The Road to Hell is Crazily Paved with Best Intentions

In spite of my best intentions, I've been somewhat preoccupied these last few days with the 9/11 thing.

However, through accident or design, every time talk of 9/11 seems to be reverting to background levels something has come along to knock the volume back up a couple of notches

• There were those rants written by Monbiot in the Guardian comparing 9/11 scepticism to a disease and describing 9/11 sceptics as morons
• Then there was that BBC documentary that went down so well
• And most recently, from the BBC again, that footage of a reporter doing a Mystic Meg impression on 9/11 - followed by an excruciatingly poor 'explanation' of how that came to be

The established UK press sure has a hard-on for 9/11 at the moment

Which, in a way, is a shame as I have been distracted from documenting the results of my latest research into staring at famous London buildings whilst holding my breath until I see hidden messages in their architecture, plus I had a great title for a post after reading the news that Cressida Dick had been promoted to Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Sadly, the moment passed and so the title...

Shoot a Brazilian and Win a Prize!!!

will never see the light of day, except for here, obviously

London is about to get a lot more Dick. Phwoar! Angelina Jolie eat my your heart out

There was a cracking quote from Len Duvall at the MPA...

“Unprecedented circumstances surround one of the officers we have confirmed as Deputy Assistant Commissioner. Consequently I have decided to take the unusual step of commenting on matters that would normally remain confidential.

“Having considered these circumstances we are satisfied that our decision to confirm promotion is the right one to take at this time.

“The MPA is keenly aware that the people of London must have confidence in the police who work, in what are often difficult circumstances, to protect them. By confirming this promotion we are making it clear that the officer retains our full confidence.”

... which you could interpret in a couple of different ways, depending on just how cynical you happen to be feeling at the time

Anyway, I was hoping to put 9/11 out of my mind for a while and then I came across a link to this (admittedly 2 month old) post on the BlairWatch website

Listen guys, you've posted the same thing time after time on Blairwatch. We do not believe the theories based on the evidence you present. We're also concerned that you also appear to get a lot of your 'evidence' from neo-nazi sites.

You are welcome to post here on other subjects, but we're bored of the same old story you're spamming us with.

Therefore we will delete any further posts by yourselves on 9/11 and 7/7.

Delete posts about 7/7 as well as 9/11?

Equate 7/7 scepticism with being a neo-Nazi?

I have to say, there's something about being accused of being an insane, moronic Nazi, infected with a mental virus that can really win a guy over to other people's point of view.

7/7 has become an absolute cornerstone of the Blair government's 'security' agenda. 7/7 and 9/11 are frequently cited as the primary evidence to justify all sorts of heinous shit that would otherwise be rejected out of hand

...and a site called Blairwatch is going to delete posts relating to scepticism about the official account of 7/7?

So, presumably investigation into any possibility of complicity on the part of the security services - ranging from direct involvement to merely hyping up the terror threat - goes right out of the window?

For fuck's sake

(edit: a commentator from Blairwatch (I think) has chipped in their penny's worth at the end of this post and fair play to them for taking the time to do so)

I appreciate that some of the people advocating 9/11 and 7/7 conspiracy theories are sometimes, how can I put it, 'enthusiastic' about promoting their ideas and very often a tad more 'imaginative' than your average person but that's not the same thing as demonstrating there are no issues there.

And, as The Antagonist reminded me in a post about Mark Thomas wanking on at the No Trident protest last week if there's one thing we can be sure of, without recourse to any conspiracy theory, it's just how ineffective and plain crap the mainstream left in UK politics has been in recent years...

"You're all doing very well... and now I'm asking you to do just that little bit more and SMS the world into being a better place (Calls Cost £1.50, normal network charges apply. Please ask a grown-up for permission beforehand)"

crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap

crap

The embarrassing truth about Left wing politics in this country is that the fundamental changes imposed on our civil liberties and corporate ownership and control of our social infrastructure under the current Labour government far exceed anything that happened in the Thatcher years

So, tell me again, who are the moronic twats living in a fascist fantasy world? I'm having trouble keeping up to speed with that one.

But hey, just one more march, just one more petition, one more free concert, one more text message, will turn things around and it will all be over by fucking Christmas

Bollocks

That would be the 'Surge' theory of mainstream left wing activism

There's a line from an old war movie I watched once and it went something like

'Never reinforce failure. Failure reinforces itself'

Too bloody right

Tony Benn speaking at the Troops Out - No Trident demo ... just like Groundhog Day but without the jokes

At times like these I'm reminded of a couple of quotes from the Great George Monbiot

Democracy is sustained not by public trust but by public scepticism. Unless we are prepared to question, to expose, to challenge and to dissent, we conspire in the demise of the system for which our governments are supposed to be fighting...

.. If we are to preserve the progress, pluralism, tolerance and freedom which President Bush claims to be defending, then we must question everything we see and hear...

In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, there's a fundamental belief that still persists even on the political left, that our leaders are basically decent, honest people, the same as the rest of us and when they do something wicked it's always the result of an honest mistake. Never anything darker than that.

And that's the fundamental reason why 'Conspiracy Theories' are so maligned and will continue to be maligned even if the entire neo-nazi space-alien contingent disappeared (was abducted?) overnight.

The debunkers guide to spotting mentally ill, mentally retarded, neo-nazi plague carriers - ouch, I think I've just cracked a rib laughing so hard

A conspiracy theorist is basically saying 'Someone is responsible for this and should be held to account'. The opposing point of view is 'Shit happens'. In reality, the 'Truth' usually lies somewhere between the two extremes; with arguably more weight on the 'someone is responsible' side of things than is currently admitted in the mainstream.

And the sooner a few more people start looking at our government and the bulk of our media as entities that willfully act in the interests of a small minority; rather than as a collection of idiots staggering from one unforeseen fuck up to another, the better.

If that assumption is made, or at least entertained, it totally changes your view of what are and are not viable tactics to deal with the excesses of that minority.

It doesn't even really matter if an ultra cynical view of government is 100% 'True' or not. I doubt that it is. The point is that the existing paradigm for popular activism just isn't delivering results and more of the same old crap thinking isn't likely to either.

Of course, no such changes are going to happen for a while yet. A lot more 'perfectly honest' mistakes will have to be made and things will have to get a lot more fucked up first.

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The Bizarro World Broadcasting Corporation

Ooooh I can't wait until the poor bastard tasked with moderating the backlog of comments on this blog post gets into work tomorrow

That's the post where the head of BBC World News tries to explain how his channel seems to have been able to report WTC7's collapse twenty minutes before it actually happened.

I say seems because he has been unable to confirm that is what happened, as the BBC has lost its own archive footage of the broadcast.

A step-by-step guide to the correct operation of write-protect tabs that I shall be helpfully emailing to BBC World tomorrow

So, consequently, in a post that seems to come straight out of Bizarro World, we have the head of a major news unit within the Mighty BBC admitting that he had to watch coverage from his own channel on You Tube of all things.

Verily I say unto Thee - You couldn't fucking make it up

I'm still keeping an open mind as to the actual significance of the footage, if any, but a response like this from the BBC, missing tapes and all, isn't helping

I've just taken a quick peak around cyberspace and it's looking like forensic, line by line, deconstruction of this example of finest Bizarro World bollocks is set to become the fun new popular Internet pass time for all the family (age four and over)

Personal favourite extracts from the BBC response include...

"If we reported the building had collapsed before it had done so, it would have been an error - no more than that"

I think the one thing that everyone can agree on is that it definitely was an error of some kind or another

"Our reporter Jane Standley was in New York on the day of the attacks, and like everyone who was there, has the events seared on her mind. I've spoken to her today and unsurprisingly, she doesn't remember minute-by-minute what she said or did"

Mmmwah, Doublespeak-tastic

"We no longer have the original tapes of our 9/11 coverage (for reasons of cock-up, not conspiracy). So if someone has got a recording of our output, I'd love to get hold of it. We do have the tapes for our sister channel News 24, but they don't help clear up the issue one way or another."

Fuck that. If I had a high-quality version of the original footage the BBC would be the last place I would send it to. At the very least they've hardly covered themselves in glory on the 'keeping important video footage secure' side of things

Also, I remember back to 7/7 when the television and radio was full of presenters and police spokespeople urging any members of the public with relevant photos or video clips to send them in ASAP.

The first thing I thought was

No! Don't do that. Upload a few hundred copies onto Flickr and You Tube tagged as "Madonna", "Crotch", "Shot" or something first

But to no avail.

Who knows what slipped down the memory hole on that day.

And on the subject of missing video footage and memory holes it looks like I may have to update...


Stef's All-Time Favourite Top Six Seven Suspiciously Conveniently Missing Video Tape events


7. Fourteen plus CCTVs in the Alma Tunnel on the night of Princess Diana's death

Were they facing the wrong way? Were they turned off? Who the fuck knows?


6. Eighty four assorted security camera tapes taken from near or around the Pentagon on 9/11


5. Footage from the CCTV camera on the No. 30 Bus that blew up in Tavistock Square on 7/7


4. CCTV footage from Stockwell Tube Station on the day Jean Charles de Menezes got shot ... lots

The station staff tell the IPCC that the shooting was captured on camera. The police returned the camera hard drives wiped clean saying there was nothing on them

Nobody in authority seems to care very much


3. 7/7 Suicide Bombers in transit

Fulsome clips of Somali transvestites prancing around Birmingham coach stations are all very entertaining and a useful aid in encouraging patriotic outbreaks of Burkaphobia. As are clips of brown men looking into barrels of what may or may not be fertilizer. But why the reluctance to release any of the video of the four men alleged to have carried out the 7/7 bombings?


and, new in at number...

2. BBC World News loses the tapes of its coverage of one of the most significant World events in the last 50 years

See above


1. Apollo 11 Moon Landing Tapes

The notion that the Apollo Program was a hoax is hard to swallow I know (aside from the 50 year gap between the last visit to the Moon and the next planned visit amongst a few other inconclusive niggles) but this just has to be Number One based on the sheer number of missing tapes alone...

13,000

That's 13 with three zeros after it

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Angelina wants to feast on your bodily fluids

And, in an moderately synchronistic twist to my previous post about the perfect Internet marriage of conspiracy theories with pictures of film stars with big tits, I've just come across this article on the Prisonplanet website...

The Establishment admits Lara Croft

Apparently, Angelina Jolie has been invited to join those blood-sucking pan dimensional space lizards in the Council on Foreign Relations.

"The idea of having Henry Kissinger and Angelina Jolie in the same organisation is dazzling."

The world has just got that little bit weirder

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It's Infowar Baby! (ever so slightly updated)

I still don't know what to make of that BBC video I mentioned in the previous post

Time will tell

There's an unsourced quote (now sourced - I love the line about the missing tapes in Point 4 BTW) bouncing around supposedly from Richard Porter, Head of News, BBC World

"If we reported the building had collapsed before it had done so, it would have been an error - no more than that."

Well, that's for sure...

In a way it, it doesn't really matter if this particular story turns out to have legs or not.

People are looking at the video for themselves, asking questions and looking for answers - completely independent of the mainstream media

Brilliant!

A key legacy of 9/11 scepticism is that a significant number of people have become less trustful, more proactive and more savvy when it comes to passively accepting what they are told. The WMD bullshit that was parroted uncritically by the mainstream press before the attack on Iraq has had a similar effect.

And that is one of the reasons why, even though there is little people outside of the US can do about 9/11, the treatment of the 9/11 narrative is still important to us. 9/11 scepticism offers a key to a different way of looking at the world that pisses off both the establishment and the established anti-establishment (Hello George) in equal measure

Anyway, the significance of the content of the BBC video is not the most important, or entertaining, thing right now

What is most entertaining at the moment is the response to what may have been attempts to censor the video from sites like Google Video, You Tube, Digg and elsewhere...

• A lot of people are uploading copies of the video all over the place

• A lot of people are arguing for its significance online with what appear to be somewhat 'puppety' sounding opponents. Come to think of it some of the people arguing for the significance of the video have something of the Shari Lewis about them too

In short, it's full-on INFOWAR!!!

And who does Lambchops think was responsible for the World Trade Centre collapse?

It's a new kind of war where the only territory occupied is virtual, where it is almost impossible to tell friend from foe, and the only casualties are mounds of suspended sock puppet accounts and inactive hyperlinks

It is currently a restricted war, being waged in only a small corner of the Internet populated, by and large, by seasoned Infowarriors

But serious attempts are being made to turn Limited InfoWar into Total InfoWar through acts of InfoTerrorism committed on targeted groups of civilian non-combatants - specifically Britney Spears fans and people who wank a lot

...though obviously there is some significant overlap between the two groups





What did you do in the InfoWar daddy?

Why, I sat in front of my computer eating corn chips and uploading 400 copies of the same homemade 9/11 conspiracy video with a picture of Uma Thurman's tits slapped on the front, along with a series of misleading tags such as 'hot' 'asian' 'lesbo' 'babe' and 'action' sweetheart.

Did Flight 93 Really Crash in Shanksville? The Special Edition

This new form of combat is, of course, bad news for the future of the action film genre as, even with the most dramatic backing music and best CGI Special FX in the world, it's kind of hard to imagine sitting in a theatre watching Bruce Willis grappling with M$ Movie Maker, opening a series of troll user accounts, cutting and pasting pictures of celebrity tits and hitting the upload button for 90 minutes...

On the other hand I think the porn movie industry will find it a lot easier to adapt to the new environment as there's nothing stopping its heroes being blown at the same time as the buildings in their videos.

Hmmm, Conspiracy Porno - how do I patent that?

Super Hot Lesbian Action!!!

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Edit: Well, it was worth at least checking to see if was taken...

Domain Name: XXXFILES.COM
Registrar: DOTSTER, INC.
Whois Server: whois.dotster.com
Name Server: NS1.ALBONY.COM
Updated Date: 27-feb-2006
Creation Date: 22-mar-1996
Expiration Date: 23-mar-2007

boo!
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Why I f^cking LOVE the Internet

Earlier on today, sorry it's gone midnight, yesterday someone uploaded half an hour or so of footage taken from BBC World on 11th September 2001 onto Google video.

Throughout the clip both the London-based news reader and a reporter on a live feed from New York make repeated reference to the fact that the 47 floor Salomon Brothers building (WTC7) had collapsed earlier on in the day




The Comedy Gold moment comes when the reporter in New York steps to one side to reveal WTC7 still standing in the skyline behind her




Priceless

Right now I haven't the faintest idea what this means. Maybe nothing at all. Maybe BBC reporters are Precogs

What I do know is that the original video was pulled from Google but not before copies were made and reposted to Google and You Tube and anywhere else people could think of. Quite a few of those copies seem to have been pulled as well.




It has definitely been fun watching video links appear and disappear in realtime




And even though an article discussing the video has received almost 800 'Diggs' it is not showing up in the Top Diggs of the day - which kind of defeats the entire purpose of the Digg thing IMHO.




And that is why I love the Internet. In its current form once something is put out there it is almost impossible to erase.

And if that something is nonsense someone will post a rebuttal PDQ.

It is down to the individual, not a gatekeeper, to figure what is dung and what is gold. It's a far from perfect process, sure enough, but it's a hundred times better than the one it replaced.

And there isn't anything all the smug, well-paid twats writing for all the newspapers in the world can do about it, except for bleat

-

And on the subject of rebuttals here's a link to a DIY response to the BBC 9/11 Conspiracy Theory mockyoumentary some bloke knocked up at home which I think hits just the right note of sarcasm throughout, i.e. a lot



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The Secret's in the Lighting

On the subject of smug, preppy twats telling noble lies…

Fans of the BBC documentary on 9/11 Conspiracy Theories aired last week - of which I count myself as one, and here’s another one – were no doubt delighted by the performance of Popular Mechanics’ Davin Coburn.




In spite of the fact that he only looks, and sounds, like he is fourteen years old Davin is the research editor at Popular Mechanics and was responsible for fact checking the Popular Mechanics book ‘Debunking 9/11 Myths’

In the BBC documentary a well-lit, confident sounding Coburn was interviewed in his spiffy New York office and at Ground Zero, assuring us that there were no significant unanswered questions about the failure to intercept the 9/11 planes, the collapse of WTC1, 2 and 7, or anything at all actually.

Typical Conspiracy Theory Debunker

In contrast, the 9/11 conspiracy theorists on the show were filmed picking their noses, shifting nervously in their chairs and generally looking a bit iffy. For some perfectly good technical reason I’m sure, on several occasions it was only possible to light their faces from below when being filmed

Typical Conspiracy Theorist

So, top marks to Davin for an excellent, if somewhat carefully edited, effort on the BBC2 show.

What a contrast it made to that live interview Davin gave to a local US radio station where, unlike the BBC2 guy, the DJ actually had the temerity to ask what evidence Coburn was basing his assertions on.

If Coburn didn’t come across as such a self-satisfied little wanker I would have almost felt sorry for him

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By contrast, the follow up documentary in the BBC Conspiracy Files series on David Kelly’s death shown last night was almost an example of rational, impartial film-making

I say almost

Connoisseurs of hit-piece dickumentary film making will have detected a lighter hand at work than in the 9/11 show. For the first half of the program the uninitiated might even have been lured into thinking that the documentary was going to deliver an open verdict on Dr Kelly’s demise

No chance

Many old-favourite ruses were applied but, like I said, with a much lighter, more nuanced hand than other examples of the genre…

• Use of a straw man theory i.e. that the Iraqis may have assassinated Dr Kelly

• Depiction of conspiracy theorists as fantasists including an interview with an absolute loon who claimed to receive personal phone calls from Henry Kissenger and who suggested that Kelly’s murder was the subject of a Tom Clancy novel

• Lashings of psychobabble

• A call to respect the feelings of Kelly’s family and to respect his memory by relinquishing all those silly conspiracy theories

The pyschobabble was of a particularly high order last night. I especially enjoyed a line of reasoning that went 'David Kelly was an intensely truthful man who deplored dishonesty. He was about to be caught (sic.) having told a lie. This led to a inner struggle which almost certainly put him in a suicidal state of mind'.

Che?

You'd kind of think someone who is suicidally honest probably wouldn't be inclined to tell fibs in the first place. But no matter. Let's not forget that David Kelly himself was obviously some kind of proto-conspiracy theorist, referring to "many dark actors playing games" and the risk of being found "dead in the woods", and therefore obviously mad and consequently more than likely suicidal.

Though how you can distinguish between someone who is mad and someone who is genuinely at threat from state assassination wasn't actually addressed in the show.

Anyway, case closed. Rest easy. Everything is just fine. Nothing to see here. Please move on… .

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Ignoble Lies

A nod of appreciation to The Antagonist for fleshing out his original comment made on a posting about George Monbiot in this blog into a post on his own blog.

And a second nod to Postman Patel and his post waxing lyrical on Monbiot's Calculus © as applied to the ‘science’ of climate change modelling.

The Thoughts of Charmin Monbiot

I am picking on Monbiot because, and I suspect others are doing so for the same reason, he appears to be claiming some kind of special right to speak for, and dictate, the future course of popular activism against the evils of our times.

as evidenced by him throwing his toys out of the pram and turning 180 degrees on the issue of 9/11 scepticism.

George, and people like George, aren’t sitting on and controlling that particular movement and he doesn’t like it one little bit.

Which I wouldn’t mind so much if the movements that George and people like George endorse - Make Poverty History being the first one that comes to mind – had achieved anything at all.

Well, that’s not strictly fair – exercises like Make Poverty History do a stand-up job of assuaging middle class guilt for relatively little effort or expense.

And that is what, I suspect, they are there for

The second example of arse-wipe, faux grassroots movements spearheaded by George and people like George that comes to mind is the Climate Change thing.

George likes to play fast and loose with the numbers. He also likes to refer to anyone who disagrees with him as a ‘Climate Change denier’ – a slimy attempt to equate holding an honest difference of opinion with being some kind of Nazi.

To be honest, I haven’t encountered a single person, not one, who denies that climate change is taking place. It always has. It always will. I have, however, encountered a lot of people though who believe that

• man made climate change might be less significant than is currently being made out to be, and

• even if it man made climate change is significant most of the measures being proposed by the climate change lobby would do fuck all to stop it

Calling people ‘Man Made Climate Change is a significant threat and there’s something we can do to stop it' deniers doesn’t roll off the tongue so easy

Climate change is an inevitable and intrinsic part of the Earth's natural cycle and humanity would be better off dealing with the consequences of that fact rather than pretending we can select a global climate of our choice and somehow suspend it in time.

Of course, George and people like George are never going to acknowledge that because they are committed to telling a noble lie. The point of which is to scare humanity into submitting to a view of its future held by George and people like George, because George and people like George know what’s best for us.

Carbon emissions and global warming are just a ruse to serve a higher purpose. Before global warming we were told to be scared of global cooling and resource depletion – the solutions to which, coincidentally, were the same as the ones currently being advocated to deal with the global warming scare.

I can remember back to when cold fusion was first announced and, for a short time, it seemed that non-polluting, ‘free’ energy might be achievable. Were the environmental crowd pleased with that? Bollocks were they. They were complaining about all the damage mankind would wreak on the Earth if equipped with a limitless clean energy source.

The issue is not about too much CO2, too little CO2, too much energy, too little energy. It’s about misanthropy and control. The belief that only a self-selecting elite knows what’s best and that the bulk of humanity is a dumb mob that needs to be centrally controlled and have limits imposed on its size. That is the context underlying much of what is going on in the world, Monbiot’s movements included.

So who's the fucking Nazi then?

I love Google and Google loves me

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NB

Monbiot's Calculus © is now copyright and the phrase "mathematics of indeterminate numbers" TM is trade marked.

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The Thoughts of Chairman George

Thanks to Antagonist for posting this link to a Guradian article written by George Monbiot on 16th October 2001...

Gagging the Sceptics

Selected highlights include

... If we are to preserve the progress, pluralism, tolerance and freedom which President Bush claims to be defending, then we must question everything we see
and hear...

There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical. The magical appearance of the terrorists' luggage, passports and flight manual looks rather too good to be true. The dossier of "evidence" purporting to establish Bin Laden's guilt consists largely of supposition and conjecture...

This could indeed be the work of terrorists, who may have their own reasons for widening the conflict, but there are plenty of other ruthless operators who would benefit from a shift in public opinion...

Democracy is sustained not by public trust but by public scepticism. Unless we are prepared to question, to expose, to challenge and to dissent, we conspire in the demise of the system for which our governments are supposed to be fighting...


All of which contrasts in a somewhat perplexing way with some of George's later works such as this article here and this one here

And today's special project is to write a short, 500 word essay that reconciles the thinking behind all three articles without making any reference to George Orwell, Doublethink and Memory Holes or using the words "shill", "gatekeeper" or "twat"

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Conspiracy Theorists vs Conspiracy Fantasists

A couple of the alternative news portals I occasionally visit have recently linked to a web page that promises to offer 'The true inside facts about the 7/7 London bombings'.

'Ah, marvellous', I thought, 'the Internet comes to the rescue once again. Is there nothing it can't teach me?'

Imagine my disappointment when, on reading the article, I discovered that it was only a rehash of existing stories and speculations, remixed and represented as an interview between the author and his mysterious inside contact 'X10'.

The only new material that I could identify at all was the codenames of two of the intel operatives behind 7/7 and the fact that they drove off in a soft top that day...


JC- “So the guys on the train who were ex MI 5, ex SAS, they left the explosives on the train and then got off. What were their names again?”

X10- “The ex MI 5 man was codenamed ’J-boy’ and Mcgreagor was the ex SAS guy”

JC- “And then you say they escaped in a Vauxhall cabriolet?”

X10- “Yes and they were driven away from the scene”

JC- “So your MI 6 contact confirmed it was a Vauxhall cabriolet?”

X10- “Yes"


Oh dear, this really isn't helping anyone very much at all

With some trepidation I checked out the rest of the guy's site and quickly established that he claims to be ex MI6, that MI6 stages 'Black Ops' and controls the global drug trade so that it can pay for the construction of a series of 4,000 underground bases connected by an antigravity train system that travels at Mach 2.7 ... which is used by aliens ... some of which are reptiles.

Not all of the aliens are bad however and Good Aliens are here to help us from the bad ones, and ourselves.

Phew, that's a relief

The Pleiades aka The Seven Sisters

The Good Aliens are called Pleiadians and are presumably the same Pleiadians promoted by the extensively bearded, long-time professional alien contactee and undisputed Master of one-handed Photoshopped UFO photography Billy Meier




Other legends of the professional alien contactee genre that have brought me much entertainment over the years include; Rael, Adamski, sorry I meant this Adamski, and George King of The Aetherius Society.

A Killer UFO picture from Adamski

I particularly enjoy the George King story; a part-time taxi driver who, in his own words, was innocently drying the dishes in his kitchen in Maida Vale one Saturday morning in 1954 when a loud, apparently physical voice told him...

"Prepare yourself! You are to become the Voice of Interplanetary Parliament."

Marvellous

In fairness to them, most of these guys established relatively benign cults which share essentially the same, mostly harmless teachings

• Aliens are amongst us and seeking to communicate through their Chosen Representive
• The Aliens' message is that the Earth is faced with an impending ecological catastrophe if Mankind does not change its ignorant ways
• People must help save the world by sending modest, but regular, financial contributions to the Aliens' Chosen Representative

An interesting exercise in symbolism from Rael

Amusingly, however whacked out all this may seem to the majority of folk, there was a shared strain of thought and sometimes shared membership between alien cults like George's, the New Age movement and early environmental activism. If Greenpeace was a person, alien contactee cults would be like a peculiar, a very peculiar, old uncle that person would rather not talk about.

The Environmental Movement's embarrassing old uncle speaks...

The underground bases and races meme also goes back a long way. A very long way. We all share a primeval fear of nether regions that has been manifest time and again in folk lore and myth. Stories of underground beasts and worlds that juxtapose nicely with legends of sky gods and their worlds.

The idea of a series of underground military bases linked by a network of tunnels reminds me of an all-time favourite expression of 1960s Cold War paranoia - the astoundingly bad movie 'Battle Beneath the Earth' which had the Red Chinese burrowing across the Pacific and planting nuclear bombs in tunnels underneath American cities. There's one scene where one of the heroes is lying on a pavement on a busy city street, with his ear to the floor calling out to passers-by 'They're here! They're amongst us! Can't you hear them!' before he is carted off and taken somewhere with soft walls




All of the above is good fun in my opinion and makes for more interesting pub conversations than if everyone believed the same thing...


"What do you think mate?"

"Same as you mate"


Asking questions is always a good thing

As is a little open-minded speculation

However, making up answers and pretending that they are definitive rarely ever is.

In principle, it's not the fact that someone claims that alien space lizards are cruising around underneath our feet in hover-trains that I have an issue with. It's the fact they've come up with absolutely fuck all evidence to prove it.

David Icke does it. David Shayler does it.

As do countless other, less high profile individuals.

Unfortunately, because of their free-thinking nature, 'truth' movements attract these folk like bees to honey

Things are so bad that I cannot point to or endorse a single 9/11 website that isn't in some way tainted by bizarre claims and assertions that seem to serve no other practical purpose than to make relatively straighforward lines of questioning seem guilty by association.

And there are those who would do the same thing with 7/7 - crapping in the pool by associating doubts about mainstream accounts of domestic terrorism with unverifiable and irrelevant tales of space aliens, Sumerian tablets, Biblical prophecy and God knows what else.

Don't get me wrong. I'm up for a drunken conversation about the significance of ancient Sumerian tablets as much, usually more so, than the next person but not in the context of pressing for investigation into legitimate unanswered questions on matters of life and death that have lead to blood being spilled on the streets of New York, London and Baghdad.

And unlike George Monbiot I am capable of at least acknowledging that there are different personalities with different motivations at work out there and not just lump them all together as fantasists and 'morons'.

Some of the space alien brigade seem sincere in what they are doing. They occupy different mental territory to most other people, but there is no malice there. However, there are others conspiracy fantasists who must know full well the impact of what they are up to and are either out to fuck things up deliberately or make a buck somehow.

And there is another line of thought I hadn't considered until recently.

I played up couple of minutes, just a couple, of audio of an MI6 Space Alien fan taken from the Net to my Mrs. Once she had stopped laughing, I asked her if she thought the guy sounded like he really believed what he was saying. She decided that he did but then suggested that he did because somebody else had wound him up for a laugh.

Which, of course, brought to mind the outstanding lifetime achievements of Robert Hendy-Freegard ...


A former barman who posed as a spy to trick his victims out of almost £1m has been jailed for life.

Robert Hendy-Freegard, 34, of Blyth, Nottinghamshire, persuaded his victims they were being hunted by the IRA.

London's Blackfriars Crown Court heard they endured years of poverty and carried out bizarre "missions" for him over a 10-year period.


He's in prison now but maybe he has a brother or a particularly adept disciple still at large. Maybe a whole army of them ...underground

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From the Golden Age of French-Canadian Comedy

Comedy gold from the Canadian army ...

Anti-Tank

Zeut Alors! Crissss alors ! Tabarnake !

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GM = c^nt QED

I keep meaning to take a break from my current bout of obsessing about 9/11 and 7/7 issues but, what with one thing and another, I'm finding it easier to say than to do.

Someone left a link to an article by the Grauniad's George Monbiot entitled '9/11 Fantasists pose a mortal danger to popular oppositional campaigns' under one of my posts yesterday

I read it

I didn't like it

I've got no problem with the fact that George doesn't share my doubts about what happened on 9/11, and I would guess 7/7.

Fine

What does piss me off is the arrogance coming out of the piece.

An arrogance that might be bearable if it were deserved but, fuck me, am I having real trouble identifying how George and his precious movements have made the world a better place ... or am I having real trouble identifying how George and his precious movements have made the world a better place...

The last time I looked

• The war in Iraq happened
• Rapacious Globalisation has gone from strength to strength
• Social mobility in the UK is falling. Inequality is rising
• 'Operation turn UK plc into a Police State' is well and truly underway
• And an awful lot of people are being suckered into a fucked-up view of climate change that will be used as a tool for unprecedented social control by the 'enlightened' few, George Monbiot included presumably

And all this whilst a supposed Left Wing party, presumably the party of choice for Monbiot and his fellow Grauniadistas, has been in power ... for ten years

Monbiot at the Make Poverty History rally - well, that worked a treat didn't it

Fuck George and all his other useless Chomsky clone mates

They just don't get it

And if even I didn't have doubts about 9/11 to start with I'd be sorely tempted to pretend that I have just because 9/11 scepticism has the magic property of pissing off both the establishment and established anti-establishment figures like Monbiot. So it definitely has something going for it. And if it helps torpedo movements that have nobbers like Monbiot at the helm, even better. Maybe people will put together something effective next time.

I just loved this extract from Monbiot's online bio...


Monbiot’s fifth book, The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order, was published in 2003. The book is an attempt to set out a positive manifesto for change for the global justice movement. Monbiot critiques anarchism and Marxism, arguing that any possible solution to the world’s inequalities must be rooted in a democratic system. The four main changes to global governance which Monbiot argues for are a democratically elected world parliament which would pass resolutions on international issues; a democratised United Nations General Assembly to replace the unelected UN Security Council; an International Clearing Union which would automatically discharge trade deficits and prevent the accumulation of debt; and a Fair Trade Organisation which would regulate world trade in a way that protects the economies of poorer countries.


Well, that sounds excellent. A centralised, omnipotent One World government. That would certainly be one in the eye for the Forces of Darkness. There's no way people and entire nations could be exploited and enslaved under a system like that.

Sign me up for that George

You twat

There really is something about the way this NWO, global government, population control, eco-Nazi bullshit keeps popping up in all sorts of places, on either side of supposed political divides, that I find particularly creepy

I could wax lyrical about how much I adore people like Monbiot, their wisdom and their saint-like humility for hours but there's no need. This article by Steve Watson does a blinding job IMHO. It's hosted on one of Alex Jones' sites but I like the piece enough to forgive its dodgy provenance. I particularly enjoy the tale of 'George Monbiot and the Mystery of the Missing 9/11 Article'...



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From the Golden Age of British Comedy

The link to this video has been bouncing around for a few days now...

The Dead Parrot Sketch, as performed by a pair of 419 Scammers

Their performance is packed with conviction and breathes new life into a tired old classic...

"Pining for the fjords! What kind of talk is that?"

And whilst I'm posting links, a few days ago I praised a petition submitted to the 10 Downing Street website which called for the Prime Minister to...

"Change police sirens to the Benny Hill theme music"

but sadly, at the time, I couldn't find a quality example of the Benny Hill theme music to link to. I have now

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Stop Press - Man in Dress

And the Number One news story in the UK tonight was...


CCTV images of one of the 21 July bomb suspects apparently fleeing London in a Muslim veil have been shown in court.

The jury at Woolwich Crown Court saw footage of Yassin Omar, 26, wearing a black full-length dress and burka with a handbag over his arm.

He is said to have travelled by bus to Birmingham from Golders Green in north London on 22 July 2005 - the day after an alleged attempt to bomb the Tube.

Not only were the images shown in court, the Metropolitan Police obligingly released a video of Yassin Omar wearing a burka so that everyone else could have a look.

The video is obviously a tremendously crucial piece of evidence, as demonstrated by it being the first item on most news broadcasts, but a few niggling questions remain...

The only thing the video seems to actually prove is that it is possible for a large Black man to flounce around Birmingham wearing a dress without drawing too much attention to himself.

All very disgusting from the point of view of any red-blooded heterosexual but, to the best of my knowledge, Omar is on trial for unsuccessful terrorism in London, not successful transvestism in Birmingham

"I'm a just a Sweet Transvestite from Transexual ... East Africa"

The sheer irrelevance of the footage comes across nicely when reading the non sequiturs in articles attempting to report it as news...


The police have released a video of a black man in a dress

Er...

He's on trial for trying to blow up London


However, whilst it is not exactly slam dunk evidence of Omar's role in the 21/7 bombings the footage released today does convey two very important pieces of information to the British public

1. The next time you see someone wearing a burka they could be a terrorist
   
   
2. CCTV is a jolly good thing

With the conspicuous exception of 7/7 and the Stockwell Shooting (where is that pesky CCTV footage?), our security forces have been planting news stories that preach the virtues of high tech surveillance (CCTV/ DNA databases/ Cellphones/ Travel Cards) for years now and we're used to that - though if CCTV really did make our world a better place London should be fucking Nirvana by now

But the banging on about the burka thing is something newer and nastier

And why is no-one in the mainstream questioning what the police are up to releasing this material whilst a trial is still going on?

So what's the deal now? The police release videos shown at every criminal case? Just terrorism cases? All videos? Just selected material? Selected on what criteria? By who?

This is so dodgy, and not a squeak from anyone.

I'd expect our tabloid press and politicians to bump up their circulation figures by stirring up the mob, but our police joining in as well. Our police?

-

I haven't seen much blogging about the 21/7 trial to date. I suspect that's because people are waiting to see how the defence pans out. From what has been made public so far, the 21/7 bombers, and their bombs, come across as some kind of incompetent comedy act, coordinated by the Somali equivalent of Coco the Clown and destined for failure from the start. These guys are cast from the same mould as most of the other losers living in bedsits that our police have trawled up in recent years. They are not the same kind of people as those who carried out 7/7. Oh no...

Of course, there is a tiny problem-ette with waiting to hear what the defence case might be. And that problem is our media doesn't report the defence case in terrorism trials. Take the trial of the guys arrested during the amusingly named Operation Crevice for example. Lots and lots of daily coverage of the prosecution case, including lashings of CCTV footage from the police, then as soon as the defence starts, and particularly when one of the accused mentions the ISI - biff - nada - niente.

Ah well, fuck it, not many people want to hear what the defence has to say anyway.

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