Climate Deniers, Rabid Capitalist And God People.

 

        I'm sure that in that part of the world we call America, there are a lot of intelligent, rational people, but what comes across is, it is a land of  climate deniers, Christian fundamentalists, and rabid capitalists. I know we have them here in this country, as other countries do, it just seems that they are the voice of America. From what we get over here, they appear to be a people of dreamers living in a fog of illusion, depending on God and capitalism to sort things out for them. Yes I know, we have them also, but ours appear to be a minority and seem a little less vociferous.

       This article from Bella Caladonia puts it rather well.

       Bill McKibben of 350 informs us that “5.6 million Floridians have been told to evacuate, making it by far the largest mass movement of people in American history. Hot new world.” Meanwhile Trumps environmental chief Scott Pruitt tells us that “now is not the time” for discussion about climate change, even amid record-breaking hurricanes Irma, Jose, and Katia.

        The above photograph could be the defining image of our time.
        When Florida gun owner Ryon Edwards Florida posted a Facebook event to encourage others to ‘shoot the storm’ and fire their guns at Hurricane Irma, 46,000 people responded.
      In an outburst of irony he explained: “I never envisioned this event becoming some kind of crazy idea larger than myself. It has become something a little out of my control.”
     It’s been well documented that whilst the medias attention has turned to the crisis in America far more deadly events are unfolding in Asia, but there’s a reason we are focused on America and the Caribbean.
       As the Floridians golf through carnage, the storms are descending on the epicentre of ignorance, the dead centre of denialism, a Mar a Lago endgame.
      What club would you choose for the end of the world?
      But as a new study asserts that 50% of temperature increases and 32% of sea level rise was caused by just 90 companies. The New Republic suggests we start naming hurricanes “after Exxon, and Chevron, not Harvey and Irma”.
     “Specifically, the study asserts that the 90 largest carbon producers—including BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil—have cumulatively caused up to 50 percent of the increase in global mean surface temperature since 1880, and up to 32 percent of global sea level rise. Investor-owned companies like BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil have caused 16 percent of the global average temperature increases and 11 percent of the global sea level rise, the study says.
      The study “demonstrates, strictly speaking, causal responsibility” for the worst impacts of sea level rise and temperature increases, Oxford University political science professor Henry Shue wrote in accompanying commentary for the study.”
      So as the hurricanes descend it’s obvious that the problem isn’t just climate change, it’s Capitalism.
      And that’s one of the reasons – other than Western-centric news filters – that the focus is on America.
      It’s easy enough to defy reality as you bunker-down (pun intended) to the abstract notion of climate crisis. It’s rather more difficult as the storms are laying waste to your golf club.
      If NOW is not the time – when is?
The denialism has layers.
       The first, the outright lies of the deluded or the compromised: ‘This isn’t happening.’ The second the idea that ‘sustainability’ and a growth agenda can fix this. The third that capitalism is reformable.
       The first and second have been widely debunked exposed and ridiculed, The third is now in play.
       The delusional behaviour is stark in America – suffering under a (well armed) combination of Trumpism, turbo-capitalism and Christian fundamentalism, but it exists everywhere.
       This from the Dark Mountain’s new collection of essays Walking on Lava:

The stakes are in the meadow … the fields are overgrown
The winds of change are blowin’ through the place I’ve called home
They’re digging at the edges to build the power line
Same old story … but now the story’s mine […]
It all began 300 years before
What story is beginning
If this one is no more?

– Railroad Earth, ‘Lone Croft Farewell’

“It has become something a little out of my control.”

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Converting Natural Events To Human Disasters.

       Natural storms, escalated to human disasters with the help of human activity. The recent storms, Harvey Imra, Jose, show up the folly of human activity as we tarmac the planet, and build extensively on flood plains, in the belief that everything will be OK. After all, we are superior beings in control of the planet!!!

     An interesting article which highlights the glaring flaws in the capitalist system which puts greed for profit above rationalism and compassion, and shows that the system is cruelly loaded in favour of the big corporations. It is taken form the magazine Dissent.

                An aerial view of Houston in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, August 31

          Weather creates storms. It’s people who turn them into disasters, as this summer has made all too clear—from Texas and Louisiana, facing the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, to India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, where monsoon floods have killed more than 1,400 people in a single month.
         In the United States, Harvey presents perhaps the starkest illustration since Hurricane Sandy of the kinds of disasters we are capable of concocting. And as with all such extreme weather events, the slow disaster most directly precipitating this immediate one is climate change, making storms and floods more frequent and fearsome than they otherwise would have been.
       Unless you deny climate change exists outright—as several members of the Trump administration do—it’s hard to argue that there isn’t something at least a little unnatural about Harvey. Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann argues that the storm surge from Harvey was seven inches higher than it would have been just a few decades ago thanks to sea level rise. Harvey benefited from hotter-than-average temperatures in the waters where it brewed: average sea surface temperatures in the Gulf have risen about 0.5 degrees Celsius in recent decades, and as Harvey approached in August, stood at up to 4°C above average. “Not only are the surface waters of the Gulf of Mexico unusually warm right now,” Mann wrote, “but there is a deep layer of warm water that Harvey was able to feed upon when it intensified at near record pace as it neared the coast.” As a result, Houston is now dealing with the aftermath of the third “500-year flood” the city has experienced in the last three years.
          Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt, meanwhile, called it “opportunistic” and “misplaced” to talk about climate change in the storm’s wake, telling Breitbart radio that, “to look at things like this and to talk about a cause and effect really isn’t helping the people of Texas right now.” Worth mentioning, too, is that Pruitt has spent the better part of his tenure as EPA director trying to peel back regulations that would cap greenhouse gas emissions. He’s currently gearing up for a government-funded Red Team-Blue Team debate on the reality of climate change—with help from the Heartland Institute, a climate-denying think tank copiously funded by the oil and gas industries.
         Even if Pruitt is right and tides aren’t rising, Harvey still would have hit the Gulf harder than it should have. Storms happen all the time in nature, from solar flares to Martian dust storms. No one would care much if a hurricane of Harvey’s scale struck some unpopulated stretch of land or spun out to sea. The difference when they hit places like Houston—the nation’s fourth most populous city—is that people do live there, and that those people are organized in particular ways: by racism and capitalism and any number of other structuring forces in society, themselves sharing a web of connections to one another.
       In the case of Houston itself: The Magnolia City has long been heralded by libertarians as a kind of case study for no-holds-barred development, un-zoned and untainted by regulations and—by extension—a playground for enterprising real estate moguls. As a ProPublica and Texas Tribune report last year found, there have been 7,000 residential buildings constructed in floodplains since hurricane Katrina. From 1996 to 2011, Harris County (containing the wider Houston area) has also seen a 25 percent increase in the amount of impermeable—that is, paved—surfaces, which displaced absorbent wetlands and prairie grass that help provide a buffer against runoff. That development not only puts more people and property in harm’s way, but drives up the cost of dealing with disasters.
        While developers have been able to move about Houston at will, the same can’t be said for its residents. Houston alone is home to an estimated 575,000 undocumented immigrants, the third most of any metro area after New York and Los Angeles. As thousands began to evacuate, the Border Patrol announced that it would keep its checkpoints in the Rio Grande Valley open so long as the highways also remained open. This left undocumented Texans in Harvey’s path with an unbelievably cruel choice as the storm approached: try to ride it out, or risk deportation. Had it not been temporarily blocked via court order, this past Friday would also have seen the implementation of SB 4, one of the country’s most draconian anti-immigrant laws. Now, many of those attempting to rebuild their lives post-Harvey will also have to deal with the White House’s decision today to rescind DACA, which protects from deportation undocumented immigrants who arrived to the United States as children.
          There’s nothing natural, either, about the fact that Harvey’s floods inundated thirteen of Texas’s forty-one Superfund sites that are still awaiting clean-up, sites whose toxic contents now threaten their neighbors. A group of AP journalists visited storm-impacted sites around Houston before EPA inspectors, whose spokespeople claimed the sites were inaccessible. Long-term, the administration seems posed to make a bad situation even worse. Trump proposed a 30 percent cut to the EPA’s Superfund cleanup fund in his March budget blueprint, extending the George W. Bush administration’s doctrine that the polluters responsible for creating such sites should no longer have to contribute to cleaning them up.
         Some of those same polluters are at the root of yet another kind of disaster unfolding in Southeast Texas. Storm damage has resulted in an emissions spike from the area’s oil and chemical refineries, which spat out 2,700 extra tons of pollution because of storm damage, and still more from preventative shut-downs. Beginning Thursday, chemical fires at the Arkema chemical plant in Crosby, Texas, about twenty-five miles from downtown Houston, sent a plume of noxious black smoke billowing over the area. The fires lasted through the weekend, as International Business Times reported that the company had successfully lobbied Republicans to block relevant safety regulations—despite being fully aware of the risks.
         A broader analysis from the Center For Biological Diversity has found that Harvey has so far triggered the release of an estimated 1 million pounds of harmful substances from the area’s sixty petroleum plants. On top of storm damage, then, Texans—particularly the low-income communities of color clustered around oil and chemical operations—now face a mounting public health crisis. And that’s without mentioning the risk of infectious diseases carried by sewage and other waste contaminating floodwaters.
          It’s not very many people who create these man-made disasters. That catastrophic weather events are growing more common and severe is owed—in large part—to the 100 companies that have spit 71 percent of carbon emissions into the atmosphere since 1988, including many of those with hubs in Texas. Then there are developers who’ve taken advantage of lax zoning laws, and the members of the GOP eager to gut the budgets of the programs and agencies tasked with helping both prevent and recover from some of the storms’ worst impacts.
          So if the response on the ground to the crisis in Houston has been defined by a sense of collective solidarity—of neighbors helping neighbors—the precipitating causes of that crisis are undoubtedly a product of wealthy elites.
          Like climate change itself, Harvey’s horrors can’t be broken down to any one cause, be it rising warm tides or greedy developers or austerity-addled politicians. Yet what’s most foreboding about the prospect of an increasingly climate-changed reality is that all of those things which are already making life unlivable for so many will get muddled with the new ecological normal of our hotter, wetter world: immigration authorities threatening to deport people as they try to get out of harm’s way; capital swooping in after waters subside for a fresh round of land speculation; a hollowed-out public sphere, growing less nimble with every passing budget negotiation.
         Even a socialist America would have to deal with bad weather, and probably a lot more of it given the level of warming we’re already on track to experience. How we respond to that weather—and prevent more of it from happening than needs to—will mean the difference between a changed climate and an altogether meaner one.

---

Kate Aronoff is co-host of Dissent’s Hot & Bothered podcast on the politics of climate change and a writing fellow at In These Times.

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Merchants Of Death, War Profiteers, DSEI.

        The increased sabre rattling between the West and North Korea, could almost be seen as a publicity stunt for the coming exhibition/fair/sales drive, of man's incredible means of self destruction. I refer of course to the arms industry's mega sales drive which takes place in London, Monday September 11th. to Friday September 15th. when DSEI is in town. All the latest instruments of repression and destruction will be on show. State representatives, security executives and despots, will all be there, saliva dripping from their mouths as the view the latest devices from the madhouse of the arms industry, instruments with which to consolidate, or increase their power. DSEI, Defence and Security Equipment International, should be renamed War and Repression Equipment International, WREI.

      The arms industry is a massive slice of the profit making corporate juggernaut, it makes its money from death and destruction, and will almost certainly be rubbing their hands in delight at any escalation of a conflict into the insanity of war. After all, business is business, and they are in the business of selling military hardware, and without wars and conflicts their business might slow down.

       The arms industry has nothing to do with defence nor safety, it is all about power and wealth and the securing these aspects for the powerful and the wealthy. It is an industry of obscenity, where countries spend billions of tax payers money under the misnomer of "defence". The UK's "defence budget"  is approximately £45 billion annually, a large slice of this so called "defence budget" is spent in places like Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, countries that at no time threatened to attack our country. Each of these countries now lie in ruins, millions of ordinary people displaced, hundreds of thousands dead, and many more maimed and traumatised. All done with "defence budgets".

       We the ordinary people, pay through our taxes, for the ability of the powerful and obscenely wealthy to hold onto that power and wealth. We also pay in blood, when these power mongers decide to expand their power, and the arms industry is always there handing them weapons of ever greater destructive power. It is a vicious circle based on greed, wars feed the arms industry, the arms industry feeds wars. Perhaps if things were properly named people would be more aware of their purposes. The "defence budgets" should be re-named the "war budgets", and the arms industry should be re-named, the "War Promotion Industry"

       Of course this exhibition of money making, destructive war machinery will not go unhampered, as there are thousand of people who will be there to protest against this inhuman obscenity. However, let's not forget, the arms industry and capitalism are inseparable, and to get rid of one, we have to destroy both.

Protest details HERE:

More details HERE 

And HERE: 

         Anti-war activists have begun a week of protests in east London in an effort to stop weapons and military equipment arriving at Britain’s biggest arms fair.
         The biennial Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI), which bills itself as “the world leading event” for buyers and sellers of military equipment, begins next week at the ExCeL centre in Docklands.
          More than 34,000 visitors are expected to attend the arms fair, including delegations from regimes accused of human rights abuses such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, as well as representatives of the world’s 10 biggest arms companies.
         Keynote speakers include Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, and Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, as well as the chiefs of staff of the British armed forces.

         Thousands of protesters are expected to take action outside the the ExCeL centre throughout the week, with blockades, actions and demonstrations outside all main entrances in an effort to hamper exhibitors from setting up their stands for the four-day event, which opens on 12 September.
           Protests on each day will have a different focus, from nuclear weapons to arms to Israel to free movement for people rather than weapons. Opponents to the fair say that some of the world’s most oppressive regimes are represented among buyers.
          On Monday, protesters were demonstrating against arms to Israel. By 3pm, police had already made six arrests, according to Kat Hobbs of Campaign Against the Arms Trade.

Read the full article HERE:

       DSEI 2017 is at: ExCeL London, One Western Gateway, Royal Victoria Dock, London, E16 1XL

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Extremism, A Weapon Of The State.

       In keeping with the previous post, this article in support of all prisoners, from Contra Info:

    Multiform combat against global tyranny, irreducibility to the advance of state terrorism
      In Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia, Paraguay, Greece, Turkey, Syria, USA, Venezuela, Germany, Poland, Russia, India or China – as in Portugal or any other part of the world – the order is to attack by all means those who resist, relentlessly pursuing all combatants, imprisoning them, torturing them, killing them if they deem it necessary. The dogs of Power receive the salary to that, the laws are adapted to legitimize the crimes of state terrorism, all crimes of capitalism. Capitalism, in all nuances, feeds on these situations while the peoples remain inert, terrified or dormant, ignoring to what extent their inaction reinforces the implementation of fascism that is tried to install everywhere.
      We are against all frontiers, against all forms of power, of subordination, against all forms of capitalism. We could appeal in particular to the solidarity with comrade Santiago Maldonado, disappeared by the police in Argentina (when he was in solidarity with the dignified struggle of the Mapuche people) – or with all the other anarchists who struggle daily around the world for the destruction of this system, for freedom, risking their lives, inside and outside prisons – however, we consider that the only way to defend your freedom and life is to take care of our freedom and our own life, each of us. This is the memory that must prevail.
Multiform combat against global tyranny, irreducibility to the advance of state terrorism.
The passion for freedom is stronger than all prisons!
Some anarchists
August 24, 2017
in pdf here
in Portuguese, Spanish, German

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Freedom Is Born Through Struggle.

       Those who confront the injustices of this greed driven capitalist system, openly and head on, often pay a high price. For some the price is their life, others it is being locked up in the various states' cages of repression. All deserve our unending solidarity, if our aim is to build a world of fairness for all our people. The state will not relinquish its authoritarian power willing, it will never offer the people freedom, it will not fade away quietly. It will fiercely attempt to crush all and any flowering of freedom and self determination, it can only survive by our subservience, our freedom and justice can only blossom from its ruins.

       The Vrije Bond from Amsterdam, has started an own initative of solidarity, to support the comrade, sentenced to 2 years an 7 months in Hamburg for having participated in the protest against the G20 summit in July.
Money is desperately needed and could be transferred to the following bank account:
VB SOLIDARITEITSFONDS IBAN: NL80INGB0005495473 BIC/Swift: INGBNL2A Key Word : G20

Please spread this information!

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Organised Anarchists.

       It should be obvious to any observer of the present economic system that rules this world, that it can't be reformed. Capitalism can't be converted into a caring compassionate, system that sees to the needs of all our people. Its basis is self gain based on the exploitation of others, others are there to be profited from, not cared for. So running to a ballot box putting down your mark, against a chosen party disciple, will not bring about the compassionate capitalism you hope for, nor will petitioning the political ballerinas that hold the reins of power because of that ballot paper. 

      The creation of that better world for all, must take place outside the rules of capitalism, and outside the legislation of the capitalist minders, the state. The change has to happen among the people, by the people, in their communities and workplaces, in spite of, and in opposition to, the structures created by this enslaving economic system. We have no rules, we create structures and strategies as we develop, our needs will determine the shape of our new society, after we have built a bonfire of all the rules and legislations that bind us as units of profit, and as subservient units of the state.

       This from:  The Foundation for Economic Education

In the New York Times, Niki Kitsantonis writes, “It may seem paradoxical, but Greece’s anarchists are organizing like never before.”

No. Anarchists – the sensible ones, at least – are not against organization. They are against rule – against ruling and against being ruled. Merriam-Webster explains the derivation of the word: “Medieval Latin anarchia, from Greek, from anarchos having no ruler, from an- + archos ruler.”

True, as the dictionary editors note, “anarchy” and “anarchism” are sometimes used to mean something like “absence or denial of any authority or established order” or simply “absence of order.” But rational political theorists and even activists don’t advocate pure disorder; they advocate the absence of rule, which they define as the absence of government.

So what is it that these Greek anarchists are organizing for? Well, in fact, the focus of the article is on how anarchists are supplying the services that the Greek state is not providing:

Seven years of austerity policies and a more recent refugee crisis have left the government with fewer and fewer resources, offering citizens less and less. Many have lost faith. Some who never had faith in the first place are taking matters into their own hands, to the chagrin of the authorities….

Whatever the means, since 2008 scores of “self-managing social centers” have mushroomed across Greece, financed by private donations and the proceeds from regularly scheduled concerts, exhibitions and on-site bars, most of which are open to the public. There are now around 250 nationwide.

Some activists have focused on food and medicine handouts as poverty has deepened and public services have collapsed.

In recent months, anarchists and leftist groups have trained special energy on housing refugees who flooded into Greece in 2015 and who have been bottled up in the country since the European Union and Balkan nations tightened their borders. Some 3,000 of these refugees now live in 15 abandoned buildings that have been taken over by anarchists in the capital.

One part of Athens seems to have been a self-governing, but not state-governed, territory for some time. Some sources say Exarchia has existed since as early as 1870. The name presumably comes from “ex-,” out of, away from, and of course “archos,” ruler.

In Athens, the anarchists’ epicenter remains the bohemian neighborhood of Exarchia, where the killing of a teenager by a police officer in 2008 set off two weeks of rioting, helped reinvigorate the movement and produced several guerrilla groups that led to a revival of domestic terrorism in Greece.

The police and the authorities tread lightly in the area.

The police have recently raided some buildings illegally occupied by anarchists, called squats, in Athens, in the northern city of Thessaloniki and on the island of Lesbos, a gateway for hundreds of thousands of migrants over the past two years….

The anarchists say their squats are a humane alternative to the state-run camps now filled with more than 60,000 migrants and asylum seekers. Human rights groups have broadly condemned the camps as squalid and unsafe.

In Exarchia, one of the squats includes a former state secondary school that was abandoned because of structural problems. Established last spring with the help of anarchists, the squat is now home to some 250 refugees, mostly from Syria, who have set up a chicken coop on the roof. Many more refugees are on a “waiting list” for other occupied buildings.

The squats function as self-organized communities, independent from the state and nongovernmental organizations, said Lauren Lapidge, 28, a British social activist who came to Greece in 2015 at the peak of the refugee crisis and is actively involved with several occupied buildings.

“They are living organisms: Kids go to school, some were born in the squat, we’ve had weddings inside,” she said.

There’s really nothing paradoxical about anarchists setting up institutions and communities outside the state to provide needed goods and services. The Greek anarchists probably don’t see businesses as part of that non-state society, though libertarian anarchists and anarcho-capitalists do.

What is paradoxical, as I wrote five years ago, is Greek “anarchists” who object to the state reducing its size, scope, and power by cutting back on taxes and transfer payments. Anarchists who organize voluntarily to achieve common purposes are just living their philosophy.

This piece originally published at Cato@liberty

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Expropriation.

         Wouldn't it be nice if supermarkets were places where you picked up the necessities of life, instead of places where you are obliged to spend the crap wages you get from your lousy job, all so that you are a unit of profit for this insane, unjust, unequal, crap economic system. 

This from Act For Freedom Now:
      Expropriation of OK super market, in Exarhia – Athens

        Few days ago we decided to join the operations that are taking place around the area of Exarchia contributing as we want and we can to liberate our neighborhood from the presence of the capitalist super markets…. But at the same time we understand and we like all the attacks by our comrades. Against the suppression that we feel every day on our skin or in a psychological way..from the mercenaries of the state, so called police. Against the gentrification of the area by luxury and expensive cafeterias etc..
       We perceive Exarchia as a revolutionary field of resistance and we think that is unacceptable and a big contradiction to compromise with this situation.We are hostile to every form that is feeding capitalism. The gentrification is here..is an indirect attack to corrupt,infiltrate and poison the characteristics of this area.. It happened many times, in many places in the past.. An example is Plaza de Sol in Madrid.. A square that from instructional environment turned into a lifestyle meeting point.
       So stop the invasion of our squats, of our neighborhood and open your fucking capitalist spots somewhere else, or we will be every time more active in the resistance.

FREEDOM FOR PANAGIOTIS Z.
FREEDOM FOR OUR COMRADES IN PRISON
GET THE FUCK OUT FROM EXARCHIA
Source

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People Hidden From Society.

       Yesterday, Wednesday, another lovely day, though the wind could have been a wee bit kinder,13/14 mph. These nasty thoughts about the wind never used to enter my head, but now that I'm an old wrinkly, fair weather cyclist, they do creep in from time to time.

       As I said, another lovely day, so out on the usual route, the Campsie area. Not a good run for a Westerly wind, which it was, as the start of the run is mainly down hill, from the Lowmoss/Torrance round-about, all the way through Kirkintilloch, you have it easy and the Westerly wind behind you. Like I said, those nasty thoughts creep in as I flee downhill towards Auchenreoch, "I'll have to face this bloody wind all the up this drag on the way home", an easterly wind would be nice for this run.

       On the way home I thought I would go and have a look at that wee lochan I saw through the trees, last time out. So I wandered down a twisty path to its edge, there were a couple of locals out with their dogs, and I asked if this small lochan had a name. Their answer was a wee bit of a disappointment to me, they said "No". They explained that it was a man made settlement pool for domestic waste water from the nearby, well-to-do housing estate that was built on what was once the beautiful location of Lennox Castle. Hidden away from public view, surrounded by trees, Lennox Castle, has gone from a home for those with learning difficulties, to a swanky housing estate. It seems that it has followed the normal course in this society, from a publicly owned hospital, albeit, with a dubious past, to a home for the wealthy. Ah well, I suppose that is par for the course in this society. 

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Street Poetry.

        I often spout that a poem can say more than a large book. It can condense and yet magnify events, feelings, and ideas into a phrase or a line. I received this from a comrade, thanks Andy, it says it all, the misery, injustice, brutality, repression, inequality, anxiety and stress, of this insane system we live under.  

 

Street poetry fae Dundee
FREE THINKING
Someone got abused and it's you that gets the blame
Weirdo cracks, and snide remarks. To tell you your not the same.
As bingo, soap, and clubby folk, who s labour gives them hope,Who live their lives, like the dance of flies. Whilst drinking in their smoke.
the powers that be, say there,s war , your children flock to fight, The chocked dry words that mask the fact, their death's the ultimate sacrifice.
How old is young Billy there, he looks a strapping lad,
Make sure he joins the chosen few, in the footsteps of his dad
And if he survives he,ll get to march, with worthless medals, to the cenotaph.
the watchers, watch your freedom, concerned about your health.
All you want, desire, or crave, is sitting on a shelf.
The prison population, is as healthy as can be,
The courts are working overtime, to keep your freedom free.
So pay your debt and pay your tax, and forget the powers that be. Leave them to do there job, to tell you that you're free
if you need another crutch. You,ve always got your church,
That will guarantee you,ll never die, believe in us we never lie,
But you must remember, to give them all your cash,
Or the top man in heaven, won't see their wealthy rash.
Nor golden goblets, raised in praise, the best of wine no aftertaste,
The pious followers of the faith have heaven on their mind,
The same as the thieving prison,who are serving out there time.
insurance is a business, copied from the church,
Selling you salvation, they know your a soft touch,
The banker sells you money. With slimey bloodsoaked hands,
He makes a tidy living, from our loss and pain and harm,
He,ll be the first to advertise the country should re arm,
To finance strife,makes up his life, and profit margins rife.
With the corpses of his shady deals, and desperate people with no meals.
The breaking news, of procesded views, will feed you all their fear,
The media slant. Of the current rant. Is directed straight at you
Watch out for knives, and hooded youth's, and computers that steal your lively hood.
Don't drink smoke, nor crack a joke, about a religion that's not yours
Don't eat too much. And wash your hands, and give generously to the poor,
Save energy and save the trees,save all the creatures in the seas,
And save your childrens, children's from likes of you and me.
The freedom that we,re looking for, is locked up in our minds,
The key's that free our freedom, are guarded by a fear that binds,
We dare not follow a different path, for fear of fear,s been planted here by the civilisers wrath.
The moral ways, of our living days, are not about free will,
Obey the educators and keep on standing still.
Free thinking men and women are at liberty to think,
But must keep their thoughts in closets, in case they cause a stink.
The written word was written for the likes of you and me,
The only thing it fails to state, is that it will never set you free

Andy Duncan.

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Twisted Values And False Histories.

       Listening and reading about the débâcle of removing confederate statues in America, I'm surprised that such a campaign has not been raging through our own society here in the UK.  In this upside down society of twisted values and false histories, it is safe to say, that most of the immortalised great and good, of our country, have blood on their hands, the captains of industry, the leaders of military, the builders of empire, all glorified, all soaked in guilt, all standing knee deep in the misery and blood of others. Industries that destroyed lives, enforced poverty, and polluted our planet, military leaders who saw the breaking of bodies, as a way of gaining power for their masters, All depended on useing people mercilessly to achieve their own personal ambitions. We are suppose to look up to them and feel proud, how insane is that.

        Back to America, its slave era and that brutal link to one of America's great and good, a Dr. James Marion Sims. 
This from Anarcha Library:

 Dr. James Marion Sims.

A Note to the Editor

         As a medical student I am often exposed to a short history of the discovery and or circumstances related to the construction of a tool or drug before or during a scientific lecture. I almost always hear the professor exclaim that Greece was the birthplace of modern medicine and that we should thank this person or that person for contributing to American medicine. Needless to say the countless contributions of many other nations and people are almost always missed.
       I have spoken with other medical students for whom this is also a problem. The reading material for most medical schools is standardized and I am sure that each student can see that the medical contributions that make it into most medical textbooks are almost always devoid of contributions from minorities or people who would not be considered white.
       Very recently I was particularly affected by this inequality as I listened to a lecture on the female exam. I felt like a large part of the history was overlooked when the lecturer commented that she would not discuss the controversial history of the speculum except to say that Dr. [James Madison] Sims created a very useful tool that allows physicians to examine the walls of the vagina and the uterus.
       I was very curious about the history that she was eager to omit. After reading several accounts of his various cruelties and the way they where distorted to make Dr. Sims out to be a hero I was compelled to memorialize the enslaved women in the same way that he is memorialized.
       Anarcha was not able to tell her own story it is probable that she was unable to read or write. I am sure that her story would be more horrible than the fictional account that I have written but with the bits and pieces that I have placed together I am sure that what she endure in the name of the advancement of medicine could have read like the following submission.—Alexandria C. Lynch, MS III

ANARCHA'S STORY.

By Alexandria C. Lynch, MS III

       A pregnant woman stands in the blazing sun with her arms arched to her back. Tired from an 18-hour workday, picking cotton, looking after Master's children, or cooking in the big house. These days are particularly hard for her, as it is hard for all women who must work until the moment they are to give birth.
        Yes, she is worn tired and she can feel the aches grappling her bones. She is also filled with a glorious anticipation, any day now her sweet beautiful baby will be born. As an enslaved woman, life is difficult to say the least but there are still beautiful moments that this woman cannot be denied. Even though enslaved she can bring life into the world as naturally as any other woman.
        She returns to her cabin, covering herself as best she can with a tattered cloth or blankets. She has a conversation surrounding her thoughts and concerns about the arrival of her child with her fellow captive comrades. All of the women on the plantation are anxiously awaiting the birth of this new hope and the father is also anxious. Both parents have mixed concerns about bringing a child into a life of slavery but there is nothing that can derail what will soon happen.
        Later on that night she feels the pain of labor contractions. She is hoping to give birth quickly because she knows that the birth of her child will not be an acceptable reason to miss work the following day. She waits a few hours and awakens the other women in the room with a scream. They rush to her aid and prop her up on the bits and pieces of tattered blankets. They make her as comfortable as possible. The night passes straight away and she is still in labor. The headman must now be informed that she will not be in the field today. She cannot stand and she cannot work. The day passes and still no baby is born. She is tired and in pain. Three days will pass and she still will not see her child.
        After three days her condition is past serious and the fact that she is unable to perform her duties as an enslaved woman starts to weigh heavy in the Master's thoughts. In an effort to protect his human investment he summons a physician to aid in the delivery.
        By this point she is beyond fatigued and lying flaccid on the floor. He enters the room and uses a tool to excavate the baby that was stubbornly lodged in the woman’s vagina. He has had very little experience using his makeshift forceps. Several days after the birth of her child she is unable to control her bodily functions. Her Master finds her condition repugnant and sends her to the same physician to see if there is anything that he can do to repair his damaged property.

Continue reading:

      

        Look behind the façade, seek the true history, see the cruelty and the misery they perpetrated, all in the name of fame, wealth and power.

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Hamburg Summer 2017: I Am There, I Stay There!

 

        Like I have said before, it is difficult for me to keep my mouth shut within this kaleidoscope of injustice and inequality, repression and poverty.  I have often spouted off about prisons and their purpose, their part in the control chain of this repressive and exploitative system. This letter taken from Act For Freedom Now, from a victim locked up inside one of Germany's many prisons, for protesting that injustice, puts it much better than I could.

Letter from Hamburg from Billwerder Prison, by a French prisoner
        It’s been almost a month and a half since I was imprisoned during the twelfth G20 summit in Hamburg, in a city that was besieged and taken in hostage by the security forces, but which also saw an important local and popular protest.
       Tens of thousands, if not more, flocking from all over Europe, and even beyond, converged, met, organised, debated and demonstrated together for several days in a great surge of solidarity. At all times aware of the possibility of suffering the violence and the repression of the police. A huge prefab police court had been built for the occasion, to punish any dissent against this international summit as quickly as possible.
      My arrest, like that of many comrades, is based only on the sacred word of the police, of a brigade sent to infiltrate, observe and follow their “prey” (during forty-five minutes in my case, for a supposed throwing of a projectile…). Once isolated, they sent colleagues to arrest them, intervening quickly and violently, and leaving no loop-holes.
        So, here I am, locked up in these places primordial to the proper functioning of a global social order, these places that serve as a tool for the control and management of poverty, essential to the maintenance of their “social peace”. Prison acts like a sword of Damocles hanging above each and every individual so that they are petrified by the idea of deviating from the codes and dictates of an established order: “working, consuming, sleeping”, from which no dominated individual may escape, so they alienate themselves through work and the life that goes with it, to be on time, without ever flinching, and not only during the second round of the presidential elections, where we have been required to be “En Marche” [“in operation”, Macron’s slogan and name of the party in power right now] or to die, preferably slowly and silently.
        Since the law has no vocation to guarantee the general interest, nor to be neutral, it is the expression of an increasingly institutional domination by the most powerful in order to guarantee their property and security and thus paralyse, sanction and marginalize anyone who does not see things the same way or who will not submit.
        Beyond the cases of the well-known and supported activists who are locked up, there are also, and above all, those men and women who are exposed to the brutality and the cruelty of imprisonment. Here the work is paid one euro per hour, of which half is accessible only on release from jail. In my wing, detainees in pre-trial detention or for short sentences (six months to four years) are mainly detained only for one reason: their social condition and origin. Apart from the staff, very few are from the host country, all are foreigners, refugees and/or precarious, poor, weakened by life. Their crime: they did not submit to the rules of the game, for the majority by engaging in drugdealing or by committing thefts, scams, alone or in organised gangs at various scales.
         Imprisonment is a fundamental pillar of this system but one can not criticise it without attacking the society that produces it. The prison, not operating in self-sufficiency, is the perfect link in a society based on exploitation, domination and separation in its varied forms.
“Work and prison are two essential pillars for social control, work being the better police and rehabilitation a permanent blackmail.”
        My thoughts go to the Italian comrades facing an umpteenth wave of repression, especially those charged in the investigation into the “explosive device” left in front of a bookstore linked to Casapound. The extreme right must face an organised, popular and offensive counterattack. It is so useful and complementary to those states that feed on its security aspirations and delusions and its incessant stigmatization of “foreigners.”
        Thoughts also for the comrades who will face trial next September for the police car burned on the eighteenth of May last year, in Paris, during the movement “loi travail” (labour law) movement. Many people have gone through prison and two are still incarcerated. Strength to them!
        Acknowledgments to the local activists organising rallies in front of our prison, an initiative appreciated here as it breaks the routine and the state of ambient lethargy in which we are alienated. Acknowledgments to all those who support us here and everywhere.
To the Bro’, 161, MFC, OVBT, wild youngsters, those who BLF and other friends …
Comrades, strength!
        Let’s free the G20 prisoners and all the others! We’re not alone!
One imprisoned among others
Billwerder Prison,
Hamburg
14 August 2017

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A Wee Hidden Gem.

         Haven't been able to get out on the bike much recently. A combination of lousy weather, (I'm now a fair weather cyclist) and difficult circumstances. However, today was forecast to be dry, with light winds, so dusted it down, checked the tyres and set off for a spin round my old familiar patch, the Campsie Hills area. Wrong shirt, it was a bit cooler than I thought, but still a very enjoyable run, not as many cyclist out on the road as usual. Although I have covered that area on the bike countless times, it never fails to surprise me, a view I hadn't taken in before, something through the trees I hadn't noticed before, some trees that have been removed, a burn in spate, and so on. Today, as I took to the cycle path just before you enter Lennoxtown, second time ever, I was obliged to stop because of a group of people with about six dogs spread out all over the pathway. While stopped I noticed through the trees a small lochan I never knew existed. It is pleasantly tucked behind shrubs and trees. So I stood looking at it for a while, watching the mallard peacefully swimming about. I had to take a wee photo. 

 On the cycle path just before you enter Lennoxtown. 

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Call Out For Solidarity.

        In this so called democracy, sanitised, and authority choreographed, marches, demos and protests are tolerated, but even in these sanctioned affairs, the eyes of the minders of the state, are ever eager to mark things with their branding iron of fear, just in case anybody should try to think for themselves and act accordingly. Glasgow Pride March, a rather merry and pleasurable affair, saw 5 arrests.
         This is a call out from various groups, to show support and solidarity with those arrested.

Solidarity with 5 arrested at Glasgow Pride MarchHi, 

     There’s a write-up on this blog, including pictures and video: https://athousandflowers.net/2017/08/19/no-pride-in-police-arrests-in-glasgow-as-protesters-resist-police-led-pride-march/amp/
       The first three arrests were a planned protest by Free Pride and they were bailed on Saturday. The other two arrests were from our bloc: a young person nicked for having an offensive banner (with no chance to surrender or destroy it) and someone who tried to intervene / observe. As far as I know these two are being held for court on Monday.
        I’ll go to the court tomorrow in support; is anyone else coming, and do we know the full names of the arrestees? I expect both to be not called, or bailed or ordained to return for trial. Does anyone know where prisoners are released from Glasgow Sheriff Court custody, if they don’t get out through the main doors?
        Thanks for any help, best wishes,

Solidarity with 5 arrested at Glasgow Pride March
        Latest news is that two people are still in custody, the other three have been released. There is going to be a solidarity demo at the Glasgow Sheriff Court tomorrow Monday 9am onwards
       For updates see ACE facebook and especially Free the Pride Five events page https://www.facebook.com/events/294177851048722/
       Excerpt: On 19th August three trans activist and two antifa were arrested for protesting capitalist pride. Join us in solidarity on their court date.
UPDATE: three have been released but we will still be there for the other two.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1445513385484082&id=216550781713688&ref=bookmarks

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk