Well dear friends, The Limpet newspaper is switching from monthly to occasional publication. The Limpet ran as a monthly from September 2008 till August 2019, running to 204 issues. The paper initially got started as a vehicle to publicize Cornwall Council’s disastrous plan to destroy a small beach and area of tidal rocks at the heart of Penzance. The business consortium involved included H.R.H. Prince Charles, Duke of Cornwall and future King of England. After rallying popular opposition to this plan, working in partnership with a small group of local activists, we won the case and defeated the opposition. A small beach was saved and you can visit it to this day. We saved the Holy Headland (Cornish: Pen Sans) and The Limpet was deeply happy to have played a part in that struggle.
After the police-slaughter of Ian Tomlinson in London I wrote extensively on police-violence and murder and covered a variety of cases in Britain and abroad. The Limpet brought attention to the Lao Gai system of slave-labour camps in China, producing cheap goods for the western market and also the barbarism of organ-harvesting that continues in the Chinese state.
The Limpet’s RESIST CARDIAC ARREST campaign got started in 2010 and has robustly campaigned for a moratorium on tasers and weapons of conducted energy. The RCA campaign succeeded in getting an admission from the British Government that tasers are lethal weapons. This contradicts the aggressive strategy of Taser International, the manufacturing company, that spent millions in suing coroners who linked fatalities to tasers in USA.
After making contact with Florida’s “Caged Crusader,” Harold Hempstead, The Limpet largely concentrated on amplifying Hempstead’s advocacy for justice for Darren Rainey, a mentally-disabled black Muslim man who was steamed to death in a specially adapted torture-shower in Dade prison, Florida, back in 2012. Harold was awarded for bravery by the American Civil Liberties Union due to the risks he took to reveal the story of Darren Rainey. He was himself an inmate at Dade, Florida’s most lethal prison and his life was in the hands of guards who themselves described the place as “Auschwitz.” I’ve written more on this topic than any other, as the contemporary horrors and injustices of the US penal system represent a vast human rights crisis that gets barely any coverage in the big media. Harold is serving 165 (one hundred and sixty five) years without parole for his part in some non-violent burglaries. Overwhelming evidence exists to prove that his trial was conducted illegally and his case really is one of the most outrageous distortions of justice that you could ever hear of. Please consult the numerous articles on Harold Hempstead and Darren Rainey and also check out his book, that talks about the system we set up whereby he would send me messages from prison to publish from Britain. In my position as a ‘foreigner’ I was able to help him with communications without fear of intimidation and revenge by the corrupt authorities of the State of Florida. Working with Harold has definitely been the high point of my journalistic efforts and I regard him as a man of immense integrity, vision and courage.
I deeply recommend his book, Department of Corruption, and also the website I edit for him: Harold Hempstead Caged Crusader. They are both scrupulous and encyclopaedic archives of evidence proving a miscarriage of justice in the Rainey case and also throw light on Harold’s own background as a childhood Confidential Informant for Florida police departments and how he was set up and exploited from an early age.
There will definitely be more publications on Harold Hempstead on this channel.
Recently The Limpet has given coverage to the planetary crisis we all now face in the form of Climate Chaos. I am convinced that cooperation and open communication between all of us is absolutely vital for humanity to have a chance of literally saving the world before it’s too late. Only democratically accountable and transparent activism can succeed in this, the ultimate theatre of action, and it’s natural for any movement to attract egotistic ‘leader-types’ but the movement must evolve beyond that level if it is to attract mass-participation. The Limpet recommends that everyone, meaning everyone, starts germinating and raising trees for guerrilla-gardening. Don’t leave it to others to plant the trees we need, start your own little forest on your window-sill.
Limpets will still appear when the tides are right.
Wishing you all peace and happiness. A better world is in our hands if we dare to reach for it.
Jeremy Schanche, Editor, The Limpet – nature, democracy, free speech – Since 2008.
