A POEM FOR BIG RED by John Sinclair

Poet-author-scholar-human John Sinclair wrote “this little ode in memory of my pal Big Red, who passed away in Lansing MI around Christmas time”…

hold your horn high
for ron redman gulyas

early sunday afternoon
taking coffee at the dolphins
& the spring training reports
from the detroit news on-line,

all of a sudden
i’m at the batting cage
in royal oak 20 years ago
with big red,

a great big motherfucker in his late 20s
who weighed about 390
& played the tenor saxophone
with the sound of yore

like coleman hawkins
& ben webster were whispering
in his ear
while he fingered his horn,

big red
was a great big crazy motherfucker
who could tell you
the high school & college stats

for all the players
coming up on the tigers in the spring,
& he still played baseball himself,
semi-pro for a lansing team,

not the popular lansing lug-nuts
but some obscure outfit
that would pay him a few bucks
to suit up & power a couple of balls

out of the park,
& he claimed to be a gypsy
or either related to the little giant
of jazz, don redman

& he played
anything he wanted
on the tenor saxophone,
incomplete skills but

plenty of feeling, a
round,
warm sound
that was always good to hear,

big red,
my man,
he backed me up so many times
& played in my band (even though

johnny evans couldn’t stand
the way he played
the other tenor sax),
a great big crazy motherfucker

who drank more beer
than anyone you seen, & his weight
would go up & down
from 390 to 210

& then back up again,
& in the early ’90s
he fled the united states
& roosted in budapest

for a few years
& had a ball playing his horn
calling himself “ron goulash”
like the hungarian stew

& why he ever came back
will never be known
but he passed in east lansing
just before christmas?

big red,
hold your horn high,
let us hear your raspy breath,
my brother, just one more time

–the dolphins,
amsterdam
march 19, 2006

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.’

ARTHUR ON AIR AMERICA WEDNESDAY NIGHT…

Arthur editor Jay Babcock will guest on national progressive radio network AirAmericaRadio’s “The Marc Maron Show” on Wednesday, May 31 . He’ll be discussing the Arthur vs Godsmack kerfuffle and also Arthur’s forthcoming CD (curated by Josephine Foster) which will benefit anti-military recruiting campaigns. It’s going to be AWESOME.

Info on the show: www.airamericaradio.com/maron/

AirAmerica radio network stations: www.airamericaradio.com/stations

Listeners on the internet can stream live at www.airamericaradio.com while the show is on the air. Air America Premium members can podcast and hear archived shows they missed.

MORE INFO ON THIS WHOLE RUCKUS:

Transcript of the Arthur v Godsmack interview (May 1, 2006), with Introduction, Afterword and Footnotes: www.arthurmag.com/magpie/?p=1244

MP3 of the Arthur vs Godsmack interview (May 1, 2006) (courtesy Crooksandliars.com and Bobby Tamkin): http://movies.crooksandliars.com/arthurvsgodsmack.mp3

Streaming audio of Arthur vs Godsmack interview (May 1, 2006) (courtesy Apollo Audio and Bobby Tamkin): http://www.apolloaudio.com/lt.asp?name=AA32

New York Daily News on Arthur vs Godsmack (May 10, 2006): www.nydailynews.com/news/gossip/story/416382p-351810c.html

CNN Headline News’s “Showbiz Tonight” interviews Godsmack on controversy – transcript (May 11, 2006):http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0605/11/sbt.01.html

Howie Klein commentary at The Huffington Post (May 8, 2006): www.huffingtonpost.com/howie-klein/not-all-rock-stars-are-li_b_20648.html

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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