Carmarthenshire Blogger Arrested for Performing a Public Service

Not long since South Tyneside Council's very expensive attempts to stop Independent Councillor Ahmed Khan's inconvenient publicising of local Council officers' activities, news arrives that Carmarthenshire Council is now sending in the police to arrest innocent members of the public just for filming open meetings - meetings that in many other areas are already streamed online for everyone to see, paid for by the taxpayer. And here is blogger Caebrwyn doing it for free in her own time. Far from being harassed, she is doing a good turn and should rather be congratulated for her excellent service to the community.

Caebrwyn says: "I was taken outside the door, handcuffed, searched, my phone taken and marched out to the waiting police cars. I was then taken 30 miles to Llanelli police station where I remained handcuffed for another hour before being 'processed', and put in a cell for another two hours.

By this time I was very disorientated, worried about my young daughter who needed picking up from school, I was cold (the police had taken my jacket and shoes and socks) and distressed. Without a solicitor present, I was then threatened by three police officers who said that if I didn't sign an 'undertaking' not to film/record any more meetings I would be kept in overnight, I am not sure now whether they could even keep me that long. Earlier in the day I had been told that they was looking at the relevant legislation and were 'talking' to the council, it is now clear exactly what was discussed ..."

More ...

So after all this, you may well ask, just exactly what has the Council got to hide?

What price transparency and accountability of the, ahem, democratic process?

Dirty Secrets Hidden on Craggy Island

In the Irish Catholic State

' Mary Norris ended up in a Magdalene laundry for disobeying an order. A teenage servant in Kerry, she took a forbidden night off, and was taken away to a convent where the nuns had her examined to see was she still a virgin (which she was). From there she was dispatched to the Magdalene laundry in Cork. Immediately on arrival, the nuns changed her name – standard practice in all the Magdalene laundries. "When I went in there," recalls Mary, "my dignity, who I was, my name, everything was taken. I was a nonentity, nothing, nobody." '

Imprisoned, dehumanised and forced to work as a slave. Pour encourager les autres. Place in authority a corps of uniformed functionaries who are cut off from normal social interaction and deny their fundamental human nature as sexual beings and you have disaster in the making.

Graceful Illusion

A couple of very interesting reviews of Adam Curtis' latest offering, "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", one on The Politics of Well-Being and another over at Media Ecologies.