I found this little gem in the colorado criminal code. The wording is vague enough to give me pause, but then again I think that it infringes on free speech to an extent that it wouldn't hold up on appeal.

18-11-203. Membership in anarchistic and seditious associations.

(1) Any association, organization, society, or corporation, one of whose purposes or professed purposes is to bring about any governmental, social, industrial, or economic change in this state or in the United States by the use of sabotage, terrorism, physical force, violence, or bodily injury, or which teaches, advocates, advises, or defends the use of sabotage, terrorism, physical force, violence, or bodily injury to person or property, or threats of such injury, to accomplish such change, and which shall, by any such means, prosecute or pursue such purpose or professed purpose is declared to be anarchistic and seditious in character and to be an unlawful association.

Houston Anarchist Black Cross is a small collective of political prisoner supporters and prison abolitionists that have been active in Houston since 2000. This past October, Houston ABC had a meeting where we reflected on the work that we do, and our successes and failures.

Houston ABC is transitioning into working primarily as a zines to prisoners project. We are asking for help from the community to help us get the work out about our project and help fill requests for radical literature by folks incarcerated in the US South.

Check out the catalog: http://houston.indymedia.org/news/2008/01/62890.php

Silence used to be, to varying degrees, a means of isolation. Now it is the absence of silence that works to render today’s world empty and isolating. Its reserves have been invaded and depleted. The machine marches globally forward, and silence is the dwindling place where noise has not yet penetrated.

Civilization is a conspiracy of noise, designed to cover up the uncomfortable silence. Wittgenstein understood the loss of our relationship with silence. “The unsilent present is a time of evaporating attention spans, erosion of critical thinking, and a lessened capacity for deeply felt experiences.”

Silence, like darkness, is hard to come by, but mind and spirit need its sustenance. Certainly there are many and varied sides to silence. There are imposed or voluntary silences of fear, grief, conformity, complicity. For example, the AIDS awareness silence=death formulation. These are often interrelated states, and nature has been progressively silenced as documented in Rachel Carson’s prophetic Silent Spring. Nature cannot be definitively silenced, however, which perhaps goes a long way in explaining why some feel it must be destroyed.

On January 19th, about 30-50 people mingled around outside Modesto’s cold downtown area to listen to various anarcho-folk singers, eat hot soup, and also pick up free copies of magazines and pamphlets. Various performers played, including Rien from Sonora, Kenneth Sime from Modesto, Cody from the bay area, and Starla, who came all the way from Canada.

Realizing that we were in the middle of another (daily) continued assault on regular folks in the area with the newly proposed (and now passed) dumpster diving ban (which would make dumpster diving a misdemeanor, get you up to a $500 fine, and also would land a person up to 6 months in jail) someone brought a large banner that read “Trash the Rich: Fight the Dumpster dive Ban.” Some within the group took it upon themselves to march around downtown after the local security took down the banner from a metal barricade. Then the police showed up and said it was time for their regular downtown meeting at the newly installed pig station and the group had to move from where it was located right in front of its doors. Police have installed a new sub-police station to better coordinate their hold over the downtown area, which is apparent in the lack of any youth in the area. As one person commented, “Why do you think no one is down here.” Police are also getting a brand new surveillance system which will cost around $400,000 (hence the logic of further criminalization and more tickets).

“Could you please turn it down, just a little bit?!” Janet Kalish turned away from me and yelled across the room, to the group of neighborhood kids bunched around the community center’s single computer. They were blasting rap music as loud as the speakers would go, and some of the boys, dressed in black puffy jackets and jeans, mimicked the rapper whose music video played on the screen. The kids looked up, and one of them turned the volume down. Or seemed too. A minute later, the noise was back again, and Janet and I couldn’t hear ourselves talk.

We were at a party to raise rent for the 123 Community Space in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. The space, founded by four grassroots organizations focused on anarchism and freeganism, was conceived as a neighborhood gathering-place for young people and community members interested in starting creative projects. Kalish, a middle-aged Spanish teacher and an active member of the New York freegan community, was collecting admission fees that night. She began asking newcomers for donations, but the kids continued to brush past her, in and out, avoiding eye contact. As word of the admission fee began to spread, they slowly dissipated.

HE WAS AN ANARCHIST, AGITATOR AND JOURNALIST WHO WENT TO MEXICO TO DOCUMENT PEASANT REVOLT — AND HE ENDED UP FILMING HIS OWN DEATH

The Martyrdom of Brad Will

Even before he was killed by a Mexican policeman’s bullet, Brad Will seemed to those who revered him more like a symbol—a living folk song, or a murder ballad—than like a man. This is what the thirty-six-year-old anarchist-journalist’s friends remember: tall, skinny Brad in a black hoodie with two fists to the sky, Rocky-style, atop an East Village squat as the wrecking ball swings; Brad, his bike hoisted on his shoulder, making a getaway from cops across the rooftops of taxicabs; Brad, locked down at City Hall disguised as a giant sunflower with patched-together glasses to protest the destruction of New York’s guerrilla gardens. Brad (he rarely used his surname, kept it secret in case you were a cop) wore his long brown hair tied up in a knot, but for the right woman—and a lot of women seemed right to Brad—he’d let it sweep down his back almost to his ass. Jessica Lee, one of the few who spurned him, met Brad at an Earth First! action in southwestern Virginia the summer before he was killed. They skipped away from the crowd to a waterfall where Brad stripped naked and invited Lee in her swimsuit to stand with him behind sheets of cascading water. He tried to kiss her, but she turned away. She thought there was something missing inside him. “Like he was incomplete, too lonely,” she says. Maybe he was just tired after a decade and a half on the front lines of a revolution that never quite happened.

On a walking tour of Denver, Unconventional Action makes plans for the Democratic National Convention.

If not for all the pink hair and inventive body modifications, the two dozen people wandering around the Golden Triangle on a sunny Saturday could be mistaken for delegates surveying the city in advance of the Democratic National Convention.

"Gather 'round, everyone. Welcome to Denver. My name is Rockslide. I am going to be your tour guide for the day." The bearded twenty-something clears his throat and announces an itinerary similar to what might be offered by convention organizers: "We're going to go though Civic Center Park, walk through downtown to the Pepsi Center."

A couple of individuals from New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles met informally and wanted to propose a national/inter-regional gathering for Anarchist People of Color.

This is just a draft proposal, it is not the final say in how this shit is going to happen or what's going to happen at it.

This is being put out to initiate some discussion around this idea.

This conference will be a serious gathering to strategize, dialogue, plan, follow through, and create the foundation for real solidarity and revolutionary movement throughout different regions.

Anarchist Bookfair in Zagreb (ASK - Anarhisticki sajam knjiga) is annual anarchist event that aims to become a long-term, developing project. First three bookfairs went well, and we hope to bring in more and more people every year as participants, publishers, groups, projects - whoever is interested in what the bookfair has to offer.

ASK will take place in Zagreb every spring, as a local resource for anarchist and libertarian books and other publications. We also aim to open discussion on subjects that are important for the anarchist movement, or for our local community.

Life is far too short to spend days, weeks, years just getting by -- getting treated like an object. How much of your life do you really get to control? How often are you really fully alive and free?

If you wish things were different and dream about a better world, you're not alone. Vast numbers of people from all walks of life realize that life as we know it isn't satisfying our real needs and has to change. But hoping and dreaming isn't enough.