A Jury?

 An interesting post from Craig Murray:

 

           I want to make one or two points for you to ponder while I am in jail. This is the last post until about Christmas; we are not legally able to post anything while I am imprisoned. But the Justice for Craig Murray Campaign website is now up and running and will start to have more content shortly. Fora and comments here are planned to stay open.
         I hope that one possible good effect of my imprisonment might be to coalesce opposition to the imminent abolition of jury trials in sexual assault cases by the Scottish Government, a plan for which Lady Dorrian – who wears far too many hats in all this – is front and centre. We will then have a situation where, as established by my imprisonment, no information at all on the defence case may be published in case it contributes to “jigsaw identification”, and where conviction will rest purely on the view of the judge.
        That is plainly not “open justice”, it is not justice at all. And it is even worse than that, because the openly stated aim of abolishing juries is to increase conviction rates. So people will have their lives decided not by a jury of their peers, but by a judge who is acting under specific instruction to increase conviction rates.
          It is often noted that conviction rates in rape trials are too low, and that is true. But have you ever heard this side of the argument? In Uzbekistan under the Karimov dictatorship, when I served there, conviction rates in rape trials were 100%. In fact very high conviction rates are a standard feature of all highly authoritarian regimes worldwide, because if the state prosecutes you then the state gets what it wants. The wishes of the state in such systems vastly outweigh the liberty of the individual.
         My point is simply this. You cannot judge the validity of a system simply by high conviction rates. What we want is a system where the innocent are innocent and the guilty found guilty; not where an arbitrary conviction target is met.
         The answer to the low conviction rates in sexual assault trials is not simple. Really serious increases in resources for timely collection of evidence, for police training and specialist units, for medical services, for victim support, all have a part to play. But that needs a lot of money and thought. Just abolishing juries and telling judges you want them to convict is of course free, or even a saving.
         The right to have the facts judged in serious crime allegations by a jury of our peers is a glory of our civilisation. It is the product of millennia, not lightly to be thrown away and replaced by a huge increase in arbitrary state power. That movement is of course fueled by current fashionable political dogma which is that the victim must always be believed. That claim has morphed from an initial meaning that police and first responders must take accusations seriously, to a dogma that accusation is proof and it is wrong to even question the evidence, which is of course to deny the very possibility of false accusation.

Read the full article HERE: 

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Pegasus.

       Big Brother just gets cleverer and smarter and more devious. The latest invasion of your privacy comes from the home of an Israeli company NSO with its latest spyware Pegasus. It is capable of spying on and stealing data from any phone on its list without the owner having the slightest idea of what is going on. Each day reveals an ever growing list of journalists, activists, politicians, etc. names popping up as more is revealed of this underhand grab by anybody who can afford to purchase the spyware. There may be an outcry against this insidious infringement of our privacy, but big money is lining up to try and buy the company, as the financial Mafia know very well that there is big bucks to be made in snooping into other people's lives. That is the shape of the society we tolerate, it stinks, it is rotten to the core. For decency and justice, for personal lives free from prying eyes of corporate or state power mongers, we have to destroy it, root and branch.

The following from KNOWLEDIA:

 

       NSO's Pegasus spyware, a cyberweapon enabling state-sponsored terrorism against civil society, has outraged the world. In Israel, there's complicity – or complete indifference. NSO's Pegasus spyware, a cyberweapon that hacks cellphones and enables state-sponsored terrorism against civil society, has outraged the world. In Israel, there's complicity – or complete indifference.
       "The violation of Israeli settlers' right to ice cream": The Ben & Jerry's "outrage" is what most of Israel's media, government and the Israeli public have been obsessing over for the last 24 hours, while in the rest of the world, newspapers headlines have been publicizing Israeli surveillance company NSO's complicity in the political persecution of journalists, lawyers, politicians and human rights activists.
         Since 2017, when NSO's involvement in political persecution in Mexico was exposed, there has been a steady flow of investigations around the world into its other human rights violations, and every few months more findings have been published. And in Israel, there was, and is, general indifference, both in the public square and in the political sphere. Was Israel Aware of NSO Clients' Surveillance Targets? || NSO's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week Is Just the Start
          A charitable explanation of that indifference in Israel would be based as stemming from the (mistaken) belief that these were isolated, exceptional cases, or that the publications that exposed the misdoings were inherently "anti-Israel."
         But even now, when the trickle of information about NSO has become a tsunami, in particular its Pegasus spyware (believed to have been acquired by numerous authoritarian governments as a spyware weapon to target political opponents, journalists and human rights activists), Ben & Jerry's decision to stop selling its products in the occupied territories is still the most discussed issue in Israel – and the trigger for the loudest outrage.
         Activists and journalists protest outside Mexico's Attorney General's Office after a criminal complaint following a report their smartphones had been infected with spying software made by Israel's NSO Carlos Jasso/…

 

Further info on Pegasus: 

 Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info  

More Anger.

        The Protest on the Glasgow Green on Saturday, July 31st. against the avalanche of closures and sell-offs of our public assets, was, I hope, the start of some really angry voices from the citizens of Glasgow. This unprecedented number of closures and sell-offs of our public assets will affect the very fibre of our city, to the detriment of all its citizens and its future citizens. We cannot simple stand by and watch our culture and services being plundered to the benefit of the private corporate world. It's our city, or it's the private owners city, we have to decide, and the decision has to be made now, not sometime in the future when we will be denuded of all our public assets. Fighting to get them back will be a lot more difficult that fighting to hold on to them.

Some more photos from the event.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk  

Angry.

         Today, 31st. July, some Glasgow citizens marched from St Mungo Museum to Glasgow Green in protest at the cuts and closures taking place in the city, libraries, community centres, sports centres and more, plus the selling off of other of the citizen's public assets. It was a colourful march and well attended, but not well enough attended. Glasgow citizens it's time you got angry and raised you voices in on thunderous roar, "We will not tolerate this slashing of our services and assets".
        What is happening is the plundering of public assets, which will end up in private hands, and the diminishing of the quality of life for those who live in this city and to whom these assets belong, a slashing of the quality of life for the next generation. What is the council for if it is not to service and maintain the services and facilities for the people who live in the city. If they can't do that then then the city council is superfluous to requirements.
      It is time to stop being polite and time to take to the streets with your righteous anger and force the take back of all our assets into the control of the all of the people of our city. Glasgow, get angry, you have every right to be ferociously angry, and show it on the streets of our city and in our communities. It is your health and welfare and that of your children that are going to suffer from this plundering of the public purse.

 

 

Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info    

Glasgow.

       A new addition to  Spirit of Revolt website, a radical map of Glasgow, if you are interested in Glasgow's working class history, the history from below, then visit the "Education" box on Spirit of Revolt website, and find out about some of the people and events that helped shape our City. Just visit the page and click on a star and learn from history.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk  

Lords.

           For July’s “Read of the Month” we at Spirit of Revolt have chosen a little pamphlet called "Lords of the Realm" it has a look at those who own most of the planet and most of the wealth produced by the planet’s population. A very unsatisfactory situation for most people on the planet. Perhaps reading it may increase your desire to change the equation in favour of the people who actually create all that wealth, the ordinary person on the street. Enjoy.
Read online:

Some interesting info on the situation of the world's wealth.

          The wealthiest 1 percent of the world’s population now owns more than half of the world’s wealth, according to a new report.
          The total wealth in the world grew by 6 percent over the past 12 months to $280 trillion, marking the fastest wealth creation since 2012, according to the Credit Suisse report. More than half of the $16.7 trillion in new wealth was in the U.S., which grew $8.5 trillion richer.
         But that wealth around the world is increasingly concentrated among those at the top. The top 1 percent now owns 50.1 percent of the world’s wealth, up from 45.5 percent in 2001.

Visit ann arky's home at https:/spiritofrevolt.info    

Vacs.

 

        Most people will admit that the last year and a half or so during the covid19 pandemic, we have more or less followed the rules and dictate of the state. We have accepted restrictions that under different circumstances would have been resisted and labelled fascism and rightly so. Of course it is generally accepted that it was all for our own good. However, the pandemic was not handled properly, different decisions would have lead to different circumstances. How much different would it have been if it was the scientists and professional medical experts that made the decisions on how to handle the pandemic and based in the community with co-operation between those communities, with the political element taken out of the equation. After all it was a medical emergency, not a political problem, politics muddy the water considerably and opened up opportunities for the raft of abuses we have witnessed in handling contracts and the rich and powerful scratching each others backs while the state racked up a mountain of debt pouring billions into the coffers of very rich and powerful corporations, a debt that you and I will be forced to repay by means of "austerity" that translates into slashing public services, lay-offs, increase in taxes, and slashing working conditions. Now we have to be vigilant in seeing that all those restrictions, legislation and public manipulation by the state and its mouthpiece, the mainstream media are swept completely away. Let's neuter the state and its repressive apparatus that only supports an exploitative system of greed. Screw the economy, it is just the gambling den of the rich, pampered, privileged parasites.

The following from Greece Via Act For Freedom Now: 

 

        So what about vaccinations?
        While the Greek state – like many other European states – is ramping up the pressure on its population to get the Covid19 vaccination, many seem to have ceded to this imposition of “making the responsible choice”. Let it be clear that we think individuals can have legitimate reasons to get the vaccination. We do not hold a moralistic judgment on getting vaccinated or not. But we keep on being reluctant. We think that the whole discourse about taking responsibility actually aims to give greater powers to the state by creating a dual society with privileges for those who comply and sanctions for those who don’t want to or cannot comply. This means a reinforcement of control and inequalities.
Believe the leaders
        We don’t think we have to dwell on this very long. We have been forced to wear masks while walking alone in a park. We have been fined for being on the street at night while the metros were overcrowded during the day. We have been insulted for sitting on the squares while the indoors work places were running at full capacity. And we have seen them cynically calculating the costs of providing extra hospital beds against shutting down parts of the economy. We have seen them opting to hire more cops while the health of people was at stake. We have seen them trying to smother any form of protest while ramming through more exploitative and oppressive policies. They have lost all credibility and they know it, the only thing they can still do is twisting our arms and blackmailing us.

 

Read the full article HERE: 

 

Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info    

Opinion.

My Humble Opinion From What I’ve Seen.
        Why I think protests against closures are bound to fail. Councils are by law prevented from running a deficit, they are compelled to balance the books, and the financial structure is engineered so that each year, because of inflation, rising wages (meagrely) maintenance and repairs etc. they have to make savings, “efficiency saving” which translates into closures and/or lay-offs of staff. Barmulloch community centre is closing, let’s suppose that the whole district mobiles to such an extent that the council concedes and keeps it open, it still has to look elsewhere to swing its axe to balance that inefficient budget. Should the council decide, to hell we will run a deficit for a few years and try and sort this out, then the government sends in its “managers” to run the city over the heads of the people. Remember Derek Hatton and Liverpool in the 80’s. 

  

 

     On a national government front, the game is rigged in favour of the large financial institutions who have the power to bring a country to economic disaster. Some 30 years ago approximately, these same financial institutions decided that privatisation was the best way to re-capitalise the system and more or less dictated to states that they had to follow this policy or find themselves outside the financial markets, economic doom. Of course they can force the issue in other ways, remember Greece 2010, Greece according to the EU financial mafia, was carrying too much debt, so sent in a team of their financial managers to sort it out, over the heads of the elected government, how it should be tackled, ordering the privatisation of lots of Greece’s profitable assets, altering labour laws etc. while loading them up with more debt, “the bailout”, so the privatisation policy continues merrily on its way. This debt of course has to be paid by the people. Some ten years on by 2017, unemployment in Greece was still at 22% and one third of the population still living below the poverty line, conditions haven’t changed much since then, this is how states repay their debt to the financial Mafia. You’re appealing to the minions who are forced to follow the rules set my the financial Mafia. They may now and again get some bubble gum and popcorn, but those who dictate the direction of the governments are sitting in their grand mansion counting their pieces of gold, and they like what they have and are not in any shape or form going to change the system that has given them such wealth, power and privileges. They will gladly bring down a country, should they not play be their rules. The UK is not immune, remember 16th September 1992, Black Wednesday? UK joined the European Exchange Rate against the wishes of the financial Mafia, who then engineered a fall of the pound to such an extent that the Chancellor raised interest rates three times in one day in an attempt to save the pound from becoming worthless, eventually gave up and withdrew from the European Exchange Rate. Privatisation is the direction set out and being implemented, and it is not going to stop because you shout at a councillor. Public assets will be disposed of one way or another, either by phoney community takeover or straight privatisation and placards are not going to stop the relentless march of the corporate world to gain all public assets of any worth.
        So what should we do? I suppose be anarchists and have one aim and one aim only, not to appeal to the system to be fairer, not to encourage people to follow a doomed path of asking to be treated fairly, but work hell for leather on destroying the system completely. The system will not change in any dramatic manner by dialogue, appeals and petitions, the system can cope very well with these methods of protest, and if the powers that be think these are getting too nasty for their liking, they have the armoury to stifle it, police, judiciary, prison system. 

           I tend to think that people of Peru and Colombia are getting close to the direction by burning police stations, banks, corporate buildings and looting supermarkets, but first you have to flood the streets with your anarchist ideas, literature, meetings, stalls etc. until there is enough of the population who have finally realised, the system has to be destroyed, not petitioned, if we want a free, fair, just, sustainable world, that sees to the needs of all our people. 

Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info     

Rip-Off.

 

          Following on from my previous post on that group of useless prats, those pampered, privileged parasites that live in opulence off the sweat of our labour, I thought this little video would help to make the point. Thanks Loam for the link.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk   

Loot.

 

How to get out and about.

           Today I was reading the Financial Times, yea, the Financial Times, I do read it from time to time. This paper is obviously put together for that stock-market, banking, CEO brigade of parasites and their corporate cronies. So it feeds them lots of info, some of it interesting for those looking for the blatant rip-off and plundering that keeps the poor poor, and fattens the off shore bank accounts of the parasite class.

A life on the ocean waves.

       One little article that caught my eye, Vitol, a London based oil trading company, after a bumper year has decided to pay its executives and staff the equivalent of more than $7 million to each of its almost 400 London based trading partners. That's a lot of loot, to the ordinary person $7 million is nothing, it is just an unimaginable entity, a lot of zeros on a piece of paper. Where did all that money come from? Why from you and I, of course, where else. Money does nothing unless we sell our selves to the corporate beast and take our pittance to spend in their shops and malls. Meanwhile they shovel mountains of pounds/sterling into their favourite off-shore tax haven, or perhaps buy a new £100 million yacht. 

If you are in a hurry to get to another country.

       Bearing in mind that is just one company among thousands that garner plunder from our labour, and salt it away for the pampered privileged few. Just imagine if all that loot, that you and I created went to social services instead of Bentley and Rolls-Royce cars, private jets and fancy mansions on some idyllic island. Do you think it would make a difference to the lives of the ordinary person, who happens to be the essential element in creating that wealth? Without the workforce of millions, they would just be a bunch of useless twats, but of course, they already are. It is the wealth that we create that gives them their power and privileges, why don't we take it away from them and share the fruits of our labour across our own communities, creating the style of society we want, one that see to the needs of all our people, and not just to that useless pampered, privileged parasite class.

 A simple place to lay your head.

 

Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info     

Rage.

 

             One aspect of our lives that has seen remarkable growth is the surveillance camera, they are everywhere. It would be difficult to take a walk through your city, town, village and not be photographed, recorded, stored for future profiling. It is no longer just photos, the technology has moved rapidly in an insidious manner, it is now videoing your every move with face recognition, profiling you according to mannerism etc. following you into shopping malls, pubs, on transport, there is no escaping the all seeing eye of Big Brother. How anyone can be aware of this all encompassing state, council, private companies recording your every move and still believe they live in a free society, beggars belief. A proliferation of surveillance is incompatible with individual freedom, it is the hall mark of state control, but somehow we have accepted this 24 hour prying eye of the state and its partners to invade our every move. If we wish to live in a free society then we will need a concerted effort to rid our lives of the all encompassing, invasive prying state eye. 

The following from Act For Freedom Now:

         As long as there are forms of police control over our lives, whether widespread or not, there will be people trying to prevent them from doing harm.

Download PDF HERE:    PDF: ‘Rage Against Video Surveillance’

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