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January 3, 2005 - 6:16pm -- hydrarchist

There is an interesting article about release group structures in the most recent Wired.

One of those interviewed also works for media corporations, both to altert them about the imminent arrival of their goods online, or to allow them to insinuate their product into the distribution mechanism. This reinforces the point made in Pirate Autonomies that piracy can be veiwed critically, as a form of invisible labour, handmaiden in the broader scheme of promotion through affinity/affective labour.

In fact, Forest believes the scene will eventually go legit, and he's even started a company, called Jun Group, that uses the topsites to promote movies, musicians, and TV shows. "The topsites don't care where their files come from, as long as no one else has them," he says. Last summer Jun Group dropped a collection of live videos and MP3s from Steve Winwood on the topsites. "We got 2.9 million downloads," says Forest, "and album sales took off."

January 3, 2005 - 10:52am -- hydrarchist

Picked up a couple of interesting items data-wise in recent days. The first is by Debord: "In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni", Simar Films, 1978, B&W 35mm (100'), narrated in french with Italian subtitles. I am unaware as to whether an english language version exists, but Ken Knabb's translation of the soundtrack can be found here. Another Debord work. "On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Period of Time", Dansk-Fransk Experimentalfilmskompagni, 1959 , B&W 35mm (20') is slowly creeping its way down my edonkey channel - fingers crossed. I already have both "Society of the Spectacle" and "Refutation of all judgements whether for or against, which have been brought to date on the film Society of the Spectacle", Simar Films, 1975, B&W 35mm (25'). I also have a film made by Brigitte Cormand in collaboration with GD, and broadcast posthumously on Canal +, titled "Guy Debord: Son Art, Son Temps". Not Bored insistes that the whole operation was a scam designed to raise reveune for Debord's lover to emancipate her from working after his departure (via suicide). Notwithstanding this coda, I watched the movie and found sections of it pretty interesting. In the eighties he had a series of written collaborations with L'Encyclopedie des Nuisances", whose raison d'etre was to ensure the continued survival of the human species - marked of a critique of capitalism strongly influenced by ecological considerations - the footage of pollution and devestation in the former Soviet Union etc is telling.

Apart from Debord there are also a couple of films by Rene Vienet "Can the Dialectic Break Bricks" and the "Girls of Kanmare"; I've the latter in digital and the former on VHS.

Isidour Isou contributes the last little pearl to this miscellany of experimental film "Venom and Eternity" was made in 1950, at the height of the Lettrist period when he and Debord were still pals.

December 31, 2004 - 10:55am -- hydrarchist

When I was growing up there were 300 acres of derelict buildings between the two canals which ring the Liffey and define the limits of the city. Ten years of economic growth has performed cosmetic surgery on the place. But I'm not going to follow that thought here, besides, I'll be exploring it in excruciating detail in the following months.

So for now I'll report some pleasant surprises. The first is that rental prices are falling, something which I believed impossiible. After years of construction the city is now awash with apartments and the suburban sprawl goes on forever. This year 50,000 new housing units have been built, equivalent to 25% of the number sin the UK in a country with a fifteenth of the population. The rsult is that supply has now outstripped demand, leaving tenants in the happy position of being able to force landlords to reduce their rents mid-tenancy. Housing is now cheaper here than in Rome and wages and labour mobility are significantly higher. On the other hand the city is now planning on selling off up to a third of its public housing :-(( and is investing fuck all in the construction of new homes, so it's not all roses.

My other happy discovery is that finally there is the emergence of a new critical libertarian culture. This expresses itself not only in the numbers on demonstrations and health of indymedia ireland, but also in the birth of new bookshops and discussion spaces. The city centre now has two offside bibliophile havens. Red Ink shares a small store on the first floor of a building on Fownes St., above the second clothes shop Flip. They have a nice little selection of books and a fantastic array of zines, many of which are almost art objects. The people who work there (volunteers) were extremely friendly and it was really encouraging talking and sharing experinces with them. A related project is that of the Bad Books lending library located on the North Strand, where the have a "Forgotten Zine" library and about 500 volumes.

Nearby Red Ink there is Anthology Books, run by leftie feminists. The space itself is ultra-modern but vey comfortable, with an upstairs level with couches etc. where they also hold readings and discussions. The inventory is pretty strong on critical theory, globalization, gender, sexuality and literature (including sf and noir).

Both of these are commercial premises, but are no less welcome for that. Shortly before Xmas there was a second benefit organised for the drive to set up a Social Centre in Dublin. From what I'm told there is a substantial crowd around this project now and they have soem cash in the bank, so here's hoping...

Now that I've decided to spend more time back in Ireland, I'd hope to be able to give some support to these spaces. Books and resources for the much-mourned (and amply celebrated) Garden of Delight will probably end up in their hands. Otherwise I'm curious just to exchange stories and perspectives with them, understand their subjectivity and encourage generational continuity. During the period of GOD I had the enormous privelige to get to know older people who were part of the radical tradition here as far back as the early sixties. At the same time it's important that younger groups determine their own course, without being bossed or dominated by those hwo've been around the block. As Mike Davis once said to me, "freedom is the right to make your own mistakes."

Then I heard that a group of ex-Stickies (Workers Part members) who are organised mostly in North Dublin have declared themselves libertarian communists, it occurred to me that miracles do happen!

Amen to that.

December 25, 2004 - 2:17pm -- hydrarchist

Several years ago I saw a fascinating film at the Anthology Fim Archives called "Finally Got the News" , an account of the revolutionary syndicalist movement in detroit area. Elsehwere this story was chronicles in "Detroit, I do mind dying". Thuis movie is available through first run films in New York, but at an exhorbitant price clearly designed for institutional use.

Another gem I came across in the same period is "A Luta Continua" by Robert Van Lierop, a former member of SNCC, now a lawyer in NYC who in the eraly seventies made many visits to Mozambique to chronicle the emancipation striggle against the portugese colonialists. The film is extraordinary, not least because not only Van Lierop shot the guerilla in combat, but incredibly was also able to acquire footage shot by the portugese army on the other side of the same shoot-out. Van Lierop's objectives were unabashedly partisan, so apart from crerating these materials to spread consciousness in the United States, he also trained members of Frelimo in the use of his cameras which he left there at the completion of shooting. The director mader anorther movie "O Povo Organizado", which was due to be screened in NYU but a mistake was mad ein the print, so it didn't happen. The following is from the announcement of the screenings:

Van Lierop made the films after becoming involved with the Frelimo, the revolutionary movement fighting to liberate Mozambique from Portuguese colonial rule. The films are regarded as having deeply impacted an era of Black independent cinema characterized by the most progressive ideas of human and personal liberation.

December 25, 2004 - 11:33am -- hydrarchist

After a nearly two years of downloading via bit torrent, I relaize how spoilt I've become. Amidst the fallout of the MPAA swoop, which closed numerous torrent and edonkey sites, I am one amongst many refugees from communities whose golden age has passed.

In my case, a forum dedicated entirely to independent, arthouse and documentary genrers kept the client occupied virtually 24/7. In fact, it was becomiung distinctly unhealthy; the first task of every day was to check the new arrivals and calibrate a downloading schedule for the day - it was becoming like a job!

Now that it has closed - although we hope that it will reopen as things "quieten down", I have been obliged to take recourse to simply using the edonkey client and its integrated seach function. There are lots of interesting materials, but the predestrian nature of the data transfer is pure torture: usually it takes several days to complete a download.

Even more than the efficiency woes what I miss is the community which allowed me to discover an unbelievable amount of interesting flics, by directors whom I had never heard of. There was a strong collective spirit such that we would seartch out titles and encode films for one another, and in the cas eof the torrent being old, all; that it required was a personal maessage to another user so as to have them make it available again. 90% of the files we shared are of no interest whatsoever to the studio industry, many of them not even being available on VHS or DVD, but amidst the general panic generated by the raids, closures and arrests, we too became a victim. In spote of all this I'm confident that new techniques that are more robust to such legal attacks will emerge, and that all the binjured communities can get themselves back in action....

I don't use Windows, but I have recently heard of a usenet search and transfer client called Grabit which might eb worth checking out if you use that platform. I'd be interested in hearing other user's evaluation of it....

http://www.shemes.com/

December 24, 2004 - 3:35am -- Anonymous Comrade (not verified)

Against Capitalism – Against Religion Smash The State

1) The elimination of the neo-conservatives ideology. 2) The termination of capitalism, governments, nationalism and imperialism. 3) The rulers and their brainwashed soldiers armed with expensive guns, mercenaries paid in cash for killing local people and the applauding rednecks at their so called US/UK homeland base. 4) The rich man’s cult/club and the last American Empire, the final fall of capitalism. 5) We know very well why more than half of the American electorate voters are bloodthirsty and choose a mass killer as their leader. 6) The morality, values and ethics of the neo-conservative Reich. 7) Whilst those from the left and right were attacking the anarchic theory the neo-conservatives won again under your noses. 8) As long as the capitalist killing for profit machine is operative it will be attacked on all fronts. 9) For a non-violent anarcho-social revolution in Europe and America. 10) The nazi-Christian neo-conservatives of America, the new imperial rulers of the world and their racist Zionist accomplice. 11) America and Israel today are the most terroristic and violent entities on earth. 12) For humanity there is only one choice – to bring down the capitalist system and destroy its machinery of mass killing and global impoverishment.

I mean let’s face it - half of the Americans and Israelis people are very nasty and very stupid, no wonder they always elect such bloodthirsty leaders. But this super national religious euphoria is going to be stopped, by peaceful means of mass human emancipation. One of every two Americans and Israelis is a racist and ideologically ugly. No wonder they are now exterminating other nations. Capitalism by its nature creates ugly states and ugly, violent and stupid people. Passive consumers of mass junk turn into very equipped soldiers for the tycoons. Passive and mentally retarded/defeated people in search of a similar leader – what a pathetic human condition the so-called western quasi-civilization. All those that vote in the world are very stupid and delusional citizens believing that they might have any stupid impact, the voters vote to be dominated and ruled like herds, the ants’ mentality. Anarchy is the only super-force that is capable of confronting and defeating world capitalism and American imperialism. How many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Palestinians the Americans (54 million miserable neo-conservatives) and the Israelis (3 millions racist Zionists) have to kill and maim before they are physically stopped? How many prisoners they want and how many cities to be bombed and erased before they will stop? Is this not nazis running globally loose, choosing the weakest countries to strike, yet America and Israel will be defeated. Is this not the continuation of the capitalist war against humanity but this time instead of fighting against communism it is now against terrorism and Islam? We all know well why the Zionists want to annihilate the Palestinian people, because they want all their land and the Americans want the oil. America and Israel have a very sick society with many pathological people living in them. It is enough just to watch how they treat each others and their own citizens to realize how sick and perverted this system, in short modern capitalist fascism stinks. Only an anarchist revolution in these countries and everywhere else will stop this capitalist madness of mass poverty and state global and local violence. All this is happening at the final stage of capitalism (2005-2010) and the collapse of the state and hierarchy structures. Anarchy will replace capitalism in the coming future; first to fall will be the empire USA and then the rest of capitalism. Anarchy will dismantle the army and police, will abolish the banks and money, erase the laws, which only serve the rich, and rulers and the people will manage themselves very well without them. There will be no more poverty or oppression, in anarchy all are equal, creative and free. first we rescue the Palestinians then we save the Iraqis and after we can help the poor of Israel, Europe and the USA and at the same time we can salvage the rest of the world of course and on course. The Americans and Israelis are going through the same ideological euphoria as when the majority of Germans enthusiastically supported Hitler in the 1930’s.

“The capitalist is a thief who has succeeded through his efforts or those of his ancestors; the common thief is a would be capitalist who is simply waiting to become one, on the proceeds of his hauls, that is on the work of others.” – Errico Malatesta

Without Gods or Masters – Communist Individualist Anarchism

Happy revolutionary year to (all - capitalists) = anarchism. May the years 2005 become the last year of capitalism - Happy revolutionary year to all the good people on earth who wish for a genuine freedom and material equality to all. The Anarchic Revolution 2005-2010 CIA-Comm-Indi-Anar

December 23, 2004 - 11:12pm -- Anonymous Comrade (not verified)

I'm always surprised that people don't seem to get what's at stake in the arguments about inclusion/visibiity. It's not about Negri versus Foucault, although that is one way of marking out the debate, at least for those who like their politics marked by personnae and academic patronage. It's about, among other things, what 'autonomy' might mean, how it might be distinguished from the autonomy of bourgeois subjectivity (the capacity for responsible self-exploitation) and whether it might therefore be useful to continue talking about 'autonomy' and to what effect.

I'm in the process of writing up a review of Allaine Cerwonka's Native to the Nation: Disciplining Landscapes and Bodies in Australia, which deserves to be read more widely I think. There's lots to talk about.

But the more interesting part of the book is the discussion about Aboriginal subjectivity and governmentality, a discussion which relates to current debates about welfare, etc -- and a more general debate about whether at issue here is the operation of exclusion and invisiblity. Liberals (and those like Tute Bianche who pretend they're not liberals) have tended to talk about exclusion/invisibility as if misfortune springs from this, and therefore that the solution would be to include and make visible.

Cerwonka, otoh, insists that what happens here is the production of particular kinds of visibility and inclusion. The political/theoretical lineage here is, of course, Foucault.

A quote:"governmental policies for economic self-reliance in Aboriginal communities ironically require the production of an Aboriginal subjectivity in the mold of the bourgeois ideal [...] Colishaw argues: 'Recognising "the community" entailed the production of communities as suitable recipients of state funding. Certain kinds of subjects had to be produced who would take part in the procedures that the state demanded. The bourgeois ideal of autonomous, self-willed subjects took a particular form in this field of governing Aboriginality.' [...] self-determination programs are still grounded in a cosmology that priveliges history as progress, an epistemology that posits knowledge as technique, and an 'ontology premised on being apparent and visible'. [... What Colishaw] stops short of saying is that such forms of epistemology and ontology are the srtuctures that modern power takes [and] the means by which the modern state governs."

Cerwonka disagrees with Colishaw that government officials "ignore Aboriginal forms of meaning and communication." Rather, "Aboriginal groups are forced to make their knowledge 'apparent and visible' if they are to receive government resources. [...] this mandate to make meanings and knowledge visible to the government is an important process by which settler Australians have responded to the challenges that Aboriginal land rights pose to the territorialization of the Australian settler state."

As postscript: The same questions about the injunction to visibility and inclusion/exclusion are at work in the areas of 'refugee determination' and border policing. That's a debate I've written about elsewhere and for some time. But I'm always surprised that some people imagine that what's at stake in those debates is some factional dispute or abstract theoretical question. But I'm thinking that those who continue to imagine that the stakes in such an argument are either factional or theoretical has more to do with the fact that this is what is at stake for them.

December 22, 2004 - 4:27am -- Anonymous Comrade (not verified)

[This is Part I of a longer piece on welfare, labour and the body of politics. Yes, it's a drafting process]

The Australian government is currently setting about changing the criteria for which people, in particular indigenous people and those with disabilities, can receive welfare payments. Australia’s welfare system has always operated as a direct adjunct to work and is a principal technology for the organisation of the national labour market. Welfare is paid at a level far below any estimates of a livable income because it is, quite literally, disbursed as an unemployment income. It is not meant to supplant the injunction to work, but supplements that injuction in a very particular fashion. ‘Welfare payments’ do not amount to welfare in any abstract sense and are certainly not outlayed by the state as an unconditional right. Rather, they are an index of the relative force of very specific understandings of what ‘the welfare of the commonwealth’ might mean.

If recent elections and policy are anything to go by, there is an alternation between the blunt corrective of fiscal ‘rectitude’ and the unprecedented disbursement of constituency-building measures, mostly in ‘marginal’ electorates. Indigenous peoples, immigrants, people with disabilities, young people and creative types are out; families are in. To be clear, this is not some battle between discrete ‘classes of persons’ over proportions of the social income, as if it were possible to squeeze actual people into one category or another. Rather, the shift to ‘families’ has much to do with the pressure of a decade-long shift from national to ‘household’ debt coupled with the twinned strategies of re-defining the national in familial and enterpreneurial terms—which is to say, along Darwinian and biological (racialised) lines. For the enterpreneurial unit of ‘the family’, the task of managing psychological—if not material—risk has been given over to the fast-growing industries of pharmacology, ‘self-help’ and evangelism. What each of these industries has in common—aside from their competing but similarly rigid foundationalisms in biochemistry and a Higher Power respectively—is an emphasis on salvation and revelation as processes of individual behaviour modification.

That said, proposed changes to welfare include intensive monitoring and control of “behaviour” deemed to be “passive”, that is: unproductive—and certainly not properly familial—in the strict terms of what it means to reproduce the conditions of a national labour market. Changes include the introduction of ‘smart cards’ to monitor what people buy and the extension of work-for-the-dole and ‘mutual obligation contracts’ to entire communities. Other measures include the cutting of payments or denial of repairs on public housing if parents do not ensure their children attend school ‘clean and neatly dressed’. Moreover, in a process designed to shift “native title” landholdings into commercial circulation (and quite likely, to mount an eventual land grab), lands recently returned to indigenous communities and held under communal title will become real estate and used as collateral for loans.

Among other things, the changes to welfare are designed to force people off welfare (and into ‘self-employment’ and low-paid work) by introducing punitive measures against certain “behaviours” and making life on welfare unbearable. They are widely seen as a test case for the welfare system as a whole. Indeed, the specific criticism from human rights organisations of the proposed changes suggests this is more rather than less than likely. For the most part, human rights organisations have criticised proposed changes to welfare arrangements for indigenous people as a contravention of anti-discrimination laws rather than amounting to the extension of forced labour, thereby implicitly making a case for the generalisation of those changes (and forced labour).

Nevertheless, these changes are continuous with Australia’s history of forced labour (especially of indigenous people) and of welfare arrangements since the 1970s. In the 1970s, the Fraser Liberal Government introduced the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP) which made welfare payments conditional upon work, well before the Keating Labor Government’s extension of work-for-the-dole scheme to all long-term unemployed over 25 in the early 1990s, and the Howard Liberal Government’s more recent ‘mutual obligation’ contracts, which similarly made forced labour a condition of welfare. Nevertheless, the extent of recent proposals indicates a more aggressive attempt to end, as the Government terms it, “passive welfare once and for all”.

In this aim, they are supported by some indigenous people whose resort to the jargon of “uplift” and “prohibition” reasserts the “civilising” and paternalistic doctrines of the missionary organisations vested with the task of “Aboriginal Protection” since the beginning of the last century. With that resort has come a prominence granted on the basis of deflecting the charge of racism. Noel Pearson—whose assertions that welfare payments are “a major contributor to the drug problems of Aborigines” can at best be described as a teetotaler’s fantasy of causation—has become a significant figure in the legitimation of government policy. That legitimation functions, as it always has, by insisting that punitive measures and control are enacted ‘in the best interests’ of those who cannot ‘control themselves’ sufficiently to be entrusted with the task of exploiting themselves. But while Pearson and others holding photo opportunities with the Prime Minister have been presented as representatives of and for indigenous people, conflicts between indigenous people remain more than apparent, but largely (as is often the case) unrepresentable as such in a context where mediation is principally the performance of simulation, inclusion/exclusion and the legitimation of state violence.

Part II: Redfern, Palm Island and deaths in custody ...

December 19, 2004 - 10:16pm -- Anonymous Comrade (not verified)

Hope and Survival by Wallaby Poors

The land has been taken and taken over again. The ones that come and plunder the land don’t know the land and its sacredness. There seems no way out from the consequences of their actions. Their system devours all that is sacred to us. We are unsure where to turn, with our survival and our hope disconnected from each other. Survival without hope for the future makes their less options for survival in the future

Hope and survival need to reconnect or we will spiral downward into a new world order where none of us will be free. Hope is what carries us on, what transcends our enslavement. Slaves carry on only with the hope of a better future. The hope for freedom. A freedom from slavery.. Disconnecting from each other and our environment are our greatest threats. Not having enough supporters is worse that having many opponents.

The biological disasters the system is creating are being ignored by the profiteers of the system and the mass media. Indicators for climate change increasingly point to sooner and larger changes in the environment. The ice melts of the northern and southern poles are on, and life on earth will never be the same. Talk of rise in sea levels should have us on the coast a little worried.

The latest report from the United Nation’s International Union of Conservation and Nature (IUCN) on endangered species reconfirms that species extinction is running at 1000 times the natural rate. The alarm bells have been ringing now for so long that many people can no longer hear them. The mass media has tiny little coverage of what should be important global headlines. We have failed to inspect the evidence and the canary is dead.

It seems like we need to free the canary before we can free ourselves. The canary in the coalmine carried the warning of impending death. The global mine has lost its bearings and those enamoured in the excess and waste of first world imperialism have forgotten what is always in the front of their eyes but absent from their daily thoughts.

To free ourselves we must remember the ghost of the canary in our global industrial military nuclear chemical shopping mine.

The alarm bells are ringing clearly in all environmental indicators, such as the death of frogs in the riparian zones and waterways, to the plankton of the melting Antarctic to the polar bears of the melting Arctic Circle. The last of the planet’s ancient ecosystems are being woodchipped under a corporate planetary banditry. Desertification is increasing through unsustainable agricultural methods.

Permaculture or permanent culture is a loose framework for a future method of survival, as industrial pesticide and petrochemical culture follows a road to extinction. We need a holistic permanent culture based on socially just and environmentally sustainable principles. A culture that blends the best of old and new knowledge. A culture that has learnt the lessons of war, genocide, ecocide, pollution and slavery. A culture that embraces the natural environment as its greatest asset and treats it as a gift that can be lost if not respected and acknowledged as such.

Biodiversity is the planet’s greatest asset, and is being lost at a diabolical rate. Biodiversity is part of the Earth and not owned by gene altering chemical corporations. Minerals are part of the earth and not owned by mining corporations. The ability to survive is increasingly being illegally owned by corporations, as is DNA, and the patenting of life. Monsanto does not legally own life under any justice. Nor does Novartis or Huntingdon Life Sciences.

Living under slavery is a hard place to fight for freedom and justice from, but ignoring your slavery is no place at all.

Freedom is not forgetting the past. Lessons of the past learnt can save us from the condemnation of repeating them. It’s the freedom of learning through karmic nudges not karmic sledgehammers. Sledgehammers hurt and make us more repressed.

Precautionary and reactionary behaviours appear at different times to the same problems. Precaution gives us insight and a little foresight, whereas reaction is taken when we are on the back foot.

Freedom is not forgetting the past and freedom is not forgetting the future. Decisions made for future generations on the lessons learnt from the past, done consensually by the myriad of interpretations different people compassionately and honestly bring.

Freedom is self determination, not a new IKEA coffee table made from old growth Brazilian rainforest or choice between McDonalds or KFC for dinner. Freedom is suppressed by brands and products brought to us by a litany of corporate destruction.

Self determination comes through an understanding of cause and effect. The Rainforest furniture came from the place that the big mac patties now come from. I can’t support the rainforest and support McDonalds. Which benefits the planet more, the biodiversity, the cultural diversity, and therefore, myself? Which is my choice?

Self determination is for all, a freedom from discrimination in the community. Self determination requires a co-operative community that respects people for who they are. Self determination can only ever be ensured by guaranteeing it for everyone. Freedom requires the responsibility of not threatening another’s freedom or survival.

It is this cornerstone idea; with the sanctity we give someone’s life, which underpins our repulsion to murder. If we are repulsed by murder, we must also have a repulsion to war, which is a mass genocide of people, but harder to pinpoint in its rage of mass murder from afar. In war, many people die for some elite people’s spat over glory and wealth.

Currently global decisions are being made in the interests of warmongers who direct their enslaved footsoldiers in their plans for global imperialism, from the safety and leisure of their palaces. Are we going to continue to be victims of mass murderers and thieves forever or until they destroy us all?

Rather than people gaining the freedom to self determine their best interests, and having the ability to move toward a more sustainable lifestyle, we are all getting increasingly chained to the system. We are being led like lemmings to toxic meltdown. We cannot cope anymore. People want to change but fear the government. If given the chance would people govern themselves to seek better outcomes to the entrenched problems of the current system?

A lot of people are living to protect their own interests, and where possible their children. The future that their children’s’ children will inherit is not being considered by those who have the privilege of ignoring it. The future survival prospects of humanity are leading some white racist movements to justify ignoring AIDS in Africa. Their ideas of survival in the future have the ethics of survival at all costs, and envision a them and us mentality. The talk is of shooting your neighbour, not helping them.

It is this self-interest that is leading us to mutually assured destruction all round.

No one is free unless we are all free. To persecute difference is to persecute the natural physicality and culture someone is born into, and to persecute the way we can all express ourselves and think. To persecute others for where and whom they are born to is a persecution of lucky dip. To think that it is justified to have the freedom of hatred of others on these grounds is irrational.

The persecution of difference also leads to a reactionary persecution of those who sympathise with all of humanity, and respect global and local needs of cultural sovereignty and diversity, and a reactionary persecution of those who care for the biodiversity, ecosystems and other species on the planet.

Those who dare to dream of a better future face increasing persecutions by the state. Our war is for a better future for the earth and its inhabitants. All violence amongst any of the people benefits the state. We need to stand together. Our enemy is state, capitalism and authoritarianism, but our fight transcends these foes, as it is a fight for survival as we know it. A survival that can only be granted by collectivist means, not by huge disparities in wealth and survival for some. A survival that does not include genocide of the poor

The great idea not focussed on in evolutionary theory is co-operation, and our natural consciousness understands that we all bloom in peace and equality. Human rights can never be realised if those who receive human rights are selected by genetics or beliefs. Human rights only exist if they exist for all humans.

Our human survival depends on a humanity free of genocides. We cannot ignore continents of people suffering and do nothing. This is condoning genocide. Reprehensible ideas of feathering our own nests so our going doesn’t get too tough need to be examined for their effect on people outside our community. You don’t need a gated community, and if you think you do your world is based on fantasies and delusion, not justice and security.

We need to recognise that the mass genocides that have created so much upheaval cannot be repeated again in the increasing globalisation of neoliberalism. The new brand name for mass global genocide is neoliberal globalisation. It is a conversion into a new world order that wants a single culture dictated by and for the interests of the powers that be. Where people gain their food nutrition from and appreciate the diversity of the mcdonalds menu.

The waves of new technologies and their continual rebranding occupy the mental environment, making the future less certain but guaranteed to be branded. Neon lights do not trick us anymore!

People are starting to wake up to the complete darkness the powerful are leading us into. Many feel powerless to change things and some attack groups of people they feel they can hurt. This can include those who support their emancipation from slavery. (by fighting for their own emancipation)

It can be a bitterness toward people who appear free, as they fight for ideas of freedom, but who are just struggling against the system a little louder. These same people struggling and resisting a little louder also condemn the persecution of anyone, making it an effort for people to justify their prejudices over a more rational analysis of the situation.

There is a consensus of realisation that while some of us feel a desperate need for change, others couldn’t care less. This is an argument for us to keep walking forward, not going quietly into other people’s oblivious disconnection. The challenge starts with ourselves and ends with ourselves in our own seeking of truth as best as we can. Yes we need everyone else to support the need for change, but most of all, the planet needs people to not give up hope on it or each other. Let that hopeful person be you.

There is an important need for the consolidation of peace, justice, human rights, local cultural sovereignty, asylum from persecution, other species’ rights, ecological survival and clean food and water protection. There is no justice, just us. We ARE our only hope. We still care and our concerns still matter.

Those who fight for social change and environmental survival do so not because they want to be proven right. I wish I were wrong. My personal hell is to spend the last moments before a nuclear apocalypse yelling I told you so to other condemned souls.

We need to believe ourselves, and not the media lies that get fed back to us, sometimes by our own families and communities. We need to seriously consider our preparation for the outcomes of our own prophecies. Lets save seed diversity, let’s recall our ancestral connection to natural timing and balance. Let’s honour our home and environment. It is one and the same.

Let’s celebrate with our environmental calendar, not the shopping calendar. Let us be heard on the winds, not lost on them. Hear each other over the television. Hear our neighbours over the elite benefactors of the system.

Lets talk under trees, not over old growth timber coffee tables. Look after your connections and your connections will look after you. That being a universal existence and a connection to all

Wallaby Poors 2004 Soil Liberation Frontyard Publications sustainablesnail@riseup.net nonprofit copyleft printed on recycled paper

December 10, 2004 - 3:38am -- Anonymous Comrade (not verified)

I don't do this enough at all; I really should add in a little more journal content, and much more frequently.

Another boring but busy year has all but run its course; and, while I had hoped that I might find myself gainfully unemployed, that did not turn out to be the case. No, I managed to do little more than file an unemployment claim and then, work just enough to NOT be eligable for any benefits... up until the point where I was put on rotating shifts with a regular crew (in the factory where I work as a temp manual laborer) at summer's end.

And yet, it has been a momentous year - in a slow, uneventful way. I went from getting my first credit card - a $200 secured card - to being issued a Gold Card with a $10,000 limit. Quite bizarre, as the ~2 years I've been temping at the factory where I'm assigned is the longest period of time I've ever held one job at the same place.

I think it had something to do with the old life insurance policy I discovered I owned this spring (when I started paying income tax on its dividends - the first time I've ever made enough in one year that I would have to pay such taxes)... and promptly cashed it out, so that I could upgrade my computer and install Adobe's Creative Suite of programs.

Hey: a REAL credit card - now I don't have to stop eating in order to buy something that I need to make use of right away! That's how I finally managed to get my hands on a decent 35mm camera (over the internet); and how I was able to snap up a factory refurbished color laser printer (over the internet).

Now I actually have the equipment I need to do some serious desktop publishing... except, now I live in a relatively small community, where there isn't really anything happening. Ironic.

I did, however, manage to put together a new web site, which is featured as an article in the current issue of Rhizomes.net (issue #9).

It is located at http://OriginOfWriting.com and outlines my work in deconstructing/ reconstructing the image writing used by the First Nations of North America during pre-Columbian times.

I followed a format defined by Gilles Deleuze's 'seven criteria for sign differentiation', as outlined in "Proust and Signs".

I'll add in some more stuff, eventually.

SO: I can print images myself now; if anyone wants some of whatever I've posted on my site, let me know.

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