Say yes to peace *Please pass this email on to your band members or anyone you know who plays in a band*. Some of you may want to sign the petition below. - it is to be found: here in case you don't want to wade through the explanation:
The Government is intending to introduce new licensing laws Governing the performance and rehearsal of music in public buildings, a move that will drastically affect the whole culture of music-making in England and Wales. Essentially, what they are also trying to do is legally redefine the notion of "performance" to include "performance and/or rehearsal." They want all venues (and this includes any church holding rehearsals or performances not directly related to the religious function of the building) to be subject to a Public Entertainments License. Currently they haven't published a fee but leaks to date have suggested that this fee will be between £500 and £1000 per annum. Clearly this will do a lot of harm to both amateur and professional music, drama, and dance - informal rehearsal venues will be a lot thinner on the ground as smaller organisations that play host to choirs, amateur theatre, musical groups, and concerts will simply not be able to afford the license. It will be illegal even to burst into song spontaneously in the pub, as the current two-in-a-bar rule will be abolished, and any "entertainment" at all, however informal, will require a license. Failure to comply? Currently suggested penalties include a £20,000 fine or a 6 month prison sentence.
It's worth noting that not only the administrator of an unlicensed venue but also any musician performing in such a venue would be criminalised. If you want to read the whole Bill (great fun, I can assure you!), it can be found here.
This threatens the whole spectrum of musical performance, from a production of Dream of Gerontius at Worcester Cathedral in the Three Choirs Festival, via school performances, music at weddings, and hospital concerts, right through to folk sessions in the local pub (a spontaneous activity encouraged in Scotland and Ireland).
There is a petition on-line, to be found here (the wording of this is taken from an early day motion, the text of which can be found here.
If you are a musician, or feel strongly about this, please can I urge you to sign this petition, and also forward this message on to anyone you can think would be affected or would care about the issue.
PLEASE put the details of this protest event in your calendar and pass it on to as many people as possible, and please attend if you can. Monday 27 January 2003, 1:00 PM Parliament Square, London Mozart's Birthday Silent Protest To illustrate the appalling impact that the Government's Licensing Bill will have on live and community music-making. Bring your instrument (AND A GAG (medical-type mouth-coverings work well), but *don't play it.
Contact: Caroline Kraabel 020 7237 1564
Many thanks TONY WREN
SAY YES TO PEACE.... SAY YES TO PEACE.... SAY YES TO PEACE....
Other classic case of this and previous governments robbing the poor, yet they (corrupt politicians) have conveniently lowered co-orperation tax to the massive multinationals by 20% in real terms over the last 20 years!!
Maz
Seaside Tribe
Building a beautiful vibe
Share your ideas with us on: 07811 260359
Seaside Tribe strive to deliver quality events & parties with integrity, diversity and a sense of discovery. We are always on the look out for musicians/bands, artists, and party venues. By supporting parties with purpose, you raise funds & awareness for ethical causes. Your help/feedback is appreciated.
Email suggestions: maz@theseasidetribe.org
InvitationSSSS This is an open invitation ...
Anyone that could possibly help me is invited to the "wedding" that is supposed to be held 25.01.2003. I had it all planned, but the other half told me in specific detail what he was wanting..... NOT WHAT I'D GOT SORTED!!!
Basically, he wants a mini version of the 2002 Dutch Teknival which was in the Bergen (Nijmegen) area. We went & had one hell of a time. Now, it's up to me .....
:(
HELP!!! All my contacts are still in that country, not the UK.
Any volunteers? South of England would rock.
:D :D :D :D
Bushisms "Will the highways on the Internet become more few?" — Concord, N.H., Jan. 29, 2000
"This is Preservation Month. I appreciate preservation. It's what you do when you run for president. You gotta preserve." — Speaking during "Perseverance Month" at Fairgrounds Elementary School in Nashua, N.H. — As quoted in the Los Angeles Times, Jan. 28, 2000
"I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family." — Greater Nashua, N.H., Chamber of Commerce, Jan. 27, 2000
"We ought to make the pie higher." — South Carolina Republican Debate, Feb. 15, 2000
"I understand small business growth. I was one." — New York Daily News, Feb. 19, 2000
"It is not Reaganesque to support a tax plan that is Clinton in nature." — Los Angeles, Feb. 23, 2000
"I thought how proud I am to be standing up beside my dad. Never did it occur to me that he would become the gist for cartoonists." (sic). "If you're sick and tired of the politics of cynicism and polls and principles, come and join this campaign." — Hilton Head, S.C., Feb. 16, 2000
"How do you know if you don't measure if you have a system that simply suckles kids through?" — Explaining the need for educational accountability in Beaufort, S.C., Feb. 16, 2000
"I've changed my style somewhat, as you know. I'm less I pontificate less, although it may be hard to tell it from this show. And I'm more interacting with people." (sic) "I think we need not only to eliminate the tollbooth to the middle class, I think we should knock down the tollbooth." — Nashua, N.H., as quoted by Gail Collins in the New York Times, Feb. 1, 2000
"What I am against is quotas. I am against hard quotas, quotas they basically delineate based upon whatever. However they delineate, quotas, I think vulcanize society. So I don't know how that fits into what everybody else is saying, their relative positions, but that's my position." — Quoted by Molly Ivins, the San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 21, 2000 What!?
When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were," he said. "It was us vs. them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they're there." — Iowa Western Community College, Jan 21, 2000
"The administration I'll bring is a group of men and women who are focused on what's best for America, honest men and women, decent men and women, women who will see service to our country as a great privilege and who will not stain the house." — Des Moines Register debate, Iowa, Jan. 15, 2000
"I read the newspaper." — In answer to a question about his reading habits, New Hampshire Republican Debate, Dec. 2, 1999
"The important question is, How many hands have I shaked?" — Answering a question about why he hasn't spent more time in New Hampshire, in the New York Times, Oct. 23, 1999
"I don't remember debates. I don't think we spent a lot of time debating it. Maybe we did, but I don't remember." — On discussions of the Vietnam War when he was an undergraduate at Yale, Washington Post, July 27, 1999
"The only thing I know about Slovakia is what I learned first-hand from your foreign minister, who came to Texas." — To a Slovak journalist as quoted by Knight Ridder News Service, June 22, 1999. Bush's meeting was with Janez Drnovsek, the prime minister of Slovenia.
"If the East Timorians decide to revolt, I'm sure I'll have a statement." — Quoted by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times, June 16, 1999
"It was just inebriating what Midland was all about then." — From a 1994 interview, as quoted in First Son, by Bill Minutaglio
UK: Reading / Happy New Year! Hsppy new year to all who contributed to what I understand was an excellent party in Reading (no trouble, and pretty much left alone by the old bill!) which went on until 16:00 today.
Unfortunately I missed this one as well due to illness[1] - but I at least got a chance to wish my friends happy new year over a rather garbled mobile phone link over the din of the music!
Lets hope there are more events like this in 2003, especially as the weather gets better.
-GL-Reading, UK
[1] Don't worry, its nothing serious - just the usual winter cold/viruses, but although this was a brilliant party I didn't want to make my state of health worse by cycling 6 miles in the pissing rain, and then caning my body and not getting enough sleep b4 work the next day! At least I can get myself in better shape for the next ones...
new year eve??? hi i am from italy, i came to london for holiday..and i would like to go on rave on new year eve.so please if anyone know something in london let me know.thx
Parties on New Year’s Eve In Europe:
http://www.payetontekos.fr.st/
And Australia:
http://www.users.bigpond.com/rent_the_rig/NYE.htm
If you have any more free party listings to share, post them below...
Giving ecstasy the same status as heroin and cocaine misleading One of the Government's leading drug advisers has called on the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, to downgrade ecstasy to a class B drug. Professor David Nutt, who is on Mr Blunkett's official drug advisory panel, said giving ecstasy the same status as heroin and cocaine misleads young people.
"One of the sad things is giving them the message that ecstasy is as dangerous as heroin," said Professor Nutt, who is on the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. "Millions of kids every week take ecstasy and it's actually a very safe drug. I'm fully signed up to it being class B."
His views will strengthen calls from drugs campaigners, senior police officers and politicians for further reform of Britain's drug laws.
In July, Mr Blunkett announced the first relaxation of the laws for 30 years with the downgrading of cannabis to class C. Next month, he is expected to outline plans to improve access to treatment for drug addicts and increase the availability of heroin on prescription. But the Home Secretary has rejected calls from MPs on the home affairs select committee to reclassify ecstasy.
Professor Nutt, head of clinical medicine at Bristol University, added: "It's clearly safer than heroin or crack but more dangerous than cannabis. Politics is never far away with ecstasy. I think the Home Secretary's decision to reclassify cannabis and not ecstasy was based on fear of public opinion [after the death of the teenager, Leah Betts]."
Last year, 40 ecstasy-related deaths were reported. Between 1993 and 1997, 72 people died after taking the drug compared with 275,000 who died from smoking or alcohol-related illness. This year, three leading psychologists started a controversy by claiming ecstasy may not be dangerous.
One, Dr Harry Sumnall of the University of Liverpool, said previous research was flawed, researchers were biased and there is no conclusive evidence to show the drug damages the brain.
Dutch psychologists are planning a five-year study into ecstasy's side effects.
Pubdate: Nov.24 2002
Author: Sophie Goodchild, Home Affairs Correspondent
URL: http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=355267
There’s millions of us – and we aren’t losers (BBC Health) A new study shows that millions of Europeans have tried ecstasy. Contrary to the stereotype of drug users being marginalised and suffering from their drug use, most are professionals or students.
Between three million and 3.5 million adults in the EU have probably tried ecstasy at least once, says a European drug monitoring body.
Up to half a million have taken it once a week or more at some time in their lives, according to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction.
In a review of the situation across the EU's 15 member states, the Lisbon-based agency found that most users of ecstasy and other synthetic drugs are not people on the "margins" of society or in any way disadvantaged.
Instead, most are students or young professionals, most of them relatively well off.
"These trends seem to have established themselves rapidly across the EU," said Mike Trace, the Centre's chairman.
"The main reasons people say they consume ecstasy is to feel more pleasure when they dance, and to have fun," the Centre said in statement.
"Other recreative drugs are consumed to gain confidence or energy, or in search of new experiences."
Policy-makers
Whilst noting that reducing the risks to the ever greater numbers of "normal" young people who take drugs is one of the main concerns of policy-makers at local, national and international level, the centre warned of the need for responses to the problem to be realistic and well-founded.
"The consequences and risks of recreative consumption of drugs should be the object of scientific assessment," it said.
In particular, it called for action to break the close link between excessive consumption of (legal) alcohol - "the mind-altering substance most frequently consumed for recreative purposes" - and (illegal) drugs.
To be effective, it said, such action should be taken in cooperation with bars and clubs on the one hand, and the drinks industry on the other.
The work of the centre in monitoring developments in member states and acting as an information exchange is at the heart of an increasing tendency for EU member states to learn lessons from each other's experiences and move more in step in policy terms.
Recent developments include, in Portugal, the decriminalisation of possession and consumption of small quantities of any drug, and in the UK the downgrading of cannabis to a class C drug - effectively decriminalising its possession and use.
The centre is one of a number of specialised institutions under the aegis of the European Commission, each based in a different EU member states.
BBC Health, posted 23 November 2002, accessed 25 November 2002
URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2503925.stm
NY Times Editorial: Reefer Madness We interrupt our coverage of the war on terrorism to check in with that other permanent conflict against a stateless enemy, the war on drugs.
To judge by the glee at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the drug warriors have just accomplished the moral equivalent of routing the Taliban - helping to halt a relentless jihad against the nation's drug laws.
Ballot initiatives in Ohio (treatment rather than prison for nonviolent drug offenders), Arizona (the same, plus making marijuana possession the equivalent of a traffic ticket, and providing free pot for medical use) and Nevada (full legalization of marijuana) lost decisively this month. Liberalization measures in Florida and Michigan never even made it to the ballot.
Some of this was due to the Republican election tide. Some was generational -- boomer parents like me, fearful of seeing our teenagers become drug-addled slackers. (John Walters, the White House drug czar, shrewdly played on this anxiety by hyping the higher potency of today's pot with the line, "This is not your father's marijuana.") Some may have been a reluctance to loosen any social safety belts when the nation is under threat. Certainly a major factor was that proponents of change, who had been winning carefully poll-tested ballot measures, state by state, since California in 1996, found themselves facing a serious and well-financed opposition, cheered on by Mr. Wlters.
The truly amazing thing is that 30 years into the modern war on drugs, the discourse is still focused disproportionately on marijuana rather than more important and excruciatingly hard problems like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines.
The drug liberalizers - an alliance of legal reformers, liberals, libertarians and potheads - dwell on marijuana in part because a lot of the energy and money in their campaign comes from people who like to smoke pot and want the government off their backs.
Also, marijuana has provided them with their most marketable wedge issue, the use of pot to relieve the suffering of AIDS and cancer patients.
Never mind that the medical benefits of smoking marijuana are still mostly unproven (in part because the F.D.A. almost never approves the research and the pharmaceuticals industry sees no money in it). The issue may be peripheral, but it appeals to our compassion, especially when the administration plays the heartless heavy by sending SWAT teams to arrest people in wheelchairs. Thus a movement that started, at least in the minds of reform sponsors like the billionaire George Soros, as an effort to reduce the ravages of both drugs and the war on drugs, has become mostly about pot smoking.
The more interesting question is why the White House is so obsessed with marijuana. The memorable achievements of Mr. Walters's brief tenure have been things like cutting off student loans for kids with pot convictions, threatening doctors who recommend pot to cancer patients and introducing TV commercials that have the tone and credibility of wartime propaganda. One commercial tells pot smokers that they are subsidizing terrorists. Another shows a stoned teenager discovering a handgun in Dad's desk drawer and dreamily shooting a friend. (You'll find it at [url]http://www.mediacampaign.org./[/url] Watch it with the sound off and you'd swear it was an ad for gun control.)
Drug czars used to draw a distinction between casual-use drugs like marijuana and the hard drugs whose craving breeds crime and community desolation. But this is not your father's drug czar. Mr. Walters insists marijuana is inseparable from heroin or cocaine.
He offers two arguments, both of which sound as if they came from the same people who manufacture the Bush administration's flimsy economic logic.
One is that marijuana is a "gateway" to hard-drug use. Actually Mr. Walters, who is a political scientist but likes to sound like an epidemiologist, prefers to say that pot use is an "increased risk factor" for other drugs.
The point in our conversation when my nonsense-alarm went off was when he likened the relationship between pot and hard drugs to that between cholesterol and heart disease.
In fact, the claim that marijuana leads to the use of other drugs appears to be unfounded.
On the contrary, an interesting new study by Andrew Morral of RAND, out in the December issue of the British journal Addiction, shows that the correlation between pot and hard drugs can be fully explained by the fact that some people, by virtue of genetics or circumstances, have a predisposition to use drugs.
Mr. Walters's other justification for turning his office into the War on Pot is the dramatic increase in the number of marijuana smokers seeking professional help. This, he claims, reflects an alarming rise in the number of people hooked on cannabis.
But common sense and the government's own statistics suggest an alternative explanation: if you're caught with pot, enrolling in a treatment program is the price of avoiding jail. And marijuana arrests have doubled in less than a decade, to 700,000 a year, even as use of the drug has remained static.
In other words, the stampede of pot smokers into treatment is probably not a sign of more dependency, but of more aggressive enforcement.
So what's really going on at the White House drug office?
I can think of three answers.
One is that they are sincerely worried about pot. Marijuana is not harmless.
Regular pot smoking can mess with your memory and attention span, your immune system and fertility.
Mr. Walters may feel the dangers justify a lot of hyperbole.
A second explanation is the old political-bureaucratic imperative. To justify a $19 billion drug control program you need a threat that touches middle-class voters - not just the few million mostly wretched, mostly inner-city, mostly nonvoting users of heroin and cocaine.
And you want to be able to claim success.
When he appointed Mr. Walters, President Bush announced he wanted "measurable results," and the measure would be a reduction in the number of people who admit to being recent drug users - 10 percent by 2004. Well, since three-fourths of illicit drug users are pot smokers, the easy way to get the numbers down is to attack the least important aspect of the drug problem.
That will give President Bush some bogus victories to boast about when he runs for re-election.
The third reason is the culture war. Mr. Walters is a veteran of the conservative political bunkers, where pot is viewed as a manifestation of moral degeneracy. "It's still about the war in Vietnam and growing your hair long," says Mark Kleiman, a drug law expert at U.C.L.A. and a thoughtful centrist in a debate monopolized by extremes. "It's the 60's being replayed again and again and again - the S.D.S. versus the football team." For this White House, to give ground on pot would be a moral surrender.
Mr. Kleiman's view, which I find persuasive, is that the way to deal with marijuana is to remove criminal penalties for possession, use ( recreational or medicinal ) and cultivation of small amounts, but not to legalize sale. It's silly and costly to treat people as outlaws for enjoying a drug that is roughly as addictive as caffeine and far less destructive than tobacco or alcohol.
At the same time, the inexorable logic of a legal marketplace would mean a lot more consumption and abuse.
Consider this statistic: Fifty percent of the liquor industry's revenues are derived from alcoholics - people who down at least four drinks every day. The sin business, whether it's a private liquor company or a state-run lottery, may preach responsible behavior, but it thrives on addiction.
Once you're past pot, you face the gloomy landscape of hard drugs, along with newer chemical worries like Ecstasy. If your experience of the hard-core drug world is mostly from movies like "Traffic" or two splendid HBO series, "The Corner" and "The Wire," you may be inclined to despair of easy answers.
You would not be wrong.
The moralistic drug war has overstuffed our prisons, left communities fatherless, fed corruption, consumed vast quantities of law enforcement time and money, and led us into some cynical foreign ventures, all without making drugs scarcer or more expensive. Legalization, on the other hand, means less crime and inner-city misery, but more addicts.
The things worth doing are incremental and unglamorous and lacking in demagogic appeal.
They aim not at winning a spurious war but at minimizing harm - both the harm caused by drugs, and the harm caused by draconian enforcement. Almost everyone ( including Mr. Walters, in principle ) agrees that diverting drug users into treatment, preferably backed by the threat of jail, is much better than consigning them to prison.
But liberalizers are all carrot, and drug warriors are all stick.
The drug czar who so eagerly intervened in Arizona and Nevada has kept his distance from efforts to humanize New York's merciless and failed Rockefeller drug laws.
Drug reform requires not only money, creativity and patience, but also the political courage to face down ideologues. And political courage, you may have noticed, is a lot harder to come by than drugs.
Reefer Madness
The New York Times
By Bill Keller
A remembrance service… The London squat party scene is today in a critical condition. It is on a
life support machine, the few party people keeping it alive are the odd
blips amongst an otherwise stagnant lifeline on the heart monitor, a
lifeline that has been attacked and assaulted, beaten and broken, in the
end destroyed and defeated by the very people it was there to protect and
fight for.
For a time yes, there really was "no law here, only the law of
the drug and of the music" and the reaction, chemical and physical of so
many different ingredients coming together every Saturday night was
something that if packaged would have on its label "the way forward".
However this package would not have been the property of a monopolising
multinational pharmaceutical bastard.
It would have been for the people. So many people, so many different
cultures, attitudes, beliefs all coming together to search for a new,
different and exciting and for some, life changing experience. None of
"you can't come in with those trainers on". None of "you have to pay this
extortionate amount so I can then afford to run my ozone destroying, asthma
causing car". No blatant lying like in the late 80's about "we are all as
one, I may be a promoter of this event but I am just like you" as they
count the thousands made from taking a bit of space and saying it is theirs.
No rules necessary, instead of telling us what to think, feel, say,
oppressing - it was instead encouraging the basic human instincts of love,
happiness and respect.
What of this temporary utopia now? It lies amidst a sea of foil heroin
wrappers, tin cans used for crack which are enough for an aluminium can
Blue Peter recycling appeal, the only chemicals combining now are the blood
from acts of violence and the shit and puke unwittingly discharged from
lifeless ketamine bodies who lurch around, seeing nothing, hearing nothing
- enlightened minds? Minds not seeing anything, minds concerned with making
more money than the next "competitor" who can't scream "k, rock, brown" as
loudly in that black K hole of a stairwell. Minds that are about as
enlightened as that City executive closing his latest money making deal.
Minds that are about as enlightened as the one who sees something different
and wants to destroy it. The party scene is no more. The definition of
party does not include violence, aggression and hate. Unplug the machine
nurse, this one has breathed its last. RIP London squat parties.
Mr S - ripsquatparties@hotmail.com
Update Fix,
Just a quick one to let you know that despite my best efforts I simply couldn't coax your forum's posts from the old board [even the second time round]. I hope you don't mind too much.
So. Jersey/PA area Dj Spins Hoooooouse, mostly.
Also plays with 2step, jungle, breaks, trance, hardhouse, hardtrance, mainstream dance, adn, oh yes Michael J......
Looking for other dj's in my area....soooo
give a yell and let me know you're out there!!
Peas
DjJuttin'
UK/Reading: party squatters lose *home* many of u here (from da south of da UK especially dirtycircus refugees)may have had a good time @ last weeks Reading warehouse party. It was also home to 5 of Readings squatters - and a workspace 4 working on backdrops, art, bikes, rigs etc.
following last weeks party, Thames Valley Police immediately got in touch with the owners, and helped the owners fast-track the court case through civil court, and now these squatters have been evicted from home as a reprisal for the party.
The graffiti drawn on every wall, and damage (although minor) was cited in court as a reason for swift eviction - as I type they are clearing out - and worse still managers of other companies in the industrial estate, angry that their van was parked in "their" parking space, have called the old bill and had their van towed away for no tax, so the squatters have also lost their transport
luckily they have contingency plans. Full details are restricted for security purposes but at least they have somewhere to sleep at the weekend (and it is cold as fuck here in Reading!)
OK they did know that a second party in the venue may hasten eviction - but graf and stuff on the walls didn't help their cause.
To give u lot that party, they sacrificed their HOME.
Next time you take out your marker pen - THINK. IS THIS SOMEONES HOME? and if you DO scrawl on your own walls at home (even if Mum gives you a slap) think about a press release I read from British Transport Police - loads of graf artists are caught when Pc Plod visits their home address and sees their tags on the bedroom wall or door.
Use your brains...
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