Patels Panics

I got this message from Herr Werner Patels on MyBloglog account.

Please be advised that Eugene Plawiuk will be reported to the authorities for criminal libel and harassment this week. A report about this will also be sent to his union and the school he works at, since he is clearly not fit to be around children.

It appears that bi-polar blogger Patels is panicking, first he erased his offending web pages on Alberta Spectator blog where he attacked Montreal Simon and Red Tory last month, then he created a new set of multi-blog personalities called Eye On. Including Eye On Blogosphere.(aka Eye on Blogs)

What Eye on the Blogosphere is about

1. cyberbullying
2. freedom of speech
3. harassment
4. libel
5. political blogging

1. 
   

Ironically his attack on them was the result of one of his purged posts (available thanks to Google Cache) where he said this;

As I wrote here a while ago, there seems to be a trend (primarily among lefties and/or Liberals) to muzzle bloggers by slapping them with lawsuits. Funny how you never hear about conservatives suing bloggers (unless I missed something, so if you have information on such a case, please do drop me a line in the comments section below).

Ah hem, well I for one would like to report Werner for threatening to do this, I am not sure he is a conservative, but he is a whingnut. Of course his threat to me is not the first time he has said he would sue me. Or report me to my employer which he has also threatened to do to me and other bloggers in the past.

Now in the midst of his latest revisionist rewriting of the story of his cyberstalking, he has created another blog called Common Sense Musings. Which used to be his Ideas And Issues Blog. And was the original URL setting for Alberta Spectator.

Common Sense Musings provides snapshots of the world we live in. This blog is about finding common sense, or rather, an attempt to instill some common sense, as well as about ideas and the issues that matter.

Of course with multiple blog personality Werner his opinions are as far from commonsensical as one can be.

At this site he reposts his posts from his other blogs. In this particular case he has reposted his revisionist history of his cyber-stalking and blog attacks on Red Tory and Montreal Simon with a passing reference to yours truly whom he calls and extremist leftist. It is the same story he published on the weekend in his new Eye On Blogs. Which I commented on .

Unfortunately he has purged all his posts at Eye On Blogs and reposted his new sanitized version at his Common Sense Musings.

I guess he figures if he says something over and over again on various of his blogs which he sanitizes then folks will be fooled into believing he is a reasonable, rational, fellow.

He also rewrote his article on Michael Coren, at yet another of his blogs purging any reference to me. The original article was posted on the now purged Alberta Spectator, there he had linked to my original article on Coren and recognized I had blogged on this first, he gave me a H/T.

• 

  On animals, mental disease and Michael Coren

  8 days ago in Alberta Spectator · Authority: 122

  we can eat them, wear their skins, experiment on them if we can thus improve the human condition. Clearly, if there's a mentally ill individual, it's Coren, but not people who really and truly understand animals and what they're all about. Hat tip to Eugene Plawiuk for alerting me to the story. Cross-posted from A Writer's Musings Alberta Spectator

As for criminal libel there is no such a creature, there is slander and libel and it is covered in a section of the criminal code. It is not a felonious offense so it is a civil matter which is resolved through a suit in civil court.

And purging your offensive articles, will not save your ass if you are sued.

Please have your lawyers contact my lawyers;
Hungadunga, Hungadunga, Hungadunga, Hungadunga and McCormack.




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No Boom For Canadian Workers

What Time Is It?

Time For the Four Hour Day.

Employees burn while the economy booms With Canada's unemployment rate hovering at its lowest level in 30 years, you'd think all would be harmonious in the labour market. But while more of us are working, a new study from the Canadian Policy Research Networks shows many of us aren't happy with the quality of our jobs. Despite the current economic boom, real wages have increased only slightly since 1980. And it's also becoming more difficult to balance work and home life.One in five Canadians are dissatisfied in that regard, a 20 percent increase from 1990 to 2001.Working overtime is part of that equation. Almost a quarter of those questioned reported working overtime, and about half of that extra work was uncompensated. Teachers lead the way in unpaid overtime, at 34 percent. And work schedules are problematic as well. Both long work weeks and short work weeks are on the rise, meaning some workers have no time, while others are always strapped for cash.

Only one in three Canadians is ”very satisfied” at work and the country will face difficulties attracting new workers, according to a study published on Monday.

“It should be of concern that only about one-third of all workers are very satisfied with their jobs and that fewer than one in five employees are very positive about multiple dimensions of job quality,” the Canadian Policy Research Network said in its report.

“The report provides solid Canadian evidence that the nature of a job and the environment in which people work are critical to achieving employee satisfaction,” the report’s author Graham Lowe wrote.

What workers want: It's time to raise the bar

My research for a Canadian Policy Research Networks report, "21st Century Job Quality: Achieving What Canadians Want," examined dozens of job-quality measures to reach this conclusion. The biggest change since the early 1990s has been a 45-per-cent decline in unemployment. However, the hiring binge has not increased the proportion of full-time, continuing jobs.

Precarious employment persists. While more people work shorter weeks, the longer work week (more than 40 hours) has increased. Employers have been slow to adopt or offer flexible hours and schedules, something workers of all generations want. Information technology, and growing concern for the environment, should make telecommuting an easy move, but if this happens at all, it usually involves unpaid overtime on evenings and weekends. Basic benefits are being cut back, notably employer pension plans and supplementary medical insurance.

SEE:

Productivity and Wages

$63.90 Per Hour

The End Of The Leisure Society

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Curses!

It appears though that Wicca has made it into the Big Leagues in America. As in Major League Baseball. Not so strange since most sports types are superstitious and after all witchcraft and magick is commonly used in Soccer.

Garner can’t find right voodoo doll

Looking for a way to slow down Chicago Cubs ace Carlos Zambrano, Houston Astros manager Phil Garner decided to try voodoo.

“I’m confused,” Garner told Chicago’s Daily Southtown. “I went online and looked for my voodoo guy and I’m going to have to pick one and try to get it. Most of these curses are against lovers … I’ve got to find one that puts a curse on a baseball player.”

Of course there are other ways to curse a ball player.

“It wasn’t voodoo. I stayed away from the voodoo. I can’t go into the details. I’ll just have to tell you Wicca (a form of witchcraft),” Garner said to the Houston Chronicle, explaining his latest plan.

But Voodoo ain't Wicca. The former does claim on occasion to use curse magick the latter says it doesn't.


Voodoo is Black Magick, as in originating in Africa, while Wicca claims to be White Magick, as in Eurocentric.

A Witchcraft suppression bill, currently being drafted by the Mpumalanga legislature, has struck fear into the hearts of South Africa's witches, who fear the dark days of medieval witch-hunts may soon return.

The bill, leaked in June to the South African Pagan Rights Alliance (Sapara), threatens to undermine the freedoms and rights of a religious minority by criminalising and prohibiting their right to exist and practise their religion, says Sapra convener Damon Leff.

The draft, titled the Mpumalanga Witchcraft Suppression Bill 2007, states in its introduction that it is "to provide for the suppression of witchcraft in the province".

In Chapter 6 it states any person who "professes a knowledge of witchcraft or the use of charms" or "for gain pretends to exercise or use any supernatural powers, witchcraft, sorcery or enchantment" shall be guilty of an offence.
One of the major causes of the Western pagans' upset, according to Leff, is the failure of the bill to recognise the doctrinal and ethical gap between Western pagan and some forms of traditional African witchcraft.

And according to Vos, by lumping the two religions together the bill has overlooked how differently they approach the issue of ethical responsibility.

"While in rare cases (some in Mpumalanga) murder has been committed to get hold of human tissues, such as hearts and genitals for muti practices, the furthest a Western pagan would go is to collect human hair and nail clippings," he claimed.

Another serious criticism Western pagans in the country harbour is the bill's stereotyping of witches and witchcraft as being harmful and dangerous to their community.

The bill defines witchcraft as "the secret use of muti, zombies, spells, spirits, magic powers, water, mixtures, etc, by any person with the purpose of causing harm, damage, sickness to others or their property".

Leff has asked the Mpumalanga advocates to replace it with the definition: "a religio-magical occupation that employs the use of sympathetic magic, ritual, herbalism and divination".

AIDS, Witchcraft, and the Problem of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa

As an epidemic of AIDS sweeps through this part of Africa, isidliso is the name that
springs to mind amongst many in the epidemic’s path. To the extent that this occurs, the epidemic of HIV/AIDS becomes also an epidemic of witchcraft. But the implications for a witchcraft epidemic are quite different from those of a public health crisis, at least as such things are conventionally conceived in western discourses of social and political management.

In this paper I will examine some of the implications of interpreting HIV/AIDS
infection as witchcraft and ask what they might mean for the legitimacy of public power in post-apartheid South Africa. For when suspicions of witchcraft are in play in a community, problems of illness and death can transform matters of public health into questions of public power, questions relating to the identification and punishment of persons deemed responsible for bringing misfortune to the community, that is: witches.

So instead of using pins in dolls to curse his opponent perhaps Garner should have found a witch who was good at casting Lucky Mojo Spells.

Like this guy.

Wiccan Wins Lottery

Wiccan instructor Elwood "Bunky" Bartlett says a New Age book store made it possible for him to become an overnight multi-millionaire.

The Maryland accountant, who claims to hold one of four winning tickets sold for Friday night's estimated 330 million dollar Mega Millions jackpot, says he made a bargain with the multiple gods associated with his Wiccan beliefs: "You let me win the lottery and I'll teach."

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Michael Crichton Climate Change Denier

In an essay on his home page Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, compares the current debate around Climate Change with the Scientific movement for eugenics and Lysenkoism. He calls it the politicization of science. Well duh science has always been the handmaiden of the ruling class.

"Once again, the measures being urged have little basis in fact or science. Once again, groups with other agendas are hiding behind a movement that appears high-minded. Once again, claims of moral superiority are used to justify extreme actions. Once again, the fact that some people are hurt is shrugged off because an abstract cause is said to be greater than any human consequences. Once again, vague terms like sustainability and generational justice --- terms that have no agreed definition --- are employed in the service of a new crisis.

I am not arguing that global warming is the same as eugenics. But the similarities are not superficial. And I do claim that open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed. Leading scientific journals have taken strong editorial positions of the side of global warming, which, I argue, they have no business doing. Under the circumstances, any scientist who has doubts understands clearly that they will be wise to mute their expression. "

Michael Crichton© 1997-2007 Constant C Productions. All rights reserved.

However in describing those who oppose the science and politics of climate change as brave 'authentic', 'objective' scientists whose voices are being suppressed he overlooks their politics, and their political agenda. Which is not the defense of science, or even technology but of capitalism as it currently exists.

As much as Crichton is a popular author, and one who opposes attempts to patent genes, on the issue of Climate Change he ends up using the arguments of the political right who have made the eugenics argument their way of slagging feminism and the left and now those who defend the science of global warming.

What they fail to do, as does Crichton, is differentiate between the moralist reform movements of the fin de sicle 19th Century (the temperance movement) which sought to keep women in the home and those progressive movements that sought greater liberty for women. Both were precursors to modern feminism and the progressive movements for social reform. But they were politically different, and thus to confuse the two is at best poor scholarship at worst deliberate political obfustication.

In his essay Crichton ultimately sounds like that other defender of science and technology and opponent of the conspiracy theory of Climate Change; Lyndon LaRouche.

In the first half of the 20th century, eugenics in action largely meant governments sterilizing or murdering people they didn't like. (Lenin, Stalin, and Mao slaughtered even more tens of millions in the name of equality than Hitler murdered in the name of inequality. And, as Aleksandr Solzenhistyn has pointed out, the doctrine of "class origins" transformed "egalitarian" mass murder into ethnic genocide since there is no sharp line between family and race.)

Progressives, Eugenics, Women and the Minimum Wage
Stephen W. Carson

American intellectual life in the early 20th century has a dirty secret and its name is Eugenics. Alex Tabarrok points out an excellent article by Thomas C. Leonard on Protecting Family and Race: The Progressive Case for Regulating Women's Work (PDF). Leonard makes the point that Progressive support for exclusionary labor legislation for women, including the minimum wage, was based among other things on ensuring "that women could better carry out their eugenic duties as 'mothers of the race'". Though most know that eugenics had some sort of open popularity prior to the Nazis giving it a bad name, few know how thoroughly it was supported by all the "best and brightest". Here's a partial list from Leonard's paper: Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and economist Irving Fisher.

Progressives, in part for eugenic reasons, wanted to make women and other groups unemployable. Their chosen tool: the minimum wage.

...these progressives argued that minimum-wage-induced disemployment was a social benefit. Legal minimum wages and other statutory means of inducing undesirable groups to leave the labor force were, in the progressive view, a eugenic benefit.

The Progressive Case for Regulating
Women’s Work

By THOMAS C. LEONARD*

ABSTRACT. American economics came of age during the Progressive Era, a time when biological approaches to economic reform were at their high-water mark. Reform-minded economists argued that the labor force should be rid of unfit workers—whom they labeled “unemployables,” “parasites,” and the “industrial residuum”—so as to uplift superior, deserving workers. Women were also frequently classified as unemployable. Leading progressives, including women at the forefront of labor reform, justified exclusionary labor legislation for women on grounds that it would (1) protect the biologically weaker sex from the hazards of market work; (2) protect working women from the temptation of prostitution; (3) protect male heads of household from the economic competition of women; and (4) ensure that women could better carry out their eugenic duties as “mothers of the race.” What united these heterogeneous rationales was the reformers’ aim of discouraging women’s labor-force participation.

Eugenic thought crossed national borders, and it also traversed an extraordinary range of political views. Ideologically, the eugenics movement attracted reactionaries, such as Madison Grant, author The Passing of the Great Race, and key movement figures, such as Francis Galton, founder of modern eugenics, and Charles Davenport, head of the Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who can be described as social conservatives. But eugenics also won advocates of very different politics, such as Margaret Sanger, the birth control advocate who began intellectual life as a radical anarchist (a protégé of Emma Goldman), Fabian socialists such as Karl Pearson, Sidney Webb, and George Bernard Shaw, and the sui generis feminist, economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Love and Eugenics in the late Nineteenth Century
Angelique Richardson

Developed by Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton in the 1860s, and drawing on theories of evolution, eugenics looked to provide solutions both for the problems of the urban poor and for the challenge of maintaining national supremacy. Richardson shows how these theories had particular resonance for a number of intellectually and politically concerned women in the period, who firmly believed that "the women of Britain could best serve the race, the country, and their own interests through the rational selection of a reproductive partner" (p. 215). This was the view that time and again comes across in the fiction of some of the best known New Woman Authors, particularly Sarah Grand and George Egerton (although, as she shows, resistance to eugenics is an important aspect of Mona Caird's work). Richardson's achievement is to get us to recognize this fact and its implications, as well as the part played by their writings in the late-century debates between the hereditarians and the environmentalists. This is a bravely revisionist reading, which will give considerable pause for thought to all those who have enthusiastically embraced and celebrated the progressive, protofeminist aspects of the New Woman movement. One understands freshly that the resistance to romance which can be found in so many of the New Woman novelists and polemicists is less a defiant call for woman's autonomy and self-determination than a demand for rational reproduction. Richardson exposes not just the class biases, but in some cases the antihumanitarianism of these writers.

In the first volume of The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault deemed eugenics one of the ‘two great innovations in the technology of sex of the second half of the nineteenth century’. Richardson’s book is a notable aid to our understanding of the scope and importance of Foucault’s remark and the continuing significance of eugenics as a language of modernity. Much scholarly work in recent years has emphasized the pervasive anxiety about degeneration and decline characteristic of the period, in which eugenic thinking played a central part, but Richardson also shows the tremendous eugenic optimism felt by many of its enthusiasts: able to reverse Malthus’s cruel laws, eugenics promised a new and clean way to social perfection … In charting this ground, Richardson leaves us in no doubt about the class violence endemic to eugenic discourse in the period. That advocacy of eugenics was most enthusiastic within collectivist politics is now well known, but illuminated further here, especially in the final chapter on Mona Caird. Biological determinism, Richardson argues, ‘was underpinned by the paralysis of the individual’; at the heart of the eugenic project of this period is a critique of liberal individual, exemplified here by one of the book’s good men, John Stuart Mill. In her suggestive interpretation of this troubled alignment between left politics and the eugenic fantasy of state-managed human reproduction as a means to squeeze suffering out of the social body, Richardson reminds us that individualism ‘was not anathema to Marx’. Mill’s own contribution to the opposition to eugenics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is an individualism that shares with Marx a commitment to ‘autonomy, activity, true consciousness, and sociality.’

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