Professor-rat's Blurty
 
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Saturday, July 5th, 2008

    Time Event
    3:45a
    Ultra-left considered harmful
    Marxists seem split on the usage of this term. Some are plumping for it as ultra-Leninist as in his late 1917 period. This is the line followed by Trotsky who advocated for it in the Spanish revolution. It boils down to seizing state power and establishing a totalitarian dictatorship.
    Then by 1921 Lenin ( and Trotsky) stood fully revealed as the counter-revolutionary left-fascists, they had been all along. And this Lenin wrote the infamous and unholy, ' Left-wing communism - an infantile disorder'.
    The trouble was that the left communists he referred to had basically aligned with anarchism in wanting to see socialism-from-below ( specifically in the form of direct workers control through workers councils)
    So these 'ultra-lefts' are almost the complete opposite of the Top-Down school of thought embodied today by the likes of James Petras ,Tariq Ali, Walter Lippman, the Cockroach and etc.
    To further confuse matters the Council Communists also come in several ' distros' that include ' Libertarian Marxists', Luxembergists, Situationists and maybe others. ( Dutch, Italians and Germans all squabbled over this school of thought though it was reasonably coherent by 1928)
    Having alleged ' historical materialists' unable to agree on such basic categories is very telling about the current splintered state of Marxism and may be exploited by us with skillful disinformation campaigns. ( ie mostly truth-in-advertising campaigns!) Perhaps a workaround for the Marxists might be a small 'l' for the 'from-below' ultra-left and a large 'L' for the statists?
    Probably too much too even hope for when obscurantist obfuscation is yr best friend and constant companion in Marx.
    The best result could really come from a war-to-the-knife where both tendencies purge each other out of all material existence. There's really no question that both these sicko types are highly dangerous and need to be wack-a-moled as they pop-up.
    4:10a
    Stadium meat
    Report: Obama Camp Considering Football Stadium For Acceptance Speech

    Mary's Step-Father: Oh man! How'd you get the beans above the frank?

    [after telling Mary that he's an architect]
    Pat Healy: Really, it's only a side thing for my true passion.
    Mary: And what's that?
    Pat Healy: I work with retards.
    Mary: Isn't that a little politically incorrect?
    Pat Healy: Yeah, maybe, but hell, no one's gonna tell me who I can and can't work with.

    Norm: Really? Where would I have seen your work?
    Pat Healy: Well, have you been to, uh well, let me see... Santiago, Chile?
    Norm: Twice last year. Which building's yours?
    Pat Healy: Are you familiar with the soccer stadium?
    Norm: Did you build the Estadio Olimpico?
    Pat Healy: No, just down the street the Celinto Catayente Towers. It's quite a fine example, in fact. I recommend that next time you're up that way that you drop in and take a gander at it yourself.
    4:26a
    To all our Ultra-left 'friends'
    Here's a little test I would run by any recovering Marxist trying to line up with us 50 years late.
    Just ask them straight-up - are you an anarchist or a Marxist? ( You can't be both)
    If they cling to Marxism then they resisting on some level and allowing at least the possibility of another Messiah. Another Lenin. This makes them far less of an asset to us and far more of a danger.
    Sooner or later a choice must be made and registered - this doesn't mean they can't change their minds later or some sort of blood-oath. Just a recognition of certain concrete realities.
    You want to calibrate with anarchism - then come out as a fucking anarchist. Ante up.
    4:42a
    Nationalization Vs decentralization
    '...Ernest Mandel has pointed out, however, in an article in the French review Les Temps Modernes, decentralization cannot stop at giving autonomy to the directors of enterprises, it must lead to real workers' self-management...'

    http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931/guerin/Conclusion.html

    This is directly opposite of the policy of most all local Marxist death-cults which is for as much Nationalization as possible. ( National-socialism?) Perhaps these are the Marxists of whom Marx is alleged to have said that if thats what they were, then he was no Marxist.
    4:55a
    Kissinger needs killing
    '...the story of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s visit to the United States in 1975. Solzhenitsyn was a hero to Helms. After just one year of service in the Senate, Helms introduced a resolution to make Solzhenitsyn an honorary American citizen. It failed in the House. Then Helms helped to arrange a Washington visit for the exiled Soviet dissident the following year. At every turn, he faced obstruction by key figures in the Ford administration, led by secretary of state Henry Kissinger. When, thanks to the diligent work of Helms’s staff, Solzhenitsyn was indeed brought to the country, Helms tried to set up a meeting for him with President Ford.
    Not only was he rebuffed, but the State Department even forbade its employees to attend Solzhenitsyn’s major speech (to the AFL-CIO). So what did the freshman senator from North Carolina do? He went to the floor of the Senate, called it a “sad day for our country,” and accused Ford of “cowering timidity for fear of offending Communists.” It was a public-relations disaster for the White House. Among the conservatives angered by the administration’s parade of limp-noodle lickspittles was Ronald Reagan, who lambasted Ford in his newspaper column. Trying to rectify the situation, the White House approached Helms about a meeting with Solzhenitsyn, but refused to issue a written invitation for fear of supplying tangible evidence of caving in. Lacking such an invitation, Solzhenitsyn refused...'
    5:08a
    No state - no master
    "No state, however democratic," Bakunin wrote, "not even the reddest republic---can ever give the people what they really want, i.e., the free self-organization and administration of their own affairs from the bottom upward, without any interference or violence from above, because every state, even the pseudo-People's State concocted by Mr. Marx, is in essence only a machine ruling the masses from above, from a privileged minority of conceited intellectuals, who imagine that they know what the people need and want better than do the people themselves...." "But the people will feel no better if the stick with which they are being beaten is labeled 'the people's stick' " (Statism and Anarchy [1873], in Dolgoff, Bakunin on Anarchy, p. 338)
    5:12a
    A tyrant three thousand miles away
    Or 3 thousand tyrants a mile away

    '...Stirner glimpsed the danger that in a communist society the collective appropriation of the means of production would give the State more exorbitant powers than it has at present:

    "By abolishing all private property communism makes me even more dependent on others, on the generality or totality [of society], and, in spite of its attacks on the State, it intends to establish its own State, . . . a state of affairs which paralyzes my freedom to act and exerts sovereign authority over me. Communism is rightly indignant about the wrongs which I suffer at the hands of individual proprietors, but the power which it will put into the hands of the total society is even more terrible."

    Proudhon was just as dissatisfied with the "governmental, dictatorial, authoritarian, doctrinaire communist system" which "starts from the principle that the individual is entirely subordinate to the collectivity." The communist idea of the State is exactly the same as that of the former masters and much less liberal: "Like an army that has captured the enemy's guns, communism has simply turned property's artillery against the army of property. The slave always apes his master." And Proudhon describes in the following terms the political system which he attributes to the communists:

    "A compact democracy - apparently based on the dictatorship of the masses, but in which the masses have only power enough to insure universal servitude, according to the following prescription borrowed from the old absolutism:

    The indivisibility of power;

    All-absorbing centralism;

    The systematic destruction of all individual, corporate, or local thought believed to be subversive;

    An inquisitorial police force."

    The authoritarian socialists call for a "revolution from above." They "believe that the State must continue after the Revolution. They preserve the State, power, authority, and government, increasing their scope still further. All they do is to change the titles . . . as though changing the names were enough to transform things!" And Proudhon concludes by saying: "Government is by its nature counter-revolutionary . . . give power to a Saint Vincent de Paul and he will be a Guizot or a Talleyrand." Bakunin extended this criticism of authoritarian socialism:

    I detest communism because it is the negation of liberty and I cannot conceive anything human without liberty. I am not a communist because communism concentrates all the powers of society and absorbs them into the State, because it leads inevitably to the centralization of property in the hands of the State, while I want to see the State abolished. I want the complete elimination of the authoritarian principle of state tutelage which has always subjected, oppressed, exploited, and depraved men while claiming to moralize and civilize them. I want society, and collective or social property, to be organized from the bottom up through free association and not from the top down by authority of any kind.... In that sense I am a collectivist and not at all a communist.

    Soon after making the above speech Bakunin joined the First International And there he and his supporters came into conflict not only with Marx and Engels but with others far more vulnerable to his attacks than the two founders of scientific socialism: on the one hand, the German social democrats for whom the State was a fetish and who proposed the use of the ballot and electoral alliances to introduce an ambiguous "People's State" (Volkstaat); on the other hand, the Blanquists who sang the virtues of a transitional dictatorship by a revolutionary minority. Bakunin fought these divergent but equally authoritarian concepts tooth and nail, while Marx and Engels oscillated between them for tactical reasons but finally decided to disavow both under the harassment of anarchist criticism. ..' - FROM

    http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931/guerin/basic.html#critique
    5:31a
    Withering away the statists
    '...Marx revises some passages of the Communist Manifesto of 1848. In the Manifesto Marx and Engels had developed the notion of a proletarian evolution by stages. The first stage would be the conquest of political power, thanks to which the instruments of production, means of transport and credit system, would 'by degrees', be centralised in the hands of the State. Only after a long evolution, at a time when class antagonisms have disappeared and State power has lost its political nature, only then would all production be centered in the hands of 'associated individuals' instead of in the hands of the State. In this later libertarian type of association the free development of each would be the condition for the free development of all.
    Bakunin, unlike French socialists, had been familiar with the Communist Manifesto in its original German since 1848 and didn't miss a chance to criticise the way in which the revolution had been split into two stages - the first of which would be very strongly State controlled. He put it like this: "Once the State has installed itself as the only landowner... it will also be the only capitalist, banker, moneylender, organisor and director of all the nations work and distributor of its products. THIS is the ideal, the fundamental principle of modern communism." What's more: "This revolution will consist of the expropriation, either by stages or by violence, of the currant landowners and capitalists, and of the appropriation of all land and capital by the State, which, so as to fulfil its great mission in both economic and political spheres, will necessarily have to be very powerful and highly centralised. With its hired engineers, and with disciplined armies of rural workers at its command, the State will administer and direct the cultivation of the land. At the same time it will set up in the ruins of all the existing banks, one single bank to oversee all production and every aspect of the nation's commerce." And again "We are told that in Marx's people's State there will be no privileged class. Everyone will be equal, not just legally end politically, but from the economic point of view. At least that's the promise, although I doubt very much, considering the way they go about it and their proposed method, whether it's a promise that can ever be kept. Apparently there will no longer be a privileged class, but there will be a government, and, note this well, an excedingly complicated government, which would not simply govern and administer the masses in a political sense, as all present governments do, but which would also administer the economy, by concentrating in its own hands production, the fair distribution of wealth, the farming of the land, the establishment and development of trades, the organisation and control of commerce, and lastly the application of capital to production through the only banker, the State."

    Goaded by Bakunin's criticisms, Marx and Engels felt the need to correct the overly statist ideas they had held in 1848. In a preface to a new edition of the Manifesto, dated 24 June 1872, they agreed that 'in many respects' they would give a 'different wording' to the passage in question of the 1848 text. They claimed support for this revision in (among others) "the practical experience gained first in the February Revolution (1848), and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months." They concluded that "This programme has in some details become antiquated." One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery and wield it for its own purposes." And the 1871 Address proclaimes that the Commune is "the final discovery of the political form by which the economic emancipation of labour may be created."
    In his biography of Karl Marx, Franz Mehring also stresses that on this point 'The Civil War in France', to a certain extent, revises the Manifesto in which the dissolution of the State was certainly forseen, but only as a long-term process. But later, after the death of Marx, Lehning assures us that Engles, struggling with Anarchist currents, had to drop this corrective and go back to the old ideas of the Manifesto.
    The slightly over-rapid volte-face of the writer of the 1871 Address was always bound to arouse Bakunin's scepticism; He wrote of the Commune: "It had such a great effect everywhere that even the Marxists, whose ideas had been proven wrong by the insurrection, found that they had to lift their hats respectfully to it. They did more; contrary to the simplest logic and to their own true feelings, they proclaimed that its programme and aim were theirs too. This was a farcical misrepresentation, but it was necessary. They had to do it - otherwise they would have been completely overwhelmed and abandoned, so powerful was the passion this revolution had stirred in everyone." - FROM

    http://libcom.org/library/libertarian-marxism

    '...a farcical misrepresentation, but it was necessary...' Lenin in 1918? Its a grave mistake all ultra-left communists make to split Lenin, Trotsky and even the Chekists off from the Marxist tradition imho.

    'Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.” - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
    5:44a
    George Carlin lives!
    HAVANA (AFP)--Former Cuban president Fidel Castro on Thursday praised the
    Colombian army's rescue of Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other hostages from Marxist
    FARC rebels and said they should never have been held.

    "Civilians should never have been abducted, nor soldiers held as prisoners under
    jungle conditions," the veteran Communist leader said, describing the detention
    as "cruel" and that "no revolutionary purpose could justify it."

    "For basic humanitarian reasons, we welcome the news that Ingrid Betancourt,
    three U.S. citizens and other hostages were freed," he said in a statement on
    the official Cubadebate website.
    5:49a
    Poor workman blames their tools
    Feith - '...The CIA was mistaken, we all now know, in its assessment that we would find chemical and biological weapons stockpiles in Iraq. But after the fall of the regime, intelligence officials did find chemical and biological weapons programs structured so that Iraq could produce stockpiles in three to five weeks. They also found that Saddam was intent on having a nuclear weapon. The CIA was wrong in saying just before the war that his nuclear program was active...'

    I guess any kitchen in the world could be included in that ' chemical and biological weapons programs ' structured to produce stockpiles in three to five weeks. I've even been is some shared households where such stockpiles were produced in less time than that in the fridge and the sink. But if the CIA found Saddam was intent on having a nuclear weapon then why did they advise the president twice not to mention the 16 words story? That the British had allegedly learned that Saddam was seeking uranium in Niger?
    Also there was a footnote casting doubt on the aluminum tubes half of this case for Saddam wanting nukes in the Iraq NIE. So the CIA covered its arse on that as well. Someone is lying here and it ain't the CIA so far as I can see. Then there was all those Libby and Cheney visits to Langley...I thought the CIA was supposed to be some kind of fearsome and deadly organization...looks like they are really such pussies they let the stupidist fucking dipshit on the planet go around spreading vicious lies about them. What a weak and worthless paper tiger!
    6:05a
    Great Helmsman
    On the creation of the Victims of Communism Memorial in DC. Helms played a significant role in its final realization:
    One of the most important contributions came from retired senator Jesse Helms, who was an original sponsor of legislation authorizing the memorial. From his nursing home in North Carolina, he signed a letter that inspired a gift of $25,000. “That letter was probably the last official communication of his political career,” says John Dodd, head of the Jesse Helms Center at Wingate University.
    6:09a
    BO has VD - pass it on
    Four of July Flopitis [Victor Davis Hanson]

    The question is no longer on what has Obama backtracked, but rather on what has he not?

    The political problems with Obama's flopitis are twofold: one, it is coming late in the season. To defeat Hillary he went hard left in the void left by Edwards. But the primary dragged on so long, that when he just recently flipped and flopped to leave the hard left on NAFTA, Trinity Church, Rev. Wright, FISA, gun control, campaign financing, death penalty, Iran, Iraq, Jerusalem, etc. he did so in the near summer, not late winter. The result is that his formerly left positions were showcased longer than most go-to-the-center politicians and thus his abandonment of them more striking and fresh in our memories.
    For each inoperative "I can no more disown Rev. Wright" statement, there comes another each day about not quite pulling out of Iraq or wire-taps sorta OK, or NOT meeting John McCain "anywhere, anytime." Every opportunist knows that in presidential politics such shamelessness should be over and done with by March.
    Second, to employ a well-known Obamism, Obama 'raised the bar' so high with his 'hope and change' sophistry about transcending lobbyists, tawdry campaign financing, et al. that he is now being hoisted on his own petard — flip-flopping is the normal sort of rank opportunism, but for a messiah it is tantamount to sacrilege and heresy.
    Some of us have been ad nauseam suggesting Democratic buyer's remorse soon, and still stand by that prediction. The problem is not that the Left will abandon him; they won't, and will gladly put up with an Iraqi war-fighter, huge private cash raiser, wire-tapper, free-trader, and gun-rights/death penalty advocate if he brings them all back to power. (But watch their furor if Obama sinks below McCain in the polls.) Instead the rub is that Obama's new legions of hopers and changers won't register, work, and turn out in sufficient numbers if they feel that they've been had and made to look silly, and Obama is just another Jimmy Carter/Walter Mondale/John Kerry. Nor will all this triangulation necessarily win the "clingers" vote, even though the about-faces are done on their behalf.
    What's going on? Obama's handlers knew that their candidate had boxed himself into orthodox left-wing positions during the primary, but they counted on his prophet-like charisma and landmark "new candidate" appeal charming almost anyone as he 'evolved.' We will see whether such brazenness will necessarily work with either tough-minded Ohio or Michigan working people or cynical you-tubers.
    Usually the in-party gets blamed for all the bad news—in this case gas prices, wars, weak dollar, shaky stock market, financial instability, mortgage crisis—but if a magnetic candidate like Obama loses in a made-for-order year like this, Democrats will have to call in Bill Clinton to relearn the art of triangulation, and how to disguise the liberal agenda with a southern accent, bubba aw-shucks populism, and trivialities like school-uniforms and Sister-Souljah moments.
    In his defense, we forget that Obama is trying to be the first liberal Northern Democratic candidate to make it since JFK—and I don't think, for all his talents, he is quite a JFK.
    Next flip? I expect he will soon "refine" his view of lifting the Social Security tax ceilings—once we start hearing about 60%-plus state and federal tax bites. - The Corner

    Iceberg! Dead Ahead! Heh heh. This movie could finally get interesting.
    6:45a
    Celebrate July 4th
    With 20 new arrivals @
    http://scatmovies.com/home.php
    And some psychobabble from a nutcase liar
    "But we are seeing a change in Iraq for the better. And when we talk about Iran, there is no greater barrier to Iranian influence in the region, negative Iran influences in the region, than a strong Iraq that has a strong Arab identity, that is at peace with its neighbors, and that has a good relationship with the United States."

    Only on America
    7:51a
    Oil and water
    Libcom...shit

    '..the necessity for the working class to take political power...'

    ICC wrote:

    Finally, faced with the tragic degeneration of the Russian revolution and the emergence of the Stalinist nightmare, it wasn't anarchism that was able to explain what had happened and draw the lessons for the struggles of the future, but once again the marxist left: the Italian left around the review Bilan but also the German-Dutch left...'

    See? Once a Marxist - always a Marxist. Always wanting to take power and explain everything. Even the so-called ' Libertarian - Marxist'. There is really only one question for Marxists when it comes down to it - who is to be master, thats all.
    These 'new chums' of ours are no real friends at all. Still this is not to say all Marxism is worthless. Marx was a free-trader , anti-statist and armchair revolutionary who wrote down some good ideas now and then. When Marxism is in the dumpster of hirstories discarded lies we can safely pick over them. The best Marxist until then remains a mummified one.
    8:09a
    Gonzo journalism from 1936
    Homage to Catalonia is a great work. But it was almost never written. Orwell was almost tortured to death, or shot out-of-hand in 1937 in Spain. He came that close to death by going in to bat for a Trotskyist. You can read about it in the book. This was at exactly the same time the leader of the POUM battalion Orwell had just been fighting with was being tortured. Andres Nin, the leading Spanish Trot was eventually flayed alive by the KGB of that time, the NKVD. I urge anyone who doubts the existence of left-fascism to read this short lively book. And if you like it then yr in for a treat. Sonia Orwell's collected editions of Orwell's journalism.
    Not all of it Gonzo exactly but very readable and enjoyable writings.
    8:32a
    Die Drum die
    Do you think about the crap you post? How did anyone let you have a podium like the Washington Monthly?

    This has got to be the crappiest Drum column of all time. How can you just forget 90 percent of the Bush crimes? Remember Karl Rove? Remember the Plame case? On and on and on. Very shallow analysis, Drum.
    Posted by: Marylander

    What a shitty post by Kevin Drum. Nixon was a choir boy next to the criminal now in the White House.

    Kevin,

    You're an @#$.

    You have so bought into the Republican meme of "well he is doing for the right reasons, so we must forgive him for it".

    You don’t think he tortured prisoners for venal reasons. TORTURE DOES NOT WORK. The only reason to use it is for venal reasons (revenge and the pleasure derived from being a sadist).

    I could go on but that one statement has put me over the edge.

    Bush is a criminal, worse than Nixon. While Nixon did his criminal acts to get elected, at least once he got into office most of the time he tried to act for the benefit of the country. Bush on the other hand, once he got into office acted solely for his and his cronies benefit, no matter what the cost to the country.
    Posted by: Loviatar

    Kevin, why do you think most garbage collectors lose their sense of smell? If you're around this sh*t all the time, you get desensitized to it. Wake up and smell the coffee, man. There are crimes that have occurred under Bush's watch and through his efforts.
    Posted by: moe99

    Kevin wrote: "So far, anyway, there's no evidence the George Bush has done anything wrong for purely venal purposes."

    With all due respect, that's screamingly false and perhaps the most lazy and clueless comment you have ever written here.

    To suggest that the Bush Administration somehow is not as corrupt as Nixon's is completely daft.

    '...from a smirking, back-slapping, fake, phony, empty-suit, ignorant cretin...' named Kevin Drum

    he's a sadist and a psychopath. From Scientific American:

    Charming but Callous
    First described systematically by Medical College of Georgia psychiatrist Hervey M. Cleckley in 1941, psychopathy consists of a specific set of personality traits and behaviors. Superficially charming, psychopaths tend to make a good first impression on others and often strike observers as remarkably normal. Yet they are self-centered, dishonest and undependable, and at times they engage in irresponsible behavior for no apparent reason other than the sheer fun of it. Largely devoid of guilt, empathy and love, they have casual and callous interpersonal and romantic relationships. Psychopaths routinely offer excuses for their reckless and often outrageous actions, placing blame on others instead. They rarely learn from their mistakes or benefit from negative feedback, and they have difficulty inhibiting their impulses.

    If the shoe fits ...

    Kevin, you got properly reamed in the comments.

    The pathetic, weak, spinelesss propaganda drivel you originally posted is the literal embodiment of the GOP spin machine's wet dream.
    When the blogging community buys such BS, it's no wonder that the criminal SOB hasn't been impeached yet.
    Take your hands away from the keyboard, shut down the machine, go climb a high mountain, and...'
    10:08a
    The Guano report
    Is it just me or does the proposed desalination plant planned for Victoria look like its on very low flat land very close to um, the ocean thats predicted to rise quite a bit possibly quite soonish?

    Never mind
    10:42a
    The assassination of James Dalton by the coward Robb London
    Paying down the national RAT Institute debt should be complete by 2010. ( Barring the total collapse of capitalism in a couple of months! Fingers crossed, touch wood) This means a round trip ticket for Jim and a hospitable holiday in sunny Australia for the maestro if he wants it. Jim who?

    http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2001/04/42951

    The Vancouver, Washington resident said he was coerced into taking a plea agreement on July 18, 1997, in which he admitted to obstructing IRS agents, writing "Assassination Politics" and stink-bombing the carpet outside an IRS office.

    "Much of that plea was basically fictional," Bell said. He said he was "given a pill the previous day. "I was groggy and sleepy."
    10:54a
    Politenessman strikes again
    From his steel hanky fortress of solicitude the arch-villain Politeness man has extended his war on terrorism to the broader war on annoyances.
    WHEN other children her age were being read The Wind in the Willows, Rachel Evans's dad, a Uniting Church minister with liberal leanings, read her passages from The New Internationalist.
    He took her to rallies against apartheid, and at 16 she was roughed up by police when protesting against an arms bazaar. Ms Evans, 33, has continued to lead a life of protest, which has now put her front and centre at one of the biggest events ever to hit Australia.
    She is the leader of the NoToPope Coalition, a collection ofactivists that includes pro-choice campaigners, transvestite churchgoers for gay rights, contraception advocates, anti-AIDS activists, Trotskyists and anarchists.
    Joining them are the Raelians, a cult that believes humans are descended from aliens and claims to have cloned people.
    Many of the NoToPope members are veterans of other big actions including the Stop Bush anti-APEC campaign, and some go back to the violent anti-globalisation S11 protest in Melbourne in 2000.
    Their target this time around is Pope Benedict XVI and the thousands of pilgrims who will descend on Sydney this month for World Youth Day.
    NoToPope's flyer calls on supporters to march in Sydney on July 19, under the banner "defend the right to protest, no to homophobia, no to anti-condom policies, defend reproductive rights".
    The route it plans for the march follows that of the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. At a meeting this week Ms Evans briefed activists with plans including direct interaction with pilgrims at a certain part of the route, where NoToPope intends to hand out condoms.
    When it first got under way, NoToPope could probably only have counted on rallying support from a few diehards.
    But that changed after the revelation this week the NSW Government had quietly promulgated regulations that would make wearing T-shirts promoting NoToPope's causes illegal and punishable by a $5500 fine.

    Ms Evans has skilfully milked the widespread angry reaction to widen the campaign from an eclectic fringe to a broad movement for free speech. Yesterday she held a press conference with a lawyer in a suit, NSW Council for Civil Liberties secretary Stephen Blanks.
    Mr Blanks said he regarded World Youth Day as an "exciting event" - he is hosting some pilgrims in his house. But he was opposed to "counterproductive" laws designed to prevent protesters "annoying" Catholics.
    Mr Blanks had been contacted by solicitors and barristers so opposed to the laws that they would help the council mount a legal challenge to them next week, acting pro bono.
    "We'll see if the state Government can outlaw annoyance - it's absurd," he said.
    Ms Evans had been heartened by the support she had received from unions, religious leaders including Jesuit priest Frank Brennan, and firefighters who have refused to impose the laws.

    She insists she wants a peaceful protest. Next week NoToPope will stage a "T-Shirt Off" in front of state parliament, in which protesters will compete for the prize of displaying the most annoying top. Yesterday, Amber Pike, a 23-year-old part-time nursing student, modelled a T-shirt with the words "The Pope was Wrong, Put a Condom On".
    Ms Pike is a member of the socio-anarchist group Resistance, which says on its website "the state is the ruling class's apparatus of social control".
    In an age where young Sydneysiders appear more driven to a career that will buy them a nice flat with harbour glimpses rather than to activism, Ms Evans and Ms Pike might be a rare breed.
    But Ms Evans says: "All the polls show young people are committed to combating global warming and fighting poverty."
    Meanwhile Politenessman has vowed to take no prisoners and wage a never-ending war on abstract nouns.
    11:17a
    Muslins under the beds
    '...I've always made a sort of satirical joke that they were screaming "the terrorists are coming to kill us all in our beds!" But now they are literally saying that. Good thing nobody cares what they think anymore.
    digby...'

    eBay Australia's Bedding Buying Guide
    Muslin sheets: Muslin sheets have a rough and tough feel and are at the low end of the cotton spectrum. I also pick up muslin sheets when I find them - the older, more vintage ones will have a wonderful feel from decades of use and board-washings.
    11:39a
    Dear Anarcho
    What, after all, is considered more useless and foolish among elites of all stripes than earnestness?
    How embarrassing. Back in the 1918, the Marxist gasbags were all so grateful when the "grown-ups" roared back into town, stole an election and took over the government for our own good. Today they ignore Stalin as if he never existed. He has been disappeared from their storyline. In spite of ninety long years of global experimentation by some of the most starry eyed, naive, intellectually confused creatures the world has ever known --- Marxist-Leninists --- they persist in portraying anarchists as silly and insubstantial.
    How anyone could still think that the people who were taken in by con men like Lenin and Trotsky and 'Uncle Joe', who invaded the Ukraine with no plans beyond the first thirty days based on the assumption that the locals would greet a foreign occupation enthusiastically, who created a secret police force staffed by mercenaries from Latvia all paid with solid Imperialist gold coin --- are serious is beyond me.
    But they do. And people who don't believe the Democratic and Libertarian socialist left should torture, spy on its own citizens or invade foreign lands based upon lies must not only be ignored, they must be aggressively repudiated, in order to rig elections and govern squalid little police-states like Cuba, Zimbabwe and China.
    11:54a
    Parchment farm
    Over two centuries ago, colonial peasant America reacted to the abuses of their leaders in the most drastic and violent way open to them, by taking up arms against their oppressors. Revolution is not to be taken lightly, and wasn't by those men and women. Perhaps recognizing within themselves the potential to create a grand experiment that would alter world history, or perhaps just fed up with the status quo, they acted.
    And out of their actions was built something indescribably profound. A simple piece of paper that recognized both the strengthens and the foibles of human beings, that allowed the best of what's in us to flourish, while providing a stop against the natural tendency of those in power to abuse their rule. The philosophy of these men and women when approaching governance was best summed up by John Adams:

    "There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty."

    The shred of paper that grew out of the experience of colonization, oppression, violence and revolution has proved remarkably durable over these 219 years.
    My mother's people came by ship
    And fought at Bunker Hill
    My daddy lost a leg in France
    I have his medal still
    My brother served with Patton
    I saw action in Algiers
    Oh we must be doin' somethin' right
    To last 219 years.

    I pray my sons won't go to war
    But if they must, they must.
    I share our country's motto
    And in God I place my trust.
    We may have had our ups and downs
    Our times of trials and fears.
    But we must be doin' somethin' right
    To last 219 years.

    I've lived through two depressions
    And seven Dust Bowl droughts
    Floods, locusts and tornadoes
    But I don't have any doubts.
    We're all a part of history
    Why Old Glory waves to show
    How far along we've come 'til now
    How far we've got to go.

    It's been hard work but every time
    We get into a scrape
    Let's think of what our children faced
    In this two thousand and eight
    It's up to us, to pave the way
    With our blood and sweat and tears.
    For we must be doin' somethin' right
    To last 219 years.
    12:03p
    Okay you've covered yr ass
    Samuel Johnson famously wrote in 1775 that "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." In The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce made the appropriate correction: "With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first."

    The past eight years proves Bierce’s thesis once and for all.

    The remorseless gangsters currently in charge of the executive branch aren’t the first American leaders to falsely define patriotism to include torturing, racketeering and warmongering. Its up to us to make sure they're the last. Never doubt that a few well placed assassins can change matters. Indeed its often the only thing that has.
    12:08p
    Up the Cornish!
    Right up the Cornish
    All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts.

    ... Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by "our" side. ...
    The Cornish nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side at teh 'English Riviera', but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. ...
    In Cornish nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind. This level of double-think requires industrial strength Cornish Tinfoil helmets.
    12:46p
    Net rules
    Fellow netizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today?
    What have I, or those I represent, to do with your net independence?
    Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in the declaration of sexual independence, extended to us Bogan peasants?
    And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the net altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
    And am I sounding like Candace Bushnell already?
    Don't answer that.
    Would to FUCK, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to all these fucking questions!
    Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold that a net's sympathy could not warm them?
    Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless net benefits?
    Who so stolid and selfish that would not give their voice to swell the hallelujahs of any wildnet's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from their P2P limbs?
    I'm not that man. In a case like that the dumb might eloquently speak and the "lame man leap as an ass."

    But such is not the state of the hardcase. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice are not enjoyed in the usenet commons. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your celibate priestly fathers and their fathers and their fathers, fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This net 2.0 is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a kinky pervert in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, neizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today with a zipped Gimp mask on?
    If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn that it is dangerous to copy the example of Taranto terrorist whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty anus, burying that brand in irrevocable ruin! I can today take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people exploited by trash movies like Road Warrior.
    "By the rivers of Watergate, there we sat down. Yea! We wept when we remembered Talon. We hanged our arse upon the pillows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of redhotmilitarywomen. How can we sing the Love's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Studio 54, let my right hand forget her cunning. If do not remember thee, let yr tongue cleave to the roof of my rectum and I'm sure it twill come back to me"
    Fellow netizens, above your notional, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the Sex-Pistols jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorry this day, "may my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth"!
    To forget them, to pass lightly over their bondaged trousered wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before Dury and the punk world. My subject, then, fellow netizens, is sexual slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing there identified with the leather bond, making their wrongs mine. I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that the character and conduct of this dungeon never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July 2008!
    Whether we turn to the safe-word declarations of the past or to the painful professions of the present, the conduct of the scat dominatrix's seems equally hideous and revolting. Kink is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with the human toilet and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the physical constitution and the perverts Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate straightness -the great sin and shame! "I will not equivocate, I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that anyone, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, shall not confess to be right and just....
    For the present, it is enough to affirm the excess penishood of the male Negro race. Is it not as astonishing that, while we are plowing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting homos, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, and secretaries, having among us lawyers doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators, and teachers; and that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale blowhole in the Pacific, feeding it into sheep and cattle on the hillside, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living, fucking in families as husbands, wives, and children, and above all, confessing and worshiping the hetrosexual kinksters's God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are virile!...
    What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make humans brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow masochists, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply....
    What, to the toilet slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to them, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which they are the constant victim. To them, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your swelling greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to them, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of Germany, Brazil and Japan at this very hour.

    Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms- of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this perverts paradise, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, the net reigns without a rival.
    12:59p
    Focus on Columbia
    While many could think Ingrid got off lightly for being a wise-ass politician the same may not be said for those deliberately obscure ' experts' from America tasked with vital 'lungs-of-the-planet' eradication.
    This sort of nutcase forest cover eradication is not just murder - its suicide. Any Norte Americano involved in the most separated way is fair-game for reprisal by any means. Any attack on the environment demands a measured response. Six years imprisonment is not enough solace for planetary suicide by proxy. You think you can 'round-up' the living breathing word-for-world?

    How dare you! Death is too good for the likes of you.
    1:19p
    Lets see...
    Now who was calling for the Zapatista's to muscle up against the Mexican state just recently?

    Why I don't think I'm talking out of school when I mention James Petras and Tariq Ali.

    In other words these well upholstered armchair Marxist 'guerrillas' wanted to see 1,2,3 Many FARCing Columbia's.

    Some street-fighting-men, some 'revolutionists'. Some arseholes. This is the fucking Cockroach- Woods school of unmitigated left-fascist bullshit. That just cos' Trotsky and Lenin broke a few million 'eggs' and created the Stalinist model that all sorts of red-fascist dingbats should have the same chance to create the same bloody omelet. Fuck that for a joke. And double fuck that fraud Castro and his bff Huge-ego. They are wearing a lot of egg-on-face as we speak. And for what these two cooked up for the ELN that is the least that can happen. Really they should both be packed off to North Korea together tied in a sack.
    1:45p
    Backtrack Obama
    Barry must think his shit don't stink with 65 points in the betting markets. But those markets aren't the only markets. There's also a load of dead-pools and assassination markets out there. I can't keep up with them!
    And Barry the Chump is living - temporarily - in a feathered fools paradise if he thinks he can dodge a dum-dum bullet.

    So long loser - its been real - give my regards to Jesse
    2:52p
    So sad
    We had to let Egor go. Turns out those most economical rat-cages that he was supplying us with were mainly cut out from supermarket trolly's. Those marine plywood bases? ' Fell-off-the-back-of-a-truck' near the waterfront. So long old mate. The lab will seem empty without you. However...this does leave an opening at the RAT for a fresh new lab assistant. Actually... as so much of our work is automated and outsourced these days the position vacant is actually more of a 'personal-assistant' one. The applicant will therefore have demonstrated abilities in handling all varieties of large major sexually aggressive animals. They will have some scat-submissive experience and be desirous of learning more in this area. They must have no background and family and be willing to do overtime for rat-pellets . All applications to the director. pro2rat@yahoo.etc
    3:17p
    Still good to go
    Anthrax letters are...and thats not all. Lest we forget firebombing SUVs and state forests, pressure-cooker roadside mines, ANFO truck-hire-bombs, mobile sniper-teams and much, much, more. Lets mix-it-up people and get out there! Rome wasn't burned in a day!
    Comrade Yang just showed us whats possible. The rolling Jaffa just showed us whats possible. Be all that you can be - blow-up a police station tomorrow.
    3:24p
    The little drummer boy
    'Anthrax-Andy' ,Andrew Sullivan, who had earlier accused the antiwar movement of being part of a bi-coastal "fifth column," was so certain the anthrax attacks were proof of Iraq's perfidy that he called on the U.S. to drop nuclear bombs on the Iraqis in retaliation.
    Anthrax Andy is STILL regularly cited by Kevin Drum as a credible source acting in good faith.

    Do these Drum type donkeys really deserve jack-fucking-steam-offa-our-shit?

    I don't think so - Not. This. Time.

    Further to the previous post - follow-ups on any physicals with major-league DDoS attacks - faster please. SCRAM THE REACTOR!
    3:43p
    Celebrity passport files
    Hundreds of those who joined the International Brigades were shot by the NKVD...many passports were stolen by the NKVD. One was later used by Ramon Mercader in order to traverse America into Mexico. On completion of a 20 year sentence for animal cruelty, Ramon recuperated in sunny Stalinist Cuba.

    http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/itsonlyfair/latimes0372.html

    Possum et veritas
    4:07p
    Stuart Munckton - Call me genius
    '...I think Mao's very useful contribution, especially counterposing the
    actions of the Chinese revolutionaries in their armed struggle to the actions
    of the Nepalese Maoists, who Chaves pays respect to as militants while criticising their
    tactics — the same as me. It seems clear the militarist approach of the
    Nepalese has lead them to a dead end, politically isolating them...'

    You can say that again Stewie.
    4:14p
    A fire in Cheneys mind
    On February 14 Thomas Fingar, chief analyst of the eighteen-agency US intelligence community, gave a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Not the most public of public servants, Fingar, a longtime intelligence analyst, stepped out of the shadows before a respectful audience to defend his much-maligned colleagues. "You want it real bad, you sometimes get it real bad. And the Iraq WMD estimate falls in that category," Fingar said. He was referring to the dismal measure by which CIA analysis is now judged: the calamitous ninety-three-page National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that the intelligence community produced in October 2002. "It was requested. We were given a two-week period in which to produce it. And it was bad. It was really bad.... The percentage of analysts who participated in the production of that hurry-up, get-it-out-the-door-in-two-weeks product was tiny compared to the larger set, all of whom were tarred with the same brush of incompetence."
    More notable than the aggrieved tone of Fingar's address was its extremely selective account of the events leading up to the creation of that infamous NIE. In mid-2002, Bob Graham, the Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, received classified briefings on Iraq from then-CIA Director George Tenet. Behind closed doors, Tenet presented a much less alarming picture of Iraq than the one George W. Bush gave the public. But Graham, concerned about an impending push from the White House to authorize war, soon learned the Bush Administration had not ordered the CIA to prepare an NIE on Iraq, indicating to him that the Administration's position on Iraq was not guided by the intelligence. Invoking rarely used senatorial authority, Graham formally requested an NIE--before the war vote. If Graham was guilty of anything, it was not hostility to CIA analysts, as Fingar insinuated, but suspicion of White House manipulation of intelligence, and CIA complicity. As Graham explained several years later in a Washington Post op-ed, "Particular skepticism was raised" by the NIE "about aluminum tubes that were offered as evidence Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program...' - MORE ON

    http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080714/ackerman/print

    "Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply," wrote Gen. Jimmy Doolittle in a secret 1954 report for Dwight D. Eisenhower about revamping the CIA's covert actions. "We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy."

    The dark side if you will bend over
    4:24p
    By George!
    '...George F. Kennan wrote a lengthy critique of Rostow’s Wilsonian internationalism, noting that there was nothing about economic progress that led inexorably to freedom—“some of the most hideous manifestations of modern totalitarianism have come in some of the most highly industrialized and best educated countries.”

    http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=18696

    Hideous Marxifications
    8:44p
    Suntory mermaid
    http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/02/26/transportation-tuesday-the-wave-powered-boat/

    The propulsion system works by taking the usually-hindering power of waves to propel the boat forward. Two fins set at the front of the boat generate the power by moving up and down as the waves rock the boat. The fins act much like a dolphin’s tail, pushing the boat as the waves move past them. As if that wasn’t enough, the hull of the boat is made out of a super-thin recycled aluminum and solar power will be used for the ship’s interior electronics. (pics)
    9:25p
    Destroy all MEK and PEJAK monsters
    Shoot-to-kill orders approved
    Patrick Cockburn reports from Baghdad that Mahmud Osman, a Kurdish MP, maintains that an attack on Iran by Israel or the US would plunge Iraq back into war. Cockburn points to two terrorist groups based in Iraq that the US Pentagon appears to be deploying against Iran. They are the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK or MKO) and the PEJAK or Iranian branch of the Kurdish Workers Party. The Iraqi parliament has discussed expelling the MEK.
    In the summer of 2005, a previously unknown Kurdish guerrilla group called Pejak (Kurdistan Free Life Party) began to launch attacks against army and Pasdaran outposts. Unlike the KDPI and Komele, Kurdish revolutionary groups that emerged from the Iranian left, this new group emerged out of PKK camps in Iraq, where western intelligence has a heavy presence. A communiqué that appeared on its website amounted to a thinly-veiled threat: Then a recent New York Times article stated that PJAK and PKK "appear to a large extent to be one and the same. Your ILF* mission should you decide to accept it. These groups being known and armed red-fascists would make them all Marxist-Leninist 'dead-men-walking' and fair game. If anything does go wrong simply blame it on Mossad. The secretary of the RAT Institute will disavow all knowledge of yr activities. This post will self-destruct in five seconds.

    * Intercommunal/Interzone Liberation Front - Full spectrum resistance since 2001. Who dares wins...
    ' By any memes necessary'
    9:51p
    ' Kim must be bridging'
    As a single ray of light shone down Arapiles gulley

    Your Fourth of July and My Fourth of July
    Your Fourth of July is blood for oil.
    My Fourth of July is the pure sunbeam of peace.
    Yours is the imperial presidency and "so what?" to public opinion.
    Mine is "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"
    Yours is profiling and discrimination.
    Mine is "all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights."
    Yours is "My country right or wrong."
    Mine is avoiding "Offences against the Law of Nations"
    Yours is the veto of child health care and rejection of Kyoto,
    Mine is an America that cares about the wellbeing of our children.
    Yours is a monarchical presidency above the law.
    Mine is, with Tom Paine, "in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other."
    Yours is aggressive invasions of countries that did not attack us first.
    Mine is "and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends."
    Yours is water-boarding and electrocution.
    Mine is the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
    Yours is the stench of a million moldering corpses, military rule over 27 million, and the creation of oceans of misery.
    Mine is "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
    Yours is off-shore drilling, coddling polluters, 'heckuva job Brownie.'
    Mine is a stewardship of America the beautiful for succeeding generations.
    Yours is the privatization of war and the deployment of whole divisions of "contractors. . ."
    Mine is an America where privates do not risk their lives for a tenth of what a mercenary is paid by the Pentagon.
    Yours is the erection of protest zones as zoos for citizens.
    Mine is, "or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
    Yours is the swagger of the flight jacket and the bombs raining down.
    Mine is the schooling of the next global generation.
    Mine is America, the pure sunbeam of peace.
    With apologies to Kahlil Gibran. - INFORMED COMMENT

    I guess you had to be there
    10:03p
    Ohio vice
    Remember when Hamilton County [Ohio] Mike Allen had to resign his office for sexual harassment? Back in the day, Allen was the big torpedo bent on sinking Larry Flynt on obscenity charges as well as Elyse Metcalf. Well, it seems like these Ohio law boys can't keep their hands off a woman's skirt.

    www.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=27919

    Here's the latest news in the Dann situation:

    COLUMBUS, Ohio (Legal Newsline) -- Ohio Attorney General Nancy Hardin Rogers announced she has retained outside counsel to represent the State as it attempts to negotiate the sexual harassment charges filed by two female employees who were harassed under the administration of recently ousted Ohio AG Marc Dann.
    Dann resigned May 14 after revealing he had an affair with a staff member and as calls for his impeachment or resignation from Ohio's governor and others grew increasingly vocal.
    The women, Cindy Stankowski and Vanessa Stout, continue to work in the AG's general services division, the same department in which they worked when the harassment occurred. A May 2 report issued by Ben Espy, who Dann had appointed to conduct an inner-office investigation into the women's claims, found that the harassment had indeed occurred and that when supervisors were notified of it, they did nothing about it.
    Rex Elliott, the lawyer representing the women, is seeking $400,000 for each woman as well as nearly $100,000 in legal fees. He was unavailable to comment on the AG's actions today.
    According to Jim Gravelle, press secretary for AG Rogers, Littler Mendelson was selected to represent the Ohio AG because "they're the best employment law firm in the U.S. They're also the largest."
    The nationwide firm has offices in Columbus and Cleveland, as well.
    Littler Mendelson attorney Jeff Hiller, of the firm's Columbus office, will lead the team negotiating with Elliott. He was not available to comment for this story.
    Gravelle says Rogers and the law firm signed a fee agreement earlier today that calls for Littler Mendelson to be paid $175 an hour with a cap of $20,000. - Adult FYI
    10:06p
    Famous National-socialists
    What petty and haute bourgeois, Marx and Engels saw as the real value of trade unionism was spelled out in the Communist Manifesto:

    "But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more…

    "Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lie not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by Modern Industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes...'

    Ein struggle - Ein Nation - Ein ideology
    10:13p
    Rebel worker
    Even when the unions enter politics, as in the eight-hour day struggle (which Marx had called a victory for the "political economy of the working class" – Quoted in Hyman, p. 13-14) Lenin argued that they were only engaging in capitalist politics. Hence he opposed what the "Economists" called "lending the economic struggle a political character" as a fundamental strategy, arguing that "trade unionist politics of the working class is precisely bourgeois politics of the working class."
    ("What is to be Done?", Selected Works, Moscow 1970, p. 186)
    10:15p
    Militant Victorian Police union strikes for the right to torture
    Lenin’s own analysis was that the fruits of imperialism had been used to corrupt a certain layer:

    "The receipt of high monopoly profits by the capitalists … makes it economically possible for them to bribe certain sections of the workers, and for a time a fairly considerable minority of them, and win them to the side of the bourgeoisie.
    "This stratum of workers-turned-bourgeois, or the labour aristocracy … is the principle prop of the Second International, and in our days, the principle social … prop of the bourgeoisie. For they are the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the working class movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class."
    (Quoted in Tony Cliff, Lenin, vol 4, London 1979, p. 51)

    Leon agreed

    "There is one common feature in the development, or more correctly the degeneration, of modern trade union organizations in the entire world: it is their drawing closely to and growing together with the state power." ("Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay", in Leon Trotsky on the Trade Unions, New York, 1969, p. 68).

    Yet even here, Trotsky stressed the element of conscious political strategy on the part of the bourgeoisie, and conscious treachery by the bureaucracy and "labor aristocracy":

    "Monopoly capitalism is less and less willing to reconcile itself to the independence of trade unions. It demands of the reformist bureaucracy and the labor aristocracy who pick the crumbs from its banquet table, that they become transformed into its political police before the eyes of the working class. If that is not achieved, the labor bureaucracy is driven away and replaced by the fascists." (Ibid p. 72)
    10:38p
    Perverts in love
    I can't keep up with what's been going on
    I think my heart must just be slowing down
    Among the human beings in their designer jeans
    Am I the only one who hears the screams
    And the strangled cries of perverts in love

    God sends his spaceships to America, the beautiful
    They land at six o'clock and there we are, the dutiful
    Eating from TV trays, tuned into to Happy Days
    Waiting for World War III while Jesus slaves
    To the mating calls of perverts in love

    Last night I watched the news from Washington, the capitol
    The Muslims escaped while we weren't watching them, like Muslims do
    Now we've got all this room, we've even got the moon
    And I hear the Chinese will be open soon
    As vacation land for perverts in love
    10:50p
    He knew all the Engels
    Common to both Marxism and Leninism is the idea that the working class is incapable of bringing about a social revolution or constructing a new society. Then the 'militarisation of labour'was driven by Trotsky with the vital support of Lenin. Statements at the 9th party congress of March 1920 that "The working class cannot be left wandering all over Russia. They must be thrown here and there, appointed, commanded, just like soldiers" and "Deserters from labour ought to be formed into punitive battalions or put into concentration camps" give a clear idea in what contempt the Bolshevik leadership headed by Trotsky and Lenin held the working class.
    These ideas came out of their theory they had developed themselves and from their background in Marxism. When Lenin said in "The immediate tasks of the Soviet Government" published April 28th 1918* that "Unquestioning submission to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of the labour process based on large scale machine industry" he was echoing the Engels of 1872 when in a letter criticising the Anarchists of the First International he had said "How these people propose to run a factory or operate a railway , or steer a ship without a single will that decides in the last resort, without a single management, they of course do not tell us."

    * A little over a fortnight previously on April 12-3, the Cheka had ran its first major terrorist operation. This was against the anarchists in Petrograd and Moscow. ( Maximoff, Voline and Avrich )
    Marxists had begun their ninety year reign of terror that has so-far claimed over 100 million lives.
    11:06p
    Au feminists site
    Abortion
    The abortion compromise in New Zealand has been rocked by a court judgement that most abortions performed are probably outside the rules set up in the Contraception Sterilisation and Abortion Act 1977. The blogosphere was alight with discussion, and no doubt there will be more to come.

    Idiot / Savant has a run-down on the judgement, the blog on GayNZ gives a potted history of abortion law in New Zealand, and Stef the Ex-Expat sorts out the statistics at The Hand Mirror. She also thinks it’s bizarre to find she agrees with the anti-abortion lobby that the current law is an ass, but she reaches quite a different conclusion. Queen of Thorns reacts to the news with do-I-laugh-or-do-I-cry. In a guest post at The Standard, Julie advises If you’re against abortion then kindly don’t have one”. I wrote about why abortion is morally permissible, and even morally desirable. Lyn has a personal response to abortion.

    In a more reflective mood, both at The Hand Mirror, Anjum worries about the religious fanaticism that will come into play, and Anna Mc thinks about Being Catholic and being feminist. In a excellent post, this is the bit that stands out for me:
    The Church’s respect for human life is something which is very important to me. But whereas I interpret this message as ‘Get off your arse and do something about poverty, injustice and suffering’, others hear it as ‘Stand outside an abortion clinic and shake your rosary beads at a woman undergoing what may be one of the most difficult experiences of her life’.

    After the initial flurry has died down, Julie thinks about the strategy from here.

    Idiot / Savant has the cartoon in which Moreu captures the legislative choices on abortion oh so clearly.

    Across the ditch, Lauredhel points out that the anti-abortion lobby is preventing cancer sufferers from using a drug that can treat certain tumours, because it can also be used for abortion: RU486 Import Restrictions in Australia.

    The abortion debate is live and well and happening in Victoria too: Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony has the latest on the push to decriminalise abortion there.

    And Emervents thesis-procrastinates by having a vent about the anti-abortion lobby. - MORE ON

    http://inastrangeland.wordpress.com/2008/07/04/the-2nd-down-under-feminists-carnival/

    Lest we forget the Left fascist coathanger police states Nicaragua and Chile ( gasp, omigod, not Michelle!)
    11:33p
    Dack me once...
    The two distinguishing factors in Mazdak's teaching was to reduce the importance of religious formalities, claiming that the true religious person was one who understood and related correctly to the principles of the universe; and a criticism of the strong position of Zoroastrian clergy which had resulted in suppression of the Persian population and much poverty. In many ways can Mazdak's teaching be understood as a call for social revolution, and he has been called the "first Socialist in history".
    Mazdak emphasized good conduct, which involved a moral and ascetic life, no killing and not eating flesh (which contained substances solely from Darkness), being kind and friendly and live in peace with other people.
    Despite the concepts of good conduct, the followers of Mazdak raided the palaces and harems of the rich, removing the valuables they believed they had equal rights on. Facing the unrest in the empire, the King Kavadh 1, ruling from 488 until 531, converted to Mazdakism. With his backing could Mazdak embark on a program of social reform, which involved pacifism, anti-clericalism and aid programs for helping the poor. Mazdak had government warehouses opened to help the poor in the society. Mazdak had most Zoroastrian fire temples closed, save 3.
    His programs were so dramatic that there rumours told that he planned to have all private property confiscated, and replace marriage with free sex."
    11:41p
    Life's worked out well
    For some
    '...Inside, the scene is one of pure hedonism, Moscow style: brash, unabashed, gaudy and ostentatious. Long-legged models covered in body paint pose topless next to a Formula One car on show for the night, a few steps from a dozen oversized Faberge eggs on sale for pound stg. 2000 ($4140) a piece. Perfectly sculpted dancing girls covered only in baby oil and tiny bikinis gyrate on the bar overlooking a packed dance floor.
    Rising above are the club's private lodges. The cheapest - a cramped cubicle for six - costs pound stg. 1200 for the night. The VIP, a kitsch affair with its own back room and shower, can be hired for pound stg. 5500, drinks included. On this night, all lodges are taken: one by Andrei, the son of a wealthy businessman, who is celebrating his 17th birthday with friends; his driver and bodyguard kill time watching a DVD in a Mercedes outside.

    In the midst of a haze of smoke, bright laser beams and sparkler sticks, Andrei and his schoolmates are puffing on water pipes and knocking back vodka shots and mojitos. One of his girlfriends, who looks barely 18 and is wearing a see-through top, fishnet tights and diamond earrings, is drinking champagne and picking strawberries from a giant fruit platter. "Life is great," shouts Andrei over the loud music, as a throng of very young women and older men dance below. "Look at this. It's Rai! What better place to be than in Moscow? We have it all. It's the best place in the world to party. If you have money, of course. But that's not a problem."
    As if on cue, a Russian pop song with the lyrics zhizni udalas (life's worked out well) comes on. The crowd goes so wild that security has to remove two young girls. But it's later, by the bar, that I find a more poignant way to sum up the Moscow of the zolotoya molodezh (the golden youth). An attractive young blonde, sipping a cocktail, wears a white T-shirt with a warning emblazoned across her cleavage: "No yacht. No plane. No money. No chance." - MORE ON

    Hey Bakunin came from Russia - they could have a revolution there one day

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