2nd Renaissance -37 : Melbourne Indymedia

Living In Peril of Prison [265]
Most people are presently indifferent to the growth of private prison industries and the harsh punishment meted out to the wrong doers incarcerated within the 'correction' systems of the US, and copycat administrations such as Australia. However, ordinary citizens really need to be concerned about such trends. Western prison systems are reverting to practices and conditions that were abolished long ago. Private prisons and prison industries are spreading in Britain too, due to the economic imperatives of finding cheap labour sources to compete with global corporations using third world labour.

Currently three US states, Alabama, Florida, and Arizona, have reintroduced chain gangs. Wisconsin and California are also said to be considering such a measure. Here is a brief report by the World Organisation for Human Rights USA, that is published on the WWW.

* "The new chain gangs are somewhat different in form from the old system, which was dismantled in the 1960s. Today's chain gangs do not engage in large-scale private of public works [yet] and are not bound together by heavy-gauge chains. But, the primary purpose of current chain gangs continues to be humiliation, punishment and intimidation.

Chain gangs at Limestone Correctional Facility in Alabama began by cutting weeds and picking up trash along the highways. Now they break rock. Prisoners are shackled together with lightweight leg irons, walk into a barbed wire pen, and work on the rock pile with sledge hammers. Interestingly, chain gangs are cost efficient, an important factor in light of increasing prison populations. "one officer can guard 40 chained prisoners but only 20 without chains." Facility officials take pride in showing the chain gangs to the media and tourists. In Arizona, members of chain gangs are shackled at the ankles but not to each other. Prisoners are used for road clean-up. Chain group[s] for women prisoners also have been instituted recently as a method of punishment and to discourage recidivism."

The World Organisation for Human Rights USA site also documents another innovation that enables guards to control greater numbers of prisoners, with consequent savings in operating costs.

* "Use of electro-shock devices, such as stun belts, stun shields and stun guns is emerging as the newest form of abusive punishment. These devices produce an eight second powerful electric shock of 50,000 volts to the kidney area, causing severe pain and incapacitation. Stun belts currently are in use in the federal prison system, the U.S. Marshall's Service, 16 states and over 100 county corrections facilities. Unfortunately, they can also cause death and long-lasting injury for those suffering from heart of other health problems, a circumstance that is not always known to those applying the current."

The crimes people are being sent to prison for are often minor. The three strikes rule is exacerbating the problem and filling the jails with factory fodder for global corporations to employ for a few cents an hour. The following excerpt tells the sad tale of one woman who was sentenced to do time in Chowchilla and never made it out - back to her family. It is from the web site of the prisons activist group U.N.I.O.N.

* "Stephanie Hardie, a 33-year-old mother of two, sent to prison for overdrawing her own checking account is finally free from the talons of the California Criminal Justice System. She's dead.
Did this senseless death really benefit or protect the citizens of California? the heartbreaking answer could only be "no".

Hardie had complained of chest pains and sought help at the prison medical clinic three times in the two weeks preceding hear death. ... any barely trained medical professional would have suspected the heart as the problem. Normally, an EKG and a chest x-ray would be ordered for chest pains and the patient hospitalised until the results were analysed. Instead Hardie was given a "breathing treatment" and offered Pepto-Bismol and Motrin. She was asked for a $5 co-payment and turned away from proper diagnosis twice by MTA's, a hybrid guard-nurse combination which is equivalent to a Licensed Vocational Nurse with a nightstick. The physician did not order these basic tests even with familial history of heart disease. Why not?

The answer is most likely to save money, which is hardly available for the health and dental care of California's 160,000 inmates."

* "No one ever saw a defribulator, a shock device key to treating heart attacks and so common that almost every airplane has one on board. If CCWF even owns one of these basic pieces of emergency equipment it was never used on Hardie.

On the weekends, no doctors are present to handle [the medical] problems of 3,200 women, the size of a small city.

An ambulance would only be called if the inmates could afford to pay for it and few of them could at salaries of 18 cents or less an hour. ...

Hardie's relatively minor offences resulted in capital punishment for her and a lifetime of hurt for her surviving mother Diane Hardy-Rios, a juvenile probations officer in Pomona. I question what she was doing in prison in the first place."

It's clear from accounts such as this that the incarceration system is now geared to the containment of more and more 'workers' at the lowest possible cost. Why else would the jails in the US be awash with electronic shock devices that enable fewer guards to control greater numbers of prisoners, while the largest women's prison complex on earth can't find a defribulator to shock an inmate's heart back to life?

What will Stephanie Hardie's mother tell her daughter's two children about their mother’s death. "Mommy went to jail for overdrawing her account at the bank and, while she was there making garments that are so cheap they are being dumped in Asia because even the Asians pay their workers more, she had a heart attack: and, because it's so important to keep costs low to compete globally, the prison couldn't do any tests or use any equipment to save Mommy."

Why would Stephanie's kids ever want to be citizens of California or the United States of America? Why wouldn't they want to live in a free city where there are no jails for women and children, and where very few men are locked up either? Why wouldn't they want to do this in California, which is their home after all, and their birthright? California without the state or federal governments and their connections to big business could be a nice place to live and grow old. With them, it's becoming a nightmare for families like the Hardies and the Rossums. More and more people are being harmed by the justice and punishment systems, and fewer and fewer will see the wild birds in the sloughs along on the ways to inhuman places like Chowchilla.

Poverty, combined with increasingly harsh laws and mandatory sentencing rules, will force more and more people into the state's proliferating centres of punishment and industry called 'correctional facilities'. A woman with two children, such as Stephanie Hardie was, might well overdraw her checking account if it was to meed their urgent needs for basics such as food, medicines and clothing. Prison is not a serious deterrent to people who are struggling to exist.

New welfare reform guidelines like those applying in California make it harder for needy people to 'go straight' once they are released. Individuals who have been previously incarcerated in California are not eligible for public benefits such as housing. Just existing is being made harder for people who are already unable to cope in the wonderful world of 'free' markets and capitalism.

Women are most vulnerable to poverty levels that correlate with imprisonment; they don't tend the have the best jobs and they don't enjoy equal pay for equal work. Recent statistics for Australia show that while the overall incarceration rate for men increased by 15% between 1995 and 2002, the rates of imprisonment of women rose more sharply.

* Imprisonments for homicide rose 70 percent.
* Imprisonments for assault rose 79 percent.
* Imprisonments for theft rose 95 percent.
* Imprisonments for robbery rose 172 percent.

These figures are not a reflection on working class Australian women, they are an indictment of the economic policies and incarceration practices of governments, at both the federal and state levels. The number of women imprisoned in Australia is still relatively low, but the trend is clear and threatening.

Poverty is not far from the doorsteps of average Australians either. Due to their experience of high rates of taxation and of frequently seeing savings invested in funds and shares misappropriated or mismanaged, many families have sought to build wealth through home ownership. The family home is one of the few assets in Australia that is not subject to a capital gains tax and rising property prices have encouraged people to take mortgages to buy houses or apartments. However, the level of household debt (borrowing) in Australia is the highest in the developed world, and even moderate rises in interest rates have the potential to force families who can't meet higher repayments onto the streets.

Just four major banks hold the financial future of the majority of Australian families in their hands. When a turnaround in property prices comes, and it is associated with rising interest rates, many Australians will find that a great criticism that the financial trader. George Soros, makes of capitalism is true. Soros laments the fact that "capitalism has no soul".

Because of a looming crisis in the international monetary system, the next recession in both Australia and the US could easily become a catastrophic depression. In such circumstances many more people would be forced into poverty, at a time when the justice and punishment systems are becoming harsher, and when globalisation and competitive imperatives are driving the rapid adoption of cheap prison labour.

When slick politicians stand up before an election and promise a return to full employment and jobs for your kids when they leave school, be wary that they don't mean prison jobs!

Globalisation threatens to incarcerate Australians through another route. A 41-year-old Australian man, Hew Raymond Griffiths, who has never visited the United States, is involved in the first case in legal history of extradition for copyright crimes. If his extradition to the US and trial there go ahead, Griffiths faces a 10 year term in prison and a fine of up to $500,000. He could end up in one of the new chain gangs in the US, wearing a stun belt and being held up by the AMIC as a deterrent example to internet pirates and other copyright violators.

Given the propensity of the US industrial complex to patent and copyright everything that can be covered by such protection, and a good many natural substances as well, it is certain that considerable efforts will be made to extradite 'offenders' from anywhere on the planet and demonstrate the way that 'justice' can be meted out to them. We can expect laws to be extended to facilitate this form of prosecution. The Australian feds, for example, are likely to 'help' the AMIC protect its IP 'rights' and even to apply anti-terrorist legislation to the task.

Mr Griffiths has already been held in prison for some months for an alleged offence from which he clearly did not seek to make any money. His motives appear to have been to break down barriers to the free flow of technology, music, and other forms of entertainment, so that anyone connected to the internet, including people in the third-world, could benefit from otherwise prohibitively priced items. In this sense he represented a direct threat to the status quo, and the right of a few nations in the developed world to 'own' and exploit anything they choose to patent or copyright, even natural forms and designs. Hey, he must be made an example of.

Given the growing importance of intellectual and creative inputs to a knowledge based economy, we can expect to see a growing emphasis on 'protection' of the rights of a minority over the needs of the majority. Maintaining scarcity, as has already been noted, lies at the very core of capitalism. It is not beyond the bounds of probability that corporations with vested interests in controlling the supply of all manner of goods and services will actively pursue ordinary people who can be found to have breached patent or copyright restrictions.

Even minor infringements could be used in another iteration of 'killing the chicken to scare the monkey'. If numbers of Australians, Indonesians, Thais, and so on, can be extradited to the US or Europe and incarcerated for illegally copying such innocent materials as music or videos for their own enjoyment, a powerful deterrent to such activities will develop, or so the RIAA and others might think.

The Times Record News, Washington, reported as follows in June, 2004. The heading was "Post-9/11 laws expand to more than terrorism."

* "The FBI has used Patriot Act provisions in a political corruption probe involving a Las Vegas girlie bar, and the Justice Department reported to the House Judiciary Committee last year that it used the new law in probes of credit card fraud, theft from a bank account and a kidnapping."

* "Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University, recalled that Congress adopted antiracketeering laws in 1970 with the intent to thwart mobsters, but the punitive laws have since been broadened and put to use in civil cases against corporations, and most recently against the organised campaigns of pro-life protesters against abortion clinics."

Of the Patriot Act: "Swire said one little-noted impact of the law on the judicial system is that prosecutors can add more charges against defendants, even when terrorism isn't involved. Prosecutors like to have more arrows in their quiver - it gives them more leverage in plea bargaining." he said. Plea bargaining is the process where prosecutors offer to drop some charges in return for a defendant's guilty plea in order to avoid costly, time-consuming trials.

Swire contends the Patriot Act has been so controversial that the Justice Department has been very cautious in using all of its provisions. "They are careful because they know people are checking to see if it is abused" he said. "Once it becomes permanent, I think it will be used more widely."

Nor will the long arm or the law be restricted to new or broadened legislation that is passed in the name of 'The War on Terror'. Where necessary, various old laws on the statute books might well be pressed into service to help fill the prisons with cheap labour.

It was once a normal event for women to be tried and imprisoned or executed for witchcraft. In one of his many books, The Invisible College, Robert Lomas makes just this point.

* "... During the rule of the Long Parliament (1645-7) just twenty-three years earlier, Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, executed 200 old women who were said to be practising witchcraft. In the seventeenth century magic and miracles were part of everyday life. Witchcraft was an acceptable explanation of ill fortune. ..."

One might think that convictions under the Witchcraft Act are all in the past, but the case of Helen Duncan indicates otherwise. She was the last 'witch' to be tried in the Old Bailey and sentenced to time in Holloway women’s prison - in 1944.

Duncan was a well known medium and her 'crime' was to reveal, during a seance, that the British battleship HMS Hood had been sunk in action with the German navy, before the information had been released to the public. How Helen Duncan knew about HMS Hood and also HMS Barnham is not the issue here, what is important is that instead of merely trying and fining her under the 1824 Vagrancy Act, which was usually used where mediums were said to have obtained money by fraudulent means, the authorities choose to apply the harsher provisions of the Witchcraft Act of 1735. This enabled Duncan to be imprisoned or even executed.

This mother of six spent nine months in jail after having been found guilty of "pretending to raise the spirits of the dead". It seems clear that whether they believed in her ability to contact the 'other side' or not the government of wartime Britain were not prepared to chance her predicting the time and place of the Normandy landings. Accordingly, they used a 200-year-old act, from times of very different beliefs, to lock her away. Due to a public outcry at the time the Witchcraft Act was repealed and replaced with the Fraudulent Mediums Act, which carries lesser penalties.

After 911 neither the British, Australian or US governments would seem to have any need for old laws such as those against witchcraft, although many such laws are still available to them. Post-911, any citizens who the authorities deem to be terrorists (modern witches) or to have assisted or harboured terrorists, or even to have expressed public criticism of antiterrorist measures, can be detained without trial. History tells us that whilst governments have such draconian powers they will surely use them, and not necessarily against real terrorists but anyone they wish to silence.

The British police subsequently hounded Helen Duncan, raiding her seances and repeatedly taking her before the courts. Her premature death in 1956 followed such a disruption and people still assert that she died because of their intrusion breaking her trance-like state. It would have been more humane and probably just as secure for the authorities to have obtained Helen Duncan's word that she would not reveal any matters of military significance discovered during her seances. Instead, the government of the day chose to use a decidedly medieval law to incarcerate the woman.

This seems hard to fathom until you realise that this was the same government that was willing to perpetrate the greatest war crime of all, the firebombing of civilians and war wounded at Dresden. On the basis of that single act the then British government would seem not to have had any humanity or sense of right or wrong.

Governments of this defective nature are again in power in the West. People in various totalitarian-democracies are now living in real peril of imprisonment. They just don't realise it yet.

Related:

2nd Renaissance -36

It is not fanciful to believe that criminals can be rehabilitated or that the harm they have caused might be repaired, various tribal societies managed to achieve such outcomes for thousands of years. It can be done, and discussing the presently catastrophic regimes of justice and incarceration will lead people to fathom ways of doing so again, within a Level 4 Civilization.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/05/113284.php

2nd Renaissance -35

But, before considering the implications of the death penalty, there is reason to consider how we already treat each other in relation to the imprisonment and punishment of women and their families. Great barbarity is going on right now in this area; within the ambit of the rule of law and the revenge and punishment systems of our "civilized" societies.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/05/113143.php

New Strategy for an Autonomous Politics

My aim in this article is to present some hypotheses on issues of strategy for anti-capitalist emancipatory movements. The idea is to rethink the conditions for an effective politics, with the capacity to radically change the society we live in. Even if I will not have the space to analyze concrete cases, these reflections are not a purely "theoretical" endeavor, but spring from the observation of a series of movements I had the chance to be part of -the movement of neighbor's assemblies in Argentina, some processes of the World Social Forum, and other global networks- or that I followed closely in the past years -the piquetero (unemployed) movement also in Argentina, and the Zapatistas in Mexico.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/05/113147.php

2nd Renaissance -34

Punishment By Imprisonment Is A Medieval Concept [258] Although this is the 21st century, the societies of the Level 3 Civilization have not yet abandoned the medieval notion of prisons being places of punishment. Today’s institutions of incarceration are called 'Correctional Centres' and other sanitised terms, but they remain vehicles for revenge and punishment exacted by courts under the Rule of Law.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/05/113003.php

2nd Renaissance -33

The natural, some would say instinctive, organisation model for humans is the tribe. But there is no suggestion here of attacking or harming the less numerous members of big government and big business organisations that are structured along institutional and militarist lines. Any physical attack on the forces of the OWO would not only violate the sixth commandment, it would fail to advance humanity or benefit society in any way. No, the conflict between the OWO and the rest of us is a battle of ideas and, as such, it holds great potential as a transformational force that will benefit all of humanity - even those people who are presently on the side of federalism, capitalism and a creeping totalitarian control of the many by a few.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/05/112747.php

2nd Renaissance -32

Then the penny drops, literally. The earthlings are selling water, they are treating it as a commodity. For the sellers of water this means that the scarcer fresh water is the higher the price and the greater the profit. There is still CAPITALISM on Earth; a system that became redundant in most galaxies aeons ago. No wonder water is scarce here.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/05/112562.php

2nd Renaissance -31

The dissemination of information about the end of the 20th century scientific Dark Age and the advent of wondrous new spike technologies is something we can all do. It is not yet illegal to write or talk about such matters. In order to help raise general awareness of already existing opportunities to end economic scarcity it is necessary to first discover and absorb information that is never presented by the OWO controlled media. Then it is time to spread those alternate perspectives of science and technology at the interpersonal level.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/05/112310.php

2nd Renaissance -30

"Near-Spike technologies will ensure that everyone could have access to this cornucopia, and while different cultures and moieties within those cultures will respond idiosyncratically to the great change, we might expect a general drift back toward the ancient codes implanted by evolutionary pressures. Humans have evolved in a million years and more of moderate ease, each tribe's small numbers drawing modestly upon the self-replenishing bounty of the earth. We will slip easily back into that blissful state, spared its occasional murderous bouts of uncontrollable fire, flood, drought, plague and infestation.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/05/112101.php

2nd Renaissance -29

There is a simple answer, however, and that is to set up the bomb, and arm it to go off when the Sun passes through the required geometric point. The newspapers warn us that the tests will be carried out over a series of months, so we sit back with a set of astro tables and paper on which to calculate Sun positions, and wait for the results. When the first start coming in, we must confess to a certain excitement. What began as a theory is proving in actuality to be perfectly correct. We have cracked a code that the atom bomb countries have long tried to hide. "

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/05/111933.php

2nd Renaissance -28

Far Out Ideas For a Far Out Century [226] This freesite is not concerned with the existence or otherwise of aliens or UFOs, nor is it concerned with what such beings might be doing in our skies. There are thousands of web sites and publications that deal with UFOs and aliens. This freesite is concerned with far more serious threats to the freedom and well-being of humanity than extraterrestrial visitors. These threats have already been identified as takerism, nationalism, capitalism, and militarism. The iron grip of the OWO on the world's resources has far more serious consequences than the alleged activities of aliens and UFOs.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/05/111733.php

2nd Renaissance -27

At first impression this might seem a good thing, but the real price of such a concealment has been more than seven decades of denying the means and capability to bring abundant energy to the whole world. Not only could the release of such knowledge have ended all militarism and the related suffering caused by wars, it could have enabled presently 'developing' countries to feed, house and clothe their populations to levels that would have freed them from poverty, disease, and the burden of debt they currently 'owe' to the capitalist West.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/04/111574.php

2nd Renaissance -25

This diagram is not reproduced here to suggest that the absolute amount of energy that can be obtained from matter is known, Cramp points out that it is theoretical. The purpose of the diagram is to drive home the realisation that energy is by no means scarce. All that is required to tap it is the right knowledge. Tesla and many others have already shown that such knowledge exists and that it is practical to draw energy from beyond matter - from the ether itself.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/04/111235.php

2nd Renaissance -24

The defection of large numbers of people from federal citizenship, and the establishment of free cities that will run on free energy, can and will break the hold of old ideas and false scientific notions that held us back during the entire 20th century. That 2nd Dark Age is now behind us and the way to a better, Level 4 Civilization, is open. How soon the transformation is accomplished is now in the hands of ordinary folk, it has very little to do with our federal 'representatives', the industrial councils of big business, the parrot press, or the dogma specialists of orthodox science.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/04/111028.php

2nd Renaissance -23

While it is far less radical than Tesla's idea of 'broadcasting' power to everyone on earth, the Christie/Brits generator could revolutionise domestic power supply, if it were ever allowed to do so. Once a household had one of these devices it could not only meet all its own power requirements, it could also feed around 10 kW of energy into the local power grid each day. When a family moved home, it would be practical to take the generator with them to their new residence. Given the long service life of the device, many generations of the family would inherit it, and it would continue to pump out 24 kW of clean power every day.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/04/110786.php

2nd Renaissance -22

Tesla was arguably one of the most outstanding geniuses of the late 19th century. But he was never astute in business, being far too naive and trusting. Tesla thought that everyone would readily support a discovery that would make energy available to all, and do much to end poverty and scarcity in the world. The capitalist/militarist establishments of the US thought quite differently.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/04/110212.php

2nd Renaissance -21

Who Is Running The Universe? [205] There is a common piece of street wisdom that describes how to determine who is really running any strange town that you come to on a journey. The advice is to listen to who is mentioned in conversations about the affairs and administration of the town. It is never the people who are talked about in connection with town matters or politics who are actually running things. The rule says that it is always the people who are never mentioned who are in real control. If you want to know who has the power, find out who is never mentioned as having any. When you begin to learn about and debate science with other non-scientists like yourself, remember this piece of street wisdom. Nothing is what it seems to be. The mayor or the police chief might seem to wield the power but, in reality, the power lies elsewhere, and that truth is seldom mentioned.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/04/109956.php

2nd Renaissance -20

Who are the most imaginative and lateral thinking people in our present society? Are they the scientists, or possibly the high IQ individuals employed to find new products and markets? Are they the entrepreneurs of the world, or are they advisors and consultants to industry and government? The answer to this question is known, and it is surprising to most people.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/109767.php

2nd Renaissance -19

A key principle in such situations will be to limit the time that any individual can serve in political office. One or two terms should be the limit, there should be no opportunity for people to make a career out of politics. Nor should it be possible for generation after generation of any family to be employed in politics or as politicians. One only has to look at the distortions and inequalities that some of these political dynasties have introduced to the course of legislation in Australia and the US to know that long-term careers and generation to generation successions are not a good idea.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/109519.php

2nd Renaissance -18

It is worth learning geometry as the ancients taught it because music is geometric. It is worth studying music in a geometric sense because this uncovers truths about vibrations and patterns of vibrations, Vibrations are important because all matter is formed from them. The 2nd Renaissance involves an explosion of knowledge and discovery that is taking humanity beyond the old 'drop in on your foot' materialistic and mechanistic view of the world and the universe beyond. The 21st century talent collectives that will build new technologies to defeat scarcity and create abundance will do most of their work in the realms of invisible vibration patterns. All young people, both boys and girls, now need to learn within these fields of knowledge, because humanity's future will be built there.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/109198.php

2nd Renaissance -17

Education systems in free cities and regions must be very different to those of nation states. It is not just the methods of encouraging learning that will distinguish education in free cities from that of nation states, but the truth that the knowledge is rooted in. There is no point in swotting to pass examinations in subject knowledge that is wrong. Yet, that is exactly what young people in state education systems are doing. Neither they, or their parents, or their teachers realise this fact, but it remains the case.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/109002.php

2nd Renaissance -16

Supporting secessions and the formation of free cities and regions is going to be crucial. Only in these new beachheads of tomorrow’s society will such innovations as home-schooling, and a lack of state censorship and media spin, enable young people to discover the truths they will need to know to build a Level 4 Civilization.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/108722.php

2nd Renaissance -15

Historically, there have been periods when legal distinctions between animals and humans have been blurred. For instance, in medieval Europe, in the 14th and 15th centuries, numerous trials and executions of animals occurred. One source identifies 34 recorded instances of pigs having been tried and cruelly put to death. Besides pigs; rats, chickens, goats, and bees were similarly tried. Some of the pigs were fully dressed in human clothes at the time they were, inevitably, found guilty. In one case a vicar excommunicated a flock of sparrows that infested his church. All this happened despite the theological stance that animals had no soul, and no morals or conscience. They could not really be guilty of transgressing the Rule of Law.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/108557.php

2nd Renaissance -14

Withdrawing Support For Militarism [179] The problem with revenge is that it lowers the humanity of those who exercise it down to the same level, of even below, those who committed the original crime. Although we can't yet know who was responsible for 911 or 1012, we do now know that forces of the Coalition of the Willing (CoW) have, on occasions, been just as barbaric as the people who killed on those dates. This has been amply demonstrated in Afghanistan and again in Iraq. If you doubt this, seek out more facts about the CoW's use of DU and NDU weaponry and cluster bombs. These horror weapons continue, to this day, to put young children and adult civilians at risk of injury or death from unexploded munitions, radiation, and toxic substances in the ground water and the food chain.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/108373.php

Surveillance

It is up to ordinary people to raise the level of debate about the undemocratic surveillance practices of the many faceless and unaccountable agents who make daily intrusions on individual privacy, and about the apologists and propagandists for the War nn Terror who applaud every new attack on human rights and freedoms as "prudent" or "necessary". If there is no discussion of reverse surveillance in the national media, create it on the streets on a citizen to citizen basis. If nobody is talking about the outrageous assaults on privacy and human rights embodied in the new antiterrorist acts forced through US, UK and Australian legislatures, start talking about it to your neighbours and friends.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/108175.php

2nd Renaissance -13

Such a development is part of the phenomenon of reverse surveillance that will come to characterise the 2nd Renaissance and a rapid transition to a Level 4 Civilization and a truly free society. You can learn more about reverse surveillance at the 'Surveillance' freesite. Reverse surveillance principles extend well beyond the use of ubiquitous digital imaging technologies, and include audits of all aspects of federal government operations, by randomly selected teams of citizens. The Feds and the parrot people will be quick to pronounce that such monitoting is "not in the national interest," but it will definitely be in our interests, and those of future generations of humanity.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/107989.php

2nd Renaissance -12

There are reports that in one Balinese kampong that provided labour to the clubs in Kuta Beach, seven empty coffins were buried, because there were no identifiable remains of the missing workers. It was as if they had been vaporised. Scores of people, mainly locals, are thought to have disappeared without trace.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/107756.php

2nd Renaissance -11

Fortunately, the power and control of government and military elites is illusory in the 21st century. The world no longer works the way it did, and there is nothing to compel people to support failed, outdated systems any longer. This is an understanding that must be widely and quickly shared. The future of our children and the planet depends upon our changing our thinking about governments, and our support for them.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/107560.php

2nd Renaissance -10

In the Afghanistan turkey shoot the CoW forces used vast numbers of hard target weapons and other munitions containing depleted uranium (DU). This substance is almost twice as dense as lead. When it punches through concrete bunkers, armour, or mud huts, DU disintegrates into a chemically toxic and radioactive dust. In contrast to the earlier DU weapons used in Gulf War I, the newer ordinance produced deaths and deformities within weeks of the start of military action by the CoW. Between 1990-91 and 2001 the US arms manufacturers are thought to have "improved" the DU technology by introducing milled uranium ore to their warheads. This non-depleted uranium (NDU) is - wait for it - cheaper to produce and far more potent than DU. It poses massive health risks to civilian populations exposed to it, and constitutes, in every sense of the word, a weapon of mass destruction, or WMD. "Hey they're hunting them in Iraq, aren't they?"

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/107216.php

2nd Renaissance -9

The Old World Order will not do anything to smooth the path to a Level 4 Civilization, and a better world. On the contrary, they will do whatever they can to make it difficult. The police, the military, the media, the financial system, the rule of law, and all the mechanisms of civil control and surveillance will be mobilised in defence of the status quo. But, once they understand their options, the people of the world will not engage in a battle with the forces of the OWO. They will simply abandon the old way of living under national rule, for a better, freer, life in new tribal societies. Kinship mechanisms will help people cope with the pressures of official opposition to radical changes that will finally enable them to escape the invisible prison that the OWO had fashioned around them.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/107047.php

2nd Renaissance -8

Ultimately the old order will lose the battle to preserve their privileged way of life, based on all prevailing scarcity, pseudo-democracy, and the rule of law. But in the interim, hundreds of millions of innocent people might lose their lives in bloody resistance to the changes being made by the Old World Order (OWO).. If such a terrible thing happens, it will all have been for nothing, because:

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106816.php

Tales of Adam
Daniel Quinn*
http://ishmael.com/index1.cfm

2nd Renaissance -7

When coupled with the introduction of artificial scarcity and taker concepts of property ownership and legal tender, Western death-fearing religions played a significant role in subduing, otherwise independent, tribal peoples.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106537.php

2nd Renaissance -6

The second route involves the setting up of entirely new living spaces on tribal lands that were previously seized by colonising governments that espoused and followed Taker philosophies. This route has greater credibility, in the sense of secession rights, where clear historical ownership of the land can be shown.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106327.php

2nd Renaissance -5

Quinn contends that while governments can imagine a revolution they can't imagine abandonment. As he puts it, "..even if it could imagine abandonment , it couldn't defend against it, because abandonment isn't an attack, it's just a discontinuance of support."

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106136.php

2nd Renaissance -4

In due course, there is one achievement of overriding significance that Caral might well provide. One great contribution or lesson that can be applied to the 2nd Renaissance. How to live in peace, with spiritual meaning, and without warfare, for a thousand years.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105935.php

The New Renaissance
Daniel Quinn*

http://www.mnforsustain.org/quinn_d_new_renaissance.htm

2nd Renaissance -3

Plichta writes of this model as follows. "There was a time I used to make fun of the Apocalypse of St John and believed it to be a totally unreliable historical source. Today I am filled with deep humility, perhaps because I am now able to give a concrete description of the foundation of the world as seen by St John with my mathematical discoveries, and thus possibly open a new way to all of humanity which has now reached a dead end."

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105799.php

2nd Renaissance -2

Georg Cantor (1845-1918), by his origination of modern set theory and his studies of the nature of infinity, left science a valuable legacy. Cantor was regularly admitted to a psychiatric clinic within the University of Halle, in Germany, where he lectured and worked as a Professor of Mathematics. On each occasion that he became ill he had been thinking about infinity and the continuum hypothesis. Such intense thought, at the boundaries of his comprehension, caused Cantor to suffer repeated mental breakdowns. Infinity drove him mad.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105634.php

2nd Renaissance

This story was published in September 2004 and it was a big secret. I received it on disk but I think it should be public by now anyway. It is interesting to look back at it and in terms of today's world some two years on. I will link each chapter as I go along over the coming weeks.- The Old World Order - Happy reading!

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105519.php

Fight Iemma - Debnam

All they can say is 'lock em up'

It seems we are in the thick of it again - the stupid, heartless "Law & Order" auction.

Premier Morris Iemma and Opposition leader Peter Debnam are trying to outdo each other with idiotic "tough on crime" policies.

Original Article
http://oldsydimc.cat.org.au/front.php3?article_id=64701