Free Oil Painting Portraits
I am doing a couple portraits for free. This is on a first come, first serve basis.
You must be able to come sit for the portrait a few sessions so being in the Kansas City area will may be a must.
The portraits will be posted online here.
The final painting will most likely be 18x24, but this could change.
If you are interested in one of these don’t hesitate because I am only doing this for a limited time.
Please contact me through e-mail here. Of course if you have my personal contact information, feel free to use that.
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Poor Dumb Patriots
I got this e-mail today, I thought it was too funny not to share:
IT’S TIME TO RESIST THE OCCUPIERS!
America is under siege, socialist revolutionaries and their paid cadres are taking to the streets in a mad bid to end freedom as we know it and, once and for all, eliminate the free market! THIS IS NO JOKE and it is NOT A DRILL: they mean what they say and they say what they mean.
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?
We know from the Bible, a book sacred to our Founders but despised by the Occupiers, not to “return evil for evil”, so while they threaten to use violence against American patriots simply because they are successful, we need to SHOW UP in LARGE NUMBERS and show them how PEACEFUL Americans resist occupation of this nation by foreign and alien ideas that have their root in the writing of dead tyrants!
The Occupiers want to drag Americans, kicking and screaming if need be, BACK to the bad old days of the all-power socialist workers’ paradise that so many of us stood against during the Cold War. Their anachronistic slogans and Marxist-sounding rhetoric about “equality” at the point of a gun have not gone un-noticed by thoughtful Americans who embrace The Declaration of Independence and the Constititution over Mao Tse Tung or hugo Chavez, or even Roseann Barr and Nancy Pelosi.
ARE YOU PREPARED TO STAND UP to the Occupiers?
We need to get organized and link arms QUICKLY with every freedom loving Amercian we can find to STAND UP and SHOW UP in these cities targeted by the OCCUPIERS to demonstrate that there are more of us, who love America and the values that made this nation great then those who hate America and want to impose the foreign and alien ideas of the OCCUPIERS on us all!
WILL YOU HELP?
Volunteers are needed NOW to help promote the FREEDOM alternative to the OCCUPIERS, the “RESIST THE OCCUPIERS” Project.
Our aim is to enable and equip hundreds of thousands of Americans to SHOW UP in every city targeted by the OCCUPIERS and JUST SAY NO TO SOCIALISM!
We need to see AMERICAN FLAGS not the flags of socialism organizations and REAL Americans, not the rent-a-revolutionaries or the Soros foundation, in ALL of these cities and NOW!
HERE’S WHAT YOU CAN DO:
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SIGN UP to be a volunteer organizer in your city or community to RESIST THE OCCUPIERS
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Volunteer to use social media to urge freedom-minded groups and individuals to take similar action
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Laiason with us if you are a member of a group that is organizing a RESIST THE OCCUPIERS activity or event
WE MNUST RESIST THE OCCUPIERS and we need to take action NOW!
The London Metropolitan Police have withdrawn an appeal to the public to report anyone with anarchist sympathies, admitting it was “badly worded”. But the climb-down is telling in itself: they did not seek to “stigmatise those with genuine political beliefs”, but to “gather information on criminal acts”. The conflation of anarchism and criminality is a key tactic in the state offensive against anarchists, driven by the fear that anarchist ideas are gaining ground within a new politics that eschews parties and favours direct action.
Anarchists are under attack because their ideas are gaining ground
Alasdair Thompson
openDemocracy
August 3, 2011
The London Metropolitan Police have withdrawn an appeal to the public to report anyone with anarchist sympathies, admitting it was “badly worded”. But the climb-down is telling in itself: they did not seek to “stigmatise those with genuine political beliefs”, but to “gather information on criminal acts”. The conflation of anarchism and criminality is a key tactic in the state offensive against anarchists, driven by the fear that anarchist ideas are gaining ground within a new politics that eschews parties and favours direct action.
The mainstream left has failed to achieve the change we require in society. I have come to believe a more radical break with the status quo is now our only option.
The most inspiring action over the three years since the financial crisis has come not from the traditional political parties or established trade unions but from spontaneous, unilateral action by workers and students: the workplace occupations, the day X student protests and university occupations and the direct action of groups like UK Uncut.
It almost seems to have been forgotten already, but in 2009 there was a wave of militant industrial action unprecedented in recent times in this country. At Lindsay, Prisme, Vestas and Visteon workers refused to accept that their factories were being closed or their jobs lost. We saw wild cat strikes and occupations of workplaces. Not all were successful, but some were. Workers at Prisme and Visteon won improved settlements that would not have been possible without the occupations and at Lindsay all victimised workers were re-employed.
At universities and colleges across the country students have refused to wait for the NUS and their local students’ unions to take action and instead have occupied buildings and reclaimed space within their institutions. These occupations were instrumental in building local anti-cuts groups and galvanising the left on campus. While the student protests failed to prevent the passage of fees in England and Wales, every party bar the Tories went into the elections for the Scottish Parliament this May promising to maintain free education. Without the actions undertaken in the six months following Millbank it is unlikely this would have happened.
These actions weren’t all organised by anarchists, or even necessarily organised along explicitly anarchist principles. But they showed the ability of the working class and those under attack to organise themselves without recourse to centralised authority and bureaucratic hierarchies.
What have we seen in response to these actions? A campaign of vilification in the media, joined, apparently, by other leftist organisations, the conflation of property damage and violence, and the proliferation of unfounded myths about anarchism: notably, that anarchism is inherently violent, that it eschews all structure (and that hierarchy and structure are synonymous), and that anarchist thought is incompatible with defending state-provided public services or benefits. These myths and others have been countered brilliantly by Joseph Kay in his recent post for the blog libcom.
The police have been raiding squats and social spaces, dragging activists out of bed and detaining them for hours as a pre-emptive move to prevent acts of protest. In the run-up to the Royal Wedding, people known to have been politically active in the past were placed under virtual house arrest, where in some cases there was no evidence of any planned action.
In the light of these attacks, perhaps we should see the Met Police Report not as an aberration as they would now have us believe, but as a brief moment of honesty. The Commune has described it in bleak terms: “the police defend the state unconditionally, the state defends capital unconditionally, and capital attacks us without remorse.” Bright Green put it like this: “The police who arrest and harass us are just doing their job, and doing it well.”
The world is changing. Though many of the ideas of anarchism are not new, as Paul Mason so eloquently described back in February, the social dynamic within which we interpret them has shifted. New forms of technology and communication are often lauded as harbingers of this change, and though it is wrong to say that they have prefigured or created these forms of organisation, they do help to facilitate horizontal structuring and allow us to bypass traditional means of control. The Deterritorial Support Group has described the fallout from the series of scandals to befall our elite:
The corruption and nepotism of the closed circle of politicians, press and police was a disgusting necessity for the efficient running of the state in the interests of the status quo, but it worked because it was hidden, neatly covered with the facade of the consensus of progressive patriotism, classless society rhetoric and the meritocracy… The system of parliamentary democracy and capitalist media as it exists in Britain simply wasn’t designed as a transparent system, and technological developments, hitting at the same time as a restructuring crisis, are forcing open those contradictions.
At the same time, the future for an increasingly educated cohort of young people - people disillusioned with parliamentary politics and discredited ideologies, who have been lied to once too often - looks bleak in the face of intergenerational inequality which sees many unable to find jobs, burdened with debt, and stuck living at home for years after our parents’ generation would have settled down with a family. Globally, an ecocidal economic system is producing increasingly evident environmental destruction, which traditional forms of power are incapable of dealing with. And culturally, a post-materialism that won’t accept the old centre left goal of increased affluence and consumption in lieu of real democratic power is undermining the productivism of pre-ecological leftist thought.
No one cause can be said to have changed the rules of the game, but a confluence of factors are emerging as the old economic and political order falters, pushing anarchist ideas to the forefront of a new wave of resistance.
Alasdair Thompson is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, co-editor of Bright Green, a trade unionist and anti-cuts activist.
Just Started Gardening
I am often discouraged because of my line of work. As a graphic designer I have this thought that if society collapsed over night I would have few skills to contribute to a new career. This was part of why I wanted to start learning to grow food. I took an area of land in the back and I have been working on it. I have tomatoes, peppers and onions in so far. Hopefully we will have more in this week and over the weekend.
I am starting this to learn. I hope I can make some money and feed myself with it, but also I am wanting to learn how to do this. People will always need food, so farmers will always have a place in society.
I have made a few mistakes and learned a few things already. Growing up mostly in Cleveland Ohio and living in mostly urban environments my whole life has led to me really not knowing much about this kind of thing. I am entering into a whole new world and I am loving it so far.
To plant in the ground I had to remove the grass that was already there. I tried to rent a sod cutter, but had no truck to transport it so I started to go at it by hand. We managed to get enough up to plant the onions after about two hours of work. I am still needing to remove more sod, so we will still be looking out for a truck.
I would like to see how much I can plant in this area. I am hoping to go out and buy a few more seedlings this weekend. So far we have some more peppers, tomatoes, cantaloupe, eggplant, onions and cucumbers. It’s nice to have the internet at my fingers so I can just look stuff up when I have questions.
Here I go, Farmer Shane and his little anarchist farm. I’ll try to get some pictures posted here in the next few weeks.
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