Archive for September, 2024
Freeing My Mind on a Ten-Day Summer Holiday Digital Detox
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I recently returned from a ten-day digital detox, during a family holiday in Sicily, which not only involved me being completely offline — away from the internet and from all social media — but also involved me having no information whatsoever about the outside world, not watching any news or even glimpsing a single headline in a newspaper.
It was a liberating, albeit brief experience, and not just because summer holidays — unknown to the working class until the 20th century, and not widely involving foreign travel until the dawn of cheap flights and package holidays in the 1980s — are meant to be a time when we take a break from the stresses and strains of our working lives.
In my case, it was an important, perhaps crucial psychological break from an accumulation of often almost intolerable bleakness brought about by the particularly difficult times we’re all living through right now, largely involving the derangement of our leaders, and of almost all political discourse, all of which has been exacerbated by my presence in an often suffocating media and social media landscape.
The Four Fathers Release New Album, ‘Songs of Loss and Resistance’, on CD and as a Download
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I’m delighted to announce the release, on Bandcamp, of ‘Songs of Loss and Resistance’, the new album by The Four Fathers, marking ten years of our existence as a south London-based band playing mostly original folky, rocky, reggae-inflected protest music.
The album, our third, and a belated follow-up to our second album, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’, released in November 2017, was recorded, sporadically, over the last six years, in sessions in July 2018, December 2019, July 2022 and January 2024, with the great Charlie Hart, a multi-instrumentalist and producer, best-known as a member of Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance in the 1970s and ‘80s, who also plays electric piano and accordion on three of the songs. Do check out Charlie’s work if you don’t know it, as he is currently involved in two very worthwhile musical projects — the Equators, an epic collective of talented players of African-tinged jazz and r’n’b, and a revival of Slim Chance, mostly featuring musicians who played with Ronnie in the band’s bucolic heyday, following Ronnie’s exodus from the excess of the Faces.
The long genesis of the album was caused by personnel changes, the huge disruption of Covid in 2021 and 2022, and the difficulty of getting everyone together to rehearse, and, most specifically, to work on arrangements of the songs in the gaps between work commitments and, more recently, the kinds of family illnesses that begin to afflict those of us in our 50s and 60s with ageing parents.
Please Support My Reader-Funded Writing and Campaigning for Guantánamo’s Closure Over the Next Three Months
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Dear friends and supporters,
Every three months, I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my ongoing work as a genuinely independent journalist and activist, primarily in relation to my work on the US prison at Guantánamo Bay (on which I have written and published 2,600 articles over the last 17 years), but also touching on other topics that seize my attention, including, these days, two topics of colossal importance that are generally either misreported or under-reported by the mainstream media — Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the biggest “war” that any of us have ever experienced; namely, the war waged by humanity on a liveable climate, which is manifesting itself via the unmistakable signs of unprecedented climate collapse.
If you can help me to continue this work, please click on the “Donate” button above (or here) to make a payment via PayPal. Any amount will be gratefully received — whether it’s $100, $25 or even $10 — or the equivalent in any other currency.
You can also join my monthly sustainers by making a recurring payment, ticking the box marked, “Make this a monthly donation,” and filling in the amount you wish to donate every month. If you are able to do so, a regular, monthly donation would be greatly appreciated.
Photos and Report: Eleven Coordinated Global Monthly Vigils for Guantánamo’s Closure on September 4, 2024
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Huge thanks to everyone who took part in the latest coordinated global monthly vigils for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on September 4, 2024. My apologies for taking so long to collate the photos and to post this report, but on the day of the vigils I flew out to Sicily on a family holiday, where I was offline as part of a ten-day digital detox — a pause in the relentlessness of the bad news that plagues us on so many fronts, which I can heartily recommend to all activists and campaigners at risk of burnout from atrocity overload.
If We Should Live, Our Scribes Will Record 2024 As The Beginning of the End for Humanity
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If we should live to tell the tale, our scribes will record the third decade of the 21st century as the time when the last vestiges of coherent political thought — and any notion of political integrity — were abandoned by those with power and influence, not only in national parliaments, but also in the media and in corporate boardrooms throughout the Global North.
In the last two and a half years, our leaders have chosen to revive apocalyptic war and slaughter as the purpose of existence, while simultaneously ignoring the greatest “war” of all — humanity’s “war” on the precious climate that makes all human existence viable.
The two are, I believe, closely connected, the frenzy for war and slaughter a buried, unacknowledged, psychically traumatized response to the realization — as spelled out incontrovertibly by climate scientists — that everything our neoliberal societies have worshipped and profited from over the last 40 years is killing us.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
