Category Archives for Uncategorized

W I T C H activities, 1968-9.

from Playpower by Richard Neville:

W I T C H — Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, has conducted several (black) mass demonstrations outside New York business institutions. Witches, it is pointed out, have been the original guerrillas and resistance fighters against oppression down through the ages. Historically witches are seen as non-conformist, free, intelligent, joyous, aggressive, creative, scientific and actively rebellious (birth-controllers, abortionists, herbalists, heads and pushers). On Hallowe’en Eve (1968) W I T C H haunted the New York Stock Exchange. Nervous commissionaires barred the way while witches in black fairytale cloaks claimed they had an appointment with the Chief Executor of Wall Street himself — Satan. (‘With closed eyes and lowered heads the women incanted the Berber Yeall — sacred to Algerian witches — and proclaimed the coming demise of various stocks. A few hours later the market closed 1.5 points down, and the following day it dropped five points.’ Rat, 6 November 1968.) On St. Valentine’s Day (1969) witches disrupted New York’s first Bridal Fair at Madison Square Garden (a sample slogan: Love starts at Chase Manhattan) and were roughed up by uniformed bouncers who screamed, ‘You’re sick, you’re sick, you’re sick.’

House Blocks Votes on Amendments to Improve Military Women's Health

Anti-choice legislators deny improved health services for rape victims in the military, even as attacks against servicewomen rose 40 % since 2004

Washington, DC- Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, called it shameful that anti-choice congressional leaders blocked votes on two amendments to the Defense Authorization Act that would improve health services for military women – including those who are survivors of sexual violence.

The Rules Committee blocked the House from considering the two following amendments:

1) Reps. Mike Michaud (D-ME) and Tim Ryan (D-OH), both of whom oppose legal abortion, asked to offer an amendment to ensure that emergency contraception – also known as the “morning-after” pill – is stocked and made available on every military base. This medication, if taken within days of unprotected sex Ôø? including a sexual attack, can prevent pregnancy by up to 89 percent.

2) Reps. Chris Shays (R-CT) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) wanted to offer an amendment allowing federally funded abortion care for military women who are rape or incest survivors.

“It’s outrageous that the anti-choice House leadership would continue to deny lawmakers a chance to vote on these commonsense, common-ground proposals that would improve our servicewomen’s access to health care on military facilities. Women serving our country should never have to face the tragedy of a sexual assault, but if they do, they should Ôø? at a minimum Ôø? be able to receive timely care and support,” Keenan said. “Voters will remember that this anti-choice Congress caves in to the far-right at the expense of women’s health. The only way to secure better treatment for women in the military is ending the anti-choice groups’ grip on Congress.”

This is the second consecutive year that the House Rules Committee denied their fellow lawmakers the opportunity to consider these two amendments, despite the alarming statistics of sexual assault in the military.

Last year, there were 2,374 reported cases of sexual assault among servicemembers Ôø? a 40 percent increase from 2004. In the Army alone, the number of reported rape cases rose from 356 in 1999 to 469 in 2003.

The committee agreed to allow an amendment by Reps. Susan Davis (D-CA) and Jane Harman (D-CA) to repeal the current-law ban that forbids servicewomen and female military dependents from using their own funds for abortion care at overseas military hospitals. NARAL Pro-Choice America strongly supported the Davis-Harman amendment, which failed yesterday by a vote of 191 to 237.

May 10, 2006
House Denies Health Care Service to Military Women

Davis-Harman amendment would have lifted ban that forbids servicewomen and military spouses from using personal funds for abortion care

Washington, DC- Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said the House’s refusal to repeal a discriminatory ban that prevents military women overseas from using their own money to pay for abortion care violates the core American principles of freedom and personal responsibility. The House rejected the amendment by a vote of 191-237.

Reps. Susan Davis and Jane Harman (both D-CA) offered the amendment to the Defense Authorization bill. It would have repealed the current ban that forbids servicewomen and female military dependents from using their own funds for abortion care at overseas military hospitals.

“For the 12th consecutive year, anti-choice members have bowed to the political pressure of their extremist supporters in the anti-choice movement. It is a disgrace that Congress continues to deny women, who are making such enormous sacrifices in defense of their country overseas, their constitutional right to choose,” said Keenan. “I applaud Representatives Davis and Harman for their unwavering support of our servicewomen overseas. We will stand with them until Congress acts to improve military women’s health care and adopts policies that reflect our pro-choice values of freedom and responsibility for all women.”

Below is more information on the Davis-Harman amendment:

Ending geographic discrimination. Under current law, women who have volunteered to serve their country, and female military dependents, are discriminated against and cannot exercise their legally guaranteed right to choose, simply because they are stationed overseas.
Lifting the ban on privately funded health services. If the Davis-Harman amendment were enacted into law, the Department of Defense would not be required to pay for abortions – it would simply lift the current ban on privately funded abortion care at U.S. military facilities overseas.
Equalizing services for military women. Military women should be able to depend on their base hospitals for all their health-care services. Repealing the current-law ban on privately funded abortion services would have allowed women access to the same range and quality of medical care available in the United States.
Preserving personal refusal clause. If the ban is lifted, no medical providers would be forced to provide abortions. All branches of the military have provisions that permit medical personnel who have personal objections to abortion not to participate in the procedure. These provisions will be preserved if the ban is lifted.

COURTESY MOLLY F.!

TRAPPED IN THE MILITARY — OR, HOW A CENTURION CLASS IS BORN.

Los Angeles Times

Amid War, Troops See Safety in Reenlisting

The military offers steady wages, housing and a health plan — benefits that many service members find scarce in civilian life.

By Faye Fiore
Times Staff Writer

May 21, 2006

TACOMA, Wash. — The first time Staff Sgt. Matthew Kruger came home from Iraq, he and his wife, Maggie, went straight into marriage counseling. The second time, she threatened to divorce him if he didn’t get out of the Army. The separations were tearing them apart. So in July, to save his seven-year marriage, Kruger quit the service.

Then he looked around the job market, and it didn’t take long to figure out that leaving the Army held its own perils. Nothing offered him the financial security of his military job — especially the generous health coverage for his wife and three small children.

And so, 29 years old and with no other place to turn, Kruger spent his first full day of freedom at a military processing center, signing up for four more years.

“We had nothing. We were scared,” Maggie said recently, struggling to keep their rambunctious children entertained in a pizza parlor outside the Ft. Lewis military base. “We suddenly realized there was no way to take the kids to the doctor or dentist for any little reason, as we had been used to.”

For Kruger, who returned to a war zone for his third tour in December, the danger of losing his family’s health insurance was more real and immediate than the danger of dying in combat.

At military installations around the country, other families cling to the modest but steady wages, the guaranteed housing allowance, the solid retirement plan and the health benefits of the armed forces.

Although the Army missed its recruitment goals last year, in part because of the Iraq war, retention continues at record levels. Reenlistments this year are running 20% above the Army’s goal, despite the long overseas deployments. Two out of three soldiers eligible to reenlist do so.

For many service members, it’s a matter of balancing risk: Within the military, multiple deployments are commonplace, and more than 2,400 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq and 18,000 have been wounded. Outside the military, 46 million people in the U.S. have no health insurance, and those who do pay increasingly higher prices for it.

“It used to be that General Motors had a health plan equally as generous as the military,” said Susan Hosek, a senior economist specializing in military benefits at Rand Corp., a nonpartisan think tank based in Santa Monica. “But GM has cut their benefits, while the military has maintained the level of benefits and even improved it. Being in the military is a risky occupation, but in other ways, it’s very secure.”

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1 in 136 U.S. Residents Behind Bars

Associated Press, May 21

1 in 136 U.S. Residents Behind Bars

By ELIZABETH WHITE, Associated Press Writer

Prisons and jails added more than 1,000 inmates each week for a year, putting almost 2.2 million people, or one in every 136 U.S. residents, behind bars by last summer.

The total on June 30, 2005, was 56,428 more than at the same time in 2004, the government reported Sunday. That 2.6 percent increase from mid-2004 to mid-2005 translates into a weekly rise of 1,085 inmates.

Of particular note was the gain of 33,539 inmates in jails, the largest increase since 1997, researcher Allen J. Beck said. That was a 4.7 percent growth rate, compared with a 1.6 percent increase in people held in state and federal prisons.

Prisons accounted for about two-thirds of all inmates, or 1.4 million, while the other third, nearly 750,000, were in local jails, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Beck, the bureau’s chief of corrections statistics, said the increase in the number of people in the 3,365 local jails is due partly to their changing role. Jails often hold inmates for state or federal systems, as well as people who have yet to begin serving a sentence.

“The jail population is increasingly unconvicted,” Beck said. “Judges are perhaps more reluctant to release people pretrial.”

The report by the Justice Department agency found that 62 percent of people in jails have not been convicted, meaning many of them are awaiting trial.

Overall, 738 people were locked up for every 100,000 residents, compared with a rate of 725 at mid-2004. The states with the highest rates were Louisiana and Georgia, with more than 1 percent of their populations in prison or jail. Rounding out the top five were Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma.

The states with the lowest rates were Maine, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire.

Men were 10 times to 11 times more likely than women to be in prison or jail, but the number of women behind bars was growing at a faster rate, said Paige M. Harrison, the report’s other author.

The racial makeup of inmates changed little in recent years, Beck said. In the 25-29 age group, an estimated 11.9 percent of black men were in prison or jails, compared with 3.9 percent of Hispanic males and 1.7 percent of white males.

Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, which supports alternatives to prison, said the incarceration rates for blacks were troubling.

“It’s not a sign of a healthy community when we’ve come to use incarceration at such rates,” he said.

Mauer also criticized sentencing guidelines, which he said remove judges’ discretion, and said arrests for drug and parole violations swell prisons.

“If we want to see the prison population reduced, we need a much more comprehensive approach to sentencing and drug policy,” he said.

Black Mask #7 (1967)


[007332] Morea, Benn & Hahne, Ron (Eds.). Black Mask #07. New York: 1967. First Edition. 25.5 x 33 Cm.. Magazine. Good. Political underground magazine. Black Mask evolved out of the New York Surrealist Group and the American Anarchist Group, initiated a number of politico-artistic demonstrations, and eventually transformed themselves into the underground revolutionary group, Up Against The Wall Motherfuckers. Linked to Heatwave/King Mob in England, Rebel Worker in Chicago, and the Situationists in Paris. Revolution and dada, futurism and surrealism; The sexual revolution; Black America. 4 pp. Small tear at the fold. Writing on the cover in red. Ex-collection Steef Davidson. Language: English.

Alphabets are as simple as…

18/04/2006 London Telegraph

Alphabets are as simple as…

Writing systems may look very different, but they all use the same basic building blocks of familiar natural shapes, reports Roger Highfield

If there is one quality that marks out the scientific mind, it is an unquenchable curiosity. Even when it comes to things that are everyday and so familiar they seem beyond question, scientists see puzzles and mysteries.

Look at the letters in the words of this sentence, for example. Why are they shaped the way that they are? Why did we come up with As, Ms and Zs and the other characters of the alphabet? And is there any underlying similarity between the many kinds of alphabet used on the planet?

To find out, scientists have pooled the common features of 100 different writing systems, including true alphabets such as Cyrillic, Korean Hangul and our own; so-called abjads that include Arabic and others that only use characters for consonants; Sanskrit, Tamil and other “abugidas”, which use characters for consonants and accents for vowels; and Japanese and other syllabaries, which use symbols that approximate syllables, which make up words.

Remarkably, the study has concluded that the letters we use can be viewed as a mirror of the features of the natural world, from trees and mountains to meandering streams and urban cityscapes.

The shapes of letters are not dictated by the ease of writing them, economy of pen strokes and so on, but their underlying familiarity and the ease of recognising them. We use certain letters because our brains are particularly good at seeing them, even if our hands find it hard to write them down. In turn, we are good at seeing certain shapes because they reflect common facets of the natural world.

This, the underlying logic of letters, will be explored next month in The American Naturalist, by Mark Changizi, Qiang Zhang, Hao Ye, and Shinsuke Shimojo from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The analysis is simplistic but, none the less, offers an intriguing glimpse into why we tend to prefer some shapes over others when we communicate by writing.

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'Why be normal when you can go where the nuts come from?' …Os Mutantes

‘Why be normal?’

Brazilian rockers Os Mutantes were poised to take over the world, but they collapsed under the weight of 1960s free love and drugs. Now they’re back. By Will Hodgkinson

Thursday May 18, 2006 – The Guardian

‘Why be normal when you can go where the nuts come from?’ … Os Mutantes

There is a rich lineage of great musicians who have been discovered long after their due. The Buena Vista Social Club took 40 years to find an audience outside Cuba. When the English singer Vashti Bunyan released her debut album in 1970, it was met with such deafening indifference that it took her 36 years to get round to recording a follow-up. Had Nick Drake known that his dismal-selling albums from the early 1970s would become cult classics, he might still be with us today.

But perhaps the most dramatic revival story belongs to the Brazilian psychedelic band Os Mutantes. Formed in 1965 by Arnaldo and Sergio Dias Baptista, teenage brothers from Sao Paulo, and Arnaldo’s girlfriend Rita Lee, Os Mutantes were Brazil’s most inventive and irreverent rock’n’roll group. The trio became the backing band for TropicÔø?lia, the avant-garde movement formed by the singers Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso in 1967, but in the mid-1970s the band fell apart – not least because the two brothers argued over, of all things, guitars. By the 1980s, Os Mutantes had become a footnote in Brazil’s history; outside Brazil, few got to hear of them at all.
“What has happened to Mutantes?” says Veloso, when I ask him about his old friends’ late-flowering international success. “Everyone has gone crazy over them! When Gil and I were in England in the 70s, we would play people Mutantes records and the reaction would always be the same, ‘It sounds like a Beatles rip-off.’ We knew they were much more than that, but nobody else in England did … until now.”

Two decades after the band fell apart, the Baptista brothers are back together, rehearsing at Sergio’s studio on the outskirts of Sao Paulo for next week’s Os Mutantes concert in London. It will be the first time Os Mutantes have ever performed outside Brazil, and the first time the brothers have shared a stage since 1975. After that, they will be travelling across the US for a tour that is already mostly sold out. The US singer Devendra Banhart, a substantial name himself, wrote to Mutantes and asked if he could be their roadie. (They made him a support act for the London show.)

“It’s been so great,” says Sergio Dias, a toothy, cheerful, fiftysomething rocker who looks rather like a Brazilian version of Paul McCartney. “We’ve been working hard, Arnaldo is sounding better than I’ve ever heard him, and we’re getting on so well. I asked God for a reconciliation with my brother because all of this bullshit between us had been going on for too long. And you know what? It happened!”

Sons of a poet father and a concert pianist mother, the Baptistas brought a deep musical knowledge and a literary grounding to a love of the Beatles that inspired them to form a band. The latter they shared with Rita Lee, the rebellious daugher of Italian-American immigrants. Together, they would perform Beatles songs with an orchestra on Brazilian TV, and it was here that they met the classical maestro Rogerio Duprat. He introduced them to the singer Gilberto Gil (now Brazil’s minister of culture), who made Os Mutantes part of the Tropicalia movement. When Gil and Veloso were jailed and then exiled to England by Brazil’s military dictatorship from 1969 to 1972, it was left to Os Mutantes to lead the country’s psychedelic revolution, providing the hippy underground with its own anthem, Ando Meio Desligado (I’m Feeling Spaced Out). But they collapsed under the weight of free love and drug use in the years that followed.

Rita Lee left in 1974 to become a solo artist of stadium-filling popularity and questionable artistic merit, while Arnaldo Baptista had mental breakdowns; his brother Sergio worked as a session guitarist in the US. The brothers fell out (Arnaldo said that it was because Sergio liked Fender guitars while he favoured Gibsons) and by the 1980s Os Mutantes were either forgotten, or thought of as Rita Lee’s old hippy band.

Why the revival? Mutantes became a hip name to drop after endorsements by Beck and Kurt Cobain in the early 1990s, but the cult only really got going after the 1999 release of Everything Is Possible!, a compilation put together by David Byrne on his label Luaka Bop. On the cover was a picture of three freaky teenagers joyously jumping in the air; the inner sleeve showed them dressed as aliens – and the music was equally intriguing. Ave, Lucifer was a tender, poetic ode to Satan while a cover of the Brazilian singer Jorge Ben’s O Minha Menina (My Girl) turned the samba rock of the original into a garage-punk classic through the use of a bizarre effects pedal powered by a sewing machine, built by Sergio and Arnaldo’s elder brother Claudio.

This inventiveness was at the heart of Os Mutantes’ creativity. Frustrated at the lack of decent musical equipment in 1960s Brazil, the band had no choice but to find ways of re-creating the backwards tape sounds they heard on the Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows (by aiming a can of bug spray at the microphone) and Jimi Hendrix’s wah-wah pedal (Claudio’s wooh-wooh, which made Sergio’s guitar sound as if it was going to be sick). Everything Is Possible! got the message out: while the Beatles and the Stones were making history, three teenagers from Brazil were fighting the twin forces of a military dictatorship and a lack of resources with surreal humour and ingenuity.

The fact that Rita Lee isn’t playing with the Baptista brothers is a sign that not everything is resolved. Lee and Arnaldo Baptista met in 1964, both aged 16, at a high-school battle of the bands in Sao Paulo. They became sweethearts and, with Sergio on board, Os Mutantes were born. After Rita Lee stole the keys to the wardrobe departments of the TV shows they were appearing on, Os Mutantes’ theatrical image was born, too. She would dress the band up as conquistadors for one appearance, witches for the next. “Everyone came to me for ideas,” says Lee. “Why be normal when you can go where the nuts come from?”

The good times were not to last. Sergio dates the beginning of the end to the time Arnaldo took off on a motorbike across South America in 1970, leaving Lee behind. He returned to marry her on December 30 1971, the day she turned 24. The marriage was over by the time she was 25.

“I didn’t leave. They chucked me out!” says Lee of her 1974 departure. Arnaldo, whose heavy LSD intake in 1971 was already affecting his mental health, remembers it differently. “Rita Lee put me in the madhouse.” Why? “Because she wanted to go to Europe. I went to the madhouse five or six times over the next 10 years, and I was somehow disconnected with the world and I wanted to get out. So I jumped.”

In 1982 Arnaldo attempted to escape from a psychiatric institution by jumping from a fifth-floor window. The fall put him in a coma for six weeks, but he emerged from it with his future wife Lucinha – a fan who had read about the fall in the press – by his side. Since then he has been making a slow recovery, living quietly in a small town in the state of Minas Gerais. He is philosophical about the forthcoming concert. “I am happy to be making music with my brother again. Maybe it doesn’t matter that Rita Lee isn’t doing it because we have this new girl now.” (She has a name, too: Lia Duncan.)

The London concert fulfils a long-gestating dream of the Baptista brothers to play in the land that inspired them in the first place, and Sergio has been digging out Claudio’s old contraptions to re-create the unique Mutantes sound. Until recently, the Baptistas were unaware of the cult that has been building up around their old band. “I didn’t even know that we were booked to do the concert,” says Sergio. “Nobody told me! The whole thing seemed to happen naturally, like a spontaneous combustion. At first I was pissed off. Now I think it’s great because it would never have happened if it had been left to Arnaldo and me. In fact, it’s some kind of a miracle”.

Ôø? Os Mutantes play the Barbican, London EC2, on Monday May 22. Box office: 020-7638 8891.