In response to a comment left under my previous post I have just spent the last few hours immersed in all things Madeleine McCann.
I think it is fair to say that a lot of people out there are reacting somewhat, er, negatively to the behaviour of the McCanns, the McCann media circus and the relative docility of the mainstream press. These people are quite keen to get their hands on some material, any material, that incriminates the McCanns in some wrong-doing.
Well, I've just ploughed through an awful lot of shit; including some unsubstantiated hypotheses that even the most open-minded people would consider to be plain mental, and I haven't found diddly on the McCanns.
Sadly, my most promising lead, this picture I found on Flickr...
...and its tantalizing suggestion of a connection with organized crime in Thailand proved to be a dead end
That's not to say that the Find Madeleine campaign and its media coverage are not weird and suspicious.
Of course they bloody well are
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As far as I can tell there are two key reasons why people are smelling a rat...
- The Find Madeleine campaign is very well-organized, well-connected, well-publicized and got rolling very quickly. That in itself is not particularly suspicious. What is peculiar is the sheer number of countries and organizations that have been caught up in this business - often on the flimsiest of pretexts. There are also some aspects of the campaign that suggest that the people behind it were preparing for a long-haul from its earliest days. Put bluntly, the campaign seems to be about something more than 'Finding Madeleine'
- With one notable exception, the media have given the McCanns an astonishingly easy time over the fact that they left three small children unattended and appear to have told fibs about what they did. The number of mainstream voices criticizing the sheer lunacy of the scope of subsequent campaign is also small
It's one thing to be open to the possibility that parents with guilty minds might be engaged in a distraction exercise but that doesn't even start to explain why so many other people and organizations are playing along and complicit in hyping this thing up to nonsensical proportions.
And then there are the questions over the role played by Clarence Mitchell. Depending on what newspaper you read, when Mitchell's name has been mentioned he has either been described as the McCann's 'Press Adviser' or the 'Foreign Office liaison' appointed to assist the family. In fact, Mitchell doesn't work for the McCanns or the Foreign Office but is the Director of the Government's totally unspooky Media Monitoring Unit.
I've known a fair few people who've got into shit overseas and none of them were appointed a full time liaison officer sent over from Whitehall, and certainly not a liaison officer seconded to the Foreign Office whilst being the head of a government department.
and this may or may not be relevant but in his previous incarnation as a BBC reporter Clarence led the BBC's coverage of the Soham murders - which was also characterized by some frankly bizarre government and media behaviour.
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There is the faint whiff of an exercise in mass psychological manipulation (purpose unknown) about the Find 'Maddie' campaign, like Soham before it, and the Princess Diana schmaltz-fest before that. Non Conspiraloons™ will maintain that there is nothing deliberate or managed about these outbreaks of collective hysteria. Conspiraloons™ will, on the other hand, depending on what kind of day they've had, tell the Non Conspiros™ to either go fuck themselves or at least try and maintain an open mind and accept that such things may be possible. It's not like anyone is talking about having to believe in space aliens here, just screwing with people's heads through application of mass media.
And that's as far as I'm going with this one. I have no doubt that something truly peculiar is going on but short of making research into this business a full-time occupation I don't think anyone on the outside is going to be able to come up with any useful answers until after it has run its course.
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12 comments:
Missing Maddy's unique eye pigment condition that was featured on the wanted posters is also the same genetic condition that makes people immune from the rage virus in 28 Weeks Later.
Remember Descent being advertised on the London bus bomb, 'outright terror, bold & brilliant'...
"Get ready for the eerie sight of Madeleine’s distinctive right eye in the O of the Google Search Engine logo. The McCann Machine has struck an agreement with the company and the altered logo should be use by June 22, 50 days after the disappearance."
of course, this could all be part of an experiment in some new and exciting entertainment medium where instead of watching scripted movies in the confines of a cinema we actually participate in them in our 'real' lives - kind of like The Truman Show only on a slightly larger scale
/ updates post title
Lol.
The photo is a punn.
Macan (spoonerised to Mc Cann) is the Indonesian/Malay word for eat.
/ one new thing every day learning quota met
which of the two photos are you talking about though?
and on and on it goes...
http://tinyurl.com/39fjcg
yadda yadda...
http://tinyurl.com/yvhlt5
It gets more surreal...so they plan to release 50 balloons in 50 cities across the globe. Is this what the Maddie fund is paying for? How exactly is that meant to help find her?
of course, this could all be part of an experiment in some new and exciting entertainment medium where instead of watching scripted movies in the confines of a cinema we actually participate in them in our 'real' lives - kind of like The Truman Show only on a slightly larger scale
The telescreen has come to life, only it's not the one in the other corner of the room.
Still, not to worry:
"There is extensive coverage of CCTV with over 6000 cameras on the network, this will increase to 12,000 by 2010 as part of the ongoing station modernisation plan under the Public Private Partnership contract. This is being further enhanced to accelerate some of these works and improve recording quality amongst other CCTV initiatives. This will see the upgrading and expansion of CCTV facilities from analogue to digital and the recording of high quality images to hard drives rather than magnetic tape. Ultimately this will mean that no one will be able to enter the Underground network without their face being recorded by CCTV."
Oyster card, anyone? Compulsory registration to follow shortly after all the ticket offices are shut down - for your convenience, security and to avoid being refused access to the network. Any problems, see the armed police operatives at any of the entrances. Anyone attempting to dodge £10 per journey fares will do six months hard labour in a New World Order Labour Camp, courtesy of Wackenhut Inc.
Like in any decent film that leaves you feeling warm and fuzzy, the general public wake up, all the people who participate in making all the bad stuff come to fruition realise that if they're fucking someone, they too are getting fucked; everyone jointly realises how royally fucked they have been, and continue to be getting, at the hands of the biggest and most successful bunch of criminals known to history, and -- in one great and irrepresible concresence of consciousness -- everyone sees through their superficial differences and everything works out alright in the end.
Oh, wait, that's roughly the plotline to V for Vendetta....
@ant
Still, not to worry
thanks for the link to that important document - I feel much safer now
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