The £12m defences of the most heavily guarded power station in Britain have been breached by a single person who, under the eyes of CCTV cameras, climbed two three-metre (10ft) razor-wired, electrified security fences, walked into the station and crashed a giant 500MW turbine before leaving a calling card reading “no new coal”. He walked out the same way and hopped back over the fence.
From guardian.co.uk. For four hours, the UK’s carbon footprint went down by 2%. (Of course, this happened by taking out a huge chunk of the electricity in the grid.)
The UK has seen a lot of these sorts of protests in the past year. Well, not these sorts, but you know, civil-disobedience style ones. Let’s see where this goes, yeah?
About a month ago, we learned that reality TV had hit bottom, with the announcement of Smile, You’re Under Arrest, a reality show from Fox (of course) in which people with warrants are tricked into believing it will be the best day of their lives, only to discover it is actually the worst, as they are being arrested. The man responsible, Mike Darnell, talks about how the show will only have non-violent criminals. Oh, and it’s all okay, because (from Darnell): “If it were a regular person you’d feel bad for them, but they are all wanted by the law.”
So anyway, I was full up with hate for a good minute over that. But today, the internets provides good news, perhaps even an answer. Kopbusters (website currently down, most likely flooded with traffic). This show, created by Barry Cooper, is essentially a setup to catch the police breaking the law in a drug raid. They rented a house and outfit it with surveillance, then set up grow lights and two small potted plants that looked like weed, but weren’t. Eventually, the police raided the house, even though they had no legal method of “knowing” that there could be drugs inside. Here’s some of the raw footage.
Cooper is an ex-narcotics cop who now apparently makes his living selling videos about how to avoid getting busted for drugs. He also campaigns against the drug war.
I’m looking forward to seeing the show, and I hope it runs for a long, long time. (Or that we abolish the specialization of enforcement and remove the police as an institution. That would make me happy as well.)
This falls under the “holy fucking shit” category. Over half of Greece’s prison population (the numbers vary depending on source, but at the beginning of the strike it was more than half of the of 12,315 people imprisoned in Greece and at the end it was still more than 3-4 thousand participants) participated in an 18 day hunger strike that ended with the government capitulating on a large number of their demands.
In short, the prison system in Greece is only intended to hold around 8,000 prisoners total, and has been holding 12,000+. As a direct result of this strike, half of Greek prisoners will be released. I suppose the law-and-order types think this is the worst possible news, but I would guess that most of the world understands that punitive justice systems don’t actually work. What does work, we can now see, is solidarity among people who are told they have no power. These prisoners refused food for 18 days and have fundamentally changed the nature of the Greek justice system.
For 8 years it’s been “Bush did this” and “Bush bombed that” and it was driving me up the damn wall (almost drove me up-against-the-wall a couple of times too). But of course, it’s the entire capitalist nationstate that’s corrupt, and soon we’ll see that, cause you all got to vote yesterday but money votes every day (insert additional anarchist/radical slogans here).
Anyhow, it will be nice to be able to talk about things in the context of this whole system being bankrupt again, and maybe we can finally start addressing some fundamental issues, like the national forest timber giveaway or, you know, the existential crisis that is global warming (and believe me, this administration will be taking baby steps when it’s time for running).
Oh dear. I thought I wouldn’t make any more election-related posts between now and election day. But, well, a group called The Masked Avengers, from Canada, prank called Sarah Palin, pretending to be the president of France. She bought it, and of course, made an ass of herself, and of course, it’s really, really funny. There’s a transcript available as well, which includes translations of some of the bits they say in French. And there’s the usual fun back and forth in the comments over at boing boing.
So there’s this group that you’ve probably already heard of, the Westboro Baptist Church, who run godhatesfags.com (ooh, and even more interesting, godhatestheworld.com, an interactive map that lets you find out why god hates everywhere). Basically, these people go around and picket other folk’s funerals for being gay, or even more bizarre, the funerals of dead soldiers, since the soldiers were “defending” a country that “harbors” homosexuals. Anyhow, they’re a bunch of bastards, really summing up the whole “close-minded religious lunatic” thing pretty effectively. So anyhow, a few people have shown up at their protests and made pretty clever protest signs: (more…)
I’ve been watching too much mythbusters recently. Anyhow, a recent episode taught me things I’d always wondered about (for no good reason, of course): how to get past a trained guard dog, and how to evade a bloodhound.
with the guard dogs, they tested two things that worked: distracting the dog with raw meat, and distracting the dog with the piss of a bitch in heat (works only on male dogs).
For the bloodhound, they busted a lot of theories, including the old “pepper” trick (although they only tried black pepper, not cayenne or anything hotter). Crossing streams, walking up streams, zigzagging, none of those worked at all. Changing clothes distracted the dog for only a moment. The only thing that did any good was getting to an urban environment.
The illegal immigrants arrested must plead guilty to lesser counts or face indictment on charges of aggravated identity theft and possible mandatory two-year prison terms.
That is to say that immigrants, who often use fake SS numbers, can be treated the same as someone who steals someone’s SS for the purpose of emptying their bank account. There is clearly a quantitative difference here.
As for the immigration issue itself, for anarchists it plays out fairly simple: we don’t respect the right of the nation-state to exist, let alone enforce arbitrary, war-won borders (most of the places inhabited by Mexicans, for example, are places that were historically part of Mexico). But let’s take it in a modern context… the anti-globalizationists problem with this insane level of immigration enforcement is the hypocrisy of opening borders to resources but not to people.
Immigration exploded after NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Act, which “liberalized” our monetary exchanges with Mexico. Basically what happened is that we, as the richer nation, gained the ability to extract resources from Mexico without paying tariffs or other fees that are used to insulate an economy. Within the USA, we can see how this plays out in ghettos: by putting in a McDonalds, we are essentially siphoning money out of the local neighborhoods.
So we’re able to take Mexico’s wealth, but when Mexicans come to the USA for a chance to earn a decent (hardly decent) wage, we throw them in jail as if they had stolen all of someone’s money?
we are far better equipped to take advantage of liberal disillusionment than liberal outrage. The last four years have been a testament to this, with the clearest beneficiaries of outrage being the Democratic party and the authoritarian Left (see: the anti-war movement.) Liberal disillusionment has been far kinder to anarchists. The C.S.A. is of the opinion that it is no accident that the surge of anarchist activity in the late ’90s overlapped with a Democratic administration in the process of moving to the right.
Four years ago, I put it to my uncle, a concerned and politically aware liberal. I asked him how he would convince me, an anarchist, to vote for president. And his primary response was that while yes, the president has little power to change things for the better, the tone they set “trickles down” (yes, my uncle intended that irony) to all levels of the system.
I’m certainly not of the opinion that anarchists need to rush off and go vote (except for in local elections… Oregon has got some seriously racist and classist initiatives that need shooting down), but there’s no denying that what happens in a couple weeks is going to affect everyone, probably everyone in the world.
What anarchists actually want, and our problems with the “democratic” system as stands, are pretty well summed up in this new zine by crimethInc: The Party Is Over.
And, of course, Bill Hick’s little speech still rings true:
This video is really interesting. It’s about the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, an insurgent army in Turkey that’s been fighting since the 70s. In this video, a CNN reporter is hanging out at one of their camps that reminds me quite a bit of a forest defense camp. There’ve been a few articles in the news recently about clashes with turkey, and more interestingly about the important role of women in the PKK [infoshop.org discussion].
Are these people freedom fighters or terrorists? The age-old question, right? They formed under marxist and maoist ideology, fighting for the freedom of kurdistan, hoping to form a socialist republic. Later, they stepped back a bit from communism and adopted more nationalistic and, it is argued, islamic beliefs. However, these days it looks like their main stance is actually a fight against the patriarchal world. Really quite interesting. Historically, however, they’ve been kidnapping tourists, utilizing suicide bombers on non-military targets, and generally being the kind of bastards that so many guerrilla groups are. If the wikipedia article is to be believed, a large number of their militants were given false promises of having their families taken care of. It’s harder to get a grasp on their modern ideology (at least for me, thousands of miles away and just looking at the internet as of this morning).
I always get my hopes up when I see videos like these. Here’s a guerrilla group that is dedicated to fighting for cultural independence, social reform, and gender equality. I want to like them, I really do. Turkey has pretty much wholesale banned speaking in kurdish, singing kurdish songs, really having any kurdish identity, despite 20% of their population being kurdish. But apparently there are reformist kurds attempting to work for greater kurdish representation in turkey’s government, and the PKK have assassinated a few of those people. The comparison in my mind would be if the ELF burned down the house of the president of Sierra Club.
And the PKK have apparently bombed shopping centers and other civilian targets, something which there is really no excuse for. There’s a 1998 documentary about the PKK and their old leader on youtube, 19 minutes long.
Every time I get my hopes up about a group like the PKK just to have them shattered I remember how much I love the EZLN.
