18/7

Steam power is the basis of the industrial revolution and the birth of Capitalism in America. Some of the steam lines in New York City date back to then. And steam is inherently explosive.

Huge Steam Pipe Blast Kills One in NYC

Emergency personnel look over a truck that lies in a hole in the street after a steam explosion in midtown Manhattan, New York, Wednesday, July 18, 2007. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

A transformer exploded in midtown Manhattan on Wednesday, creating a roar and a huge plume of smoke and sending pedestrians fleeing from the area in scenes reminiscent of the September 11 attacks.

Police at the scene said 15 to 20 people had been taken to the hospital. CNN said three of the injured had been admitted to the New York Presbyterian Hospital emergency room.

In Washington, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security official said there was no apparent link to terrorism.

"Right now it is a localized incident," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "At this point, we see no nexus to terrorism."

Officials said a ruptured steam pipe appeared to have caused the transformer to blow.

The explosion erupted during the evening rush hour in one of the busiest sections of New York City, near the transportation hub of Grand Central station.

A loud constant roar rang out through the streets.

Photograph by J.D. Griggs on February 3, 1988

Steam explosions (also called littoral explosions, because they occur at the shoreline, or littoral zone) result when lava meets the sea. In the photograph above, the explosion sprays fragments of lava into the air. The smaller pieces are carried by currents and deposited in bays to form black sand beaches.

SEE:

Nuclear NIMBY

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And Justice For All

Shareholders rights upheld in Lord Blacks trial which has conservatives all in a tizzy. Since they favored the aristocratic pretensions of robber baron Black rather than the rights of the 'little guy and gal'.

For Prince, 58, Black's fate was sealed in a 2002 shareholders' meeting.

As prosecutors played the recording, and she heard angry investors lambasting Black about why he and other high-ranking Hollinger executives were receiving millions in non-compete payments, Prince decided she would do everything she could to convict him of fraud.

In fact, if it were up to her, Black would also be going down on an additional fraud count. Had that happened, she said, it might have shown the pattern of criminal activity jurors needed to convict the fallen media baron of the most serious charge of all – racketeering.

Despite efforts to avoid media during the trial, jurors overheard in an elevator one day that some Canadian media had called them a "blue collar" jury and critiqued their appearance. "When we were deadlocked, one of the jurors, she's a teacher, gave us a pep talk," said Prince. "She said, 'They're calling us country bumpkins. They think we're too stupid to figure out this case.' And it brought us all together. We were going back in there with a unanimous verdict," she said.

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Torture Porn

I see that the MSM have spent this weekend focusing on what they call Torture Porn which I wrote about in Gore Kulture. Cliff from Rusty Idols and I then proceeded to have a running discussion on the phenomena in the comments.

From horror film to torture porn

Torture porn films - horror or hype?

Is there any escape from tired, old torture-porn?

Hollywood, movie fans shy away from "torture porn"

Held captive to torture-porn zeitgeist

Torture porn for popcorn eaters not up to snuff

Filmgoers may be fed up with sadistic gore

See

Gothic Capitalism Redux

Jack the Ripper

Emotional Plague


Serial Murder

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Die Vurm

Gathering dust for a hundred years; a source for De Vermis Mysteriis

A University of Alberta paleontologist has helped discover the existence of a 95 million-year-old snakelike marine animal, a finding that provides not only the earliest example of limbloss in lizards but the first example of limbloss in an aquatic lizard.

The fossil was originally collected during the 19th Century from a limestone quarry in Slovenia. It then sat at the Natural History Museum in Trieste, Italy for almost 100 years before Caldwell and a colleague found it in 1996 during a trip to Europe. He later connected with Alessandro Palci, then a graduate student in Italy whom he helped supervise, and they worked on the fossil together.

The researchers soon realized the lizard's front limbs were not formed during development. "There was a moment when I said, 'I think we stumbled on a new fossil illustrating some portion of the aquatic process of losing limbs,'" said Caldwell. "There are lots of living lizards that love to lose their forelimbs and then their rearlimbs, but we didn't know it was being done 100 million years ago and we didn't know that it was happening among groups of marine lizards."

Ancient giant serpents were known as worms (vurms, wurms),in Europe. Giant serpents or legless lizards may have existed into the modern age. They are not to be confused with Dragons, which are a different kind of beastie, though they commonly are.

If huge giant things roaming the Scottish hills were not enough, we have also had to contend with huge dragon things too. If you had been around in the 12th century you could have visited the Linton Worm who lived in a hollow outside Jedburgh on Linton Hill in the Scottish Borders (still called Worms Den to this day). The dragon terrorised the country, eating cattle and generally making a nuisance of himself. He was finally dispatched at the point of a peat-coated lance by a courageous - some would say reckless - lad called Sommerville of Larison. There have been no more dragon-sightings since.

Like the Lambton worm which was featured in Bram Stokers Lair of the White Worm. Which was made into a passable bit of gothic horror blasphemy by over the top art house director Ken Russell.

The Nordic saga of the Giant worm plays a role in the popular revolutionary imagination of Wagners Ring Cycle.

Now the Giants have the Hoard and Ring safe-kept by a monstrous Worm in the Gnita- (Neid-) Haide [the Grove of Grudge]. Through the Ring the Nibelungs remain in thraldom, Alberich and all. But the Giants do not understand to use their might; their dullard minds are satisfied with having bound the Nibelungen. So the Worm lies on the Hoard since untold ages, in inert dreadfulness: before the lustre of the new race of Gods the Giants' race fades down and stiffens into impotence; wretched and tricksy, the Nibelungen go their way of fruitless labour. Alberich broods without cease on the means of gaining back the Ring.

In the period around this first prose résumé and the first libretto sketches for the Ring, the years 1848 and 1849, Wagner also wrote several important texts which may shed light on his intentions with the tetralogy. Among them are «Die Wibelungen. Weltgeschichte aus der Sage» (The Wibelungen. World History as told in Saga), which includes several sections on the Nibelungs, «Die Revolution» (The Revolution), «Die Kunst und die Revolution» (Art and Revolution) and «Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft» (The Art-work of the Future), all written in 1849 These works are very likely to have been influenced by the philosopher Feuerbach, whom Wagner is known to have read at that time, and with whose writings stylistically common traits have been found at least in The Wibelungen, by the anarchist Proudhon, whom he probably also read (certainly in Paris in 1849), as well as by the ideas of the socialist thinkers Max Stirner, Mikhael Bakunin and Karl Marx.

A Brief Introduction to Norse Myth

When Ragnarok would come,
the winter would last for three years and would be
extremely bitter. The two giant wolves, Skoll and Hati,
would devour the Sun and Moon whilst starts would fall
from the heavens. The giant worm Nidhogg, which was
gnawing on the roots of the Yggdrasil for the longest of
times, would finally succeed. The root Nidhogg succeeded
in gnawing through was the root that supported Niflheim.
Loki, who had been confined for causing Balder's death
escaped his imprisonment. Loki would rally with the
frost giants and his offspring and would lead them
against the Sons of Mankind and the Gods. Fenrir would
escape the magical Fetter, the Midgard Serpent,
Jormungand, would slither out of the ocean. The Frost
Giants and Mountain Giants would leave their home in
Jotunheim, sailing on a ship known as Naglfar, whilst
their cousins the fire giants would leave their realm
of Fire, Muspelheim.

And Australia has recorded the largest earth worm ever, 13 feet long.

Of course worms are not legless serpents, nor some strange creature out of Tremors. Or out of the sewer in a town in Georgia.

Employees at the Huddle House had been having problems with the restaurant’s drainage line clogging up and when plumbers came by to check on the problem they found that some unknown species of animal had apparently crawled through the city sewer lines toward the Huddle House until it became lodged in the line just short of the outside clean-out plug. When a worker spotted the plug, he grabbed it and began pulling it out. And he pulled and he pulled and he pulled until an eight foot long, white, skinless, eyeless snake-like creature emerged. At first glance, it appeared to be a long grease clog. But closer inspection revealed that its composition was of a meat-like consistency. And it had the makings of a mouth. But, apparently, had no skeletal structure.

Or in the Gobi Desert.

The first time you hear about the Mongolian Death Worm you assume it has to be a joke; it sounds too much like the monster from a B-movie or an especially dire comic book to be true. A five-foot (1.5m) long worm dwelling in the vast and inhospitable expanses of the Gobi Desert, the creature is known to Mongolia’s nomadic tribesmen as the allghoi khorkhoi (sometimes given as allerghoi horhai or olgoj chorchoj) or ‘intestine worm’ for its resemblance to a sort of living cow’s intestine. Apparently red in colour, sometimes described as having darker spots or blotches, and sometimes said to bear spiked projections at both ends, the khorkhoi is reputedly just as dangerous as its alarming appearance would suggest, squirting a lethal corrosive venom at its prey and capable of killing by discharging a deadly electric shock, even at a distance of some feet.

The Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) are offering a free documentary, watchable on their website, on the hunt for the fabled "Mongolian Death Worm". In 2005, respected writer-researcher Richard Freeman led a four man team from the CFZ to Mongolia in search of the notorious worm; a fabled reptilian beast said to spit venom and kill its victims with electric blasts. The investigation is documented in "The Lair of the Red Worm", which can be viewed in two parts - Part One and Part Two.

And in this day and age of modern virtual myths you can play a Giant Worm in a PC Game.

Giant worms fascinate us. We loved them in Beetlejuice, we thought they were cool in Dune, and we loved watching them be blown away in Tremors. I've seen giant worms pop up as enemies in games before, most recently in Lost Planet. Death Worm may be the first game, indie or otherwise, that lets us play as the giant beasts though.

SEE

Nessie?

Snakes Alive

Nessies Relative

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Harpers Latin America Tour

Harper leaves on his mission to Canada's trading partners in Latin and Central America and the Caribbean. The small number of countries he is visiting shows this trips is all about being Canada's salesman for our friendly Imperialism in the region.

Whether it is promoting our investment interests in Haiti, or those of Barrick Gold in Chile, or the role of the money laundering Scotia Bank in the region. Canadian miners are big investors in the Caribbean and Latin America, and their impact on the environment leave much to be desired.

It is a natural extension of the Conservatives contientialism. They have abandoned aid to Africa, a Liberal policy, for selective aid to countries we have sent our military to, or have investment interests in.

Ironically one of the Caribbean countries we have major investments and influence in is not being visited by Harper, Cuba.

Harper's itinerary is also packed with meetings with Canadian investors in the region, and with speeches to local economists and businessmen.

In Santiago, he will celebrate the 10th anniversary of Canada's free-trade deal with Chile, tour a new Scotiabank office, and stop by the local headquarters of Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corporation, which is developing a highly controversial mine in Chile.

"It will be very disappointing if the prime minister returns from this trip and it simply has been a business-as-usual approach - of trying to sign as many new contracts as possible, slapping leaders on the back, talking about how investment is going to flow and how new commercial opportunities are opening up - without any significant attention paid to these very real human rights concerns," said Alex Neve of Amnesty International Canada.

Well Alex be prepared to be disappointed.

See:

More Munk-Key Business

Haiti Quebec's Shame

Haiti Canada's Colony

Haiti Atrocities

Canadian Imperialism

Gildan Sweat Wear

Gildan Sweat Shop Success Story

Gothic Capitalism Redux

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Pakistans Reichstag Fire

Like that other fascist regime which used an ultra left communist as their scapegoat for the Reichstag Fire, Pakistans Friendly Fascist President/Generalismo Musharraf used the Red Mosque for the same purpose this week. To distract from the fact that Pakistans Intelligence Service is behind the Taliban, and other Islamist fascist movements including the Red Mosque.

It is Pakistan that is the terror state with nuclear weapons, not Iran, that is the greatest threat to the region.

Leading up to the crisis of the Red Mosque of Islamabad, General Musharraf was facing an unprecedented uprising by the ordinary citizenry, led by the popular and recently dismissed chief justice of Pakistan. As the sweltering summer of discontent spread across the country, tens of thousands of lawyers poured onto the streets in what is known as the "black coat" protests. Finding no room to manoeuvre, Gen. Musharraf emulated Ayub Khan, and manufactured a crisis. Then, like a knight in shining armour, he stepped in to put down the rebellion by Islamists holed up inside the Red Mosque.

It's important to know that the Red Mosque was a creation of Pakistan's intelligence services, which used it for decades to recruit armed jihadis. It was another U.S.-backed Islamist dictator, General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, who had allowed the Red Mosque jihadis a free hand in spreading their hateful doctrine of extremism under the name of Islam. The Americans simply went along.

The brothers who led the Red Mosque rebellion - the one who was arrested trying to escape in a burka, as well as the mullah who died in the fighting - worked for Pakistan's intelligence agencies. Their father, too, was an employee of the government and ran the fiefdom in the heart of Islamabad until he was assassinated.

The mullahs and radical jihadis in the Red Mosque were all actors in the game of Pakistani roulette. As long as the mosque remained a visible hotbed of Islamist activity, Gen. Musharraf could show the West that it needed him to fight terrorism. Just as Ayub Khan was able to convince successive U.S. administrations that, without him, Pakistan would slide into communism, Gen. Musharraf has convinced George Bush that, without him, Pakistan would become one large Red Mosque teeming with jihadis trying to whip the nation into an Islamist nuclear power.

What he fails to disclose, of course, is that the arming of the Red Mosque could not have happened without his government's full knowledge. There's no way that machine guns, rocket launchers and ammunition could be brought into the heart of Islamabad, next door to government ministries, without arousing the suspicion of the country's omnipresent security agencies.

Today, the Pakistani army will claim to have stamped out a hotbed of Islamic terrorism. Tomorrow will be another story. Abdul Rashid Ghazi will emerge as the martyr of the Islamist movement in Pakistan, and his death will become the rallying cry for the Islamofascists, not its end.

In the end, Gen. Musharraf was caught in his own trap. He could not put the jihadi genie back into the bottle, so he had to kill it. He may come out as a hero to the White House and to Pakistan's ruling upper-class elites, but history dictates that this will be a short-lived romance.

SEE:

I Was An IslamoFascist For MI6

Harpers Silence Over Musharraf

Winning Friends

How To Create Terrorists

Say It Ain't So

Brief Cases vs Batons

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Comeuppance

The irony here is that Lord Black of Crossharbour left Canada to buy his Lordship from the Mother Country, because he thought we were too liberal for his pro-American conservative values.

Say it loud: Lord Black is too proud

Now that democracy of the common man; America, has given the Lord his comeuppance.

Conrad Black found guilty of obstruction and could face decades in prison

Just like his Her0 that other Crime Lord from Chicago.




Also See:

Conrad Black

Criminal Capitalism: Black Lord Dodges Tax Man

Criminal Capitalism: Black & Radler,Thick as Thieves

Criminal Capitalism: Lord Black Fugitive

Criminal Capitalism: Black gets his comeuppance

Criminal Capitalism: Hollinger's Black Eye

Criminal Capitalism: Black Out


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Tax Cuts For The Rich Burden You and Me

Two recent stories point out the failure of the 'peoples government of Canada' to meet the peoples need. Instead they have passed on the tax burdens once again to Johnny and Janey Canuck. And these assessments don't come from the Left but from the Right.

Basically reminding us that Jim Flaherty's much vaunted Tax Fairness is not.

Misdirected Tax Reforms Driving High Canadian Tax Rates: C.D. Howe Institute

Targeted tax relief doesn’t cut it, think tank says

Workers bear the brunt of taxation with high personal income, payroll and sales taxes, the report stated, with the Canadian effective tax rate on labour at 45.9%, down slightly from 46% in 2006.

"As economic studies have shown, the effect of such high effective tax rates on employment income is to reduce the incentive to work, especially for secondary workers in the family," said the report.

Corporate cuts at consumers' expense

- Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is urging provinces to go for a tax change that would shift billions of dollars a year in corporate taxes to the shoulders of individuals.

In this year's federal budget, Flaherty renewed Ottawa's push to get all provinces to harmonize their sales taxes with the goods-and-services tax (GST).

However, full harmonization by the five provinces that still operate retail-sales taxes --Ontario, B.C., Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Prince Edward Island -- would shift $7.5 billion in what is now a tax on businesses to consumers, a new report estimates.

In Ontario alone, the shift would amount to $5 billion annually, said Jonathan Kesselman, a public policy professor at Simon Fraser University. "It's large," he said in an interview, adding that it's been a bit of a political sleeper.

"Harmonization's Achilles heel continues to be the visibility of the large tax-burden shift from business to consumer," Kesselman writes in the latest edition of Canadian Tax Highlights, a Canadian Tax Foundation publication.

See:

Tax Fairness For The Rich

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The More Things Change

A post Canada Day note. Plus ça change... (plus c'est la même chose)

Over half of all federal "Celebrate Canada" funding is directed to Quebec-based events, government records show.

More than $3.7 million will pay for flag-raisings, fireworks, face-painting and other projects across the province, accounting for 55 per cent of the funds channeled through Celebrate Canada.

In contrast, funding for national holiday events in the rest of the country totals just over $3 million.

SEE:

I Am Canadien

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THE BRITISH DISTRIBUTIONISTS

Those who are regular readers will know that I have a passing interest in Distributionism and its impact on Canadian reformist populist politics of the Right and Left.

From the Canadian Anarchist Journal; Any Time Now. ATN #26 - Spring 2007
it includes a critique of Elizabeth May's mentor; Commander Coady.*

THE BRITISH DISTRIBUTIONISTS
review by
Kevin A. Carson
Race Matthews. Jobs of Our Own: Building a
StakeholderSociety--Alternatives to the Market & the State
(Australia and UK, 1999).

Matthews starts with the nineteenth century origins of
distributism: in the Catholic social teaching of Leo XIII's De
Rerum Novarum (heavily influenced by the proto-distributist
cardinal, Henry Manning, who in turn translated it into
English and added his own commentary), and the wider
tradition of Christian socialism; and in what Matthews calls
the "communitarian and associative" strand of the greater
socialist movement.

The distributist vision of a social order based on
widespread, small-scale ownership of property, and of
an economy where the means of production were
mainly owned by workers, dovetailed closely with the
principle of "subsidiarity" in Catholic social teaching:
that social functions should be carried out at the
smallest scale and the most local level of control
possible.

Distributism clearly also had strong roots in the socialist
revival of the 1880s, but was alienated from an increasingly
statist and collectivist socialist movement. In the terminology
of Chesterton and Belloc, distributists saw themselves in
opposition to both capitalism and socialism. But I get the
sense, from reading Matthews, that their position was less a
repudiation of socialism as such than a recognition that the
state socialists had permanently stolen the term for
themselves in the public mind.

Rather than a breach with socialism, it would perhaps be
more accurate to say they abandoned the term to their
enemies and adopted the name "distributism" for what
"socialism" used to mean. One contributor to the Distributist
Weekly, W.R. Titterton, commented that distributism would
have fit nicely with the kind of socialism that prevailed in
England back when William Morris was alive (and, I suspect,
would have fit in better yet with the earlier socialism of
Proudhon and the Owenites). "It was a fine time that, and
the vision which possessed us might at last have captured
England, too. If we had not met Sidney Webb!"
The Fabians, like other collectivists who have tried to
marginalize cooperativism within the socialist movement,
dismissed distributism as a "petty bourgeois" or "preindustrial"
movement relevant only to "artisan labor," and
inapplicable to large-scale industrial organization. Cecil
Chesterton, whose premature death dealt distributism a
serious blow, treated such arguments with the contempt
they deserved. "If Mr Shaw means... that it cannot distribute
the ownership of the works, it might be as well to inquire first
whether the ownership is distributed already.... I must
confess that I shall be surprised to learn that Armstrong's
works are today the property of a single man named
Armstrong.... I do not see why it should be harder to
distribute it among Armstrong's men than among a motley
crowd of country clergymen, retired Generals, Cabinet
ministers and maiden ladies such as provide the bulk of the
share-list in most industrial concerns."

Of the major intellectual figures of British distributism, Cecil was the most
aware of the central importance of producer organization.
The distributist movement of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire
Belloc, unfortunately, was long on theory and short on
action. It made little or no attempt at common cause, for
example, with the Rochedale cooperative movement.
Although distributist intellectuals were strongly in favor of
cooperatives in principle, they seemed to have little
awareness that the wheel had already been invented!
Despite impulses toward practical organization in the
provincial chapters of the Distributist League, and Fr.
Vincent McNabb's support of agrarian colonies on vacant
land, such efforts were inhibited by the leadership vacuum
in London (whose main concern, apparently, was apparently
intellectual debate, soapbox oratory, drinking songs, and
public house bonhomie).

Antigonish

The first large-scale attempt to put distributism into practice
was the Antigonish movement of Frs. Jimmy Tompkins and
Moses Coady, among the Acadian French population of
Nova Scotia. Tompkins and Coady acted through adult
study circles, strongly geared toward spurring practical
action. One of the first outgrowths of their educational work
was a decision by lobstermen to build their own cooperative
canning factory. This quickly led to cooperative marketing
ventures, buying clubs for fishing supplies, and cooperative
outlets for household woven goods. The movement
continued to spread like wildfire throughout the Maritimes,
with over two thousand study clubs by the late '30s with
almost 20,000 members, and 342 credit unions and 162
other cooperatives. By keeping for themselves what formerly
went to middlemen, the working people of the Antagonish
movement achieved significant increases in their standard of
living.

Through it all, Coady and Tompkins were motivated by
the "Big Picture" of a cooperative counter-economy on a
comprehensive scale: cooperative retailers, buying from
cooperative wholesalers, supplied by cooperative factories
owned by the movement, and financed by cooperative
credit.

In practice, though, the main emphasis was on
consumption and credit rather than production. The
fundamental weakness of Antigonish, Matthew argues, was
that it relied mainly on consumer cooperation, on the
Rochedale model. Consumer cooperation, by itself, is
vulnerable to what Matthews calls the "Rochedale cul-desac,"
in which cooperatives have "gravitated from the hands
of their members to those of bureaucracies," and adopted a
business culture almost indistinguishable from that of
capitalist firms. Worse yet, cooperatives are sometimes
subject to hostile takeovers and demutualization.

The problem with the cooperative movement, idealized by Distributionists, Social Credit and even the CCF was it was limited as a producer's movement in opposition to existing capitalism. It was unable to produce a strong enough alternative economy and political force, whether from the right or left as the legacy of the UFA, Socreds and CCF show, to defeat existing capitalist relations.

When these producer based movements became political parties within a parliamentary system they literally sold their souls to the company store.
In building a broad based alliance between farmers, workers, and urban professionals, these movements pushed for real parliamentary reform calling for direct democracy; referendum, recall.

In becoming a political party especially one in power, whether in Alberta or Saskatchewan, or indeed in some American states, the ability to reform the parliamentary system was limited, and in fact a straight jacket around the realpolitik of the movements.

Ultimately such movements during the last century in Europe and in North America ended up as consumer cooperatives, rather than independent artisan or producer alternatives to the banks and ultimately the capitalist system of production and distribution.

As such they became cogs in the existing capitalist system, as they are today. One really cannot tell the difference between the CO-OP stores and Safeways, or the Credit Unions and the big Banks.

Since once you transform producers to wage slaves they ultimately become 'consumers' in capitalist culture. As such they are subjects of history, rather than class conscious objects; makers of history.

The advent of transforming producers into wage slaves and ultimately declasse consumers, was the ultimate key to the survival of post Depression, post WWII capitalism.

The secret to becoming a revolutionary class for and of itself, the object of history, is the proletariats realization of the need to once again become producers,and land owners, thus self-valorizing individuals.



* a cheeky reference to a ground breaking rockabilly group from the sixties; Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen.


SEE:

Corporatism

Shameless

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