No to drones at Aberporth - or anywhere

The abhorrent noise of the Watchkeeper 'drones' or 'umnanned aerial vehicles' being flown round above Aberprt and other parts of Ceredigion, Carmarthenshire, Powys and North Pembrokeshire continues. While this constant buzzing - often for hours on end, may no be as piercing and sudden as that of low military jets in mid Wales, the purpose is just as sinister and a constant reminder of how Wales is being abused to further the cause of government sponsored 'remote killing.'

The hateful noise of these cruel machines makes anyone on the ground below wonder:

Do the parents of children playing in their gardens, on the beach or walking on the coast path know that above them, the weapons company Qinetiq is developing a machine to spy on and target victioms in Afghanistan - or wherever else our Government decides to use them?

Is the spying equipment being tried out on the people and properties in Wales?

Why were we told at the Airspace Use ' Public Consultation' that the drones would make no noise? That was patently untrue.

Over £26 million of our money has been spent on developing Parc Aberporth. Fewer than 39 people are employed there to test these offensive killing and spying machines. What a waste of money - we could invest public money in much better jobs for local people, energy efficiency measures for homes and public services.

Is this what we want for Ceredigion and Wales?

We are also told that in future these Watchkeeper drones may be armed. We are constantly reminded of how precise are drones. This means is that there is a high probability that a drone hits the target that it was aiming at. It says nothing about whether the target was the right one to begin with, even if one concedes that a government has the right to target and kill anyone it pleases - as judges jury and executioner.

Let our elected representatives in Wales think again - and think hard. There really are better, more environmentally and morally sustainable ways of investing the fruits of or precious labours on behalf of our children and grandchildren

Thanks to  CND Cymru  from where above article  was borrowed.

http://www.cndcymru.org/cndcymru/no-drones-at-aberporth-or-anywhere

Amnesty International and my local group have been campaigning for the last few years, with others, concerning the use of Parc Aberporth near Cardian as a devlopment and testing site for inmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) commonly referred to as Drones. Drones are used by Israel against innocent civilians in  Gaza and their use constitutes human rights abuse. This coming Saturday 23 June Cymdeihas y Cymod, Fellowship of Reconciliation in Wales, will hold a service of repentance by the drones  testing site in the farm yard of Hendre farm, Blaenannerch, SA43 2AN, at 3 0'clock. I will be there under our group banner, join us if you want.
For further details and directions please see

http://www.cymdeithasycymod.org.uk/diary.htm

Furthermore Drones are immoral and intolerable and are vehicles for spying. As remote killing machines they represent a further and cruel devolution in human behaviour, escalating conflicts causing fear and resentment and contribute nothing towards any long term solution.
They kill innocent civilians indiscriminately and are dehumanising for the operator as well as target victims and those under surveillance. Operated by satellite, they escalate the use of space as a theatre of and platform for killing and war. They are big business across the world and are certain to herald the development (marketing & sale) of 'anti-UAV weapons'.
Military drone attacks are calculated by some to kill 50 civilians for every combatant killed. However, a senior administration official has said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr Obama was in  'single digits'.. This is because the US military counts all military age males in a strike zone as combatants ... men, women and children can all be considered 'terrorists'unless 'there is explicit intelligence postumously proving them innocent'.
50,000 people live uner the new 500 sq mile UAV fly zone. Two drones crshed in the first months of flying out of Parc Aberporth so there are serious local concerns about safety. The Welsh Assembly has not carried out any public assessments drone flying over Wales. No infomation was made available about crashes or known accidental fatalities.
The type of drone flown at Parc Aberporth (Hermes?Watchkeeper) has been used by the Israeli military to target civiliands during its attacks on Gaza.
The European Convention on Human Rights makes public organisations responsible for not invading our privacy. Watckeeper drones carry powerful cameras and other tracking equipment for surveillance, monitoring and reconnaissence exercises. Welsh Assembly Government (Wag) has not given assurances that they will act within the law on this issue.

LIVING IN THE NO FLY ZONE -  Harry Rogers

LIVING IN THE NO FLY ZONE
HEAR THE SOUND OF A DRONE
NEIGHBOURS MAKE A GROAN
BEEN LEFT ON HIS OWN

HAPPENING MORE AND MORE
LIVING ON THE FLOOR
UNDERNEATH A DOOR
THIS IS MODERN WAR

DON'T WANT NO UCAV
BOMBING YOU AND ME
DON'T WANT NO RFID
TRACKING YOU AND ME
DON'T WANT NO CTTV
WATCHING YOU AND ME
ALL WE WANT YOU SEE
IS A COUNTRY THAT IS FREE

SOLDIERS HAVE ALL GONE
BUT THIS WAR CARRIES ON
THE CEASEFIRE IS A CON
IT'S OUR ARMEGEDDON

DON'T WANT NO UCAV
BOMBING YOU AND ME
DON'T WANT NO RFID
TRACKING YOU AND ME
ALL WE WANT YOU SEE
IS A COUNTRY THAT IS FREE

Copyright:
Harry Rogers -5/6/12

An earlier post on this issue can be found here.
http://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/first-minister-challenged-over-drones.html

Can you name these Corporate Brands? Can you name these Trees?

Got me thinking this did, might have to go for a lie down.
Answers please.
Happy Fathers Day.

Release Mahmoud Sarsak

At this moment in time many people in the UK are enjoying the UEFA Euro 2012. But also happening is the fate of a young Palestinian fotballer named Mahmoud Sarsak, he is currently in a critical condition after 89 consecutive days of hunger strike. This follows his detention under 'administrative  detebtion' procedures, where he is being held by Israel without charge and without trial. He has been detained since July 2009, when he was detained at a checkpoint as he travelled from his home in Gaza to join the national Palestinian squad for a match at Balata in the Northern West Bank. In their first home international last year, an Olympic qualifying match against Thailand, the Palestinian team was without eight key players, all of whom had been refused permission to travel from Gaza to Ramallah.
The 25 year old had once hoped to push the ranking of his national team back to a reasonable standing. If Palestinians ever deserve to be called fanatics, it is in relation to their love of soccer.Their struggle to play it, is linked with their struggle for freedom. Palestines ranking at 164th in the world is testament not to any lack of passion for the game, but to Israel's constant attempts at destroying even this pastime, and passion.
Growing up in refugee camps it is through sports like football that many Palestinian youth are enpowered.

Earlier this year, the UN determined that Israel's policies in the occupied territories amounted to a violation of the UN's convention prohibiting apartheid.
Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Director, Philip Luther on Mahmoud said

' After almost three years in detention, the Israeli authorities have had ample opportunity to charge al-Sarsak with a recognisable criminal offence and bring him to trial. They have failed to do so, and instead repeatedly affirmed his detention order on the basis of secret infomation withheld from him and his Lawyer.'

He has also been denied proper access to medical treatment repeatedly during his hunger strike. For someone on the verge of death, this amounts to inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of Israel's international obligation.

Time is not on his side and the matter gets urgent by each day, the international community has daily been speaking out, with Eric Cantona, Red Card against Racism and the FIFA President all speaking out against his continual detention.

You can support Mahmoud today by following this link, and try and help release him so that he can return to his family and friends. Asking your MP to make urgent representations to the Foreign office now.

http://psc.iparl.com/lobby/84

Eric Fromm (23/3/00 -18/3/80) -The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness

"This new type of man. . . turns his interest away from life, persons, nature , ideas- in short from everything that is alive; he transforms all life into things, including himself and the manifestations of human faculties of reasoning, seeing, hearing, tasting, loving. Sexuality becomes a technical skill . . . feelings are flattened and sometimes substituted for by sentimentality; joy, the expression of intense aliveness, is replaced by 'fun' or excitement; and whatever love and tenderness man has directed towards machines and gadgets. The world becomes a sum of lifeless artefacts; from synthetic food to synthetic organs, the whole man becomes part of the total machinery that he controls and is simultaneously controlled by. He has no plan, no goal for life , except doing what the logic of technique determines him to do. He aspires to make robots as one of the greatest acievements of his technical mind, and some specialists assure us that the robot will hardly be distinguished from living men. This achievement will not seem so astonishing when man himself is hardly distinguishable from a robot.
   The world of life has become a world of 'no-life'; persons have become 'nonpersons', a world of death."

Reprinted from
' The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness'
Jonathan Cape , 1974.

Incidentally this blog is 3 years old today, so thanks to all who have dropped by, left a comment, shown encouragement and to all the other blogers who have given me inspiration, you know who you are.
Am beginning to run out of steam, but will plough on for a bit. Time to lose control.

End military recruitment in Welsh Schools

On Friday 1 June 2012, Cymdeithias y Cymod ( the Fellowship of Reconciliation) launched a petition against army recruitment in schools at the Temple of Peace in Cardiff. The UK is currently the only country in the European union and in NATO to recruit 16 year olds to the armed forces. The petition on the National Assembly's website declares:

" We call on the National Assembly of Wales to urge the Welsh Government to legislate to stop the armed forces from going into schools in Wales to recruit children to join."

Arfon Rhys, Secretary of Cymdeithas y Cymod, said : " The UN Committe on the Rights of the Child has aked the UK to consider stopping the recruitment of children aged 16 to the armed forces and not to target children from ethnic and deprived backgrounds. This is why we will submit the petition to the Assembly on United Nations Day on 24 October. Cymdeitas y Cymod is an organisation that on the basis of our faith believes in the power of love and non-violent ways of resolving conflict in our world."

The petition is also supported by CND Cymru, the youth branch of Plaid Cymru, and a whole host of social organisations.

This morally indefensible practice should not be allowed to continue. Education is one of the Welsh Assembly's, key areas of responsibility, so here is a good reason to raise the matter of MOD recruitment programmes aimed at minors. Children should never be used and manipulated in this manner. Schools should be a place of learning and education. There is absolutely no place for militarisation in schools or in association with schools. It is immoral and unjust. In a world of conflict and exploitation, I feel children could do with more engagement with the issues of peace and social justice.

If you would like to sign the petition you can go here

https://www.assemblywales.org/epetition-list-of-signatories.htm?pet_id=754

http://www.cymdeithasycymod.org.uk/

http://www.cndcymru.org/

Ray Bradbury (22/08/28 - 5/6/12) R.I.P - Something gentle has departed this world.

A few days ago I was down in Hay-On -Wye for its annual literary festival, listening to the writer Terry Pratchett, when he was asked about the news of Ray Bradbury's death. Oh no I sighed, another one gone, a writer whose many works I knew were waiting reappraisal back home.
His most famous novel written in 1953 was Farenheit 451 which painted apicture of a dystopian future America, where books were outlawed and burned. The books title gives the temperature in which paper will burst into flame.
Ray Douglas Badbury was an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, poet and mystery writer who with the afformentioned book plus the Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951),Something Wicked this way Comes, Ris for Rocket, The Golden Apples of the Sun ..... and many  many others altered the landscape of fantasy forever.He has become known and celebrated as one of the greatest 20th Century writers of speculative fiction. Dark and chilling full of atmoshpere, once read his words will stay imprinted on your mind, his imagination, transformative and inspirational. He once said ' I'm not a science fiction writer, I've written only one book of science fiction ( farenheit 451). All the others are fantasy. Fantasies are things that can't happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen.' Well if you read his books well a lot of what he wrote about has actually happened, so who knows.
Famously distrustful of the internet, I think he would have been amused by the many tributes to him appearing across this forboding planet of ours. He was also an unrestrained idealist, who disliked totalitarianism, did not bow down to political correctness or political ideologies, but did believe in hope and unfettered imagination.
So thanks Ray,may you rest in peace .

Obituary from the Guardian here

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/06/ray-bradbury

Rememberance - A poem by Ray Bradbury

And this is where we went, I though,
Now here, now there, upon the grass
Some forty years ago.
I had returned and walked along the streets
And saw the house where I was born
And grown and had myendless days.
The days being short now, simply I had come
To gaze and look and stare upon
The thoughts of that once endless maze of afternoons.
But most ofall I wished to find the places where I ran
As dogs do run before or after boys,
The paths put down by Indians or brothers wiseand shift
Pretending at a tribe.
I came to the ravine,
I half slid down the path
A man with greying hai but seeming supple thoughts
And saw the place was empty.
Fools: I thought. O; boys of this new year,
Why don't you know the Abyss waits you here?
Ravines are special fine and lovely green
And secretive and wandering with apes and thugs
And bandit bees that steal from flowers to give to trees
Caves echoe here and creeks for wading after loot:
A water-strider, crayfish, precious stone
Or long-lost rubber boot-
It is a natural treasure house, so why the silent place?
What's happened to our boys that they no longerrace
And stand then still to contemplate Christ's handiwork:
His clear blood bled in syrups from the lovely wounded trees?
Why only bees and blackbird winds and bending grass?
No matter. Walk. Walk, look, and sweet recall.

I came upon an oak where once when I was twelve
I had climbed up and screamed for Skip to get me down
It was a thousand miles to earth. I shut my eyes and yelled.
My brother, richly compelled to mirth, gave shouts of laughter
And scaled up to rescue me.
"What were you doing there?" he said.
I did not tell. Ratherb drip me dead,
But I was there to place a note within a squirrel nest
On which I'd written some old secret thing now long forgot.
Now in the green ravine of middle years I stood
Beneath that tree. Why, why, I thought my God,
It's not so high. Why did I shriek?
It can't be more than fifteen feet above. I'll climb it handily.
And did.
And squatted like an aging ape alone and thanking God
That no one saw this ancient man at antics.
Clutched grotesquely to the bole.
But then, ah God, what awe.
The squirrel's hole and long-lost nest were there.

I lay upon the limb a long while, thinking.
I drank in all the leaves and clouds and weathers
Going by as mindless
As the days.
What, what, what if? I thought. But no. Some forty years beyond:
The note I'd put: It's surely stolen off by now.
A boy or screech-owl's pilfered, read and tattered it.
It's scattered to the lake like pollen, chestnut leaf
Of smoke of dandelion that breaks along the wind of time...

No. No.

Discussion with Ray Bradbury concerning Farenheit 451

See also earlier post

Sarah Teasdale   - There will be soft rains

http://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/sara-teasdale-881884-29133-there-will.html 

Cesar Vallejo(16/3/1892 -15/4/38) - The anger that breaks a man down into boys

    The anger that breaks a man into boys,
that breaks the boys down into equal birds,
and the bird, then into tiny eggs;
the anger of the poor
owns one smooth oil against two vinegars.

    The anger that breaks the tree down into leaves,
and the leaf down into different-sized buds,
and the buds into infinitely fine grooves;
the anger of the poor
owns two rivers against a number of seas.

  The anger that breaks the good down into doubts,
and doubt down into three matching arcs,
and the are, then, into unimaginable tombs;
the anger of the poor
owns one piece of steel against two daggers.

 The anger that breaks the soul down into bodies'
the body down into different organs,
and the organ into reverberating octaves of thought;
the anger of the poor
owns one deep fire against two craters.

Translated from theSpanish by Robert Bly

God Save The Queen

God Save The Queen - The Sex Pistols

It will all be over soon, but the spin  continues.keep fighting back.

Battle of the Beanfield Anniversary - Lest we forget.

On Saturday  June 1st 1985. The combined forces of the state gathered to attack several hundred members of a peace convoy heading to the 14th Stonehenge festival in Wiltshire. Their was carnage and mayhem as the marginalised and dispossessed were brutally targeted and beaten by a police force taking orders from the Thatcher Government the most repressive and right wing Government of the 20th Century. A horrible time, a bit like today, where people who lived on societies edges were attacked for being different.
In what has become known as the Battle of the Beanfield, people were beaten and bloodied because they refused to conform or bow down to a rotten system, and had decided to try and live by their own set of alternative values. Who  simply wanted to gather under the stones to celebrate their lives, sing and dance. The intensity of the violence was shocking. with women  and children  being forced out of their homes, and in some cases whilst still inside their homes, they  were savagely ripped apart. The overall cost of this operation was a staggering £5 miillion. The media of the time played their part too, with footage of the most extreme police violence being subsequently lost, and the subsequent demonising of the traveller lifestyle.
We should never forget, this bitter bit of our social history. It marked a turning point after wapping, and the miners strike in the supression of our civil liberties. A dark day for justice and freedom.Echoes can be seen in recent history, the eviction of the residents of Dale Farm.

Good links here for more on this story
http://www.ukrockfestivals.com/henge-85.html

http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/

The Levellers - Battle of the Beanfield

  

Operation Solstice

- Documentary

Hawkwind - Ghost Dance

Stuff the Jubilee - Republic demo on June 3rd

Firstly, thanks to Republic http://www.republic.org.uk/
They have been the rallying point for many republican sympathisers up and down the country. You might not have heard them mentioned much in the mainstream  printed media, or on the television, due to excessive  the excessive propogandering going on at the moment. All we have is spin,spin, and more spin.
Personally in a time of extreme poverty and austerity, I think it is pretty obscene to be forking out £32 million for the farce that is the Queens anniversary celebrations. Apparently 69% support the upcoming celebrations,  this is because they never get to see the other side of the coin, fed daily images of good news of this archaic family. like the Olympics people are force fed to exhaustion point,  but this weekend up and down the country their will be many who will not be celebrating, and will be hosting their own celebrations.
A key focus point will be down in old London town, details of which I'm posting here.

Jubilee Protest - 3 June 2012

The Thames Pageant is the key event in the Queen's jubilee celebrations. The pageant  involves 1000 boats travelling in procession down the Thames from Putney to Tower Bridge, with the Queen and other parasitic members of her family on the lead boat.

We will be staging a major protest at the Tower Bridge end of the route, where banners and placards will be displayed and speeches will be made. This is a unique opportunity to make a bold statement about our opposition to the monarchy and to promote the republican cause.

Here are the details

Date:

3rd June 2012

Time:

12 noon till 5pm, with speeches from 1:30 pm. We'll be there from mid morning, so come and join us if you want to make a full day of it or want to help out.

Venue:

On the South Bank of the Thames, near Tower Bridge and City Hall.

As I've said their will be many other protests in cities across the Country, it is not all bunting and jubilation, despite what the B.B.C and the rest of those hand in hand with the monarchy are saying. So I hope they correct the balance against the pomp and privelege and inherited wealth of the biggest benefit cheats in Britain. Visitors to my blog might get the idea that I'm against everything, this is not the case. I do think humanity still is rather strange when we still have to bow down to our so called masters, but I do believe in fairness, justice and equality and it is these themes that I try to promote .
S'sssh........ don't wake her. She's pretty vacant anyway.

Anyway here's a quote from Aneurin Bevan

"Royalty, in the propoganda apparatus that it is, has four functions; to foster the illusion of national unity; to prescribe the hierearchy of honours and titles by which representatives of the workers are subjected to the most insidious forms of corruption, to supply a fertile source of diversion, and above all, to intervene at times of acute political crisis and exert its influence in favour of the existing social order."

and here's a tune

When the sheep go marching in - The Queen Elizabeth anti Diamond Jubilee song 2012