It's me again with another link to another 'interesting' article.

PSSSST!

This one's about pepper spray. Season's greetings!

This is a letter I read in The Independent, a British newspaper. It is, in my opinion, a very succinct summation of the Occupy movement.

The protesters in London's financial district are not opposed to capitalism, per se; they are opposed to the abuse of power, the greed and the corruption which have led so catastrophically to spiralling unemployment, massive national debt and the dismantling of our services and infrastructure.
Despite all the banging on by politicians and financial institutions about the failure of communism and how capitalism is the only system which works, it was their decision to shift virtually all manufacturing to the communist state of China – which has somehow led to reduced production costs and yet not yielded a corresponding reduction of prices – that has been largely responsible for the collapse of western economies. This manoeuvre provided a massive short-term gain to the directors and shareholders of the companies who took advantage of the cheap, unregulated labour market, but at an incalculable long-term cost to our own industries and our workforce.
Combined with other dubious money-market activities such as gambling in commodities which may or may not exist, and trading in debt, this has been a very dangerous game. Now real people are paying with their livelihoods and with the futures of their children.
Yet still we hear the wearisome whine: "Tax the rich to excess and they'll leave our shores." Please, let them shift their tax-avoiding activities elsewhere – after all, they've already shipped all the jobs; their contribution to society is negligible and their denial of responsibility is offensive in the extreme.

Julian Self
Milton Keynes

A very good article found on BoingBoing: http://bit.ly/eBY1Ew

An admirably restrained report from the New Economics Foundation, written by Anna Coote...
Download the PDF.
Friedman's economic shock therapy, coming right now to a country very near you.

December 10 is Human Rights Day, so ..... The good people of the Free Tibet Movement have decided to highlight the plight of the Chinese writer and holder of the 2010 Nobel peace prize, Liu Xiaobo .. he's currently in prison in China. By clicking on the link below you can email the leaders of the G8 to apply pressure on the Chinese Government to release him .... you know it makes sense...
Free Liu Xiaobo, Free Tibetan Heroes

http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5380/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=4842

"While clouds of smoke by day and the glow of flames by night mark burning towns, the sky over the neighbouring vicinity is clear; where the screams of tortured prisoners are heard in one place, bankers count their coins... Somewhere else."
- Barbara Tuchman, 'A Distant Mirror', pub. Alfred A. Knopf, 1978

It seemed appropriate to publish this ahead of the 2 minutes silence being played in the charts tomoro....Before Rihannna or Tke thaT or whatever the f__.......

Heathcotte sent me this saying he had been listening to our harry patch tune while writing it.
And as far as i know its unpublished..

To me the 2minutes silence is to wish the souls of those who have lost their lives in war may rest in peace.
And that we consider very very carefully the rights of goverments to make decisions to go to war in future.. based on lies.


Thom


Harry Patch: War Hero

17 June 1898 – 25 July 2009


“Dress it as we may, feather it, daub it with gold, huzza it, and sing swaggering
songs about it, what is war, nine times out of ten, but murder in uniform?”

– Douglas Jerrold

At the age of a hundred and eleven, Harry Patch, the last surviving soldier from World War One, gave strict instructions for his funeral: “There should be no weapons on display”.

On his last visit to Flanders “to remember his pals” Harry had said that war was “calculated slaughter” and that the dead were “victims of governments” and that the “war wasn’t worth one life”.

Then, with slow, telling movements of his spindly arms and pallid, blue-veined hands, he carefully indicated the wreaths which he’d brought with him, to be laid beside the graves of those whom the British army had killed.

When aged 109, Harry had mischievously suggested in his crow-like, West Country life-rattle of a voice that he’d give the Presidents of quarreling countries “a bullet each for each of the fools to fight it out alone.”

The last living witness to the war to end all wars would stoutly declare that he’d no time for “thieving politicians’ lies”.

‘Dulce et decorum est…’ Harry doggedly nailed the warmonger’s vampire fib, that great lie which so stubbornly refuses to give up the ghost and die. Harry Patch was able to give the vain glory of “dying for your country” a more derisive snort than even Wilfred Owen managed.

For the last soldier in that so heroic and so mawkishly mythologised ‘war to end all wars’ could give the most lethal lie to the whole ill-conceived venture: Harry had never aimed to kill a single enemy, for he had none.

The last hero undermined all wars’ empty heroics with every breath he took by deriding the fond fairy stories about how noble it is for a fresh-faced boy to flush his life down a muddy toilet of a trench while he’s screeching and bleeding and howling with horror as he’s thwacked again and again by flying lumps of burning metal so that, as all the opportunistic liars and the well-respected stately madmen, so ritually claim, “others might be free”.

But there was more to Harry’s thought than the soft- brained platitudes of peace and love. It was born of the bone. When faced at Paschendaele with someone coming towards him, coming to kill him, coming shrieking out of the smoke and cawdite, their pistol blazing, Harry made a point of bringing him down with just a leg-wound.

“I didn’t kill him” he’d always say with pride and, then almost inaudibly, he’d reveal how, early in the war, he’d made his own small bid to end it. To end that ‘war to end all wars’.

Harry had made a pact with five fellow-soldiers that they would never kill a man; that they’d never kill one single ‘enemy’.

“When the so-called enemy showed up ,” Harry whispered, “and it was to be them or us, then what we’d do – we’d just wound them – that’s all – by aiming for their legs. That was it.”

According to King’s Regulations this peacenik pact would have been a capital offense had Harry and his mates been discovered and, ever afterwards, Harry alluded to it with a guarded chuckle as if he might still be arrested for it; escorted to the guard-house and even put before a firing squad and shot for his ‘treason’ nearly a century on.

Just after the illegal invasion of Iraq, a real traitor, the then prime minister, Tony Blair, hoped to meet Harry – now becoming well-known as ‘The Last Tommy’ – with a view to his exploiting him in a photo opportunity to heighten his own profile. After Blair had effected this introduction, he edged towards Harry’s wheelchair, transparently trying to absorb Harry’s stardust and claim it for his own.

But, unexpectedly, he met with Harry’s sharp rebuff. Harry regaled him with the Harry Patch remedy for conflict resolution, namely that “politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organizing nothing better than legalized mass murder”.

Harry also told him that “nobody during the first world war should have been shot for cowardice as war is organized murder.”

Harry then looked slowly up at the embarrassed face of his now thwarted lens-hungry predator adding, with a rigid stare, “and nothing else.”

Harry Patch had done what no War Crimes Tribunal has yet succeeded in, namely to make the despised war criminal and profiteer, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair squirm, make his excuses and then scuttle off.

Harry also thought that Poppy Day, the nation’s commemoration beside the Cenotaph of its wartime dead, was “just show business”.

Instead Harry would prefer to sit quietly with a glass of stout; a tartan blanket on his knee; and recall each of the exact days upon which all of his good friends had died. In his mind’s eye he’d see them still, standing and quivering and then flailing “like windmills” as they’d stumble and fall towards Harry through the mists of time.

“They’re still thrashing about” he’d say with a quick dab at his cheek, and he’d gasp a second, recalling the trench dogs that tore at dead men's battle-dress, fighting each other for the abandoned ration of broken, bloodstained biscuit in a battle-dress pocket.

Harry would then look up from such reveries, to enquire sharply, “What are we doing now that's really any different? Two civilized nations, British and German, fighting for our lives? What are we doing now?”

Those who came to visit the great man from the un-great war in his care home in Somerset would meet an amateur historian, keen on Arthurian myths who’d spent his life as a professional plumber. An ordinary man, Harry was keen to make that plain, but one who’d plumbed a simple truth in an extraordinary fashion.

There was no glory. Not the slightest whiff of it. “Glory’s just gold leaf,” he’d say. “Paschendaele was mud, mud and more mud mixed together with blood.” He’d look up, his head at a frail, half-wounded angle but always with a twinkle in ancient, limpid eyes, and wryly ask, “if all wars end with people sitting round a table talking, just like we are now, then you’d think they could have done that to begin with, without all the heaps of bodies in between.”

Harry had had the chance like few others to put war’s inflated myth-making to the test and find it wanting – caused by a fault-line in the human psyche which Harry tried to patch. By way of reward, Harry would suddenly discover that he’d lived far longer than almost anyone just, perhaps, by his talking life-enhancing sense.

One rainy Saturday in Somerset he closed his eyes, for that distant reassuring twinkle to find another home. Seated in his armchair he slipped off, with no showbiz fanfare – no medal for a final leap “over the top” to no- man’s land.

The new no-man’s land he hoped would be unburdened by quaking, shrieking half-children and hellish bombs and searing bullets but instead filled with rollicking mates – the fellow pact members he’d kept faith with all his life, now maybe joking with all the so-called enemies they’d spared by winging. A gang of flightless angels even.

The pact’s members, and those whose lives they’d saved, would now be joined by one who’d spent 111 years as a living testament to the virtues of none of it happening again, if he could help it.

As soon as Harry’s death was announced every statesman, politician, royal panjandrum and military brass-hat sidled swiftly into the limelight.

To bathe in his reflected glory; eager to use him for their own ends; to squeeze Harry into the crooked jigsaw of their own inglorious agenda – namely to re-brand the moth-eaten romance of war. To wring out the last drops of patriotic blood-lust from blood-soaked flags, as if Harry’s soul had anything in common with their tawdry militaristic bling and the State’s ungodly fanning of man’s functionless death-wish. Each in turn ignorantly romanticized his courage in war, “What a man.” “What a testimony to human endeavour.” Cliché after cliché was piled on top of his body as thoughtlessly as a child slaps down its mud-pies.

“Private Harry Patch was the greatest living Englishman etc” “The last glorious survivor of the Great War etc” was fervently repeated with all the grandiose pride that conceited nationalism can conjure, whilst each speaker would pointedly overlook Harry’s truest and most revealing and most subversive quality, as if all were desperate to conceal his message in the cold clay along with his remains.

Every single person forgot to mention what Harry Patch had done.

As the serried ranks of all the very dullest dogs of pomp and power’s fly-blown ceremonial paid their enfeebled tributes to his “loyalty and service” they endlessly reiterated a claim that Harry had never made, the false claim that Harry had fought so “we could all be free”. Thus they all insidiously implied that, while peace was a hopeless pipe-dream – a scorned province of cowardly simpletons – war must still be good since, after all said and done, had it not spawned such splendid superheroes as Private Harry Patch?

But the irony was, the unique, exquisite irony was, that the hero they were at such pains to arrogate to themselves, Harry Patch, hadn’t really fought in their war at all.

Their hero was a conchie. A fifth columnist. A peacenik renegade. He’d never killed a soul. He’d never fought in that Imperialist war they so sentimentalized, that war engendered solely by trade rivalry, that ‘war to end all wars’ which would then be the cause of World War Two, and then, thanks to all of that war’s unfinished business, of World War Three, the Cold War; leading inexorably to Four and maybe Five and maybe more and more.

Instead Harry had fought against war’s oppressive, squalid lie in the bravest way he knew, together with his pals.

He was as brave as any puffed-up killer. Harry had had his groin ravaged and his chest clawed at by piping hot pieces of shrapnel and he wanted others to be spared the experience of grasping hold of your burning, bleeding, disintegrating crutch while bawling across a dank, wasteland of sludge and cold, stinking shite stretching to the horizon with no one within earshot. Spared shredded bowels and bits of flesh draped on barbed wire or frozen on the ground and spared the sounds of misled boys screaming for their mothers before dying.

And, at the last, he fought not to have his shy and noble stature poached by crooked Whitehall kingpins – the spin doctors of the status quo and the dusty panoply of Royal confectionary, all of whom, through their moral bankruptcy and idle self-regard, give credence still to yet more idiotic ventures whereby other lions are led by donkeys to their doom.

Heathcote Williams

After about a month of studying cases, I put to my first term torts students a couple of hypothetical questions. The first concerns an ‘evil deity.’ ‘Suppose,’ I ask my students, ‘such a deity were to appear to you, as president of this country or as controller of our legal system, and offer a gift, a boon, which would make life more pleasant, more enjoyable than it is today. The gift can be anything you want — be as idealistic, or as obscene, or as greedy as you wish — except that it cannot save lives.’ Later I will drop even that requirement. ‘The evil deity suggests that he can deliver this gift in exchange for one thing … the lives of one thousand young men and women picked by him at random who will each year die horrible deaths.’

When I ask, ‘Would you accept?’ my students almost uniformly answer, ‘No.’ Indeed, they are shocked that one could even ask the question. I then ask, quietly, what the difference is between this gift and the automobile, which takes some fifty-five thousand lives each year.

– Guido Calabresi, Ideals, Beliefs, Attitudes, and the Law, 1985

i am testing to see whether this works.

I think that it will.
here is a link to a strange place.