sixties with the advent of TV the serials were now our Saturday Afternoon cartoons. A joy to watch and learn from. Every year growing up I grasped more and more of the naunces and subtlties of these cartoons. You learned as you watched them. They were never boring, they taught you. Because they were Adult cartoons.

They did not treat the viewer as a simpleton, a child, they had no message of character development to give us, except for the character development of the cartoon characters themselves.

And they challenged us to think. Why was Peter Lorre in early Bugs cartoons, cause he was the popular character in the thirties and forties horror films that Jones and Company were parodying.

Thanks to Jones and company, we were never subjected to Kiddie Toons or animated drivel we were treated to intelligent cartoons. And we love them still.


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