The State Broadcasting Company strikes back

And for anyone who doesn’t subscribe to BBC Newsnight’s daily emails …

Extract from the first email of the day from the Newsnight team...


Those of us who inhabit the world of old media have learned the hard way to respect the power of the blogger. Over the past couple of years many an error, example of hypocrisy or attempted cover-up has been searingly exposed by the bloggers, and a few careers sunk.

We'd asked the fearless political blogger Guido Fawkes to make a film for Newsnight on what he sees as the failings of mainstream political reporting.

This was no trick, but at that point Guido was in a corner. His film had been an exhortation to programmes like Newsnight aggressively to empty-chair politicians who refuse to debate. While he himself prefers to operate in the shadows he could therefore hardly refuse, and a poll of his site's readers urged him overwhelmingly to appear.

The result, was a bit of car crash. Guido's keyboard-orientated pyrotechnics were no match for Michael White of the Guardian's verbal swordsmanship.

But hats off to Guido for entering our world. He'll be back.


Well, that’s not patronising, self-congratulatory wank at all is it?

I saw the interview in question and it wasn’t so much the poor performance of the blogger that struck me, and it was poor, it was the thinly disguised sense of anger and hate coming off both Michael White and Jeremy Paxman. They fucking hate blogs. And White was more than happy to lie through his teeth to score some points

Jason Statham doing his ever-popular Michael White impression

And then, tucked away in the second email of the day from the Newsnight team...


KATHY SIERRA

Following death threats famous US blogger Kathy Sierra has called on the blogosphere to combat the culture of abuse online. She has had to cancel public appearances as a result. We'll be interviewing her live on blogger bullying - should there be any limits in the blogosphere?


Methinks I'm starting to see a theme developing here

Fuck ‘em

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Subversion

I am enjoying these immensely...





Details of similar projects and the kind of specialist, high-tech equipment needed to carry them out can be found here




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And, nothing to do with subversive street art at all but equally pleasurable if you happen to be a Dalek or Monty Python fan...

Dr Who and the French Dalek

(found via Adhesive X's blog, ta)

though I suspect that the genius of this work will be lost on anyone who isn't British and of a certain age. Aren't cultural differences great.

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Is that a GPS in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me? (redux)

I've met a lot of people outside of the UK, including the US, who have told me that they rely on British news organisations, particularly the BBC, for more even-handed coverage of world events than they get at home.

The poor, deranged fools

Helping to serve you up hot steaming shite, fresh from the horse's arse

Me, I prefer to tune-into American daytime women's chat shows to see people at least trying to discuss something more than a 'unipolar' view of what's going on in the world




Fuck me, what has the state of journalism in the English speaking world come to when Rosie O'Donnell is now at the forefront of thoughtful, open-minded geopolitical comment?

Rosie and Chums talking about captive British sailors, the death of diplomacy, corporate domination of the media, false flag operations and WTC7 - Part 1 - Part 2

NB In keeping with my new in-house illustration policy, from this point onwards all pictures of public figures borrowed for use in this blog will be sourced wherever possible from celebrity look-alike agencies, starting with...

Rosie O'Donnell

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Not as hard as he thinks he is

In case anyone has missed this...

Norwegian Guy Skis Down Tube Escalator

I guess he thinks he's pretty hardcore but I can't help noticing that he pulled off his little stunt in North London. If he'd tried that in a Tube station this side of river somebody would have shot him in the back of the head nine times, wiped the videotape clean, stripped his body and sold his nice shiny skis in a pub to buy some lovely, yummy crack.

Bloody tourists...

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Is that a GPS in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?

As a history buff, I have to say how great it is to see that the ancient and noble art of the well-crafted, heavily reported, naval incident is still alive and kicking.

There’s nothing like a fuck-up involving a couple of ships to really get the party going.

Ships and sailors have always been well-suited to the task of breaking the ice between potential adversaries for several excellent reasons…

• Ships are portable and can be easily positioned somewhere provocative. Somewhere on or around a disputed boundary usually works best
  
  
• Ships are considered to be national territory. An attack, real or imagined, on one of your ships is tantamount to an attack on your homeland
  
  
• Ships and sailors have a tendency to sink when you put holes in them …and they therefore tell no tales
  
  
• The number of independent witnesses passing by in the middle of the sea is normally on the low side

And what a fine catalog of seaborne shenanigans and marine mischief history has to offer us - the USS Maine, the RMS Lusitania, the Elli, the USS Liberty, the Altmark, the Belgrano, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and, not forgetting, Captain Jenkins Ear – possibly the most bizarre pretext for a war ever!!! and an all time personal favourite…

The thing about wars in general, and the War of Jenkins Ear in particular, is the better you think you are at winning wars, as the British did for a while, the more inclined you are to grab any opportunity, and I mean any opportunity, to start one.

Cue the tragically sad story of Captain Robert Jenkins…

Under the 1729 Treaty of Seville, the British had agreed not to trade with the Spanish colonies. To verify the treaty, the Spanish were permitted to board British vessels in Spanish waters. After one such incident in 1731, Robert Jenkins, captain of the ship Rebecca, claimed that the Spanish coast guard had severed his ear. Encouraged by his government (which was determined to continue its drive toward commercial domination of the Atlantic basin), in 1738 Jenkins exhibited his pickled ear to the House of Commons, whipping up war fever against Spain. To much cheering, the British Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, reluctantly declared war on October 23, 1739.

Only time will tell if Leading Seaman Faye Turney and her fourteen shipmates will make it back to Blighty with all their appendages intact.

Before

After

I genuinely wish them all well, unlike the bastards who put them in Harm's way in the first place.

Still, it was handy that the BBC and The Independent had the forethought to interview LS Turney just before she was arrested by the Iranians. I thought that was a nice touch.

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What's it good for?

Well, it looks like the Megaphone and BNP sock puppets are out in full force, commenting on the BBC 'Have Your Say' page on the current 'crisis' between Britain and Iran.

This crowd's touching concern for our servicemen is bringing a lump to my throat

Apparently, there are a lot of people out there who seem to think that 'We' should reduce Teheran to rubble...

'Nuke them back to the Stoneage'

'Iran give us back our people that they have taken by force, or we take back our people by the same force and level Tehran in the process'

'Next turn, why wouldn't the mullas simply put a nuclear warhead on a postal box elsewhere?'

and so on, and so on

There are significantly fewer comments on Craig Murray's posts on the subject, where he tries to warn people about taking what the British government (his former employer) is saying at face value. A point of view which isn't getting much airtime in the mainstream press.

Time and time again, our government has been caught out lying through its teeth about what is happening in the Middle East, and pretty much everything else come to think of it. Most recently, it has been shown that when Downing Street dismissed the Lancet's estimate of 655,000 Iraqi civilian dead as being unreliably high last year the government's own advisers were confidentially reporting that the figure was probably an underestimate. Has anyone in the mainstream run with that story? Nope. Is the BBC treating government claims about the circumstances behind the current situation with Iran with even the slightest trace of healthy scepticism? Nope

Or has anyone raised the subject of the USS Vincennes shooting down Iran Air Flight 655 and killing 290 people in 1988? Round about the time the US was pressuring Iran to make peace with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. The US government claimed that the Vincennes was sailing in international waters and thought it was under attack. In truth, the ship was sailing in Iranian waters and wasn't being attacked. The guy who shot the airliner down was given a medal...

for shooting down a civilian airliner... in peacetime... whilst trespassing in another country's territory

"For distinguished duty in the face of overwhelming... er... something..."

If that isn't fucked-up I don't know what is.

Come to think of it, has anyone had the bollocks to contrast the way the Iranians are dealing with their captives with the way we in the Coalition of the Free treat some of our captives?



Of course not

The collective amnesia, bias and hypocrisy of our media is staggering. And people fall for the same old bullcrap time and time again.

One of the reasons a country as small as Britain, with its relatively small army, managed to conquer an Empire as large as it did in the 19th century was that the people who led Britain back then were smart enough to get other stupid Muppet bastards to fight Britain's wars on our behalf.

And I can't shake the feeling that it's now our turn to be the Muppets.

It's quite to difficult to fully communicate how powerless and disgusted I feel at the way my country has been manipulated, and is being manipulated, into fighting other people's bloody wars

And what can I do about it aside from rant in a blog?

Absolutely nothing...



War!

Good God!

What's it Good for?

the defence and security industries, distracting people from domestic issues, maintaining the dollar as a reserve currency, opening up new markets for multinationals, bringing about the return of the Messiah and ensuring steady supplies of cheap drugs and bananas

but aside from that...

Absolutely nothing!


I won't say it again

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London schoolchildren are getting crunchier

I always find myself grappling with contradictory feelings when the media covers stories about the rise, or is it the fall, of crime in the UK, particularly London.

One side of my brain, probably the left, tells me that hysterical coverage of crime stories, as put out famously by newspapers such as the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, is part of a drive by vested interests to scare the crap out of people so that they will agree to more laws, more CCTV, more police. More of the same ineffective bullshit that is a lot more about curbing dissent and generating revenue than making our world a genuinely better place.

Which isn't a good thing

The other side of my brain tells me that it really is getting scarier and nastier out there.

Which is hardly a good thing either

Of course, provided you're willing to indulge in a little conspiracy theorising, you can reconcile the two observations by concluding that crime is being allowed to rise deliberately so that people will call for a more, er, 'policey' state

Which, of course, puts you into David Icke 'Problem-Reaction-Solution' territory

Which means that you are mad, as well as having shocking taste in music

And then I see stories like this one in today's Times...




which, for some reason I cannot quite put my finger on, just had me laughing

... for about a minute longer than a sane person would

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Contraceptive Bicycle Shorts and Original Sin

There's absolutely no way I'm going to put up a post on the subject of Original Sin and pass up on a chance to mention the life and works of Abbe Lazzaro Spallanzani. A pioneer in the scientific study of man juice and the man who gave the world condoms for frogs.

Oh no

Forget the Galileos, the Darwins or the Newtons. By far and away the most entertaining and informative stories from the history of science are those of the scientists, often very clever, very meticulous scientists, who went to superhuman efforts to reconcile their observations with the prevailing beliefs of their times. Even when those observations flat out contradicted those beliefs.

Of course, we're a lot more sophisticated now and simply recalibrate our instruments, correct our data or simply write-off anomalies as being insignificant.

Anyway, back to Lazzaro

Lazzaro, like many of his contemporaries in the mid 1700s, was an ovist.

Ovists believed that the offspring of an individual are preformed within the egg.

Which meant that, logically, if every egg contains a tiny little preformed person, that tiny little preformed person must also contain eggs which also contain even tinier preformed people. In fact, all future generations of offspring would be contained within an egg

The great thing about ovism was that it did a very neat job of reconciling Genesis with Science. Christian ovists were able to conclude...

• Eve literally held all of mankind in her ovaries
• All of mankind was present inside Eve when she was cast out of Eden and therefore shares her guilt
• As the egg bearers of mankind, women are responsible for transmitting the stain of Original Sin
• Men do not carry eggs and are therefore inherently purer

Or put more simply

Science proves that we are all born in Sin and women are to blame

An absolutely brilliant idea. Totally bonkers, but brilliant nevertheless.

The only problem was actually proving that babies were preformed within eggs.

Enter Stage Left, Lazzaro Spallanzani...

Spallazani believed that contact between egg and semen was not necessary for generation to occur. He believed that sperm only 'awoke' the dormant embryo within the egg by means of transmission of what he called 'spermatic vapour'.

And to prove his theories he carried out an experiment in which he dressed male frogs in tight-fitting contraceptive bicycle shorts made from taffeta before introducing them socially to girl frogs.

Strangely enough, no matter how many times the boy frogs came in their pants, those spermatic vapours stubbornly failed to do their job and no tadpoles were conceived. Occasionally the shorts would split and Lo! baby frogs but Spallanzani still didn't get the hint.

Some people did take the hint and became 'spermists', believing that the imaginary, preformed little people must, obviously, be present in sperm rather than eggs; though history fails to record whether any of them went on to follow in the footsteps of The Master and fit lady amphibians with prophylactic underwear

Eventually, Spallanzani gave up on frogs and took to masturbating dogs in the name of science instead but that's another story...

Horse Whisperer

Dog Wanker

Anyway, that was pretty much that for the 'scientific' belief that sin could be transmitted through the generations genetically. And modern evolutionary theory is quite strict on the transmission of characteristics acquired by an individual in its lifetime to its offspring i.e. it doesn't happen. A man who loses a leg in accident doesn't have one-legged kids. So, presumably, a man who did something wicked in his lifetime doesn't necessarily spawn wicked children either.

At least I thought so. Until the last couple of years when I started to come across stories about the new science of epigenetics - the notion that the genes we inherit from our ancestors are shaped by their experiences and their environment. Which would mean that someone could argue that maybe we do inherit guilt for our ancestors' actions after all.

Bad news for Darwinists, excellent news for lawyers.


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Saving wretches like me

There was a time when I was pretty well up to speed with any big protest marches taking place in London but I have lost interest recently. After a while it is quite difficult to fight an apathetic sense of ‘If you’ve seen one demo you’ve seen them all’. The same protesters, the same banners, you even start recognising individual policemen.

I’m so out of touch now that I wouldn’t even know if a march or demonstration was due to pass by my flat.

Which is sort of what happened on Saturday.

Saturday started for me with the sound of Amazing Grace drifting into my bedroom.

I popped outside and discovered that Kennington Park was full of archbishops … chanting

Kennington Park - handy gathering spot for rampaging, vengeful mobs

For centuries people have gathered in Kennington Park before crossing the Thames to kick some Establishment bottom; most recently the poll tax riots back in 1990. Ah, those were the days. Marches and demonstrations were still scary and extremely photogenic back then. I suspect even policemen look wistfully back to the good old days when they actually saw some action rather than standing around in their hundreds, scratching their nuts for hours on end. Bored out of their skulls as yet another tedious procession of ring tone revolutionaries trundles by. Off to listen to Tony Benn in Trafalgar Square, spouting the same old crap he’s been spouting for decades. For fuck’s sake, what kind of Class War is that?

Sadly, Saturday’s gathering of the Bishops in Kennington Park was not the precursor to 250,000 clergymen massing together before storming across Westminster Bridge for a little bit of populist argy bargy.

No

They were commemorating the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery.

And by the time I strolled over to the park, admittedly a little late in the day, there weren’t that many people there. A few hundred maybe. The Archbishop to Prole ratio was on the high side.

Which, at first, surprised me.

Literally dozens of people listening to the Archbishop of Canterbury saying ' Sorry'

After a while, having listened to what a few of the speakers had to say, I was a lot less surprised by the low turnout and fucked off home myself.

A constant theme that all the speakers returned to was 'Our' shared guilt for the injustice of slavery - a guilt that has been passed on from one generation to the next. Consequently, we should all apologise for what was done two hundred and more years ago.

Bollocks

There are two groups of people in this world with a hard-on for this kind of race guilt – Christians and Lawyers.

Oh yes, and Mel Gibson

...but he's Christian

So that's still two groups.

Christians go for it because if you buy into that ‘Stain of Original Sin’ confidence trick you are effectively submitting to those who claim to be empowered by God to absolve that sin. Believing that we are born fallible is one thing. Assuming the guilt for the supposed sins of the first man and woman is an altogether different barrel of apples.

Lawyers also get moist thinking about historic race guilt because if some fucker is stupid enough to apologise even for something they had no control over, they are admitting liability and you can therefore sue their arse.

Definitely not the fault of anyone alive today

... nor is this

...nope, still not feeling responsible

The families of the people who made money out of slavery did a pretty good job of keeping hold of that money, then and now. And, for my sins, I worked in the sugar business for a few years and could easily provide a few names and addresses come the Revolution. However, the bulk of ordinary people in the UK in the late 1700s and 1800s lived hard, grim lives working in mills and factories. So why should any of their descendants apologise for, and presumably pay for, the sins of the same kind of people who fucked their own ancestors over as well as the slaves?

Aside for the thorny issue of apologising for something most us had no hand in, the abolition anniversary also throws up another tricky question

Whilst there's no doubt that many people opposed slavery because it was plain wrong, Abolition came about through the decisive influence of two groups of people with slightly more convoluted motivations – Evangelical Christians and Industrialists.

It’s no coincidence that Britain got round to ditching slavery round about the same time it was perfecting the steam engine and mass production. Ditto for the success of the abolition movement in the US forty years later - when the industrialised Northern States decided that the US did not need slaves any more.

After all, slaves represent a significant fixed cost. They have to be housed, clothed and fed by their employer. 'Free' factory workers don’t. And in an industrialised economy there are plenty of ways to effectively enslave people without being responsible for their welfare. Oh yes.

I have spent a lot of time travelling through the Southern States in the US and anyone who takes even a passing interest in their history has to ask themselves...

‘If the abolitionists and the Northerners really cared so much for the welfare of the slaves why did everyone sit back and allow those slaves and their descendants to be treated like shit for 100 years after abolition? What was going on between 1860 and 1960?'

The answer, I suspect, is that the actual welfare of the slaves was not top of many abolitionists' list of priorities once they had got what they wanted - a transfer of economic power from one group of bastards to another group of bastards for the industrialists and a ticket to Heaven for the Christians.

Which kind of takes the edge off celebrating the 200th anniversary of abolition if you happen to be a Secular Left Winger.

The moral of the tale being, I think, that sometimes good things happen for bad reasons and that judging the decency of a cause by the decency of the people who support it is not a particularly reliable test.

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That's why mums shop at Iceland

Thanks to Paul for pointing me to economist Michael Hudson’s webpage by way of a comment on an earlier post.

There is some good stuff on the subject of debt, interest rates and asset price bubbles on that site. Though the page itself has a sort of late 1990’s feel to its layout and style and links to a bewildering minefield of file formats – flash animations, pdfs, mp3s, m3us and shonky html layouts – at least one of which is bound choke a visitor’s browser. Even if what Hudson has to say isn’t of any interest, visiting the site is a good test to see if you are up to date with all your browser plug-ins.

One audio file of Hudson speaking to a group tickled me in particular. It’s on the long side (70 minutes), is of so-so sound quality and includes some waffle. However, aside from that, it serves as a pretty good primer on the mentality and motivations of the people who lend and the people who borrow money in the kind of effervescent, bubbly times through which we are living today. It is recommended if you're into this sort of thing but only as the kind of listening material that is best consumed whilst doing something with your hands, catching up with household chores, something like that – 70 minutes exclusively spent listening to an economist, however astute, is far too much of anyone’s life to waste.

Hudson makes an interesting observation mid-way through his talk when he points out that the total value of real estate in New York is equal to the total value of all plant and machinery in the entire US. No doubt, the same could be said about London and the UK. Hudson’s point is that the US stopped being an industrial economy long ago and the US economy is now based on property ownership, rent and usury rather than actually making things.

Which is, of course, a throw back to the good old days of feudalism

Which is nice if you either own lots of property, happen to be a money lender, or are an environmentalist who wants everyone to return to a ‘simpler’ way of life, but not so crash hot for the rest of us

HRH Prince Charles - interests include environmentalism, auto mechanics, owning Cornwall and serfing

Hudson does lose the plot at one point a little later in the talk. He explains to his American audience that house prices have become so high in Britain that people no longer invite you round for dinner because their mortgage payments are so high they cannot afford meat (!?) Which is exaggerating the current situation here in Britland just a teensy weensy little bit.

The British can still afford to eat meat. Admittedly, the kind of meat that has children growing breasts and running up the walls after they’ve eaten it but it’s definitely meat. I think...

Hmm... Iceland

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NB! A much shorter, less technical explanation of how the debt-inflation cycle works can be seen in this Gootube video here...

That's NumberWang!!!

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Electric Friends

And for anyone still confused about the challenges we face due to climate change here’s a link to a video clip of former TV weather forecaster and motivational speaker (sic.), Tania Bryer explaining the science behind cloud damage



"...Perhaps the most disturbing effect is the disruption of rivers. This is footage of the River Euphrates flowing backwards. It looks like it's flowing forwards but only because we've reversed the film..."




This clip comes, of course, from Chris Morris’ spoof current affairs show Brass Eye which was made ten years ago. How time flies. The key message of the show, if any message was intended, is that you can always find a plentiful supply of celebrities willing to endorse even the most insane, most nonsensical campaign or cause. Celebrities who are ready to read any old crap off a cue card without any questions, like a parrot; provided they are convinced they will look good and the endorsement will further their careers or ego.

Something I saw on TV last week gave me cause to root out the Brass Eye back-catalog and watch it again for the first time in years. The show stands up pretty well and there is an aching need for the return of something that approximates to decent, toothy satire on British television.

The scene where agony aunt Claire Rayner reacts in disgust to a video supposedly taken from Japanese TV that shows people taking drugs through a dog is a minor classic..

Cannabliss!

as is the line repeated by another dickhead celebrity later in the show “This is a scientific fact. There’s no real evidence to support this but it is scientific fact”

Rumour has it that Morris might be doing a show on terrorism later in the year. I await the result with more than a little curiosity and trepidation.

The reason why I felt the need to dig out and re-watch old episodes of Brass Eye was seeing a former member of the band Blur on TV late one night advocating personal carbon trading as the best tool available for combating global warming.

There was something especially annoying about watching a bloke, whose claim to fame is that he played in a band that became successful posing as being working-class, walking around his farm in his green wellington boots preaching to the world that imposing a corrupt trading scheme on ordinary people will save the planet

There is nothing native-born Londoners love more than a Mockney, particularly a rich one who spouts shit

Blur in concert

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And whilst posting links to videos, here’s one that will only appeal to fans of either George Formby or Gary Numan – but if you happen to fall into the target categories it’s a treat…

Are Friends Electric – Ukulele version

You know I hate to ask
But are friends electric?
Only mine's broke down
And now I've no-one to love

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Beer

Reasons not to drink Budweiser

1. It tastes like piss (and, yes, I have tried both)

2. This...

"Welcome Home" Budweiser Ad

I'd like to claim that no British brand would ever be so crass as to try and sell beer by associating it with support for our nation's servicemen who have been thrown into the middle of a fuckup by lying scumbags but, to be honest, I can't

Budweiser: Official Beer of the 2006 World Cup and the 2003 Iraq War

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Money (redux)

Here be dragons...

A few weeks ago I blathered on about inflation, debt, interest rates and the grand-daddy of all conspiracy theories - Bankers Control the World!!!

To properly understand the Bankers Control the World!!! conspiracy theory the student theorist must first be comfortable with the concept of the Business Cycle...


The Business Cycle explained aka 'How to turn made-up money into tangible assets in 10 easy lessons...'

1. Banks create lots of money out of thin air
2. They lend that money to people at low interest rates
3. Because so much money is pumped into the system its value falls
4. Because money is worth less prices rise
5. People have to borrow more and more made-up money from banks to pay those higher prices
6. After a few years, banks hike up interest rates and reduce the amount of money in circulation by cutting back on lending
7. Prices fall, as do many people's incomes
   
8. The size of outstanding loans, however, does not fall
   
9. People can no longer afford to service their loans and are obliged to turn their property and businesses over to the banks
10. Repeat every 15-20 years or so

The terms 'banks' and 'bankers' are used very loosely and refer more to the people behind the banks and bankers than the banks and bankers themselves. We are, after all, talking about a hidden ruling reptilian elite

All of this Bankers Control the World!!! stuff, all of it, is insane nonsense, obviously.

For example, when faced with the news that house prices in London have risen by 22% over the last year and the average price of a home in London now stands at £366,302 (sorry, that was yesterday, it must be topping £380,000 by now) the delusional conspiracy theorist will blame the eye-watering price rises on cynical manipulation of the money supply by scheming bankers.

Whereas the clued-in people, the rationalists who really know how the world works, will know that high levels of property inflation are due to non-conspiratorial factors such as...

"Wealthy City financiers, foreign buyers and big income earners are driving the demand in London and with quality stock at an all-time low, there is an exacerbated effect on prices"

All very sane and rational.

Only a couple of problems though

First off, it's a matter of record that people are borrowing shit loads of money to buy property - not 'wealthy city financiers' or mysterious 'foreign buyers' but ordinary people being obliged to saddle themselves with buttock-clenching levels of debt to buy a home.

Second off, there's the small matter of the former Governor of the Bank of England openly 'fessing up and admitting that, yes, he and his buddies had deliberately stoked up personal debt and inflation to unsustainable levels...


"In the environment of global economic weakness at the beginning of this decade ... external demand was declining and related to that business investment was declining.

"We only had two alternative ways of sustaining demand and keeping the economy moving forward: One was public spending and the other was consumption.

"Now of course it's true that taxation and public spending may influence the economic climate, may influence consumer spending.

"But we knew that we were having to stimulate consumer spending; we knew we had pushed it up to levels which couldn't possibly be sustained into the medium and long term.

"But for the time being, if we had not done that the UK economy would have gone into recession just as has the United States.

"That pushed up house prices, it increased household debt ... my legacy to the MPC if you like has been 'sort that out'."


Or put another way 'Why have a recession in 2001 when you can have a full-blown depression a few years later?'

Or put another way 'We could have stimulated the economy by building infrastructure that would have served the nation for generations but decided to encourage everyone to go out and buy shit instead'

Or put another way 'Me and my mates decide the price of your house, your monthly outgoings, how much you earn, and even whether you have a job or not. And there's fuck all you can do about it'

And because ordinary people don't understand, haven't been educated to understand, how money works, bankers can pull shit like this again and again without ever being strung up from the nearest lamp post. Hats off to whoever figured this money-lending game out in the first place. He was a clever dude. Destined to burn in Hades for all Eternity, sure enough, but definitely clever.

The really intriguing part of this business is the fact that a lot of people are expecting, have been waiting for, the UK economy to go tits up - for years now. But, like the proverbial watched pot, it stubbornly refuses to boil over. Somebody or something will pop the bubble eventually but who, or what, and when?

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Help fight Global Warming whilst sitting on your arse

Do your part to halt the retreat of the glaciers with...

Local Cooling

(thanks for the inspirational link Noel)

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You're a big daft cock

"and for your viewing pleasure for tonight..."

I have an educational background in geology and geophysics.

The geology background has left me blasé about the prospects of sea levels bouncing up and down and extinctions. The geophysics has left me sceptical about computer models

And, for a time, back in the late 80s I was especially interested in climate change. That would be natural rather than man-made climate change.

One thing I realised early on was that attempting to model the Earth’s climate was just about the most difficult, maybe impossible, task that anyone could think of in natural science. The sheer number of complex variables, both terrestrial and astronomical, relationships and feed-backs is just plain scary. And if you miss out, or misunderstand, just one of them the predictive power of your model will be comparable with reading tea leaves. Creating a model that describes the past perfectly is one thing. Coming up with a simulation that tells you the future is an altogether trickier business.

One quality about the Earth’s climate that did strike me, and still strikes me, as being remarkable is not that Global temperatures have historically oscillated by a few degrees up or down but the fact that the oscillations have been so relatively limited in range. By accident or, sorry, design the Earth has taken everything thrown at it over billions of years without its atmosphere boiling off or freezing to a solid lump. That’s no small achievement.

Which is why I am more than a little scornful of every twat who appears in the media hysterically preaching that the very existence of the Earth is currently at stake. It has been at stake for 4,500,000,000 years and the probability is that it will continue to be at stake long after we are all gone.

Talk like that has more to do with the worst expressions of religious fervour than science. It’s the Garden of Eden all over again. And if we fail to head the prophets and continue with our sinful ways a globally warmed Hell awaits us all.

Fucking horseshit.

The horseshit being the tone taken, not the possibility that we might be warming things up a little, which may or may not be so.

Though it’s rarely presented as such, the case For and Against man-made global warming is relatively straightforward and could be communicated to your average non-scientist in a handful of words…


The Case For Man Made Climate Change

• Global temperature appears to be rising at a faster than natural rate
• Increased CO2 levels due to human activity may have a significant impact on that temperature
• The majority of scientists cannot think of anything else to account for the temperature rise

The Case Against Man Made Climate Change

• The climate is naturally variable
• There is no hard evidence that increased CO2 levels have a significant impact on global temperature (as opposed to temperature having a significant impact on CO2 levels)
• The supposed evidence for human produced CO2 having a significant impact on climate is circumstantial and based in large part on theories and computer models

That’s about it.

I can see how people could honourably adopt either position. My own take is that if I were on a jury I wouldn't, in all conscience, convict someone on the evidence that has been presented in support of Man Made Global Warming and am therefore obliged to be a 'denier' by default.

Under normal circumstances a scientific debate like this would get straightened out over the course of a few years. Unfortunately, the issue has become politicised by some and elevated to the status of a religion by others. So much so that when the last IPCC report was issued we were widely told in the mainstream media that 'the debate was over'.

Hmmm, well that's one way to try and win an argument.

And, just like its evil twin The Global War on Terror, Global Warming is now being used to justify measures that are much more about control and the centralisation of power than solving the problem they claim to address.

(filched from Beau Bo D'Or)

As well as being a handy excuse to centralise power, Global Warming, as with the War on Terror, is also a damn fine way to distract us from all the other fuck-ups going on at home and abroad. Forget the thousands dying from MRSA in our hospitals, the hundreds of thousands dying in Iraq or the millions in Africa, let’s spend our time talking about environmental-friendly light bulbs and bicycles instead.

For fuck’s sake

Man Made Global Warming may not be a fraud but many of the changes that will be thrust down our throats in its name definitely will be.

I can only hope that at some point people on both sides on the Global Warming issue can at least agree that the changes we permit to be imposed on our lives, by wankers, are to be genuinely worthwhile and not a pile of hysteria-driven, eco-fascist, NWO bullcrap

Sadly, the signs at the moment are not good

-

And on the subject of frauds, back to The Great Global Warming Swindle for a moment.

The web has been buzzing with claims that the program included half a dozen scientists who have been clinically proven to be ‘bad’ people and that one of the other scientists in the show was hoaxed into appearing.

Without making apologies for The Great Global Warming Swindle, the ‘debunking’ itself hasn’t exactly been scrupulously honest either. The most powerful testimony in the program; relating to natural climate variability, doubts about the relationship between CO2 and temperature, and political shenanigans within the IPCC, came from scientists who have not been proven to be ‘bad’ people or spoofed.

On top of that, there’s the issue of packaging science in a populist format for the masses. I’m not a great fan of the practice but many producers of popular science documentaries admit to simplifying and ‘enhancing’ their material so that it is readily digestible to the dumbed-down fuckers who constitute the TV-viewing public.

The Great Global Warming Swindle was certainly guilty of 'enhancing' some of its evidence. As is Al Gore, as are the fuckers who have been using a picture of cute, fluffy (assuming 1,200lb flesh-eating predators can be considered ‘fluffy’) polar bears balancing precariously on chunks of ice as proof that the ice-caps are melting catastrophically. …

Eco-shite

That would be a picture taken two and half years ago … in the middle of summer


The producer of The Great Global Warming Swindle has recently responded to criticisms of his show in a much more succinct and simplified way than I have done above. In keeping with the highest standards of his profession, he has responded to a couple of his more patronising critics in terms that can be easily understood by the non-scientific layman…

“You're a big daft cock”

“Why have we not heard this in the hours and hours of shit programming on global warming shoved down our throats by the BBC? Never mind an irresponsible bit of film-making. Go and fuck yourself”

Yes I did make that documentary - now fuck off!!!

a slightly longer, less sweary response from the producer can be found here

.

Peculiar entry requirements

Yesterday the Mrs was doing a little surfing on my behalf, checking up on the New Zealand visa application process.

The Kiwi embassy in London is located in the inventively titled 'New Zealand House'.

- as is, she discovered, a speciality Bed and Breakfast in Fort Lauderdale, Florida...

New Zealand House

I particularly recommend their 'rates' page, complete with a totally baffling picture of a hairy naked man standing behind a bush




Cruising through the New Zealand House site brought back amusing memories of a very entertaining couple of days in Key West where a similar dress code is in force.

It's worth noting in passing that, as well as being home to an unfeasibly large number of Ernest Hemingway look-alikes and a gay scene that leaves San Francisco looking limp-wristed in comparison, Key West is also home to that international ambassador for brotherly love and understanding David Irving (a man whose many lifetime achievements do not include being granted a New Zealand visa).

That fact that Irving chose to make a home in Key West of all places totally blows out of the water the old myth that Nazis are repressed homosexuals whose denial of their own nature has sent them insane.

Not Gay

There is no moral to this tale. Other than the fact that hairy naked men standing behind bushes are a lot funnier than invading Poland

.

Zany name Zany Guy

And thanks to the person who left a comment directing me to the life and works of individualist anarchist Lysander Spooner in the context of a discussion about the limitations of democracy - particularly when that democracy involves giving knob heads a vote

"A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years"

I've enjoyed reading up on Lysander immensely and was particularly taken with a paragraph in his Wikipedia entry...


Though denouncing its embrace of slavery, Spooner sided with the Confederate States of America's right to secede on the basis that they were choosing to exercise government by consent — a fundamental constitutional and legal principle to Spooner's philosophy. The North, by contrast, was trying to deny the Southerners their inherent right to be governed by their consent. He believed they were attempting to coerce the obedience of the southern states to a union they did not wish to enter. ... He argued that the right for states to secede derives from the same right of the slaves to be free. This argument was not popular in the North or South once the war started, as it was contrary to the government positions held on both sides.


Fantastic! None of that 'you're either with us or against us', Left Wing vs Right Wing, false dichotomy crap for Lysander.

= instant personal hero

Another bee in Lysander's bonnet was the the concept of jury nullification - that is, allowing juries to refuse to convict someone if they think the law that has been broken is nonsense.

Given all the arse-wipe legislation that has been recently introduced in the UK by a Government that holds absolute power with less than 23% of the vote, jury nullifcation is starting to look like an awfully attractive concept. And possibly one of the reasons why that government has been pushing to do away with jury trials in certain 'special' circumstances.

and the great thing is, because Lysander is dead, he can't ever disappoint me by selling out and doing voice-overs for toilet roll adverts later on

.

Malleus Maleficarum (redux)

Well, here’s some news that must come as a slap in the face for all those pinko fag subversives who complain that years of unrelenting torture cannot achieve valuable results…

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's '31 plots'

Presumably Khalid’s screams have been edited out to keep the document down to a manageable size and make it easier to read. As was Khalid’s admission that he had consorted with demons, assumed the form of a cat when the Moon was full and had copulated with Satan on numerous occasions...

Sheik Mohammed ... Self-confessed global terrorist mastermind and Satan-f^cker

I, for one, am convinced of his guilt in all these crimes and now realise that hurting people until they say what you want them to is a very good thing and that thanks to techniques like this the War on Terror will be over by Christmas.

I also think it's really great how all the newspapers and TV channels are downplaying and not get worked-up about the secret court/ torture side of the story. Cool.

A 17th Century artist's impression of life in Guantanamo

I'm feeling a lot of pride right now

...and trust

Pride, trust, and yes ... gratitude.

.

Like a banana republic without the bananas (redux)

One of the myths that sustains your average Britisher through these difficult times is the persistent belief, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that British institutions are essentially straight.

Whenever a corruption story breaks, someone somewhere will inevitably comment ‘We should always remember that British public life is largely free of the corruption that blights so many other countries, even some of our European neighbours such as Italy for example’

Yup, not as bent as Italy. Now that’s something to be proud of.

Two of these three people are deceitful sociopaths. The third is dressed as a pirate

In order to maintain the belief in Britain’s essential incorruptibility it is also necessary to maintain another national myth and that is that the British are uniquely gifted when it comes to fucking things up to start with but always muddling through in the end.

So, that way, when we are told the projected cost of the Olympics has risen from £2.4bn to £9.3bn in a year and a half (with five years still to go) we can happily convince each other that this didn’t happen because people were lying through their thieving teeth but because they are shit at their jobs.

It's also worth noting that the British are also uniquely gifted when it comes to dissonance.

Lord Coe... having a laugh

How else can you explain the goings on surrounding the Serious Fraud Office’s decision to terminate a major corruption investigation into the UK's biggest arms company, BAE.

The new Eurofighter - now available with 'Cashback'...

I’m looking at two separate articles on the story; one from the BBC, one from the FT. The BBC article includes quotes from an interview with the head of the Serious Fraud Office and says…


The head of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has defended his decision to drop a corruption probe into a defence deal between BAE Systems and Saudi Arabia.

Speaking exclusively to the BBC, Robert Wardle said he had come under no political pressure to drop the inquiry.

Mr Wardle said he had made the decision independently, following warnings that continuing the probe could damage UK national security.


The FT article includes quotes from Tony Blair and a Downing Street spokesperson and says…


Tony Blair on Friday defended the government’s decision to halt a Serious Fraud Office inquiry into bribery allegations against BAE Systems, saying he took full responsibility for the move…

…the attorney general, decided to end the inquiry on security grounds and because of uncertainty over whether the case would lead to a prosecution.


Even if you manage to zone out the apparent contradiction between the SFO claiming that there was no political pressure and the politicians freely admitting that they exerted political pressure there’s still the small matter of both the SFO and Prime Minister freely admitting that Britain’s national interests are somehow dependent on paying massive bribes.

Hmmm… definitely not like Italy at all

-

And on a not entirely unrelated subject…

I saw an excellent little film last week called ‘Thank you for Smoking’




The movie is basically a guide to how people gifted with a certain degree of ‘morale flexibility’ can effectively lobby for causes and interests which, on the face of it, appear to be indefensible.

The trick is never to try and win an argument but, instead, throw in as many new arguments as possible, whether relevant or not, and baffle the shit out of everyone.

So, if someone is pressing you about the harmful effects of cigarettes you start talking about the cholesterol content of cheese, or personal liberties, or anything else you can think of – just keep talking and always answer a question with a question and an argument with another argument. Even if there is only one side to a story always pretend that there are two or, if possible, a hundred

There was a nice illustration of the principle in action on the BBC last night. A reporter covering the OECD’s condemnation of Britain dropping the BAE fraud inquiry said something along the lines of...


'35 out of 36 countries are condemning the British decision to drop the fraud investigation but British officials maintain that national security was at stake and therefore Britain has done nothing wrong. So Jeremy, there is some debate as to the significance of the OECD's statement'


Sheer genius…

.

He must be right. He's on the money...

And whilst on the subject of peculiar men who helped turn fucking people over into a science…

Congratulations to Adam Smith for making it onto the back of our money




Like Nash 200 years later, Smith is famous for advocating the beneficial power of naked self-interest.

The idea being that if everyone fought each other to a standstill some kind of harmonious equilibrium would be achieved.

Of course, both Nash and Smith also admitted that the naked self-interest thing is bollocks but that didn’t fit in with the spirit of their respective times and was quietly ignored.

Sadly, my favourite Adam Smith quote didn’t make it onto the new £20 pound which is a shame as there is no reason why banknotes shouldn’t be educational as well as smelling nice…

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

.

Not such a beautiful mind

Fans of TV documentaries that feature archive footage of social scientists in nylon shirts, set to music from John Carpenter horror movies, had a real treat last Sunday...


Yes, Adam ‘Power of Nightmares’ Curtis is back and in top form

Curtis is the film-maker who is almost single-handedly supporting BBC TV’s increasingly ill-deserved reputation for not being totally shit.

In his films Curtis explores how different elites – be they political, scientific or economic – adopt new ideologies and then try to impose those ideologies on society; normally fucking everything and everyone up in the process.

Curtis is not a conspiracy theorist. Curtis deals with memes rather than conscious conspiracies - though, to be honest, the end-results would be the same regardless of whether there was a grand hidden plan or not.

And that’s often the problem with bandying a term like ‘conspiracy theory’ around in a pejorative way. If you try and document how a particular group or class falls in love with an idea and then tries to implement that idea should that be written off as a conspiracy theory? Some people do.

Curtis’ latest series is a three-parter called ‘The Trap’ and it seeks to explore...

‘how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom’

and it’s ace.

It hasn’t appeared on Googlevideo yet but a couple of torrents are available – and a reason in itself to get to grips with downloading torrents and testing just how unlimited your ISP’s download limits really are (after, obviously, satisfying yourself with the legality of downloading BBC shows from the Net)

My personal highpoint of the first episode was the interview with John ‘not such a beautiful mind’ Nash. The man who won a noble prize for proving mathematically that fucking people over was a rational thing to do, even if everyone loses out as result.


Nash has softened a little over the years and he explained to Curtis, somewhat apologetically, that he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and hearing voices at the time.

Unfortunately, that didn’t stop sociopaths like the people at the RAND Corporation and others incorporating Nash’s ideas into the kind of insane Cold War strategies that inspired Dr Strangelove, or rationalisations for pointlessly bombing the shit out of North Vietnam, or turning provision of state education and healthcare in the UK into a target-driven fuck up.

The mathematically proven way to win the Vietnam War...

Given all the wonderful things that have flowed from Nash’s ideas it’s a real shame that Curtis missed a trick when interviewing him. Every time Nash answered one of Curtis’ questions I was just begging for Curtis to say ‘I’m sorry. What are you talking about? I didn’t ask you anything’, then make some ‘whoo whoo’ noises and skip off out of the room.


It’s the least we could do for John

Part Two. Next Sunday. BBC2. 9.00pm. Be there.

.

Best spoof Ecofascist website ever?

Libertarian National Socialist Green Party

It's all about overpopulation and lebensraum baby!


Well, I hope it's a spoof. It's so hard to tell these days


.

Liberty for Freedom?

I’ve just clipped out my favourite part of Alex Jones’ video TerrorStorm and popped it onto Gootube…

Liberty for Freedom

TerrorStorm includes a fair slab of material relating to 7/7, 21/7 and the Stockwell shooting but that material is riddled with annoying little inaccuracies, so personally I haven’t recommended it to anyone.

But there’s this one section, the part that I’ve put up, which is absolutely priceless. Jones is interviewing a woman who runs a stall outside Stockwell tube station, a few days after Jean Charles de Menezes got shot...

"I don’t know. It is a lot of times to shoot him"

In less than 90 seconds she manages to regurgitate and encapsulate every single piece of bullshit that was put out by the police, government and the media immediately after the shooting. Virtually everything she says is untrue. She then finishes her turn with the finest example of Orwellian doublethink I have ever been privileged to witness….

"I think people should give up their Liberty for Freedom..."

If democracy means people like this get a vote something is very wrong with democracy. Or very right, depending on where you’re coming from.

.

Blue Monday

Not wanting to labour a point too much but...

The man most likely to become the next Prime Minister of Britain had a message of hope for mankind today...

Chancellor Gordon Brown is seeking to regain the initiative on the environment with a call for a "new world order" to combat climate change.




Which is the first time he's used the expression New World Order since at least January...

Chancellor Gordon Brown has spoken of the need for a "new world order" to deal with future security and environmental challenges






Answer A. or B. - the man most likely to be the next Prime Minister of Great Britain is either...

A) A big 80s dance music fan

Those who came before me

Lived through their vocations
From the past until completion
They will turn away no more

or

B) A c^nt


And the bonus question is

'Who's the conspiracy lunatic? The person who twitches whenever they hear a particular dodgy expression being used or the scary cyclops bastard who keeps using it in policy speeches?

It's all very weird. People like Brown can openly state that they're working towards a NWO but if anyone comments about it they're a conspiro-loon. How fucked up is that?

Old One-Eye is back

and no, I wouldn't claim that the NWO thing is definitive evidence of some grand unified conspiracy, just the possibility that power-freak bastards tend to hang out with each other, happen to think in very similar ways and get excited by the same kind of ideas...

of course they might wear hoods, chant in Latin and defile small children in the name of Beelzebub whilst doing that, but it's not strictly necessary except maybe on special occasions

.

The worst thing about living in Lambeth...

And whilst on the general subject of the differing priorities of patrician and plebeians…

A few weeks ago there was a larger than usual spate of teenagers being shot to death by other teenagers in this part of London.

As is usual with this kind of flap, the media spent a week or two covering every subsequent gun related incident, fatal or not, in great detail; trying its best to give the impression that the situation was suddenly spinning out of control.




The police and politicians did their bit by announcing a series of bullshit initiatives that wouldn’t achieve anything other that to throw up a smokescreen until the newspapers got bored of the story and moved onto something else

Which is, of course, what happened

Needless to say, shootings and stabbings are still taking place but they are back to a more even spread and therefore not worth reporting nationally.

The same weekend that the spate of shootings was all over the media dozens, possibly hundreds, of yellow signs suddenly appeared, mushroom-like, all over Lambeth.

"Beware - Street robbers are targeting persons using MP3 players in this street" (Kennington Police Station in the background)

The signs are printed with stark warnings such as…

They want your pod. Beware

Attention. Beware thieves and pickpockets

Under which, in smaller lettering, are the strangely far from reassuring words…

Working for a Safer Lambeth / London

Anyway, I was in the process of photographing one of these signs at the bottom of my street - awestruck by the sheer fear-inducing perfection of this latest woefully ineffective and presumably quite expensive publicity campaign. I was standing there thinking that the only useful purpose the signs might serve is to distract people from the number of drug-related murders that had taken place recently…




A group of four, very white, very comfortably comfortable looking people walked past me. And as they passed I caught a fragment of their conversation

‘… the really difficult part about Jonathan having moved here is that it is so hard to find a really good fudge shop…’

WTF!?

Methinks Jonathan and his friends may be in for a surprise or two...

The solution to all of Inner London's ills?

.

An Inconvenient Truth

"Who's that then?
I dunno, must be a king.
Why?
He hasn't got shit all over him."

Just to revisit a point from a previous post for a moment…

The most stand-out part of The Great Global Warming Swindle for most ordinary people who watched the program seems to have been the ‘revelation’ that historic data shows CO2 levels rising after temperatures do.




Another curious aspect of the data, not mentioned in The Great Global Warming Swindle, is that as well as there being a lag on the way up there is also a lag on the way down. The significance being that global temperature can fall even while CO2 levels are still rising, which is kind of a kick in the teeth for the CO2 = Global Warming fanboys

Now, whilst this data does not definitely disprove that CO2 plays some part in global warming it certainly doesn’t constitute proof that it does either.

Which is not the story that has been told by some leading Anthropogenic Global Warming advocates, most notably Al Gore in his Oscar-winning Powerpoint presentation An Inconvenient Truth…




It is possible to argue that Gore isn’t lying as such, he is after all a politician and too clever for that, but he’s certainly taking liberties with the truth

And that’s one of the problems with this whole global warming business – the ‘truth’ about the nature of Climate Change is not as important to some people as the agenda they hope to fulfil using Climate Change hysteria as a tool. We’re into noble lie territory.

And the fact that many leading Anthropogenic Global Warming advocates come from the privileged and patrician classes is relevant (and that includes you George, you wanker).

"Are any of you daft plebs out there buying this bullcrap?"

As is the fact that, however scary they claim Global Warming to be, the patrician eco-prophets continue to live lifestyles that leave the rest of us looking like, er … peasants

Examples that come to mind include…

• Al Gore’s unfeasibly large electricity bills (though, apparently, conspicuous overconsumption is OK if you can afford to offset it)

• Prince Charles and his lovely Aston

• The Goldsmiths …all of them

It’s worth spending a few minutes reading through the wikibios of Zac, Ben and Edward Goldsmith. After which you run a serious risk of having your head buzzing with all sorts of apparently contradictory facts and peculiar connections – a strong commitment to deep ecology, idealised peasant lifestyles, venture capital funds, Mayfair night clubs and supercasinos – dynastic relationships and friendships with the Windsors and the Rothschilds – all sorts of peculiar stuff that could send you off into all sorts of different lines of investigation and contemplation.

The number one question being 'What is it about hardcore environmentalism that draws these people like flies to shit?' After all, it is unlikely that they picture themselves grubbing around in that shit with all the rest of us peons

There again maybe not. Our role in Life is not to question the motivations and actions of our betters is it?

.

Man Love Rules OK

Thanks to t-mix for posting links to that very special episode of Top Gear where the three presenters went on a US road trip from Florida to New Orlins in a representative selection of the finest in pre-owned American automobiles (a pick up, a pimp mobile and a sports car with the handling characteristics of a small sperm whale)

The best part of the show starts mid way through the fifth clip and into the sixth

That’s the bit where the zany presenters paint slogans as offensive to Southern sensibilities as they can think of all over each other’s cars before driving through Alabama…

‘Man Love Rules OK’, ‘Country and Western is Rubbish’, ‘Hillary for President’, ‘NASCAR sucks’

…stuff like that




Surprisingly enough, when the presenters stop for petrol men with dogs appear in pick-up trucks and start throwing rocks at them.




Now the funny part is not the discovery that if you are offensive to people, particularly people in poorer, somewhat less, er, 'sophisticated' parts of the world, some of them might start throwing rocks at you.

Nope, that’s not the funny part. The funny part is the surprise and panic shown by the same middle class BBC presenters who, only a couple of hours before, thought it was all a bit of laugh to visit a country and take the piss out of its inhabitants.

There’s a lesson to be learned from this but it never is.

"It looks like the locals have had a sense of humour failure Sergeant Major..."

.

There's nothing like a good debate - and this is nothing like a good debate

Hmmm, is that temperature I see falling whilst CO2 levels are still rising? My head hurts...

Right, the Google Video of that Man Made Climate Change 'Denial' documentary is now up on Google Video and it's also available as a torrent.

One heartening thing I noticed on the comments made on the Google Video version was how people are getting wise to some of the sock puppetry that goes on in Google Video, Youtube and other sites that permit user comments - people posting comments calling for Jihad using cheesy, stereotypical Muslim names, other people describing themselves as '7/7' or '9/11' 'survivors' and using that as mandate to insult or belittle others, stuff like that.

Maybe some of the posters are the real deal. Some are almost certainly not. What is amusing is that on Google version of The Great Global Warming Swindle someone posted this powerhouse comment worthy of a Guardian environmental journalist...

Sorry, I'm a climatologist and this is simply wrong. This documentary is lying.

only to be followed by several comments made by people praising the documentary who also claim to be climatologists and in one case 'the Dark Knight Batman'

Marvellous

edit: sadly, the Google Gods have now deleted the positive comments from people claiming to be distinguished Nobel prize winning climatologists and Batman but decided to retain the negative comment from the person claiming to be a climatologist - nice one guys


I've now watched the documentary for a second time and have spotted a few more inaccuracies and sneaky tricks employed by its producers but I won't be posting them. Plenty of other people will be doing that. Oh yes, yes they will.

The program was clearly intended as a polemic and in that respect no different to the much larger body of material put out by the Climate Change Lobby. It was made to challenge, to infuriate and to entertain and whilst I do not condone its sins they are no worse than those committed every day by the professional fear mongers.

-

And whilst on the subject of climate change 'denial'...

I doubt that many climate change 'deniers' believe that spunking away finite resources like hydrocarbons is a clever thing to do. Nor do I suspect that they think poisoning cute fluffy animals with toxic crud is great either. There are, as far as I can tell, at least two perfectly decent reasons to be opposed to Climate Change hysteria...

You might oppose it simply because you think the science is wrong, or exaggerated, and you have an aversion to wrongness

You might have a serious problem with how the response to the threat is being directed. There are some rather obvious parallels between the Climate Change issue and The War on Terror. If we collectively fall in line with the 'solutions' being advocated for these two Global 'threats' you can pretty much give up on increasingly old fashioned notions such as personal freedoms or civil liberties - and over a much shorter time-scale than most of us would have believed possible only a few years ago

Gaia loyalty cards heading our way soon? Sadly, telling Milliband to stick them up his arse was not a voting option

A lot of people are saying that even if Man Made Climate Change doesn't turn out to be such a big deal most of the measures being proposed to deal with it would be worth doing in their own right anyway.

Well, yes, that's sort of true

But there are a couple of problems with that point of view.

First off, I don't think people have really twigged where this Climate Change thing is going. Sooner or later, its more vociferous proponents will be pushing for some form of global government, population control initiatives, suppression of development in developing countries and maybe even confrontation with those countries which tell us what to do with our carbon quotas. Or do people really think that a few energy saving light bulbs and a bit more of our electricity from renewables are going to be enough to either change our climate or, more to the point, keep the Lobby and its backers happy? Come on. Some serious changes will be on the cards once we've been collectively softened-up enough.

Second off, if the Man Made Climate Change Lobby is wrong and the next major change in climate is both natural and inevitable we will have wasted precious time and resources on a pointless exercise, when we should have been focusing on preparing to adapt to the consequences of that change.




And for today's pop quiz, try reading this comment found underneath an abysmal on-line piece written by a Guardian environmental journalist and see if you can distinguish between the mindset of the ecofascist dickhead who wrote it and the mentality of your average, run of the mill, religious fundamentalist - paying particular attention to the delightfully sinister use of the word 'educate'. So much for the supposed collapse of organised religion...


To anyone needing to find out the truth about climate change just search George Monbiot on this site.
This thread is depressing. There are sound scientific truths agreed with by 99.9 per cent of the world's scientists on climate change.
The programme last night drags out tired old oounter-arguments by the bury-their-heads-in-the-sand brigade. The sadness is what their own children are going to have to endure.
Actually, if I had time and money, I would wish to take out a court injunction preventing Channel 4 or any other mass distributor of 'information' from having the right to broadcast total nonsense on THE most fantastically urgent nad terrifying problem the world has ever, ever seen.
The urgency now is to EDUCATE people on what's happening and create real substantial CHANGE. It is sad and depressing that at this critical moment in human history a programme inviting everyone to sneer and giggle at the genuine scientific evidence behind what is soon to become a catastrophic situation, is allowed.
I would like to sue the head of Channel 4 for manslaughter. Any person he has influenced by last night's programme to think - oh, that's all right then! I won't listen, I won't change, I'll just go on sneering about global warming whilst endlessly consuming, junketing around the world, spilling emissions into the environment at increasing levels, because I want I want I want I must have I must have I must have - deserves to be sued.

.

They don’t like it up ‘em

Last night Channel 4 aired that Anthropological Global Warming ‘denial’ documentary George Monbiot tried to warn us about

And it was bloody marvellous

I’m kicking myself for not recording it. No doubt somebody else did and will be sticking it up on the web soon.

‘I wanted to call it “Apocalypse My Arse”, but in the end we decided on “The Great Global Warming Swindle”. It’s a provocative title, which helps with ratings.’

The program was far from perfect and committed many of the same sins that the Global Warming Climate Change Lobby does in its own propaganda. Even though the documentary made very many good points, it did contain flaws in its reasoning and oversimplifications that someone with a different point of view could go to work on.

Alternatively, you could just launch a pathetic ad hominem attack on the scientists in the show, dribble on about conspiracy theorists conspiring against the sacred work of the Global Warming movement or, funniest of all, complain that the documentary only presented one side of the case and that it wasn’t balanced – as the first commentator on this post whined

Boo fucking hoo. Someone from the movement that claims the 'debate is over' and labels all those who disagree as ‘deniers’ (i.e. Nazis) is pissed off that one show, just one show, didn’t recycle the same old crap we have to listen to day after day after day.

The ad hominen attack I linked to above was written by an ‘environmental journalist’ who was clearly stung by the suggestion that her breed have a vested interest in promoting climate change. Nonsense of course and a disgraceful slur on the thousands of hard-working, selfless humanitarians who devote their lives to traveling from one multi-million dollar, transglobal enviro-jolly to the next.

It’s a shame about all those poor souls in the developing world though – the Greater Good demands that they can’t burn any of their oil or coal, build any hydro projects or develop nuclear power. But hey, fuck ‘em. There are too many of the bastards anyway.

Hmmm, I love the smell of cultural imperialism in the morning.

And it’s no surprise that some of the 'deniers'' claims are dismissed as being ‘ludicrous conspiracy theories’ (I keep being told by the BBC and the Guardian that there are a lot of them about these days).

One of the ‘ludicrous conspiracy theories’ was the suggestion that many scientists advocate Global Warming because that’s where the funding is. This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it's simply an opinion on how academia works. I think back to my postgraduate days twenty years ago and remember quite clearly that some subjects were strongly favoured over others when it came to funding availability. Back then, as I recall, biotechnology and robotics were the shit hot subjects and you were well-advised to work them into any funding application. So what if someone claims that Global Warming has become the money magnet these days? How is that a conspiracy theory?

Well, it's easier to play the increasingly overused 'conspiracy theory' card than put together a reasoned response isn't it.




For a nice example of the grant funding paradigm in action, flip on a TV documentary channel and watch any archaeological documentary made in the last ten years. Almost all will conclude that the answer to whatever ancient question they have been discussing will include some reference to climate change. They have to. That’s where the loot is.




A key obstacle faced by the Global Warming Lobby is the undeniable fact that the Earth’s temperature and climate have always varied, even before people even existed. Personally, my money has always been on some variant of this guy's ideas being a (the?) major factor in climate change. Climate variation is periodic and as old as the Earth – and it’s a good bet that the variation is somehow related to periodicity in the Sun’s output or the Earth’s distance from the Sun.

The problem with that line of thought from the Lobby’s point of view is that even the most rabid enviro-twat will have real trouble arguing that taxing the shit out of people in the developed world, suppressing development in the rest of the world and putting enviro-twats in charge of things will have any noticeable impact on the Earth’s orbit or the temperature of the Sun. Even middle-class hubris has its limitations.

I was particularly interested to see what the response would be to the claim made in The Great Global Warming Swindle that geological records show that, in the past, CO2 levels have only started to rise after global temperatures started picking up.

"We need to band together to END GLOBAL COOLING!!!

Oh wait, the Earth has started to warm...

END GLOBAL WARMING!!!!

Oh wait, it's starting to cool again.

END GLOBAL COOLING!!!!

This is fun! =]"

I trawled around a few blogs, clicked on some links and found some ingenious rationalisations that attempt to fit the evidence of a 'lag' in CO2 increases into the existing Global Warming paradigm. For example, utter shite like this…


What does the lag of CO2 behind temperature in ice cores tell us about global warming?

This is an issue that is often misunderstood in the public sphere and media ... At least three careful ice core studies have shown that CO2 starts to rise about 800 years (600-1000 years) after Antarctic temperature during glacial terminations…

Does this prove that CO2 doesn't cause global warming? The answer is no.

The reason has to do with the fact that the warmings take about 5000 years to be complete. The lag is only 800 years. All that the lag shows is that CO2 did not cause the first 800 years of warming, out of the 5000 year trend. The other 4200 years of warming could in fact have been caused by CO2 ...

The 4200 years of warming make up about 5/6 of the total warming. So CO2 could have caused the last 5/6 of the warming, but could not have caused the first 1/6 of the warming.

From studying all the available data (not just ice cores), the probable sequence of events at a termination goes something like this. Some (currently unknown) process causes Antarctica and the surrounding ocean to warm. This process also causes CO2 to start rising, about 800 years later. Then CO2 further warms the whole planet, because of its heat-trapping properties…


In summary:

• We don’t actually know what process has triggered past global warming events but it definitely wasn’t a CO2 rise
  
  
• However, some people have decided that this unknown process, for some equally unknown reason, arbitrarily stops being significant just as the level of CO2 starts to rise. At which point elevated CO2 levels change from being a consequence of increased temperature to being a cause of increased temperature
  

Yup, I think I can see why this area is frequently misunderstood.

.

Manhunters

The Scene: A top floor office in New Scotland Yard. Crack FBI psychological profiler Will Graham is briefing Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair and Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke on the characteristics of a typical terrorist. In the background a soft rock guitar solo slowly builds to a crescendo as they speak…

Graham: The guy’s going to need transport so he’ll probably have access to a motor vehicle or even… a bus pass

Clarke: Go on. You're getting the old scent back aren't you Will

Graham: … and some travel luggage

Blair: Uncanny, is this how you caught Hannibal Lector?

Graham: He’s also going to want to carry out preliminary reconnaissance and communicate with other terrorists. So he’ll be carrying a digital camera and a cell phone, maybe even… a camera phone

Blair: This is amazing. It’s almost as if you know him personally

Graham: Wait! I haven’t finished yet. He’s also going to have an Internet connection

The backing music is so loud now they’re having to shout at each other

Clarke: Great. We’ll start monitoring and arresting everyone who fits the profile. That’s the last thing the terrorists would want

Graham: And just one more thing…

Clarke: Yes?

Graham: He’s a brown c^nt with a beard

.

It couldn't happen here

…and remember, Terrorists need to walk. So if you know anyone who has amassed a suspiciously large number of shoes call our confidential helpline immediately - even if it is your own mother we're talking about

…and remember, Terrorists need to use the toilet. So if you see anyone behaving suspiciously near a lavatory call our confidential helpline immediately




…and remember, Terrorists sometimes dress as women. So if you see any particularly butch looking potential shemales phone our confidential helpline immediately




…and remember …oh fuck it, just report any dodgy looking non-conformist fucker who isn’t behaving normally – normal being watching X Factor, vomiting outside a pub or shopping – it’s the only way to be sure

Not Normal

Of course, the Metropolitan Police can’t possibly be serious about this nonsense. With all the extra resources put at their disposal – the extra personnel, the latest in cutting-edge surveillance technology, access to confidential databases and the change in our laws – there’s no way that they could be arresting people simply on the basis that they’re ‘a bit dodgy looking’.

Not only would that be wasteful and call into doubt all the zillions being spent and police claims of hundreds of terrorists supposedly present in our country, it would also serve to alienate the people being arrested and the communities in which they live. What kind of stupid fuckers would behave like that? Nah, it could never happen here…

.

Are you getting the message yet?

How do you tell the difference between someone just videoing a crowded place and someone who’s checking it out for a terrorist attack?

How can you tell if someone’s buying unusual quantities of stuff for a good reason or if they’re planning to make a bomb?

What’s the difference between someone just hanging around and someone behaving suspiciously?

How can you tell if they’re a normal everyday person, or a terrorist?

The answer is, You don’t have to.

If you call the confidential Anti-Terrorist Hotline on 0800 789 321, the specialist officers you speak to will analyse the information. They’ll decide if and how to follow it up.

You don’t have to be sure. If you suspect it, report it.

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The noble art of the protest song lives on...

Here's one in the eye for grumpy old bastards (like me) who say that the youth of today are apathetic and lack the passion or the vision to get worked up about things that matter...

The PS3 Song

The heart-rending tale of just how sucky the new Sony Playstation 3 is, particularly compared to the Wii; jam-packed with raw emotion and genuine pathos



I was in tears before the song had even finished

Bob Dylan and Joan Baez eat your fucking hearts out

I'm still half convinced it's a joke but 475,000 views and 2,685 comments can't be wrong

And what sophisticated comments they are too...




"I wish this was on itunes to download on my ipod"

"meetoo"


At times like this I have to work very hard not to believe that the entire human race is doomed...

It'll be the 40th anniversary of Woodstock in a couple of years. Maybe when the inevitable commemorative concert is held all the performers could get together and sing updated versions of classic favourites; reworked to reflect more contemporary, consumerist concerns...

'The Ring Tones They are a Changing'
'This Nokia is Your Nokia'
'Wii! (What's it good for?)'
'The Star Spangled iPod'

and a track from my generation, the unforgettable...

'(Buy one get one) Free Nelson Mandela!'




and, of course, a cover of Janis Joplin's...

'Mercedes Benz'

...the cool thing being that there's no need to change any of the lyrics as people will now take them at face value and think the song is about how great buying stuff is. The day that song was used to actually advertise Mercedes' really should go down in history as marking the final and absolute defeat of the 1960s in general and hippies in particular

You lost ... Losers

.

Not under a Blood Red Sky

I happened to be in Grosvenor Square on Saturday night; attending a glittering night of the stars of London's tea, coffee and fried breakfast retail sales community (aka a London Italian dinner dance - somewhat akin to Phoenix Nights but with fewer Northerners and more prosciutto).




Grosvenor Square is, of course, home to the US Embassy and has had a strange vibe about it post 9/11. If a mouse so much as farts there 400 day-glo policemen appear at the drop of a hat. Even walking through it at night you can't escape the feeling that unseen eyes are tracking your every movement.




A family friend lives in a flat within the permanent security cordon that surrounds the embassy. A few months ago she was sitting in her kitchen, minding her own business when a police sniper, complete with humongous scoped rifle, came crashing through her skylight. He was awfully apologetic and promised to send someone round to fix the damage, before asking where the front door was and scampering off.

On the plus side of the balance sheet, she's a lot less worried about the risk of burglary than most other people. Having men with guns crawling around, and occasionally falling through, your roof 24/7 does bring a sort of peace of mind.

Strange days

There are news reports that the US Embassy may be moved to Chelsea Barracks. Though, considering the mental state of the current US leadership, maybe everyone involved would be a lot safer if it was temporarily moved a little further West than that - by about another three and half thousand miles.

Anyway, there we were enjoying a particularly depressing Tom Jones impersonator doing a cabaret routine when word spread around the tables that there was a lunar eclipse taking place. And out everyone went.

Lunar eclipses are noted for the fact that the Moon is bathed with coppery-red refracted light during the eclipse.

Sadly, my photographic record of the event and the mental image I had of photographing a Blood Red Moon over the US Embassy was thwarted by several unavoidable environmental factors

• I only had an inadequate little camera with me
• I had been drinking
• I really wasn't in the mood to run the risk of having to explain what I was doing photographing the US Embassy at night
  
• The snuggly, protective layer of vehicle fumes that shields Londoners from harmful UV in the Summer and keeps us warm in the Winter also seems to filter out red-shifted light :(
• The Moon wasn't in the right part of the sky
• It was also quite small
  

And here it is - Partial Lunar Eclipse over Grosvenor Square...



And here is a close up taken at the moment of total eclipse



Breathtaking...


/ gives up any dreams of becoming a professional astrophotographer

.

First they came for the photographers...

And whilst still on the subject of futile protests, thanks to Minority Report for making me aware of a current petition on the Downing Street website. Somehow, I missed this one...


We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Stop proposed restrictions regarding photography in public places.

There are a number of moves promoting the requirement of 'ID' cards to allow photographers to operate in a public place.

It is a fundamental right of a UK citizen to use a camera in a public place, indeed there is no right to privacy when in a public place.

These moves have developed from paranoia and only promote suspicion towards genuine people following their hobby or profession.

I think back to time spent in countries with fairly ropey governments - being randomly challenged to show ID on the street, seeing armed security personnel all over the place and having to be careful which buildings I was pointing a camera at - and thinking to myself 'Fuck me, how lucky am I to have been born in Britain, I'm so glad I'm going home in a week or two'

Ooooh, the cruel irony of it all

OK, it's plain as day that signing the petition won't change anything but I have signed it anyway - it really wasn't any effort - and that's the problem, it really wasn't.

.

All we are saying is give w^nking a chance

A commentator called Paul has made a very important point underneath one of my posts about the likes of Yours Truly directing negative rhetoric at "Ringtone Revolutionaries" and others engaged in patently ineffective, but occasionally lucrative, acts of protest.

As Paul rightly points out

"Don't mock, at least they're doing something!"

Indeed. And in that spirit may I recommend this equally worthy site

www.masturbateforpeace.com

Well, it can't do any harm can it?

.

Just when I thought that I was out they pull me back in - pt1

So there I was minding my own business, watching television. Happy to put some of the thoughts that have been uppermost in my mind on the back burner for a while. When...

Channel 4 showed a trailer for a program it is putting on next week (Thursday @ 9pm) called The Great Global Warming Swindle

'Hmmm, interesting' I thought 'I'll do some Googling and see if I can find some background info on the people who made it and who are in it.

I do things like that. Many of us have the tools now. Sadly, few of us use them.

And, strike me down with a feather, whose name did I see listed in the first half dozen search results. Oh yes

Heeeeeeeeeeeres's Georgie...

Don't be fooled by Bush's defection: his cures are another form of denial by George Monbiot

The most entertaining part of the article goes something like...


Some chance. A company called Wag TV is currently completing a 90-minute documentary for Channel 4 called The Great Global Warming Swindle. Manmade climate change, the channel tells us, is "a lie ... the biggest scam of modern times. The truth is that global warming is a multibillion-dollar worldwide industry: created by fanatically anti-industrial environmentalists; supported by scientists peddling scare stories to chase funding; and propped up by complicit politicians and the media ... The fact is that CO2 has no proven link to global temperatures ... solar activity is far more likely to be the culprit."

So it's the same old conspiracy theory we've been hearing from the denial industry for 10 years, and it carries as much scientific weight as the contention that the twin towers were brought down by missiles.


I haven't seen the program yet and, even though its thesis coincides with some personal thoughts I have on the subject of Man Made Climate Change, there's nothing to stop it being a pile of crap. Just because someone or something appears to share your views that doesn't stop it, by accident or design, being riddled with flaws (cf. Loose Change cf. George Monbiot)

But whatever the actual quality of the program, George's response to the very thought of the airing of a show sceptical about Man Made Climate Change is 100% pure Monbiot

There he is again...

• Using the denial word - equating holding a different view to his own on the subject of climate change with being a Nazi

• Identifying anyone who disagrees with him as being a conspiracy theorist (and therefore either a moron infected with a mental virus or in the pay of the 'Denial Industry', or both)

In Monbiot World the label Conspiracy Theorist serves the same function as a subroutine in computer programming. Once you've written it you can just keep calling it again and again...


gosub conspiracy theorists

print "yah di yah ya moronic blah blah nazi blah ... insane blah blah mental disease blah bla etc etc"

return


George must be so pissed off that burning disbelievers and blasphemers isn't carbon neutral

"Recant and let your souls be saved..."

And what a flexible group the "Conspiracy Theorists" are

• sometimes they think Bush and the PNAC crowd are behind 9/11

• other times they side with Bush and the PNAC crowd in denying Man Made Climate Change
  

Well, they're nothing if not versatile

A Four Man Cell of Conspiracy Theorists ... conspiring

And the number of these heretics who conspire (oh, the irony) against George and his beloved movements is multiplying. Why else would George be so preoccupied with them?

Look out George they're there ... and there .. and underneath that ... and in your dreams ... Oh God they're everywhere ... aaaaaaaaahhh!!!

George Monbiot ... in a hat

.

He's forever blowing bubbles

"and for my next trick..."

Whilst on the subject of ineffective political activism and the people on the mainstream Left of British politics being up Bollocks Creek without a paddle...

Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister in waiting, came out with a blinder yesterday and announced that health and other public sector workers were going to receive a below inflation pay rise this year.

In the words of good old Gordie...

"The overall awards come within the inflation target at 1.9% demonstrating our total determination to maintain discipline and stability and continue with an 11th year of sustained economic growth."

• Gordon neglected to mention that, whatever La La Land inflation targets the government may set, the real rate of inflation for ordinary people is something like 4 to 9% which means nurses will be receiving an effective pay cut of as much as 5% in real terms.

• He also neglected to mention that giving lower paid staff an effective pay cut will have virtually fuck all impact on the rate of inflation.

Inflation has a LOT more to do with the 800 billion pounds of personal debt (all paying a lovely rate of interest to the banks) that's been whisked out of thin air and pumped into the country since he took charge and nothing to do with whether a nurse can pay her electricity bill next month or not.

Could that staunch socialist Gordon be making low paid workers scapegoats for the excesses of the financial services industry (it's been a cracking year for bonuses BTW)?

Perish the thought

That 800 billion pound increase in personal debt and all the lovely shopping that went with it has also been the major contributory factor to those 11 years of sustained 'growth'. The only problem being that people are starting to have trouble servicing it.

Fuck it, I'll write it out in full

800,000,000,000 ... pounds

that's on top of the

600,000,000,000 ... pounds

that was there before Brown took over. Making a total of, give or take the GDP of a few small countries

1,400,000,000,000 ... pounds

of personal debt which was spunked away on over-priced housing and tat that's mostly in a landfill by now and which people will be obliged to pay off, with interest, at some point

Gordon 'Bubbles' Brown and his good buddy Alan 'Even Bigger Bubbles' Greenspan off for a Friday night drink at their local

Hmmmm, lots of lovely debt and lots of lovely pay cuts for low-waged people who can't keep up with the price rises facilitated by that debt.

And there's no way Gordon doesn't know all this. Only he's not owning up to it.

"I like making these... they're pretty..."

Naughty Gordon

My money's on him hoping to distract everyone with a spot of Terror and some Enviro-twaddle. Tony's been doing a pretty decent warm-up act

Media pundits are predicting that Gordon is going to take over as leader of the Labour Party and consequently become Prime Minister in a few months' time because there are no other Labour MPs who are strong enough candidates to oppose him, and even if there were they wouldn't muster enough support from their fellow MPs to be nominated.

Which says a lot for just how terminally fucked the Labour Party is

And the really hysterical thing is that they're running the place

And it gets even funnier

The only viable alternative is to vote the Conservatives in

My, how we laughed

Everyone is going to have to download twice as many ringtones to straighten this particular mess out

... and remember, in times of economic uncertainty gold is always a safe investment. I suggest stocking up here

.

Trailer

"BBC News - Bringing you the news as it happens, when it happens ... sometimes even before it happens"

I suppose those of us who have derived so much pleasure from this story really should get round to asking themselves who started it, and why, at some point.

It seems like it's all a bit too much for the poor old Beeb and the flow of readers' comments on its response page seems to have been choked off for the time being.

Maybe somebody should make a fair and balanced documentary, voiced-over by some patronising bint, on the subject of BBC News reporters who pass off speculation and unverified rumour - buildings falling down before they do, WMDs in Iraq, IEDs from Iran, stories from unnamed 'security sources' etc etc - as fact...

The c^nters

-

edit:


edit2:

And whilst not directly relevant to the WTC7 Mystic Meg cock-up it's always worth reading the bio of former BBC Governor and former Chair of the BBC World Service 'Consultative Group' Dame Pauline Neville-Jones if you're ever infected with the mental virus of thinking the BBC is somehow independent - oh, pardon me, that would be me propagating a conspiracy theory wouldn't it

.

That last post in summary

1. The bulk of Left wing bloggers and sites out there appear to be giving in to the official line on the 7/7, tWoT business and it's fair game to revile anyone who hasn't.
   
   That is due in part to a sustained media campaign, people not being comfortable with the implications of doubting the official narrative, and, yes, a good number of ‘Conspiracy Theorists’ are moonbats.
   
   Having said that, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that some of those moonbats deliberately set out to stigmatise perfectly healthy scepticism. It’s not as if it would be difficult to knock up a few sock puppet accounts is it.
   
   I am not singling out any one blogger or website for special attention.
   
   
   
2. On the other hand, we've reached such a sad state of affairs that profound wank like this nonsense can now be passed off as popular activism and be greeted with barely a squeak of criticism.
   
   This is just one example. I could cite a depressingly large number of others. The only thing that has scared this government, or most other governments come to think of it, is the prospect of mass civil disobedience (and countermeasures are being prepared). That, combined with people thinking things through for themselves. Unquestioning worship of false prophets, getting pissed in a park and listening to a few bands, wearing sweatshop produced bracelets or buying shite cover singles on pay-as-you-go ain’t scaring anyone.
   

Right, it's back to linking to knob gags and Japanese toilet training videos for a while...
.