John E. Archer – 'By a Flash and a Scare', Arson, Animal Maiming, and Poaching in East Anglia 1815-1870 Breviary Stuff Publications, ISBN 978-0-9564827-1-6

‘By a Flash and a Scare’ illuminates the darker side of rural life in the nineteenth century. Flashpoints such as the Swing riots, Tolpuddle, and the New Poor Law riots have long attracted the attention of historians, but here John E. Archer focuses on the persistent war waged in the countryside during the 1800s, analysing the prevailing climate of unrest, discontent, and desperation.

In this detailed and scholarly study, based on intensive research among the local records of Norfolk and Suffolk, Dr Archer identifies and examines the three most serious crimes of protest in the countryside — arson, animal maiming and poaching. He shows how rural society in East Anglia was shaped by terror and oppression in equal measure. Social crime and covert protest were an integral part of the ordinary life of the rural poor. They did not protest infrequently, they protested all the time. Read more…

Roger Ball – Tolpuddle And Swing, The Flea And The Elephant
Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #12

In 1834, six Dorset farm labourers were tried and condemned to transportation to Australia for joining an early Trade Union. Since then the 'Tolpuddle Martyrs' have become an iconic part of modern British History. Three years before the events in Tolpuddle, much of rural England was rocked with a massive uprising of farm labourers known as the 'Swing Riots'. This pamphlet analyses why 'Tolpuddle' has taken its place in the popular memory and the far more significant events of 'Swing' have been distorted and forgotten. Read more…

Andrea Button – Bristol's White Slave Trade, Indentured and Enforced Labour In The 17th Century
Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #13

Bristol’s role as a supplier of labour to the American and West Indian colonies in the eighteenth century is associated with the African Slave Trade however, this trade was not officially open to the Bristol merchants until 1698. The indentured white servant system, operated in Bristol during the seventeenth century, were used by merchants to meet demand for labour in Britain’s new colonies until the Bristol merchants were legally able to compete in the lucrative transatlantic trade. This pamphlet reveals the extent of this ‘white slavery’ and its links to Bristol. Read more…

No Quarter 5

Includes A Somali Pirate Story by Jordan Zinovich (with Hans Plomp), an interview with Gabriel Kuhn, author of Life Under the Jolly Roger, Reflections on the Golden Age of Piracy, Anarchist Commune at Nootka in 1911? by Larry Gambourne, A Couple More Things About New Hazelton by David Tighe, John Oswald: Atheist, Vegetarian, Revolutionary by N. N., Somali Pirates by Peter Lamborn Wilson, book reviews, and a reading list, all interspersed by some nice black and white imagery. Read more…

It concerns two of the most common types of popular disorders in late Tudor and early Stuart England: the food riots and the anti-enclosure riots in royal forests. Particular attention is paid to the Western Rising of 1626-1632, a series of massive anti-enclosure riots which took place in Gillingham Forest on the Wiltshire-Dorset border, Braydon Forest in Wiltshire and the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. Concurrent riots in Leicester Forest, and Feckenham Forest, Worcestershire, and lesser known disorders in the Western forests which took place during the English Civil War are also investigated.

The leaders and most active participants in riot were rural artisans — skilled men working in non-agricultural employments. These artisans, particularly those in the major industries of seventeenth-century England located in the forested West, were largely wage-earners. Virtually landless cottagers, who relied on the market for food, clothworkers and other artisans frequently engaged in food riots and attempted insurrections during times of depression or harvest failure. These artisans exploited the common waste of the royal forests. Enclosure of the forests by the Crown threatened the livelihood of the workers who depended on the forests for raw material and pasturage.

The most striking demonstration of continuity is to be found in the identities of a number of the rioters and in the nature of the leadership. Twelve of the participants in the riots of 1643-45 had been fined in the Star Chamber for their part in the disorders of the 1620s; eight were artisans, one was a mercer, two were husbandmen, and one was of undetermined status. Four of them were noted as notorious offenders in the 1640s, including a fuller who acted as drummer and John Philips, tanner, who took over leadership of the riots in 1644 from Richard Butler, a poor linenweaver. It is clear from the examinations of witnesses that Butler had been the leader of the riots in 1643 until he was apprehended and brought before the Lords. His opinions, as reported by a number of witnesses, show considerable contempt for Parliament and for Elgin's agent, Thomas Brunker. At the beginnning of the disorders in 1643 he went into a shop to buy gunpowder. When told it cost 1s. 6d. per pound, "hee sayd his monie would not hold out to have soe much, but desired her to lett him have 2 pennyworth and sayd it would be enough to serve Tome Brunker and for his proclamation I care not a fart of mine arse."

Extract from Ch. 9., A Second Western Rising: Riot during the Civil War and Interregnum

Buchanan Sharp's conclusions challenge the dominant modern view that work in rural industry was merely the by-employment of members of peasant households. Contrary to the prevailing interpretation that disaffected men of standing were generally behind disorders such as the Western Rising, manipulating popular grievances for their own ends, In Contempt of All Authority concludes that in times of economic and social distress or political dislocation (such as the Civil War) the “lower orders” of Tudor and Stuart England were provoked into self-organised direct action by very basic issues of food supply, employment, and common rights. In the course of such actions they manifested an intense hatred of the gentry and the well-to-do, whom they held responsible for existing conditions.

The Breviary Stuff Publications offering is the first paperback edition, in an oversized format (191×235mm, 204pp), with a RRP of £12.00. It is available from all good bookshops, online retailers, such as Amazon, and directly from the Breviary Stuff Publications website, www.breviarystuff.org.uk.

… keep on and on 'til the break of dawn … ]]> http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/10/08/henry-snowstorm-the-one-day-house/feed/ 0 http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/10/01/two-radical-history-pamphlets-old-and-new/ http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/10/01/two-radical-history-pamphlets-old-and-new/#comments Thu, 01 Oct 2009 06:56:43 +0000 p http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/?p=1167 Two radical history pamphlets; the former supposes a high level of prior knowledge of its subject, whereas the latter serves as an introduction.

Historical Geography Research Series No. 1, 1979
Andrew Charlesworth – Social Protest in a Rural Society : The Spatial Diffusion of the Captain Swing Disturbances of 1830-1831 (78pp.)
http://www.exeter.ac.uk/cornwall/academic_departments/geography/HGRG/Research%20Series.html

1830 was a year of revolution in France and Belgium. In England it saw the revival of agitation for parliamentary reform, sustained partly by the examples of Paris and Brussels and undoubtedly encouraged by the success in Ireland the previous year of O'Connell's Catholic Association. 1830 was a year of tax potests and of widespread industrial unrest. And in the autumn and early winter of that turbulent year, whilst the first steps towards the making of the First Reform Bill were being taken, there swept across southern and eastern England a massive series of protests by agricultural labourers.

The labourers' protests took many forms. In some areas there were demands for higher wages and for tithe reductions, although the two were not always associated. Other areas saw the overseers of the poor attacked; in a few places workhouses were the target of the crowd. In central-southern England forced levies of money by the protestors were common, but even more widespread were the detruction of threshing machines. And as a background to the collective protests there was the firing of barns and ricks and the receipt of threatening letters, often signed by the mythical 'Captain Swing'. Finally, after earlier concessions, order was brutally restored.

Such, in brief and bare outline, were the Captain Swing protests of 1830. In the most detailed study of the the protests so far, Hobsbawn and Rudé maintain that:

One thing can be said with some confidence: they [the protests] were essentially a rural and local phenomenon. That is to say their diffusion had nothing to do with national lines of communication and very little to do even with the local towns. Over most of Sussex, Hampshire and Wiltshire, for instance, the movement spread across such main roads as there were from London to the coast of from one town to another … The path of the rising … followed not the main arteries of national or even county circulation, but the complex system of smaller veins and capilliaries which linked each parish to its neighbours and to its local centres.
[E.J. Hobsbawm and G. Rudé, Captain Swing (London 1969; rev. ed. 1973) 159]

It is contended that these conclusions are at variance with the evidence. In fact, the diffusion of the protests had a great deal to do with national lines of communication. Moreover, it is argued that this altered perception of the spread of the revolt opens up new questions and possibly affords new insights into the world of the agricultural labourer. The new findings challenge not only Hobsbawn and Rudé's views on the spatial patterning of the protests but also their conclusions on the unpolitical motivations of the labourers' actions.

Thus the first part of the monograph sets out to identify the channels along which the disturbances spread. In so doing, although we can identify pathways of the rising different to those indicated by Hobsbawn and Rudé, simple contagion models of diffusion are still inadequate to explain why the major routeways of southern and eastern England guided the spread of the revolt. In the second part of the monograph, therefore, the diffusion of the protests is explained in the light of the work of such historians as Charles Tilly and E.P. Thompson. Their perspective on social protest places more emphasis on the 'political' and organisational aspects of collective action, rather than on economic motivation and on the spontaneity of the outbreak of disturbances. It seeks to place collective protest within its historical context, the spread of crowd turbulence reflecting the political crisis of the day rather than the ever present hardships of the common people.

Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #11, 2009
Steve Mills – A Barbarous and Ungovernable People! A Short History of the Miners of Kingswood Forest (20pp.)
http://brh.org.uk/publications.html

"A barbarous and ungovernable people" is a bit of a strong condemnation of a community. Especially considering that at the time the community in question was situated on the outskirts of a vibrant city in Britain. The people of Kingswood Forest supplied the south west of England and the industries of Bristol with coal, and it is fair to say that without the Kingswood Forest coal Bristol would not be the city it is today. However, the relationship between the two communities was strained to say the least.

By the time of the English Civil War 1642-1649 squatting on the common land of Kingswood Forest had become more widespread and many people exercised their age-old right of eking out a living from the raw materials that their environment provided them with. Following the Restoration of 1660, the Crown sought to reassert its authority in the old Royal Forests, Kingswood Forest included. The residents were not prepared to give up their rights easily and over several generations they resisted through petitions, physical force, tearing down of tollgates, smashing of looms, roadblocks, rioting and other means.

This pamphlet tells the story of the misunderstanding and mistrust which, from time to time, blew up into full scale conflagration.

Of particular interest to me were a couple talks delivered by the Bristol Radical History Group, which were perhaps the most controversial thing there. These were about the large scale Captain Swing riots "that swept across the south of England 3 years before the events in Tolpuddle." These were controversial in the sense that they were carried out by the so-called ignorant rural peasants. As the speaker pointed out, whereas The Tolpuddle Martyrs were innocent, the Swing Rioters were guilty and they were defiant in their guilt. They recognised their rights as people, despite what the law and the law-makers would have to say on the matter. It is the innocent/guilty polarity, (amongst other reasons), according to the speaker, which means that today many have heard of the Tolpuddle Martyrs but few have heard of Captain Swing, despite the Captain Swing riots being a much larger movement involving a far greater number of people, and being a far bigger problem for the authorities. I agree. The talk was titled 'The Flea and the Elephant', the flea being Tolpuddle, the elephant Captain Swing.

The Bristol Radical History Group have put on many events, check their website for details of upcoming events. They also publish a series of pamphlets, three of which I picked up whilst I was at the festival:

We Come For Our Own And We Shall Have It, Smuggling In Poole And Dorset
Kevin Davies
Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #2
A look at the history of smuggling in Dorset and the government responses to it. This pamphlet examines whether smugglers should be considered folk heroes and to what extent smuggling was a community enterprise.

Yesterday's To-morrow, Bristol's Garden Suburbs
Stephen E. Hunt
Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #8
In 1909, the Bristol Garden Suburb Limited was set up to implement the ideas Ebenezer Howard popularised in To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, first published in 1898. Garden-City principles inspired promising developments at Shirehampton, Sea Mills and Keynsham chocolate factory, but were diluted in the construction of Bristol's interwar housing estates at Knowle West and Bedminster, Hillfields, Southmead, Horfield, Speedwell and St Annes. Today it's timely to revisit Howard's ideas in the light of several topics of green chatter — transition towns, peak oil and Gordon Brown's intention to promote the construction of eco-towns.

Nicotiana Brittanica, The Cotswolds' Illicit Tobacco Cultivation In The 17th Century
Will Simpson & Jim McNeill
Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #9
Four centuries ago a group of farmers from the West Of England decided to see if they could make a living for themselves by growing tobacco. This put them at odds with the English state and its imperial ambition to build a mercantile economy driven by indentured and slave labour. This is their story of resistance.

To date, the Bristol Radical History Group have published 10 pamphlets, see their website for further information.

This text is an updated version of that originally issued by Past Tense. Further information on No Quarter publications can be found on the No Quarter website: anarchistpirates.blogspot.com ]]> http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/07/05/no-quarter-publications/feed/ 0 http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/05/25/greedy-thieving-bastards/ http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/05/25/greedy-thieving-bastards/#comments Mon, 25 May 2009 09:55:17 +0000 p http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/?p=892 It is said that public confidence in politicians is at a very low ebb following the Telegraph's leaking (and subsequent reporting by most newspapers) of the majority of politicians' questionable expenses claims. Claiming for second homes, piano tuning, clearing of a moat (£2,115), an ornamental duck house (£1,645), swimming pool maintenance (several claims), mortgages that don't exist (£15,000+), double-claims for council tax, a trouser press (more than one claim), home cinema system, removal of wisteria, trimming hedge around "helipad" (£609), leather rocking chair (£1,200), food, toilet seat, eye liner, biscuits, and so on, and so on, ad nauseum.

Politicians from all the main three parties have been exposed. Most give the appearance of being humbled in the media now that they have been found out, however, some, (the Tory gentry, as you may imagine), have appeared indignant that they should have to answer to the lower classes. An example of this is Anthony Steen, MP for Totnes in Devon, who claims that we are all just jealous of his million pound home: "I've done nothing criminal, that's the most awful thing, and do you know what it's about? Jealousy. I've got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral. It's a merchant's house of the 19th century. It's not particularly attractive, it just does me nicely."

What is surprising, or perhaps unfortunate, is that it takes something like this exposé in the media to lower the public's confidence in MPs when just a quick browse through history will show that they have been stealing from us for years. Most people would face fines or imprisonment for theft, but these MPs just give an apology, pay a little back and feel exonerated.

There have been heated, angry public debates where politicians are confronted by their constituents, resulting in some MPs being in denial about the feelings of the people whom they are supposed to represent. One wonders if this could be the spark to ignite the summer of discontent of which there have been murmurings of in the press. There is a long history of social protest in the UK, as you can imagine (if you don't already know). Let us take the act of incendiarism as an example and quote from John E. Archer's 'By A Flash and A Scare', where he asks Why Incendiarism?:

—
Links
MPs' expenses in detail (The Telegraph)
MPs' expenses on Google Earth (The Telegraph)

Further details and downloads can be found on the Unofficial Claws Mail ClamAV™ Plugin page.

Since google launched gmail IMAP the Claws Mail development team (and several Claws Mail users) seem to have devoted a proportionately high amount of time to answering questions and working around problems that arise through gmail's IMAP implementation. The same must surely be true of other open source teams. How many wasted man-hours must that add up to through all the different development teams and how many more useful things could have been achieved in that time? How far will they set things back?

Don't believe the hype!

This is all part of New Labour's target, launched in 1998, to cut truancy, which includes pouring millions of pounds, (over £800m), into the initiative, giving the police new powers to drag kids back to school, hefty fines and imprisonment for parents, paging and text messaging of parents, electronic tagging of parents, withdrawal of child benefit for truants' parents, spiked security fences tipped with paint which marks pupils' uniforms if they try to climb in or out, swipecards for pupils, fingertip scanning of pupils, informing travel agents to warn parents of the dangers of term-time holidays, and so on.

Does it work?

In 2008 truancy rates in England reached their highest level since 1997.

If school days are the best days of your life, go and see a psychiatrist!

"The essays in this volume all point to the paradoxical and hypocritical ways in which the ruling classes speak for the white working class on the one hand, and how they speak about them on the other. Whereas middle class commentators are happy to defend the white working class interests against the onslaught of politically correct multiculturalism, they will simultaneously deride and riducule the feckless and underserving poor, who have squandered the opportunities gracefully given to them by the state, and therefore righfully be left to wallow in their own poverty."³

The study has been prompted by "a recent emphasis in the media and by other commentators on the segragation of, and competition between, ethnic groups [which] has suggested that white working class communities may be losing out in the conflict over the allocation of scarce resources. … [It] shows that … the most disadvantaged working-class people of whatever ethnic background, roughly the poorest fifth of the population, are increasingly separated from the more prosperous majority by inequalities of income, housing and education. By emphasizing the virtues of individual self-determination and the exercising of 'choice', recent governments have in fact entrenched the ability of the middle and upper classes to avoid downward social mobility and preserve the best of life's goods for their own children. Moreover, the rhetoric of politicians and commentators has tended to abandon the description 'working-class', preferring instead to use terms such as 'hard working families' in order to contrast the the virtuous many with an underclass perceived as feckless and undeserving. … life chances for today's children are overwhelmingly linked to parental income, occupations and educational qualifications — in other words, class. The poor white working class share many more problems with the poor from minority ethnic groups than some of them recognise."⁴

The media's skewed portrayal of the white working class, e.g. the BBC's White Season and Channel 4's Immigration: — The Inconvenient Truth, is exposed as fallacy, "the white working class are habitually pitched against those of minority ethnic groups and immigrants, while larger social and economic structures are left out of the debate altogether. … The media's efforts to acknowledge and discuss white working class grievances has excluded issues such as the legacy of Thatcherism and deindustrialisation, or the rise of the super-rich under Labour. Instead, there is a fairly consistent message that the white working class are the losers … while minority ethnic groups are the winners – at the direct expense of the white working class."⁵

"The white working classes are discriminated against on a range of different fronts, including their accent, their style, the food they eat, the clothes they wear, the social spaces they frequent, the postcode of their homes, possibly even their names. But they are not discriminated against because they are white."³

"When commentators argue over the neglected interests of the 'white working class', the comparison to other groups is always in terms of their ethnicity, with Bangladeshis in Tower Hamlets, or Pakistanis in Oldham. The distinctive social position of these groups is presented in terms of their ethnic identity, as cultural or religious difference, rather than by the very marked class inequalities that they also experience. This exaggerates the differences between ethnic groups, and masks what they hold in common. By stressing the whiteness of the white working class, the class inequality of other ethnic groups also slips from view. This sidesteps the real issue of class inequality."⁶ Of course, this is how the game works for the ruling classes: divide and rule. It always has. For example, see the employment and vagrancy laws, first in the UK, then later in the colonies, bending workers as far as they will go before they break.^*

"The rising significance of education in British society has not undermined the role of class; instead it has opened up new avenues for class competition and disadvantage. … despite the meritocratic values⁷ of British society, high social position still helps to 'insure' against weaker educational performance, and numerous studies show that if we compare lower achievers, those from more privileged backgrounds have much better careers than their less advantaged peers. … the fact remains that it is often harder for privileged children to fail than it is for disadvantaged children to succeed."⁶

England is the "most explicit example of the use of schooling by the upper classes to dominate the lower classes. … Adam Smith epitomised the English bourgeois viewpoint regarding working class education in The Wealth of Nations:

For Smith, as well as for the vast majority of the political, and intellectual élite at the time, the schooling of the working classes was always to be subordinate and inferior to that of the middle classes, designed to contain and pacify rather than to educate and liberate.⁸ When the English state schooling system was set up in the late 19th century the intention of the dominant classes was still to police and control the working classes rather than to educate them."⁹

All well and good, and to paraphrase a line from the introduction, this may all appear as truisms to you or I, even verging on the banal, but it is good that an organisation such as the Runnymede Trust has finally lifted the corner of the carpet and reported on what they've seen brushed under there. I welcome this publication, even if it does put itself well within the bracket of the middle class once again speaking about and for the working class — then again, the main body of readership will be the middle class, that is, I guess, its target audience. Mostly the essays are highly readable but, for me, it fell down in two places. One of these essays in particular made for nauseating reading indeed: the 8th and final essay. It starts with, "The remit for this chapter was to produce a contribution which translates academic thinking to non-academic audiences"¹⁰. An incredibly condescending read! Who did the author think he was writing for, the odd working class person who happened to come across the publication? If the difference between academic writing and non-acedemic writing is the dumbing-down for its apparently dumbed-down audience, then he did a great job. But, seriously, the main difference between an academic person and a non-academic person is the academic's ability to produce prose, but not his thought processes and his ability to understand and reason. This last essay was unnecessary.

Having said that, the report is, however, a stimulating read on the whole. If it works towards creating more solidarity and self-awareness within the working class, then it's a good thing.

Who Cares about the White Working Class? is available as a free PDF from the Runnymede Trust, here.

——
1. http://www.runnymedetrust.org/
2. Who Cares about the White Working Class?, inside cover.
3. Kjartan Páll Sveinsson, Introduction: The White Working Class and Multiculturalism: Is There Space for a Progressive Agenda?, What Does this mean for Race Equality? — The Aims of this Volume, pp. 5-6
4. Dr Kate Gavron, Foreword, pp. 2
5. Kjartan Páll Sveinsson, Introduction: The White Working Class and Multiculturalism: Is There Space for a Progressive Agenda?, Class Re-emerges in Political Discourse, pp. 5
6. Wendy Bottero, Class in the 21st Century, pp. 7, 10
7. …or, rather, because of them?
8. So little has changed.
9. Diane Reay, Making Sense of White Working Class Educational Underachievement, A Brief History of the Working Class Underachievement, pp. 23
10. Danny Dorling, From Housing to Health — To Whom are the White Working Class Losing Out? Frequently Asked Questions, pp. 59-65

Total Casualties:

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2009/jan/03/israelandthepalestinians

------
Palestine Solidarity Campaign: http://www.palestinecampaign.org/
Stop the War Coalition: http://www.stopwar.org.uk/
War on Want: http://www.waronwant.org/
Jews for Justice for Palestinians: http://www.jfjfp.org/

What's in a name? Think Cheltenham Road, Bristol, circa 1984. I'll say no more.

This album has been produced using only FOSS.

Henry Snowstorm gets the party started

therefore consider seriously what you ought to doe in this cause, now is the time to break the neck of tyranny, which if you do not, be sure that Tyranny will breake your neckes one day, because you had him in your power, and did not break his neck. I would not have you kill Tyrants, for then you might kill your selves, but first destroy tyranny in your selves, and then in others: first doe such things your selves, as you would have others to doe, for he that bids me do, and doth the good he bids, he leads me to the substantive, and leaves me not in quid.

Tyranipocrit Discovered, 1649

To quote the wikipedia entry:
The Menahan Street Band is a collaboration of musicians from Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, El Michels Affair, Antibalas and the Budos Band, brought together by musician/producer Thomas Brenneck to record hits in the bedroom of his Menahan St. apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn. With influences reaching beyond the funk/soul/afrobeat architecture of their other projects into the more ethereal realms of Curtis Mayfield and Mulatu Astatke, the Menahan Street Band creates a unique new instrumental soul sound that is as raw as it is lush.

Make The Road By Walking takes it name from an organization named "Make the Road By Walking" which is located around the corner from Menahan Street (on Grove Street) which "catalyzes change for low-income New Yorkers by working in five Impact Areas: Expanding Civil Rights and Civic Engagement; Promoting Health for all New Yorkers; Improving Housing and Fostering Environmental Justice; Winning Justice in the Workplace; Promoting Access, Excellence and Opportunity in Education." It sounds like every community could do with an organisation such as this.

The "Make the Road By Walking" organisation, in turn, takes its name from the poem Proverbios y cantares XXIX by Antonio Machado (1875-1939):

Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.

Searcher, there is no road.
We make the road by walking. ]]> http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2008/11/20/menahan-street-band-make-the-road-by-walking/feed/ 2 http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2008/09/25/diggers-then-is-another-part-of-now/ http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2008/09/25/diggers-then-is-another-part-of-now/#comments Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:41:18 +0000 p http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/?p=305 James Holstun's essay Rational Hunger: Gerard Winstanley's Hortus Inconclusus in Pamphlet Wars, Prose in the English Revolution, is refreshing reading. He hits the nail on the head in both the way he exposes certain historians disregard for the historical significance of the Diggers, and in his clear insight into why the Diggers are still relevant today and how the oppression that they faced is still being faced today. It also clarifies that the problems of enclosure don't ever dissipate. It is well worth a lengthy quote:

there is nothing in the human character which would more surprise us, than the almost universal subjugation of strength to weakness — than to see many millions of robust men, in the complete use and exercise of their faculties, and without any defect of courage, waiting upon the will of a child, a woman, a driveller, or a lunatic. And although … we suppose perhaps an extreme case; yet in all cases, even in the most popular forms of civil government, the physical strength lies in the governed. In what manner opinion thus prevails over strength, or how power, which naturally belongs to the superior force, is maintained in opposition to it; in other words, by what motives the many are induced to submit to the few, becomes an inquiry which lies at the root of almost every political speculation.

The question still remains some 200 years later. How is it that the proletariat, despite complaints and a common agreement that "this isn't right", subjugate themselves to the law-makers and wealth-controllers of their nations, when they not only help to build and maintain the proverbial prisons within which they are contained, but at the same time hold all the keys to the locks and are able to free themselves from this bondage?

Issue 3 of No Quarter has recently been published. This issue contains…

• A reprint of Lost Utopias by Ron Sakolsky, "scholar of music, revolution and radio", from issue 3 of his self-published, anarchist-surrealist zine, Oystercatcher.
• An interview with a member of the Bristol Radical History Group, an independent collective exploring history from below. They have staged some remarkable events, all without any funding from universities, political parties, business or local government.
• The trial statement of nineteenth-century French anarchist Émile Henry (1872 – May 21, 1894). He attempted to dynamite a mining company which was in dispute with its striking workers, only to have the bomb discovered before it was detonated and retrieved to the police office, where it did detonate, killing several policemen present. Later he would mis-throw a bomb into a bourgeois café, slightly injuring a few bourgeois, wounding three persons with gunshot whilst making his escape. He was executed at 22 years old.
• Many reviews of related books and films.

For details on how to obtain a copy of No Quarter #3, see the No Quarter blog. ]]> http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2008/07/18/no-quarter-3/feed/ 0 http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2008/07/18/the-western-rising/ http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2008/07/18/the-western-rising/#comments Fri, 18 Jul 2008 07:21:46 +0000 p http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/?p=163 Between the years 1626 and 1632 there were massive anti-enclosure riots in western England. Collectively known as The Western Rising, these riots occurred in Gillingham Forest on the Dorset-Wiltshire border, the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, Braydon Forest in Wiltshire, Feckenham Forest in Worcestershire and Leicester Forest. The cause of the uprising was the Crown's policy of disafforestation and enclosure, denying the immemorial, customary rights of common held by all. The main body of the rioters was made up of artisans, landless peasants and wage-earners as, although the Crown had consulted with and offered compensation to the Lords and landowners for their losses, the rights of the majority, who were landless peasants and relying upon the forest and its raw materials for subsistence, were ignored and their rights had no basis in the Crown's laws.

Facing extreme poverty, having access to the land stolen from them, their customary rights denied, and enjoying no rights in law, the pulling down of the enclosures was the only course of action possible. Although many were involved in the riots, (sometimes as many as 3,000 rioters), only few were arrested. This was due to the view of the ruling class that the commoners were incapable of organising themselves, as Buchanan Sharp puts its in In Contempt of All Authority, Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586-1660:

Most of those escaping punishment were persons of the lower orders. The Crown's object was to capture and punish the ringleaders in order to set an example to others and to break the spirit of the rank-and-file. Since Stuart government took it for granted that a ringleader was a person of quality, gentlemen were prime suspects, while artisans and laborers would more easily have escaped notice.

A recurring theme in official opinions on the Western Rising is that the belief that the lower orders were incapable of organizing and directing themselves and, consequently, that persons of quality were behind the riots. This was, of course, only one manifestation of an opinion universally held in the seventeenth century. It is expressed, for example, in that near-limitless storehouse of the period's aphorisms and commonplaces, the essays of Francis Bacon. In "On Sedition" Bacon ascribes the root of sedition to poverty in the common people and discontent among their betters: "If poverty and broken estate in the better sort be joined with a want and necessity in the mean people, the danger is imminent and great: for the rebellions of the belly are the worst." Sedition required the better sort to provide leadership, "for common people are of slow motion, if they will not be excited by the greater sort."

Buchanan Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority, Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586-1660
(University of California Press 1980), 130-131

This was ruling class naïvety, as there were no rogue gentlemen leading the revolt and the commoners, of course, were more than capable of organising themselves.

Here we are about 400 years later and what has changed? The middle class are now doing the dirty work of maintaining inequality, whilst the ruling class hide themselves from public view. The proletariat are viewed as the ignorant masses or chavs, whilst the media encourages them to fight amongst themselves and reinforces their lack of self-belief and self-worth. Their history is largely hidden, their identity fragmented. At some point morning will come and it will be time to wake up.

    * New features
          o The vertical 3-paned view mode was added.
          o The feature to save SSL peer certificate was added.
          o The option 'Treat HTML only message as attachment' was
            added.
          o The feature to confirm missing attachments was added.
          o The feature to confirm recipients before sending was added.

Why is this amusing? It is amusing because Claws Mail, (née Sylpheed-Claws), started life as the development branch of Sylpheed, where new features could be added, tested and improved before going into the Sylpheed main branch — at least, that was the agreement which was reached and the agreement which instigated the start of the Sylpheed-Claws project — in order to make Sylpheed better rather than to make a better Sylpheed. To cut a long story short, although the movement of code from Claws to Sylpheed was happening early in the project, (Actions, Colour Labels and Templates originated in Claws, for example), this movement slowed and then ground to a halt. We had code and features in Claws that were well-tested and stable and yet the migration to Sylpheed was not happening, and little or no reason was communicated as to why this stagnation was occurring. Eventually it became obvious, without ever being said, that the features/code already written in Claws were not ever going to get into Sylpheed, and that Sylpheed was a one-man-band, a one-party system, as it were. So, naturally, the Claws Mail team decided to fork the project and go in its own direction. We started out with the aim to make Sylpheed better, and ended up with a better Sylpheed.

o The vertical 3-paned view mode was added.

In Claws Mail since version 2.8.0 (February 2007). Claws Mail also has additional 'Wide message', 'Wide message list' and 'Small screen' layouts.

o The feature to save SSL peer certificate was added.

In Claws Mail since version 0.8.5claws (October 2002)

o The option 'Treat HTML only message as attachment' was added.

With Claws Mail's clearer display/layout, an option such as this is unnecessary and irrelevant.

o The feature to confirm missing attachments was added.

Added as a plugin for Claws Mail in November 2006.

o The feature to confirm recipients before sending was added.

This feature is not in Claws Mail, but I wonder who actually needs a feature like this?

Coming up: An exhaustive list of the differences between Claws Mail and Sylpheed. (See what features Sylpheed might have in 5 years!!)

Anthony Hancock, Paintings & Sculpture: A Retrospective Exhibition ran for 14 days in September 2002 at The Foundry, London. It allowed "for a complete re-assessment of Hancock's contribution to the art of his time" as the Department recreated "the entirety of Hancock's known pictorial output, as well as his most important sculpture (the magnificent and imposing Aphrodite at the Waterhole)." Magnus Irvin, gave a practical demonstration — by reconstructing Hancock's only known "action painting" Aphrodite at the Waterhole (on the Horizontal) — on the exhibition's opening night, 7 September 2002 vulg. (in reality New Year's Eve 129 EP by the 'Pataphysical calendar).

Compared to Hancock, Gainsborough comes across as a rank amateur, while Paul Cézanne is frankly contemptible. … Hancock craftily demonstrates that it is more socially valuable for artists to manifest the contradictions of their calling as specialist non-specialists, than to buttress the spectacle without even realising that art is irredeemably reactionary. Hancock intuitively understands that those capitalism condemns to be artists must simultaneously and by necessity join with the proletariat in allowing the real anti-art to begin. Our task is to create a new world, and all of anarchism can be found in the ridiculous idea that bohemians may live groovy lives while the rest of us are oppressed by the tyrannies of exchange.

Stewart Home, Tony Hancock as "The Rebel": Warhol before Warhol, or From The Art of Commerce to the Business of Art, Encomia for Anthony Hancock (Eds. Alastair Brotchie & Magnus Irvin) (London Institute of 'Pataphysics, 2002)

Links
Anthony Hancock, Paintings & Sculpture: A Retrospective Exhibition
The London Institute of 'Pataphysics
Anthony Aloysius St. John Hancock at Wikipedia
The Rebel (1961) at The Internet Movie Database
Magnus Irvin
Stewart Home
Alfred Jarry at Wikipedia
George Melly at Wikipedia
Simon Watson Taylor at Wikipedia
Henry Snowstorm
Collège de ´Pataphysique
London Fieldworks

The legal cliché is that the American constitution is written, while the English is unwritten. Strictly speaking this is untrue inasmuch as both have stemmed from the Magna Carta of 1215. The important difference between English and American constitutional development is not that one is unwritten and the other is written. The difference is Africa. The maintenance and expansion of unwaged labor on the plantation where slaves produced surplus value was indispensable to American constitutional and revolutionary history, whereas the salient English development was the statutory enclosure of lands and privatization of all attempts at commoning. The Atlantic multitudes were divided by race in the emerging constitution. The Charters of Liberties were contested in this process. The enclosure movement, opposed by English commoners, conveniently ignored the Forest Charter. The movement to abolish slavery used Magna Carta and helped put it back into the English working-class movement.

It is available from the Unofficial Claws Mail ClamAV™ Plugin page here on this blog.

This latest release of the plugin will build against the ClamAV™ 0.93 (libclamav 4:1:0) release and all older versions, once it is patched, of course. The necessary patch is also available from that page.

I will continue to maintain this unofficial plugin for at least as long as I am using the plugin.

See the page for more details.

I recently switched power supplier, because the previous one's prices were rising steeply. The previous company had overcharged me, my final statement from them told me as much. Two months later they still hadn't paid me back, so I telephoned their 'customer support' line, (not a free call), to get it sorted. A fortnight later my cheque arrived. The accompanying letter began with, "As promised here is a cheque for …" — As promised! As promised? They take my money, keep hold of it, force me to give them more money just to enquire about it, and then present themselves as the good guys! Hey npower, is it so hard to say sorry?

Meanwhile virginmedia announce that they "always try to listen to what our customers tell us and because you didn't think the premium rate call charge for our technical support helpline was right, we decided to do something about it!" — as if it never occurred to them that their charges were high until some customers mentioned it. And in a sickeningly informal manner, "That means that now you can get the help and support you need, totally free, just like you asked." Well, thanks mate! You're a real pal. I hope this won't eat into your vast profits and require Branson to have a lifestyle change.

[suggested soundtrack: Alternative TV - You Bastard - The Image Has Cracked, 1978] ]]> http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2008/05/01/bullshit-companies/feed/ 0 http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2008/04/26/claws-mail-article-in-linux-magazine/ http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2008/04/26/claws-mail-article-in-linux-magazine/#comments Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:52:23 +0000 p http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/?p=152 Following the awful review of Claws Mail in issue 86 of Linux Magazine — awful because of its inaccuracies — I wrote a critical blog post and informed the editor, Joe Casad, of my post, thoughts and feelings. He quickly responded, apologising and offering further coverage of Claws Mail in the form of a full article, if I would like to write it. What a great response, it couldn't have been any better!

The article is now written and published in issue 90 and can be downloaded in PDF format via this page.

Too bad about the seagull feet, I would have preferred to see The Manticore, a "gigantic red lion with a human face and three rows of teeth [whose] nails are twisted into talons, like drills and […] teeth are cut like those of a saw"^[1], or Humbaba, who "had the paws of a lion and a body covered with horny scales; his feet had the claws of a vulture, and on his head were the horns of a wild bull".^[1]

[1] Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings

Now, a quick recap on what I'm talking about:

• Claws Mail upgraded its license from "GPLv2 or later" to "GPLv3 or later".
• The Claws Mail team were alerted to the licensing problem, (a GPLv3+ app cannot link to a GPLv2-only library), by Debian Bug Report 462963.
• The Claws Mail team implemented what they thought was a possible solution: Making the ClamAV™ plugin a standalone plugin instead of it being part of the main Claws Mail package and downgrading the plugin's license to GPLv2+, (at the agreement of all the authors of the new code that has been added since the change to GPLv3+, which was just Colin).
• In the meantime the Claws Mail team sought confirmation of their solution from the Software Freedom Law Center and were informed that the proposed solution was not legally distributable.
• The Claws Mail team dropped the ClamAV™ plugin.

Some interesting points to note: When the ClamAV™ plugin was first released, libclamav was released under a 'GPLv2 or later' license. The 'or later' clause was first dropped in ClamAV™ version 0.91rc1, (libclamav version 2:4:0), which was released on the 30th May 2007. On the 17th August 2007 it was announced that SourceFire^® had acquired ClamAV™. One can clearly see that there could be a connection here, and imagine that discussions between the ClamAV™ developers and SourceFire^® had been taking place. Then one may recall that Snort^®, the network intrusion detection system, was also acquired by SourceFire^® and it also downgraded its license to GPLv2-only — and not without some controversy; for example, see this post, Snort license changes revisited, on the Inliniac blog.

In my opinion, a license change is an important thing, particularly a downgrade in the licensing of a library, which could impact on several other projects. But, when looking at the NEWS and README files of ClamAV™ version 0.91rc1 there is nothing to be found about the license change, which seems a little strange. Even stranger is that the ChangeLog doesn't mention it either! That's a bizarre oversight by whoever writes those files.

Downgrade Claws Mail? Are you crazy?

A few Claws Mail users, having upgraded without taking the time to read the release notes, and suddenly finding themselves without a ClamAV™ plugin, and panicking, (well, possibly panicking), have asked how to downgrade Claws Mail so that they can get the plugin back.

It is possible to call clamscan, clamd, or clamdscan using Filtering or Actions as an alternative, for example:

Filtering:
Filtering condition: ~test "clamscan --quiet %F"
Action:              move "#mh/Mail/trash"

Action:
Menu Name:    clamscan
Command Line: clamscan -i '%p'

The best solution, it seems to me, would be for these users to keep a copy of the ClamAV™ plugin and build it themselves — as long as they do not distribute their copy of the source code they would be within the bounds of the law, as the problem here is only the distribution of source code under incompatible licenses, not in personal use.

Here is a copy of the ClamAV™ plugin source code which has been patched so that it will only build with libclamav version 2:3:0 or earlier, that is, the last version of libclamav to be released with a 'GPLv2 or later' license, making it legal to distribute. There is nothing stopping you from taking this code and patching your own local copy so that the restriction is lifted, the only caveat is that you must not distribute your locally patched copy.

You could use a patch like this and then run ./autogen.sh:

--- configure.ac        2008-02-28 10:19:45.000000000 +0000
+++ configure.ac.orig   2008-02-29 10:41:51.000000000 +0000
@@ -89,7 +89,7 @@
 AC_SUBST(GTK_CFLAGS)
 AC_SUBST(GTK_LIBS)

-PKG_CHECK_MODULES(CLAMAV, libclamav < = 2:3:0)
+PKG_CHECK_MODULES(CLAMAV, libclamav)
 AC_SUBST(CLAMAV_CFLAGS)
 AC_SUBST(CLAMAV_LIBS)

Claws Mail ClamAV™ Plugin version 3.3cvs3: clamav-plugin-3.3cvs3.tar.gz (requires libclamav <= 2:3:0)

UPDATE: Go to the Unofficial Claws Mail ClamAV™ Plugin page for the latest version.

It seems that Sourcefire^®, the company who employ the core ClamAV™ developers, wish all the ClamAV™ code to be published under GPLv2 only, and this is Incompatible™ with the GPLv3+ license that Claws Mail has.

You might Think™ that it would make Sense™ for a library to be licensed under 'GPLv2 or any later version', but apparently not. So, Goodbye To ClamAv™. Now the Bogofilter Plugin will have to catch all the Spam™ for me, as, Essentially™, that was what the ClamAV™ plugin was doing for Me™.

Q: Who wants to be a millionaire?

A: This is the song Tony Blair hums every morning when he rises and tots up his latest windfall — a million for telling business groups in China nothing they didn't know, three or four million for buying JP Morgan influence in whatever corridors of power he imagines still welcome him. That this criminal, awash in a nation's blood, is so enriched and deluded that he believes he should be president of Europe is a shame upon all of us in Britain who deny his prosecution.

That's breviary stuff, that is.

MC Jon Wayne – DannyHouse EP

1. Read The Script

2. Sexual Harassment*

3. Not Bombs*

4. Lyrical Diabetes*

5. Interlude

6. Don't You Think?*

7. Garbage Rhymes

These beats were originally available on the Henry Snowstorm instrumental album Civil Unrest.

___________________________________

Also see the Winsor McCay – Little Nemo In Slumberland Vol 1 entry in the Reading List category.

Of course, being a member of the Claws Mail development team, I am particularly, (perhaps only), interested in what he has to say regarding Claws Mail, (or The Mail Claw, as the article puts it, sic), but, in passing, I'll point out the first error that I noticed: In the opening, introductory paragraphs he says, 'Some computer users also like to encrypt messages to provide protection against sniffing or to have a digital signature to validate the sender.' Of course, a digital signature does not validate the sender, what it does is show that the signed content has not be tampered with en route. Not a good start. Then we soon realise that the author's preferred application is KMail, his preferred desktop environment is KDE, and his preferred distro is SuSE. Rather than a fair, unbiased review, we get one very much based upon the reviewer's personal preferences. His opinion is the benchmark.

The author doesn't use Claws Mail, and it seems that he fired it up just for the purposes of the article. Unfortunately, it is obvious that he didn't allow himself the time to really explore it and rushed the whole thing. In my opinion, this is not really desirable behaviour from journalism, not for the magazine itself, who paid him for the article and rely upon their journalists for quality writing, and not for the readers and purchasers of the magazine who should get something better in exchange for their money.

So, what's wrong with the information that is given?

• "When looking for Claws Mail packages, make sure you do not confuse them with Sylpheed packages."
This is like saying, when looking for an application do not confuse it with another application that has a different name. Is that stupid or what??
The article actually does its best to engender this confusion. In the title it says 'Claws Mail', when we reach the section about Claws Mail it gives the heading 'The Mail Claw', then it starts by talking about Sylpheed. Next the Overview box has the title 'Sylpheed Claws Overview'. Mirko seems confused, indeed.

• "For example, SUSE users can turn to Packman for packages. Besides the claws-mail package, you will also need to install claws-mail-extra-plugins."
Or they could use the official repository. You don't need to install the extra-plugins package, there's no literal need for this — it depends upon whether you want the extra functionality that these extra-plugins provide. The main plugins, distributed with the Claws Mail source tarball, are actually part of the Claws Mail SuSE RPM package.

• "Figure 10: Claws Mail provides a lean alternative to the three Linux mail global players."
Nothing wrong with the caption, but the image it accompanies shows that Mirko has used his KMail maildir mailbox for Claws Mail. Because of this, each folder has 'cur', 'new' and 'tmp' subfolders; Also because of this, it shows Claws Mail's standard inbox/sent/drafts/queue/trash folders and also normal folders with the names 'drafts', 'outbox', and 'sent_mail'.

• "Figure 12: Claws Mail has much ground to gain. The current version has only rudimentary functionality."
This caption is completely misleading. It actually accompanies an image of an address book dialogue. I believe that the intention was to refer to the address book as having 'rudimentary functionality' but that is not what it says. If you've used Claws Mail then you will know that it does not have 'only rudimentary functionality'.

• "Claws Mail lacks a usable address book, simple integration of GPG, and a spam filter."
Not true! Claws Mail's address book is not as fully-featured as others, but this does not make it 'unusable', this is just nonsense!
GPG integration is as simple as using the GUI to load the plugins, there's nothing too complicated in that it seems to me. Thunderbird needs an Extension for GPG support, but I don't see the same criticism leveled at Thunderbird in this article.
Lacks a spam filter? Here the author is unaware of what he wrote just before, '…there are plugins for integrating SpamAssassin…', he also neglects to mention the other spam filter, the Bogofilter plugin.

• The Overview boxes
Mailing Lists
KMail gets 5/5, Claws Mail gets 3/5.
Claws Mail has good mailing list support. I believe that, in his rush to finish his article, the author didn't even discover Claws Mail's mailing list support. I believe that Claws Mail's mailing list is at least as powerful as Kmail's and, at the same time, is more flexible.
Filtering
KMail gets 5/5, Thunderbird gets 5/5, Claws Mail gets 4/5
Having written filter conversion scripts, I know that there are things that Claws Mail can do in its filtering that the other two cannot.
Security GPG/ HTML
Claws Mail 2/5
An unreasonably low score. Claws Mail supports PGP/MIME, PGP/Inline, S/MIME; it also has an anti-virus plugin, using Clam AntiVirus; it has anti-phishing support built in; the two HTML viewer plugins do not load remote content by default. What more do you want??
Spam filter
Claws Mail 3/5
Claws Mail offers a choice of either SpamAssassin or Bogofilter to deal with spam. They can use address book whitelisting, can be trained via toolbar buttons or menu items, can deal with 'unsure' mails, the SpamAssassin plugin can use a remotely running SpamAssassin, can be configured in a number of ways. Claws Mail also offers the SpamReport plugin to report spam to central databases.

• "The difference between the Create Filter Rule and Create Processing Rule in the drop-down list is not entirely apparent. Both take you to the same dialog."
Wrong! They take you to similar dialogues, but the not the same dialogue. The difference between Filtering and Processing is well documented, in the manual and FAQ, etc. The reviewer should RTFM!

• "[Claws Mail] also lacks a couple of functions, such as a tray icon (which you can download as a plugin.)"
Evolution also requires a plugin for the trayicon, but this wasn't mentioned.

The author thinks that when functions are provided by plugins this means the app lacks those functions. Would he say, for example, that the audio player Audacious is useless and can't play any audio because those features are provided by plugins?

The author completely fails to mention the powerful Claws Mail Actions feature.

I could continue with this blog post but I feel that I've already spent more time on this than the author did on his article.

Could there be any morals to draw from this post?
Don't believe what you read?
Don't buy Linux Magazine, its articles are poorly researched?

Clearly, I am disappointed by this slack and lazy journalism.

Wee (as men) confident of your integrity did chuse you as our Proctors and Atturnies, the King's Majesty with his best councell and we (the poore Commons) entrusted you with all we had but we had no mistrust that you would deceive us of all we had. We trusted you to maintaine our peace, and not to embroile us in an universalle endlesse bloudye war. We trusted you with our estates and you have Rob'd, Plundered and Undon us; we trusted you with our freedomes and you have loaded us with slavery and bondage, we trusted you with our lives and by you we are slaughtered and muther'd every day. . . . Thus we perceive that you pretend to fight for the Protestant religion and all the world may see and say, you have made a delicate dainty Directory, new religion of it. And you have fought for the King but it hath been to catch him and make him no King. You have fought for our liberties and have taken them from us. You have fought for the Gospell and you have spoyl'd the Church, you have fought for our goods and you have em and you have fought to destroye the Kingdom and you have done it. . . .

The Generall Complaint of the Most Oppressed, Distressed Commons of England Complaining to
and Crying Out Upon the Tyranny of the Perpetuall Parliament at Westminster (1645)

I sat for a while in a square, a row of benches spanning the perimeter. In the centre was a busker with his guitar, singing songs, at one side sat a handful of 'tramps', (for want of a better word), one of whom approached the busker, threw a few coins into his collection and asked him to play 'Sarah'. He asked him not to start until he'd called his girlfriend over, who was selling copies of The Big Issue, (magazine sold on the street by homeless people), a little way further up. They stood there together listening to the song. That was a beautiful moment.

The procedure is easy and painless and is detailed on this page: HowTo EASILY Boot From MMC card. The only thing that didn't work in the instructions was this command

# insmod /mnt/initfs/lib/modules/current/ext2.ko

# insmod /mnt/initfs/lib/modules/2.6.18-omap1/ext2.ko

Incidentally, I'm using a D-Link DAP-1160 Wireless G Access Point connected to the uplink of my wired router for the wifi network. It uses GPL licensed code and comes with a printed GPL license, which is nice to see.

Should anyone else want to do the same and face the same problem, this is how I got around it.

1. The following software packages are required:
osso-xterm
becomeroot
MPlayer

2. Create the following 2 wrapper scripts with your favourite text editor.

#!/bin/sh

mplayer http://vipicecast.yacast.net/europe1

#!/bin/sh

mplayer http://mp3.live.tv-radio.com/franceinter/all/franceinterhautdebit.mp3

Save it as finter in the folder called Documents.

Start xterm and issue the following commands to make the scripts executable and copy them to /usr/bin/

# cd /home/user/MyDocs/.documents/
# chmod +x europe1
# chmod +x finter
# sudo gainroot
# cp europe1 /usr/bin/
# cp finter /usr/bin/

3. Download these 2 images to the folder called Documents.

Then, still in your xterm session, copy them to the correct location.

# cp europe1.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/
# cp fr_inter.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/

4. Create the following 2 desktop files with your favourite text editor.

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=0.0.1
Name=Europe1
Comment=Listen to Europe1 with mplayer
Exec=osso-xterm -e /usr/bin/europe1
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=europe1
X-Icon-path=/usr/share/icons
X-Window-Icon=europe1
X-HildonDesk-ShowInToolbar=true
X-Osso-Type=application/x-executable

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=0.0.1
Name=France Inter
Comment=Listen to France Inter with mplayer
Exec=osso-xterm -e /usr/bin/finter
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=fr_inter
X-Icon-path=/usr/share/icons
X-Window-Icon=fr_inter
X-HildonDesk-ShowInToolbar=true
X-Osso-Type=application/x-executable

Then, again still in your xterm session, copy them to the correction locations.

# cp europe1.desktop /etc/others-menu/extra_applications/
# cp europe1.desktop /usr/share/applications/hildon/
# cp franceinter.desktop /etc/others-menu/extra_applications/
# cp franceinter.desktop /usr/share/applications/hildon/

They will then be accessible from the Extras menu. A click will launch xterm which will spawn mplayer and load the stream.

These are climate change protesters who are against the further expansion of Heathrow airport, exercising the long-held right to peaceful protest in the UK.

This means that peaceful protesters will be subject to being stopped and searched and having their vehicles searched without there being any evidence to suspect them of terrorism. Their homes can also be searched and they can be held by the police for a month without charge.

It has been said since the introduction of the new powers in the S44 Terrorism Act 2000 that these laws would be used to erode the freedom of ordinary UK citizens. This is the first widely reported case of this process in action.

This is the government using its laws to protect the business interests of wealthy companies like BAA at the huge expense of the rest of us. But this shouldn't come as a surprise, there's a long history of laws being created and used to protect and bolster the interests of the wealthy few and destroy the power of the poor majority.

So now, if you hold some concern about the state of the planet and decide to voice that concern, according to the government, you could be a terrorist.

"Put that veggie-burger on the ground and your hands on your head."

The Plane Stupid Campaign Group
The Camp for Climate Action

Put it another way: Never hang on when your Guardian tells you to let go.

Right Now.

Suppose you were holding one of the ropes? Would you have let go in time, which is, of course, at the first upward yank? I'll tell you something interesting. You would have a much better chance to let go in time now that you have read this paragraph than if you hadn't read it. Writing, if it is anything, is a word of warning …

Let Go!

As the n800 runs GNU/Linux and a modified Debian, using it is fun and easy. I don't have a wi-fi connection, so it's not as much fun as is it might be; I have to download packages on my main PC and then copy them onto the n800 via USB, so it's not quite as easy either. I wanted to upgrade the firmware, as you do when you get a new device such as this, but it was no-go, just forever waiting at "Suitable USB device not found, waiting". I guess that the device-mapping has changed since flasher-3.0 was written, but I'm still not sure. Anyway, this sort of stuff doesn't stand in my way.

Here are a few screenshots (click the image for a larger version)

Claws Mail XTerm desktop

Having one of these devices is a big incentive to actually spend a little more time looking at the maemo bug reports and feature requests, and to spend time contributing to Jean-Luc Biord's Maemo port, but not to the detriment of Claws Mail as a desktop app, that will retain the main focus.

Let the hacking commence!

Claws Mail Maemo port: http://www.claws-mail.org/maemo/
Claws Mail at the Maemo Garage: https://garage.maemo.org/projects/claws-mail
Jean-Luc Biord's page at maemopeople.org: http://www.maemopeople.org/index.php/jlbrd/

My article from this breviary stuff, entitled TheaurauJohn : A Name, Not The Thing, is reprinted in the recently published issue 2 of the No Quarter anarchist zine. It also includes an interesting interview with Marcus Rediker, the historian, writer, teacher, and activist; unlike many published historians, he is also a great writer, not simply stuck in the dust of academia thinking that a procession of facts constitutes a book; he also understands 'that general readers are smart and thoughtful and capable of getting interested in complex, well-researched histories', which is a fact that has been evidently missed by many. In my opinion, his work is comparable to that of the late Christopher Hill, whose article Radical Pirates? is also reprinted in this issue of No Quarter. Radical Pirates? 'deals with the period in England after 1640 … [of] those who rejected a state church, supported full religious toleration, and often carried this over to advocacy of democratic, communist, or antinomian ideas – beyond the pale of respectable puritanism.' It deals with the apparent disappearance of radical ideas after 1660.

The memoires of French anarchist, Illegalist and founding member of The Bonnot Gang, (la bande à Bonnot), Octave Garnier, are presented, translated from the French. He was a believer in the theory of la reprise individuelle, the belief that since the bourgeois and the rich obtained their wealth through exploitation of the lower classes, individuals are justified in redistributing wealth on a small scale, (i.e. stealing it back), rather than waiting for a general redistribution of wealth "after the revolution".

No Quarter also contains bibliographies and many, many reviews of books through which readers can further pursue their interests.

The editor says in his introduction that the purpose 'of this zine is not to withdraw from the present, from the world, and to seek comfort in dusty books and libraries … or to escape into fantasy. This zine does not look at history as an escape from the present, but rather to better understand what has happened and is happening now', and that's breviary stuff, that is.

Patch against current SVN: ripperX-2.7-gtk2_i18n-rev2.patch.gz
RipperX source with the patch applied: ripperX-2.7.1-gtk2.tar.bz2

The patch is to be applied against the current code in SVN, but if you don't have all the necessary build tools to build from SVN and want to give it a go I've provided a tarball, made with 'make dist'.

What the patch does:

GTK2
Implements a GTK2 interface, version 2.6.0 or greater is required.
Not all deprecated GTK functions have been replaced. For developer help, I've added the --disable-deprecated configure option, with sets GTK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED. (Since not all are replaced, using that will result in a build failure at present.)

i18n
Implements the i18n (internationalisation) framework. gettext 0.15 or greater is recommended.
The patch includes a British English translation, po/en_GB.po, but this is simply a demonstration, as there's nothing that needs translating into British English.

build system
autoconf >= 2.60 is required.
All the files that will be auto-generated have been removed, such as configure, Makefile.in, etc. There is now no need to have a configure script in each sub directory. I have added autogen.sh, and this should be used to initiate an svn build, configure options can be passed to autogen.sh, as it runs configure. configure.in has been replaced by configure.ac, and configure.ac has all the necessary directives for building. 'make dist' will build both tar.gz and tar.bz2.

This record just arrived in the post, so I slapped it on the turntable and immediately the clouds parted and the sun began to shine, a feeling began to develop inside and a smile appeared on my face. Music rarely gets as good as this!

Here are the cover notes…

THE SONGS ON THIS RECORD ARE A PAIR OF FIGHT SONGS

"War" is pure battle sound from beginning to end; it draws your blood and attunes you to the conflict you face. Any master fighter can tell you the realest war is not the one flashing on your television or the one sparking in these streets; it's the one waged within. We dedicate this song to all our gutter people in the world that they be spiritually uplifted and psychologically prepared for the struggles that surround them.

The tones in "Mercury" are based on an ancient Chinese weather tactic whereby an emperor, having assembled his troops for battle, would call on a priest or shaman to send rainstorms over a rival's army. But while that idea illustrates the scope of military theater, the song's solos represent the ritual of warfare from the perspective of a faceless soldier thousands of years ago; the preparation for battle, the drama of the battle itself and finally, the joy and elation a man feels when he's won the battle and rejoins his family in the village.

Limited to just 500 copies, so rush to it!

http://hypnoticbrass.blogspot.com/
www.myspace.com/hypnoticbusiness

The Internet Archive hosts 15 Antibalas live recordings which are all available for free download. So, what are you waiting for? If you wonder which to try first, Live at Culture Room on 2003-04-28 is not a bad place to start.
—
(If you wonder how to convert the different audio formats into something a bit more manageable, I recommend pacpl, the Perl Audio Convertor.)

File it under beats, under hip-hop, under jazz, under funk, under leftfield, file it under whatever you want – it's an entirely instrumental, 27-track album.

… conflict is part of existence and nothing is gained without struggle …

Component: WordPress core, version 2.1
Patch: WordPress-2.1_show_blogroll_descriptions.patch
Apply this patch in the /wp-includes/ directory.
Description: The default behaviour for the blogroll links display in WordPress 2.1, (using the Links widget of Sidebar Widgets Plugin, version 1.0.20060711), is to not show the link descriptions, which is the opposite behaviour of previous versions of WordPress. This patch reverses that, making showing the descriptions the default. It patches the _walk_bookmarks function in the file /wp-includes/bookmark-template.php. (There is no way to change the default behaviour, with or without this patch.)