History Of Slave Ships

Atlantic Historian (history of the sea and colonization) Marcus Rediker, who authored the 'must read ' The Many Headed Hydra, has a new book out on Slave Ships since this is the 300th anniversary of the beginning of the end of Slavery.

For capitalism to expand, forced conscripted labour would be replaced with a new form of exploitation; wage slavery. Which itself was evolving from both indentured servitude and slavery during this period.

Rediker takes a libertarian socialist view of the Atlantic trade and its importance in the creation of global capitalism continuing the social/labour history tradition developed by E.P. Thompson in creating approachable and readable works.

Over more than three centuries, more than 12 million Africans were loaded on ships, bound for the Americas to be slaves.

Aboard the slaver, or Guineaman, as the vessels were also known, the kidnapped Africans frequently had to travel in living quarters as cramped as coffins, and suffered savage beatings, outright torture and death to quell uprisings and forced dancing to keep them fit.

While the plantation system and other aspects of slavery have been widely studied, the history of the slave ship itself is largely unknown, says historian Marcus Rediker, author of "The Slave Ship — A Human History."

"What I'm basically interested in is how captains, ship captains, officers, sailors and the slave interacted with the slave ship. What was the actual reality? Of course, it was quite horrifying," said Rediker, a University of Pittsburgh history professor. "In many respects, the development of the Americas through slavery and the plantation system is unthinkable without the slave ship."

For a couple hundred years, most people thought they knew what happened during the Atlantic crossing, Rediker says. Abolitionists had produced evidence of life aboard slave ships, but many scholars were suspicious of what they'd gathered, thinking it propaganda.

Perhaps the most significant reason for lack of scholarship, he says, is an assumption that "history happens on land, that the landed masses of the world are the real places and that the seas in between are a kind of void."

Marcus Rediker escapes the 'the violence of abstraction' in this history of slave ships that richly mines the extant writings of captains, sailors and slaves.

But, as promised, this account of life aboard the "vast machines" is not told with charts and tables. The slave ship, as a floating factory, prison and weapon, was recognized by all as a world-altering technology. Rediker's sources include parliamentary hearings, abolitionist pamphlets and the extant writings of captains, sailors and slaves. Chained below decks aboard what some imagined were "houses with wings," Africans were already, according to Rediker, forging new communities.

The slave ship ranged in size and design from 11-ton sloops, capable of carrying 30 slaves, to 566-ton behemoths, capable of carrying 700 to 800 slaves. Such variety belies the slow pace of innovation within the trade. In spite of its centrality to European ventures abroad, the great minds of the Enlightenment added to the slave ship -- over the course of 100 years -- copper-sheathed hulls (to protect against shipworm), ventilation and netting to catch those who tried to jump overboard. Liberté, égalité and fraternité came separately.

Much of Rediker's book also concerns the lives of sailors, the trade's "white slaves." Many were compelled to sea by debt, others by trickery. Half were cut down within months by West Africa's endemic parasites. Those who survived disease had to endure the cruelty of captains driven mad by profit. Some escaped, only to be caught and sold by African traders. Others became pirates. But all were lucky compared with the chronically ill, penniless sailors who, cheated of wages and their passage home, littered 18th-century ports from Kingston to Charleston.

Rediker looks not at that bigger picture but at the slave ship itself, as a microeconomy where the captain was chief executive, jailer, accountant, paymaster and disciplinarian, exercising these roles by maintaining, from his spacious captain's cabin in a very unspacious ship, the mystique of what later military leaders would call command isolation. Slave ships are, after all, a far larger part of our history than we like to think. Our normal picture of an 18th-century sailing vessel is of one filled with hopeful immigrants. But before 1807, ships carried well over three times as many enslaved Africans across the ocean to British colonies as they did Europeans.

Not only was the business a booming one, it was, until pesky abolitionists started making a fuss in the 1780s, considered highly respectable, as central to the Atlantic economy as is something like oil today. "What a glorious and advantageous trade this is," wrote James Houston, who worked for a firm of 18th-century slave merchants. "It is the hinge on which all the trade of this globe moves." John Newton, who later wrote the hymn "Amazing Grace," spent part of his youth as a slave-ship captain and believed that because of the long periods of time at sea, there was no calling that afforded "greater advantages to an awakened mind, for promoting the life of God in the soul."

Slave ships were death ships for crew and captives

Monday, October 01, 2007

By Mark Roth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The typical slave ship began its life as a merchant vessel, and was refitted later for its grim purpose.

The primary remodeling, which often occurred on the outward leg of the voyage, was to build walls below decks to separate men and women, and then build horizontal platforms halfway between the first and second decks on which to stack the slaves.

The height between the first and second deck usually was only about 5 feet before the remodeling, said Marcus Rediker, University of Pittsburgh history professor and author of "The Slave Ship: A Human History." Once the platforms were built, headroom was about 2¹/₂ feet.

"This produced crowding of a kind that is almost incomprehensible," he said. "One of the things that struck almost everybody about a slave ship was the stench of it.

"It was said in Charleston, S.C., that when the wind was blowing off the water a certain way you could smell a slave ship before you could see it. It was a function of sickness, vomit, diarrhea, death and also the way the human body perspires in the condition of fear."

And while it is true that some slave ship seamen joined the crew because they were sadistic or wanted sexual access to African women, many of them were victimized almost as badly as the slaves, Dr. Rediker said.

"One of the great mysteries I wanted to explore was how sailors were recruited to slave ships when they knew the conditions were going to be horrible and the death rates were going to be high."

He discovered that in many cases, ship captains would get sailors to run up debts in taverns, and then would pay off the tavern owners with some of the sailor's advance wages in return for the sailor being handed over to work on the crew.

Slave ship captains also would offer sailors advance wages worth $800 to $1,200 in today's money or to pay part of the sailors' salaries to their wives once a week.

Once they were onboard, many crewmen were treated almost as brutally as the slaves. For a huge variety of infractions, they were whipped, chained, denied food, stabbed and even shot.

In fact, the death rate among slave ship crews was almost as high as among the slaves, Dr. Rediker said, and hit 5 percent even on the healthiest of voyages.

The slave trade was required to create vast accumulations of capital. And it is directly tide to British expansion and so called Free Trade.

People in Norfolk are about to have their eyes opened to the county's role in the transatlantic slave trade.

If you think of the trade in enslaved Africans using British ships, Liverpool, Bristol and London spring to mind. But project historian Richard Maguire is about to shock Norfolk people with the deep links he has unearthed concerning the role the county played in the trade - and its abolition.

His research culminates in an exhibition at the Norfolk Record Office at County Hall from Monday.

He said: “The original idea was to look at something that was never looked at before - Norfolk's connections to transatlantic slavery.

“People have always tended to assume that the slave trade was exclusive to Liverpool, Bristol and London. But research we have done at the Record Office has revealed there to be a goldmine of information relating to Norfolk. Norfolk was connected at all levels of the trade - slave ships left King's Lynn for Africa, county people owned slaves and invested in plantations and traded slaves from here. But on the other hand Norfolk people from the 1780s onwards were equally involved in calling for the end of the slave trade.

“We are trying to give people an understanding of part of the history that nobody knew about before.”

The exhibition also reveals black people have lived in Norfolk since the 17th century. Documents on show reveal that a black man lived in King's Lynn in 1673, a black woman Rachel was baptised in Diss in 1799, and Elizabeth Buxton, from Stradsett, left £10 to her black servant in her will of 1729. Other documents reveal the inhumane treatment slaves received from owners, and a list of the enslaved people on the Hanson Plantation, Barbados, owned by Sir John Berney of Kirby Bedon Hall, lists black people as stock alongside cattle.

And in a related story a freedom ship may be at the bottom of Lake Michigan.

A fantastic story is unfolding along the Lake Michigan shoreline in Indiana.

It involves a 150 year old shipwreck, a Porter County Historian, fugitive slaves and The Underground Railroad.

Legend has it a wooden schooner would stop on the shore in Indiana to pick up fugitive slaves and take them to Chicago where they would hide on ships bound for freedom in Canada.

After the 1850 Compromise was passed it became dangerous to help escaped slaves even in free states like Illinois and Indiana.

According to the law you could be prosecuted, fined and even thrown in jail. The mysterious ship met with a tragic fate.

Now a team of researchers is racing against time and the elements to solve this mystery and prove this was the legendary ship used to smuggle fugitive slaves to freedom.

Again the idea of piracy and privateers arising from the Atlantic Slave trade to become the basis of capitalism in the new world plays an important role later in the industrial revolution created by the American Civil war.

Just as it is important today in the creation of what Phillip Bobbitt calls the New Market State. Which we see in the rise of gang (pirate) controlled countries like Somalia and Jamaica.

Piracy was the origin of capitalism as it evolved within the declining feudal economies of Europe.

The history of capital is not merely the history of wealth accumulated by a few families who hand it down, it is the history of the worlds wealth created by slavery, indentured servitude, serfdom and its transition through the creation of labour saving machinery to replace the degradation of humans to become the degradation of work.

See:

Abolishing Slavery In Canada

Edward Gibbon Wakefield

Jamestown; the beginning of Globalization

Jamestown; The Birth of Capitalism

Commodity Fetish a Definition

Black History Month; P.B. Randolph

Black Like Me

The Era Of The Common Man

1666 The Creation Of The World

Libertarian Anti-Imperialism;William Appleman Williams

Libertarian Dialectics

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The Slave Ship — A Human History, R.Buckminister.Fuller, The Many Headed Hydra, pirates, piracy, freebooters, capitalism, free-association, Marcus Rediker, anarchism, anarchy, libertarian, libertarianism, left-libertarian, primitive-accumulation-of-capital

War On Satan the Sodomite

African Anglican bishop: homosexuals "insane, satanic"

As I said here religious fundamentalists of all stripes have declared war on Satanism and the result is always scary.

SODOMITES
A proverbial term of reproach applied to those who practiced
sodomy (ritual homosexuality)

Papal Bulls dealing with heresy equated sodomy with sorcery.
Which were always a double edged sword. Before we had real witch-hunts we had the political campaigns using accusations of heresy, sodomy and sorcery.

The King of France issued charges of sodomy, simony, sorcery, and heresy against the pope and summoned him before the council. The pope's response was the strongest affirmation to date of papal sovereignty. In Unam Sanctam (November 18, 1302), he decreed that "it is necessary to salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff." He was preparing a bull that would excommunicate the King of France and put the interdict over France, and to depose the entire clergy of France, when in September of 1303,

The Pope survived however the Knights Templar were not so lucky. Sodomy and sorcery were seen as capital offenses as King Edward the Second would discover.

The chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker, written about thirty years later, mentions Edward's ill-treatment. He was held in a cell above the rotting corpses of animals, in an attempt to kill him indirectly. But Edward was extremely strong, fit and healthy, and survived the treatment, until on the night of 21 September 1327, he was held down and a red-hot poker pushed into his anus through a drenching-horn. His screams could be heard for miles around. Here are some other ideas on the story: - Mary Saaler, in her 1997 biography of Edward II, quotes Adam Murimith's comment that Edward was killed per cautelam, by a trick, and wonders if this phrase became corrupted to per cauterium, a branding-iron. - Pierre Chaplais and Ian Mortimer have commented on the death of King Edmund Ironside in 1016, said to have been murdered in a similar way to Edward, while sitting on the privy. The story was often repeated in thirteeth-century chronicles. - And finally, Edward's brother-in-law the earl of Hereford was killed at the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1322 when he was skewered through the anus by a spear pushed up through the bridge. It's my belief that the grotesque 'anal rape' narrative of Edward's death (Dr Ian Mortimer's phrase) is nothing more than a reflection of the popular belief that Edward was the passive partner in sexual acts with men, and that this means of death represented Edward receiving his 'just desserts'. The deaths of the earl of Hereford and Edmund Ironside may have provided the inspiration for this. Similarly, the castration (or emasculation) of Edward's favourite, the younger Despenser, in November 1326, was said by the chronicler Jean Froissart to be a punishment for his sexual relations with Edward. Whether this is true or not is impossible to say, but I think the narratives of both men's deaths reflect the widespread belief that they had sexual relations and were punished for them. Often, a story that begins as a joke or a rumour takes on the aura of 'truth' - such as the death of Edward's descendant George, Duke of Clarence, who died in the Tower of London in 1478. He is supposed to have drowned in a 'butt of malmsey'. It's difficult to ascertain whether this is the truth, or merely reflects his reputation as a drunkard.

After the Reformation the Protestant Churches criminalize heresy with the same result.
Rennsiance England saw the continuation of persecution of gay men as heretics, sorcerors and sodomites.

In Reformation England and France, Protestants and Catholics hurled accusations of homosexuality at one another. Although homosexuality was largely ignored in England until the seventeenth century, burnings continued in France. Still, several monarchs and many aristocrats were perceived by their contemporaries as having same-sex relationships, including Kings Henry III and Louis XIII, Philippe d'Orleans, and four of Louis XIV's generals. As for England, Crompton argues, against many biographers, that James I and William of Orange had male favorites. After William's reign, however, toleration of homosexuality decreased in England and hangings became more and more frequent. Meanwhile, French Enlightenment thinkers began to question state enforcement of church-based morality and whether “victimless” crimes should be prosecuted at all.

The 1791 Code Pénal de la Révolution made no mention of sodomy, making France the first western European nation to decriminalize homosexuality.

"Buggery, sodomy" , male to male sex was never seen as consensual but as being Satanic. The person was possessed overwhelmed, seduced, enticed.

As we moved into more modern times this last vestige of medieval religious fear of the other was then transformed from a heresy equated with fascination, spell casting and sorcery, the idea of the magickal use of ones will to dominate another into the more modern idea of male rape. In patriarchy one can only be taken by someone more masculine. Homosexuality as buggery was the very essence of masculinity.

Pennsylvania, 1786. In a sweeping liberalization of the legal system, the state of Pennsylvania removed capital punishment for many crimes including burglary, robbery, sodomy, and buggery (in Pennsylvania at the time, "buggery" referred to sex with animals). These formerly capital crimes had their sentences reduced to the forfeiture of all property and a period of servitude not to exceed 10 years.

Pennsylvania's enthusiasm for legal reform came from an abhorrence of the English legal code which legislators felt was forced on the colonies before the American Revolution of 1776. In an effort to cast off the legal vestiges of British rule, they began a movement toward legal reform that led to the elimination of capital sentences for most crimes.

All homosexual sex was seen as rape by any other name, despite the revolutionary movements of the Enlightenment the medieval fear of homosexuality as something dark, satanic, remained in British law which of course influenced law in Canada.

In 1859, offences punishable by death in Canada included: murder, rape, treason, administering poison or wounding with intent to commit murder, unlawfully abusing a girl under ten, buggery with man or beast, robbery with wounding, burglary with assault, arson, casting away a ship, and exhibiting a false signal endangering a ship.

Before 1859, Canada relied on British law to prosecute sodomy. In 1859, Canada repatriated its buggery law in the Consolidated Statutes of Canada as an offense punishable by death. Buggery remained punishable by death until 1869. A broader law targeting all homosexual male sexual activity ("gross indecency") was passed in 1890. Changes to the criminal code in 1948 and 1961 were used to brand gay men as "criminal sexual psychopaths" and "dangerous sexual offenders." These labels provided for indeterminate prison sentences. Most famously, George Klippert, a homosexual, was labelled a dangerous sexual offender and sentenced to life in prison, a sentence confirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada. He was released in 1971.

Canadian law now permits anal sex by consenting parties above the age of 18, provided no more than two people are present. The bill repealing Canada's sodomy laws achieved royal assent on June 27, 1969. The bill had been introduced in the House of Commons by Pierre Trudeau^[10], who famously stated that "there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation" ^[11]. In the 1995 Ontario Court of Appeal case R. v. M. (C.), the judges ruled that the relevant section (section 159) of the Criminal Code violated section 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms when one or both of the partners are 16 to 18 years of age; this has not been tried in court again.

A similar decision was made by the Quebec Court of Appeal in the 1998 case R. v. Roy.

To be a poof, a queer, a three dollar bill, a fairy, a faggot, etc. was to be destined for the gallows. And it was no less a social and moral offense to decent society when the death penalty was finally removed.

Everett George Klippert (1926 - 1996) was the last person in Canada to be arrested, charged, prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned for homosexuality before its legalization in 1969; the reforms which led to Canadian legalization of homosexuality were a direct result of the Klippert case.

Klippert, a mechanic in the Northwest Territories, was first investigated by police in connection with an arson in 1965. Although he was not found to have had any connection with the fire, Klippert voluntarily admitted to having had consensual homosexual sex with four separate adult men. He was subsequently arrested and charged with four counts of "gross indecency".

A court-ordered psychiatrist assessed Klippert as "incurably homosexual", and Klippert was sentenced to "preventive detention" (that is, indefinitely) as a dangerous sexual offender. Klippert appealed to the Court of Appeal for the Northwest Territories; his appeal was dismissed. He then appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada; his appeal was dismissed in a controversial 3-2 decision.

The day after Klippert's conviction was upheld, New Democratic Party leader Tommy Douglas invoked Klippert's name in the Canadian House of Commons, stating that homosexuality should not be considered a criminal issue. Within six weeks, Pierre Trudeau presented an omnibus bill (C-150) which, among other things, decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adults. The law passed, and homosexuality was decriminalized in Canada in 1969.

Klippert, however, remained in prison until July 21, 1971, whereupon he was released. He lived twenty-five more years before his death from kidney disease in 1996.

And this fear, this law, this history remains the basis of homophobia in patriarchal society today. Homophobia is based upon the fear of man penetrating man, as this law shows. It shows that homosexuality was recognized as a sexual / gender reality but at the same time denied as an aberration of the norm. The norm being of course patriarchal masculine domination, the man on top. Anything else was to be the other, a woman, to be feminized.

Anti-homosexual laws were specific; buggery = male rape. No man could admit to accepting or enjoying being the other. In fact if he did he must be killed, as was the case with Shakespeare's contemporary Marlowe. He too was accused of Satanism, as the author of Faustus, and for his atheism. And like King Edward II he got his just deserts.

• The most graphic is the testimony of Richard Baines, an informer who made a long list of allegations against Marlowe after his arrest in Flushing (see above). Most of these allegations concern Marlowe's atheism, but Baines also claimed that Marlowe said "all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools" and that "St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom, that he used him as the sinners of Sodom".

All homophobia is based on this cultural / social construct. It is the fear of being buggered not the fear of being a bugger.

Sodomy: Myth or Reality?

This article describes some of the influences that religious and moral views
have had on our laws and society. It will also discuss how the gender and sexual
views of today mostly arise from our religious past. As a result of some of
these interpretations, not only females but non-traditional outcast groups, such
as homosexual, transsexual, and transgender individuals have been subject to
hundreds of years of prejudice and subsequent persecution.

And the equation of Satanism with homosexuality remains as the subtext of of fundamentalist discourse even today.

Our sodomite conspirators have demonstrated the sorcerer's mastery of deception by legitimizing the pervert "out" from the closet and with the other hand, closeting the truth.

In order to establish the link between abortion and sodomy one must understand the essence of sodomy. The term sodomy is a take off from the warped lust portrayed in Genesis 19:4-5

"Before they went to bed, all the townsmen of Sodom, both young and old--all the people to the last man--closed in on the house. They called to Lot and said to him, "Where are the men who came to your house tonight? Bring them out to us that we may have intimacies with them." "

As horrendous as abortion (the murder of the most innocent of all human beings) is, sodomy is the far graver sin. Acts of sodomy produce no eternal spirits that have the opportunity to enter Heaven. With abortion there is an eternal spirit –produced at the instant of conception– who will have the opportunity to choose between good and evil in non corporeal¹ form and thus will be able to accept or reject eternal life.

Allah will not like looking at those who do sodomy

See:

The Yezedi

Satan Made Him Do It

Black History Month; P.B. Randolph

Bulgarian Women Abused

My Favorite Muslim

Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani

Antinominalist Anarchism

New Age Libertarian Manifesto

Heresy

Gnosis

Gnostic




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Out Of The Hogwarts Broom Closet

The Christian right wing bigots that already fear and hate Harry Potter and attack the novels and movies for being about magick and witchcraft can now add the heresy of sorcery = sodomy to their inquisitional charges.

Dumbledore was gay, JK tells amazed fans The late Richard Harris as Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. There could hardly have been a bigger sensation if Russell Crowe, Rod Stewart or Sven-Goran Eriksson had come out of the closet. Millions of fans around the world were yesterday digesting the news that one of the main characters in the Harry Potter novels, Albus Dumbledore, is gay. The revelation came from author JK Rowling during a question-and-answer session at New York's Carnegie Hall. It instantly hurtled around the internet and the world. News websites in China and Germany announced starkly: 'JK Rowling: "Dumbledore is gay".' One blogger wrote on a fansite: 'My head is spinning. Wow. One more reason to love gay men.' After reading briefly from her mega-selling book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, on Friday night, Rowling took questions from an audience of 1,600 students. A 19-year-old from Colorado asked about the avuncular headmaster of Hogwarts School: 'Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?' The author replied: 'My truthful answer to you...I always thought of Dumbledore as gay.' The audience reportedly fell silent - then erupted into prolonged applause.

Lynda Harris writes, rather charmingly, "In medieval Europe, the Cathars were often referred to as 'Bougres.' This was an acknowledgement of the fact that their religion had originally come from Bulgaria." Yes, and also that the Cathars, like many other heretic groups, were accused of unconventional sexual acts, hence our word "buggery." We know that this word was current in fifteenth-century Italy at least, because Michael Rocke lists it among the terms used by accusers of sodomites in Florence at that time:

abbracciare to embrace
buggerare to bugger
fottere to fuck
servire to service
sodomitare, or sodomizzare to sodomizen

And we read in Gabriel Audisio's Waldensian Dissent, p. 76f.:
According to Hansen, a German historian at the beginning of the twentieth century, the label vaudois was apparently used for the first time to refer to sorcerers in the French-speaking regions of Switzerland and in Savoy. In these parts, vauderie meant lust, and sodomy in particular. A man accused of this in France was called bougre (Bulgarian, or bugger), in Savoy vaudeis. Since bougerie or vauderie was believed, wrongly, to be an act of heresy, heretics tended to be accused of bougerie or vauderie. In these regions, during the great wave of persecutions at the beginning of the fifteenth century, people commonly called sorcerers vodeis or vaudois. Meanwhile, the notion spread that the satanic Sabbath was a practice common to Cathars and the Waldensians. A theologian, for example, entitled his treatise against sorcerers written in 1450, Errores gazoriorum seu illorum, qui probam vel baculum equitare probantur (Errors of Cathars or those who ride on brooms or rods). Jurists and theologians, finding the term vaudois applied to sects of sorcerers, equally used the expression without further consideration. In this way, the double confusion grew up, between vaudois meaning bougres (sorcerers) on the one hand and vaudois meaning heretics (Waldensians) on the other.

"Outside are the dogs and the sorcerers ...".(Revelation 22:15)(Critical Essay)

Revelation 22:15 lists practitioners who do not have the approval of the writer: "the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood." Unlike the "blessed ... who wash their robes" (22:14), they have no right to attain the tree of life nor to enter the city. They are "outside."

Nearly all, if not all, scholars read this list, and its parallels in 21:8 and 9:21, as a "catalog of evildoers" (Schussler Fiorenza: 110) or a list of moral vices (Kraft: 279) that the writer saw in his social world. Typical is Massyngberde Ford, who says that 22:15 "appears to refer mainly to unethical conduct: the dogs are sodomists, the 'sorcerers' ... refer to poisonous magicians or abortionists, then follow the prostitutes ... murderers and idolaters"

The odd one out in this list is the very first: "the dogs." All others are obviously humans who practice certain vices. But to whom or what does the term the dogs refer? Are they to be understood at all in relation to the next group on the list, the sorcerers (pharmakoi)?

SEE:

Bush Apologizes to Witches

Bulgarian Women Abused

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Edmonton Anarchist Bookfair 2007

Time again for Redmonton's annual Anarchist Book Fair.

Your humble servant will once again be doing a workshop.

This time on Anarchism and the origin of the Anti-Anarchist International Police Org. aka Interpol

It will be on Sunday, October 28.

Norman Nawrocki: Lessons from a 7ft Penis
Thursday October 25^th
Jekyll & Hyde Pub
10610 100 Avenue
Doors 8pm
$8 (or by donation to the underemployed)

Ward Churchill-organizing to win
Friday October 26^th
Doors 6:30 event 7:00 pm
Myer Horowitz Theatre
Students' Union Building
8900 114 Street
University of Alberta
$10 (or by donation to the underemployed)

Anarchist Bookfair
Vendors, workshops, food and childcare
Saturday October 27th 11am-7pm
Sunday October 28th 12pm-5pm
Alberta Avenue Community Center
9210 - 118 Avenue

Halloween Party
Saturday October 27 8pm-closing
Jekyll & Hyde Pub
10610 100 Avenue

Anarchist Folk Show
Todi Stronghands (halifax)
Starla! Ubiquitous (halifax)
R.Olson (vancouver)
Ben Disaster (local pop punk hero)
Lex Mckie (lamenting folk)
Sunday October 28th
7 pm
Donation $5 +
The Remedy Cafe (upstairs) 8631 109 Street

See:

Sacco and Vanzetti

Anarchist History of Edmonton

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This sucks

File this under; when you get lemons make lemonade.

United States airport now officially 'SUX'

SIOUX CITY, Iowa - City leaders have scrapped plans to do away with the Sioux Gateway Airport's unflattering three-letter identifier - SUX - and instead have made it the centrepiece of the airport's new marketing campaign.

The code, used by pilots and airports worldwide and printed on tickets and luggage tags, will be used on T-shirts and caps sporting the airport's new slogan, "FLY SUX." It also forms the address of the airport's redesigned website - www.flysux.com.

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Make Family Day A National Holiday

We all need a day off in February. Heck if I had my way we would only work a four day week, period. But public holidays whether federal or provincial are great for workers. Either you get them off , get an extra vacation day or the boss has to pay you overtime. Now that's freedom of choice as the neo-con's like to call it.

Back to February. The last holiday/long weekend most Canadians get is in January. Then its the long wait till Easter for a break. Which gives us that four day week for two weeks. And productivity does not decline, instead consumption increases.

Anyways this is rather ironic. Coming as it does from the Party of Family Values.

Mr. Paul Dewar (Ottawa Centre, NDP) asks if the Harper Tories will let everyday Ontarians who work for the Federal government take off Dalton McGuinty's "Family Day" Pierre Poilievre (Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board, CPC) lashes back: We in fact provide 11 holidays to our federal employees, whereas the province of Ontario only provides 10, so there is an additional day. I hope the member is not suggesting that we take one of those holidays away from our public servants, many of whom live in his own riding.

Now since Family Day, like the Harper Reform/Alliance/Conservative party, originated in Alberta, you would think they would jump at the opportunity to make it a national holiday. I mean its a values issue isn't it. Time off wage slavery to spend time with your family consuming for the good of the nation.

Especially now that Ontario has created it's own Family Day and Manitoba and Saskatchewan are planning to do so too.

Of course when it was announced after the election of the McGuinty government the media wags showed their complete ignorance of its origin in Alberta. Typical.
Except it comes from the right wing conservative mouthpiece the National Post which should know better. Family day was a originally a Conservative idea.

Family Day

Steve Murray, National Post

Published: Friday, October 12, 2007

The best part about the Liberal majority is that even if you didn't vote for them, you still get that sweet February holiday. No hard feelings! Nice.

Unfortunately though, it's still going to be called "Family Day," which sounds like a half-price day at Canada's Wonderland and is insulting to people like me who have no family. I would also argue against "Friend Day" for a similar reason.

So, let's embrace vote-buying holidays and democracy by suggesting better names for Family Day to Mr. McGuinty! Send your suggestions (and reasons for the suggestions) to smurray@nationalpost.com and I will personally deliver the list to Mr. McGuinty, laminated so it can't be easily shredded.

Now like the former Liberal government who denied Federal Workers in Alberta the day off, instead giving them the first Monday in August off, the Harpocrites are now denying Ontario (as well as Alberta) federal workers the day off.

Meet the 'new' boss same as the old boss.

A major union representing thousands of federal workers in Ottawa has been swamped by phone calls from members demanding to know why they won't be enjoying Ontario's recently announced Family Day holiday in February.

Ed Cashman, regional executive vice-president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), said calls began once re-elected Premier Dalton McGuinty confirmed his election promise of a new provincial statutory holiday.

"We're getting hundreds of phone calls in our office saying: 'hey, how come everybody else gets this and we don't'?" said Mr. Cashman.

"I can think of no better way for the government to get to work than to give the families a little more of what they value above all else - time together," the premier said at a news conference last week.

But Mr. Cashman said many families in Ottawa will not be granted this time.

"If you work for the public service, you're not going to get the day off," he said.

"Ironically, the Family Day is not going to reunite families because one member of the couple might be having the day off and the other will not."

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Ontario, Don Getty, McGuinty, Alberta, Liberals, PSAC, Conservatives, Federal Government, politics, family day, holidays, Canada,

Facebook Politicians

Here is the Facebook listing for Canadian politicians.

It appears that Dion is more popular here than in Quebec. Jack Layton is in second place while our PM places third.

Poor Gilles Duceppe has the least support and he has no pic. And he can't blame Facebook for being Anglo it has hundreds of thousands of members in Montreal, QC and Quebec City, QC .

Name:

Stéphane Dion

Supporters:

11,557

Name:

Jack Layton

Supporters:

9,137

Name:

Stephen Harper

Supporters:

6,815

Name:

Gilles Duceppe

Supporters:

377

While the guy who wants Dion's job may have a lot of friends in high places and the back rooms of the party but not on Facebook. He has a ways to go to catch up with Dion, Layton and Harper.

Name:

Michael Ignatieff

Supporters:

3,969

Lucky for him the other contender for Dion's job, unelected, Bob Rae doesn't have a profile on Facebook. Come to think of it neither does Gerard Kennedy.

In Toronto Liberal Martha Hall Finlay, unelected, is in a race with Dipper Peggy Nash, elected.

Name:

Martha Hall Findlay

Supporters:

259

Name:

Peggy Nash

Supporters:

289

While Olivia Chow of the NDP is in a neck and neck race with Belinda Stronach who is no longer a MP.

Name:

Olivia Chow

Supporters:

2,486

Name:

Belinda Stronach

Supporters:

2,455

There are 166 politicians listed and the majority are men. However women politicians on Facebook are more popular than the majority of their male counterparts.

And of these three are openly gay, Brison, Davis, and Siskay.

Scott Brison, Carolyn Bennet and Dr. Hedy Fry were all wannabe Liberal leader. Maybe Ruby will try next time.

Name:

Scott Brison

Supporters:

1,819

Name:

Ruby Dhalla

Supporters:

1,812

Name:

Libby Davies

Supporters:

1,237

Name:

Carolyn Bennett

Supporters:

987

Name:

Dr. Hedy Fry

Supporters:

745

Name:

Todd Russell

Supporters:

685

Name:

Irene Mathyssen

Supporters:

517

Name:

Tina Keeper

Supporters:

428

Name:

Maria Minna

Supporters:

405

Name:

Bill Siksay

Supporters:

363

Another neck and neck race is between these two, and McGuinty has more name recognition.

Name:

Rebecca Coad

Supporters:

354

Name:

David McGuinty

Supporters:

353

File this under Geekiest photo.

Name:

Gord Zeilstra

Supporters:

395

Poor Paul Martin remains the forgotten PM. Heck the other Martin is more popular.

Name:

Paul Martin

Supporters:

55

Name:

Pat Martin

Supporters:

156

The NDP, Liberals and even the BQ outnumber the Conservatives. In fact it's hard to find any Conservatives outside of the boss in Facebook. Must be the long arm of the PMO. Somebody forgot to send the memo to this guy though.

Name:

Bev Shipley M.P.

Supporters:

278

Of course there is always the possibility that being on Facebook could be embarrassing.

FRENCH government ministers have faced embarrassment from their own children whose entries on Facebook were aired to the public.

Embarrassed ... French PM Francois Fillon's son Antoine has revealed some of his favourite pastimes on Facebook / File

French Prime Minister François Fillon's son, Antoine, 22, is a member of several “high-brow” chat groups including "I am too proud of my poo" which has 93 members who discuss the "16 different types of turd", Telegraph.co.uk reporte


You even find wannabe politicians here. This guy is running against right-whingnut Calgary West Conservative Rob Anders.

Name:

Kirk Schmidt

Supporters:

311

Heck even a wannabe B.C. Green candidate has a profile.

Name:

Dan Grice

Supporters:

312

While this would be B.C. NDP MP is driving a solar car.

Name:

Julian West

Supporters:

245

Being the NDP Defense spokesperson who has taken the lead on opposing Harpers War has not hurt Dawn Black's popularity.

Name:

Dawn Black

Supporters:

221

Despite his efforts to be the Blogging MP Garth Turner seems to have overlooked Facebook.

Name:

Garth Turner

Supporters:

241

And there is even one Senator listed from Alberta no less. And no it's not Bert Brown. Rather it is former leader of the Alberta Liberal Party.

Name:

Grant Mitchell

Supporters:

60

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Canada, Canadian Politicians, facebook,social network, politics, Conservatives, Stephen Harper, Liberals, Stephane Dion, NDP,BQ, Jack Layton, Gilles Duceppe,