Saturday, December 08, 2007

Bali Why

Why am I not surprised?

Blogging from Bali: The Other Canada

It does not seem that the Canadian government is playing a very constructive role at this conference thus far. Here are two examples. First, Canada refuses to commit to binding targets unless all major emitters accept binding targets - a position which goes against the principle underlying the UNFCCC, which is criticized by development economists, which has attracted opposition from China and which may lead to a negotiating impasse. Second, in sessions of the compliance committee, Canada has proposed that the countries who appoint representatives to lead enquiries regarding non-compliance should be responsible for their own travel and accommodation costs. Considering that Canada is likely to be the subject of such an enquiry, this position does not appear to be anything but defensive and self-interested.
Now that Australia has signed on to the Kyoto Accord it just leaves Steve and George to do their No Kyoto Bali Roadshow; that began at the Australian APEC meeting and ended last week in Africa at the Commonwealth meeting.














Which of course is a road to nowhere.

NUSA DUA, INDONESIA and OTTAWA — Canadian Environment Minister John Baird is urging delegates to the Bali climate change meetings to avoid "the same mistakes" made at Kyoto when large emitters like China and India weren't given binding targets to reduce carbon.

Mr. Baird, who left for the conference yesterday, said that the U.S. decision not to ratify Kyoto stemmed from the fact that large developing countries weren't obliged to sign on to targets.

"Many said that one of the big reasons Kyoto wasn't ratified is that there weren't binding targets on China and India," Mr. Baird said. "Ten years later, let's not make the same mistakes we made 10 years ago."

Yesterday, Canadian delegates to the United Nations conference were reported to have called for a "comprehensive review" of the fundamental "architecture" of the Kyoto treaty, provoking new questions about its commitment to the battle against global warming.

The wide-ranging review of Kyoto should assess its structure, its architecture, its "adequacy" in achieving its goals, and its key principles, such as the idea of differentiated responsibilities for different countries, a senior federal official said yesterday.

The official made the comments at a closed-door session at the conference in Bali. No news media were allowed at the session, but his comments were verified by environmental activists who attended.

The comments were made at a session where countries were assessing Kyoto's performance. But while some countries have called for a reconsideration of the accord, the Canadian delegation seemed to be calling for a much more far-reaching review than anything contemplated by other nations, the environmentalists said.

They said a sweeping re-examination of Kyoto could be a serious distraction at a time when the world is trying to hammer out a new climate-change agreement within the next two years to replace Kyoto when it expires in 2012.


Mr. Harper Goes to Bali

..."It's clear that Canada and Japan are talking to each other and using the same language. And Japan seems completely averse to doing anything without the United States."

Another environmentalist, Steven Guilbeault of the Équiterre group, said the Canadian position has been poorly received by most other countries. "It's a poison pill, and it makes a lot of countries very nervous," he said. "Canada is saying it wants to do less. Everyone is disappointed and appalled by it."

Japan and Canada have dominated the "Fossil of the Day awards" – sarcastic prizes given every day by environmentalists to the worst-performing nation at the Bali conference.

Mr. Guilbeault, who has been attending climate-change conferences for the past 12 years, says there is widespread suspicion among other countries that Canada may be trying to derail an agreement at Bali.

"The level of distrust toward Canada is at an all-time high," he said. "In 12 years, I've never seen such distrust.".
Canada accused of undermining climate talks

Canada is taking heat from activists at the Bali climate change conference, who are accusing it of undermining negotiations.

Climate Action Network Canada claims to have a document showing that Canada's negotiators have been instructed to demand that poorer nations accept the same binding, absolute reduction targets as developed nations.

"Canada is trying to rewrite history by putting the burden of emissions reductions on poorer countries," said spokesman Steven Guilbeault on Saturday in Bali, Indonesia.

However, Environment Minister John Baird -- who arrived in Bali on Saturday -- has said this past week that any new climate change agreement must include all the world's major carbon polluters and set binding targets.

CTV's Steve Chao, reporting from Bali, told Newsnet that a top UN official said earlier this week that Canada's government is a skeptic and that it doesn't want to do anything on climate change.

The activists say that the Kyoto Protocol is built on the recognition that industrialized countries are largely responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change and must lead the reduction fight.

While emerging economies like China and India must slow their emissions growth, the activists say that they should not be subject to the same absolute reduction targets as developed countries.

Canada -- which has 0.4 per cent of the world's population yet produces two per cent of greenhouse gas emissions -- the United States and Australia are the world's biggest per capita emitters. Canada and the U.S. emitted about 20 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents per capita in 2004.

In comparison, China emitted 3.8 tonnes and India 1.2 tonnes.


Canadians should be embarrassed by the actions of our PM and his Enviro-Flunky; John Baird, not the actions of those attending the Bali conference to give voice to Canadians real views, and paying for it out of their own pockets since the Conservatives have put the kabosh on anyone but their handpicked cronies going as the official delegation.

The Stephen Harper Party on the other hand spins it this way;

Mr. Heinbecker said he didn't think it was "proper" that Mr. Dion will be in Bali and could raise a stink about the Harper government's position. "The reality is the government is the government," he said, "and the position they take is the Canadian position until such time as a different Canadian government takes a different position." (Embassy, December 5, 2007)
Once again forgetting that they are a MINORITY government representing a minority of Canadians and their politics are those of an even smaller minority.


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Right Wing Nationalism


The man who proclaimed his support for Alberta Separatism with Firewall Alberta has again shown Quebec that he can embrace their 'nationalism' for his cause of decentralizing federal power in Canada. Just as he can embrace the concept of provincial rights for Alberta.

After all the pure laine nationalism of the Quebecois, as exemplified by the ADQ, has the same reactionary base as the right wing separatism of the Reform/Alliance coalition that is the Stephen Harper Party today.
It shares a common political economic ideology of the petite bourgeois middle class and rural farmers. And in Quebec it embraces the idea of racialism and the exsitance of a 'French' race which is of course the White Race. Just as it's counter parts in Alberta share the idea of the White British Race. This is the same base that made up it's historic predecessors of the twentieth century; the fascist movement.

And what we have in Stephen Harper is an ideologue with the absolutist power of the PMO to reshape Canada in his image just as Trudeau had done before him. His agenda is to stay in power, and to recreate the Canadian State according to the vision of his pals in the Calgary School. The party is irrelevant, except as a vehicle for him to maintain his power as autarch.

Harper in Quebec to woo ADQ supporters

He also said his move to recognize the Québécois as a nation within a united Canada has proved critics who said the motion would endanger national unity wrong. “The philosophy of this government is the very antithesis of the centralizing philosophy of the successive Liberal regimes of [Pierre] Trudeau through to his successor, [Stéphane] Dion,” Mr. Harper told the gathering.


Nationalism -- A Political Religion
Rudolph Rocker


That modern nationalism in its extreme fanaticism for the state has no use for liberal ideas is readily understandable. Less clear is the assertion of its leaders that the modern state is thoroughly infected with liberal ideas and has for this reason lost its former political significance. The fact is that the political development of the last hundred and fifty years was not along the lines that liberalism had hoped for. The idea of reducing the functions of the state as much as possible and of limiting its sphere to a minimum has not been realised. The state's field of activity was not laid fallow; on the contrary, it was mightily extended and multiplied, and the so-called "liberal parties," which gradually got deeper and deeper into the current of democracy, have contributed abundantly to this end.

In reality the state has not become liberalised but only democratised Its influence on the
personal life of man has not been reduced; on the contrary it has steadily grown. There was a time when one could hold the opinion that the "sovereignty of the nation" was quite different from the sovereignty of the hereditary monarch and that, therefore, the power of the state would be awakened. While democracy was still fighting for recognition, such an opinion might have had a certain justification. But that time is long past; nothing has so confirmed the internal and external security of the state as the religious belief in the sovereignty of the nation, confirmed and sanctioned by the universal franchise. That this is also a religious concept of political nature is undeniable.

Mussolini's liberal clamour stopped immediately as soon as the dictator had the state power in Italy firmly in his hands. Viewing Mussolini's rapid change of opinion about the meaning of the state one involuntarily remembers the expression of the youthful Marx: "No man fights against freedom; at the most he fights against the freedom of others. Every kind of freedom has, therefore, always existed; sometimes as special privilege, at other times as general right."



SEE

Bernard Lord And Two Solitudes

White Multiculturalism

Denis Lebel Nationalist

Canada and Quebec Two Tory Solitudes

Bouchard's Bankrupt Nationalism

Conservatives Orwellian Language Politics


The Tories Two Solitudes

Corruption, nationalism and capitalism





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Friday, December 07, 2007

Tora, Tora, Tora


Today is the day that America used to celebrate as the Day of Infamy. Since 9/11 it has fallen into second place. To commemorate the occasion, I highly recommend watching Tora, Tora, Tora the unique American Japanese co production that is one of the best war movies ever made and the best on the attack on Pearl Harbour.

"Tora" means "tiger" in Japanese

It was denounced by the U.S. as an unprovoked preventive attack. Today it has been adopted by the U.S. as official policy of the Bush administration and is known as the right to preemptive attack.


Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Day of Infamy" Speech

To the Congress of the United States:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The United States was at peace with that Nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its Government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in Oahu, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to the Secretary of State of form reply to a recent American message. While this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or armed attack.

It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the Japanese Government had deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.

The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. Very many American lives have been lost. In addition American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.

Yesterday the Japanese Government also launched an attack against Malaya.

Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.

Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam.

Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.

Last night the Japanese attacked Midway Island.

Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our Nation.

As Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense.

Always will we remember the character of the onslaught against us.

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

I believe I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again.

Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.

With confidence in our armed forces -- with the unbounded determination of our people -- we will gain the inevitable triumph -- so help us God.

I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December seventh, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The White House, December 8, 1941

Excerpt from the 'Day of Infamy' Radio Address


SEE:

Not MacArthurs Republican Party


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Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Bernard Lord And Two Solitudes

Bernard Lord has been appointed language Czar for the Harpocrites. What is this all about you ask? Is Canada facing a language crisis? Not really but the Conservatives are. You see they don't believe in Bilingualism and Bi-Culturalism that is after all Trudeau Liberalism. So they are going to rewrite Canada's languages policies. Not based on two founding peoples but rather on recognition of Minority Rights. Which is not what Bilingualism is about. It recognizes two 'official' languages in Canada. Neither of which is a Minority language. Minority languages are those that are not French of English.

"His findings will help the government ... provide language programs and services that serve the unique needs of minority communities," Harper said
Of course in English Canada French is a minority language as English is in Quebec. However the only reason English is a minority language in Quebec it due to its provincial language laws. So what does this all mean? Well the Tories will respect French in Quebec and English in the rest of Canada. Meaning they will try and change the nature of the Official languages act to end Federal Bilingualism. That has always been a bug a boo in the bonnet of their right wing base.

Another one of their hidden agenda's coming to light.

SEE

One Free World

White Multiculturalism


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Sex, Religion and Violence

I love that as a header. In Alberta yet. It comes from this CP wire story that ran over the weekend. And it's all about right wing homophobe Craig Chandler.

An ugly internal dispute over sex, religion and violence erupted within the Alberta Conservative party Saturday, ending up with a candidate being ousted and Premier Ed Stelmach saying the reasons for the "difficult" decision must remain confidential.


Where was the violence in all this? He was denied the right to be a candidate.Sex and Religion sure I can see but 'violence'? Where's the violence? Except in over active imaginations of reporters. This was a bloodless purge of 'fightin' Craig Chandler the pugilistc politician.


Edmonton Journal Leg reporter Graham Thompson equates poor Craig Chandler with being bashed like a poor baby seal on the weekend. Well actually he equates it with the Sopranos.

It was like a Mafia hit gone wrong.

What should have been done quickly and bloodlessly months ago ended up being done messily with a baseball bat last weekend.

Officials with the Alberta Progressive Conservatives bludgeoned to death the political career of Craig Chandler in a meeting room of a Red Deer Hotel on Saturday. It took 21/2 hours for the officials to bash away at Chandler's history and credibility before rejecting him as a candidate for Calgary-Egmont.

By the time they were done, there was so much blood on the carpet it's a wonder someone didn't think to put down a plastic sheet beforehand.

Don't any of these guys watch The Sopranos?

What's so puzzling about all this isn't that the Conservatives whacked Chandler but that they took so long to do it. And I don't mean the 21/2 hours of brass knuckles behind closed doors on Saturday.

The Tories could have saved themselves and Chandler a lot of grief if months ago they had taken him aside and warned him off. They could have simply told him that he wasn't welcome because while he might be a "conservative" they didn't think there was much "progressive" about him. Furthermore, if he managed to win the nomination, Premier Ed Stelmach wasn't going to sign his papers.

Chandler says he would have appreciated the warning.

"Someone could have taken me aside and told me," he said in an e-mail exchange on Monday.

It's not as if Chandler was a stranger to the PCs. He has a long and loud history of involvement with right-wing political movements including the federal Reform party and the Alberta Alliance. He is a social conservative, at times belligerently so.

More to the point, he has a long history of making inflammatory comments, often against homosexuality. He got in trouble with the Canadian Human Rights Commission and earlier this year posted an apology on his radio program's website agreeing to "cease and desist" from saying homosexuals are "sick, diseased or mentally ill" or that they are "wicked or dangerous."


It was brought on by his stacking and winning the nomination in Calgary Egmont, but the nail in his political coffin was this Human Rights Ruling last week.

An Alberta man who has pressed for five years to get an anti-gay letter branded as hate literature won a victory Friday with a human rights commission ruling that said it broke provincial law and may even have played a role in the beating of a gay teenager.

The letter, written by Stephen Boissoin and published in the Red Deer Advocate in 2002, carried the headline "Homosexual agenda wicked" and suggested gays were as immoral as pedophiles, drug dealers and pimps.

Darren Lund, a high school teacher in Red Deer at the time, complained to the Alberta Human Rights Commission after the teenager was beaten in the city two weeks after the letter was published.

In Friday's ruling, commission panel chairwoman Lori Andreachuk said both Boissoin and the Concerned Christian Coalition to which he belonged broke provincial human rights law by likely exposing gays to hatred and contempt.

During the panel's hearing earlier this year, Boissoin testified that Craig Chandler - a former CEO of the coalition who recently won a provincial Progressive Conservative nomination in Calgary - was aware of and supported what he was doing.

Chandler posted a formal apology on the coalition's website about the letter last January after a separate complaint to the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Tory officials are scheduled to review Chandler's nomination on Saturday.



The implication in the news reporters and pundits comments was that this was the Night of the Long Knives for the Social Conservative Right Wing in the PC's. Unlikely or they would have gotten rid of Oberfuerher Ted Morton.


Some bloggers say this shows how undemocratic the internal politics of the PC political apparatus is. In fact Craig Chandler sold more memberships, and stacked the nomination meeting with his supporters. Which is far more 'undemocratic' then ousting him cause he does not meet Uncle Ed's 'progressive' standards.

The fact is he should never have been allowed to run if they were going to deny him his nomination, and that has raised the hew and cry from bloggers left and right. But what did they expect why are they surprised at this apparent anti-democratic action by a Party that has ruled this One Party State for thirty six years.

Well because Uncle Ed blundered badly. Unlike King Ralph and his advisors, who pulled folks aside in the back rooms and told them whether they could run or not, Uncle Ed made this public. He wants to send a message that the Party is for All Albertans not just the radical right. Which does not explain his making Morton a Cabinet Minister, since he too represents the radical right. And Morton has campaigned long and hard against Gay Rights, just as Chandler has.

Like I said it is being equated with a Night of the Long Knives for the radical right in the PC's. But is it?

This is all for show, Chandler is an easy target, Morton isn't. There is going to be less fall out from kicking Chandler out than there would have been if Morton hadn't been given a Cabinet position. And considering how Morton is blundering, and dependent on the next election, he may not be in cabinet next time around.

Why is everyone surprised? This is typical of political parties that dominate power in other One Party States. Just look at Putin's election victory in newly 'democratic' Russia over the weekend.


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Sunday, December 02, 2007

Gay Old Communists

I found this terrific graphic at one of my anarchist pal's blogs; Kehlkopfmikrofon . It visually reveals the sinister link between the Gay Agenda and the Communist Agenda to undermine faith, family and the American way. Say it ain't so.

Russians in love.

"Thank you comrade for rescuing me from Nazism."





















And don't forget them commies were once America's friends during WWII.



















Which of course was an embarrassment at the end of the war so they created a witch hunt to purge commies from America.

After all as we all know in Uncle Joe's Russia then and still today, just like in Bonapartist Iran, there are no gays just happy peasants and the Glorious Soldiers of the Red Army.

Just like there were no Gay men or women in America until they were discovered after WWII.


Before
Joseph McCarthy began his witch hunt began against commies in the U.S. State department he began with a witch hunt on homosexuals.

And of course homosexuals did not exist in America before they were publicly outed post WWII by McCarthy's HUAC. Because his witch hunt began before Kinsey published his studies on American Sexuality.

In fact thanks to HUAC's witch hunts the commies were some of the folks who then were active in creating the first Male Homosexual Society to fight for their rights; The Mattachine Society.

Like dear departed Harry Hay. Who was not only a communist but a Wobbly and a Pagan.

You can't hardly separate homosexuals from subversives ... A man of low morality is a menace to the government, whatever he is, and they are all tied up together. —Senator Wherry in New York Post, 1950 It may come as a surprise that the gay movement not only began in the 1950s, but that its founders were former communists and radicals. Harry Hay, who wrote the first call for a gay movement in 1948, had been a party member for 20 years, active in labor organizing and cultural work. The fact that these organizers had already spent most of their lives outside the mainstream no doubt prepared them for the risks involved in forming a gay organization. The modern gay movement in America began in Los Angeles, a city that symbolized the mobile, affluent lifestyle of Americans after the War. The Mattachine Foundation (to be distinguished from the post-1953 Mattachine Society) was formed in the winter of 1950 by a group of seven gay men gathered together by Hay. The name refers to the medieval Mattachines, troupes of men who traveled from village to village, taking up the cause of social justice in their ballads and dramas. By sharing and analyzing their personal experience as gay men, the Mattachine founders radically redefined the meaning of being gay and devised a comprehensive program for cultural and political liberation.

In 1951, Mattachine began sponsoring discussion groups. Years before women's “consciousness-raising groups,” Mattachine provided lesbians and gay men a similar opportunity to share openly, for the first time, their feelings and experiences.



So in effect the so called 'Gay Agenda' would never had come about if it weren't for Americas Uncle Joe, and his rabid anti-commie aide, Roy Cohn who was gay. Proving again that homophobia is created by self hate and denial. The Right Wing created the modern gay movement thanks to their need to repress freedom. Ironic eh?

Cohn confers with Senator McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy Hearings

Cohn confers with Senator McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy Hearings

In 1952 Joseph McCarthy appointed Roy Cohn as the chief counsel to the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate. Cohn had been recommended by Edgar Hoover, who had been impressed by his involvement in the prosecution of the Rosenburgs. Soon after Cohn was appointed, he recruited his best friend, David Schine, to become his chief consultant.

For some time opponents of McCarthy had been accumulating evidence concerning his homosexual relationships. Rumours began to circulate that Cohn and David Schine were having a sexual relationship. Although well-known by political journalists, it did not become public until Hank Greenspun published an article in the Las Vagas Sun in 25th October, 1952.



And of course these folks who fought for Gay Rights in those dark days coincidentally came from the Left Coast, home to the Beats and the rising Youth Culture that would create a new American 'Counter Culture' in the Sixties. Influenced as they were by Kinsey and the rediscovery of earlier American Radicalism that the post war social amnesia of the Witch Hunts had failed to suppress.

The Daughters of Bilitis /bɪ’li:tis/ (DOB), considered to be the first lesbian rights organization in the United States, was formed in San Francisco, California in 1955. The group was conceived as a social alternative to lesbian bars, which were considered illegal and thus subject to raids and police harassment. It lasted for fourteen years and became a tool of education for lesbians, gay men, researchers, and mental health professionals.

As the DOB gained members, their focus shifted to providing support to women who were afraid to come out, by educating them about their rights and their history. Historian Lillian Faderman declared, "Its very establishment in the midst of witch-hunts and police harassment was an act of courage, since members always had to fear that they were under attack, not because of what they did, but merely because of who they were."

Daughters of Bilitis (D.O.B.) was founded in San Francisco, California in 1955. The name of the group comes from the book Song of Bilitis by French author Pierre Louy, which contains love poems between women. In 1955, the group only had eight members. In the years to come, the group grew considerably. D.O.B. provided a place for lesbians to meet outside the bars, documented their lives, and promoted civil rights. One of their most significant achievements was a national newsletter for lesbians, titled The Ladder. They soon started other U.S. chapters, and even one in Australia. D.O.B. held their first national convention in San Francisco in 1960.

For a time, Daughters of Bilitis and The Mattachine Society joined together in "Common Cause". Some women even wrote for Mattachine's ONE Magazine. As the women's movement began to grow in the U.S., it became apparent that the men of Mattachine showed little desire to champion women's issues. At the same time, the women's movement was not particularly welcoming. The National Organization for Women (N.O.W.) was afraid that lesbian involvement would only bring further hostility from the media and a male dominated world. They called lesbians "the lavender menace" and sought to eject them from the movement.



Revisionist history continues today in America in Tom Brokaw's new book on the Sixties that overlooks the importance of the Mattachine Society and the Lesbian; Daughters of Bilitis Society and the rise of the Gay Rights Movement. .

BOOM! Voices of the Sixties: Personal Reflections on the '60s and Today shares Brokaw's perspectives and personal accounts of 1960s issues including Vietnam and the civil rights movement.

One glaring Boomer-era omission, however, was the gay rights movement. Brokaw, on a recent CNN appearance, says that the gay rights movement "came later," and he didn't intend to slight the movement by not including it.

While the impact of the movement was marked notably in the late 1960s by the Stonewall riots, its momentum and progress were due in no small part to the work of Dr. Frank Kameny, who has written a letter to Brokaw and representatives of Random House Publishing Group.

"I write with no little indignation at the total absence of any slightest allusion to the gay movement for civil equality in your book 'Boom! Voices of the Sixties'. Your book simply deletes the momentous events of that decade which led to the vastly altered and improved status of gays in our culture today."

Ralph, a man approaching his eighties and one of my regulars at the Café, had a good chuckle when I told him about my research for this story. He said "I can answer that easily. The way we met in the old days was the three B’s: Balconies, Bushes and Baths; those are all gone now." Ralph stumbled into the gay scene in the ’50s by accident; he loved watching movies, especially John Wayne westerns. He was surprised by the number of people that would congregate in the dark balconies of the theaters. Then, when someone sat right next to him in an empty row he caught on. After that, Ralph became an avid moviegoer since that was the easiest way for him to meet other men.

Camille, in his 80s, spoke about the baths in New York City. He has a fondness for that era in the mid-’60s because "it provided a sanctuary where we could truly be ourselves. It was more than a place for sex, it was our entire social outlet. We could talk openly there but we couldn’t associate with one another in the real world. It was also a pure time, before AIDS entered the gay scene and changed everything."

Some men, especially those who grew up in rural areas, also spoke about "the bushes." Tom, a colleague in the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus, described growing up queer in Ohio in the early sixties as "not fun and very lonely." He heard rumors about the city park and that became the only means he could connect with other gay men. He said it was very dangerous and he was assaulted there once.

Clearly not all men met through sexual encounters back then. Some, like Jim, 74, sought out a socio-political gathering of gay men known as the Mattachine Society. He felt that finding the courage to attend that meeting was the only way to meet other men like himself.

The next generation of men I spoke with, the men who came out in the ’70s and ’80s, had new means available: personal ads and the bars. Although gay bars have been in existence for ages, people felt safer to venture out and frequent them, given the end of police raids thanks to Stonewall and the emerging gay rights movement.
Even today America hides the truth about the history of the Gay Rights movement because it is not just the history of the counter culture but reveals that mass movements are the direct result of the Right Wing Political Agenda to suppress freedom. This is the dialectic in action. As Michael Focualt points out in his History of Sexuality; suppress human rights around sexuality and you create movements for human rights for sexual freedom.

Foucault argues that we generally read the history of sexuality
since the 18th century in terms of what Foucault calls the "repressive hypothesis." The repressive hypothesis supposes that since the rise of the bourgeoisie, any expenditure of energy on purely pleasurable activities has been frowned upon. As a result, sex has been treated as a private, practical affair that only properly takes place between a husband and a wife. Sex outside these confines is not simply prohibited, but repressed. That is, there is not simply an effort to prevent extra-marital sex, but also an effort to make it unspeakable and unthinkable. Discourse on sexuality is confined to marriage.
That repression is something the right wing in Canada, America, Israel, Russia and Iran share in common to this day. And the fight for freedom is always counter to that agenda. Which is why the fight for gay rights is the fight for human rights.


The history of the world is none other than
the progress of the consciousness of freedom.
-George Hegel, 1821




SEE

War On Satan the Sodomite

Out Of The Hogwarts Broom Closet

Ezra Says Gay Bashers Are Muslims

Outing BP

Procreation To Save The White Race

Marx on Bigamy

Polygamy is NOT Polyamoury

The Sanctity of Marriage Debate

Whose Family Values?



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Saturday, December 01, 2007

B-Day

I got a reminder notice today from the nice folks at Blog.ca.

Happy Birthday plawiuk,

today is your birthday and we wish you a day filled with your favourite things, with sunshine and laughter and lots of good cheer.

How about writing something about your birthday in your blog? Your friends and the blog.ca community will certainly be glad to hear about how you have experienced this special day.

Just log in http://www.blog.ca/login.php to write a post on your blog to your friends or to the whole blog.ca community .

We wish you all the best and are looking forward to seeing you again soon.

Your blog.ca-team

As if I would forget. And since they asked me to post about my birthday well shucks who could resist. Here is my post..... from last year; Today In History.

Modest ain't I.


And here are two versions of Beatles doing Happy Birthday. I like the second one best. Both are rockin'. The original Happy Birthday song was called Good Morning To You.


Happy Birthday - The Beatles






Birthday by the Beatles
From The White Album


,


Unfortunately these guys forgot about me;

December 1
Birthdays in History - December 1 Deaths - December 1 Events
And I didn't make the news like these folks.

Today in 1982 Michael Jackson released his autobiographical video;
" I am not like other guys' Narrated by the great Vincent Price. It created the culture of mass music videos.

And of course Birthdays are a pagan celebration.

Birthday

It is thought the large-scale celebration of birthdays in Europe began with the cult of Mithras, which originated in Persia but was spread by soldiers throughout the Roman Empire. Such celebrations were uncommon previously so practices from other contexts such as the Saturnalia were adapted for birthdays. Because many Roman soldiers took to Mithraism, it had a wide distribution and influence throughout the empire until it was supplanted by Christianity. The Jewish perspective on birthday celebrations is disputed by various rabbis.

Celebration of birthdays is not universal. Some people prefer name day celebrations, and Jehovah's Witnesses do not celebrate either, considering their origins to be pagan festivals along with Christmas and Easter

And I have that statue of Mithras at home...coincidence? I think not.

Also 'coincidentally' Mithras shares the same birthday as Jesus, as does Krishna and Horus. Since it is the Sun's Birthday.

They are after all Sun Gods.

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And don't forget today is World AIDS Day. I noticed a lot of Harpocrites were not wearing their red ribbons this week neither in the house or while doing interviews on Mike Duffy.

Hmmm.....I guess for them it is still a Gay Disease,

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, left, chats with Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay as he makes a defence spending announcement onboard HMCS Halifax in Halifax on Thursday July 5, 2007. (CP PHOTO, Andrew Vaughan)

despite evidence to the contrary.

Harper also can focus more attention on AIDS in Canada, where more than 62,000 people are living with HIV/AIDS. New infections are often among young people, especially girls 15 to 19 years old.

But at least one Cabinet Minister was wearing his Red Ribbon...why am I not surprised?

Environment Minister John Baird


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Thursday, November 29, 2007

American Proletarian Republicanism


American Exceptionalism is based upon proletarian republicanism.

In England and the Commonwealth the rule of the Master over his 'servants' was postulated under the Master Servant Act which determined the condition of the working class as one of indentured servitude. This Act remained the basis of labour law in Canada even after it was reformed. However its concept of a fiduciary responsibility of the worker to the boss remains as the basis of all labour relations law to this day in the British Commonwealth.

Because America was founded upon the concept of the free land movement, which Edwin Gibbon Wakefield so bitterly complained about, this concept was actively resisted and the liberal ideal of a free contract for labour was embraced.

It was for this reason French and Irish Canadians in the 19th Century often traveled freely to the United States to work, and then came back home to farm.
Which lead to bitter complaints from Nativist Americans about 'illegal immigrants' and 'Papists'.

It was quite common during the building of the Great Lakes Canals, the grunt work being done by Irish 'Navvies'. And it was this free movement of workers between Canada and the U.S. that led to Rebellion of 1837 in Canada where the rebels embraced the liberal ideals of American Proletarian Republicanism; free labour and free trade.


Citizenship and Justice in the Lives
and Thoughts of Nineteenth-Century American Workers

DAVID MONTGOMERY
THE TANNER LECTURES ON HUMAN VALUES
Delivered at
Brasenose College, Oxford University
April 29, May 3, and May 6, 1991

Master-and-servant legislation in Britain and the United States
shared the same roots in the fourteenth-century Statute of Laborers
and the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers. The law imposed criminal
sanctions against workers who left their employment without
the master’s permission. Those sanctions applied to wage earners
as well as to slaves, indentured servants, and apprentice.23 In
1823 the British Parliament renewed the law’s provision that abandoning
work could lead to criminal prosecution before a justice of
the peace and a sentence of up to three months at hard labor after
which the workers’ still owed their masters all contracted labor
time. The new British law did, however, eliminate the magistrates’
powers of supervision of conditions of employment, which
had been part of the Elizabethan law but had lapsed into disuse.
Daphne Simon has calculated that during the 1860s an average
of ten thousand men and women in England and Wales were
prosecuted each year for leaving their jobs, most of them agricultural
laborers, household workers, miners, and workers in potteries
and cutlery trades.

During the same decade that Britain’s Parliament renewed the
law of criminal sanctions, American courts discarded it. A book
by Robert J. Steinfeld sheds important light on this development.
Steinfeld argues that the decisive legal judgments hinged on the
claims of owners of indentured servants, and they were couched
in language that sharply contrasted the legal position of wage
earners to that of slaves. Although all northern states by 1820
either had prohibited chattel slavery or had decreed the eventual
manumission of all children subsequently born to slaves, migrants
from Europe who had contracted themselves into temporary bondage
for specified periods of time continued to arrive and be sold
in the ports of Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore. Pennsylvania,
the most common destination of such servants, had enacted
regulations of the trade by 1818, to require schooling for servants’
children and to inhibit the separation of families and the sale of
servants outside of the state.

Virtually all the new arrivals were sold to rural employers —
for labor in the fields, within households, or on construction
projects. In the northern cities the rapid disappearance of journeymen
residing within the households of employing artisans, the
substitution of day-to-day money wages for board and services provided
by the master’s wife (“found”), and the large influx of
immigrant journeymen after 1790 had undermined the eighteenth century
reliance of Philadelphia’s artisans on indentured whites
and of New York’s artisans on black slaves. In New York City,
where the owning of slaves had been remarkably equally distributed
throughout the white population before the Revolution, most
slaves of 1800 were found in households of the wealthy, and
bondspeople still employed by artisans had declined to only 18 percent
of the total. White artisans, laborers, and household workers
alike vociferously objected to being called “servants” and to physical
punishments, which they considered badges of servitude.26
Both chattel slavery in its New York and New Jersey agricultural
strongholds and indentured servitude on Pennsylvania
farms were plagued with runaways and with (often successful)
efforts of bondspeople to negotiate better terms with their owners.
Shane White’s study of the decline of slavery in New York has
produced evidence of many black slaves negotiating their way to
freedom through long-term indentures, especially after the enactment
of the gradual manumission law of 1799. Simultaneously,
popular antipathy toward bondage for white people created difficulties
for owners who sought to enforce the terms of indentures.

The troubled persistence of indentured servitude is revealed
by the experiences of Ludwig Gall — ironically a German follower
of Charles Fourier — who came to Pennsylvania in 1819 in
search of a site for a phalanstery. Gall brought eleven servants
with him. When they arrived in Philadelphia, Gall recorded:
They had scarcely come ashore when they were greeted as
countrymen by people who told them that contracts signed in
Europe were not binding here; . . . that they were free as birds
here; that they didn’t have to pay for their passage, and nobody
would think ill of them if they used the money instead
to toast the health of their European masters. . . , The last
scoundrel said: “Follow me, dear countrymen; don’t let yourselves
be wheedled away into the wilderness.”

Gall resorted to the threat of debtors’ prison to make his “companions”
repay their passage. He brought one defiant servant
before a justice of the peace and had him incarcerated, only to
discover that he (Gall) had to pay the prisoner’s maintenance,
and a late payment the second week set the man free. Although
that servant seems to have enjoyed his stay with a “boisterous
group” of three hundred debtors, who “formed their own little
republic” in the Walnut Street prison, the other ten were persuaded
by the threat of jail to indenture themselves to Gall for
three to four years, in return for Gall’s promise to pay them ten
dollars a year.

Gall’s troubles did not end there. His anxiety to rush the
servants out of the city before they learned the ways of American
life was well founded: five men whom he had boarded apart from
his family deserted him the day he left Philadelphia. The remaining
servants made Gall cut short his westward journey in Harrisburg.
Five days after his departure from Philadelphia, he wrote:
“Two of my servants deserted me between Montjoie and here
[Harrisburg]; and my choice was to continue the journey with
hired help, whom I should have to pay $2 a day, or stay here
perforce.” He rented “a pretty country house” with thirty-six tillable
acres, “precisely as much as the [one man and two women]
who remained true to me can care for with two horses.”

Alas, the remaining man did not “remain true” for long. He
soon demanded a seat at the family table and a good Sunday suit,
and on Gall’s refusal, he absconded. A neighborhood farmer
captured the man and had him jailed by the justice of the peace.
From prison the man spent six weeks negotiating the terms of his,
own release, while Gall paid his maintenance. His prison had
cards, whiskey, and in fact, growled Gall, “Methodists with a
misplaced love of humanity supplied him and his fellows with
an abundance of food and drink. . . . Indeed, everything was in
vain. In the end I had to let the fellow go.”

Just to rub it in, the “French-speaking Swiss immigrant,”
whom Gall hired in the servant’s place, threatened to drag Gall
before a justice of the peace for asking him to feed the horses on
Sunday (in violation of state Sabbath laws). Gall settled out of
court: paying the hired man half the anticipated fine.

The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company reproduced Gall’s
experience on a larger scale, when it brought some five hundred
laborers from Ireland in 1829, only to have them depart for Baltimore
or to nearby railroad construction, where higher wages were
available. Prosecution of the runaways proved prohibitively costly
to the company, and juries refused to convict the workers. Even a
federal judge who was willing to enforce Maryland’s 1715 statute
against runaway servants acknowledged that bound wage labor
was “opposed to the principles of our free institutions and . . .
repugnant to our feelings.” Both the canal laborers and those
working nearby on the new railroad struck several times during
the next six years over wages and over control of hiring, inducing
President Jackson to dispatch federal troops in 1834 to maintain
order. But no worker faced imprisonment for breach of contract,
such as they would have risked in England.

The repugnance felt by the federal judge had been written
into law by the Supreme Court of Indiana in an 1821 ruling on
The case of Mary Clark, a woman of color. The case was brought
by a free black woman in a free state, whose master made the
familiar claim that she had bound herself voluntarily in 1816 “to
serve him as an indented servant and house-maid for 20 years.”
When her suit for habeas corpus was denied by a lower court,
Clark appealed to the state supreme court, which set her free with
the resounding declaration that no one but apprentices, soldiers,
and sailors could be subjected to criminal prosecution for deserting
a job in violation of a contract. Because a contract for service
“must be performed under the eye of the master” and might “require
a number of years,” enforcement of such performance by
law “would produce a state of servitude as degrading and demoralizing
in its consequences, as a state of absolute slavery.”

Although legal commentaries soon began to quote The case of
Mary Clark, it did not appear frequently as a cited precedent until
after the Civil War. By that time the adoption by former Confederate
states of Black Codes — labor codes applying specifically
to African Americans, whose central feature was the imposition
of criminal prosecution for those who failed to sign one-year labor
contracts, or who left a job after they had signed such a contract —
had evoked a vigorous reaction, first from black southerners and
then from the federal Congress. “I hope soon to be called a citizen
of the U.S. and have the rights of a citizen,” a black soldier
from South Carolina had written in 1866. “I am opposed myself
to working under a contract. I am as much at liberty to hire a
White man to work as he to hire me, I expect to stay in the South
after I am mustered out of service, but not to hire myself to a
planter.”

The soldier’s conception of liberty was enshrined in the 1866
Civil Rights Act, and subsequently in the Fourteenth Amendment
to the Constitution, both of which nullified contractual requirements
of the Black Codes, and put in their place national principles
of “freedom of contract” to regulate both economic and
family life. The promise sought by the black soldier of equal
application of the principle of employment at will had become the
law of the land. Its practical significance for the daily lives of
southern rural workers provides an especially dramatic illustration
of the impact of democracy on the law of wage labor and will
receive close attention in my final lecture.


SEE:

Native America and the Evolution of Democracy

"Are Anarchists Thugs?"

Jamestown; The Birth of Capitalism

Jamestown; the beginning of Globalization

The Era Of The Common Man

1666 The Creation Of The World

The Many Headed Hydra

Plutocrats Rule

American Fairy Tale

Slavery in Canada

A NEW AMERICAN REVOLUTION

The Origin of American Conspiracy Theories

History of Slavery

The Truth Shall Set Ye Free

Cooperative Commonwealth=Free Market


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