During the years 1811-1918 many popular protests occurred throughout Britain. Two of the main protests that happened throughout this time period include; Luddism and The Swing Riots. Their significance, how far they challenged the authorities and how successful their challenge was in bringing change to Britain is mainly down to opinion.

The Luddites were a radical social movement that were active during the nineteenth century. They protested against the new machines that were introduced into factories during the Industrial Revolution. They began protesting in Nottinghamshire however, the protests soon spread throughout the Northern part of England to Lancashire, Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire, this shows that they were gaining significance. The Luddites used tactics such as, destroying machinery and sending threatening letters with death threats signed by “Ned Ludd”. The Luddites were a very effective group and some of their protests included up to 100 men, they also destroyed £100,000 worth of property in 14 months and in some places new machinery wasn’t even introduced due to fear that the Luddites would destroy it. Luddism was the first large-scale and open display of radical dissatisfaction through the machine breaking which occurred in the form of riots. These were isolated incidents and the movement was strongest in 1812. The government however reacted strongly to these protests and treated them seriously; as a result they sent thousands of troops to the areas where there had been trouble. However there were few arrests and executions of the Luddites, this can be linked to the fact that they were protected by local communities. In 1812 the parliament made machine breaking a capital offence and 17 men were executed in 1813.

The Captain Swing Movement was active during the years 1830 to 1831. The group was made up of farm workers, which is similar to The Luddites as they were also working class. Captain Swing was the name that appeared at the end of threatening letters during protests in England, thus the group being named Captain Swing and the swing riots. During the Swing Riots threshing machines were smashed up, petitions were made for an increase in wages and the movement spread throughout the East and South of England. The government’s reaction to these riots was harsh as they feared a revolution would occur similar to what happened in France. The authorities also feared that the rural revels would join the urban workers. This then led to a change in the way the government dealt with Swing Rioters and more extreme sentences occurred – 19 were executed, 505 transported and 644 imprisoned. This Movement was similar to the Luddites in that swift and harsh sentencing from the authorities reduced the effectiveness of the protest movement.

Overall, this shows that both radical movements were significant to challenging authority, however not effective enough overall.

DEL RIO, Texas – The recent release of the film version of Dan Brown’s best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code, has sparked protests among Christians in Texas, Alabama, and New York.

Thousands of Christians rampaged Sunday in Texas and Alabama, setting fire to the Danish Pastry Emporium, burning French flags, and lobbing stones at movie goers from a Maronite Catholic church as violent protests over caricatures of the story of the life of Jesus spread.

Christian spokesman Oral Roberts made a forceful statement protesting the violence. “It is a critical situation and it is very serious,” he said on radio. “Enough is enough, and our people should get more involved. Claiming Jesus was married is bad enough; next thing you know, some author will claim that Jesus was a Jew!”

The Danish Pastry Emporium urged pastry lovers to leave riot areas as soon as possible, while plans were made to pull their popular Easter Bunny and Sunday Celebration pastries.

Catholic protesters would not take to the streets on Sunday. Instead, they started their violent protests on Saturday. Bishop Willie Dewitt addresses a mixed crowd of Catholics, Protestants, and atheistic protestors.

“The Catholic Church finds the books and movie by Dan Brown highly offensive and demeaning,” Dewitt said. “It is a terrible day when people are allowed to cast such aspersions on the one true religion.” As police subdued the majority of the crowd, Dewitt claimed that “the church has two thousand years of unblemished godliness. That is, if you except the Inquisition, witch hunts, heretic burnings, Crusades, pedophile priests, decimation of the West Indies, refusal to decry Hitler, antagonism towards democracy, and a few other minor incidents.”

Da Vinci Code director Ron Howard said: “Now it has become more than a case about the film: Now there are forces that want a confrontation between our cultures,” Howard said, referring to Hollywood and church groups. “It is in no one’s interest, neither them or us. Heck, the churches have made a fortune on religious stories, so now it’s our turn.”

Syria blamed Denmark for the protests, criticizing the Scandinavian nation for refusing to apologize for the popularity of the movie in Europe.

“It is unjustifiable under any kind of personal freedoms to allow a person or a group to insult the beliefs of millions of Christians,” a spokesman for Fox News said.

After anger had broken out across the Muslim world over 12 caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten in September, Hollywood decided to capitalize on the outrage that would follow the release of a film that would upset most of Christianity.

The book and film have touched a raw nerve in part because one of the ten commandments forbids any depictions of Jesus, his private life, and the Prophet Muhammad for fear they could lead to idolatry.

“Insulting the church and Jesus is unacceptable, resentful, and a sign of barbarism,” Opus Dei’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Isaac O’Malley said, adding that the church planned to take further action. “We’ll be asking serious questions,” O’Malley said. “We’re putting the ‘quiz’ back into inquisition.”

In Memphis, some 42 protesters came by the busloads to rally outside the Super-Dooper Cinema and Package Goods, where they chanted, “There is no god but God, and Jesus is the messenger of God, and Jesus didn’t date!” Some 2,000 troops and riot police were deployed.

Some 1,000 people tried to march to the offices of the ACLU and other aid groups in New York. Police tossed bread and wine coolers into the crowd to disperse them, officials said. Nobody was hurt.

“The violence now, particularly the burning of pastry shops abroad, is absolutely outrageous and totally unjustified, and what we want to see is this matter being calmed down,” Iranian Foreign Secretary Mohammed Abdul Mohammed-Swartz said in Tehran, adding that the media must exercise its free speech privilege responsibly, or die.

Robert Sprackland reporting as

PETER PAUL ENMARRIE, NEWSWEAK REPORTER

The “Arab Spring” has a chance to really last if the protesters formulate and demand a coherent anti-imperialist and mainly economic developmental program

Some have compared the CIA backed Middle Eastern protests to the failed wave of liberal uprising around Europe in 1848. That description however may only apply to the protests against the regional monarchies and not the Arab republics.

Political currents of some of the key countries of the region are similar to pre-WW1 Europe:

The Muslim world is where Europe was in 1850-1900. Their brief “Napoleonic period” was the combination of Western world’s brief occupation and Nasser’s efforts. This introduced some of the wealthier Muslims to liberal values. As of today, Muslim liberals are slowly wrestling away social influence from blatant coalition of clergy, oligarchs, sub-national ethnic/tribal leadership, and Western educated authoritarian playboy aristocracy. Only these liberals provide genuine source of nationalism. They are the ones that have real sense of moral indignation of poverty and their country’s backwardness. The liberals want majority of their countrymen to be represented in a broadly legitimate government, united, and have the modernization that unified national action can bring.

Genuine nationalism for most of the Muslim world is not yet possible. Large swaths of the population don’t really have united societies or legitimate governments to really fight and root for. The clergy still effectively competes with state governments for people’s affections. Sub-national affiliations are also very strong still. Influence of supra-national church and sub-national factions will decline as long as literacy continues to spread and college education becomes widely available.

Of course, some parts of the region are now ready to begin engaging in genuine nationalism (bottom up nationalism versus top down Nasserist/Baath party efforts) and that this is dangerous within current international set up.

It is very possible that citizens of the Middle East will become as willing to die their artificial new countries as an average Frenchman or German was in the trenches of WW1. (The recentRobert Gates outburst that NATO cannot break the spine of western Libya betrays genuine amazement at the degree of nationalistic consolidation that Gaddafi achieved via his unifying and psychologically enriching Kaiser-esque rule)

Egypt, being at the forefront of this process, is key to the whole region. To try to avert possibilities of mass violence that genuine nationalism can unleash: United States can start promoting EU style pan-Arabism to skip the national step altogether. Free trade, common currency, and a loose confederate structure can go a long way towards confusing and splitting the energies of future Middle Eastern nationalists.

Many ethnic groups around the world have successfully skipped a nationalistic period so this is definitely doable. It appears United States is now following the advice of this magazine but perhaps for the wrong reasons (either to create exploitable chaos and deny the area to Chinese and RussiansOR to eventually releasepan-Arab unification energies as a bulwark against growth in Iranian influence [SCO connected country]).

If the Arab liberal protesters (children of well to do families) do not want their movements to be hijacked by the Western financial oligarchies, if they don’t want to become a socioeconomic Trojan horse, then they will need a list of economic demands and not just political ones.

What can such a list look like?

1) A developmental national state owned bank that can provide large quantities of credit for infrastructure projects that bring employment to the “youth bulge”

2) Nationalization or 50%+1 control (Putin style) of key strategic heavy industries and using the profits to create solid safety nets

3) A legal framework to break the power of the landlords and to have housing cooperatives (individual tenants have shares of ownership in the housing complex, are collectively the landlord, and decide on apartment building management democratically)

4) Expulsion of Western military presence, of foreign banks (via regulation on speculators), and of parasitic structures like the IMF

5) A policy of neutrality concerning doing business with the West, Iran, China, etc.

6) A legal framework to deny corporations personhood and rights. Requiring foreign corporations to directly invest, share technologies, and find domestic partners if they want to do business (China/Russia style)

7) A legal framework for more horizontal, co-operative, and democratic corporate structures. Demand for democracy should extend to the workplace

8) Separation of church and state, separation of military and state, and separation of foreign interests and state

9) Peaceful pursuit of nuclear energy to power up agricultural projects, mass transportation projects, and other infrastructure

10) The right to unions and jump starting unionization via state help (to make sure private oligarchic interests don’t overflow into the vacuum being left by the receding state power)

11) Shelter, food, medicine, and college education as a basic human right (tapping into psychological need to not only emulate aspects of other countries but to advance planetary socioeconomics via a uniquely Arab contribution)

That will definitely stick it to the tyrants. CNN, BBC, and other corporate puppets like British intelligence connected Al-Jazeera will be sure to change their tone in a heartbeat if such human centric demands are made. Maybe one of the demands should be total ban on garbage like CNN.

Many other economic demands can be added based on locality’s preference. The Arab elites should be overflooded with tangible economic goals so they can do their usual meeting halfway song and dance routine.

To conclude, Western efforts to amplify and redirect genuine expressions of indigenous discontent can in turn be redirected once more via an economic program that is hostile to neoliberalism. Then we’ll really see an “Arab Spring”.

I find that very few wives ask their husband if he is cheating on the spur of the moment. Many wives give this very careful consideration. After all, no one wants to falsely accuse someone of something as serious as infidelity. Plus, if you are wrong and you accuse your husband of this and he is innocent, it could seriously damage your marriage.

So many wives will watch and wait. They will gather evidence. And they will mount suspicions that he can no longer ignore. Sometimes they will get up their courage to confront him, only to lose it again. In time, it will get to the point where they can’t take it any longer or he will do something that makes confronting him unavoidable. Still, sometimes the wife still isn’t absolutely sure that she is right. And so she will try to gauge his reaction as further evidence that he is cheating.

When she doesn’t like his reaction, she will confront him on that, too – telling him that an innocent man wouldn’t act in the way that he is. After the dust settles, she may wonder how an innocent man might act.

She might say: “my husband started acting strange about six weeks ago – shortly after he got a promotion at his job. He started staying late for work. He started dressing much better. I caught him up in the middle of the night texting someone. He would go to the office on weekends, which had never happened before. He started working out. Then one day I was running errands and I saw him at a restaurant with another woman. They weren’t touching. But there was something so intimate in their conversation and body language that I knew they were having an affair. I got so upset that I did not even approach them. But that night, when we were eating dinner, I told him what I had seen. He was furious that I left without saying anything. And he was very angry that I was accusing him of such a lack of integrity. He said that he is trying to fit in with his new position which means that he has to work more and dress better. He said the woman was a co-worker and that they have never even touched other than shaking hands. He went on and on for half an hour and all but threatened me that I had better not bring it up again. My husband is generally a laid-back kid of guy. He is not someone who gets angry in that way. His over-the-top response almost confirms for me that he is indeed cheating. But when I told him this, he says that the opposite should be true. He says that it is the innocent man who is angry. But anger is not common for my husband. I think he protests too much. How do men typically act when they are accused of cheating and are in fact guilty. Does an innocent man act differently than a cheating man?”

Reactions Vary: Honestly, the reactions that you get vary just like the personalities and the men themselves. Sometimes, perfectly innocent men will tend to overreact, while guilty men will seamlessly, calmly, and convincingly claim their innocence. A guilty man can talk about the affair endlessly, while an innocent one will change the subject immediately. You can’t always tell innocence or guilt based on these reactions.

Body Language Can Be Telling: Now, body language experts will tell you that there are usually always tell-tale signs that someone is lying. Someone who is lying will look away slightly. They will purse their lips. They will clasp hands or tense their shoulders. They will set their jaw. Some will even smile when their words sound anything but happy. However, often the confrontation happens so fast that you aren’t able to analyze posture and facial expressions.

Watch His Behavior Moving Forward: One thing that the confrontation can do is to shake the tree a bit. He knows what you suspect and now it will be interesting to see if he changes his routines at all. If everything is legitimately innocent, he may not change. But if he is cheating and doesn’t care if you know, then you may see the same reaction.

Make Yourself Visible: Here is one thing that I know for sure. An affair has a way of coming out. People slip up. Or they decide to confess. If he is cheating, you will likely eventually find out. But if he is otherwise acting normally toward you, is being attentive, then it makes sense to try to make yourself visible by taking him to lunch one day so that perhaps the other woman / coworker can see that your marriage is very much current and on track. If he’s willing to let this scenario play out, then this would tend to indicate that he is not cheating and doesn’t care if she sees you or knows that he’s actively participating in his marriage.