Now that's what I call protesting

Here's a web page that offers some useful pointers to British protesters and demonstrators looking for interesting new ways to get their message across...

The Exciting World of South Korean Protests

I think my personal favourite is hard core water resistant dude...



though the bloke who wanders into supermarkets and chucks shit all over their meat counters is a pretty close second




And, on the same site...

Getting to Know Russian President Vladimir Putin (though pictures)

.

And on BBC News today...

There's a particular terrorism court case that a few of us in Blogoland have been keeping any eye on for a while now. It involves a BNP supporter called Robert Cottage caught with a shed load of 'explosive chemicals' and other provocative items in his house.

Someone just mentioned to me in an email that the judge had passed sentence on the case

So, naturally, I first turned to the the state broadcasting company's news front page for details of the verdict...



Hmmm, no. No joy there

Which is kind of funny really when you consider how much the Beeb pees itself in its eagerness to report every juicy detail, real or imagined, when Muslim terror suspects get convicted and banged up

Ah well, a site search for 'Robert Cottage' did the trick



Two and half years...

That compares very favourably with the sentences handed out to some other, duskier, terror bastards I could think of. A couple of personal favourite examples include...

• A 40 year sentence for conspiring to commit murder. The fact the convicted terror bastard in question was conspiring with himself and had no access to the personnel and equipment necessary to undertake the supposed attacks he was convicted for is, or course, entirely incidental. He did however scribble in a notebook a lot and is a bit mental

• A 15 year sentence for being caught with a pair of dirty socks and a shopping list

The second case is a particular favourite as the successful conviction led to possibly one of the finest quotes that anti-terror supremo Peter Clarke has ever made in his illustrious career...

"We do not know when, what or where he was going to attack, but the public can be reassured that a violent and dangerous man has been brought to justice."

.

Greg Palast telling it like it is

A little while ago I was having a beer with a couple of people and we got to talking about the effectiveness, or rather lack of effectiveness, of Left Wing activism.

Being true to my Conspiraloon™ roots, I suggested that a lot of that failure was due to the fact that ordinary politically active people are being deliberately jerked-off and misdirected by journalists and writers from the established, state-sanctioned Left

and then I played one of my favourite cards and asked ‘Name an established Left Wing writer with access to the mainstream press who you trust?’

It’s not as easy a question to answer as some might think

At some point Greg Palast’s name came up




Now, I’d be the first to admit that he’s written some decent stuff.

On the other hand that whole Sam Spade investigative journalist in a trench coat and fedora thing is just a tad too cheesy for my tastes. He also repeatedly attempts to validate what he has to say by constant references to his association with the BBC and its flagship news program Newsnight

Hmmm, hardly the hallmark of quality in my book

But that’s all by the by

The reason why I don’t trust the self-publicising fucker is not because of his silly hat or what he says and writes. It’s what he doesn’t say that bothers me.

That's what misdirection is all about

Take his work on voting fraud in the US as probably the simplest example.

Yup, there is definitely something dodgy about the roll-out of paperless, unverifiable voting machines in the US. And yup there is plenty of evidence that thousands of eligible voters have been denied a vote through underhand practices

But so fucking what?

Would it really make any difference to US domestic and international policies if the Democrats won more elections?

The Democrats did pretty well on an anti-war ticket in the midterm elections last year and subsequently they endorsed an increase in US forces in Iraq.

Nothing changed. Nothing changed because the Democrats and the Republicans are in the pockets of the same lobbies

And I suspect a growing number of people in the UK are realising that the same situation applies here with Labour and the Conservatives

Meanwhile, Palast and Co are wanking off as many people who are worried about the state of politics as possible with distractive bullshit.

If all the political parties on a ballot are bent why should anyone give a toss about how the votes are counted?

In fact, personally, I quite like the idea of everyone suspecting that vote counting is bent as it strips away what little veneer of democracy is left over the whole crooked process.

Anyway, all of the above is just an intro to this clip of Palast ‘doing a Chomsky’ whilst being interviewed on the subject of 9/11 scepticism…





It’s not the fact that Palast’s views on 9/11 differ to my own that I think leaves him looking like an idiot-shill-gatekeeper-twat in this clip. It’s the fact that he contradicts himself quite severely in the space of a few seconds - first maintaining that, as a serious investigative journalist, he has no definitive opinion on the subject because he has done no research and then going on to talk about all the research he’s done.

The unedited video of the full interview is available here and does an even better job of showcasing the change in Palast’s demeanour into mumbling bumbling bullshit mode once he starts talking about 9/11

.

What do Prescott Bush and Pigeons have in common?

"Coup, Coup..."

If you type the word ‘Conspiraloon’ into Google the first result takes you to a page entitled…

‘Ten Characteristics of Conspiracy Theorists’

The page is written with absolutely no sense of irony whatsover. Which is unfortunate as all ten ‘characteristics’ display the peculiar quality of being equally as applicable to the kind of people who write pages called ‘Ten Characteristics of Conspiracy Theorists’ as to conspiracy theorists.

It’s difficult to pick a personal favourite Characteristic but, if pushed, I’d probably go for Number 9…

9. Using previous conspiracies as evidence to support their claims. This argument invokes scandals like the Birmingham Six, the Bologna station bombings, the Zinoviev letter and so on in order to try and demonstrate that their conspiracy theory should be accorded some weight (because it's “happened before”.) They do not pause to reflect that the conspiracies they are touting are almost always far more unlikely and complicated than the real-life conspiracies with which they make comparison, or that the fact that something might potentially happen does not, in and of itself, make it anything other than extremely unlikely.

The logic behind this is really quite special and seems to be saying ‘Just because something happened before that has no bearing whatsoever on the possibility of it ever happening again’

Hmmm, interesting

Total bollocks admittedly but nevertheless still interesting because it is a nice example of the kind of mental gymnastics people are willing to go through to sustain their personal world view.

Aside from the somewhat cavalier attitude to the significance of historical precedent I’m also not entirely convinced that the Bologna Bombing, Operation Gladio, Iran-Contra, Lockerbie or, more recently, the Litvinenko poisoning can really be described as being more probable and conceptually less complex than suspecting state complicity in, say, the Al Qaeda myth or the Afghan drugs business.

Journalist Gary Webb - author of Dark Alliance, a series of articles linking the CIA with the international drugs trade. The man was clearly a Conspiraloon™ and insane, as evidenced by the fact that he ended up committing suicide by shooting himself in the face, twice.

It has been said many times before but the kind of people who write pieces like ‘Ten Characteristics of Conspiracy Theorists’ are really talking about Unofficial Conspiracy Theories. Official conspiracy theories such as the Al Qaeda Myth or that the Russian Government has taken to bumping off dissidents by sprinkling radio-active isotopes all over London; endorsed, as they are, by our government and the media, are just peachy. And, provided those official conspiracy theories are endorsed by the establishment, they can be as insane and as improbable as you like.

But woe betide anyone who entertains any line of speculation, however rational, that is not pre-approved by the establishment

Anyway…

Whilst mindful of the ‘fact’ that past events carry no weight in demonstrating the predisposition of certain groups to engage in conspiratorial behaviour, here’s a link to a BBC Radio program on the subject of the 1933 Business Plot to overthrow Roosevelt’s administration by way of a coup…

The Whitehouse Coup

(alternate link here)

"If this doesn't work you're going to have to become the fucking president..."

The proposed coup never got past the preliminary planning stage for several reasons, not least because the general who was supposed to lead the military side of things wasn’t having anything to do with it and blabbed to Congress

The general in question, Smedley Butler aka The Fighting Quaker aka Old Gimlet Eye aka Snookywookylumps (to Mrs Butler) also wrote a small pamphlet entitled ‘War is a Racket’ (well worth a browse) and described his illustrious 33 year career in the United States Marine Corps as having involved being ‘a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers’.

Whatever happened to the name Smedley?

It’s worth remembering that the alleged target of the Business Plot, Franklin Roosevelt, went on to do a outstanding job of lying and tricking his country into World War 2, in spite of strict promises to the contrary, which enriched the interests who allegedly plotted against him eight years previously immensely

What a funny old world it is

Fortunately, we live in enlightened times and, empowered by the sage wisdom contained in ‘Ten Characteristics of Conspiracy Theories’ Number 9, we know that the past is a different place that has no connection whatsoever with the here and now.

Because there’s every reason to believe that the kind of people behind the corporate sponsored coups of the past, successful and unsuccessful, don’t exist any more and even if they did they wouldn’t be foolish enough to plot any conspiracies because our newspapers would find out and report them.

Yes siree, yes they would.

.

The Industrial Dwellings Company Ltd.

And whilst of the subject of foppish, hypocritical eco-twats with posh skin...

Since I made a post about eco-twat David Mayer de Rothschild a few weeks ago all sorts of informative and entertaining Rothschild-related trivia has come my way

• Rothschild fans the world over will be delighted to know that the 200 year long split (yeah, right) between the English and French arms of the Rothschild banking business has come to an end

• Craig Murray, still understandably a tad bitter about being smeared and driven out of his job as Uzbek Ambassador by the British government for the sin of complaining that the Uzbek regime was supplying the UK with nonsense terrorist intel obtained by boiling innocent people to death, has slapped up a brief post entitled ‘Parasite News’. The parasites being Gulnara Karimova, daughter of the Uzbek People-Boiler in Chief, and Nathaniel Rothschild

But that’s not important right now. The other day I was strolling around Camberwell, camera in hand, doing what I could to capture the rapturous beauty of South London and adding to my collection of futile, pointlessly located Madeleine McCann posters at the same time…






when I came across this interesting feature on the side of a housing block…






Imagine my delight, when on returning home, I plugged ‘Four per Cent Industrial Dwellling Company Ltd.’ into Google and read this…


The Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Company Limited was founded by Nathaniel Mayer Rothschild in 1885. Its purpose was to provide 'the industrial classes with commodious and healthy Dwellings at a minimum rent'. Funds to build the Dwellings were raised by issuing shares to investors, who were guaranteed a 4% return.


Verily, even going about my normal business on the streets on South London the buildings are whispering to me 'Rothschild, Rothschild...'

No doubt, the first residents of those commodious and healthy industrial dwellings grabbed the opportunity to live in them with both hands. But, personally, I have a major problem with shady dynasties throwing the occasional crumb to the masses whilst continuing with the serious, centuries-old business of fucking those masses over six ways from Sunday

I thought it was a cool-looking plaque though…

.

100% Pure Horse Monbiot

George Monbiot - sworn enemy of hypocritical wealthy middle-class environmentalists everywhere

And whilst in the kind of cut and paste from the newspapers mode that typifies the very best of British Blogging, how about some classic Monbiot from this week's Guardian...


Ethical shopping is just another way of showing how rich you are

The middle classes congratulate themselves on going green, then carry on buying and flying as much as before

George Monbiot
Tuesday July 24, 2007

It wasn't meant to happen like this. The climate scientists told us that our winters would become wetter and our summers drier. So I can't claim that these floods were caused by climate change, or are even consistent with the models. But, like the ghost of Christmas yet to come, they offer us a glimpse of the possible winter world that we will inhabit if we don't sort ourselves out...


Yet another fine piece from the 'Tsunamis aren't caused by global warming but I'll work them into my piece anyway because my readers are stupid c*nts' school of ethical environmental journalism

.

A crushing of ideals

Thanks to anon for posting a link to an interview given by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Der Spiegel published earlier this week...

SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

The fourth section is particularly pertinent and chimes totally with my own much more limited experiences of what has happened in Russia over the last 15 years and a damn sight more balanced and perceptive than the outright lies that the BBC and the rest of the owned British media continue to peddle remorselessly...


"When I returned to Russia in 1994, the Western world and its states were practically being worshipped. Admittedly, this was caused not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by the natural disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda.

This mood started changing with the cruel NATO bombings of Serbia. It's fair to say that all layers of Russian society were deeply and indelibly shocked by those bombings. The situation then became worse when NATO started to spread its influence and draw the ex-Soviet republics into its structure. This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by literally millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one fell stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc.

So, the perception of the West as mostly a "knight of democracy" has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals.

At the same time the West was enjoying its victory after the exhausting Cold War, and observing the 15-year-long anarchy under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. In this context it was easy to get accustomed to the idea that Russia had become almost a Third World country and would remain so forever. When Russia started to regain some of its strength as an economy and as a state, the West's reaction -- perhaps a subconscious one, based on erstwhile fears -- was panic."

.

US announces change in Al Qaeda tactics

Doug McClure and the remarkable Dana Gillespie on the trail of the Al-Qaeda Fortress that Time Forgot

Whilst on the subject of War on Terror bullshit, this little snippet from Reuters tickled me...


U.S. says Qaeda safe haven inaccessible WASHINGTON (Reuters)

- Al Qaeda's safe haven in northwestern Pakistan is largely inaccessible to outside forces and unlikely to be eliminated soon by the U.S. or Pakistani military, top intelligence officials said on Wednesday.

"Al Qaeda is now in a part of Pakistan that is largely inaccessible to Pakistani forces, the Pakistani government. Always has been. And it is a very difficult operating environment for them," said Edward Gistaro, the top U.S. intelligence analyst on transnational threats.

"It is just a very difficult environment for outside forces to operate in," he added.

Al-Qaeda bases are now located in regions so inaccessible they may have their own Jurassic-era ecosystems...

Movie geeks of a certain age cannot help but notice that Al-Qaeda's reported tactics are gradually shifting away from recycled James Bond plots (coordinated global crime networks/ underground bases) and starting to be more in line with classic 'Lost World' genre movies of the 1970s





And, of course, every movie geek knows that the most effective way to penetrate lost worlds is to fly through a swarm of pterodactyls in an airship piloted by an eccentric English aristocrat and his butler.

Somebody needs to tell the people in charge of US counter-terror ops to change their tactics ASAP

In the meantime, another picture of Dana doing that pagan woman thing which, intercut with scenes of fighting dinosaurs, left a profound impression on 13 year old boys everywhere...



.

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed on State Sponsored Terror

Here's a link to an mp3 of a recent talk given by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed on the subject of state sponsored terror....

Creating Terror - Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

The man appears to have discovered his cojones and seems to be taking the line 'I don't care if someone labels me a conspiracy theorist this is what the evidence is telling me, so there!'

It's a longish talk and covers ground already well known to many Conspiraloons™ but at the very least I recommend listening to the conclusion, starting round about the 64 minute mark.

Nafeez makes some very astute observations about the failure of 'The Left' in dealing with issues such as the invasion of Iraq and the domestic War on Terror. He makes the obvious, though rarely stated point, that even if in some fucking dream world Leftist activism led to the UK pulling out of Iraq that wouldn't do anything about dealing with the forces and interests that put us there in the first place

But, of course, the problem is that as soon as people start talking about the kind of covert geopolitical shenanigans our governments engage in and the motivations for those shenanigans they get labeled as conspiracy theorists and accused of mental illness. Not just, understandably, by the corporate mainstream media but, increasingly, by the (corporate?) Left.

Shame on them

Nafeez has a stab at a call to action but even by his own admission he has trouble thinking what that action could be - 'stretching the political system' by writing stiff letters of complaint to local Members of Parliament is about the best suggestion he can come up with

Hmmm, not convinced by that one

Our current system of governance is bust. I suspect terminally

To be honest I doubt if any real change will be effected until the numbers of people who understand what's going on in the world reaches a level where acts of mass civil disobedience become a viable proposition. It will happen sure enough but events, at home and abroad, will have to get a lot worse first

"Let's fuck shit up!"

but when you've got the dollar falling through the floor, carrier groups sailing in all sorts of provocative places, homeland security chiefs with 'gut feelings' about imminent terrorist attacks and UK police chiefs talking about mass internment, rest assured it probably won't be a long wait


FWIW my personal opinion is that, in the meantime, people should concentrate on educating themselves and, wherever possible, other people and attempt to effect change person by person

...oh yeah, and telling Leftist (sic.) gatekeepers to go fuck themselves

.

Mr Happy Penis

A few weeks ago I got an email from the publishers of the Schmap On-Line City Guides asking me if I would give permission (for free obviously) for one of my photographs to be short-listed for use in their Rome Guide.

Given the subject of the photograph I didn't think for a second that it would be included but I received another email on Saturday telling me that it had indeed made the cut.

So, anyone accessing Schmap!! Rome - Sights and Atractions clicking the entry 'Piazza Vittorio - Famous Fabulous Market' will now be rewarded with this image...

Original Caption - 'Mr Happy Penis'

They must be a strange old crowd at Schmap



.

Euphemisms 2

"Er, we've come on holiday by mistake"

Just in case anyone needs a translation from Parliamentary Committee speak into plain English...

When a parliamentary committee says...

"We conclude that there is evidence to suggest that the map of the Shatt al-Arab waterway provided by the government was less clear than it ought to have been"

what it is actually saying is that the government was

"lying through its fucking teeth"

when it published the map, claiming it was definitive

HMS Cornwall

Detail from the infamous Piri Reis map compiled in 1513. Scholars are strongly divided as to whether it does depict an ice-free Antarctica or not but one thing is for sure - it's coverage of the Shatt al-Arab is just as accurate as anything published by the Ministry of Defence

(See also The Tale of Iran Air Flight 655 or 'How to steam into Iranian waters, claim that you are still in international waters, shoot down a civilian airliner carrying 290 people as part of a campaign of violent intimidation in support of Saddam Hussein and then sail back home in time for tea and medals')

The USN Commendation Medal - as awarded to serving US Navy personnel for the 'heroic achievement' of shooting down 747s filled with children

.

This is how empires end...

And in yet another one of my shameless rips from Lord Patel’s blog...

A selection of last night’s closing prices for $ denominated commodities per the BBC...


I’m ripping it because it’s a nice illustration of something I was banging on about a couple of posts back

When the price of something such as houses, or nickel, goes up that does not necessarily mean that houses, or nickel, are in particularly short supply. It could equally mean that there is too much currency knocking about. The more money you create the less its perceived worth.

And if you continue to create more and more currency out of thin air and expect people to accept it in return for stuff that’s actually worth something, sooner or later that currency will die on its arse.

Blindingly obvious I know but it’s remarkable how little coverage this point of view is given in the mainstream media.

It's easy enough to understand why people don't really want to face up to this stuff though. What's a happier thought? That your house increased in 'value' by 15% last year or that the house hasn't changed in value and money is worth 15% less?

The US is by far and away the worst offender for this sort of thing and has been creating junk dollars to pay for its imports for years now. The US has sustained the perceived value of its junk dollars by the simple expedient of strong-arming virtually every other country in the world to hold trillions of them in reserve and making examples of selected countries that don’t by bombing the shit out of them

Unfortunately for the US it’s starting to looking like this gag is starting not to work any more – too many dollars and too many countries dumping too many of those dollars on the sly and not enough bombs for all of them. Though if the dollar does continue to tank the way that it has it’s a pretty good bet some poor bastards somewhere will be in for a dose of the old Shock and Awe

And to be honest the UK hasn’t been much better behaved with its currency than the US. However, sterling is getting by at moment through the simple virtue of it not being quite as shit as the dollar, plus our government is not too fussy about the cleanliness of much of the money that sloshes in and out of the City of London - it''s not so much a knowledge based economy we've got going here, more a deny all knowledge kind of thing

but our turn will come

as someone once said, this is how empires end…

no worries though, the latest Harry Potter book's on sale today, hooray!

.

Like a banana republic without the bananas - episode 9,027

Lord Levy - obviously delighted at today's news

And the best response so far to the news just in that the BBC 'understands' that No-one is to face charges after the 16-month cash-for-honours police inquiry comes from The Daily Mash...


BROWN GETS GREEN-LIGHT TO MURDER HIS ENEMIES

"Whitehall sources said the decision not to bring charges in the cash for honours inquiry, despite the piles of invoices, receipts and signed confessions, means Brown can begin working through his 200-page 'bastards list' (more)


.

Polski in the Park

I’ve spent much of this week clearing out the old shop I grew up over. Some bad people are going to knock it down and build flats that I could never dream of affording on the site

Boo

One of the treasures we uncovered whilst emptying the place was a pound coin that had fallen, or more likely been tossed, behind a cupboard...




The thing is it isn’t actually a pound coin. The weight isn’t quite right and it’s made from a soft, shiny, lead-based alloy.

There used to be quite a few of them in circulation.

I strongly suspect the reason why there aren’t so many of them about these days is because the raw materials and effort required to make them are now worth a lot more than a quid.

Forged pound coins are a thing of the past

…unless someone can find material which has less inherent worth than a real £1 coin to make them with

which is no small task

You could make £1 coins with Rice Crispies and old chewing gum wrappers and they would still have more inherent worth and retain their value better than the real thing

As veteran Conspiraloons™ know full well one of the biggest conspiracies in the world today is the money supply racket...

For years now our money supply has been increased faster than the official rate of inflation, faster than any growth in productivity and certainly faster than the majority of ordinary people’s wages

All other things being equal if you increase the amount of money in circulation by 10% every year prices will go up by 10% every year

If you keep ordinary people’s wage rises down to less than that 10%, say 5%, you’re managing to fuck them pretty comprehensively on a massive scale. The impact is cumulative, compounds every year and is the neatest method ever devised to cut people's real incomes and extend economic inequality

A lot of people sacrificed much in the past to create a fairer and more equitable society and little by little, as with our basic freedoms, it's all gradually being taken back, a few per cent at a time.

And anyone who thinks that any of the mainstream political parties are going to do anything to stop the claw-back of wealth and liberty back to the Select Few is a fucking Muppet...

Grass roots Labour/ Conservative/ Lib-Dem (delete as appropriate) supporters in action

Somebody I met taking pictures outside the Houses of Parliament once pointed out to me that throughout the entire span of Human history the proportion of people who have had access to the kind of prosperity and civil liberties we in the UK have taken for granted is precariously tiny. It is not the norm. Given the slightest chance, the unscrupulous few have always found ways to dominate the many.

He was right

And why anyone should think any of that has changed eludes me totally

Of course, to pull the inflation-theft trick off without people noticing too quickly it helps if you can fudge money supply and inflation statistics.

And five minutes spent trying to get a handle on reliable money supply and inflation figures will leave the intrepid researcher knee-deep in yummy sweetness.

And the most profitable way to inflate a country’s economy with bullshit money is to lend lots of it out at low interest rates and then, later on, you can fuck people even more by yanking those interest rates up

And, as my own mortgage statement reminded me this morning, we appear to heading into the ‘fuck people even more’ stage of the completely unplanned, totally equitable boom-fuck cycle

In the last twelve months the cost of money, as set by a completely independent (from whom exactly?) committee of bankers, has risen by 28% to 5.75%

Those of us cursed, and I mean cursed, with a slightly deeper understanding of the banking system than our fellow citizens run a serious risk of becoming obsessed with this issue. It really is a colossal con and a system that underpins so much of what is wrong in the world – wars, third world debt, obscene levels of inequality and exploitation, the works

(and that's why some of us go absolutely batshit when a name like Rothschild crops up in the context of what passes for contemporary environmentalism)

Hopefully, the UK government’s recently announced initiative to educate school children about real world financial issues will cover ground such as inflation, money supply, fractional reserve banking and how the banking system makes trillions by ripping people's faces off, rather than just focusing the 'education' on how to be 'better' consumers of financial services

/ pops outside to look for some wind to whistle at

Questions about money supply issues are rarely, if ever, subject to critical discussion in the media. Some Conspiraloons™ maintain, not without some supporting evidence, that’s because bankers control the newspapers. On the other hand, also not without some supporting evidence, it could simply be because the majority of financial journalists are plain thick

House prices certainly are subject to a lot of discussion and, in the absence of addressing money supply issues, journalists have to come up with ever-inventive ways of explaining what's going on. The 'answers' always swing on the supply of housing, never the supply of money, and virtually all pundits predict, on God only knows what basis, a steady leveling-off of house price inflation

Because, of course, as everyone knows, house prices always do that - go up really, really quickly then level off without dropping...




That's not to say that housing supply is not a factor in house pricing but on its own it doesn't explain where all the unfunny money is coming from to make the current insane pricing levels possible

-

And whilst on the subject of housing supply and the economics of inequality, now's a good time to mention London's annual Polski in the Park Summer festival - currently being celebrated in open spaces across the length and breadth of this great city

When you're a migrant earning five quid an hour and sharing a bedroom with four or five other people you'd like to get out of the place and socialise a bit but can't really afford London pub prices. The answer is, of course, to buy a few cans and drink them in the nearest park, demolition site or pavement with your mates, particularly if the weather's nice.

The same thing used to go on (still does?) in the bad old days (pre Putin) in Moscow - with the bars and clubs filled with foreigners and Mafiosi and everyone else sitting around outside drinking on the street. When the weather was really shitty people would sup their beverages underground in the metro stations and sometimes take along some snacks as well

All very festive but also just a teensy wee bit sad and squalid

Well, there's a lot of that going on in London now. I'm not knocking the guys doing it and they bother no-one but I'm not sure that it's a sign of progress and I wonder if any of the people who can afford a night-out (indoors) in London ever notice them or would give a toss if they did.

It’s all a bit too third world for my tastes and I can’t shake the feeling that there’s a price to be paid down the line.

-

edit: Thanks to anon for posting a link to this clip of Ron Paul speaking on the subject of 'Dollar Hegemony'. It's spot on IMHO (Paul takes the podium 2 minutes into the video)...



.

Euphemisms

Just in case anyone needs a translation from BBC Speak into plain English...

When the Director General of the BBC announces that 16,500 of his staff, including himself, will be attending compulsory training courses on the subject of...

'safeguarding trust'

...what he is actually saying is that he feels the need to send all his staff on courses to remind them not to lie and steal

Which, no doubt, will piss off those of the 16,500 who don't make a habit of lying and stealing immensely and leave those of the 16,500 who do feeling quite relieved

But don't worry, everything is going to be OK now and it's worth remembering that only a small fraction of the BBC's vast programming output has been been caught lying - and if they haven't been caught they can't be doing it can they?

And I have no doubt that our police will be taking the matter of financial fraud perpetrated on a national scale very seriously and banging up the perpetrators in due course

/ waits patiently

/ doesn't hold breath

.

Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew 4

Back to that coverage of the attack on Glasgow Airport (again)…

Someone else has just pulled me up for being a tad harsh about the media coverage of that day, particularly the coverage given to the firefighting operation…


Stef. I didn't have the opportunity to say before, but in the later clips on Al Jazeera (English), I saw 3 lines in operation against the burning car. Probably water (no layering observed). I think it's likely that a risk/damage assessment was made by the people on the scene and they did what they thought was necessary at the time until more info/pesonnel came in. Also, the media will always* try and show the most dramatic pics of such an incident.

Your observation at the time, while reasonable all things considered, was I a wee bit harsh.

Gosh that wasn't easy to say having realised the number and extent of USUK false flags over the years.

* unless it exposes the truth of British army/establishment crimes or those of their US buddies, in iraq for example.


Which is fair enough.

Since I made my original post someone took the time to explain why a specialist airport fire-fighting team was not on the scene. Fine. I asked a question and someone answered. I never doubted that the firemen were doing their best to deal with the fire but something wasn’t right. Even we Conspiraloons™ acknowledge that cock-ups, as opposed to conspiracies, happen sometimes.

And no doubt our sensationalism-hungry media will get stuck into the story of British Airports which, in the midst of a domestic war on terror that will last for generations, have reduced fire-service cover and no armed police on site but have all the resources they need to compile biometric databases and to jerk their passengers around in the pursuit of nonsense

/ starts waiting patiently

/ not holding breath

Let’s not kid ourselves here. The media coverage of the Glasgow attack was hysterical and no effort was spared in emphasising the scale of the ‘Terror Threat’.

The BBC, in particular, should be held to account for the way it is covering this and other issues. Unlike any other media organisation the BBC is funded by compulsory taxation. The rationale being that this liberates the BBC from crass, commercial pressures. What we get instead, taking the War on Terror as an example, is a succession of wanker-‘experts’ spouting bullshit and half-truths as they plug their risk consultancy service/ book/ spooky paymaster’s agenda. Fuck that, I can get shit like that on Sky for free.

Here's a relink that Keith Olbermann clip on the subject of bullshit War on Terror reporting I already linked earlier this month...



The War on Terror pays well. The Not War on Terror is considerably less lucrative

And to be honest, the often-repeated observation that ‘the media will always seek the most dramatic images and accounts of an incident’ is so full of exceptions and caveats as to be effectively useless. To have meaning it really needs restating along the lines of ‘the media will always seek or create the most dramatic coverage that fits its controllers’ agendas’

Which is why for example...

• Stories of Egyptian spies falling off balconies in London get piss-all coverage
  

• The story that someone was smearing polonium all over London is very tightly controlled and subject to a fraction of the sensationalism there would have been if Muslims had been involved
  
  

(The Daily Mash)

• And not forgetting bollocks stories about a pair of antiquated Russian bombers diddling around the Arctic that get reported as being a portent of a new Cold War
  

And so on, and so on

Anyone with even a passing interest in the output of the British press surely can't help but feel the stage is being set for another conflict somewhere. There's an almost palpable sense of looming confrontation just over the horizon. Probably not with Russia, maybe with Iran, maybe with somewhere else. I'm not even sure it matters who we end up fighting, as long as we're fighting someone. All we are doing now is waiting for the papers to be told to tell us who it's going to be...

.

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing Items Like This?

And in yet another shameless rip from Lord Patel's blog, this little snippet tickled me for some reason...

Per Amazon's "What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing Items Like This?" on the page selling 'Mein Kampf'




What? Only 2%?


-


And on another subject not entirely unrelated to the works of Hitler and JK Rowling there's a another post on Lord Patel's blog that links to an Italian anti-SUV site which, in turn (hyperlinks being what make the Internet go round), links to another Italian site announcing that 8th September 2007 is going to be Vaffanculo Day...




There's a Vaffanculo Day group up and running on Flickr where there's a whole V for Victory, V for Vendetta, V for Vaffanculo thing going on.




The gist of Vaffanculo Day seems to be that since the supposed collapse of the Fascist regime on 8th September 1943 Italian politics hasn't actually changed all that much and politically aware people are being asked to get together in town squares across Italy and discuss what they should do about it.

Hmmm, it's definitely worth a try but...

Whilst not discounting Italy's radical anarchist tradition for a second I'm also mindful of Italy's equally powerful post-war tradition for turning out some of the most pampered, most achingly superficial people on Earth. Not all of them of course. Just a lot of them

So yes, any event entitled 'Fuck You Day' does show promise but most of the people attending will be spending as much time checking each others' shoes out and wondering what their Mum has cooked for dinner as plotting the demise of contemporary fascism.

There's also the small matter that Italians virtually wrote the user manual on infiltration of political movements and false flag operations before Francis Walsingham was even a twinkle in his father's eye, which might go some way to explaining why so little has changed since 1943 or even, in some ways, 1543...

Long-dead sneaky English guy

Even longer-dead sneaky Italian guy

-

edit: As far as I can tell Vaffanculo Day and the V8 logo are in no way affiliated with the makers of this stuff



Just to make sure I've decided to join the Vaffanculo Day Flickr group and submit a selection of publicity images for the tremendously delicious, tremendously corporate V8 beverage range. I doubt very much if they'll still be there when I wake up...


.