Wicker Man

Watching the Wicker Man (made in 1973) on television. Have seen this film countless times yet it still unnerves me. It is not scary in the traditional sense of a horror movie but it is still scary and very unsettling nevertheless, and surreal, including the folk music. Shame the film did badly when originally released (also, 20 mins of the film was removed though, thankfully, later restored),  a storyline ahead of its time though cult horror, ‘King of the B’s’, Roger Corman show the originality and Wicker Man was shown on a double-bill in the States with that other cult classic, Don’t Look Now.

The original storyline creates a tension between organised Christianity with Paganism, furthermore the virginal Sergeant Howie (the excellent Edward Woodward) is depicted as close minded, sexually repressed and rigid in his thinking. This pitted against a much more open dynamic as represented by Summerisle, a journey for Howie that takes him as well into his own psyche, which becomes fractured and fragmented because he desperately clings to these rigid and fixed certainties.

Frankly, the remake of the Wicker Man was an appalling embarassment, utterly misogynistic.

PCS union on Vestas

PCS statement on Vestas – Chris Baugh (assistant general secretary)

The government has just announced plans to create 400,000 green jobs over the next 5 years and a huge expansion of renewable energy – yet it seems unwilling to step in to save 600 jobs at Vestas, the only wind turbine plant in England threatened with closure at the end of July. This shows the government’s double standards and that their so-called ‘low carbon transition plan’ is empty rhetoric.

PCS fully supports the workers at Vestas who are fighting to save their jobs. We call on the government to intervene to save the plant in the interests of the Vestas workers, the regional economy on the Isle of Wight, the future of the renewables industry in the UK and to show that it is serious about meeting the UK’s climate change commitments.

We are encouraging our members and branches to support the workers at Vestas by sending messages of solidarity and support.

http://www.pcs.org.uk/en/resources/green_workplaces/campaigns.cfm

Capitalism gives you the flu and makes a profit curing you!

Well, it looks like someone is making a healthy profit on the backs of illness and misery….

Yes, swine flu….is making a financial killing for GlaxoSmithKline yet they downplaying this… I mean, they don’t want to look exploitative now, do they?!! What’s also laughable is that swine flu came about due to de-regulation, globalisation, neoliberalism and the continuing industrialisation of farming:

This has been a transition, in essence, from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, unprecedented in nature, containing tens, even hundreds of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems, suffocating in heat and manure, while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates and pathetic progenies.

 Indeed capitalism gives you the flu and makes a massive profit curing you!