Saturday, 13 August 2011

The Black Panthers And The Right To Bear Arms

The founding fathers of the modern “gun rights” movement in America was…the Black Panthers ?? Yes, or so the Atlantic argues in an interesting piece on the twisted, tangled history of firearm ownership in America:

The Ku Klux Klan, Ronald Reagan, and, for most of its history, the NRA all worked to control guns. The true pioneers of the modern pro-gun movement? The Black Panthers. In the battle over gun rights in America, both sides have distorted history and the law, and there’s no resolution in sight.
It was May 2, 1967, and the Black Panthers’ invasion of the California statehouse launched the modern gun-rights movement. On the west lawn of the state capitol in Sacramento 30 young black men and women [arrived] carrying .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, and .45-caliber pistols. The 24 men and six women climbed the capitol steps, and one man, Bobby Seale, began to read from a prepared statement. “The time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.”
Opposition to gun control as what drove the black militants to visit the California capitol with loaded weapons in hand. The Black Panther Party had been formed six months earlier, in Oakland, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Like many young African Americans, Newton and Seale were frustrated with the failed promise of the civil-rights movement. Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were legal landmarks, but they had yet to deliver equal opportunity. In Newton and Seale’s view, the only tangible outcome of the civil-rights movement had been more violence and oppression, much of it committed by the very entity meant to protect and serve the public: the police.
Inspired by the teachings of Malcolm X, Newton and Seale decided to fight back. Before he was assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X had preached against Martin Luther King Jr.’s brand of nonviolent resistance. Because the government was “either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property” of blacks, he said, they had to defend themselves “by whatever means necessary.” Malcolm X illustrated the idea for Ebony magazine by posing for photographs in suit and tie, peering out a window with an M-1 carbine semiautomatic in hand. Malcolm X and the Panthers described their right to use guns in self-defense in constitutional terms. “Article number two of the constitutional amendments,” Malcolm X argued, “provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.”
The Pathers’ efforts provoked an immediate backlash. Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”

Jacob Sloan @'Disinfo'

Statement on temporary wireless service interruption in select BART stations on Aug. 11

Organizers planning to disrupt BART service on August 11, 2011 stated they would use mobile devices to coordinate their disruptive activities and communicate about the location and number of BART Police. A civil disturbance during commute times at busy downtown San Francisco stations could lead to platform overcrowding and unsafe conditions for BART customers, employees and demonstrators. BART temporarily interrupted service at select BART stations as one of many tactics to ensure the safety of everyone on the platform.
Cell phone service was not interrupted outside BART stations. In addition, numerous BART Police officers and other BART personnel with radios were present during the planned protest, and train intercoms and white courtesy telephones remained available for customers seeking assistance or reporting suspicious activity.
BART’s primary purpose is to provide, safe, secure, efficient, reliable, and clean transportation services. BART accommodates expressive activities that are constitutionally protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and the Liberty of Speech Clause of the California Constitution (expressive activity), and has made available certain areas of its property for expressive activity.
Paid areas of BART stations are reserved for ticketed passengers who are boarding, exiting or waiting for BART cars and trains, or for authorized BART personnel. No person shall conduct or participate in assemblies or demonstrations or engage in other expressive activities in the paid areas of BART stations, including BART cars and trains and BART station platforms.
@'Bay Area Rapid Transport'

Death to the Internet Craze

exiledsurfer exiledsurfer

It seems ever more clear that western nations have been reading the Arab Tyrant Manual. bit.ly/oUPa7r Actually, they taught them.

BART cuts cell phone service to stop protest

BART Cell Phone Blocking Action Was Illegal

NO Justice NO BART

ioerror Jacob Appelbaum

BART must clear the air about the decision making process involved in disabling critical cell phone service without notification. #MuBARTek

Narayanan Krishnan: True Love and Affection

(Thanx AMS!)

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg questioned about his conviction for arson

Real Scenes: Detroit

You can't talk about electronic music without mentioning Detroit. That's why in the second edition of Real Scenes, RA and Bench went to the city which birthed the genre we now call techno.
Detroit has always had a creative streak, due in large part to the boom and subsequent bust of the auto industry. Quite simply, Detroit is a city of extremes, and its music reflects that. These days, Detroit's importance in the global electronic music scene is often referred to in the past tense. When we visited the city, though, we found a number of artists with their eyes (and ears) firmly set towards the future. After our time in the Motor City, it's clear to us that Detroit will endure and innovate for years to come.
Visit the feature page on RA: residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1382

What we lose when we lose anonymity

‘Some Guy’ Built a Camera Literally Out of Trash

The Invisible Committee - The Coming Insurrection (2005)

From whatever angle you approach it, the present offers no way out. This is not the least of its virtues. From those who seek hope above all, it tears away every firm ground. Those who claim to have solutions are contradicted almost immediately. Everyone agrees that things can only get worse. “The future has no future” is the wisdom of an age that, for all its appearance of perfect normalcy, has reached the level of consciousness of the first punks.
The sphere of political representation has come to a close. From left to right, it’s the same nothingness striking the pose of an emperor or a savior, the same sales assistants adjusting their discourse according to the findings of the latest surveys. Those who still vote seem to have no other intention than to desecrate the ballot box by voting as a pure act of protest. We’re beginning to suspect that it’s only against voting itself that people continue to vote. Nothing we’re being shown is adequate to the situation, not by far. In its very silence, the populace seems infinitely more mature than all these puppets bickering amongst themselves about how to govern it. The ramblings of any Belleville chibani contain more wisdom than all the declarations of our so-called leaders. The lid on the social kettle is shut triple-tight, and the pressure inside continues to build. From out of Argentina, the specter of Que Se Vayan Todos is beginning to seriously haunt the ruling class.
The flames of November 2005 still flicker in everyone’s minds. Those first joyous fires were the baptism of a decade full of promise. The media fable of “banlieue vs. the Republic” may work, but what it gains in effectiveness it loses in truth. Fires were lit in the city centers, but this news was methodically suppressed. Whole streets in Barcelona burned in solidarity, but no one knew about it apart from the people living there. And it’s not even true that the country has stopped burning. Many different profiles can be found among the arrested, with little that unites them besides a hatred for existing society – not class, race, or even neighborhood. What was new wasn’t the “banlieue revolt,” since that was already going on in the 80s, but the break with its established forms. These assailants no longer listen to anybody, neither to their Big Brothers and Big Sisters, nor to the community organizations charged with overseeing the return to normal. No “SOS Racism” could sink its cancerous roots into this event, whose apparent conclusion can be credited only to fatigue, falsification and the media omertà. This whole series of nocturnal vandalisms and anonymous attacks, this wordless destruction, has widened the breach between politics and the political. No one can honestly deny the obvious: this was an assault that made no demands, a threat without a message, and it had nothing to do with “politics.” One would have to be oblivious to the autonomous youth movements of the last 30 years not to see the purely political character of this resolute negation of politics. Like lost children we trashed the prized trinkets of a society that deserves no more respect than the monuments of Paris at the end of the Bloody Week- and knows it.
There will be no social solution to the present situation. First, because the vague aggregate of social milieus, institutions, and individualized bubbles that is called, with a touch of antiphrasis, “society,” has no consistency. Second, because there’s no longer any language for common experience. And we cannot share wealth if we do not share a language. It took half a century of struggle around the Enlightenment to make the French Revolution possible, and a century of struggle around work to give birth to the fearsome “welfare state.” Struggles create the language in which a new order expresses itself. But there is nothing like that today. Europe is now a continent gone broke that shops secretly at discount stores and has to fly budget airlines if it wants to travel at all. No “problems” framed in social terms admit of a solution. The questions of “pensions,” of “job security,” of “young people” and their “violence” can only be held in suspense while the situation these words serve to cover up is continually policed for signs of further unrest. Nothing can make it an attractive prospect to wipe the asses of pensioners for minimum wage. Those who have found less humiliation and more advantage in a life of crime than in sweeping floors will not turn in their weapons, and prison won’t teach them to love society. Cuts to their monthly pensions will undermine the desperate pleasure-seeking of hordes of retirees, making them stew and splutter about the refusal to work among an ever larger section of youth. And finally, no guaranteed income granted the day after a quasi-uprising will be able to lay the foundation of a new New Deal, a new pact, a new peace. The social feeling has already evaporated too much for that...

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Tottenham and beyond: neoliberal riots and the possibility of politics

Reading The Riots: 5 Books That Told Us What Was Coming

The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.” - J G Ballard, Kingdom Come (2006)
Many people seem to be struggling to comprehend the UK riots. They gaze at trite aphorisms on Twitter and Facebook, listen to clumsy, inappropriate and leading questions from news reporters, frown at the exasperated cries of shop keepers and wince at the hollow and image-conscious scripts of politicians. None of these sources are providing clear, decisive or useful answers. The message is lost in the medium.
Perhaps we should turn to books instead. There have been many warnings in literature by writers and thinkers who have been aware of, and to some extent predicted, the likelihood of the events of the past few days. On reading these books, the riots are less of a surprise, as all the ingredients that have coalesced to become an insurrection have clearly been fermenting in policy and society for decades.

J G Ballard - Kingdom Come (Penguin Books, 2006)
Ballard was a tireless observer of society and behaviour. He wrote 18 novels and many short stories in response to contemporary culture. Towards the end of his life he became pre-occupied with the underlying collusion between consumerism and fascism. He argued that consumerism creates an insatiable demand that can ultimately only be satisfied by violence. This novel perfectly illustrates how an alienated class can be whipped into a wild frenzy by the relentless advertising and promotion of unattainable consumer products. The novel ends with a local community invading, looting and destroying their only ‘cathedral’, a shopping mall. If all we have to offer today’s young people are relentless instructions to buy consumer goods without providing the means to do so, perhaps the outcome is inevitable...

A great list and particularly good to see Owen Jones' book included...

'I think in life sometimes it's right to give someone a second chance' - David Cameron Jan 2011

Murdoch Hacked Us Too

When I was offered a job as a film critic for the New York Post in 1975, it had just been labeled “a terrible newspaper” by Nora Ephron in her media column for Esquire. Having been a Post reporter, she knew whereof she spoke. Dolly Schiff, the paper’s legendary dowager-in-chief, was notorious for being cheap, petty, whimsical, and, somewhat more fetchingly, a rumored onetime paramour of FDR. Her paper was a rapidly declining asset—a staunchly liberal tabloid chasing after a hypothetical middlebrow afternoon readership too highfalutin for the Daily News and yet insufficiently titillated by the sober New York Times. I knew Nora and asked her if I should really take the plunge into a newsroom she had so convincingly portrayed as a hellhole. She advised, wisely: Well, why not? I was 25 that spring and had nothing to lose except my innocence. Which I would lose soon enough. I liked and looked up to my colleagues at the Post, many of them talented, hardworking, and ingenious at circumventing the obstacles imposed by the owner. They soon inducted me into the gallows humor of the joint. Everyone knew the ax would fall one day. We just didn’t know which day, or who would be wielding it. When the moment finally arrived, shortly before Thanksgiving in 1976, with the announcement that Schiff would sell her paper to a foreign mogul almost no one had ever heard of, it was greeted as good news. “Nobody was crying,” one reporter told the Times. “It was a rebirth. The Post is an orphan that has been adopted.” Our Daddy Warbucks would not only pour money into the paper’s impoverished coffers but also, as he told the Times, preserve its “essential characteristics,” “style of reporting,” and “political policies.” The Post would continue to be a “serious newspaper.”

A day or two later, I was walking across the South Street newsroom when I ran into a young Australian reporter on the staff, Jane Perlez. You must know something about Rupert Murdoch, I said, feeling quite upbeat about our white knight from Down Under. Jane would have none of it. “He’s bloody why I left Australia!” she replied...