How Queen Elizabeth II profits from the arms trade

TEXT BY HEATHCOTTE WILLIAMS:

EDITING AND NARRATION BY ALAN COX

Queen Elizabeth II is one of the worlds richest women, worth £17 billion. Her investments in the arms trade includes firms that produce the uranium used in depleted uranium (DU) shells. The deployment of these shells by the US military in its attack on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004, is believed to be the cause of a huge increase in cases of cancer and birth defects.

Mick Farren (3/10/34 -27/7/13) R.I.P Street Fighting Man

Sad to hear of the passing of Mick Farren, who died after collapsing at the Borderline on Saturday  night. Forever associated with the counterculture, frequently getting arrested, and being at the heart of the struggle, he  was an anarchist and singer with the band the Deviants (a new line up, of which  he was playing with when he met his final curtain), white panthers from south London in the late 1960's.
Up to his final moments he was still attacking authority, agitating and spreading subversion as militant as ever. His blog was always a pleasure to look at.http://doc40.blogspot.co.uk/. A rock n'roller in the truest sense of the world, releasing a number of garage infused records, that still stand the test of time, sounding as fresh as ever, his 1978 album Vampires Stole My lunch a personal favourite, a right derailing of the senses, a demented classic.
He was also a fine writer of fantasy/horror writing, as well as being a critic, and cultural journalist , having witten for the N.M.E  and the International Times back in the day.
His autobiographical book  'Give the Anarchist a Cigarette '  is well worth checking out.
A truly iconic character, who lived his life to the full. He will be missed.

Mick Farren - The Battle for Grovenor Square

The Deviants - Let's loot the Supermarkets

The Deviants -Screwed Up

Mick Farren - I want a drink

G4S Profiteers of Palestinian Suffering

A British Company with it's fingers in wars everywhere. A London demonstration July 22 2013.

'After extracting confessions under torture, five of the Hares boys were charged with 25 counts of attempted murder even though there were only four people in the car. Apparently the military court had decided that 25 stones were thrown, each with an 'intent to kill'. The five boys - Ali Shmlawi, Mohammed Klieib, Mohammed Sileman, Tamer Souf and Ammar Souf are currently locked up in another G4S security facility - Magiddo prison where G4S provides the entire central command room.

If you look above you will catch a rare glimpse of teifidancer,out in the wild, who is at least free.

http://haresboys.wordpress.com/

http://www.inminds.com/caged/

Ursula K. Le Guin (b.21/10/29) - The Dispossessed and some poems.

                                
                                 Picture by Benjamin Reed

American. One of my favourite writers  A daughter of an anthropologist and a writer. Organised and took part in non-violent demonstrations against atomic bomb testing and the war in Vietnam.Over the years her frequent critiques of  state  power, coupled with her rejection of capitalism and a fascination with alternative systems of political economy, place her within the anarchist tradition. An imaginative, questioning mind, now in her  eighties , still creating and pushing boundaries,battling the system, a fine writer of poetry too,which she has been writing since 1959. Her poems are both earthy and transcendent, humourous too with a bite, the fruits of of over a half century writing.
Ther following is  from one of her many science- fiction novels, The Dispossessed,  a very interesting book that explores how an anarchist society would work. A vivid portrait of an anarchist utopia. A society without  government, laws police, courts , corporations, money, salaries, profit, organised religion or private property. Shrevek is the first traveller from Anarres, a moon settled 200 years previously by anarchist exiles, to visit Urras, the mother planet. Atro is a physicist on Urras.
Following this I have included three fine poems from her.

Click on image to enlarge

' Atro had once explained too him how this was managed, how the sergeants could give the privates orders, how the lieutenants could, give the privates and the sergeants orders, how the liutenants could, give the privates and the sergeants orders, how the captains . . . and so on and so on up to the generals, who could give everyone else orders and need take them from none, except the Commander in Chief. Shevek had listenened with incredulous disgusr ' You call that organisation? he had inquired. ' Yu even call it discipline? But it is neither. It is a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency - a kind of seventh millenium steam engine! With such a rigid and fragile structure what could be done that was worth doing? This had given Atro a chance to argue the worth of warfarevas the breeder of courage and manliness and the weeder out of the unfit; but the very line of his argument had forced him to concede the effectivesness of guerillas, organised from below, self-disiplined. ' But that only works bwhen the people think they're fighting for something of their own, you know, their homes, or some notion or other,' the old man had said. Shrevek had dropped the argument. He now continued it, in the darkening basement among the stacked crates of unlabelled chemicals. He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organised as it was. It was indded quite necessary. No rational form of organisation would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness, entered in.'

Reprinted from: The Dispossesed (1974)

High Desert

Out there, there is another way to be.
There is a rising brightness in the rock,
a singing in the silence of the tree.
Something is always moving, running free,
as quick and still as quail move in a flock.
The hills out here know a hard way to be.
I habve to listen for it patiently:
a drumming vcanter slowing to a walk,
a flutter in the silence of a tree.
The  owl's call from the rimrock changes key.
What door will open to the flicker's knock?
Out here there is another way to be,
described by the high circles of a hawk
above what hides in silence in the tree.
The cottonwoods in their simplicity
talk softly on, as hidden waters  talk
an almost silent singing in the tree
that says, here is another way to be.

CARMAGNOLE OF THE THIRTIETH OF JUNE

I will grow fingernails
to scratch the scab
that stops the sore's lips on  the scream
the pusty whistle of escape
EEEEEeeeoooooo steamboat annie  comin roun the bend
I will grow fingernails
ten feet long and walk on them like stilts
& breathe steam out of my nostrils
& split boards with my eye
                                          HAI!
don't get near me with your martial arts
unless you want to get split right down between the balls
neat as a colone's chicken
                  I got Real Bad Vibes
I have neen talking to my father
who died in 1960
he's 101 years old not feeling very perky
he get's left out of things
locked out.
                I will grow fingernails
and claw down the Lubyanka
stone by stone by stone.
                                     Yeah. Sure.
Listen, my vibrations areso bad
they're Richter  8-7
look out there in Daly City.
My toenails are growing too.
i can dig up graveyards with them
and dance on the burning ground.
I use the urns for footballs
& my tongue hangs out a yard.
I am WUMMUN, ta doody boo-bah,
but even worse than that I'm me
and feeling mean
                           God's stomach
rumbles like a drum
when I jump on it
when I dance on his chest he snores
when I dance on his giut he farts,
when I dance on his cock he comes
when I dance on his eyes he wakes and all the stones fall down
                    ashes, ashes

all fall down.

                    Get up and dance, creation!

Coast

In bed in the fist salt light
with the east ear I hear birds
waking and with the right
Ocean breaking inward from the night.

        
image by Clifford Harper

poems can be found in:-

Finding my Elegy - New and Selected Poems
- Ursula  K. Le Guin

Uncertainty?

Where are we?
Are we moving forwards or back
a bottle of red or white,
get off here, or follow the crooked lines
go faster or stop.
Simplicity versus complexity
a long night, or a longer day,
are sounds outside stronger
than those within?
Is it time time to smile or cry
get drunk on words 
or high on sighs?
Wishes of  future promise
or abandonment in the past,
do you remain silent, and afraid 
or seize the day, carry on,
speak of things, or leave unsaid 
turn the keys or lose the locks?

Stuff the Banks

The sun at least is smiling, but despite everything people have achieved throughout our history, society is more unequal now than it has ever been before. 
Whilst hundreds of thousands of people in the UK rely on foodbanks, and millions around the world starve, the wealthiest millionaires (& billionaires) continue to accumulate yet more wealth  - and mostly avoid giving any of it back in tax.While most of the country continues to tighten its belts bankers continue to recieve bonuses and subsidies. It is definitely a case of us not being in it all together.
There are now over half a million people in the UK going hungry, foced by the government's brutal and unnecessary cuts to make the choice between paying the bills or eating, feeding themselves or feeding their children. 
Tomorrow Saturday 20th July, UK Uncut invites you to help them transform  branches  of the big tax-dodger HSBC into a food banks, setting up UK Uncut style food banks inside branches of HSBC - shutting down hopefully the UK's biggest, bonus-munching, crisis-causing, tax dodging bank.
Am down in London at moment so will probably pop down to 133 Regent Street from 12pm, in an act of solidarity. Whilst people on benefits, and immigrants are daily attacked , it seems obvious to me who is reponsible, capitalism allowed to run amok, ruining peoples lifes. The Government smiles as it shifts the blame, does not direct it to any of their friends.
It's going to be hot tomorrow, but please try participating or in the least support the various Uncut actions across the country .Put on your shorts and  demand  that the government stops propping up the people who caused  this crisis of capitalism in the first place.
And if you can't get to a city,  wherever you are , try and  keep on pushing........

More  details and  of London action here:

http://www.ukuncut.org.uk 

https://www.ukuncut.org.uk/actions/1058

 

Robert MacFarlane (Travel writer b.15/8/1978) - A Road of One's Own.

                                   
                                   map of London , 1860.

' Psychogeography: a beginners guide. Unfold a street map of London, place a glass, rim down, anywhere on the map, and draw around its edge. Pick up the map, go out into the city, and walk the circle, keeping as close as you can to the curve. Record the experience as you go, in whatever medium you favour: film, photograph, manuscript, tape. Catch the textual run-off of the streets; the graffiti, the branded litter, the snatches of conversation. Cut for sign. Log the data-steam. Be alert to the happenstance of metaphors, watch for visual rhymes, coincidences, analogies, family resemblances, the changing moods of the street, and the record ends. Walking makes for content, footage for footage.'

Reprinted  from: Time Literary Supplement

7/10/05

Melting Pot

Dedicated to the streets of London town,
which I'm visiting at the moment.

Sitting outside on the pavement,
still looking for the future,
as life's wild unstoppability,
hurries by in the air.
People walking on filters,
of time and memory,
on corners tapestries are woven,
seamless threads stitch together,
while new languages are formed,
under hot baking sun. 
On the edge, the lost and abandoned
the hungry and the thirsty,
paths carved, with fear and danger
warm energies releasing chains,
ignitions turning on another logic
as wild petals blow in all direction, 
the sunlight following free blades of grass
while this city drips in every corner,
trailing the rhythms of different beats
the heat moves people steadily together,
embracing passion's kiss,  labourers of love
cancel out divisions, keep planting kisses
flaming in firmaments, a new day dawns.

 

Anonymous - A message to Humanity

A very powerful message to all the people of the world.

United we stand. . .

Together we can fight for a better world.

No man, women, or children should be in-salve for the greed of the few.

No human life should ever be sacrifice!

Stop the Prawer Plan

On June 24th the Israeli knesset approved the discriminatory Prawer-Begin bill, with 43 votes for and 40 against, for the mass expulsion of the Arab Bedouin community in the Nageb (Negev) desert in the south of Israel. If fully implemented the Prawer-Begin plan will result in the destruction of 35 (unrecognised) Arab Bedouin villages, the forced displacement of up to 70,000 Palestinian Bedouins citizens of Israel, and dispossession of their historical lands in the Nageb.
Despite the Palestinian Bedouin Community's complete rejection of the plan and strong dissaproval from the international community and human rights groups.
The Prawer Plan is happening now. Protests have been taking place all through Israel and Palestine today, where Israel Police have been attacking demonstrators.
The Palestinian Bedouin have lived in  the Nageb since the 7th century - long before the state of Israel was created. This plan was completed wthhout consultation of the local community is a gross violation of basic rights, and can be seen as Israel's determination to escalate the dispossession of these  people, a process that has been ongoing for 63 years now,and if forced to abandon their long historical  existence and forced into towns it would spell disaster for the Bedouin community. It must be rejected and suspended immediately, it is not just an attack on the Bedouin people it is also an attack on universal human rights. 

Their is a petition you could sign here,
please consider adding your voice  if you have not already done so.

Thanks/diolch.

http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Stop_Prawer

Poster by Palestinian graphic designer
Mohammed Hassona