...and the first visitor to the camp afterwards was an ex- marine guy,(or special forces or something), who brought some good, basic provisions and talked about having fought in Malaya and only found out afterwards that he'd been rounding up trade unionists, journo's and human rights types, more than dodgy "terrorist" types...good bloke.
At 11a.m. on the eleventh the little cross nearest the camp, by the road looking out across the Gareloch at Shandon, was quiet for a lot longer than two minutes. Some ace inscriptions on it as well as the names. Went to the nearest local for half an hour or so afterwards, then a couple of us were at the nearest library, in Helensburgh, further down the loch nearer Glasgow, looking up some other stuff, and happened across an illustrated "Honour Role" from the church service when they dedicated the Helensburgh War Memorial that someone had donated to the library. It had a picture of each individual, and the Shandon crew. Made it much more real- for me anyway. Us. Anyway, thought it was worth mentioning, 'cos there must be lots of peoples grandparents houses that've got similar things hanging around that could be donated to various local libraries, because peoples families sometimes move away from areas, but its nice for the local communities to be able to remember better, and that'd help. It'd be good to find out a bit more about people as well, a photo, a rank and a date's hardly the whole picture, and a funny anecdote or two about better times and what people would've liked to come back home to would be good, and its the sort of detective-project-thing that schools could probably do, if its in the next few years while their kids or grandkids or people who knew them are still alive.
The British legion in this part of Scotland's also recently put up another, new War Memorial on a little island on the horizon (Cymrae? not sure of spelling!) specifically for those whose bodies havent yet been found, MIAs etc, that seems a good idea.
To keep up the anarcho-credibility of "Faslania", at this point it feels like we should put something wildly "extreme", but instead heres something "radical" and utterly sensible: re the american election...

...if it was stolen, or "hacked", maybe not even by the Republicans per se, but by systematically shaving, weighting and shuffling the "populer vote"at practically every bit of the process,(even throwing a few odd Kerry wins in as "red herring"s), but mainly not in "swing" places, then... "this time its structural",eh?...can we? Media, political financing... taking the con out of the economy some- maybe we could do a bit more of an " and then we all woke up" approach and investigate everything - everything more carefully, rather than talking new scapegoats and falling for some new twist in the infowar. Its the "machine"- there's no pilot. Programmed into society, valuing the financial malarkey more than life or common sense, making puppets even of the "wizard of oz" types...
If , in november, 42 % of american citizens still thought there was some direct operational link between OBL and Sadman H, and 32% think Saddam PLANNED 911, then its not because theyre stupid, its because they were failed by their media, as we were by ours, and still are, and we should get together, get up and get busy for a while and sort it.
It is "fixed", in effect at least, but it is also broken and needs fixing. Structurally.
Not only at the wheel, but at the axle. Ditto for so many other areas of society, in the U.S. and globally... different symptoms, similar problem... did somebody mention moneychangers... not that many people doing those jobs really beleive the jobs make sense anymore, particularly after a recent 700 billion dollar bankruptcy scandal underwritten by the public showed that two and two COULD make five... or three, if the bung to the accountants was big enough. If the difference between "democrat" and "republican" states last year was that in the dem states 64% of people thought that banks, corporates and insurance co's "had too much power, but in rep states "only" 62% thought so... DESPITE their media,(etc)(- sponsored mainly by...?!), its surely worth thinking more deeply about things now. Its 2004/2005, and the world is speeding up, even if the planet isn't, and we mightn't, globally, get much more chance. More people than ever before are thinking about "international" issues now, and recent pensions weirdness, big money scandals etc. means, well, everyones finance-sceptic these days.
However "extreme" this might sound to anyone who persuaded their friends to vote
democrat rather than green, or republican rather than libertarian, or at all(!), then think how much milder on people, - families, communities - each of us - will a change be that alters the groundrules back to being a bit more sensible rather than turning one corporation against another again a "different" way, or threatens a whole new set of people/ occupations or towns in any country with the "sudden scrapheap" when you'd think the whole point of progress would be that we'd've stopped doing that to ourselves.
However accepted by the media echo-chamber, and "experts" ( who, with all respect, seem for too long to have been too close to the "timber" to have seen the forest burning), bad economics are only another sort of "friendly fire."
We do "all breathe the same air", as JFK put it a long time ago. "All hands on deck" for a while... particularly all of us who havent really been "that sort of person" in the past... and our very diversity can be our strength again: there are a few important international meetings and decisions coming up next year, and by changing the agendas with surprising, articulate, wonderfully sensible, varied, firm pressures and initiatives from "down here" beforehand, that dont give up and keep bouncing back... then, yeah, a future. Quite probably. Very possibly a much better future for all of us ... ALL of us, not only most of us, or even merely the vast majority or "everyone except THOSE b*****s."
Worth a go. Dont see another way. Push the agendas beyond rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, rather than paying people to hush those annoying noises that the turbulent lookouts keep making.
Can we? Really? But that would take...
On the eleventh of november, 2004, despite all "political logic" , from opposite ends of the U.S. party political spectrum the local Libertarians and the Greens united to put down the first of the judicial challenges to the Ohio vote. They won. Then in a few short days their members raised enough to pay for the entire recount. Without that...
So, is it really that certain, about Ohio and everything?
Well... take a deep breath. Yes.
Amongst many others, we've been prompted to rescan the web, beyond the chaff and red herrings, and underneath the "no, it CANT be" media suppressions, distractions etc, and checked with the old/new tec-ies and operator-types who might know a thing or three about this sort of thing... as doubtful it could be provable as that it occurred, to be honest.
It can. It did. It will be. When, and how, to what effect, and "now what?!" - those ARE now the real questions, however hard it is to beleive, at first. And a lot of the answers to those questions are very much up to us. Worldwide.
Even with all the media games, events engineering, hi-tech,low-tech, intimidations, smears and worse, all the financiers "thinktanks" and all the infowar's slaves, it had to hack it. Elec-trics. Yes, and its unravelling. "No papertrail"? The probabilities and statistical analysis alone would have stitched it. But the continuing cocked up cover ups make this "Mac Sennet", Keystone coup crumbling a cert. So now it is counter-coup, all together now, because it IS a stupidity coup, more than anything else.
To read some of the last few days testimony from Congress's House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, and particularly the detailed and so very, very pointed list of questions from Representative Conyers et al, and then slowly realise what they mean - is to understand what it means not only for Ohio, but for the entire of America. Then to remember that all the morning and afternoon exit polls were showing a K lead (...not that unreasonable really, since he'd seemed to most of the commentators to have, on balance, won the tv debates and had the best last campaigning month, and what with the 3 million extra voters registered mainly by anti-GWB types, and a vastly increased youth turnout and all...) and that some of the odd bits of evidence coming in were to do with an apparent rigging of the exit polls. The evening exit polls.)
If theres a danger of interference from outside parties, yet mainly a faith in the process, a "minus 25 million votes" in one county might be interpreted as a classic "you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" style heist-flick cock-up, or merely a n indicator of vulnerability in the system . There isn't faith in the system. Computer programmers agree, there is almost zero faith in the new electric democracy machineries invulnerability. When 638 citizens go into the voting booths and yield a vote for victory of over 4,000,(GWB!) it's true, it could've been a "prankster", to quote an "election official", but... And the optical readers. And the counters,the collators,the tabulators, the columns... and a turnout of over 98.7% in any county is more than strange. Its beyond stalinist turnouts ever claimed.. and probably very corrupt.And crumbling. We should all keep our eyes open, and keep it up! more-so! everyone!
...and we think more Remembrance will help. ...enough war.