Lord Byron: The eXile’s Patron Saint

By John Dolan, The Exiled

“Polidori once asked Byron what, besides scribble verses, he could do better than Polidori himself. Byron icily replied: 'Three things. First, I can hit with a pistol the keyhole of that door. Secondly, I can swim across that river to yonder point. And thirdly, I can give you a damned good thrashing.'”

OK, somebody go find a black goat somewhere, sharpen me a steak knife, and buy us some spray paint for a pentagram, 'cause we're gonna resurrect us a champion who can kick the necessary ignorant Protestant ass and make it look easy.

And lucky for you, folks, I've pre-selected us a perfect demon: George Gordon, Lord Byron. He's dead at the moment, but that's a minor problem. Like his avatar, Prometheus, Byron can die and come back as often as you need him. Hell, he likes getting killed; he was a fighter. Single-handed, he took on the Wordsworth gang and kicked the sticks they had jammed up their asses right up through their teeth.

Byron's time was like ours, a scared time, a period of reaction and retreat. His England ran the world without knowing or wanting to know a thing about it, just like our America. Our climate is in fact the same nasty Wordsworthian weather Byron fought all his life: humorless, sanctimonious, xenophobic, factional, and cruel. He spent his life firing back at that world in a long fighting retreat that saw him always heading South and East, away from “the moral North” where the Wordsworthian consensus was metastasizing.

And that, of course, is why Byron was adored in Europe but snubbed in England and America. He was everything Wordsworth's gang was not. They were utterly humorless-a Romanticist once told me that “there are three jokes in Wordsworth, or so they say…but I can't recall them.”

Byron has thousands of jokes-and better still, they're actually funny. Not that he was simply trying to amuse. On the contrary, he meant to do great harm. Jokes were, for him, simply weapons against the solemn hicks-humor to sprinkle on their high seriousness like salt on slugs.

Byron was a fighter from childhood, a clubfoot semi-cripple who made himself a boxer and with typically Olympian kindness and disdain made himself the defender of nerds at his public school. He came from serious craziness, his father earning the nickname “Mad Jack” in an era when it took real ambition to seem more mad than the run of male aristocrats.

Probability bowed quickly to him, giving him a title he was never supposed to inherit, then making him instantly famous for Childe Harolde, his first and worst album. With fame, money and sex settled, he had to find something else to fight, and like any honorable man he chose to fight his own people. And that was how Byron the sentimental poet of graveyards and lost loves became the Satanic joker all England loved to hate.

He chose to be noisily “immoral” not because he was any worse (or any better) than the average aristocrat of his time but as a weapon against the moralism of Wordsworth. I don't mean “moralism” in a normative sense-God no. I remember sifting through the elderly Wordsworth's letters looking for any comment at all on the Great Famine which was extirpating the Irish, and finding only one remark, in which the great moralist earnestly prays that England will not weaken, ie provide any aid whatsoever. It's one of the curiosities of English literary history that you'll never find the least particle of compassion for the Irish in “moral” poets like Wordsworth.

Only the “mad, bad and dangerous” Byron mentioned the slaughter of 1798, attacking the PM, Castlereagh, for “dabbling [his] sleek young hands in Erin's gore” and, as Pope would have recommended, delivering an extra kick to his enemy's corpse in this epitaph: “Posterity will never survey a nobler grave than this: here lie the bones of Castlereagh: stop, traveler, and piss.”

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The Chicago Conspiracy [Trailer]

This is a trailer for our upcoming feature length documentary based in Chile and the Mapuche indigenous territory of Wallmapu. The concept for the film was born with the death of a former military dictator, Augusto Pinochet. His regime murdered thousands and tortured tens of thousands after the military coup on September 11, 1973.

The Chicago Conspiracy takes its name from the approximately 25 Chilean economists who attended the University of Chicago and other prestigious universities beginning in the 1960s to study under the neoliberal economists Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger. After embracing Friedman's neoliberal ideas, these economists returned to assist Pinochet's military regime in imposing free market policies. They privatized nearly every aspect of society, and Chile soon became a classic example of free market capitalism under the barrel of a gun.

The Chicago Conspiracy is about today. We began this documentary with the death of a dictator, but we continue with the legacy of a dictatorship.

The Chicago Conspiracy is about the Day of the Youth Combatant. On this day, two young brothers and militants of the MIR, Rafael and Eduardo Vergara, were gunned down by police as they walked through the politically active community Villa Francia. March 29 is not only about the Vergara brothers—it is a day to remember all youth combatants who have died under the dictatorship and current democratic regime.

The Chicago Conspiracy is about the students who fight a dictatorship-era educational law put into place on the last day of military rule. Over 700,000 students went on strike in 2006 to protest the privatized educational system. Police brutally repressed student marches and occupations.

The Chicago Conspiracy is about the neighborhoods lining the outskirts of Santiago. They were originally land occupations, and later became centers of armed resistance against the military dictatorship. A number of them, such as la Victoria and Villa Francia, continue as areas of confrontational discontent to this day.

The Chicago Conspiracy is about the Mapuche conflict. The Mapuche people valiantly resisted Spanish occupation, and continue to resist the Chilean state and the multinational corporations who strip Mapuche territory for forestry plantations, mines, dams and farming plantations. The government has utilized the dictatorship-era anti-terrorism law to jail Mapuche community members in struggle. Two young weichafes (Mapuche warriors), Alex Lemún and Matías Catrileo, were recently killed by Chilean police—one in 2002, the other in 2008.

The Chicago Conspiracy is a response to a global conspiracy of neoliberalism, militarism and authoritarianism.

With music by SubVerso.

http://www.subversiveactionfilms.org

277 detained in Athens yesterday evening

36 years from the anti-dictatorial student uprising in Athens. It’s been a long while and democracy seems old enough to show its teeth: at tonight’s commemorative demonstration, 277 people (!) were in total detained by police (a “detention” also means being forcefully taken to a police station for ID checking etc). So far, out of these people, seven have been charged. It is very difficult to transmit any more verified information at the moment, although it is clear that deep into the night, the entire neighbourhood of Exarcheia was occupied by police.

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Top 10 weirdest political parties

As if the real political world weren't already weird and ridiculous enough, over the years a number of satirical and joke political parties have been formed all across the world. Whether it's thanks to their bizarre policy plans, eccentric candidates, or hilarious media stunts, some of these groups have managed to make the headlines, even if they didn't necessarily win elections. Here are some of the stranger political parties that may come asking for your vote.

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4. The Official Monster Raving Loony Party

One of the most well-known and surprisingly successful fringe political parties in England, The Official Monster Raving Loony Party was established by musician and activist David Sutch in the early 80s. The OMRLP's platform is always full of bizarre and satirical political promises, which have included adding the Loch Ness Monster to the endangered species list, banning the use of asterisks, and a pledge to see that Ozzy Osbourne receives a knighthood. Despite their intentionally frivolous platform, the OMRLP does have a number of serious policy plans, and quite a few of their original ideas, like lowering the voting age to 18, have since been signed into law. Over the years, the party has managed to win a number of seats in local government throughout the U.K., most notably in small town mayoral races, but they haven't had much success since 2005.

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UK convict accuses superiors of Iraq torture

Britain's only convicted war criminal has accused his superiors of routinely abusing and threatening civilian detainees in Iraq.

In a new disclosure in yet another controversial Iraq war torture case, former British officer Donald Payne said his commanding officers regularly tortured Iraqi prisoners to gain information.

Payne said he had witnessed Col Jorge Mendonca and a platoon commander, Lt Craig Rodgers, punching a group of prisoners, cocking pistols at them and even threatening to set them alight.

The ex-soldier was speaking at a public inquiry into the killing of Iraqi hotel worker Baha Mousa while in British custody in 2003.

Mousa was discovered with 93 wounds on his body after being in custody for more than 36 hours in a temporary detention centre controlled by Payne.

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Hunger in U.S. at a 14-year high

The number of Americans who lived in households that lacked consistent access to adequate food soared last year, to 49 million, the highest since the government began tracking what it calls “food insecurity” 14 years ago, the Department of Agriculture reported Monday.

The increase, of 13 million Americans, was much larger than even the most pessimistic observers of hunger trends had expected and cast an alarming light on the daily hardships caused by the recession's punishing effect on jobs and wages.

About a third of these struggling households had what the researchers called “very low food security,” meaning lack of money forced members to skip meals, cut portions or otherwise forgo food at some point in the year.

The other two-thirds typically had enough to eat, but only by eating cheaper or less varied foods, relying on government aid like food stamps, or visiting food pantries and soup kitchens.

“These numbers are a wake-up call for the country,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

One figure that drew officials' attention was the number of households, 506,000, in which children faced “very low food security”: up from 323,000 the previous year. President Obama, who has pledged to end childhood hunger by 2015, released a statement while traveling in Asia that called the finding “particularly troubling.”

The ungainly phrase “food insecurity” stems from years of political and academic wrangling over how to measure adequate access to food. In the 1980s, when officials of the Reagan administration denied there was hunger in the United States, the Food Research and Action Center, a Washington advocacy group, began a survey that concluded otherwise. Over time, Congress had the Agriculture Department oversee a similar survey, which the Census Bureau administers.

Though researchers at the Agriculture Department do not use the word “hunger,” Mr. Obama did. “Hunger rose significantly last year,” he said.

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Earth's magnetic reversal won't kill you

    “Hi James,The Earth's Magnetic Field

    I appreciate your attempts to get people to think about science and
    geophysics in particular; but, no offense, this question you pose is ridiculous.”


That's what a well-established Earth and Planetary scientist told me when I asked him what I could do to prepare for Earth's next Magnetic Reversal (i.e. magnetic north becomes magnetic south) as if it were daylights savings time.

First, some context. According to some people's interpretation of the Mayan calendar, the world will end on December 21, 2012, with just four shopping days left before Christmas. Some of those people think that the Doom includes an impossibly instant magnetic pole reversal which will add to the mayhem of said Doomsday. Also, Sony just made a big movie about the Doom.

Anyway, back to the scientist. He continued:

Too many people already are under the incorrect impression that a magnetic dipole reversal might start within their lifetimes.  If the paleomagnetic record and all the theoretical studies on this problem that have been done mean anything, the soonest a reversal may start would be a couple thousand years from now and it's more likely that it won't.

I then reached out to another scientist - John Connerney of the Planetary Magnetospheres Laboratory at NASA Goddard – to get his take.

First question: Should we be worried about the next Magnetic Reversal?

Hear answer to "Should We Worry?"
Connerney added:

    a reversal takes thousands of years to happen. Way beyond an individual's lifespan, to say nothing of attention span.

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Israel Kamakawiwo (Ole 'IZ') - 'Somewhere over the rainbow'

Emerging economies falter in graft survey

Public life is seen as much more corrupt in China, India and Russia than in leading western economies, says a report published on Tuesday, in a sign of the increasingly stark lines being drawn in the international battle against graft.

The three big emerging markets – which are all criticised for their failure to give stronger backing to global anti-corruption rules – have all finished below 75th place in annual rankings of 180 countries by the campaigning group Transparency International.

The results are likely to add to worries that the lack of tough rules against bribery will lead to damaging free-for-alls between states and multinationals competing for official contracts and resources in Africa and other parts of the world.

Transparency International, which is based in Berlin, said the survey results were of “great concern” because they showed corruption continued to “lurk where opacity rules, where institutions still need strengthening and where governments have not implemented anti-corruption legal frameworks”.

[ ... ]

China ranks 79th, India 84th and Russia 146th in the table, which draws on 13 surveys of businesses and experts to give each country a “perception of corruption” score. All but one of the Group of Seven leading western economies come in the top 25, with Silvio Berlusconi's Italy lagging in 63rd place.

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"The Brotherhood of Death" William Engdahl (excerpts)

...Chapter 6, Seeds of Destruction, F. William Engdahl (excerpts)

HUMAN GUINEA PIGS

Years before Henry Kissinger [1] and Brent Scowcroft made population reduction the official foreign policy of the United States Government, the Rockefeller brothers, in particular John D. Rockefeller III, or JDR III as we was affectionately known, were busy experimenting on human guinea pigs… JDR III made Puerto Rico into a huge laboratory to test his ideas on mass population control beginning in the 1950's. By 1965, an estimated 35% of Puerto Rico's women of child-bearing age had been permanently sterilized, according to a study made that year by the island's Public Health Department. The Rockefeller's Population Council, and the U.S. Government Department of Health Education and Welfare – where brother Nelson Rockefeller was Under-Secretary – packaged the sterilization campaign. They used the spurious argument that it would protect women's health and stabilize incomes if there were fewer mouths to feed…

“SECOND ONLY TO CONTROL OF ATOMIC WEAPONS…”

John D. III's forced sterilization was no radical departure for the family. The Rockefeller's had long regarded Puerto Rico as a convenient human laboratory. In 1931, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, later renamed the Rockefeller University, financed the cancer experiments of Dr. Cornelius Rhoads [2] in Puerto Rico. Rhoads was no ordinary scientist. It later came out that Rhoads had deliberately infected his subjects with cancer cells to see what would happen. Eight of his subjects died. According to pathologist Cornelius Rhoads, “Purto Ricans are beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere. What the island needs is not public health work but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the population. I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off 8…” Initially written in a confidential letter to a fellow researcher, Rhoad's boast of killing Puerto Ricans appeared in Time magazine in February 1932 after Pedro Albizu Campos, leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, gained possession of the letter and published its contents.

Rather than being tried for murder, the Rockefeller Institute scientist was asked to establish the U.S. Army Biological Warfare facilities in Maryland, Utah, and also Panama, and was later named to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, where radiation experiments were secretly conducted on prisoners, hospital patients and U.S. soldiers.

In 1961, more than a dozen decades before his policies were to become enshrined in NSSM 200, JDR III gave the second McDougall Lecture to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Rockefeller told the listeners, “To my mind, population growth is second only to control of atomic weapons as the paramount problem of the day.” He spoke of a “cold inevitability, a certainty that is mathematical, that gives the problems posed by too-rapid population growth a somber and chilling caste indeed.” The “grim fact” of population growth, he warned, “cuts across all the basic needs of mankind and…frustrates man's achievement of his higher needs.”

ROCKEFELLER SUPPORTS EUGENICS JDR III

grew up surrounded by eugenicists, race theorists and Malthusians at the Rockefeller Foundation such as Frederick Osborn, Henry Fairchild and Alan Gregg. For John D. III, it seemed only natural that he and others of his “class” should decide which elements of the human species survived, in order that they could have “life as we want it to be.” They saw it as being a bit like culling herds of sheep for the best of the breed. The logic of human life for the family was simple: supply and demand. As Jameson Taylor expressed it, "For Rockefeller the proper care of sheep…requires nothing more than an equalization of supply with demand. If supply - i.e., food, water and space – cannot meet demand, supply must be increased and demand must be decreased. The Rockefeller Foundation has used this two pronged approach to great effect. The supply shortage has been addressed by…advanced medical practices and increased crop yields. The demand problem has been solved by culling the herd via birth control and abortion." For most Americans and for most of the world, the idea that the leading policy circles of the United States Government, acting on the behest of some of its wealthiest families and most influential universities, would deliberately promote the mass covert sterilization of entire population groups was too far fetched to accept.

Few realized that individuals with names such as Rockefeller, Harriman, banker J.P. Morgan Jr., Mary Duke Biddle of the tobacco family, Cleveland Dodge, John Harvey Kellogg from the breakfast cereal fortune, Clarence Gamble of Proctor & Gamble [3] were quietly funding eugenics as members of the American Eugenics Society. They had also been financing experiments involving forced sterilization of “inferior people” and various forms of population control as early as World War 1. Their counterparts in the English Eugenics Society at the time included the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, economist John Maynard Keynes, Aurthur Lord Balfour and Julian Huxley, who went on to be the first head of UNESCO after the war [4].

COMBATING THE 'HUMAN CANCER' …

One man served as head of the Medical Division of the Rockefeller Foundation for more than 34 years. His name was Alan Gregg [5]. An all but unknown person to the outside world…Gregg wielded tremendous influence. He was Vice President of the Foundation on his retirement in 1956, and his ideology pervaded the institute decades after. It was an ideology of Malthusian brutality and rascist finality. Gregg once wrote in an article for a scientific journal on population, “There is an alarming parallel between the growth of a cancer in the body of an organism and the growth of human population in the earth ecological economy.” He then asserted that “cancerous growths demand food, but so far as I know, they have never been cured by getting it. The analogies can be found in our plundered planet.” This was a formulation which translated as, “people pollute, so eliminate pollution by eliminating people…”...

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Million hut by 'plague worse than swine flu'

A deadly plague could sweep across Europe, doctors fear, after an outbreak of a virus in Ukraine plunged the country and its neighbours into a state of panic.

A cocktail of three flu viruses are reported to have mutated into a single pneumonic plague, which it is believed may be far more dangerous than swine flu. The death toll has reached 189 and more than 1 million people have been infected, most of them in the nine regions of Western Ukraine.

President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko has called in the World Health Organisation and a team of nine specialists are carrying out tests in Kiev and Lviv to identify the virus. Samples have been sent to London for analysis.

President Yushchenko said: “People are dying. The epidemic is killing doctors. This is absolutely inconceivable in the 21st Century.”

In a TV interview, the President added: “Unlike similar epidemics in other countries, three causes of serious viral infections came together simultaneously in Ukraine – two seasonal flus and the Californian flu

“Virologists conclude that this combination of infections may produce an even more aggressive new virus as a result of mutation.”

Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has been touring hospitals where victims are being treated and presidential elections in January could be cancelled.

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Ukraine pandemic - IMVA emergency alert

...Reports of aerial spraying right before the plague hit will probably never see the light of day but if a person does not believe that there are people who would do such a thing they really are not familiar with the dark side of humanity. Dr. Gregory J. Moran, an associate professor in the department of emergency medicine in Los Angles says, “Plague may be rare today in the United States, but health care professionals should be aware of its potential as a weapon, because its pathogens are easily aerosolized and the symptoms are not likely to arouse suspicion until an epidemic is evident. If plague were to be used as a biological weapon, the pathogens would likely be spread via aerosol and inhaled, leading to the pneumonic form.”[1]

After weeks of silence in the western press the New York Times finally reported on 13th of November, “When patients began arriving in Dr. Vyacheslav Bonder's intensive care unit two weeks ago, their lungs so saturated with blood that they could barely gasp, the only thing he could compare it to was a field hospital in wartime. As soon as he hooked one patient up to a ventilator, a second and third would appear in the doorway.”[2]

The virus causing the deaths is extremely
aggressive, it doesn't first infect the throat (as
is common in flu), but strikes the lungs directly.
Dr. Viktor Bachinsky

The entire nation of Ukraine is in an absolute state of panic as a mystery illness rips through their country. The pandemic in the Ukraine is threatening the lungs of flu victims with hemorrhage The first alarm came in August when a microbiologist calls into a radio show[3] run by a doctor with dire warnings about what was about to be deliberately released in the Ukraine and then is hunted down in L.A. by a SWAT squad and its all displayed on this bizarre video. Now just two months later the Sunday Express is reporting, “A doctor in Western Ukraine who did not want to be named, said:” We have carried out post mortems on two victims and found their lungs are as black as charcoal. They look like they have been burned. It's terrifying.”[4] ...

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