Streetmedic Head Injury Advice

Head Injuries
If you’ve been hit over the head it can take up to 24 hours (and sometimes more) for symptoms  to occur EVEN IF THERE IS SERIOUS DAMAGE.

If you’ve been hit over the head you may need to go to hospital to get checked out.

Please attend the nearest Emergency Department if you have any of the following symptoms:

  • you were knocked unconscious by the blow to your head
  • you have memory loss around the time of your injury
  • you have a severe headache
  • you are nauseous or being sick  
  • you feel dizzy 
  • you become forgetful 
  • you are disorientated 
  • you are becoming drowsy
  • you have unequal size pupils (the black part in the centre of the eye) 
  • you have vision problems
  • have had another head injury recently

You can see from the symptoms above that you might not realise anything is wrong.  If you suffer a head injury:

  • Tell your friends what happened and what symptoms to look out for
  • Tell them if you are allergic to anything or have any other medical problems

Also, you can see from the list above that drugs and alcohol could result in many of the same symptoms.

  • Please don’t drink alcohol or take drugs for 24 hours after a head injury- it may result in serious symptoms being missed
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How to deal with tear gas

It is riot season again.

Here is some advice on how to keep yourself and your buddies safe should you happen to find yourself in the middle of a riot.

If you’re going to a protest where tear gas (or pepper spray) may be used, these are the street medic recommendations:

 

Prevention is far better than cure!

  • Do not wear contact lenses if you may get gassed or pepper sprayed as they will trap the chemicals against your eyes causing much worse damage.
  • Do not wear oil based skin products (ie clown make-up or sunscreen) as they will also trap the chemicals against your skin, again worsening damage.

 

Well fitting swimming goggles will protect the eyes and ensure you can still see.  You can get prescription swimming goggles if you usually wear glasses/contact lenses.

 

Next a well fitting FFP3 dust-mask will give you plenty of time to exit the gas cloud (should you wish to).

Follow the instructions on the packet to ensure you put it on correctly, or it will not work.

It must be discarded after use if heavily contaminated.

You can buy these online (search “fold flat FFP3) for example:

http://www.dustmasksdirect.co.uk/ultimate-ucf-p3v-ffp3-box-10-masks-504-p.asp

Ultimate UCF-P3V FFP3 Box 10 Masks

 

Mask

 

 

 

 

They won’t give you as long as a gas mask or quite as much protection, but are much less likely to get you arrested!

They fold flat and can just hang round your neck with the goggles hidden under a scarf.  They are cheaper to buy and much, much quicker to put on than a gas mask.

 

If you have been tear gassed

If you have been tear gassed (or pepper sprayed) whilst unprotected the following remedy will massively improve eye symptoms:

This is called Liquid Antacid and Water (LAW)

Wash your hands

In a clean bottle mix half and half

  • Clean water and
  • Mint Maalox or Milk of Magnesia (antacids- you can buy these in any pharmacy)

Make fresh LAW each day.

 

Procedure for using LAW on the streets:

  • Don’t touch the gassed person as they can’t see and that could scare them.
  • Tell the person who you are and that you can help.
  • First ask the person to remove any contact lenses and to stay calm.
  • Use LAW as an eye wash- repeat as necessary according to symptoms.

 

Your LAW will go much further if you can get hold of a clean spray bottle like this:

Spray bottle

 

Spray LAW at the affected person’s eyes while they blink repeatedly.  Again, repeat as necessary.

 

LAW can be used on the skin for pepper spray, but be sure to dab it off rather than spread it around further.

You can also use alcohol based wet-wipes to remove pepper spray from the skin- again make sure not to spread it further.

 

Contaminated Clothing

If you have been tear-gassed your clothes will be contaminated.

If you go into an enclosed space wearing them the gas residue will vaporise and everyone will start to suffer the symptoms again.

Always leave contaminated clothes outside, or seal them very tightly in a plastic bag.

 

If you can, wear a waterproof top layer which can just be hosed down (with you wearing it if necessary!) to remove gas residue.

This will also provide you with protection if water cannon are being used.

 

Stay safe on the streets!

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The Origins of Mayday

mayday history of
In the run up to mayday our good pals at Aberdeen City Arts Board (A.C.A.B) are back with another one of their mighty events – “May Day – the origins”
The guest speaker is Duncan McCabe of the Dundee Free University. Please come and join them and spread the word….As per it’s a free event but they will accept donations to cover any travel costs for the guest speakers….

Sunday 28th April – 6pm at the Belmont cafe….

https://www.facebook.com/events/111358775701227/

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It’s Not “Corporatism,” It’s Not “Crony Capitalism,” It’s Capitalism!

Chances are if you are reading this, you have spent a fair amount of time discussing the [Occupy Wall Street movement]. Anyone with a basic familiarity with the protests is aware that the demonstrators represent a broad spectrum of ideologies, beliefs and goals.

Ordinarily, there is nothing inherently negative about his fact. Since the 1970′s, America’s top capitalists have been grabbing an ever-growing share of the social wealth produced by the workers, while the latter have seen their real wages stagnate and drop despite a sharp rise in productivity. The fall of the Eastern Bloc, and the enshrinement of the TINA (“There Is No Alternative”) doctrine ushered in a triumphal wave of “Gilded Age”-style neo-liberal policies throughout the entire world, privatizing virtually everything in its wake.

Now that neo-liberal policies have finally led America to the brink of economic ruin, we should rejoice that there is now a large and growing movement pointing its finger at the power-drunk capitalists in Wall Street and other major cities. Broad fronts do have drawbacks, however, and no matter how large or loud they may be, some of these flaws can be exploited to the extent that the movement ends up accomplishing little, and long after its collapse no one seems to be able to figure out what went wrong.

Probably one of the biggest flaws of large, more or less disorganized movements is that their lack of concrete goals and clear messages makes them highly susceptible to hijacking and co-option. There have been complaints, even from otherwise sympathetic people, that the protest on Wall Street seemed to lack a coherent message, and that instead the general theme appeared to be little more than, “We’re angry at Wall Street and the bankers!”

At some point, a list of tentative demands was released, such as this one. It is highly likely that more lists will be issued and presented, if they haven’t already. The problem here is that when people are disorganized, united only by their emotional outrage, they leave themselves open to manipulation from seasoned snake oil salesmen who harness their rage and point it at a scapegoat.

Here’s a test for the reader. Read through the following passage regarding the Occupy Wall Street protests, and try to guess the ideological angle of the author.

At a point we call such corps “Monopoly Capitalists”. By the time a grouping of such Monopoly Capitalist corps are setting U.S. foreign policy, which the arms industry certainly does nowadays, the problem becomes unbearably apparent. Bechtel comes to mind, along with Halliburton, the Carlyle Group, Monsanto, General Electric, et al.

That part of Wall Street is certainly to blame. But that is not “Capitalism”. Instead, it is “Monopoly Capitalism”, and it is now observably moving America into a new world order with intent to place America under the alleged authority of a one-world government. As such, Monopoly Capitalism is un-Constitutional and must be opposed.

Truth: No corporation could threaten America without the help of the Federal Reserve. The Fed is the problem, and Wall Street is merely the symptom of that problem.

For the socialist movement in America to take this new-wave of Tea Party-type energy, the “Occupy” energy wave, and divert it into protesting a mere symptom of the problem is flat-out wrong. Especially when they use the crimes of corporate Monopoly Capitalism to attack American-styled free-market capitalism itself. That is why Oath Keepers is launching the movement to “Occupy The Fed Now!”

So who’s responsible for that train wreck of text? Do you know the answer? If you guessed that it’s probably from a Ron Paul supporter, you’re on the right track.

In fact, it comes from some very serious Ron Paul supporters. Ron Paul’s reactionary army of Austrian school economics missionaries are out in force to convince everyone that the free market is the answer to all of our problems, which is essentially the same message that has been coming from the neo-liberal mainstream for years. The only difference is that Paul supporters, like all Austrian schoolers, obsess over the Federal Reserve as the cause of all our economic woes.

For all practical purposes, this distinction between them and the fanatics of Milton Friedman is irrelevant. Believing that there is such a thing as a “free market,” and in fact believing that there has been or could ever be a “private sector,” which is not inextricably linked with and dependent on the state, is more than acceptable to the ruling forces of our society.

America’s so-called “left,” that is the “respectable” liberals, take a similar track to the neo-liberals and fringe Austrian school reactionaries. They too often refer to our problems as “corporatism,” “crony capitalism,” or occasionally “cowboy capitalism.” The solutions, we are told, amount to new regulations and reforms, punishing some of the “bad apples,” and of course, voting Democrat. The goals are “saving the middle class,” and ultimately amount to the same thing as the stated goals of the Ron Paul reactionaries and the Tea Party movement. All of these factions wish to take America back to some other era, one in which they think their ideas were better represented in society and government. The extent to which these visions of an earlier, better America are accurate, if at all, varies significantly. What remains the same in all these cases, on the other hand, is simply this – capitalism is good, there is no alternative, it just needs to be fixed.

The liberals say capitalism can be fixed with regulations, in some cases the restoration of some previously existing regulations. They are less vocal as to why corporations and lobbyists in the future won’t be able to achieve deregulation then as they did in the past. Most mainstream conservatives seem to imply that capitalism can be fixed if we just lower taxes enough, deport illegal immigrants, restrict abortion, and defeat the grave threat of Sharia law in the United States. The Ron Paul fanatics and their fellow libertarians insist that the U.S. isn’t capitalist, but it needs to be. It will achieve that when the Fed is abolished and virtually all government regulation is done away with.

Libertarians typically disagree as to the extent to which the state must be shrunk before “true capitalism” is born, but if they admit that the U.S. is definitely some form of capitalism, they will insist that it is “crony capitalism” or some other “bad capitalism.” The bottom line is, the problem isn’t capitalism, it’s always some corrupted form of capitalism or “corporatism.”

When we see how similar these political ideologies are when it comes to this crucial issue, it’s not difficult to understand why right-wing populists such as the Ron Paul fan club are so skilled at co-opting supposedly “left-wing” movements. This is in fact nothing new.

During the labor struggles which began in the mid-19th century and rose in intensity into the 20th, culminating with the Russian Revolution in 1917, capitalist apologists emerged from the right and left throughout the period. Their philosophies, goals, and methods often differed greatly, but a common theme was that capitalism, sometimes referred to as “free enterprise,” was not the problem. Something had corrupted the system, and so “true” capitalism or “free enterprise” had to be restored. After 1917, right-wing populism emerged in the form of fascist movements all over the world. Fascist leaders and ideologues sought to reconcile classes based on national or cultural unity, often claiming that class conflict was actually the work of foreign agitators. Of course, behind the fascist movements, funding their activities and turning a blind eye to their violations of the law, were members the ruling class, and particularly the big industrialists. While the industrialists were most concerned with the activities of trade unions and communists, during the global depression they also found themselves in conflict with financial capitalists, the bankers.

The message, with slight variations, is that capitalism, or at least “productive capitalism” or “free enterprise” was good, it was the banks and dishonest investors and speculators who corrupted everything. Hence, for example, one famous Nazi propaganda slogan, “Gegen bolschewismus und Hochfinanz,” meaning “Against Bolshevism and high finance!”

Fast forward to the present day and we see a similar trend, that is to say an emotional backlash steered towards various ideologies which proclaim capitalism to be inherently and unquestionably good, but that our system is not the “right” capitalism. It’s not the right capitalism because of the influence of corporate lobbyists, or corporate person-hood, or the influence of the Federal Reserve, or fractional reserve banking, consolidation, monopolies and so on.

Regardless of the source, this idea is entirely metaphysical, in the sense that it completely ignores the question, “How did we get to this point? How did the good capitalism that supposedly existed at some undetermined time in the past turn into the bad capitalism today?” Few even attempt to answer these questions. Austrian schoolers will gleefully point to the creation of the Federal Reserve, but they are hard-pressed for answers when you point out the many economic crises and bank failures which occurred prior to the Fed’s creation. Moreover, if one does their homework they will see that companies lobbying the government for favors, as well as government intervention in the market, has existed since the dawn of the United States. Indeed, the U.S. would not exist, or at least never would have achieved its position in the world, were it not for the actions of its government.

On the subject of “monopoly capitalism,” this is indeed a true form of capitalism, but it is a very natural stage of capitalism and doesn’t represent some mode of production other than capitalism. The same goes for “corporatism.” Many large multi-national corporations began as much smaller companies. The so-called “free market” is not an obstacle to monopoly but rather a facilitator of monopolies. It is incumbent upon every capitalist in a given industry to attempt to dominate the market. There is no interest in “playing fair” so as not to crush the competition. It is curious indeed that the prophets of the free market, be they neo-liberal Friedmanites or Austrian schoolers, preach the virtues of free market competition based on the self-evident “fact” that humans are self-seeking entities, and yet they seem to expect the stockholders and directors of major corporations to go against their economic self-interest and maintain a state of fair competition with their rivals. Perhaps even more absurd, they should refuse to use their massive wealth and resources to obtain favorable treatment and other benefits from the state, thus sacrificing a crucial advantage over their competitors. And they must perform these actions on their own, out of the goodness of their capitalist hearts. Surely no Ron Paul fan would dare suggest that the state force them to. Keep that in mind the next time one of these reactionary populists tells you about “rational economics,” as they so often do these days.

Let’s come back to reality now. Anyone can do some research into the largest multinational corporations and find out how they started. Many have quite humble roots. Capitalism is a mode of production, and like previous modes, it evolves over time. It does not disappear one day just because the state passes new regulations or removes old ones. It does not change into some kind of “wrong” capitalism just because lobbyists curry favor with politicians; were that the case we could say that capitalism never existed at all.

Capitalism does not disappear with the creation of a central bank like the Federal Reserve; central banking was a necessary development of an expanding capitalist economy. The problem isn’t “crony capitalism,” “cowboy capitalism,” “monopoly capitalism,” “hyper-capitalism” or even “neo-liberal capitalism.”

You can pair “capitalism” with any prefix, adjective, or noun as you see fit, but the internal contradictions, exploitation, instability and absurdities don’t lie in the words. They are all inherent features of capitalism, plain and simple. Any proposed solution to the inherent problems of capitalism which essentially boil down to more capitalism, are inevitably doomed to failure.

 

http://www.filmsforaction.org/news/its_not_corporatism_its_not_crony_capitalism_its_capitalism/

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An injury to one is an injury to all!

Aberdeen City Arts Board (A.C.A.B.) in association with Aberdeen Anarchists & The Shared Planet Society Presents:

 The Autumn Series. No.2

“The Industrial Workers of the World.”

Dek Keenan is an organiser and key member of the Industrial Workers of the
World (IWW). In this the second of Aberdeen City Arts Board’s Autumn
series of talks, Dek will give a broad outline of the organisation’s work
and practice both here and abroad as well as provide some historical
context.

The Wobblies as they are often affectionately known, is an international
radical workers union. It’s aim is to unite all workers irrespective of
trade with the common purpose of overthrowing the employing class. It is a
rank-and-file organisation, with a long and inspiring history. The IWW
boasted 100,000 members in the 1920s.

Visit for more information: www.iww.org

First time at our meetings or the University? A group will meet
outside the MacRobert Building (just off King Street near the roundabout
at Seaton) to enter the building together.

Sunday 4th November 2pm. Room MR268. MacRobert Building. Aberdeen University.

Posted in Freeschool, History, I.W.W., Industrial Workers of the World, Organise, Social Event, Trade Union | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Revolution disguised as organic gardening.

Aberdeen City Arts Board presents the Autumn Series:

“Revolution disguised as organic gardening.”

Aberdeen City Arts Board & Shared planet society presents an informal
talk hosted by Simon Gall on Perma-Culture organic gardening and it’s
importance.

Aberdeen University Campus – New Kings Building – Room 14.

October 9th – 19.30hrs.
See you there!

Kings is a safe space with full access.

Posted in Education, Enviroment, Freeschool, General, Permaculture, Social Event | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Aberdeen Against Apartheid: From Johannesburg to Jerusalem

Aberdeen SPSC would like to invite you to the event ‘Aberdeen Against Apartheid: From Johannesburg to Jerusalem’ taking place on Friday the 24th of August. This will be upstairs at the Blue Lamp and begin at 7pm.


The evening is part of Aberdeen Against Austerity’s Summer Lecture Series and will feature talks and discussions on the parallels between the struggle for justice in South Africa and Palestine.

Speakers will address the struggle against South African apartheid in Aberdeen (Tommy Campbell and Harry Bygate) and aspects of Israeli apartheid (including freedom of movement, political prisoners, ‘settlements’, water, access to land and the JNF, and energy resources).

We hope you can join us on the 24th.

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The Summer Series no.5

Please join us for an evening with Aberdeen Feminists who are hosting an evening talk on feminism and it’s role within radical political movements.

The talk will be followed by the usual lively Q&A and live acoustic music and DJ Iona does Riot Grrrlllllll….

See you there!

No Pasaran!

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We are all Pussy Riot

Although this news is not new news A.A. would like to also say…

“WE ARE ALL PUSSY RIOT!!”

We are all Pussy Riot!

 Corporate media Rip Off Alert!

“Pussy Riot function symbolically as the head of a protest movement in Russia that is being shut down. Bloggers have been arrested, and people are scared to express any anti-Putin sentiment. Only state-sanctioned demonstrations are allowed. The slide into dictatorship is apparent and, significantly, one of the biggest benefactors has been the church, which has performed a massive “land grab”. Pussy Riot exist to draw attention to precisely what is so disturbing, a totalitarian nation where the church and state are become one. Some have warned that Russia is becoming a new entity, a Christian fundamentalist state. Members of the Orthodox church have said the separation of the secular and the spiritual is “a western idea”. This what Pussy Riot are up against.

The women have been called Satanists by state prosecutors and various priests, though their supporters paint them as sweet young mothers. Doubtless they are, but they are also cleverly using long-established forms of anonymous anarchic protest. The balaclavas mean anyone can be Pussy Riot. The Guerilla Girls in the Art World did this. An anarchist “strike” once involved all of us writing with the byline Karen Eliot. Occupy does it. The dull and respectable left too often ignores the genius of these forms of dissent.” – Suzanne Moore (Full article here )

 

For more info – http://freepussyriot.org/

 Pussy Riot Wiki – Click Here.

No Pasaran

Words by The Dirty Hoof.

 

Posted in anarchism, Big Brother, Dictatorship, Dirty Hoof, Feminist, Guerilla Art, Prison, Protest, Pussy Riot, Putin, Religion, Riot, Riot Girl, Russia | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Summer Series no.3 – The Impact of Big Biomass.

Please come join Aberdeen Against austerity & Aberdeen City Arts Board [ACAB} at the Blue Lamp for a informative talk and discussion on the environmental impact of growing Big Biomass for energy.


The talk is presented by Allly Coutts and there will be a relevant movie to follow.

As per, all our event are free/donation on door.

All donations go toward the small costs involved with setting up the event (projector hire, etc) and any spare will go toward the social center fund.

We hope to see you there….

No Pasaran!

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