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“FAKE NEWS” -propaganda churned by the Bernays school, owns your mind

“Fake News” — it’s Propaganda, but not from Russia

Fake news is everywhere now, so everybody must have an idea. I am developing on the fact that fake news isn’t just an honest crusade against hoaxes, but a deliberate and dangerous attempt at censorship.

Things you hear like fake news, conspiracy theories, Corbyn unelectable, antisemitism in Labour etc are concepts that come out of nowhere and get quickly espoused by many. They seem to become dogma and carry moral weight and must be obeyed unquestionably. The logic trick they use is impose adherence lest you get branded a: sexist, racist, antisemite, transphobic, anti patriotic, tinfoil hat wearer etc. They include a false dichotomy, an authoritarian binary choice: you either agree that Infowars and the Canary are fake news, or you are a deluded tinfoil wearer. No room for nuance. You must concur that criticism of Israel (a government) is antisemitism (hatred of a supposed ethnicity) OR you are antisemite. Pariah status follows. Logical predicament bondage based on a fundamental fallacy. Language coercion. But it works, because people don’t generally stop to think, and their moral indignation and desire to appear humanitarian are usually manipulated. This case: Trump’s unexpected victory was brought on by fake news websites and if you dont believe this then you’re an enemy of US and you side with the Russians.

This is too brilliant and bears too much trace of bias to be accidental. Of course there are those who think this is an accident or imbedded in society…but for somebody who’s stumbled across the Edward Bernays’ Propaganda, things become clear: the manipulation of opinion with intellectual coercion exploiting liberal aspirations is a business, and a policy. Professionals in the field of PR have developed the art of using people’s good intent against them.

Often used for division (a subject for another time), but in the case of fake news, for deflection.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

— Propaganda (1928), Edward Bernays

Does the above paragraph sound like he’s talking about free press and opinion, or …manipulation? The book then goes on to show how to manipulate the mass. Bernays, close relative of Freud, applied the latter’s ideas of the unconscious to the manipulation of public opinion. He saw nothing wrong with it, and his ideas and him personally were co opted by the US government. The concepts and slogans churned out by US culture, media and advertising nowadays are based on his ideas. The public is told what to think, and the layered functioning of the brain applied, for images and catchy script to insert ideas, non-consensually, in the subconscious, that lead to decisions. If you present an idea rationally, to the conscious mind, it has to be to subjected to critical thought. If the idea is fed straight into the unconscious by the methods described by Bernays, they bypass critical analysis and gain a certainty status that’s almost unshakeable. It becomes instinctual, animal, with all the accompanying force. Example: patriotism. An emotional force developed by propaganda that is very useful politically, to regiment public support for useless wars, and even motivate US citizens to give their lives for something they or their families never benefit. This is so deep as to elicit official punishment and public rage if contested. But there is really no reason for the individual to give his life and money into unpopular wars (you don’t need a list, do you?!) that benefit the rich; it had to be artificially cooked in PR agencies and Hollywood films.

A New Age, highly successful form of control. This is US propaganda, and it seeped into the rest of the world dressed innocuously as “entertainment”. It’s why people like me, from Eastern Europe, long before meeting the West first hand, grew as hardcore USophiles based on the gloss of US cinema and TV. There isn’t anybody on the planet who hasn’t heard of Terminator and the films of Spielberg. How many stopped to think what ideas this culture implants in their heads? …American exceptionalism, with the sanction of CIA and FBI, who don’t even hide the fact they give a hand and control what movies say.

Hurt Locker, Oscar-winning US war propaganda film

This is why the governments employing it, the US and the rest of the West, are stable, and give the illusion of freedom and plurality; when in fact it’s sophisticated mind control.

“All art is propaganda…sometimes unconsciously, often deliberately”-Upton Sinclair.

PropOrNot

Last week a site called PropOrNot invoked russian propaganda as a major disruptive source of disinformation in the US, seeking to pervert what is otherwise a plural, democratic free press (LOL) The list provides no evidence whatsoever of russian interference but worryingly, includes most of what thinking people peruse as non biased alternative media: corbettreport, ronpaulinstitute, paulcraigroberts, infowars, globalresearch.ca, zerohedgeetc. breitbart and even astoundingly wikileaks. They all discuss the abuses of the government. The wikipedia definition of fake news is different: clickbait sites of satirical or obviously false information designed to draw income through social media. Very remote from wikileaks which is a reputable groundbreaking whistleblowing organisation that revealed government lies at a high personal cost for those involved like Manning and Assange. The attempt to conflate the two is obvious puerile attempt at deceit.Distortion of a definition to shut down opponents, and deflection through scapegoating a third party.

I think like the idea of Corbyn unelectable and “conspiracy theory”, the phrase fake news was also cooked in a PR or gov agency or other. I strongly believe the intention to deceive is very deliberate and leading on to censorship. I have friends from college who went down this path who celebrate Bernays techniques as wonderful, oblivious that what they’re paid to do is lie using the new parlance of political correctness. And steal people’s informed consent.

Where have I seen this tactic before?

This isn’t unlike what I saw in Ceausescu’s Romania: lies on TV doubled by accusations of treason, being antidemocratic and an enemy of the people addressed to dissidents and independent writers/voices who somehow slipped through the cracks. It’s shocking how similar the terminology is, even. The emotional manipulation with patriotic concepts and the thin evidence used, they illustrate perfectly the authoritarian nature of the regime. And so did Ceausescu’s.

This technique is used because you can’t just tell people outright, hey, we’re censoring you so you can’t find out what we’re really doing to you; so they have to pretend there’s an outside threat.

When the Podesta leaks happened it cost Clinton the presidency. And again this was put down to the Russians. It’s easier for the MSM to blame someone else than confront the horrible things that came to light about her; compromise of the pseudo left, non democratic processes, corruption and bribes from Saudis.

Julian Assange has a complete and verifiable trajectory as a Western journalist and whistleblower. What journalists used to before is nw called whistleblowing. mainstream journalists however, are routinely caught with the big lies. Take a moment to look at this: http://www.globalresearch.ca/who-is-behind-fake-news-mainstream-media-use-fake-videos-and-images/5557580

The accusation Assange works for Russia doesn’t hold water but people bought it nevertheless. What logic process informs the mind of a citizen who comes upon evidence of state corruption but is alarmed by where this may have come from instead? It’s the mental process of someone systematically duped by the Western press, ie, the real Fake News. So will the real fake news please stand up.

Doctoring perceptions of the Middle East

Lingo like fighting misinformation and saving democracy hides something very hideous indeed: an euphemistic talk to allow the exact opposite being done by our own governments.

I wouldn’t be discussing this here with this had it not crossed the ocean.

FAKE NEWS, NOW IN BLIGHTY

During this summer’s Labour leadership challenge, a site has provided inside info to people who had to put up with brash lies about Corbyn under attack for the most innocent things (his clothes, or the mantra “unelectable”), when real crimes of the establishment are presented as facts of life. This site is the Canary.

When their idea that the coup against Corbyn was cooked by a PR firm, Portland communications, made headlines, voices complained that such “conspiracy theories” are presented as facts. It seems the word conspiracy theory is enough to discredit a very well presented article, but lies about WMDs and Libya that lead to the destruction of countries and deaths of millions are perfectly fine being aired on mainstream channels at all times. The hypocrisy is stupefying but scarier when you realise how tight the financial red thread behind it.

Worryingly Buzzfeed’s Jim Waterson reports that Tom Watson, deputy leader of Labour, said there is a British infestation of fake news, and he quoted the Canary to illustrate them. He appointed Michael Dugher to deal with this issue. He writes in the Sun…The reason? The Canary has exposed many of their plotting over their failed coup and since.

“Watson will seek to challenge the government in parliament on the issue, while also trying to work with the likes of Facebook and Twitter to find a solution rather than attacking them directly for the problem of fake news going viral.”

Worrying, as Mark Zuckerberg has already said “Facebook will also look to third parties for help with verifying news sources.” May I remind you,

..”Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, who used Facebook in 2014 to promote genocide against Palestinians, is leading her government’s successful efforts to press Facebook and Google to censor content that her government deems “Palestinian incitement.”

Shaked recently claimed that Facebook has agreed to 95 percent of her requests for deletions.”

Ayelet Shaked collaborates with Facebook to monitor Palestinian incitement…meaning censoring Palestinians saying the truth about the hell they live in. While her incitement to kill all of them, mother and daughters included, was perfectly fine and allowed on social media. So we know which way Facebook floats.

BTW this brings me to a point about abuse in clinical psychology: it is accepted as an abusive behaviour to provoke and harm someone and then use their reaction as evidence of aggression. This is a tactic employed by abusive people that can be extrapolated to abusive governments. To take people’s response to violence, poverty, systematic bank fraud, privatisation of public services, loss of freedoms, and frame that natural survivalist response to abuse as evidence of them being “bad”… this is the Media’s master skill. People complaining that coup Labour MPs wasted everyone’s time from important matters, that shutting down their local meetings is preventing democracy, and being purged from the party so that they don’t vote Corbyn… is presented in the MSM as evidence that they’re ..unruly. That they don’t want Labour to be in government. That they don’t care about unity. When they in fact call attention to unlawful abuses inside what is supposed to be a democratic party. People trying to solve these abuses of democratic institutions in the party is presented as “hanging on to the past”. Imagine if this was said in a court of law! Some of the abuses of power have been unlawful. When challenged on these locally, some party staff and MPs said “let bygones be bygones”. Does that happen to petty criminals who go to court? Can we all know smoke pot and in court invoke “bygones be bygones”? Will it work. No. It’s a transparent and cheap manipulation trick that to my huge awe works with many otherwise well meaning Corbynistas.

It’s like poking someone with a knife and then complaining that their cries of pain are impolite. It’s abusive. And breaks the rules. If you don’t have rules, what do you have? Tyranny. This is the type of information presented by news media like the Canary, Scisco Media, the Word, Novara Media. Watson wants to shut this down with parliament and Facebook’s help? Appalling.

Attacking free press no matter what the pretext because they expose your machinations is NOT what a democracy free society is supposed to do. It’s what tyrannies do. If you fuck people you have to hide it. You own the press and then some independent media sprout through like weeds through cement; and of course these, the elite want squashed. Conflating the issue of actual satirical sites and obvious hoaxes with real journalism exposing the status quo… that’s very transparent, very dangerous CENSORSHIP.

What makes this all the more alarming is the timing: this happened in Britain the same week as snooper charter: not going to discuss it here but hopefully you all heard by now of this grave violation of freedoms and rights that has us all spied un unabashedly. The simple arithmetics between the two things is: they tell you what you may and may not read, throwing in a pretext (the Russians) and then make it obvious you are being watched so as to not go and find out. All the while the pretense is on both sides that this is about national defense, democracy and other abstract concepts. What definition of democracy includes shutting down free speech because of unproven third party alleged involvement? At the same time as watching your every move online lest you go and research?

THIS IS CENSORSHIP. What to do? There are petitions. There are motions in the Labour party you can move to this purpose. Do I trust the democratic mechanisms left to solve the problem? Hardly. But I strongly believe that each of us knowing the unseen machinations of propaganda can restore our informed consent. And therefore, potentially, our democracy.

And to end on a funny note, here’s a blog satirising MSM misinformation related to Corbyn:

https://markfiddaman.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/6-links-jeremy-corbyn-doesnt-want-you-to-know-about/

This article is based on Mara’s podcast which can be found here. Article originally published here.

NEOLIBERALISM’S TOTALITARIAN COMING OUT IN WINTER HEIST ON ALL OUR FREEDOMS

It’s from the frying pan into the fire for me, from the former Gulag, with this hi-tech neoliberal dictatorship.

This fall has seen very depressive news on the topic of freedom and surveillance: Snoopers Charter and the Digital Economy Bill to control our internet lives in an indiscriminate totalitarian grasp; and censorship paved by fake news MSM hysteria, which led to a new US Congress so called anti Propaganda Bill (Intelligence Authorization Act), at the same time as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube announcing a crackdown on “fake news” — but not the lethal WMD type fake news , of course; also, possible similar parliament censorship of alt sites in UK championed by Tom Watson.

At this rate by next year we’ll be living in a cage with electrodes attached to our brain.

To make things utterly desolate and hopeless, the list isn’t even complete: a EU piracy filter law, and a recent IRS ruling that forces Coinbase to reveal full financial transactions of bitcoin users. There is probably more. Such measures and laws are unconstitutional and unlawful, and since they’re logistically impractical and disproportionate to their stated purpose of security, their covert goal is clear — of total control of the West population through the new technology that only a decade or two ago seemed to bring liberation. Our beloved internet is now a state’s microscope over our thoughts, hopes and dreams.

These items deserve individual discussion, but there is a larger observation to be made from the coincidence of so many anti freedom bills happening all at once in UK and US. It seems an attack on liberties that seeks to compensate the surge of popular disillusionment expressed in Brexit and Trump. Various pieces of the media stories form together a very worrying picture (a threat so large and serious it cannot bear uttering here, but Putin does ). The West’s “democracy” is reduced to grotesque caricature of the worst Orwellian nightmares.

We used to live in a pretend democracy that put lipstick on its abuses. Now it’s shameless explicit tyranny. The noose is tightening.

British people are complacent but I remember the pangs of surveillance and terror. I lived them once. Then, also, they came dressed as the protection of a state that looks upon you paternally.

‘We haven’t had a Stasi or a Gestapo in Britain, so are intellectually lazy about surveillance’”

— David Davies, Tory MP

Mass surveillance doesn’t serve the stated purpose.

Targeted surveillance is more effective than mass surveillance. With mass surveillance, as Congressman James Sensenbrenner put it: “The bigger haystack makes it harder to find the needle.” There is no evidence blanket surveillance prevents atrocities. David Blunkett authorised MI5 to begin the mass collection of telephone data (using legislation that rather appropriately was passed in 1984) but this did not prevent the London Bombings of 2005.

Article 56 of the Investigative Powers Act is terrifying in its intent of subverting justice and the chance of a fair trial, as this Register articleshows:

“Section 56 of the act as passed sets out a number of matters that are now prohibited from being brought up in court. The exact wording of section 56(1) is as follows:

Exclusion of matters from legal proceedings etc.

(1) No evidence may be adduced, question asked, assertion or disclosure made or other thing done in, for the purposes of or in connection with any legal proceedings or Inquiries Act proceedings which (in any manner) —

(a) discloses, in circumstances from which its origin in interception-related conduct may be inferred —

(i) any content of an intercepted communication, or

(ii) any secondary data obtained from a communication, or

(b) tends to suggest that any interception-related conduct has or may have occurred or may be going to occur.”

Gareth Corfield goes on to say, “chillingly”:…

Potentially, you could be legally bound to go along with lies told in court about your communications — lies told by people whose sole task is to weave a story that will get you sent to prison or fined thousands of pounds.

I recommend a read of the full article.

Also, goodbye encryption: section 217 obliges ISPs, telcos and other communications providers to cooperate to undermine encryption.

Another provision in the tyrannical act is that it’s a crime to alert somebody that they are being spied on. The net of lies this entrenches is unmatched in tyrannical potential.

Where will the balance between protecting consumers and providing access to law enforcement and security services lie? We will likely never know in any useful detail since no one is under any obligation to make that reasoning or argument available outside the small group of individuals that take the decision.

— Kieren McCarthy, for the Register

Also, MPs added a clause exempting THEMSELVES from interception.

But … if you have “nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”, right?… Only for the powerless. The MPs, who rail for war, austerity — which, make no mistake, IS AN EUGENICS SCHEME, who avoid/evade tax, lie, surrounded by shushed paedo scandals … they NEED the privacy. Us, the overworked, wide-eyed class, …we ARE STRIPPED of the last of it. For security?!

Security is the degree of resistance to, or protection from, harm. It applies to any vulnerable and valuable asset, such as a person, dwelling, community, item, nation, or organization. (Wikipedia)

Let’s define harm. Victims of austerity : after many years of refusing to make the numbers public, the Department for Work and Pensions finally released a staggering statistic: 91,470 deaths from 2011 to 2014 among benefit claimants harassed by the bureaucracy. See the full article here. According to research group Energy Bill Revolution the cold kills more than 20,000 people in the UK each winter, most of which happens because they cannot afford to heat their homes. And the recurring story you hear of how NHS sent cancer suspects home for years until it was too late and they died. The general picture a Holocaust against the ill, disabled, old and otherwise unlucky. Victims of terrorism… :

We will acquiesce to the scanning of Facebook posts to fight terrorism, which has killed 56 people in the UK in 10 years, but will still regard the killing of two women a week by their partners as a private domestic matter. — Frankie Boyle

A piece of fake news fed to us by the official, “respectable”, media: “Terrorism most immediate threat to UK, says MI6” — so as to justify Snoopers Charter by invoking fear. Emotional manipulation to leave you robbed of protections against your real enemy: the one with the nuclear weapons, the police state, cameras up your ass, and who bailed out the banks that defrauded millions by a sum far larger than whatever was saved through brutal austerity. There is an abundance of evidence pointing to the rebranding of the word extremist to mean dissident:

“we must be very clear in order to defeat extremism we must also defeat non violent extremism, those who claim 9/11 was a jewish plot or muslims are discriminated in the west” — David Cameron, 2014, saying that now questioning the official stories is a form of extremism. Anti-fracking activists are extremists now. We, the people who protest peacefully or verbally against corporations and non-transparent governments, … we are the immediate threat the head of MI6 is talking about. The underlying thread here is quite sinister. In the worse sense possible.

Before long, we’ll be left defenseless in front of corporatism using the poppet state as a proxy.

Before you say austerity is punishment for the lazy, while the middle class is happy…. NO. We’re all fucked. In the glorified western civilisation, we work far more than that epitome of oppression, the medieval peasant.

The only thing that’s rife is consumption. If you confuse that with happiness, you’re evidence the scam works. Our devastating consumerism fuels a war economy, that kills millions abroad. Do we benefit from those wars? No. We work to pay for them. And the 1% get richer. We get trinkets.

Interesting footnote: David Davies, avid fighter against the bill, eventually went along with the Snoopers Charter and voted aye at the last published vote record on the parliament site; and so did ALL Labour MPs but two.

I’m as shocked as you are. This means Labour is the same as Tory, minus shushed paedo scandals. Apart Dennis Skinner and David Winnick, even John McDonnell voted for the most abusive, intrusive and legally coercive piece of legislation the world has ever known.

A careful reading of the snooper charter — reveals it’s a blow to the last remains of our freedom. Our lives have moved online, and now everything we do online can be used against us — by dozens of government agencies. Series 20 of satirical show South Park talks about TrollTrace –a platform enabling everyone to list trolls with their real data and browsing history; for all to see. Snoopers charter makes TrollTrace a friendly utopia: in cartoon land it’s everybody watching everybody. In real life, “first world”, ONLY THE GOVERNMENT can see whatever they like about everybody. The government provides zero transparency of its own actions, and clause 56 particularly sinister as it makes the use of these troves of data in law completely unaccountable, forcing lies and deceit; but no symmetrical power is afforded to the accused, in order for them to defend themselves.

This brings back fond memories of the Gulag: when kids were told in school to turn in their own parents if they criticised the state. So the state would arrest parents for mere manifestation of human discontent, present their mind controlled offspring. A state of terror and mistrust. Where free speech is like heroin, to be smuggled and indulged in the shadows, looking over your shoulder. Where the more the state oppresses you, the more there is to complain about, and the more that complaint can get you in jail. Thus the state’s ultimate goal is complete obedience in the population.

Liberal concepts like democracy, freedom, security, human rights… are hollow, putrid carcasses that carry propaganda, behind which your existence is now framed from birth to death to be that of a rat on a wheel, with your thoughts — now in symbiosis with the online — closely monitored.

“our main concern is that references to agency practices (ie, the scale of interception and deletion) could lead to damaging public debate which might lead to legal challenges against the current regime.”

Leaked government document, 2014.

WHAT TO DO?

Not much power left, after the concerted attack on freedoms of this winter. This act is the check mate to our liberties. A petition of more than 180,000 signatures was posted on the parliament website, which states:

“At 100,000 signatures your petition will be considered for a debate in Parliament.

Petitions which reach 100,000 signatures are almost always debated.”

Their answer: not debated. What type of democratic means are left to control our fate? Non consensual laws, for dormant people.

This article is based on Mara’s podcast which can be found here. Article originally published here.

Nuremberg

The sky is low and grey and wet today. I walk as fast as my middle aged legs will take me towards the warmth of the overcrowded train, meeting no-one’s eye from the moment I leave my warm, tidy flat.

Last night I watched TV as I do every night. It doesn’t entertain me. I don’t seek entertainment. I don’t seek peace. I seek enough distraction there in that quiet, musical-less space, until that feeling I will shut down for the night, and begin the day again as soon as my body has had enough of Morpheus’ gift.

Sleep is a gift, something to take me away from the gift I share with the Nazi’s children on the documentary I watched. One accepted his father crimes – his father and mother both being cruel to him; distant; afraid of love. And both stealing and killing from the interned; those they had marked with a star and damned. The other, brought up in a loving Nazi’s home, unable to square the kind father with the man who had commanded executions and torture.

My own guilt is not so easy to either stand firm and say, “I did that. I am a horrible mass murderer;” nor is it easy to say, “I am generally a nice person – I fight the system I’m caught in…”

Because here I go again, pushing against the wind and rain, avoiding the rush hour tyres throwing puddles towards me; trying to focus only on the next part of my distracting routine; buy a newspaper and a black, ultra strong coffee from the vendor on the platform. The same smiling face, surprising me every day by asking me asking me if its my usual I’ll be having – someone so young, hopeful and stuck in a routine and I know, satisfyingly, she won’t think of me until my soulless eyes gaze upwards towards her again tomorrow.

I’m earlier than usual. This is not good. This means a wait for the train that can only be filled by reading something from the paper at the side of the track, opening a newspaper and holding my coffee.

I slow my pace. Maybe if I walk slower and concentrate on surroundings; watch other wet drones head towards their places of work to earn their heat and distracting TV and packaged, microwaved, reconstituted food; perhaps that will distract me.

My glasses are covered in droplets, my peaked cap losing the battle with Scottish rain that defies gravity and falls in impossible angles. I want to be under the cover of the shelter at the train; I want the brief human contact to be over. I want my coffee and a paper to distract.

And the guilt washes over me. The deaths I have caused, the suffering, the total breakdown of humanity I have created and continue to create for my heat and soup.

I think of the children battling for their lives, the mothers who will cry blood over the bodies of their sons because of me. Because of what I do, every day, to buy stuff some other poor person has been forced to create in order to afford heat and cheap food.

Nuremberg was the height of humanity and logic after a war and after the liberation of the death camps – fair trials of those who were responsible for decisions that meant the extermination of millions of people. The world was able to work towards a cleansing because the Nazi’s – the murderers – were carefully tried; given time to realis their part in the machine of death they had created, alone in their cells or in the dock; and the guilty were sentenced – their sins purged, leaving only time to heal what they’d done.

Every day I make this journey, knowing that somewhere in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and other theatres of war, death, annihilation people will die because of my alarm wakening me this morning. Because I have this routine, because I fill the silences with distraction and wont forgo my heat, food and peaked cap.

I arrive at the station, and cross the bridge to the centre platform. And I look up at the girl, and she says, “same as usual?” And I nod. She fills the coffee filter, twists it around, pulls the lever and sets the paper cup underneath the trickling brown liquid and turns and lifts The Guardian from her rack and hands it over to me. The same distracting, satisfying routine as I stand here, water dripping from my cap. I take off my glasses and wipe them with a serviette and she smiles.

She smiles at the mass murderer, the man who today will take the decision to carry on in the system and create death; blast communities into the stone age; tear children apart; vaporise mothers, brothers, sisters, old and young.

Her face changes and I realise I am crying. The routine has been broken and the wall has been breached, for a small time. My regret spills out for a moment, acknowledged by this girl.

“Are you OK?”

I look at her, and I go cold. I’ve slipped. She does know me. She looks at me as if her world has crumbled, embarrassed. This exchange has gone beyond the usual mumbled “Good morning,” and “Thanks.”

I stare, horrified, but out of control and I sob.

She looks from right to left. There is no queue. And everyone is facing the direction of the approaching train.

And I think, “What will I do?”

And I say, “What will I do?”

And she says, “What has happened?” Her action of capping the coffee cup with its lid, wrapping it in a serviette and moving it through the space between us is retarded, she is moving through a starch thickened atmosphere, created by my spasmodic sobs.

The train pulls in and eventually I reach for the coffee, delve into my pocket and thrust the fiver at her. I usually wait for change but I turn and make for the train.

The day goes as it usually does; I read the paper on the train – death, destruction, bad decisions of political people, singers screwing and footballers failing or not. I kill thousands through my work. I go home, picking up pizza on the walk to my house, and live the brightness of the One Show, find a documentary about Stone Henge, watch a chewing gum Netflix series I never remember the name of, get sleepy and barely make it to bed before I fall asleep.

My uniform is dry, and the morning outside is cold, icy, misty. My glasses steam up and I wipe them on my cuff.

The acrid taste of the exhaust of the rush hour traffic fills my asthmatic lungs. But I think, “at least it isn’t phosphorous or the sharp metal rain of fragmentation or shrapnel. I know the difference between these words, as I should in the killing business.

I made sure this morning that I filled my cereal bowl a little more and had two glasses of orange juice – just to ensure my timings are right. I wont have to slow my usual pace.

How will she react? I need the coffee and I need the paper, otherwise, my head will be filled even further with the screaming, dying children than it usually is.

I can’t avoid her, I cant avoid the routine. But I’ll just keep it to my usual interaction; walk towards the kiosk, smile a “Good morning,” and she’ll give me my usual and I’ll board the train, keep my head down, buried in distraction and the day will eventually pass.

As I walk, I try to think about the man explaining the acoustics of Stone Henge, the ancient sounds that those people once must have thought were the amplified voices of the sky Gods. But my mind quickly flicks to the dirty faces of the refugees walking through the muddy fields, unwanted after the ordeal I have put them through. Hated by people across Europe for daring to leave the burning metal and forces that rip them apart.

And here I am walking to the place I make the decision every day to go to. A place where decisions are made to help create the perfect white hot metal storm to rip through their houses, churches, mosques, shops, schools, weddings…

I arrive at the station. I feel relief as it distracts; this problem I created yesterday, and my solution of ensuring there is less time to think at the kiosk. Less time to dwell.

I approach the kiosk. She looks down at me, I smile and say, “Good morning.”

And she doesn’t say the usual, automatic words. The meaningless exchange, the exchange we have every day that can be forgotten as soon as it has played out has been broken, as if someone has drawn a chisel across a record.

“How are you today?” She says, looking concerned.

I don’t now what to say. I open my mouth, and I want to say, “A large black Americano with an extra shot and a Guardian, please,” but I cant.

Yesterday comes flooding back. My grief at that moment. The slip. The chink between the veil of pretence that all is normal opens. And I freeze. With my mouth open.

“Is everything OK?” She says.

I look from right to left. No one is looking. Everyone is ignoring the world around them; engaging in important distracting trolling on their phones; reading papers; watching the tracks; watching the time table.

She is looking at me kindly.

I think, “What’s wrong is I kill thousands of people every day; men, women and children…”

I say, “What’s wrong is I kill thousands of people every day; men, women and children…”

Her brow furrows. “Are you OK?” She says again.

I say, “No. Im not. I take part in the butchering of families and communities. I buy my coffee and my Guardian from you and heat my house and buy my crap food with the proceeds of my murders.”

And I sob and walk away.

And the train arrives and I get on the train, crying. I have no distracting Guardian; no coffee to give me a distracting focus. I think of the lives I will end or destroy today.

I get off at my station and walk the short journey to my work and I clock in, and go to my machine and load it with wire, start it up and press the button that makes the ball bearings fall into the tray I inspect and pass on to the next guy…

There will never be a Nuremberg for me.

Mayhem in England

If you were to glance at the front pages today, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a bit of a slow news day in England, dominated as they are by stories about the class action suit against VW and the shocking story that we might experience some snow this January. To glance at the papers today would lead you to believe that everything was ticking along nicely in Tory England.
The truth is, England is disintegrating.
London is crippled by rail strikes, with commuters reporting 5 hour journeys to work. Clapham Junction became so dangerously overcrowded staff were forced to evacuate the station.
Sadiq Kahn, the supposedly Labour mayor of London – who made the fact his father was a bus driver a key part of his mayoral bid – has posted, at time of writing, ten tweets calling the strike “unnecessary.” With the mayor being so unsupportive of the unions fighting for public safety, it seems likely that the dispute will continue for some time.
The travel chaos and associated lost revenue to the capital should be a top news story in its own right, but it isn’t even close to being the most alarming thing happening in England today.
While mainstream news outlets report on the expected snowfall, the Queen attending church and the VW case, they are ignoring the fact that the NHS in England is on life support, in a crowded corridor and one severely overworked junior doctor to tend to it.
You may have missed the story a few weeks ago that every single paediatric intensive care bed in the country was full. Paediatric cardiologists were cancelling operations for babies in tears, because they had no means to care for them post-surgery. Neither Theresa May nor health Secretary Jeremy Hunt felt that was important enough to warrant comment.

Far from this being a much needed wake up call, Number 10 have allowed the crisis to deepen still further. In wake of reports of vulnerable patients being discharged at 3am with no care plan in place, no food in their cupboards and no social safety net, a patient reportedly dying on a trolley in an A&E corridor after a 35hour wait, and A&E departments being forced to close their doors to patients 140 times in December alone, the red cross were drafted in to help ease the pressure of what they called a “humanitarian crisis.”
The Department for Health left it to NHS England to comment, who played down the crisis by saying that “on an international scale” the NHS is not yet at the point of humanitarian crisis. Labour’s shadow health minister Justin Madders responded:

“For the Health Secretary to remain silent as this crisis unfolds represents either a complete denial of reality or utter embarrassment that this has happened on his watch.
Jeremy Hunt cannot say that he wasn’t warned that this crisis was coming. Every major health organisation has been warning for months that the NHS was heading for disaster unless it got more funding.
He has decided to ignore those warnings and we are now seeing a meltdown in our NHS that he is refusing to acknowledge. Patients, the staff and the public deserve better.
Jeremy Hunt should urgently come up with a plan and resources to match to end the crisis.”

Theresa May’s response was quite extraordinary. Rather than address the concerns of the NHS staff, the Red Cross and patients who are crying out for her to address the funding gap that has caused this unprecedented crisis, she chose instead to give a speech rehashing Cameron’s “big society,” rebranding it the “shared society.”
As we have reported, millions of people are reliant on food banks to eat in austerity England.

With no social care provision, our vulnerable elderly are left to fend for themselves.

Charities are propping up our NHS.

There are no beds available for critically ill babies.

Mental health provision is woefully inadeqte.

The UN has called austerity a breach of human rights legislation.

Prisons are in unprecedented crisis, with overcrowding and staff cuts causing officers to lose control in Bedford, Hull and Birmingham in the last few weeks.

It’s clear that to the Tories, a shared society is about sharing our assets out with their friends while we share the burden of trying to fix what they have wilfully, cheerfully broken.
Main stream media outlets seem determined to paint Theresa May as a safe pair of hands, and concentrate on her “brexit means a red, white and blue brexit” nonsense while England disintegrates. Meanwhile, in the real world, people are dying.
This isn’t governance. This is Mayhem.

You can email Victoria here:

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SKZ Cartoons

In the wake of the Brexit vote and Trump’s election victory, SKZ considered the question: “If you can’t laugh, what can you do?” and was disappointed to find that most of the options included actual effort: so he started to write cartoons instead.

This turned out to be less difficult than he thought, because of the sheer volume of suitable material which appears on Twitter in any given hour. He sometimes considers himself a transcriber rather than a creator, because many of his cartoons contain (or are based on) genuine quotes and arguments, and almost all try to reveal the actual meaning behind the words people use.

SKZ is too disabled to do a proper job (though he did have one once, for quite a number of years) and can even find tooning difficult on a bad day.

You can follow SKZ on facebook and on twitter.

John McHarg Writing

News, Articles and Opinion

Hey, Gringo!

Fiction

Poetry

So What, If

Check out John’s Ungagged Art

Hey Gringo! You’re in trouble now!

San Felipe, Baja California 1998.

I didn’t want to go, this was a fairly common reaction when Gary suggested going anywhere. Through frequent bad judgement being anywhere with Gary was a bad idea and as was to prove more than accurate, this time was no different. “Let’s go down to San Felipe”
This was Thursday, payday was tomorrow which in the car dealing trade in Barstow was every two weeks so inevitably every two weeks I’d hear ‘let’s go somewhere’ from this guy, he just couldn’t handle booze although he loved drinking it, it would almost always end up in him starting a fight. “No I can’t, remember Linda is flying in from Glasgow for a week” I replied with acknowledged futility. “Bring her too!” It wasn’t a suggestion it was a statement of fact. Next day I drove down to L.A.X. to get Linda, through the arrival gate she walked with the biggest suitcase I had ever seen along with her sister whose suitcase matched perfectly, I wasn’t expecting the sister.

Formalities and greeting dispensed with we got into my hired car and drove back up to Hesperia where I was staying.
The next day we all got together in Victorville and inevitably ended up in the Mall, the company consisted of Gary, Andrea and her friend, myself, Linda and her sister Sandra, needless to say the first day of the girls holiday amounted to nothing ,in a Shopping mall, in Victorville California.

“I’ve booked us huts on the beach at San Felipe, we drive down tomorrow” that was that as far as he was concerned. Next morning after getting destination details, the sisters, their suitcases and I made our way down to Mexico via Palm Springs and through the Border at Mexicali. It’s a beautiful journey through the Mojave Desert, San Bernardino Forest back into the desert and down to the border, I’d recommend it just for the boost it gives to your spirit and the girls were excited to be going to Mexico, they really shouldn’t have been as it turns out, however the journey and the Smiths CD I forced them to listen to was the start of what I hoped would be a nice trip, “from the ice age to the stone age, there is but one concern, some girls are bigger than others, some girls are bigger than others, some girls mothers are bigger than other girls mothers”.
Down the 5 and into San Felipe was quite a long trip and we were happy to arrive and pleasantly surprised, the beach was amazing and the accommodation really nice ‘nice one Gary’ I though, this might be ok. We all slept sound and spent the day on the beach together, that night, well that was to change everything in my life.
“Right! Let’s go out!” The girls were still a bit jet lagged and tired so wanted an early night “ok” I answered “where?” “There’s a bar in town, bottles of beer are only 50 cents here” “FUCK!” I thought.
We strolled into town and found the 50 cent beer bar (they all where) in which Gary eagerly started purchasing. To be honest, the night went pleasantly although I was on full red alert for indications of normal state of affairs behaviour and remarkably enough we even managed to leave the bar without trouble ensuing, a first for my socialising experiences with this guy. ‘Phew’ I thought as we were leaving, it was a ‘Phew’ far too soon….

As we strolled our way, happily I may admit, back to the accommodation we walked past a guy standing at the door of a real estate store, even to this day I am amazed at the speed into which Gary started a fight with the guy, it was so quick that I had walked a few meters on before I had even heard or realised what was going on, my instincts kicked in and I automatically jumped into trying to separate them, before I knew it I felt the searing pain of a baseball bat on my left arm……from that point to the re-emergence of my conscience in the back of a Mexican Police car with a gun pressed firmly into my temple all I can say is the red mist had set in.
“Gringo, you’re in trouble now”

The clarity of which I can remember almost every detail of the next 18 hours is a blessing and a curse as I can recount this story faithfully but I can still smell the shit, blood and piss in my nose and on my clothes when I do think about it. I got dragged into the police station by 3 officers, two male one female and deposited to the desk sergeant who instantly started screaming Spanish at me. “Gringo! NOMBRE” I didn’t have a clue what they were screaming at me but I did know that a Mexican cop screaming Gringo at you was BAD NEWS. They hate ‘Gringos’ it’s their hate term for Americans. “No Gringo, Scotland!! No Gringo!” I pathetically pleaded. This went on for a while until, and I’m shitting you not, this was said

“Scotland? Celtic? Whisky?”

“Yes!!! Yes! Celtic! Whisky! Yes…”

This changed everything and I mean everything! They calmed down and started asking me questions , I wasn’t American I was Scottish, they couldn’t believe it and I couldn’t believe my luck.
For some reason that I will never be able to explain the fairly pleasant line of questions led to this. “What does your mother work as?”

Now at that point my mother was working as an assistant, nursing elderly catholic nuns in the North of Glasgow, I could have spent a week trying to come up with a lie to impress and it wouldn’t have had the impact that this truth had.

“Your mother is good woman.”

Mexico is a VERY VERY VERY Catholic Country and the mere suggestion of fellow Catholics from other Countries had a remarkable effect on these officers, they went from utter fury to total genuinely interested inquisition (no one expected the Mexican inquisition!)

One peculiar thing I remember is that even though this was 1998 they processed my details on an old manual singer typewriter.
All the erm, pleasantries and formalities aside they told me I was heading to the cells.
When I use the term shithole it normally relates to a messy dirty rundown place, but in this respect it really was a hole in the fabric of space and time filled with actual shit and a lot of pish.
The bar cell door was about 600mm wide which led into a room of about 4mx6m in almost complete darkness. To say I was scared is accurate, to say I was shitting myself isn’t as the environment had done that for me. The smell was brutal as was the sensation of the body fluids and near fluids squelching between my toes. I made my way with my hands along the wall on the right to the end of the cell and stood with my back against the wall. The only light was the little amount trickling in from the cell door, the source of the light was a bulb that was around a corner about 3 meters away.
After about 20 minutes I had no choice, I was exhausted, a wee bit beaten up and my arm was killing me, I had to sit down. The jeans I was wearing and the 1974 No 5 West Germany football top immediately soaked up as much of the dank surrounding as it could hold. It was only then that I noticed the front of my top was red and warm from the nose bleed that had developed, it wasn’t easily stopped.
I reckon it took a good 2 hours before I noticed two pair of eyes staring at me from across the cell 6 meters away. Now, that’s when the fear really kicked in. I said nothing, they said nothing, we just sat there, in the human waste staring at each other. My fear was misplaced, this was the beginning of an amazingly positive experience in my life.
“Hey Scotland! Agua! Water for you” The Policeman was standing at the bar cell door holding a bag of water, a clear plastic bag of water. “Your friend have brought you a bag of water” I took it and drank with a thirst I have rarely known, it was then my cellmates made themselves known to me. “Please, agua, Please” they pleaded. I wouldn’t ever refused any man a drink of water and in this situation I was eager to share.
I can’t remember both of their names, I really wish I did as these two guys gave me a re-energised love of humanity that night but I do remember their faces, their humour and their story, which they told me in near perfect English.

I explained who I was, where I was from and how I had ended up there, their foul language equally matched mine, I stole ‘Celtic, Whisky’ and we spend the next 2-3 hours talking, mainly them asking me about myself and my Country. They were locals, “peasants” and I mean no insult, that was their own words, they hung around town begging from tourists and getting drunk, “we come here lots of times Scotland”. In that dark shithole, we shared stories and laughter.
Now this is a weird story I know but it gets weirder.
“Hey! You, the guy I was fighting with! You Irish?” There was an American guy in the next cell, asking if there was a guy in my cell who was Irish. “D’you mean me?” I replied.

“Yeah you” was the response. “I’m fucking Scottish! Who the fuck are you and why did you hit me with a baseball bat?” “Maaaaaaaaaaan! I’m sorry dude, I had no idea what I was doing, I was really drunk” This was Bill, he went on to explain to me that he was a local businessman, a realtor as they say in America.
His mother had come down to visit him and it had gone badly, he went on to admit he was an alcoholic and his mother had left earlier that day, he had got drunk and went out looking for a fight, to make himself feel better about himself which he had managed rapidly with the appearance of Gary.
As we both stood at the cell doors about 400mm away from each other in that dark shithole we shared our life stories and a few laughs. “Hey maaaaaaaaan! I feel terrible about fighting with you, I want to make it up. He offered one of the properties he owned locally, free of charge for as long as I liked, I thanked him and politely declined.
Bear in mind this had been a few hours now and the girls were a huge concern, knowing the bullshit that Gary was capable of I later found out my fears were well founded, I may get to that at another time.
From having a gun pressed painfully into my temple to the moment the judge appeared, in shorts, sandals and a pristine white t-shirt, at the cell door must have been around 18 hours, maybe more. He proceeded to speak to Bill to which Bill replied in fluent Spanish, I tried to interrupt to find out what was going on but the Judge told me to be quiet, I wasn’t gonna argue with him, judging by the guard that was standing next to him it would have been an unwise move. This went on for 20mins with Bill assuring me that it was “getting fixed”.

“Ok” the judge pointed to me and said to the guard “let him out” In that moment I can still go back to and relive the relief, it was overwhelming…It lasted approximately 20 seconds. When I stepped out of the cell I immediately turned round to speak to Bill and it was then I saw his face for the first time, or more accurately what either myself, Gary or a combination of both had done to his face, it was a bloated beaten bruised mess, I felt like I had been hit with a baseball bat again, it took me all my composure to not burst out crying at that moment, in that jail, I was disgusted with myself. “I’ve paid your fine maaaan! It was 40 bucks, I admitted it was all my fault and you were only trying to stop the fight, you can go”. I couldn’t speak, I just looked at him and then finally all I could utter was “I’m so sorry Bill”, “Maaaaaan! It was my fault”.
“Ok, come with me Gringo!” Where the judge led I followed, into his office, well I say office it was a shack with a desk and some crappy chairs.
So, so far this has been a weird story right? And you don’t believe a word of it right? Well, it’s true and it gets a wee bit weirder.
“I cannot believe I have someone from Scotland in my jail! I am delighted, tell me all about Scotland” and I did, everything I could think of and that was about an hour and a half before he let me stop. As a side note, I drank the one and only cup of coffee I have every drunk in my life, in that shack, speaking to that judge, it was nectar on my tongue, I hate coffee and haven’t drunk it since. Finally I politely told him I really had to get back, I was covered in blood, head to toe in shit and piss and exhausted, he didn’t mind.
On handing me my stuff he said ” do you have any souvenirs for me?” Remarkably there was still money in my returned wallet and I took out what I had to give him, “no, no no Gringo, not that, something from you to me, to remind me of your stay”. For no reason I can explain to this day I rummaged through my wallet and found a tightly folded one pound Clydesdale Bank note, I took it out, opened it up and showed him the picture of Edinburgh Castle. “The capital of my Country” his joy was a sight to see, “sign it, please” which I did. He pinned that note up on the wall of his shack and we shook hands like friends do.

“Before I go, can I ask when Bill will be getting out?”

“Oh Gringo, ( this Gringo wasn’t an insulting Gringo) we are sick of his behaviour, he is a big man with big money but he has caused trouble too many times now in San Felipe, he gets drunk and does it all the time he is going to the big house”,

“The big house?” I replied.

“Yes, Prison, this time he admitted his guilt and in Mexico you are guilty before you are innocent, he can’t buy his way out now, lucky for you he did or you would be going too.”
I returned to the accommodation to the obvious relief and bewilderment of the girls, this is a whole other story which I won’t get into now as Gary again is instantly involved.
I will finish on this, on getting cleaned up and packed we got our stuff into the car and drove through San Felipe, on our way through I couldn’t believe it but there, at the side of the road in the town centre was my two cell mates. I pulled up, opened my window and called them over. They were delighted to see me, we hugged and I emptied my wallet and pockets of everything I had, I knew what they would do with it but it’s all I could do in the moment. These two guys took me from the absolute bottom of despair, to laughter and amazement in a shit hole, in a jail, in Mexico, and for that and them and the life changing experience that was I will be forever grateful.

Jesus – Guilty as Charged

Jesus Christ did not come to rescue Wall Street like President Obama. He did not come to save the American Chamber of Commerce. He did not come to free corporations, regardless of how many courts claim that they are, contrary to all rational thought, “persons”. And he would not have agreed with that money is speech.

Jesus Christ did not promote austerity, balanced budgets, or privatization and dissolution of government services. He did not means test or drug screen those coming to him in desperation seeking mercy. He did not hide the homeless from the sight of the affluent. He did not gentrify cities with wholesale destruction of public and otherwise affordable housing in order to clear space to build apartments and condominiums for the wealthy. He did not come to preach Third Way, supply-side, trickle-down, horse-and-sparrow neoliberal capitalist economics that make poor and working people pay for the lifestyles of the rich and shameless.

Jesus Christ did not support White Supremacism or Christian Triumphalism. He did not build at great expense graven images in the form of gigantic crosses and statues of the Ten so-called Commandments. He did not call for public prayer in town councils or at football games, or for God to be thanked by celebrities at awards shows.

Jesus Christ did not extol American or Israeli exceptionalism. He did not support the original illegal immigrants to the Americas seeking a better quality of life at the expense of that of the native peoples, nor their descendants facing later illegal immigrants seeking the same.

Jesus Christ did not promote Open Carry. He did not preach Stand Your Ground. He did not even advocate Self Defense.

Jesus Christ did not condemn birth control or abortion. He did not come to save zygotes or nonviable fetuses, or for that matter fetuses of any viability, especially not at the risk of the mother’s health against her will. He did not teach that a woman’s only place is in the home and that her only purpose in life is to be a housewife and mother.

If you believe Jesus Christ supported or would support any single one of those things, you are not following the real Jesus Christ. You are following Ayn Rand in a White Jesus mask riding a red-white-and-blue horse shooting fire from its nostrils, lightning from its eyes, and oats from its arse onto the road behind it for the peasants to consume.

The real Jesus Christ, by the way, was not really Jesus Christ. In the early Christian era, he was more often referred to as Isho Nasraya in in his native Galilean Aramaic, Yeshu ha-Notzri in Hebrew, and Iesous [Ee-soos] Nazoraios [Nad-zo-rah’-yos] in Greek, all of which translate to “Jesus the Nazorean”, not “Jesus of Nazareth”.

Jesus the Nazorean was not a 21st century American with blonde hair, blue eyes, European features, and an aquiline nose. He was a 1st century Galilean with dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes, and a big nose. In other words, he looked more like the humans America has been bombing since 2001, as well as the humans against whom bigots in Texas and other states of the Southwest are building fences and patrolling borders, than he did any White, American, Suburban, Professional.

Jesus the Nazorean did not hang out with sanctimonius saints, billionaires, celebrities, lords of Wall Street, masters of industry, land-owners, TV preachers, colonials, the popular, the chic, the cultured, the socially acceptable. He hung out with righteous sinners, deplorables, basement-dwellers, workers, tenants, prostitutes, thieves, collaborators, aliens, indigenous people, refugees, addicts, the poor, the outcast, the socially undesirable. He was in the lower class, of the criminal element, and as unfree as the prisoners of mass incarceration under the empire.

Jesus the Nazorean did not deny to anyone food, shelter, clothing, or healthcare because they were the wrong race, the wrong nationality, the wrong ethnicity, the wrong social class, the wrong religion, the wrong gender, the wrong sexual orientation, felons, addicts, too poor, not sufficiently poor, or able-bodied enough to slave for pittance wages or in makeworkfare-for-welfare programs.

Jesus the Nazorean was neither a capitalist nor a supporter of capital. He did not teach that a person’s only worth derives solely from their ability to produce profits. He frequently advocated social justice and redistribution of wealth, even invading the Wall Street of 1st century Palestine to chase out with a whip the brokers, bankers, financiers, and other swindlers who had taken up residence in what was supposed to be the sanctuary of the people.

Jesus the Nazorean was an outlaw who was executed as a terrorist by the Roman empire. And of that charge there is no question that he was guilty under imperial law. Make no mistake; his trial and execution has fuck all to do with jealousy from the elders and religious elites. Their sole participation, if in fact they participated at all, was as agents and clients of the state.

Jesus the Nazorean was crucified for an act of rebellion against the state. In his time, the Temple precinct, where the oligarchs of Judea held court, their money-changers defrauded, and the sellers of death profited, fell under the administrative supervision of the Roman prefect, so an attack on it was, legally, an attack against the empire. The insurrection that took place in Jerusalem at the same festival over Pilate’s use of Temple money for building an aqueduct into the city made the outcome of Jesus’ trial inevitable. Which shows that the law is not about justice, morality, or equity, but first and foremost about protecting the elite.

And “if the real Jesus Christ were to come back today,” as the 1980s song by the English punk band The The goes, “he’d be gunned down cold by the CIA”. Maybe. More likely, he’d be sent to Camp X-ray at Gitmo, or extraordinarily rendered to a black site in Poland or Romania, or turned over to be tortured by the secret police of Egypt or Azerbaijan or Saudi Arabia.

If his itinerant preaching brought him into America from Mexico, he might find himself in a detention camp as an illegal alien. Or should he somehow make it past the border patrol and vigilante militias, he would doubtless find himself on a no-fly list.

In some states, he and his entourage would find themselves driven out of town or sent as vagrants to private prisons with forced labor for private profits. Certain municipalities would have him arrested for feeding the poor and homeless in public. Other communities would keep him and his crew from sleeping with spikes driven into the ground of every possible shelter and place of rest.

Here in America, he would not die on a cross. He would die frozen under a railroad bridge, or in a booby trap at the border, or at the hands of a suburban middle-class white ammosexual wearing fear goggles “afraid for his life”, or beaten and choked to death by cops with the words, “I can’t breathe” on his lips instead of “It is finished”.

And if he were in his homeland today, he would probably die from American drones. Or from Israeli bombs. Or from gasoline ignited after being forced down his throat.

The Kara Sea

screenshot_20161228-193103 — The Kara Sea

The Kara Sea was a one-woman band; the woman in question is Glaswegian/Mancunian hybrid multi-instrumentalist and “flâneuse” (according to an early review) Sarah Bradley, who guides violins, guitars, omnichords and assorted found-sounds into songs that have been described as “Cocteau Twins-esque electronica”. After spending her formative years working as co-founder of Valentine Records, DJing, playing keyboards in Manc pop band Megarider and generally partying it up, Sarah turned her attention to solo recording in 2006, and released a handful of well-received tracks online and through low-key releases.

The Kara Sea played several gigs in Manchester, Glasgow and Leeds, as well as recording tracks that were showcased on compilation and split EP releases on several DIY labels. Bradley drew a line under The Kara Sea project in 2009

You can find her music on MySpace https://myspace.com/thekarasea

An Ungagged Christmas Gift For You!

Available FREE on iTunes and Podbean

In this bumper festive episode, Roy Møller interviews Stiff Little Fingers singer Jake Burns, Chuck Hamilton talks about what Jesus would be like were he around today, Red Raiph treats us to anite afor chrismas (Scottish style), and Victoria Pearson fixes the rip in the fabric of space-time to restore normality before 2017.

Debra Torrance discusses the redistribution of reality, Fuad Alakbarov speaks about Syria, Amber Daniels asks us to consider those without this Christmas and Steve McAuliffe treats us to his poem Toasting the Bloody Queen.

Matt Geraghty talks the joyless joy of commercialmas, Mara Leverkuhn discusses the Snoopers Charter, we hear from Beinn Irbhinn with a message from Kazakhstan, and John McHarg tells us the true story of the time he ended up in a jail cell in San Phillips, Mexico.

With music from Attila the Stockbroker, Steve White and the Protest Family, Roy Møller and Sporting Hero, Victoria Långstrump, Frank Waln , Argonaut , The Kara Sea, David Rovics and The Wakes, Jackal Trades, and Thunder on the Left.

Start times for individual pieces will go up tomorrow.