Cream for the Rich

CEO Paycheck: $42,000 a day

A new analysis finds chief executives of large companies made 262 times the average worker's annual pay in 2005.

But for us common folks well tighten yer belts, regardless of the boom or bust, thats what the bosses always say.

Conference Board survey reveals that the average raise for salaried employees will be 3.5 percent.

Which may explain this; Eating too much fat? That's rich
Wealth and grease in diet go together, Statscan discovers in national survey

We can hope that they pass on sooner than later, unfortunately neither Canada nor the US (any longer) has an inheritance tax, so their ill gotten gains can go on to their obese children.

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Draft Dodgers in Dukhbour Country

This reunion of Viet Nam Draft Dodgers who came to Canada seems to have Faux News all up in arms, as well as some Blogging Tories.

Too bad, so sad. It was an illegal war, in fact it was an undeclared war.

One that until the last American left in a truly cowardly rushed, tail between their legs exit was called a 'polic action'.

Contrary to the comments on Faux News that they are coewards that some how forced others to take their place in the draft, well gee no they left in protest , the guys that cowardly avoided the draft were guys like Clinton and Bush.

Appropriately the reunion is in hippie country around Nelson B.C. where the original anti-war draft dodgers came from Russia during WWI, the Doukhbours And our tradition of harbouring draft dodgers from Imperialist regimes engaged in legal or illegal wars is one to be proud of thank you very much. On the other hand our internment of WWI draft dodgers in Canada is not.

U.S. deserter asks Canadians for support for fleeing war in Iraq

The reunion has drawn dozens of draft dodgers from Canada and the U.S. Many of the men and women remained in Canada but thousands of others returned to the U.S. and travelled back from as far as Tennessee for the event.

The reunion is being held in this West Kootenay city, where hundreds settled about 600 kilometres east of Vancouver.

Almost 50,000 Americans of draft age avoided the call in the late 1960s and early '70s by going to Canada, where for the most part they were welcomed.

Many returned after President Jimmy Carter granted an amnesty in 1977. It's believed that about half the original number chose to remain in Canada.

George McGovern, former U.S. senator and defeated presidential candidate, is the keynote speaker and will speak Saturday about the comparisons between Vietnam and the current war in Iraq.

Arun Ghandi, the grandson of Mahatma Ghandi, will speak on non-violence and the path of war resistance.

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In Our Backyard

Canada to host anti-money laundering secretariat

Good now they can keep eye on some the worst offenders; The Royal Bank, Bank of Nova Scotia/Scotia Bank, BMO, RBC and TD.


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Census Failure In Alberta

So I was wondering why I have been bombarded on the radio with Census ads telling folks to fill in their census forms. Its July and the Census was supposed end in May. And then they extended it.

And continue to for all the fine folks living in Alberta. Cause we're special. 1 in 5 Alberta Households Ignoring Census It's an Albertans libertarian distrust of the State.

Like the governments promise that its confidential or the reminder that its illegal not to participate. That rubs Albertans the wrong way, being told something is illegal and voluntary, the contradiction puts a burr under our saddles.

So like the government is going to fine you...yeah all 250,000 of us. Not likely. Nope...
Statistics Canada is considering hiring a small army of out-of-province enumerators to chase down the 250,000 Albertans who haven't filled out census forms.


See my previous Census stories.

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Frogs Croak

"It's shocking and dismaying," said Wake. "This incredibly rapid increase in the extinction of amphibians around the world is unprecedented in my lifetime." EXTINCTION CRISIS FOR AMPHIBIANS


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Keep Coulter I'll Take Paglia

The nasty work that is the flash-in-the-pan-neo-con-of-the-moment; Ann Coulter, is saved from being too much of a worry since she too shall pass. The neo-cons are selective in the rites and rituals, the traditions they embrace. Like flag, military, church, etc.No intellectual Coulter. In Coulters case she is the latest in the gaggle of replaceable right wing mouth pieces for the Republican party. Her influence is temporary, the gal with the mouth that roared, to be replaced soon by yet another outrageous mouth that roared.

The real intellectual that embraces tradition, in its true Whig form, are the
libertarian dialecticians that follow in the Rothbardian tradition. Of these I place the real intellectual bitch who challenges the left; Camille Paglia is in that tradition.The feminist lesbian that fellow feminists & lesbians love to hate. Can't get better than that.

Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae
Camille Paglia's impressive study of the development of Western Culture manages to piss off a lot of intellectuals. Feminist scholars detest Paglia's essentialist argument that women are biologically bound to "nature" by their reproductive powers. Leftists detest her support of capitalism (a la Ayn Rand), which she sees as having freed women from bondage to men. Queer theorists disdain her aligning homosexual aestheticism with some of the most tyrannical eras and arguing that gay men's idolatry of things masculine goes "against nature." Traditional conservatives hrrmmph at her trashing of the most sacred Western institutions--including Church and State--as male attempts to repress and extinguish powerful female forces.

She is never a neo-con anything despite her detractors on the left, but a classical liberal. So you won't find her in the pages of the National Review, rather she is regular contributor to Salon. She has been interviewed by Reason as well as in Playboy. Placing her in the centre of the neo-liberal univesre of Harold Bloom,as compared the othe post-structuralists and deconstructions in the Modern Languages and Cultural Studies departments.The Camille Paglia checklist


There I got to use neo-con and neo-liberal in the same paragraph exposing them as contrary terms.

Here is a taste from one of her Salon columns.

Now on to educational reform, a preoccupation of this column to which so many readers have eloquently responded. I recently finished reading "Worshipping Athena: Panathenaia and Parthenon" (University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), edited by Jenifer Neils, a book blessedly free of the poststructuralist doubletalk and hackneyed political correctness that are rampant in the humanities

This collection of essays shows what scholarly speculation can and should be -- weighing what is known against what is possible or probable. Theory is always tempered by fact, as best as the latter can be determined with evidence so ambiguous and fragmentary. This fine, patient, precise methodology is not only rarely taught these days but has been abandoned wholesale by the most prominent or rather showiest humanities professors of my generation in the elite schools -- for which they have yet to be held accountable by cultural commentators (an increasingly mundane and maleducated lot) in the major Northeastern newspapers and magazines.

My favorite essay was "Athena's Shrines and Festivals" by Noel Robertson, a professor of classics at Brock University in Ontario who has an engaging, pugnacious style of argumentation. There are countless intriguing details, such as that the six voluptuous caryatids (columns in human form) of the Erechtheum's Ionic south porch are carrying either baskets or water jars on their heads, which gracefully support the architrave. Apropos the Doric temple of Athena Parthenos ("the Virgin"), Robertson describes a nearby altar built over natural fissures in the Acropolis rock: "Liquid from the sacrifice was meant to run into the cracks -- perhaps the blood when the victim was slaughtered, perhaps the bile from the gall bladder when it was examined for omens."

Weighing Pausanias' first-hand account, Robertson proposes there was once an impressive, unroofed, walled shrine on the Acropolis that sheltered a well or basin containing seawater: "Whenever the south wind blew, it gave out a sound of waves, a marvelous sign." The fierce statue of Athena Promachos, shown armed and striding into battle, "gave the Athenians a terrible omen in the war between Antony, whom Athens favored, and Octavian, who won." According to Cassius Dio, the statue "turned round to the west and spat blood."

Robertson's etymological analysis of the strange name of Erechtheus, legendary king of Athens, reveals the agrarian ancestry of culture (which poststructuralism so misunderstands because of its blindness to nature). Erechtheus "typifies the threshing," a crucial harvest operation. His name is the noun of the verb erechthô, related to ereikô, which means to "split" or "rend" or "smash": "Its original sphere is 'cracking' or 'bruising' or 'grinding' vegetables, especially legumes." Hence erechthô means "'flail', 'thresh', as with repeated blows," and "Erechtheus" means "Thresher."

To "thresh" meant to "smite": Robertson concludes, "The prehistoric threshers who inspired the Erechtheus story were a file of men wielding sticks or some more special implement." I would appropriate this to support my theory in "Sexual Personae," inspired by passages in the early 20th century Cambridge school of anthropology, that sadomasochism, as embodied in the novels of the Marquis de Sade, the erotic poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne and today's bondage underworld, is an atavistic remnant of ancient nature-cult.

Cheeky very cheeky. See ya just can't disagree with her. I know I don't. I would call her a libertarian feminist, even if she is a classical liberal.

See my

The Monument Builders

Historical Revisionism

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Bucky Fuller

I always liked Bucky Fuller . He is another great unsung American thinker his work is overlooked after his heyday in the sixties.

His book The Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, I read it way back in my formative years as a radical, introduced the idea of pirates as independent captialists
( before I had heard of the primitive accumulation of capital) based on a free contractual association. In other words libertarians.

A short history of the Golden Age of Piracy in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the origins and role of the pirates in the class struggle on the high seas at the time

During the 'Golden Age' of piracy in the 17th and 18th centuries, crews of early proletarian rebels, dropouts from civilization, plundered the lucrative shipping lanes between Europe and America. They operated from land enclaves, free ports; 'pirate utopias' located on islands and coastlines as yet beyond the reach of civilization. From these mini-anarchies - 'temporary autonomous zones' - they launched raiding parties so successful that they created an imperial crisis, attacking British trade with the colonies, and crippling the emerging system of global exploitation, slavery and colonialism.Pirate Utopias (Do or Die)



Pirates and State-Sponsored Terrorism in Eighteenth-Century England
The political, economic, and social elites in England attempted to distinguish pirates from
imperialists during the early decades of the eighteenth-century. Only a few decades earlier, the
state appreciated the terror that pirates spread throughout the Spanish-controlled, Caribbean and
South Sea islands and settlements, but as the English began to colonize some of these territories
for themselves, they used laws, propaganda, and popular literature to vilify piracy and glorify
imperial trade and colonial occupation. However, the moral and social differences between
pirates and imperialists were much less clear. England’s rigid, hierarchical social structure
encouraged marginalized people to leave and become pirates so they might discover and foster
their “deviant” identities. Pirates were known as brutal villains, but many of them acted like
ideal English citizens by publishing their scientific observations and creating societies on board
their ships that put into practice the democratic and egalitarian ideals that were more rhetoric
than reality in the English colonies and in England itself. Many imperialists, on the other hand,
acted as pirates were believed to act: they cruelly traded slaves, greedily and selfishly exploited
natural resources for a profit, and violently exploited indigenous peoples for profit. The borders
between pirate and imperialist often blurred, and although eighteenth-century English society
considered itself democratic and free, the actions of its officials and merchants supported
cultural, social, and economic terrorism abroad as well as within England itself.

Was Bucky a libertarian as Robert Anton Wilson likes to claim? You betcha. He rebelled, like the pirates he enthused about,determined not to be a wage slave.
And Wilson modeled his character Hagbard Celine after him.


WHO WAS BUCKMINSTER FULLER, ANYWAY?
Inventor? Architect? Engineer? Philosopher? Dreamer? Genius? All or none of the above?
by Amy C. Edmondson

Thus began the fifty-six-year experiment of “guinea pig B”—for Bucky—in which “an average healthy human being” resolved to become a problem solver “on behalf of all humanity.” One can only imagine the reactions of family and friends when the thirty-twoyear-old Fuller announced this. He further determined to dispense forever with the idea of “earning a living,” which to him meant advantaging oneself at the expense of others; if he concentrated on doing what needed to be done, funding would take care of itself. He decided to devote himself, broadly, to the technology of “livingry,” as opposed to weaponry.


Also See:

The Many Headed Hydra

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Body Count In Gaza

So far the body count is 1 Live Israeli hostage = 27 Dead Palestinians

If any other country did this there would be world condemnation.Israeli strikes in Gaza claim more lives But in the case of Israel there is the usual silence, or a modest tch, tch, there, there. EU warns Israel on Gaza attacks .

I would think that overthrowing a democratically elected government with force would consititute a violation of international law. Israelis support killing of Hamas leaders

I guess not if you have America on your side. And after all they know all about overthrowing democratic elections.

But after invading Gaza with tanks, bulldozers, infantry and airforce attacks the Israeli's and their allies claim the Palestinians are to blame. Blame game.Gaza offensive:Timeline

Beat your neighbour with a stick and cry out for all to hear, "see, see, he is hitting me."



Watching Gaza: “The Genovese Syndrome”

PALESTINE: The War on Children

Letter from Palestine

Except even before the hostage taking the Occupation Forces of Israel were attacking Palestinian civilians at the beach. Israel Spinning Out of Control

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Who Ya Gonna Call

America has the solution to the North Korean Crisis.

Team America World Police It tells a crazy story wherein America has taken upon itself the role of world policeman and performs its duties with a maximum of carelessness, violence and poor planning.


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Success North Korean Style

This is a curious definition of success.....

"The successful missile test was part of a regular military exercise conducted by our military to boost our self-defence," Yonhap news agency quoted a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying on KRT state TV. Defiant North Korea vows to fire more missiles

Except the missles fell short, crashing into the sea of Japan. Strange definition of success.

But being one of the last post-Stalin autarky's perhaps this was good old capitalism at play. State capitalism that is, marketing its only export.

North Korea’s test-launch of several types of missile Wednesday was an export blitz, some experts say. Missile exports are one of Pyongyang’s few sources of hard currency since the heavily militarized nation has precious few other export industries. North Korea has been exporting Scud missiles to the Middle East and Africa for up to US$4 million a pop. Pyongyang's Missile Launch 'Was Sales Pitch'

Of course there are those who see this as a more sinister geopolitcs Kim-Jong -il style. And they wouldn't be wrong. Still the point is the same. It was a sales show.

One, if the missiles are fired directly at the U.S., it may lead to misperception on the part of Washington, and Pyongyang may be faced with an unintended situation (of a U.S. military strike). Instead, by targeting the U.S.’s greatest ally, Japan, North Korea can influence Japanese public opinion to exert pressure on the U.S. This is why the North fired but blew up mid-way the missile that can reach U.S. mainland. Although the analysis from the U.S. is that Pyongyang’s last test-launch did not succeed, it is unlikely to be a failure. Through the launch, North Korea clearly showed the U.S. it has the capability to reach U.S. mainland, and then exploded the missile at mid-stage. Pyongyang will now be watching how public opinion in Japan will be formed, and whether this will exert pressure on the U.S. to engage in direct dialogue with North Korea.[Guest Column] Kim Jong-il’s Missile Crisis Strategy

Unfortunately further tests or even the sales of missles, say to Iran, will only cause the USA to increase its military spending on Son of Star Wars; BMD.

Everett Dolman, a professor at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, said the U.S. is not in a position to protect itself from a surprise missile attack."Right now, the U.S. has an immature system capable of protecting a few locations with questionable reliability," he said. "With American military forces stretched thin in the global war on terror and funding for the services in a downward spiral, it seems unlikely that America can field a reliable defense against a North Korean missile attack in the next half decade or more. Expert: Missiles real threat to US

Of course that may be part of the clever ploy of China to allow its puppet regime to further drive the US into debt to its largest creditor. Nah.....

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