I am off dog-sitting for some days. Am quite looking forward to it, though here in Britain they have regulations that dog-owners have to pick up the dog-shit as there is a 500 pound fine (I think its 500, maybe this is the maximum). This dog shit fine is probably singular in the world. Am looking forward to getting the promised camcorder, so desperately needed. Hopefully it is in my hand next weekend, and then it is off making videos! There is an especially interesting article on the Centre for Social Media Studies. Richard Stallman has a blog now, which is offering a write-up of quite extraordinary encounters, like e.

Just watching videos as having bad cold. “Surplus” is absolutely great, will try to get an english version to screen in Edinburgh and somewhere else. “Hacktivists” is great, too, also a german version by ARTE. “Aljazeera exclusive” is also brilliant, by BBC world, should be seen by every journalist student. “El Che- investigating a legend” is very educating, but would be even more so if the interviews would be subtitles in english. The film includes lots of rare footage, unfortunately I still don’t know what exactly happened in Bolivia as the interviews with the eye witnesses weren’t translated, and there was no footage.

Just finished reading Stuart Christie’s “Granny made me an anarchist”. This is the first time in ages I managed to finish reading a book. I bought the book after Stuart Christie was up here for presenting his book for Word Power. It is quite interesting to read his account of the sixties and seventies here in Britain and the anarchists, autonomists and even trotzkyists behaving in these times. Actually this book is quite interesting for people who like reading autobiographies. Of course, in autobiographies, the protagonist is always portrayed in a positive light, sometimes maybe even too positive. However, I do like the account of Stuart Christie that he hardly ever meet bad people even in prison.

This blog has been updated, resulting in a whole load of error messages, and links partly not working. Though it has now a nice wysiwyg editor. The nobordercamps are dead now, via Radio Z and political magazines it got announced that the organisers closed down their mobilisation and organising structure and distributed the rest of the funds. Reason was apparantly not the repression at the last noborder camp in Cologne, but also the lack of the movement to work together, resulting in a split of the noborder camp in an antirepression camp, a gender camp, a refugee solidarity camp, but also another reason given is the lack of response to the mainstream politics via the noborder camps.

I have nearly finished the book Spitzel, which is a German book published by Assoziation A and researches police informants, snitches, narks, police spies, stoolies, and similar. It is a very good book, particularly suitable for the London and British left revolutionary movements, which have the habit of accusing anybody they don’t like or who disagrees with their politics of being a police informer, without any evidence, any proof, and without any interest of providing or discussing the accusations, just for ruining somebody’s elses reputation and to get critical people out of their way. In this book, there is a wide collection of most famous cases of informers, starting with Judas and Christ, the accusations in Karl Marx’s paper versus Michail Bakunin of being a spying Russian police agent, of state agents and informers in the GDR, of the FBI’s COINTEL program against the Black Panther Party by killing Fred Hampton and George Jackson, Leo Trotzki’s writings and experiences to escape police surveillance, snitches in literature, such as Rosenkranz and Guildenstern in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.