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Welcome to Outside the Gates
Why 'Outside the Gates'? There are many gates isolating people from each other. 'Gated communities' being the most obvious, where the affluent try to segregate themselves from the poor.
The most insidious though are the gates within our minds which separate us from, make us
think we are different to, even better than the 'other'.
Yet we all experience the same emotions, feelings, wants and needs irrespective of gender, colour, race or creed.
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The Coming Assault on Iran |
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Tuesday, 06 February 2007 |
Lets get something straight here. The United States of America wants Israel to be the only country in the region with nuclear weapons - other than itself since the illegal invasion of Iraq. Using Israel as a proxy, a vassal, a wedge to carry through American policy by destabilising and intimidating the other countries in the region to secure their strategic oil interests. This has been a priority for the Pentagon's planners since Peak Oil became a reality for the USA's domestic oil production in 1970. Though publically rubbished in 1956 Hubbert's predictions had come true. The amount of 'aid' that the USA gives Israel is staggering. In one year alone, 1997, Israel received $5,525,800,000. That's right 5.5 billion dollars. Don't believe it - read Richard H Curtiss . Such an amount given yearly comes with strings attached - "He who pays the piper calls the tune", as they say. Israel is a militarised society and its economy would collapse if not propped up by American 'aid'.  Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail | Read more...
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Playing While Making Revolution, Or Trying To. |
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Thursday, 25 January 2007 |
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I'd just finished writing an essay partly about Abstract Expressionism and it's funding/promotion by the CIA when I came across an article by Lila Rajiva at Countercurrents - Portrait Of The CIA As An Artist - on the same topic. Damn. She writes so well that her article was less than a third of the length of mine and made most of what I had written redundant.
Anyway, there was a reason for me wanting to write a little about it and why I'm still doing so by re-drafting the piece with a different emphasis from Rajiva's. The reason? The belief by Mickey Z that Jackson Pollock was, in using the words of Martin Luther King, a 'creative extremist' because he dribbled a bit of paint on some canvasses and made the cover of Life magazine. Mickey did recognise though that the abstract expressionist 'school' was "infamous" and "changed the face of art". But infamous for what? Being dissolutes? Drunks? Artistic frauds? What was the direction of change? Rajiva deals with that and the "pointy heads" who lauded them in her essay. So for something else.
(Incidentially, there is another visual art that has removed people from the canvass like abstract expressionism and it is the calligraphic art of Islam.)
At the same time the CIA was busily boosting a fringe group of anti-people avant-garde artists into the mainstream and onto public consciousness, the American population were being terrified by the McCarthy anti-communist witch hunts. To believe these programmes were not connnected is to be living in La-La Land with the Teletubbies who have TV aerials sprouting from their heads, a bit like Rajiva's "pointy heads".
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Sunday, 21 January 2007 |
To Me You Come
To me you come
and register a feeling.
Something allusive with fluid emotion,
time in broken clocks,
exotic dreams,
twilight aromas,
memories.
I want for you
the honeysuckle and the fern
to fondle your dreams
till the seas
sway no more with the moon.
ⓒ Les SkeatesBe first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail | Read more... |
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Sunday, 21 January 2007 |
Down Among the Minerals
Even now
I need to love.
Even now,
having seen,
been
so many men
burying past loves in graves of self-esteem
and prestige amongst the males.
Full grown adults these
living the life of the boys,
offering thorns from dead roses
as sharp edged put downs;
the weak excuses
for fear an honest appraisal of care,
and then sneer
at the widowed tears of love's leaving.
I don't know about you,
but even now
I need to love,
to lay this weary, addled head
between the firmness of your thighs
down among the minerals
and caress,
taste
the essence that makes
for difference.
ⓒ Les Skeates
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I Found the Lost Poem of Mickey Z |
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Tuesday, 09 January 2007 |
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I Found the Lost Poem of Mickey Z.
I dreamt a poem last night
Caressed the pillowhead with light.
But on waking the words had gone
And I was back to early morning vague.
Coming round over a coffee and a fag,
Hacking and wheezing while reading the morning's rag,
Shocked, there before my eyes was Mickey Z's lost song;
Dubya, extraordinarily, was renditioned to The Hague! Copyright: Les Skeates Mickey Z - Cool Observer Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail | Read more... |
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Granddaughters, Goddesses and Gangsters |
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Monday, 08 January 2007 |
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In a previous essay , when first told my daughter was pregnant, I wrote about daughters, landscape and time with a slight detour via the Greek god Hephaestus. At its end I promised a future essay on finding his mother, Hera's mum. Well this is it, I hope. It could be deemed odd being told you are a grandfather by your mother. But that's what happened just before Christmas. The daughter gave birth to a daughter. The daughter started to experience difficulties towards the end with an increase in blood pressure such that the obstetrician thought it warranted inducing the birth two weeks before term. It was a hard labour of 18hrs but she is young and strong and in the end she gave birth to a beautiful, healthy 7lb 6oz girl - the granddaughter. When we spoke she was high as a kite on the rollercoaster of emotion but which has settled down since. I wish them all well and a future of peace. Why is there a variance from what is termed the norm in a father/daughter relationship between my daughter and myself? Simple. My own stupidity. The relationship with her mother didn't survive the pregnancy so even before she was born I was relegated to the role of a weekend father. Then, when she was eight I left London to take on the role of Welsh Secretary of the CPGB against her wishes. That political decision gave the impression I didn't care for her, that there were other priorities in my life and it fractured an already fragile relationship. Though not as extreme, a common experience for left political activists whose actions have estranged them from their children. Actions that seemed logical at the time and which were made for what was thought honourable reasons, have a way of rebounding in unsought for ways. The undiagnosed condition of multiple sclerosis didn't help in the making of more sensible decisions at times in my life.
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Friday, 15 December 2006 |
I've just finished reading Gilad Atzmon's latest missive carried by Dissident Voice . Gilad is a Jazz musician and writer, a self-exiled Israeli who has served in the IDF and is resident in Britain. He has quite a unique take on the politics of Zionism which because of his high profile has drawn to him the hate of all the Jewish British political groups from left, right and centre. In his own words; "I may as well be the King of The Jews. I have achieved the unachievable, accomplished the impossible. I have managed to unite them all: Right, Left and Center. The entirety of the primarily-Jewish British political groups: the Zionists the anti-Zionists, Jewish Socialists, Tribal Marxists, The Board of Deputies, Jewish Trotskyites, Jews Sans Frontieres, Jews Avec Frontieres for the first time in history all speak in one single voice. They all repeat exactly the same misquotes. They all hate Gilad Atzmon.... .....But why do they hate so much? The answer is simple. Once Judaism is eliminated, what remains of Jewish identity is pretty threadbare. Once stripped of religious spirituality, all that is left of Jewishness is a template of negation fuelled by racial orientation and spiced up with some light cultural context. Sadly, I have to say that though very many emancipated and assimilated Jews have adopted universal humanist ideas, secular collective Jewish identity has never matured into adopting a universal humanist ideological standpoint or even a philosophical insight. The reasons are simple:
A. Racial or even ethnic orientation cannot form a basis for a universal ethical argument.
B. Chicken soup or Jewish humor (culture) does not make an ideological argument."
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Sunday, 10 December 2006 |
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By Ommission.
Time For those Black, Began with their slavery. Or so my history teacher said.
Copyright: Les Skeates
Today a leaked report accused British schools of 'systemic racial discrimination'. The haiku was originally written in the 1970s but still has relevance today. Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail | Read more... |
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The Despicable Politics of a Home Secretary |
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Monday, 13 November 2006 |
Ain't Talkin'. Just walkin'.
Bob Dylan Modern Times
In the last post I produced a timeline looking at anti-Islamic/Asian sentiment as it manifested itself in the timing of police terror raids, media coverage, the pre-arrest involvement and timing of Crown Prosecution Service press releases. Part of the panoply of Psy-ops.
The timeline also gave an indication of the way people are being smeared by some Labour Ministers, especially Reid and Kelly - the Mortificant. I think it really upset them when I again pointed out the surreptitious use of the paedophile scare to try and smear Muslims. Specifically by using the verb groom. Well Reid used it again last Monday in the House of Commons when arguing against the inclusion of a House of Lords amendment to the UK/US Extradition Treaty 2003 and for a meaningless government amendment designed to dismiss the Lords amendment. This time he tried to tar any opposition in Parliament to the Americans not having to provide a prime facia case for extradition in a British court with support for paedophiles. To quote John Reid:
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Psy-ops (again) and the Abuse of Language |
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Monday, 30 October 2006 |
The last few months have been good for Psy-ops machinations but not good for Muslims or the fabric of a multi-racial Britain. The word 'muslim' seems to be preceded in every news bulletin or newspaper article by the word 'terrorist' making them synonymous with one another. Where to start a time line! 10.08.06. Muslim homes throughout the country are raided and arrests made on suspicion of planning a coordinated terrorist attack on at least 10 aeroplanes. Over the next few days the media were full of scare stories which helped ratchet up the fear levels for the Other. Sensationalist claims were made by police - "mass murder" on an "unimaginable scale". It got so bad that two Asian British men were escorted off a flight from Malaga to Manchester because White British passengers were suspicious of them talking in a language they couldn't understand. The government case started to unravel quite quickly. The feasibility of preparing and mixing liquid explosives in a plane's toilet disproved; no plane tickets had been purchased; many of the 24 arrested didn't have passports; the Crown Prosecution Service involved in the planning of the raids - outwith all precedent; the release of the suspects names by the Bank of England . Non of which stopped the media addressing the arrested as terrorists without the usual legal caveat of 'alleged' being placed before it. Tried and made quilty by the media before any evidence is presented at a trial.
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