Hoipolloi Cassidy writes:

"Cliché-sous-Bois"
Hoipolloi Cassidy

"Couvre-feu ou cessez-le-feu?" Curfew or ceasefire? By reactivating a fifty-year old curfew law the French Government appears to have tamped the violence tearing apart Parisian suburbs and other parts of France for the past two weeks. Throw a few promises at the underprivileged and this could be the end of the story.

Not likely. It's more like a chess game between two skilled players where both opponents skip through the opening moves because they're all predictable. Or think of the joke about the guys who all know the same stories, so whenever someone calls out a number the rest all crack up. In a country with a political tradition as old as France the past two weeks couldn't help but follow the script. From a cycle of repression and rebellion the Right wing fashioned a narrative of France against the Un-French, order against disorder, while Center and Left begged for a return to containment, cooperation and gradual integration into "Frenchness."

The following letter was sent to an International Conference on Elisée Reclus, the 19th century anarchist geographer and political theorist. The conference, which was held in Milan on October 12–13, was one of several planned for this year to celebrate the 175th anniversary of Reclus’ birth and the 100th anniversary of his death. I was invited to do a presentation but couldn’t leave New Orleans to attend. Fortunately, our electricity, which had been out for almost six weeks, resumed shortly before the conference and I was able to write the letter hastily and find a place to email it. It arrived in Milan the day before the conference and was read during the proceedings, and it will be translated and published in the Italian anarchist magazine Libertaria.

A Letter from New Orleans

(Reclusian Reflections on an Unnatural Disaster)

John Clarke

Dear Friends,

I regret that I can’t be with you for the international Reclus conference in Milano this week. I was looking forward very much to seeing all of my good friends there and participating in the extraordinary event that you’ve organized. I decided that to help make up for my absence from my session tomorrow that I’d send you some reflections on what I’ve been doing recently and what has been occurring here in New Orleans.

Anarcho writes:

Solidarity South Pacific

The following was written by a British activist who has been involved in Solidarity South Pacific since its beginning. The opinions expressed are his and cannot be viewed as an agreed SSP policy, however it is probable that most of what is said would find broad agreement within SSP.

“Solidarity South Pacific aims to provide active solidarity with tribal and ecological struggles, mainly in the Philippines, West Papua and Bougainville. (A brief background to the situation in these places is given in the boxes below). We are a network based mainly in Britain and the U.S but with other contacts elsewhere in the world. We are very much a part of the radical ecological movement, viewing our solidarity work as an extension of our ecological and liberation struggles at home. We are not an NGO and have no paid staff.

SSP can almost be viewed as 3 separate solidarity campaigns operating under the same name and it may seem strange that we choose to do this. From our point of view though it makes sense to organise like this as much of the work takes a similar form and we are able to share information, experience and resources. Also, although we recognise that situations vary hugely within and between countries, our desire to act in solidarity with tribal struggles and to protect eco-systems applies to them all. In their relations with the land and with each other, tribal communities can be an inspiration to anarchists and ecologists. Their fight against destruction is linked to our own.”

Click Here 2 read more www.a-manila.org

"A Separate Peace:

America Is In Trouble,
and Our Elites Are Merely Resigned"

Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal

Peggy Noonan is a former speechwrtier for George H. W. Bush.

It is not so hard and can be a pleasure to tell people what you see.
It's
harder to speak of what you *think* you see, what you think is going on
and
can't prove or defend with data or numbers. That can get tricky. It
involves
hunches. But here goes.

I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture
right
now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I think that a lot
of
people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in
some
cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and
the
trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things
have
broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon. That
our
pollsters are preoccupied with "right track" and "wrong track" but
missing the
number of people who think the answer to "How are things going in
America?" is
"Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination."

I'm not talking about "Plamegate." As I write no indictments have come
up.
I'm not talking about "Miers." I mean . . . the whole ball of wax.
Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge
that
there's no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we're leaving
our
kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so
deep
that they think they can seize grandma's house to build a strip mall;
our
media institutions imploding -- the spectacle of a great American
newspaper,
the *New York Times*, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear
of
parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls
actually
imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them.
Senators who
seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a
financial
entity. Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all
authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn't think
so.