Thursday, November 29, 2007

Hypno-Teddy #1 news item on the BBC tonight!!



All Glory to the Hypno-Teddy!!



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edit: and now for an important message from Hypno-Teddy...



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Taken from my outbox today...

A couple of extracts from emails I've sent to some fellow Conspiracy Loons over the course of the day in the context of the frankly remarkable developments arising from the David Abrahams story. Well, it saves writing it all out again...


"...The current Labour sleaze crisis is even more significant than most people have yet realised and if it isn't closed down pretty damned quick it's going to shine a light on a hidden world that only Conspiraloons have dreamt of. There's a good chance one of the Establishment's bagmen has been exposed for all the world see. The Iraq War? The War on Terror? The debt mountain and f*cked up banking system? We are closer to public exposure of some of the answers as to how all these things came about than we ever have been

Given all that, it's not surprising that the blogging 'Commentariat' (promoted by The Guardian and Julia Hobsbawm's (a name well worth googling) very Common Purpose feeling 'Editorial Intelligence'), as well as the Alex Jones' of this world, are somewhat at a loss for words. They're either too compromised or too f*cking stupid to comprehend what's going on. They simply don't have the ideological tools to make sense of the implications

Sad to say, it's the right wing libertarians that are running with this - along with all the distasteful baggage that goes with it..."


and to another Loon...


"(Is there) Something nasty in the woodpile? Certainly, and I'm still trying to figure out if Brown's unprecedented catalog of closely spaced woes really is just a case of coincidental timing, the result of some kind of tipping point having been naturally reached, or half a dozen shady blokes puffing on cigars in a room somewhere deciding that their interests are best served somehow by imploding the whole f*cking shambles..."


"Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the Conspiraloon"


It's been a good week for us Loons so far but, sad to say, a good week for Loons invariably involves shocking or ghastly events that shake people out of their complacent slumber. So it's not exactly something to gloat over

nor is the fact that I fully expect plenty more good weeks for Loons in the not too distant future...

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Hypno-Teddy

The Peninsula Hotel Manila, prior to this morning's redecoration - they do a very nice eat all you want sushi buffet on Friday nights when they're not being occupied by the anti-government resistance.


I've just spent a large chunk of this morning watching the coverage of the hotel siege in Manila. Not because it was particularly interesting but because I've stayed at the hotel in question a couple of times. Many of the locals labour under the impression that any Westerner staying there is CIA, an organised criminal, a sex tourist or a combination of all three. They're not usually wrong...


Manila is actually a pretty good place to visit if you want to get a feel for what a few decades of benevolent US colonisation, followed by another few years of US sanctioned 'market-reform'-driven oligarchical rule can do for a country

And when not catching up on the latest important news from the Philippines listen to me very carefully and watch the teddy bear...




Keep your eyes fixed on the teddy bear


Think of nothing else except the teddy

You are feeling very, very angry...

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also available in the same series - Hypno-Football Manager Bear / Hypno-Notorious Unsolved Murder Bear and Hypno-Bullshit Gun Crime Crackdown Bear

The police were certainly very busy clearing through their to-do lists yesterday...

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Wednesday, November 28, 2007

People who should avoid going for long walks in the woods #438 - David Abrahams

David Abrahams


For anyone keen to keep an eye on latest developments in the controlled demolition of the UK government (Lord Patel and, dare I say it, Paul Staines and his pack of rabid commentators seem to be doing a pretty good job on that front at the moment) may I recommend spending a couple of minutes brushing up on how politics in the US works; particularly the role played by Political Action Committees (PACs) and one PAC in particular. There's an outside chance that it might prove to be relevant here

And no, I don't think Hitler was cool

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Monday, November 26, 2007

'The Middle Class Proletariat' aka 'We're all potential terrorists now'

And whilst waiting patiently for the imminent collapse of the world’s banking system and the return of the much-missed feudal economic system why not while away a few minutes flipping through a fascinating document a fellow Conspiraloon just reminded me of...

Called ‘Strategic Trends’ it is an 'independent view of the future produced by the Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC), a Directorate General within the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MOD). It is a source document for the development of UK Defence Policy'.

It’s available as a downloadable pdf (dated March 2007) straight from
the MOD website here

My favourite bits come near the end in the section called ‘Strategic Shocks


Strategic Shocks
being…


“An analysis of trends and probable outcomes can only go so far in describing the future, the unexpected also needs to be taken into account - shocks will happen. Our discussion now outlines ways in which discontinuities may occur. This section makes no claim to be a comprehensive list of all possible shocks, but does seek to demonstrate how the world might develop in ways that are radically and intuitively different from outcomes derived from linear analysis.”

My two favourite potential Strategic Shocks being…


The Middle Class Proletariat


The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx. The globalization of labour markets and reducing levels of national welfare provision and employment could reduce peoples’ attachment to particular states. The growing gap between themselves and a small number of highly visible super-rich individuals might fuel disillusion with meritocracy, while the growing urban under-classes are likely to pose an increasing threat to social order and stability, as the burden of acquired debt and the failure of pension provision begins to bite. Faced by these twin challenges, the world’s middle-classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.”

and


Terrorist Coalition of the Willing


Islamist terrorism is likely to remain the most obvious manifestation of the international
terrorist threat until at least 2020. However, changes in the strategic context could cause this threat to evolve in unusual ways. A generational change among leading Islamist terrorists could lead to a more broadly based coalition of opposition to the cultural invasion caused by globalization and modernization. A terrorist coalition, including a wide range of reactionary and revolutionary rejectionists, such as ultra-nationalists, religious groupings and even extreme environmentalists, might conduct a global campaign of greater intensity.”

Get the picture?

Alternatively, you could keep telling yourself that agencies of Western governments are not exploring the possibility of, and making provision for, waging counter-insurgent warfare against swathes of their own populations. After all, only a lunatic would believe stuff like that

here's the link to that MOD site again...



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Most poignant, and silly, piece of art I've experienced for ages...



Original, non YouTube, upload here

In a way, we're all chocolate bunnies...

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More from the malfunctioning Emma 9000 unit...

Further to my earlier post about voice-over artist Emma Clarke getting the boot for posting a series of spoof London Underground announcements...

Emma has received a fair slice of mainstream coverage this evening (with the best bits and rude words edited out, obviously) and her website has keeled over temporarily. No doubt it'll be back up and running in a day or two

In the meantime, here's a sample...



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and imagine my delight when, whilst searching for a few quick pics to illustrate the sound clip, I plopped the words 'suspicious rucksack' into Google Image Search and discovered that a picture of one of my rucksacks, sitting no more than 5ft from where I am typing now, comes in at #5...



this blog will be the end of me one day, I swear it...

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A cracking week for Coincidence Theorists™ who don't ask too many questions

Unless you’re one of those insane Coincidence Theorists™ it is becoming increasingly hard to believe that we in the UK are not witnessing some kind of deliberate, controlled demolition of our current government

And today’s entirely coincidentally occurring disaster for our governing political party, in a seemingly endless chain of coincidentally occurring disasters, is the resignation of the Labour Party general secretary, Peter Watt

Apparently, he saw nothing illegal in someone circumventing political donation disclosure laws by making political donations in someone else’s name

Now the thing is, whilst it is admittedly early days for the mainstream media’s coverage of this particular scandal, it is already pretty clear that there are a couple of questions our corporate press have little appetite for asking...

  • Why did the donor in question, David Abrahams, wish to hide his identity?

David Abrahams

  • What was he after and did he get it? (I suspect that establishment of a UK Sharia State can be safely struck off the list of possible answers)

Father Abraham


... speaking for myself, I won’t be holding my breath waiting for someone in the mainstream to start asking those questions


Colonel Abrams

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"The Emma 9000 unit appears to be malfunctioning"

"You are not fooling anyone, you filthy pervert"


Over the weekend I was chatting with someone who had recently experienced some frustration with an automated supermarket check-out unit and who admitted that, for a moment, they had forgotten that they were arguing with a talking computer

A fairly standard device in late 1960s/1970s sci-fi films was to include a scene where the hero of the film would engage in dialogue with a human-sounding computer. The computer would then get stuck in some kind of repetitive loop or the voice would start speaking... v...
e... r... y... s... l... o... w... l... y... ; leaving our hero in some kind of doodoo as the result of being in an environment where he was reliant on a unreasoning, unemotional box of wires

70s sci-fi films were fucking excellent

A few days before my supermarket check-out chat I was kicking my heels at Cockfosters underground station at the end of the Piccadilly Line

There were no fecking trains

The guard on the ticket barrier struck up a conversation with me and we got to chatting about all things Piccadilly Line and some of the joys of traveling on that particular route. Anyone who uses the Piccadilly Line regularly will know what we were talking about and there’s no reason to go over them here

We had plenty of time to chat because…

There were no fecking trains

What made the conversation particularly special was that every few minutes a recorded voice would blare out from the station speakers

‘There is a good service operating on the Piccadilly Line’

After about the third or fourth play of that message, the guard said to me…

‘You can’t believe how bloody annoying that message is when there are problems on the line’

London Underground have been regularly playing messages and putting up signs which talk about a ‘Good’ service across the network for a couple of years now

'Good', of course, means ‘Normal’ and the purpose of endlessly repeating such inane messages can only be an attempt to subliminally convince passengers that London Underground’s service isn’t shit

I wonder how much they stumped up to management consultants for coming up with that little wheeze

So, there you are walking around London Underground stations listening to crude attempts at low-grade brainwashing; delivered in the kind of recorded voice that we are accustomed to hearing in dystopic sci-films delivering messages like…

‘Thirty minutes to reactor core meltdown. Do not be alarmed. Everything is under control’

Anyway, I only mentioned all this because Emma Clarke the woman who has been recording the bollocks messages for London Underground for the last eight years has just been given the boot
by Transport for London for recording a series of spoof announcements and posting them on her blog

Spoof announcements such as…

* "We would like to remind our American tourist friends that you are almost certainly talking too loudly."

* "Residents of London are reminded that there are other places in Britain outside your stinking shit hole of a city and that if you remove your heads from your arses for just a couple of minutes you may realise that the M25 is not the edge of the Earth"

* "Would the passenger in the red shirt pretending to read the paper but who is actually staring at that woman's chest please stop. You are not fooling anyone, you filthy pervert."

* "Would passengers filling in answers on their Sudokus please accept that they are just crosswords for the unimaginative and are not in any way more impressive just because they contain numbers."

* "Passengers are reminded that a smile is actually a friendship signal, not a sign of weakness"

* "Do not drop litter on the train. Please use the tramps provided"

* "Here we are again crammed into a sweaty tube carriage… and today’s Wednesday, only two more days before you can binge drink yourself into a state of denial about the mediocrity of your life. Oh, for goodness sake. If you're female smile at the bloke next to you and make his day. He's probably not had sex for months"




The spoof messages are still available on Emma’s home page, though it does seem to be struggling with bandwidth issues at the moment. And if you do visit I strongly recommend flipping through her blog and the fascinating insights it offers into the voice-over business. The post ‘How to make reading credit examples fun!’ which ends with the plea
'Any suggestions as to how to jazz up credit examples are very welcome’ is pure gold.


cf. Chris Morris spoof airport announcements

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Saturday, November 24, 2007

Timing is everything


In years gone by, prior to the discovery of electricity and radio waves, transmission of information used to be a lengthy and unreliable process. It would sometimes take weeks, or even months, for news to travel from one end of The Land to another

But now, of course, we live in the Information Age when data can travel around the world at the press of a button and literally at the speed of light

Unless you work for The Guardian that is...


Revealed: massive hole in Northern Rock's assets



Ian Griffiths
The Guardian
Friday November 23 2007

Fresh (!!?) doubts emerged last night about Northern Rock's ability to repay the £23bn of taxpayers' money it has been lent by the Bank of England.

A Guardian examination of Northern Rock's books has found that £53bn of mortgages - over 70% of its mortgage portfolio - is not owned by the beleaguered bank, but by a separate offshore company...

The same investigation reveals just how vulnerable the bank is to a cooling property market and demonstrates the scale of Northern Rock's exposure to mortgages where customers have borrowed heavily against their homes.

The mortgages are now owned by a Jersey-based trust company and have been used to underpin a series of bond issues to raise cash for Northern Rock. It means the pool of assets available to provide collateral for Northern Rock's creditors, including the Bank of England, is dramatically reduced, calling into question government claims that taxpayers' money is safe...


No shit Sherlock

It's a bit late reporting this now though isn't it?


About two months too late


Still, it's faster than most of the other mainstream press which hasn't got round to tackling this issue at all

This isn't about newspapers acting responsibly and easing up on their coverage of crooked fuck-ups at banks like Northern Rock, RBS or Barclays to avoid creating a national panic. There's going to be bloodbath whatever they print. This is about the corporate media standing idly by whilst the whole rotten system is propped up with public cash for a few more weeks so that the Big Boys can slip their money out - and bollocks to the rest of us




So what's the explanation then? Are mainstream financial journalists terminally corrupt or are they just plain shit at their jobs?


And, with regards to the end result, does it really make any difference what the answer to that question is?

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And it's always worth remembering one thing about the money our current financial system is so reliant on; it is whisked up out of thin air by a small number of privately controlled institutions.

And if our current financial system does suffer a catastrophic rupture because of a sudden shortage of that money it will be because that handful of privately controlled institutions will have willed it so

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edit: and whilst on the subject of shite financial journalism how about this timely piece from the Newsnight blog...

The history of Newsnight's nightly markets update has not always been a happy one. On Thursday we reported that in New York the "Dow Jones was substantially down amidst more credit crunch fears". That's odd, many of you told us, as - being Thanksgiving - Wall Street's finest were on a day-off. Our economics editor Stephanie Flanders was mortified - "unforgivable and embarrassing" was her verdict.

Ace Newsnight financial journalist Stephanie Flanders


The key point about this cock-up is not that someone in the BBC mistook Wednesday's market data for Thursday's market data it's the fact that they made up a reason to account for it and reported that reason as fact

(I've made a comment to that effect on the Newsnight blog though it doesn't appear to have cleared moderation yet... edit: nope, still not there...)

Of course, we can all be sure that the Newsnight team only make stuff up on US National holidays...

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Le Morte d'Alistair


"The Phisher King or the Wounded King figures in Arthurian legend as the latest in a line charged with keeping the Holy Grail. Versions of his story vary widely, but he is always wounded in the legs or groin, and incapable of moving on his own. When he is injured, his kingdom suffers as he does, his impotence affecting the fertility of the land and reducing it to a barren Wasteland. Little is left for him to do but phish in the river near his castle Corbenic. Knights travel from many lands to heal the Phisher King but only the chosen can accomplish the feat..."


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Friday, November 23, 2007

A tragic schoolboy error...

What better time could there be to dust off the link to ‘The Iron Triangle – The Carlyle Group Exposed’?



- complete with an introduction in Dutch to have you thinking you’ve clicked on the wrong link. Unless you’re Dutch that is. In which case you'd probably be quite pleased

Carlyle Group was, of course, the driving force behind the recent float of QinetiQ which is making the news today because, apparently, there are still some people out there who don’t realise that UK plc is a corrupt banana republic

Right now, in a parallel universe somewhere a dozen or so ex-civil servants are facing 30 years hard labour for relieving the British public of £100,000,000+. In this universe the Business Editor of the State Broadcasting Company is putting out articles which explain that the theft of £100,000,000+ is not the result of top-level globalist corruption but rather a tragic ‘schoolboy error.

Schoolboys these days must have access to a lot more capital than when I was a lad

And what better time than now for a bunch of Rothschild cronies in the House of Lords to start demanding extra funding for Our Brave Boys fighting in far off fields around the world? Because, especially after so many keenly-priced floatations of national offence defence assets, you just know that every extra penny spent would go straight towards improving the welfare of ordinary soldiers; just like all that extra spending on health, education, railways, water, the environment…

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edit: a picture of a rather fetching RFID chip manufactured by a company called Matrics inc whilst it was a subsidiary of Carlyle Group...


Matrics was subsequently sold on by Carlyle in September 2004 to the appropriately named Symbol Technologies.


You really couldn't make this stuff up

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Thursday, November 22, 2007

One year on and, surprisingly, the lyrics are showing no signs of becoming dated at all...

Vlad the Conspiraloon



Vladmir Putin is currently on a stand-up tour of his country prior to next month's Russian parliamentary elections. And, naturally, the Western press is covering what Putin has to say in an even-handed and objective fashion.

Take a speech Putin made this Tuesday for example

Here's what Reuters had to say...

Putin slams foreign nationals for backing opposition

President Vladimir Putin, using Cold War rhetoric, accused foreign governments on Wednesday of sponsoring his opponents in next month's election to weaken Russia and carry out "dirty tricks" against it...




Or
The Times...


Vladamir Putin attacks the West as clamour grows for him to stay in power

Amid the razzmatazz of an Americanstyle election rally yesterday, President Putin accused the West of plotting a campaign of dirty tricks to destabilise Russia.

He told thousands of flag-waving supporters that opponents of United Russia, his party, were in the pay of foreign governments determined to weaken and divide the country at parliamentary elections on December 2.

The President, apparently fearful of the “colour” revolutions that swept away the regimes in Georgia and Ukraine after rigged elections, said that Russia faced a conspiracy to trigger similar mass demonstrations...




Not that I mistrust such even-handed and objective sources such as
Reuters or The Times but I thought I'd have a quick peek at the original speech in Russian - and with the aid of Babelfish and a couple of web searches I've come up with these translated extracts...

"Who are these parties? Those, who during decades ruled Russia, and at the end of the 80s let the people without basic services and goods, without sugar, without meat, without salt, without matches and with their policy for sure prepared dissolution of USSR.




Or speculations from those, who some ten years ago controlled key positions in federal assembly and in the government. These are those, who in 90s by being at high positions/functions caused damage to society and to the country, by serving to the interests of oligarchic structures and stealing the national property. These are trying to teach us to live today, they made, among others, the corruption the main means of political and economical competition. These are those, who year by year took unbalanced, irresponsible absolute budgets, leading at the end to default, decline and multiple attacks on standard of living of the citizens of our country.


Did not these opponents sneeringly call national economy "black hole" and refused the necessity of state support of population?

These are those, who for years did not pay child support, pensions, and salaries...

By one word all those, who at the end of the last century brought Russia to mass misery, general bribery to what we are fighting with still today."


which isn't quite the same thing as what the Western news agencies would have their readers believe Putin is saying...

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Wednesday, November 21, 2007

A little something for your Amazon wish list...

for the phisherman in your life who hasn't quite got everything...


Link to the full page here (thx yet again Tony)




Looking on the bright side, at least the disks that have gone missing didn't contain biometric data (not this year anyway) - imagine all those people affected having to change their fingerprints and retinas rather than a few on-line passwords. Messy...

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Useful Forms of the World #419 - Anti Terrorism Clearance Certificates

Google Image search can throw up the most interesting little snippets...


Thanks to a recent article on Lord Patel’s blog on the subject of HM Revenue loosing confidential data from 25 million people (whoopsies), I have just become aware of the existence of United Nations (issued by Nigeria) Anti-Terrorism certificates which, for a small fee, declare that the bearer has been cleared of any connection with terrorist funding or illegal banking transactions




Fantastic and IMHO well-worth having

and a snip at only 24,500 Euros

or for free if you do a Google image search. Here’s a blank one I just found…



What an excellent excuse to pick up that colour laser printer you've been promising yourself...

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Catastrophic Gradualism (redux)


Thanks to Tony for pointing me towards an amusing article on the BBC website entitled ‘
Climate scepticism: The top 10’…

“We look at 10 of the arguments most often made against the IPCC consensus, and some of the counter-arguments made by scientists who agree with the IPCC”

There is much sceptical amusement to be had here and for me personally the stand-out argument is #7…

7. A CARBON DIOXIDE RISE HAS ALWAYS COME AFTER A TEMPERATURE INCREASE NOT BEFORE

Sceptic

Ice-cores dating back nearly one million years show a pattern of temperature and CO2 rise at roughly 100,000-year intervals. But the CO2 rise has always come after the temperature rise, not before, presumably as warmer temperatures have liberated the gas from oceans.

Counter

This is largely true, but largely irrelevant. Ancient ice-cores do show CO2 rising after temperature by a few hundred years - a timescale associated with the ocean response to atmospheric changes mainly driven by wobbles in the Earth's orbit. However, the situation today is dramatically different. The extra CO2 in the atmosphere (35% increase over pre-industrial levels) is from human emissions. Levels are higher than have been seen in 650,000 years of ice-core records, and are possibly higher than any time since three million years ago.

Fellow Man Made Global Warming sceptics will no doubt enjoy that definition of ‘largely irrelevant’ immensely

And as a MMGW sceptic, I’m a little disappointed that the top reason for my own scepticism is absent from the list…

"Man Made Global Warming advocates are fucking pussies"

Not only are they Climate Change Deniers they are actually too scared to face up to the fact that there’s absolutely nothing we can do to prevent Climate Change


George Monbiot and some pals on the campaign trail


So, instead of advocating measures that will enable mankind to adapt to that inevitable change they prefer to kid themselves that tweaking Humanity’s CO2 output a few percent is going to ensure that global climate stays exactly the fucking same for all time. Somewhat akin to trying to steer a 100,000 ton supertanker into dock with a lolly stick

Well, I’m convinced

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Standing back from the MMGW ‘debate’ a little, it’s fascinating to see the Doublethink which underpins contemporary Natural Science being exposed on a such a big public stage

The godfathers of modern geology and evolutionary theory made it very clear that natural science was all about very boring things happening, very gradually over the kind of mind-numbing timescales that dwarfed a human lifespan.

This is known as the principle of uniformitarianism

“Uniformitarianism is one of the most basic principles of modern geology, the observation that fundamentally the same geological processes that operate today also operated in the distant past. It exists in contrast with catastrophism, which states that Earth surface features originated suddenly in the past, by geological processes radically different to those currently occurring.”

However, the motives for the adoption of uniformitarianism were arguably more ideological than scientific

A uniformitarian view of earth history permitted the huge timescales required for Darwinian Evolution to be a viable concept and, more importantly, it separated science from religion and all those dusty old books filled with catastrophic creation myths; especially floods

The only problem being that uniformitarianism is a load of old, gradualistic cock

Trying to piece together the history of the Earth without acknowledging the key role played by catastrophes is like trying prepare a report on an air crash without making any reference to any actual crashing

The Earth is littered with evidence of past catastrophes and processes that are not in operation today

And for the better part of 200 years geologists have either ignored that evidence or made up some really silly gradualistic stories to account for it

Personal favourite examples of catastrophic, in your face, geological features with bollocks explanations include; the periodic reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field, the formation of 1km thick beds of pure salt through evaporation (that’s a lot of fecking evaporation), limestone formation, the mechanism for plate tectonics and last, but not least, fossil formation.

Hands up anyone who can point me to anywhere on Earth where fossil beds or even that most tediously common of rocks, limestone, are currently being deposited

/ waits patiently

/ doesn't hold breath

The problem with contemporary uniformitarianism is that whilst pushing the Bible and religion out of the picture it also negates the Number One reason why Catastrophes were written into the Bible in the first place…

To scare the shit out of people


Big Scary Floods brought about by ignoring Prophets and continuing with Our Sinful Ways ...undergoing a bit of a Renaissance at the moment


And scaring the shit out of people, especially kids with their lovely squishy unconditioned minds, is very much the name of the game these days


and the Question for the Day is : "Why is it, with the constant diet of unrelenting optimism about their future being rammed down our kids' necks every day, that so many of our teens choose to drink themselves stupid on a regular basis? Yes, I know!! It must be the availability of alcohol. Yes, that's got to be it..."


We are now living in a weird point in time where mainstream science still pays lip service to uniformitarianism but simultaneously ramps up the catastrophe side of things to meet the needs of the current social and political climate

So, modern science is very much like the Bible then but without the Holy Men




OK, slightly fewer Holy Men

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PS Another favourite example of bollocks explanations for possibly catastrophic past events I didn’t list above was the level of radioactive isotopes in the Earth’s atmosphere. If you don’t calibrate/ fiddle raw data for atmospheric levels of Carbon and Helium isotopes you find yourself looking at some rather short, embarrassingly biblical-looking, dates for the age of our atmosphere. But that’s by the by. Whilst looking for pointers towards any new rationalisations in the field of radiocarbon dating I’ve just noticed that someone has sneaked in a couple of amusing links into Wikipedia’s article on RC dating

The links point towards the works of a guy called Anatoly Fomenko, a proponent of the most amusing piece of Loonery
I’ve seen all week…

“Fomenko is a supporter of revising chronological history. He has created his own revision called "New Chronology", based on statistical correlations, dating of zodiacs, and by examining the mathematics and astronomy involved in chronology. Fomenko claims that he has discovered that many historical events do not correspond mathematically with the dates they are supposed to have occurred on. He asserts from this that all of ancient history (including the history of Greece, Rome, and Egypt) is just a reflection of events that occurred in the Middle Ages and that all of Chinese and Arab history are fabrications of 17th and 18th century Jesuits. He also claims that Jesus lived in the 12th century A.D. and was crucified in Constantinople; that the Trojan war and the Crusades were the same historical event; and that Genghis Khan and the Mongols were actually Russians. As well as disputing written chronologies, Fomenko also disputes more objective dating techniques such as dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating.”

Whilst I'm not exactly convinced by Fomenko’s thesis I have to admit that it does display a certain degree of style and can’t be faulted for lack of scope or ambition...






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PPS and a couple of stills of Klaus Kinski's finest hour I really wanted to, but couldn't find a legitimate way to, include in this post...



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Monday, November 19, 2007

Getting away from it all...

One of the reasons why the output of this blog has tailed off a little recently is that I’m pre-occupied with preparing myself for a much-delayed move out of the UK in the first half of the New Year sometime.

All being well, I'm hoping to be able to get into New Zealand

I have personal reasons for trying to get in there but an awful lot of my fellow countrymen, part of the Exodus of British nationals now leaving the UK, have already made the move to New Zealand over the last few years

And if comments left under on-line newspaper articles are anything to go by, Brits moving to New Zealand and elsewhere can be broadly divided into those who are leaving because they believe Britain is filling up with ghastly foreign terrorist immigrants and those who are leaving Britain because they believe it is becoming some kind of fascist Dystopian police state.

I suspect both groups are in for a bit of a disappointment, as the signs are that the shit that’s been going down in the UK is going to be rolled out all over the developed world sooner rather than later

We’re just a little bit ahead of the curve. That’s all

Taking the financial system in New Zealand for example; personal debt, house prices and trade deficits have been pushed to extreme limits by the same bankers’ games that have been played here in the UK, the US, Spain and elsewhere. The end result will be greater social inequality and establishment of a form of neo-feudalism where the essentials of Life – food, water, housing - will be under the monopolistic control of the Few. Ten years ago I would have written off such ideas as Loontalk
. Now, all I have to do is look around

Or how about the War on Terror and the creation of a police state thing? Surely, a small little country like New Zealand would be immune? OK, New Zealand has been a handy source for Mossad operatives looking to obtain fake passports by impersonating severely disabled people...

Mossad agents pretending to be nationals from another country!!? Unthinkable...


...but, aside from that and the occasional exploding Greenpeace vessel (state-sponsored terrorism so that's OK), what does the Land of the Long White Cloud have to do with the Global War on Terror? Would such an out of the way place need to get involved and start rolling out all sorts of new anti-terror legislation?


After all, people keep telling me how really, really quiet it is there...

But apparently New Zealand does need new anti-terror laws, and hundreds of police officers devoted to waging the eternal, and somewhat loosely defined, War on Scariness…

New Zealand activists held after terror raid

A terrorist training camp was uncovered in New Zealand yesterday after police made a series of raids targeted on Maori extremists.

Tame Iti, a key activist in the fight for Maori independence, was arrested

More than 300 officers took part in the operation, arresting 17 people. A variety of weapons was seized, including firearms.

The most high profile arrest was that of Tame Iti, a Maori radical from the Tuhoe tribe, who comes from the thickly forested Urewera mountains of North Island where the camp was found. Mr Iti, 55, who advocates full Maori independence, appeared in court charged with possession of a firearm and petrol bombs.

A paramilitary group calling itself the Freedom Fighters had been training at the camp. Some reports suggested that their presence was disclosed when they tested napalm, a deadly petrol-based concoction used by US forces during the Vietnam War...

Napalm-spurting Maori radical, Tame Iti




and, yes, in a fashion now traditional in the UK it subsequently turned out that much of the story was bollocks and those charges which are going to be pressed will be under the terms of legislation that existed long before New Zealand’s new anti-terror laws

The point is that it doesn’t matter who the terrorists are; Muslim or Maori, animal libbers or eco-freaks, or whether they represent a credible threat which genuinely warrants legislating rights away from the entire population. The point is that all over the developed world governments are grasping at any opportunity to put new draconian laws on their books. Laws which are being implemented in such a manner and often on the basis of such flimsy pretexts that it’s not so incredible to start thinking that there may be a degree of co-ordination involved

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As luck would have it a few days after the arrests in New Zealand a guy called John Key was making a presentation to a group of ex-patriot New Zealand professionals living in London

Key is the leader of the New Zealand National Party and is effectively the Leader of the Opposition in New Zealand

Billed as being a ‘Self-Made Man’ in the kind of mould that Kiwis respect, Key’s ‘Self-Made’ his fortune in the banking industry and sat on the New York Federal Reserve bank prior to his return home in 2001 to pursue a political career

Hmmm, the Federal Reserve ...my favourite

My Other Half was in attendance at Key's talk and without going into too much detail Key devoted much of his presentation to extolling the virtues of the kind of government policies, relating to private sector provision of public services and increased labour 'flexibility', that have become familiar fare to us in the UK plc. He also buys into the War on Terror paradigm big time and is prone to kissing US Neocon arse

If anyone in New Zealand politics is the globalist-anointed future leader of that country Key appears to be that man

At the end of his presentation he received questions from the audience. One guy nervously put up his hand and said something like…

‘I’m returning home soon and the big concern that I have is that New Zealand is looking like it’s going the same way as the UK with a lot more surveillance and assaults on civil rights. What’s your take on that?’

Key didn’t seem particularly keen on answering but was spared the effort by several dozen people in the audience laughing at the guy who asked the question as if he were a nutter...

My Mrs was still feeling guilty
when she came back home hours later for not having approached the guy afterwards to let him know that he wasn't alone and that she didn't think he was mental

All things considered, I’m under absolutely no illusions about a possible move to NZ whatsoever

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(On the plus side it was heartening to read this story recently…

“NZ women most promiscuous: survey”

New Zealand women have the most sexual partners in the world, according to a global sex survey reported on Saturday...

though seeing this clip of New Zealand’s hottest new weather forecasters in action took the edge off the news slightly…



The Weather Angels - New Zealand's fiendish scheme to deter reactionary bastards planning to flee deteriorating social standards in the UK

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Friday, November 16, 2007

Good Quotes from Shite Movies #427

The RMS Northern Wreck


Andrews: "Water, 14 feet above the keel in ten minutes, in the forepeak, in all three holds, and in boiler room six."

Ismay: "When can we get underway dammit?"

Andrews: "That's five compartments. She can stay afloat with the first four compartments breached. But not five. Not five. As she goes down by the head the water will spill over the tops of the bulkheads, at E Deck, from one to the next, back and back. There's no stopping it."

Smith: "The pumps, if we opened the pumps-"

Andrews: "The pumps buy you time, but minutes only. From this moment, no matter what we do, Titanic will founder."

Ismay: "But this ship can't sink!!"

Andrews:
"She's made of iron sir, I assure you, she can. And she will. It is a mathematical certainty."


"Oh, bugger..."


Not long to go now...


and anyone who likes to play the markets and who is not currently shorting Northern Rock, Alliance & Leicester or Bradford & Bingley really should think about taking up a new hobby

"Shhhh, don't tell anybody but we're fucked..."


and for anyone stuck for Christmas present ideas for their grannie may I suggest buying them a thermos flask and some sturdy queuing shoes

and it's great to see that the same team of high-class professionals who closed down Craig Murray's blog are working hard to ensure that a particularly greasy memo published on behalf of the Northern Rock board bragging how the British public will be obliged to shoulder the financial losses resulting from their incompetence won't see the light of day


Personally, I think the biggest problem many people have with comprehending this Northern Rock business, aside from the huge numbers involved, is that in their heart of hearts they still really, really don't want to face up to how bent their country is

And the answer is...

A lot

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