It took me almost a nanosecond to figure out who it reminded me of…
Almost as disturbing, whilst doing an image search to find a specimen picture of Herself I came across this lookalike agency which has boldly taken to reproducing its lookalike contact details in a format entirely similar to that used by prostitutes in telephone boxes
So, if you want a good time you know who to call
During the last general election, a few Conservative-voting friends of mine explained away their party’s dismal campaign performance with an explanation along the lines of…
‘The Tories are waiting for the Labour party to really fuck the country up. The last thing they want to do is take over the government just before a major recession. They’ll skip this election and aim to get elected next time’
If true, this is a cunning plan.
Rugby fans will be familiar with the concept of the ‘Hospital Pass’. I was an outstandingly crap rugby player and the only time anyone on my team ever tossed me the ball was when it came accompanied by four members of the opposing team and much pain.
The only potential flaws in the Tory masterplan are
In the few days since I’ve come back from holiday we’ve been treated to
And God knows what else
John Prescott connoisseurs the World over will treasure the following quote for all Eternity …
Ms Temple's boyfriend, lorry driver Barrie Williams, 46, told the Daily Mirror: "I just can't believe that my darling Tracey has been sleeping with John Prescott behind my back.
I’ve just had a root around Google looking for an image of Blair and Prescott together. Unsurprisingly, there’s not much doing...
So I’ve decided to make do with this one instead
Anyway, if the Tories are serious about losing the next Election they really have to put their skates on and engage in ritual child sacrifice, smear themselves in fresh kitten blood or something else of that order. They’re up against real pros.
Top marks to Charlie Sheen
One week he’s the toast of the alternative media and inexperienced conspiracy nerds around the world for publicly airing his concerns about the official account of 9/11.
The next week he’s being accused of mentalist behaviour and making death threats against his ex wife.
Who would have expected such a turn of events?
You knob
In case anyone misses the news, Jean Charles de Menezes has been cleared of the the rape allegation considerately leaked to the press by the police a couple of months ago.
Now there’s a surprise.
So, by my reckoning that’ll now be the results of four separate fair and impartial inquiries needing a thorough dry cleaning before publication
Just to be clear as to my concern over this case…
We’ve come to a state of affairs in this country where our security services can execute someone in public, get caught out lying, alter evidence and smear the victim’s character and get away with it scot free
Nothing to worry about really. Everything’s just fucking peachy.
I’ve spent a fair portion of my Internet ‘on line’ time over the last few weeks engaged in a protracted debate with a True Believer in the ‘War on the Terror’. My protagonist has direct in your face experience of some of the issues involved and buys totally into what I personally believe to be the fabricated myth of an organised ‘Islamofascist’ (what a marvellous expression) global terror network. He believes that the American and British governments have, essentially, reacted to this threat along the right lines.
The discussion has taken place in a closed, private forum and has been characterised by its largely even-tempered nature.
Which is kind of unusual.
And this stuff important. The War on Terror and, in particular, key events such as 9/11 and 7/7 are the central justifications for wars, repression and all sorts of changes to the way our societies tick.
So if, like me, you believe the War on Terror is overcooked bollocks, containing more than a hint of self-fulfilling prophecy about it, you’re going to need some serious convincing as to the truth of the claims made by War on Terror advocates.
That’s why open jury trials are so important.
Trials are a far from perfect mechanism for getting at Truth but they are infinitely preferable to any Hutton or 9/11 Commission style enquiry.
Of course, with the advent of the 72 virgin crazed suicide bomber as a cultural phenomenom, trials of the perpetrators the 9/11, 7/7 or Madrid bombing attacks are conveniently thin on the ground. Unfortunately, having a live defendant is a prerequisite for most trials. In that respect, suicide bombers are the 21st century equivalent of the lone gunman so popular in the 1960s.
Whatever happened to lone gunmen anyway? They seem to have quietly slipped out of fashion.
Anyway, in the absence of first team players we have to make do with trials of lesser characters as a source of evidence which, unlike the horse shit in the media and government controlled enquiries, has been subject to at least some critical scrutiny.
And the results, so far, haven’t exactly proven to be a ringing endorsement of the Al Qaeda myth. Personal favourites include…
Yup, it's still looking like overcooked bollocks to me.
I mention all of this because I am looking forward to weeks of entertainment from the latest bollocks terrorism trial that has just started in London
Three on trial over ‘Red Mercury’ terrorism plot
It’s set to be a blinder. Not only were the three men set up by undercover reporter sheikh Mazher Mahmood, an individual with a solid track record of making crimes up for a living, but they are on trial for allegedly trying to buy Red Mercury, a substance that doesn’t actually exist.
What next?
Kryptonite?
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edit: I haven’t done the trial of the North London ricin terror masterminds justice. In addition to planning to infect toothbrushes with ricin, reseal them in their packaging and planting the tootbrushes on chemists’ shelves, the suspects were also accused of plotting to…
apologies for understating the serious threat these men posed to our way of life in the main body of this post
(The Guardian posted an interesting article on the ricin terror trial but was ordered to pull it for reasons of national security. A copy still exists here.)
A comment on a previous post mentioned that it made a nice change from my usual doom and gloom.
Good point
I’m far too downbeat too much of time.
In keeping with my new happyfeelgood vibe here are a few links devoted to the brighter, less cynical side of life…
Right, back to the doom and gloom…
For example, here’s an, admittedly ropey, picture I took in Italy last week
and here’s what I managed to come up with after no more than two minutes fiddling on Google Earth.
At this rate, five years down the line I’ll be able to set up a clip art gallery featuring people I know, a few dead dogs and a selection of charming indigenous poor people clutching their babies, chuck all my photographic equipment away and spend my evenings cutting and pasting them into backdrops generated on the Internet. Marvellous
My mother is quite attached to the place. So attached in fact that she continues to work years past retirement age so that she can finish renovating her place there.
One of her most inspired ‘improvements’ was to construct an enormous white terrace/ driveway grand enough to grace a moderate-sized mansion in front of the family shack. It is very large. And very white.
So large and white that...
This is all very well but, so far, quite self indulgent. The reason why I mention this is that on my return I decided to confirm my visible from orbit suspicions by clicking on Google Earth and, fuck me, there it was …
Note that my mum's driveway/ terrace is so bright that it has overexposed a multimillion dollar digital satellite imaging system, even from the relative safety of several hundred miles away. Imagine its effect on unshielded human eyes in much closer proximity.
It is possible of course that the area around the village has been photographed in such detail precisely because the NSA suspect that my mum's terrace was deliberately constructed to destroy spy satellites. Maybe that really is her game. I'll be buggered if I can figure out any other reason for building the bloody thing.
The resolution is astonishing. I can even pick out individual fruit trees in the fields and gravestones in the local cemetery. It’s all a bit disconcerting really but I can’t quite put my finger on why.
Additional fun facts about the village where my mum’s family comes from
There is a book about this place somewhere if only I could just figure out what it is
I’ve been reading a few seasonal news stories about the discovery of the Gospel of Judas which supposedly shines shocking new light on the relationship between Judas and Jesus.
Maybe Jesus told Judas to betray him
Ooooh, radical
Reaches for theologian’s hat…
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I have a soft spot for Judas and one of these days will do something that rehabilitates him in the public imagination. A tough task but he deserves it.
Without quoting huge chunks of gospels (John 13, Mark 14, Matthew 26, Luke 22 and Corinthians 11 if you're interested) any open-minded reading of the New Testament makes it clear that Judas was explicitly ordered by Jesus to betray him ..
'And as they did eat, he said, Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me. And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto him, Lord, is it I? And he answered and said, He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish, the same shall betray me. ...Then Judas, which betrayed him, answered and said, Master, is it I? He said unto him, Thou hast said.'
'Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me ... Lord, who is it? Jesus answered, He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it. And when he had dipped the sop, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon. And after the sop Satan entered into him. Then said Jesus unto him, That thou doest, do quickly.'
Spot the 'And after the sop Satan entered into him' line. Verily, methinks this is a later addition.
Judas isn't so pleased about this task but completes it, then hangs himself immediately afterwards. The 30 pieces of silver are irrelevant. He clearly didn't do it for the money.
Even you were to persist in believing that Judas betrayed Jesus of his own accord you're stuck with the problem that Judas clearly had no choice. If he hadn't betrayed Jesus there would have been no crucifixion and no completion of God's plan. I can just see it now, Judas having second thoughts and Christ saying 'ah well, better luck next Passover'. Clearly Jesus had pre knowledge of Judas' betrayal. How far back? As early as when Jesus called Judas to being a disciple?
So, you have one of two scenarios:
I mention all this because I drew a few conclusions from the Judas story long ago back when I was still at school, a Catholic school
In retrospect it was probably a good idea that I didn't sit the Religious Studies 'O' Level exam
Theology post ends
I’m supposed to be visiting Italy for a few days later in the month. Hopefully, that will afford me the opportunity to gauge people’s reactions first hand to what looks like to be a general election victory for Romano Prodi.
Crumbs, if the radical Prodi really does win the entire fabric of Italian politics will change for ever.
Ho ho
Not
Conspiracy theorists, anti-war and anti-globalisation campaigners alike really should spend more time reading up on the history of Italian politics from the 1970s through to the Berlusconi era. It’s all there; assassinations, false flag terrorist incidents, supposed political opponents funded by the same shadowy figures, quasi-masonic secret societies, CIA funded terrorist networks, media manipulation, intelligence services hampering investigations, corporate fraud and corruption, the works
And being Italians, they were really crap at it and some of the players actually got caught and convicted.
But, of course, this sort of stuff only happened in one country at one point in time and definitely doesn’t happen anywhere else, anymore.
Definitely not.
My favourite story from that one-off, never to be repeated, Golden Era of European politics happened when Romano Prodi contacted the authorities with the address of a safe house in which kidnapped Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro had been held by supposed terrorists.
Prodi claimed he had been given the tip by the founders of the Italian Christian Democratic Party, contacted from beyond the grave via a seance and a Ouija board.
Prodi and Blair and George W. should get on like a house on fire.
Fight Club is one of those films I saw some time after its cinema release because the producers allowed it to be totally misrepresented in the release publicity. I saw the ads, consumed the manufactured media ruckus about its 'graphic violence', decided ‘that sounds like rubbish’ and didn’t go to see it.
Whereas, in truth, if I had known what the film was really all about I would have walked over a field of kittens to see it.
Anyway, one of the gags in Fight Club is the idea of teams of disaffacted people committing various acts of subversive, corporate sabotage. I was particularly tickled by the thought of replacing airliner safety instructions with alternate cards that portrayed people on fire and screaming in panic, as would presumably really be the case in the event of a serious incident.
And after finally seeing Fight Club for the first time I remember thinking how cool it would be if people really did get together and start to subvert the Machine in those kind of ways.
So, when a friend pointed this sign out to me outside the Elephant and Castle Underground Station I was well-pleased
It goes without saying that this isn’t a genuine Evening Standard headline
Anyone familiar with the Evening Standard will understand. The Standard is an evening paper and, particularly in the Internet Age, it tries desperately to lure people into buying it by using the most sensationalist, and often scary, headlines it can come up with...
I was even more pleased after I pasted the photo into Flickr and someone commented
I've an acquaintance in London who does subversive remixes of these Standard billboards and goes around inserting them from time to time...
There is some hope for Humanity after all
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edit: Thanks to Pete for pointing me towards an entire Flickr group filled with Evening Standard banners and, no, I hadn't seen it before. Pure Gold.
... Spoof
I had to check with someone first though
Note the address of the faux Fox link.
If you would like to read more of the same may I humbly suggest visiting Ann Coulter's homepage
Sadly, the AJC ad in the previous post appears to be all too serious.
I’m still rubbing my eyes after reading this quote from a senior US Republican Senator, Bill Frist, made in the context of allegations that the Bush Administration was exercising undue influence over the media
"Of course it raises some concerns, but we can't let this issue be blown out of proportion. Of course there have to be media guidelines. Hell, if we want to plant I.D. chips in people and torture their loved ones until they break, we will. I know the idea of governmental control over what the media can or cannot say during wartime may be an uncomfortable topic for some to digest, but it is a necessary fact of life when our enemies are trying to kill us."
Mind you, I read it on the Fox News website so it must be true
Would you like to know more?
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One subject I have consciously avoided from mentioning in my blog, even though it does occupy some of my thoughts, is the whole mixing up Jews with Zionism and the role Israel plays in what’s going on in the World thing.
It makes me intensely uncomfortable.
Those of my friends and acquantainces who happen or happened to be Jewish are quite clearly not benefitting personally from a global Zionist conspiracy, nor do they spend their time agitating for continued aggression and discord in the Middle East.
But then I see crap like the advert above which appeared in several national newspapers yesterday...
And people will feel uncomfortable criticising it because it was paid for by the American Jewish Committee, whatever the fuck that is, even though it’s pretty clear that the advert is all about Israel.
The meta text on the AJC homepage includes the touching and heartfelt line ...
Builds bridges of understanding across ethnic, national, racial and religious lines in America and around the world.
This ad is just another example of the deliberate conflation of race and politics that pisses off people who may have issues with some aspects of the behaviour of a certain country whilst not having a racist bone in their body.
This particular ruse really is near the end of its useful life.
And then of course there's the fact the the majority of Ultra Zionists are actually Fundamentalist Christians, not Jews; looking to give God a helping hand by realising Biblical prophecy in their own lifetimes.
This behaviour may or may not be blasphemous, depending on whether you view Biblical prophecy as either divine prediction or something more like an employee mission statement.
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We’ve seen crap like this before. Most recently in the run up to the last attack on Iraq.
And when our governments do finally get round to attacking the next Muslim country on their list; Iran, Syria or wherever, we’ll see more.
And more
And more
And, er, more
Or does anyone out there really believe that would be the end of it?
Fuck me, New Zealand is looking good
Thanks to Postman Patel for switching me onto this story here about the guy hauled off a plane and questioned by police for singing along to a Clash record in a taxi on the way to the airport.
Oddly enough, this story was classified in the Reuters ‘Oddly Enough’ section; putting it in the same category as toasted tacos that look like Jesus and amusing anectdotes about the zany things cats get up to.
I can understand that. Stories of official paranoia and wrongful detention are an absolute hoot.
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My gut feel would be that anyone singing along to the Clash could be described as pretty well integrated into British society. It’s the songs and chants you can’t understand the lyrics to you probably should be worried about.
Anyway, Stef’s top five lyrics from punk era songs that you should twice about before singing in a taxi on the way to the airport if you look all brown and foreign…
Anarchy in the UK, Sex Pistols
I am an antichrist
I am an anarchist
Don’t know what I want but
I know how to get it
I wanna destroy the passer by
Eton Rifles, The Jam
Sup up your beer and collect your fags,
There’s a row going on down near slough,
Get out your mat and pray to the west,
I’ll get out mine and pray for myself
I feel like a Wog, The Stranglers
I feel like a wog people giving me the eyes
But I was born here just like you
I feel like a wog
Got all the dirt shitty jobs
But everybody's got to have something to do with their time
Killing an Arab, The Cure
Standing on the beach
With a gun in my hand
Staring at the sea
Staring at the sand
Staring down the barrel
At the arab on the ground
I can see his open mouth
But I hear no sound
I’m alive
I’m dead
I’m the stranger
Killing an arab
Chemical Warfare, The Dead Kennedys
Down at the arsenal they keep the nerve gasses
Guarded day and night by caged white rabbits
Been sitting there for years
I'm gonna have at it
I cut through the fence, run right in and grab it
Go crazy crazy crazy crazy
The last one is my personal favourite.
Some are stronger than others but I only had a quick bath this morning and probably need to take a much longer one to peg this list down properly.
Of course, if things carry on the way they are at the moment even Petula Clark’s Downtown could be seen as a statement of bloody homicidal intent in the mouth of the wrong person
When you're alone and life is making you lonely
You can always go - downtown
When you've got worries, all the noise and the hurry
Seems to help, I know - downtown
Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
How can you lose?
They’re coded instructons. I’m telling you!
Honourable mention to Monitor by Siouxsie and the Banshees because I haven’t listened to it for ages and it dawned on me just now that it was about 25 years too early
Monitor outside
For the people inside
A prevention of crime
A passing of time
They come and they go
It's a passing of time
They come and they go
Whilst we sit in our homes
Sit back and enjoy
The real McCoy
Our new air of authority
Our sentinel of misery
His facewas full of intent
And we shook with excitement
Then the victim stared up
Looked strangely at the screen
As if her pain was our fault
But that's entertainment
What we crave for inside
No more second rate movies
From those people outside
Whilst I was strolling around the South Bank, the part of London where I grew up, over the weekend I was struck as I always am these days by the terminal decline of the area from a living, breathing neighbourhood into a full-blown tourist trap
… as demonstrated by the plethora of living statues that now infest the place.
Something similar happened to Covent Garden years ago now.
Of course, not everyone agrees with my take on cliched, generic, dismally unoriginal performance art. This site specialising in supplying street artists has a different take on things
Less is definately more as mesmerizing stillness melts into surreal comedy moments and high drama. Human statues are very versatile, requiring minimum space they can be a theatrical solution for small areas, hold a large crowd in bigger areas and add artistic kudos to empty areas.
Tossers
I have real conceptual problems with living statues and their Starbucks-esque ubiquity. I have also reserved a small part of my own personal Cultural Hell for the tourists who go out of their way to pose family members with the statues and take pictures of them.
By doing so they our displaying their fundamental lack of understanding of how cameras work.
Photographs don’t move.
I’m guessing that’s one of the reasons why living statues spray paint themselves silver, so that bored friends and relatives back home in tourist land are able to distinguish which person in the tedious snaps being forced upon them is the actual performer and which is the bell-end.
So anyway, next time you’re in London photographing a performance artist and you hear someone mutter ‘dickhead’ in the background it’ll probably be me.
So, there we were strolling around town on Saturday, taking advantage of a beautiful spring day, and we decided to make a couple of minor detours to check out the Fool’s Day Parade at Westminster and the Fairy Raid on Piccadilly Circus.
The Fairy Raid was a particular disappointment given that it
Sod that
No interesting pictures taken
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The Fool’s Day Parade was intended as a protest against SOCPA and offered the tantalising prospect of being able to watch police officers arrest someone dressed as Coco the Clown.
It didn’t happen.
Not while I was lurking around anyway.
So disappointed was I at the lack of police arresting Coco the Clown action that I couldn’t even be bothered to take any serious pictures. Never fear, that bearded and scarily prolific doyen of London event photography Peter Marshall was working the two dozen or so people who constituted the protest and I’ve no doubt that his pictures will appear in his London Diary soon enough.
I’ve said this before but I walked away from this well-intentioned but ludicrously under attended event thinking back to the more than adequately attended, and heavily copyrighted, scenes of mayhem that were the poll tax riots.
A few quid on their local taxes and tens of thousands of people attempt to dismantle and/or burn entire swathes of central London in an orgy of militant chaos .
Fast forward fifteen years, remove age old rights and liberties and twenty people slap on red noses, run in circles around Parliament Square for two hours then sit down and eat a vegan picnic.
We are so fucked.
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Round about the same time all this far from frenzied Fool and Fairy activity was taking place the press was reporting Condoleezza Rice’s comments on the protests that accompanied her UK tour/ photo op…
"People have the right to protest, that's what democracy is all about. I would say to those who wish to protest, by all means."
Blair said something similar before pushing SOCPA through
My first thought is that we don’t need Condi’s or Tony’s blessing to protest. Well, we didn’t until SOCPA
My second thought is that Condi and Tony implying their own association with rights and liberties established by much worthier people than themselves is a pretty slug-like, repugnant thing to do. No surprises there then.
My third thought is that it’s pretty rich to publicly extol people’s right to protest whilst at the same time using security forces paid for by those same people to shove them out of sight
Aside from that, I really valued Condi's contribution to the debate.
Exciting news today with the launch of Britain’s very own FBI-style national crime fighting unit – the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).
Another fine example of our government working for us.
Simply…
The comparison being made between SOCA and the FBI is particularly amusing, given that the FBI did roughly nothing about organised crime, especially the Mafia, in the 48 years J Edgar Hoover was in charge. On the other hand, Himmler’s, sorry Hoover’s FBI was more than effective when it came to putting together personal blackmail files on any public figures Hoover deemed to be un-American. Hoover writing to Martin Luther King and suggesting that he commit suicide or else be exposed as an adulterer was a particular high point in the history of the war on organised crime.
Anyway, given that Hoover was allegedly a homosexual transvestite who liked to be referred to as Mary when attending Mafia organised fuck parties there clearly is one outstanding candidate to head up Britain’s own FBI equivalent...
He likes wearing dresses and is a complete whore when it comes to taking money to speak for dubious causes; be it the Euro or bollocks government initiatives.
He’s made for the job
