What is the true cost of the Afghanistan war? Narrated by Tony Benn. Music by Brian Eno...

Don't Execute Troy Davis.

Hi there, have you got 5 minutes to try and stop a death row execution? If so cheers , regards and all that .
Troy Davis has been on death row for 17 years for a murder he maintains he did not commit.
He was convicted in 1991 for the murder of 27 year old Officer Mark Allen MacPhail, white, who was shot and killed in the car park of a Burger King restaurant in Savannah , Georgia, in the early hours of August 19th 1989...
Amnesty International has been opposing Troy Davis's execution unconditionally regardless of questions of guilt or innocence for a while, as it does all use of the death penalty.
A judge has ordered Troy's execution to take place on Wednesday 21 September 2011 at 7 p.m, US time.
On Monday 19th September, 2 days before he is scheduled  to be executed, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles will hold a clemency hearing to decide whether Troy Davis's sentence should be commuted, or whether the execution should be carried out as scheduled. This is Troy's last chance to avoid execution.

Video below examining Troy's case.

It is vital that you take action as soon as possible,
his execution is not inevitable.

PLEASE USE THE LINK BELOW TO EMAIL THE GEORGIA STATE BOARD OF PARDONS AND PAROLES TO EMAIL THE GEORGIA STATE BOARD OF PARDONS AND PAROLES ASKING FOR CLEMENCY FOR TROY.

.http://action.amnesty.org.uk/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=1194&ea.campaign.id=11962&utm_source=aiuk&utm_medium=content&utm_campaign=deathpenalty&utm_content=troy_page_to_action

11'9"01 September 11 - Ken Loach

THE OTHER SEPTEMBER 11th

SELF EVIDENT....... some musical reflections on anniversary of 9/11

                                          Ani Di Franco - Self Evident

                                       

Billy Bragg - The price of Oil

Wolfgang Gartner - illmerica

Pete Seeger - Last Night I had the strangest Dream

and perhaps
between the silent spaces
and  winding paths
objectives will  one day
be shared
Action  is louder than words
future shadows will not forget
time alone........
lasts forever.

R.I.P

to the 2,976 Americans who lost their lives on 9/11and the 48,644 Afghans and 1,690,903 Iraqis and over 30,000 Pakistanis who died for a crime they did not commit.

SAVE DALE FARM

This post is a bit late,soon the weekend will be upon us. But tomorrow wherever you are spare a thought for all the people at Dale Farm in Essex, at this moment waiting  for the Baliffs to arrive to commit one of the greatest acts of state endorsed violence against an ethnic group ever seen in the U.K.
The proposed eviction planned has already been roundly condemned by Amnesty International. Dale Farm is home to 90 familes, which could mean up to 400 people being left homeless, and actions to evict them might actually break international law. Is their not room for negotiations. In a time of recession , is it right that about £9.5 million  should be wasted kicking people out of their homes. Let us remember that the Irish Travellers who live  at Dale Farm actually own this land, they are not squatting this patch of earth belongs to them, for 10 years a strong and vital community has belonged here but time after time have been denied repeated requests to build on the land because of bueracratic measures.
So  soon Basildon council and the Coalition Government will have to explain why they have made 100 children homeless, which will result in them being removed from their schools...
If this eviction goes ahead , the world will see our government as a bully who refuses to listen, draconian, punitive and oppressive.

More info below

http://dalefarm.wordpress.com/ 

Petition to Support the U.N call to delay the eviction
at Dale Farm
here
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/dalefarm

Emily Dickinson ( 10/12/1830 - 15/5/1880) - To dissapear enhances.

To dissapear enhances
The Man that runs away
Is tinctured for an instant
With immortality

But yesterday a vagrant
Today in Memory lain
With supersticious value
We tamper with "Again"

But "Never far as Honor
Withdraws the Worthless thing
And impotent to cherish
We hasten to adorn

Of Death the sternest function
That just as we discern
The Excellence defies us
Securest gathered then

The Fruit peverse to plucking
But leaning to the Sight
With the ecstatic limit
Of  unobtained Delight,

Fadhil Al-Azzawi ( b.1940) - In my spare time

During  my long, boring hours of spare time
I sit to play with the earth's sphere.
I establish countries without police or parties
and I scrap others that no longer attract consumers.
I run roaring rivers through barren deserts
and I create continents and oceans
that I save for the future just in case.
I draw a new coloured map of the nations:
I roll Germany to the Pacific ocean teeming with whales
and I let the poor refugees
sail pirate's ships to her coasts
in the fog
dreaming of the promised garden in Bavaria.
I switch England with Afghanistan
so that its youth can smoke hashish for free
provided courtesy of Her Majesty's government.
I smuggle Kuwait from its fenced and mined borders
to Comoro, the islands
of the moon in its eclipse,
keeping the oil fields intact, of course.
At the same time I transport Baghdad
in the midst of loud drumming
to the islands of Tahiti.
I let Saudi Arabia crouch in its eternal desert
to preserve the purity of her thouroughbred camels.
This is before I surrender America
back to the Indians
just to give history
the justice it has long lacked.
I know that changing the world is not easy
but it remains necessary nonetheless.

Fadhil al -Azzawi is an Iraqi writer who is highly respected in the Arab world having emerged and participated in Iraqi's 90s avant garde generation.
Outspoken, he has spent many  hours in prison and time spent in exile because of his refusal to conform to certain corridors of power. Born in Kirkuk in 1940.
The above poem speaks for itself...... speaking of empires, inhumanity, offering glimpses of another ideal world, a future not based on injustice, but on shared  values, giving  lands back to the people from which they were once robbed.
Given us history the justice it has long lacked, knowing, too , that changing the world is easy. The role poetry has to play in the world is to pull of the masks of peddlers of untruths, becomming a universal pointer, offering words without borders and unlocking the chains of illusion ... that can be steps in setting us free.

Fadhil Al-Azzahi, Miracle Maker ( selected Poems 1960 -2002)  Editions, 2003

Ralph Nader - 10 painful lessons of 9/11

The commemorative ceremonies that are planned for the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 massacre are those of pathos for the victims abd their families, of praise for both the pursuit of the supporters of the attackers and the performance of first responders and our soldiers abroad.
Flag and martial music will punctuate the combined atmosphere of sorrow and aggressive defiance to those terrorists who would threaten us. These events will be moments of respectful silence and some expressions of rage and ferocity.
But many Americans might also want to pause to recognise - or  unlearn- those reactions and overreactions tp 9/11 that have harmed our country. How, in this forward-looking manner,
can we respect the day of 9/11?

Here are some suggestions

1. Do not exaggerate our adveraries' strength in order to produce a climate of hysteria that results in repression of civil liberties, wmbodied in the overwrought USA patriot Actn, and immense long-term damage to our economy. Consider the massive diversion of trillions of dollars from domestic civilian needs because of the huge expansion and misspending in military and security budgets.

2. Do not allow our leaders to lie and exaggerate as when they told us there were funded, suicidal and hateful al-Qaeda cells all over our contry. They were never here. Actually, the wholesale invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan became recruiting grounds for more al-Qaeda  branches there and in other countries - a fact acknowledged by both then Army Chief of Staff George Casey and then CIA director Porter Goss.

3. Do not create a climate of fear or monpolize a partisan definition of patriotism in order to silence dissent from other political parties, the citizenry or the unfairly arrested or harassed.

4. Do not tolerate Presidents who violate our Constitution and start wars without congressional deliberationand a declaration of war ( article 1, section 8, clause 11). Do not let them disobey federal statutes and international treaties in pusuing unlawful, misdirected quicksand wars, as in Iraq, that produce deaths, destruction and debts that ndermine our country's national interests.

5. Do not have Congress write a blanh check, outside the normal Appropriations Committee hearing process, for the huge budgetry demandsfrom the executive branch for funding of the Iraq, Afghan-Pakistan and other undeclared wars.

6. Do not allow the executive branch to engage in unconstitutional and illegal recurrent practices such as wiretrapping and other methods of surveillance of Americans without judicial approval, in addition to arrests without charges, indefininite imprisonment, torture and denial of habeas corpus and other due process rights established by our Founding Fathers. Congress has passec no reforms to check the continuing exercise of unchecked dictatorial presidential power.

7. Do not let the government hide the horrors of war from the people by prohibiting photographs of U.S casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. There is to much intimidation of returning soldiers - so many harmed for life - and think about these wars and their heavy outsourcing to profiteeering corporations.

8. Do not allow leaders to violate American principles withtorture or other war crimes prohibited by the Geneva Conventions. Nor should top military brass or members of the executive branch be above our laws and escape accountability.

9. Do not allow your Congress to abdicate or transfer its own constitutional authorities to the president. We the people have not exercised our civic duties enough to make our representatives in Congress fulfill their obligations under the Constitution to decide whether we go to war and act as a watchdog of the president's conduct. The Libyan war was decided and funded by President Obama without congressional approval.

10. Call out those in the news media who become a mouthpiece of the president and his departments involved in these hostilities. What more is the military really doing in Libya, Somalia and Yemen as compared with the official line? Under what legal authority?

In addition, demand that news media outlets seek the inconvenient facts, whatever they might lead, unlike the pre-Iraq invasion period.

The celebrated American theologician-philosopher Reinhold Nierbuhr aptly wrote decades ago that " to the end of history, social orders will probably destroy themselves in the effort to prove that they are indestructible."

All empires eventually eat way at their own and devour themselves.

http:nader.org/


Well thanks Ralph, think I'm in agreement there, had been getting bored with the U.S.A for a long time, just been given some more sober excuses. I dont see their President changing direction somehow. But hey, look who we've got leading us, the same duplicitiousness, just a different flag!

The Essence of Welsh Poetry - Saunders Lewis ( 15/10/1893 - 1/9/85)

During the wars of Napoleon there was a country squire of the name of Lloyd living in the old house of Cwmgloyn, inland a little from Trefdraeth ( or Newport in the English maps) on the north coast of Pembrokeshire.  He was a justice of the peace. His father had been much concerned with the sea, and squire Lloyd had ships built for him at Trefdraeth and at Aberystwyth. One of these, the Hawk, was a fifty ton schooner made from his own woods at Trefdraeth, partly for trade, partly for his pleasure voyages. It was later sunk by the French. At its launching a local poet one Ioan Siencyn, wrote a poem to greet it and its captain, and its squire-owner. After a finely imaged description of the Hawk breasting the sea, the poet visualises squire Lloyd on board, travelling to England and Ireland, but especially visitiing his friends in North and South Wales. There the gentry and local poets come to meet him and one verse describes their welcome to him:

  Around their tables, laden with steaming dishes,
  He shall hear histories of those good men, our anscestors,
  And  cywydd and  englyn  and odes of Taliesin
  And he shall drink his fill of golden barley beer.

That poem was written close to the beginning of the nineteenth century. It speaks simply and naturally of odes of Taliesin and cywydd  and   englyn as part of the pertinent welcome to squire Lloyd of Cwmgloyn. Taliesin was a poet of the sixth century .*  Cywydd  and  englyn  were metrical forms of the Welsh Middle Ages. But for Ioan Siencyn at the very end of the eighteenth century they were all necessary for the proper entertainment of the Welsh squire in any Welsh country house. Poetry was part of the tradition of hospitality.
Now will you imagine with me that a poet of the fifteenth century, some great figure such as Tudor Aled, had been released to revisit Pembrokeshire at the launching of the Hawk, and had listened to the reading  of Ioan Siencyn's verses to squire Lloyd? What would our fifteenth century master have thought or said? He would note with warm approval the occasion of the poem. Just such an event, the completion of a new house or a new ship, had in his time also been  the appropriate moment for a complimentary poem to the head of a family. And Tudor Aled would have relished Ioan Siencyn's development of the image of the Hawk as it was launched on the water:

  Spread now your wings, forget the green woodlands,
  Learn to live mid the mouthing of seas.

When Siencyn calls on Neptune and Triton  to protect the schooner, Tudur Aled would remember that he, in the early sixteenth century was beginning to learn the use of the Greek gods from his fiends in the circle of Cardinal Wolsey; and that when the poet returns to his bird-schooner and describes the Hawk:

 Your wings playing high as the clouds,
 Your breasts cleaving the salt billows,
 Let your beak pierce the waves, your belly furrows them,
 Your rudder scatter them in spray-suds...

the fifteenth-century poet would have recognise it as just the serious playing with image that was part of the technique of poems inspired by  manual craft in his own day. And as the poem grew to the final eulogy of squire Lloyd and his society, to the reference to Taliesin and talk of the deeds of his forefathers storied over the yellow beer on the laden dining table., Tudor Aled might exclaim: " My art still survives in this last decade of the eighteenth century and the great technique and the old mastery are not all forgotten. This country poet., this Ioan Siencyn, is truly an heir of our ancient discipline; he also sings the immemmorial ideals and the pattern of behaviour of the leaders of the Welsh people, and I recognise him as a poet of the long line that began with Taliesin in the North."
There, I think, we capture something essential in the progress of Welsh poesy. We call it the literary tradition of Wales. It means you cannot pluck a flower of song off a headland of Dyfed in the late eighteenth century without stirring a great Northern star of the sixth century. And all the intermediaries are involved. The fourteenth century gave the technique of  dyfalu  or image-making, the sixteenth century brought in the Virgilian echoes, the seventeenth gave the measure. The whole body of Welsh poetry from the sixth century onward has contributed directly yo Ioan Siencyn's verses. And, mark you, the poem I am discussing is an obscure piece of work by a little known poet whose name is in no history of Welsh literature nor in any anthology. It was last published in a forgotten volume at Aberystwyth in 1842. Why do I use it as a peg for this talk? Because it reveals the nature and continuity of the Welsh poetic tradition and because it reveals its quality and creative virtue: for the virtue of that tradition is that it may enable a quite minor poet to write a major poem  . . .

Reprinted from
A BOOK OF WALES`
Collins
London and Glasgow
1953

 * Taliesin see

 teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2010/10/taliesin-yw-fi.html

Effect of the butterfly- Anastaysia Markovich ( b. 23/10/79)

 

poem inspired by above painting

by this wonderful Ukrainian painter.

.

.......

....................

balancing acts

degrees of opposition

infinite future

connects

stellar observations

Re-calibrate

abolish greed

slow down

make room

for transition

sacred geometry

dances

with

new tradition

Today the

landscape

sends up wings

the curve of life

ignites

moves along

ancient tracks

we walk here

one by one

two by two

it is nearly time.

We wear our shadows

on our sleeves

history wears its silence

like identity witout a face

the sun persists through blistered sky. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastasiya_Markovich