Sunday, February 05, 2006

Oil Can Bush

An interesting piece in the Times on Line from the UK, very funny and insightful by Andrew Sullivan. He says this about George Walkers State of the Union where he admits Americans are addicted to Oil. As the president knows from personal experience the first thing an addict must do is recognise he has a problem. The second thing he has to do is change his own behaviour. This president took five years to get to step one. Somehow I think it will be past 2025 before Americans get any further. The rest of the article which is full of dry droll English humour is damned good analysis of the political machinations around why America can't get over its addiction to oil.

Also See: George Walker Liar


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Saturday, February 04, 2006

Super Bowl Flu

On Monday morning a half million Canadians will join 1.4 million Americans with Super Bowl Flu. Mass abscenteeism occurs when folks get Super Bowl Fever which they attempt reduce through the consumption of liquids. However there are cures. Super cures for the post-game 'flu' Unfortunately they don't appear to reduce the amount of folks missing work. Even Pittsburg area students are being exempted from having to go to school early on Monday. Apparently the fever reaches its highest peak during the Super Bowl game and then the flu lasts 24 hours.

Bowl fever strikes

Getting the ball rolling Monday morning might be an XL headache for over half a million Canadians after tomorrow's Super Bowl, a Decima poll says.

About 580,000 fans -- or 5% of the full and part-time Canadian workforce over 18 -- will probably be on the injury list come Monday, according to the poll commissioned by Kronos Inc., a management company.

'BIGGEST IMPACT'

"We found that more people call in sick after a major sporting event than any other event," Kronos GM Pierre Belanger said yesterday.

"The biggest impact is on other employees who have to cover off for those missing," said Belanger, adding service and quality can go down and employers are stuck with extra costs for overtime for fill-in workers.

Other numbers from the poll:

- 7% of men call in sick while only 2% of women book off.

- 12% of those who earn $80,000 to 100,000 take the day off.

- But only 4% of those who take home $40,000 or less don't show up for work

- Albertans are most likely to call in sick with Ontarians coming in second.

'NEVER TAME'

Super Bowls "are never tame," said Mike Jeffery, owner of Bob Cajun in the Beaches and a long-suffering fan of the Seattle Seahawks who will square off against the Pittsburgh Steelers tomorrow.

"People you'd never see at a sports event show up more for the party," he said. "It ranks right up there in the top three with New Year's Eve or a gold medal hockey tilt - with our boys winning."


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Bell Slash and Burn

10,000 jobs lost at Bell Canada. Ten Thousand. Say that slowly.

Can we say that again. 10,000 jobs lost at Bell Canada.

I know the headlines say half that but you have to include the job cuts last year as well.

BCE plans spinoffs, job cuts

Between 3,000 and 4,000 jobs will be cut this year, half through attrition. The reduction amounts to about 9 per cent of Bell’s workforce, which stood at 46,200 at the end of 2005. The cuts are on top of the 5,000 positions that have been eliminated so far as part of the company’s “Galileo” cost-cutting program. BCE said the latest reduction, which the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers union condemned, yesterday, will help lead to additional savings of $700 million to $900 million annually.

Remember that when the neo-cons tell you how only the private sector creates jobs not government. And they destroy jobs and peoples lives too in this era of creative destructive capitalism.

Good old slash and burn capitalism, and of course on Monday their shareprices will rise on this good news. And the reason to cut jobs is to get cash in hand to reinvest. And its not like they suffered this year.

Solid gains were also seen at from Bell Globemedia, which owns The Globe and Mail and CTV, where revenues jumped 10 per cent to $1.6 billion in 2005.

So I guess Mike Duffy and Jane Taber will keep their jobs.

Overall, fourth-quarter revenues jumped 4.6 per cent to $5 billion, and BCE ended the year with $19.1 billion, a 4 per cent increase over 2004. Taking into account a $16 million restructuring charge, profit in the quarter was $413 million, or 44 cents a share, down slightly from $417 million, or 45 cents a share, a year earlier. The results were largely in line with analysts’ expectations.

For the year, profit was $1.89 billion, or $2.04 a share, up 24 per cent over the previous year.

Looking ahead to 2006, the company forecast a profit of $1.80 to $1.90 a share, reflecting a 14-cent cut in earnings resulting from a decrease in discount rates used to calculate long-term pension obligations.

What is the price of greed. The price is increased profits, job loses and increased gouging of consumers.

Oh and by the way for those of you living in Eastern Canada don't expect any cost savings, as consumer your prices are going up too. So much for the B.S. that competition lowers costs. Maybe for business but not for you or I.

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Dingwall Wins Entitlement

Well I wonder if like the Liberals Day Care program Stephen Harper will overturn this decision too? Doubtful if he knows anything about employment law. But then again he's the boss so he can do what he likes.

During the election Mr. Dingwall was a subject raised by the Conservatives in their TV Ads.Conservative TV ad: "Entitlements"

MESSAGE: Prime Minister Paul Martin's comment that "the Liberal party is not corrupt" is played over and over again on a tape loop, as supposedly ordinary Canadians stare at their television screens with varying forms of disgust as they're reminded of the Gomery inquiry and David Dingwall's statement that he was entitled to his entitlements.

Dingwall paid $417K in compensation
Arbitrator found in former mint chief's favour in dispute over resignation

OTTAWA (CP) — In one of its last actions before transferring power, the Liberal government has agreed to pay David Dingwall $417,780 in compensation for his dismissal as head of the Royal Canadian Mint.

Privy Council Office announced the payment Saturday following the decision of an independent arbitrator, George Adams, who concluded that Dingwall had not resigned, as the government suggested at the time, but had been fired.

Dingwall left the $277,000-a-year-job in September after a prolonged controversy about his six-figure office expense account.

A subsequent review by PricewaterhouseCoopers accounting firm concluded Dingwall’s spending was within the rules with minor discrepancies.

William Stairs, Harper’s director of communications, said he did not think the new government would contest the arbitrator’s decision.

“I don’t think we can. It was a legal arbitration between two parties.”


Nope there is nothing you can do Mr. Dingwall is entitled to his entitlements.




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Did Mittal Know This

Shocker of shockers Dofasco has announced that it has lost money. Let me repeat that Dofasco has lost money. And not just a little. Instead of posting a profit it has posted a 71% loss!

Dofasco's results dubbed `horrible'
Quarterly net profit plummets surprise 71%
Steel maker declines to give further comment
Steel maker Dofasco Inc. has reported dismal financial results 10 days after its board of directors signed a deal locking in a $5.6 billion takeover bid from Arcelor SA of Luxembourg. The Hamilton-based company earned $28.4 million, or 37 cents a share, in the fourth quarter, down 71 per cent from $96.8 million, or $1.26, a year earlier. "It's horrible," one analyst said. A consensus estimate of analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial suggested earnings of 93 cents a share, before one-time items. Dofasco's results were propped up by its iron-ore business, while steel-making operations eked out gross profits of just $9.9 million, down from $173.1 million a year earlier.

The Steelmaker which was being romanced by French and German steel interests has pulled and Enron. Arcelor the French steel company whcih bid on Dofasco sealed the deal and now Dofasco announces its lost money. Meanwhile Mittal offered to buy Arcelor, and sell off Dofasco to ThyssenKrupp for less money than Arcelor paid for it. But Mittal was going to keep the Iron Ore portion of the company which made money, and sell off the now money losing Steel factories. Interesting what did Mittal know that neither Arcelor of ThyssenKrupp knew, or for that matter Bay Street or the Dofasco investors.

And don't you just love it when Bay Street analysts underplay the shock they are experiencing with terms like 'troubling'.
Paul D'Amico, an analyst with TD Securities, said the revelation of fourth-quarter production problems was a "negative surprise." In addition, "non-operating items" reduced earnings by 11 cents per share, but no details were given on what those were or whether they have been resolved, D'Amico said, calling that "troubling."
I would say it looks like big trouble for Dofasco and again I have to ask What Did Mittal Know? It appeared last week that they had made a deal with ThyssenKrupp which is why they dropped their bid. But no-one in the market was willing to say so. But appearance is everything. And Mittal has been involved in shady deals before. See: Mittal Plays Monopoly

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Google Censoring Blogspot

Google the owner of Blogger also known as Blogspot.Com has had problems all day long and I am not the only one to suffer as the progressive porcine from Calgary made note of. Now if I was of conspiratorial mind I would say it may have had something to do with their recent deal with China and accepting online censorship. Do ya think? Maybe? Or maybe as Mr. Porcine points out its just they have gotten to big for their servers.

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Looney Toons

A follow up on my article Blasphemy is in the Eye of the Beholder

On the issue of Free Speech, Cartoons and the Muslim reaction. Here are two sides of the issue from the Canadian blogosphere both defending free speech. One from the left Those Crazy Danes and one from the right The protests are getting serious yet Canadians are sitting this out


Syrian demonstrators protest outside the burning Danish embassy in Damascus February 4, 2006. Several thousand Syrian demonstrators set the Danish embassy on fire on Saturday to protest the printing by a Danish newspaper of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. REUTERS/Khaled al-Hariri


Meanwhile in the land of the free and the first Amendment everyone is making apologies for expressions of free speech.

European cartoon stance derided in US

Leonard Downie Jr, the Washington Post's executive editor, said the paper is covering the controversy over the cartoons but not reprinting them because "the very nature of depicting Muhammad editorially is not an ambiguous question. Either you do it or you don't." "It's never a concern over reactions. It's a concern over what the Washington Post decides to publish. We're maintaining our standards." Newspapers in the United States and Canada have described the cartoons and carried pictures of readers in Europe scanning them in publications there

And why would the MSM in the U.S. and Canada defend Muslim outrage over cartoons depicting Mohammed well because they are do as I say not as I do liberals. Regardless of their political stripe. Ironically what the Washington Post fails to understand is that the depiction of any aspect of G*D or his prophets is considered Idolatry in Islam. So no more pictures of the guy in heaven with his long white beard, no pictures of Abraham, Jesus or Mohammed. None. Zip. Nada. So how far is the Washington Post really willing to go to defend their position on not running the cartoons. This is a sop and a failure to address the real issue. Muslims are free to believe whatever idiotic dogma they like they are not free to impose their views in secular society. And that is the crux of the problem.

Even the U.S. government has gotten into the act. US faults Mohammed cartoons

Republicans have expressed the same outrage over art they consider deviant and have cut funding for the arts in general as an excuse. It was Vice President Dick Cheney's wife who led the purge during the infamous attack on the National Endowment for the Arts under King George I.

At that time it was the photos of Mapplethorpe and the case of a crucifix suspended into a glass of urine that was the excuse used to attack the arts and cut funding. Mapplethorpe battle changed art world


But really that wasn't an attack on Free Speech that was just good old Republicanism in action. The right wing doesn't believe in state funded art. Funny since historically that is exactly what patronage has been. Rather the Republican regime would have art relegated to what can be sold. You know paintings of cans of Campbell soup, dogs playing poker, and black velvet art from the back of truck.

But Republicans also represent the Christian Right the so called Moral Majority, and by intruding religion into politics they like the Washington Post can't have it both ways.

Like the French editor who was sacked for reprinting the cartoons, because his paper was owned by an Egyptian (somehow that little item didn't make the news), now a Jordanian editor has faced the same retribution. He did not have the protection of Free Speech that the media in North America has.

Jordanian editor loses job after plea for reason

JORDAN - A Jordanian newspaper sacked its editor and the Government warned of legal action after he published Danish caricatures of Prophet Muhammad damned by the Muslim world. Jihad al-Momani, editor of Shihan, said he reprinted the cartoons to show readers "the extent of the Danish offence", but his editorial also questioned what sparked the Muslim uproar months after the cartoons were published in September.

The head line says it all, unlike the quisling Washington Post or the U.S. government, this Jordanian editor appealed to reason. Silly man he should know that ideology and dogma trump reason.

How will the defenders of Free Speech in North America who have denounced the European Press for publishing these cartoons now defend this injustice and attack on Free Speech in the Middle East. They can't they have allowed the Muslim outcry to overcome reason, and in their blind panic to make amends have thrown the baby out with the bath water.

In fact had they not been in such a hurry to rush to judgment, then perhaps they would have noted that even in Islam the orchestrated hate campaign against the press was denounced by Muslim Clerics including the Grand Ayatollah of Iraq. Funny that. The Grand Ayatollah being more critical than either the U.S. state department or the Washington Post.

Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani denounced the publication of the cartoons but warned that "misguided and oppressive" segments of the Muslim community were projecting "a distorted and dark image of the faith of justice, love and brotherhood "The influential religious leader said: "Enemies have exploited this... to spread their poison and revive their old hatreds with new methods and mechanisms."

Other Muslim voices have spoken out for reason as well. And not merely for false apologies based on fear of the threats.

"Muslims might have miscalculated the manner in which they handled the crisis," noted prominent Islamic scholar Abdel-Sabour Shahine, who suggested that instead of pursuing a boycott of Danish products, the Islamic world should have shown more tolerance, by focusing on promoting dialogue with the west, and educating them more about Islam. "The Qur'an ordains Muslims to engage in peaceful dialogue and use a more logical approach with those of different creeds." The prophet himself, Shahine argued, was constantly subject to offence during the first years of his prophecy in Mecca, and his reactions were so tolerant that those who initially opposed him ended up becoming Muslim."After all," said Shahine, "we'd rather have the Danes apologising out of conviction, rather than because they feel threatened."

And in case we forget all this sturm and drang is NOT about the cartoons. It was originally about Free Speech. The cartoons were the result of the fact that artists and authors in Denmark and Europe were afraid of publishing anything for fear of retaliation by fascist Islamicists.


Child's tale led to clash of cultures

· Diplomatic brush-off provoked Arab storm
· Imams toured Middle East with offending cartoons

Luke Harding in Berlin
Saturday February 4, 2006
The Guardian

It began innocuously enough. Last year the Danish writer Kare Bluitgen had been searching for someone who could illustrate his children's book about the life of the prophet Muhammad. It soon became clear, however, that nobody wanted the job, through fear of antagonising Muslim feelings about images of Muhammad.

One artist turned down the commission on the grounds that he didn't want to suffer the same grisly fate as Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film-maker stabbed to death by an Islamist fanatic. Two others also declined. "They were worried," Mr Bluitgen said, adding: "Eventually someone agreed to do it anonymously."

But along the way that issue became sidelined by the right wing. Danes march for and against Muslims The cartoons published in the right wing Danish press were part of an Anti -Muslim Anti -Islamic campaign in that country, which began last fall with comments from the Queen.

In Canada protests were neither loud nor beligerant nor violent. They defended freedom of speech. A good example that pluralism and liberalism is alive and well in Canada. They were polite, we Canadians are so damn polite, and well orchestrated.

So well orchestrated that Muslim Women and Men were seperated from each other in order to protest. Such are the Sharia laws not unlike those that oppress and discriminate against women in other religions such as fundamentalist Juadism and Christianity.

And this is a point as well, since we are making this about religion and respect, what of the respect for the human rights of individuals and in this case women which are absent from the religious dogmas of Monothiesm .


Muslims rally in Halifax over Muhammad caricatures

Last Updated Sat, 04 Feb 2006
CBC News

A crowd of about 200 Muslim protesters rallied in front of Denmark's consulate in Halifax on Saturday, angered by a Danish newspaper's publication of editorial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

The satirical depictions of the Prophet have spurred days of demonstrations throughout the Middle East and elsewhere by Muslims, who were offended because Islamic law forbids any depictions of Islam's holiest figure to prevent idolatry.

In one of the most violent incidents, Syrian protesters set fire to the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus on Saturday.

The protesters in Halifax demonstrated peacefully on the sidewalks outside the consulate.

Although women were lined up on one side of the street and men on the other, their messages were the same: freedom of speech in any country should have limits.

"Freedom, yes! Insult, no!" protesters shouted during the demonstration, which lasted about an hour.

Canadian reaction

Syed Soharwardy, of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, appeared on Canada AM Friday saying that Canadian Muslims were upset but that they were dealing with the situation constructively, by emailing and phoning officials."The Muslims in Canada, they are outraged," Soharwardy said. "They are expressing their anger through peaceful means… they are protesting against these horrible cartoons that have offended Muslims around the world."

But enough about Islam how about the economic terror that the American Christian Right Wing uses to cancel TV shows in the U.S. that they deem offensive. Millions of viewers are affected by this handful of zealots. True they don't wave placards in the streets, or burn effigies of NBC executives, but the impact is the same, its censorship. And they are proud of it. So are their right wing media buddies over at the Faux Network.

NBC, Christian group spar over "Will & Grace"
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A conservative advocacy group that urged a boycott of NBC's recently canceled drama about a pill-popping priest turned its wrath on Thursday to an upcoming "Will & Grace" episode that it says will mock Christ's crucifixion.

This is the real reason the Bush Administration defends the indefensible; censorship in the name of Religion because it is something the Republicans practice as well.

To end on a positive point, I would say this sums up my opinion of the whole affair of Gods and Sacredness. We must stand up for the right to laugh at the gods, it is a right worth preserving

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Grandpa Munster RIP

New York lost two greats this weekend first Betty Friedan and now Al Lewis. Lewis played Grandpa Munster and was the Green Candidate against George Pataki for Governor of New York passed away today.

Just two years short of his 90th birthday, a ponytailed Lewis ran as the Green Party candidate against incumbent Gov. George Pataki. Lewis campaigned against draconian drug laws and the death penalty, while going to court in a losing battle to have his name appear on the ballot as "Grandpa Al Lewis."

In dispute is his age. Was he 95 or 83? Even Wikipedia isn't sure.

Well the cigar chomping old guy always looked old even in the days when he played Grandpa Munster. So maybe like the wacko Count Dracula he played he was ageless. The Munsters were perfect TV for their time. A parody on the Adams Family and the Universal/Hmmer Horror film craze going on at the time, the Munsters gave new meaning to family values. Indeed perhaps in more than one way they helped a generation appreciate other kinds of families. The show certainly promoted, as did Bewitched, tolerance and understanding. Which is the underpining of most monster pictures be it King Kong or Frankenstien. I won't go into a detailed discussion of the role of the 'other' in popular culture, and deconstruct these TV dramas, suffice it to say they had a major influence on an entire generation making us more liberal. Shudder, see blame it on the Munsters.

I still remember his younger self from the hit series Car 54 Where Are You. He and Fred Gwynne were always a great team on both Car and the Munsters. They were the Lewis and Martin of their day or maybe Rowan and Martin.

Lewis, sporting a somewhat cheesy Dracula outfit, became a pop culture icon playing the irascible father-in-law to Fred Gwynne's ever-bumbling Herman Munster on the 1964-66 television show. He was also one of the stars of another classic TV comedy, playing Officer Leo Schnauzer on Car 54, Where Are You?

His run for Govenor was not a joke. It was a serious call for Third Party politics in the U.S. something we are blessed with in Canada. And something that is seriously lacking in the U.S. thus undermining democracy.

Green reflects on the death of Al Lewis

But in 1998 Lewis re-emerged into the spotlight as a maverick New York political candidate. He ran for New York State Governor on the Green Party Ticket, along with Albany native Alice Green, who ran for Albany Mayor this past year.

Green said, "I think most people thought of him as a funny man, but I knew him as this really serious, compassionate person who was committed to doing what he could for social justice."

Green said Lewis was loved by many, and people would just flock to him while they were campaigning together. She said he was known by everyone as 'Grandpa Al Lewis."

And while he played the Grandfatherly type he could still make even Howard Stern blush when he defended civil liberties against the censorship minded grundy's in the FCC.

Lewis rarely slowed down, opening his restaurant and hosting his WBAI radio program. At one point during the '90s, he was a frequent guest on the Howard Stern radio show, once sending the shock jock diving for the delay button by leading an undeniably obscene chant against the Federal Communications Commission.

Good Night and Goodbye Grandpa Munster.

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Grandmother of Second Wave Feminism Dies


Betty Friedan one of the Second Wave feminists, along with Simone de Beauvoir, and Evelyn Reed, has passed away today at the age of 85. Known for her groundbreaking work on the contradicitons of Post War American stereotyping of women; The Feminine Mystique.

Friedan was a classic liberal, a fighter for womens rights as individuals and a New York left intellectual, thus her recognition that womens struggle were collective as well as one of individual rights.

"A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, `Who am I, and what do I want out of life?' She mustn't feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children," Friedan said.

The First wave feminists, are often thought of as those women who began the fight at the turn of the 2oth Century Suffragettes as well as anarchists and socialists like Emma Goldman and Elizabeth Gurely Brown, Helen Keller and womens reproductive rights advocate Margret Sanger. But in reality that was the real second wave.

The first wave really began in the 19th Century around the abolishionist movement which gained many women advocates who fought for Afro-American rights and labour rights ending up fighting a losing battle for their own rights.
Friedan and de Beauvoir I would class as Third Wave feminism in this light. As the later feminists of the late sixties and early seventies, Kate Millet , Shulamith Firestone , that continue that groundbreaking work would be known as.

The struggle for womens liberation is the essence of all class and revolutionary struggle. And it's at the root of classical liberalism and anarchism.

Rooted in the utilitarian philosophy of Godwin and Mills, the revolutionary athiesm and humanism of Byron and Shelly, feminism begins with Mary Wollestoncrafts famous essay on Womens Rights. Mary was married to Godwin. And was well versed in the arguements of utilitarianism and Godwins classic contractualism.

That contractualism is the basis of later libertarianism of the Prodhounian and Tuckers schools. Thus greatly influencing the libertarian school of thought in the U.S. including Ayn Rand.

A societies treatment of women, the role they play and the freedom they have is an expression of how liberal, plural and secular a society is. Those who would down play this who denigrate feminism, especially if they are women, and women on the right in particular, do a disservice to the women who fought for their rights. The fact they have a popular and respected voice regardless of their politics is because of the struggles of feminists like Freidan.

I expect to read critical apprasials of her life and work in the coming days. And we can expect the dissing of Freidan by the usual gaggle of right wing women in the next few days. They of course will give faint praise to her, and then damn her. But their voices would not be heard had it not been for Second Wave feminists like Freidan and de Beauvoir. And certainly they would not have been heard if the only womans voice that had been respected had been that of the hopeless romantic adulator of male indivdualism; Ayn Rand.

Friedans critique was one that challenged the dominance of Freud in American culture and the role of therapy that had become the method of social control. Therapy had replaced police and social workers in the fifies and sixties as the new science of mass control. Ironic that what had once been the science of the individual had now become what Reich called Mass Psychology. The dominance of the Fruedian mystique, which is the core of Fiedans critique, is well illustrated in the early movies of Woody Allen and his self parody of the neurotic New Yorker whose always on the couch.

The uncritical acceptance of Freudian doctrine in America was caused, at least in part, by the very relief it provided from uncomfortable questions about objective realities. After the depression, after the war, Freudian psychology became much more than a science of human behaviour, a therapy for the suffering. It became an all-embracing American ideology, a new religion. It provided a convenient escape from the atom bomb, McCarthy, all the disconcerting problems that might spoil the taste of steaks, and cars and colour television and backyard swimming pools. And if the new psychological religion – which made a virtue of sex, removed all sin from private vice, and cast suspicion on high aspirations of the mind and spirit – had a more devastating personal effect on women than men, nobody planned it that way.

But the practice of psychoanalysis as a therapy was not primarily responsible for the feminine mystique. It was the creation of writers and editors in the mass media, ad-agency motivation researchers, and behind them the popularisers and translators of Freudian thought in the colleges and universities. Freudian and pseudo-Freudian theories settled everywhere, like fine volcanic ash. Sociology, anthropology, education, even the study of history and literature became permeated and transfigured by Freudian thought. The most zealous missionaries of the feminine mystique were the functionalists, who seized hasty gulps of pre-digested Freud to start their new departments of ‘Marriage and Family-Life Education’. The functional courses in marriage taught American college girls how to ‘play the role’ of woman – the old role became a new science. Related movements outside the colleges – parent education, child-study groups, prenatal maternity study groups and mental-health education – spread the new psychological super-ego throughout the land, replacing bridge and canasta as an entertainment for educated young wives. And this Freudian super-ego worked for growing numbers of young and impressionable American women as Freud said the super-ego works – to perpetuate the past.

Mankind never lives completely in the present; the ideologies of the super-ego perpetuate the past, the traditions of the race and the people, which yield but slowly to the influence of the present and to new developments, and, so long as they work through the super-ego, play an important part in man’s life, quite independently of economic conditions.

The feminine mystique, elevated by Freudian theory into a scientific religion, sounded a single, over-protective, life-restricting, future-deriving note for women. Girls who grew up playing baseball, baby-sitting, mastering geometry almost independent enough, almost resourceful enough, to meet the problems of the fission-fusion era – were told by the most advanced thinkers of our time to go back and live their lives as if they were Noras, restricted to the doll’s house by Victorian prejudice. And their own respect and awe for the authority of science – anthropology, sociology, psychology share that authority now – kept them from questioning the feminine mystique.

The Feminine Mystique
Chapter 5 The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud

Also see:The Sexual Revolution Continues

Whose Family Values?

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Super Bowl XL


Well I have made my predictions for Harpers Cabinet and with the Superbowl on Sunday I thought I would try my hand at prestitigitation. In this case both teams are well balanced, and both are underdogs.

Seahawks, Steelers are mirror images

Super Bowl XL combatants can win with pass, run or defense

They are mirror images of each other, two hard-nosed teams who believe in themselves, which is probably the only reason they are now at the top of the heap in the National Football League.

They both like to hammer you with the run. They both have young, strapping quarterbacks who are even better thant the public realizes. They both play defense in a head-on-collision kind of way, knocking around opponents with a feverish intensity.

They are the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Seattle Seahawks, two teams who have one other thing in common. Neither one of them was supposed to be where they're headed now, which is to a showdown in Detroit at Super Bowl XL.

But it's the Seahawks that are an even bigger unkown and of the two they are the real underdogs.

There's still plenty of room on the Seahawks' bandwagon
DetNews.com -
If the Steelers are the new America"s team, the Seahawks are America’s forgotten team. They are the other guys in Sunday’s Super Bowl XL, foils for the Steelers. The Seahawks are the undesirables, ignored ...

So given that the Steelers have not won in 25 years and in that time the great city of Steel and home of the American Trade Union movement has declined into a shade of its former glory I will be cheering for them.

What I will be really hoping for as we all do is a great game. At least one to match the ultimate in Football games; the Grey Cup.

Steelers play in shadow of that '70s team
Steel Curtain: Winning four Super Bowls in six years solidified Pittsburgh's legacy

Steel Dynasty: The Team That Changed the NFL by Bill Chastain (Foreword by Rocky Bleier) revisits the glory days when the Steelers had the most remarkable run on the field while also capturing the hearts and minds of football fans all across America. Six consecutive AFC Central titles, eight playoff appearances, four Super Bowl wins. Between 1972 and 1979 a Dynasty was born and no team before or since has achieved similar excellence.


See: Steeler Nation Superbowl Bound

Pro Sports and Criminal Capitalism


NFL IN TORONTO?

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