Creepiest Websites of the Day

Obviously, it goes without saying that Radical Islam and Scientology are by far and away the two greatest threats to our way of life and collective mental health in the world today. And it is right that they receive as much coverage as they do. However, I'd like to share a few links that are worth visiting briefly if you're the kind of person who enjoys feeling creeped out at the gradual realisation that there's a whole subculture of influential organisations out there devoted to fucking with everyone's heads for God knows what purpose...

• The Tavistock Institute
  
  
• Common Purpose
  
  
• Engage

Phew, it's just as well that so many ordinary people are aware of the kind of things these outfits do and know what to look out for.

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You are sooooo busted - pt1

"Would you like a polonium spritzer with that?"

A friend of mine called me up this morning (cheers John) to tell me that I really should turn on BBC News 24 to watch its headline story

It was, of course, Andrei Lugovoi, the man charged with poisoning Alexander Litvinenko, giving his frankly remarkable press conference.

My chum was thoughtful enough to appreciate that there’s nothing quite like watching a live feed before the editors get a chance to step in and the specialist correspondents have an opportunity to present the edited material in its ‘correct’ context

My chum is also aware that I maintain a particular interest in what goes on in Russia as the result a series of frankly remarkable business trips I made there a few years ago.

And what I saw was the tail end of the purest expression of kleptocracy I have ever seen in the Northern Hemisphere

Without rehashing the story of the oligarchs here, the country had been robbed blind and ownership of anything of any value had been transferred to a small band of crooks. All thanks to Boris Yeltsin’s quite staggeringly corrupt government and the assistance of hordes of Western economic advisers who maintained that the only way to save Russia was to destroy Russia.

Once the assets had been stolen, a fairly crude accounting trick that involved selling their output to offshore holding companies at knock down prices meant that the state’s share of the revenue from those assets approximated to something like fuck all.

Low-income earners couldn’t afford to pay any tax. Higher incomes earners didn’t have to. Middle income earners ended up footing all the bills. That was, at least, until there were hardly any middle income earners left.

Russia was broke

In spite of Western portrayals of the recently deceased Boris Yeltsin as being some kind of flawed hero of the Russia people, most of the people, aside from tourists, visiting his body weren’t paying their respects they were just checking to make sure the fucker was really dead

Yup, he's definitely not breathing...

Anyone wishing to study a highly compressed, edited highlight version of how globalisation works when totally unrestrained could do worse than study what happened to Russia in the 1990s

And it is worth studying. It's the Future

(as an aside, I didn't develop my views about untrammelled globalisation and klepto-capitalism sitting at a keyboard - I've seen the results first hand and they lick donkey nuts, big time)

Policemen weren’t being paid. Teachers weren’t being paid. You could sense that for a time there was a real, and very dangerous, prospect of the entire, very large, very heavily-armed, country breaking down completely

And then Putin came along

Without holding up Putin as any kind of paragon of virtue and to cut a long story short, Putin was given power by the people who were looting Russia and then, for reasons known only to Putin, he turned around and fucked them.

Which goes a long way to account for Putin's continuing popularity in the Russia, in spite of what the Western media, rather feebly, try to imply

Putin is clearly far from stupid and realised that there was no way he could take back the assets stolen by the Oligarchs without having to face some serious global repercussions.

On top of that, some of the smarter oligarchs realising which way the wind was blowing started selling large chunks of their stolen Russian holdings and exchanging them for Western assets. In money laundering parlance this is known as the ‘layering’ stage. A process which the British establishment has a long and distinguished record of bending over backwards to facilitate, Russian mobsters being no exception.

So, at first sight, Putin was stuck. Russia had been robbed of its most productive resources and unless Putin was prepared to expand the role of the Russian government to include British football club ownership he had a problem.

Only he didn’t have a problem. The thing about oil fields and aluminium mines is that you can’t physically move them out of the country. All Putin had to do was tax the shit out of their land value.

Problem solved

And he is starting to (this link is well worth a read)

So, as long as Putin or someone like Putin is in charge of the Russian government the net profitability of those resources for their thieving, scumbag owners (now Western as well as indigenous oligarchs) is severely reduced.

Basically, Putin has to go...

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The Return of the Hamburglar

In spite of my better judgement I can’t help myself and I have to return to a subject I alluded to yesterday.

Several bloggers have already attempted to write objective accounts of what is going on, including this one here and here (edit: OK, the author of Link #2 has just fessed up to a soupçon of subjectivity)

The short version of the story is that two British bloggers have been involved in a protracted and personalised dispute which has now culminated in a full-on virtual, and not so virtual, campaign against one of the bloggers.

Including some pretty vile, anonymous 'tribute' sites mimicking that person's blog

So, what's the deal here - are people really trying to get her to top herself?

Personally, I don't give a damn which one of the protagonists is 'right' or 'wrong' and I'm only commenting now because this corrosive nonsense is being willfully spread beyond their individual blogs.

God knows why, the bulk of British political and activist blogs are so fucking lame, but our current Government and mainstream media are obsessed with blogs. Did I say obsessed? Hate is the nearer the mark. I suspect that this is more to do with the future potential of blogs in the UK rather than their actual impact today; particularly once more people stop being Muppets and start to realise that all the shit that’s going down wasn’t Blair-specific after all. Whatever the reason, there are fuckers out there just itching to impose control on freedom of expression on-line...

The Internet was a mistake and now They want to rectify that mistake

"We can't very well have our products turning against us"

And, whether by accident or design, this current cyber-witch hunt is playing right into Their hands

This campaign is plain nasty and if it helps to establish a trend it threatens to provoke a blow-back that might impinge on the freedom of expression of all UK bloggers

I ask anyone who is currently participating in this nonsense to think very carefully about what they are doing and ask themselves if it is behaviour that they can be in some way proud of. I submit that it isn't

And given the relatively small circulation of this blog, I ask anyone bumping into this post who subsequently bumps into another blog that is taking part in this nonsense to at least think about asking the author if they've really thought through what the fuck they are doing.


NB All wanky emails threatening or disingenuously alluding to legal action can be sent to the address at the top of this page. At which point I will reproduce them in full on this blog and print off copies on nice soft paper so that I can wipe my arse with them.
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The non-existent NWO gets another boost

There have been some astonishing developments at the World Bank in the wake of Paul Wolfowitz’s fall from grace...




In a shock move, President Bush has decided to replace the outgoing creepy, NWO, globalist bastard with…



...another creepy, NWO, globalist bastard

Robert Zoellick is or has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, The Trilateral Commission, The Bilderberg Group and The World Wildlife Fund

Fuck me, if we were playing NWO-themed bingo Zoellick would have called 'house' years ago. Not that you’d notice from the gushing Zoellick bios the BBC and everyone else are putting out

Gordon Brnwo must be creaming his nappy

And if anyone bumping into this blog is labouring under the illusion that the WWF is somehow fluffy simply because it has a panda for a logo, it’s worth bearing in mind that past WWF presidents have included such illuminated elitist douchebags as Bilderberg founder Prince Bernhard and our very own, ultra-fluffy Prince Philip - the man who would like to be reincarnated as a deadly virus so that he can kill a few billion poor people to help reduce the ‘surplus population’.

Impotent, overweight, bamboo-chomping, genocidal c*nt...

I have no doubt that people will eventually cotton onto the connection between globalisation and elitist ecofascism simply because it is so blatant. It's going to take a while though and all sorts of heinous shit can happen in the interim

And if anyone bumping into this blog is labouring under the impression that the World Bank isn’t that significant, or that evil, here are a few links and names to get you started – Greg Palast/ Joseph Stiglitz/ Bechtel – any similarities between the way the World Bank/ Bechtel tried to fuck the Bolivians over with their water and what’s happening with the UK water industry (and everyone else's water industries) are, I’m sure, entirely coincidental


Warning: All of the above is, of course, part of a raving conspiracy theory and the World definitely doesn’t work that way and in reality everything happens by accident. It's just a coincidence that all those accidents repeatedly favour the same interests. Yes, definitely a coincidence.

And the sooner all bloggers get with the program, drop all the paranoid nonsense, start taking the mainstream media at face value, get stuck into some arguments about trivial or staged bullshit with people of slightly different beliefs or skin colour, joining in witch hunts, and calling for properly-managed inquiries into the undoubtedly innocent and well-intentioned mistakes of our leaders the better

/ fucked off

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Public Service Announcement

"This way children..."

Non-British visitors to this and other British based blogs might be unaware that a small section of the British Blogging Community™ (sic.) is pioneering a voluntary self-certification system

If you see something like this button...


...displayed prominently on a UK-based blog you can be 100% confident that the author(s) has completely lost the plot and needs to sit down somewhere dark and quiet and think things through for a while

And if you don't know what I'm talking about please don't ask (you can ask this chap though). I really can't be arsed to deal with the poxy emails threatening me with bullshit libel actions that would undoubtedly ensue. Not this week anyway. (edit: I'm in the mood now)

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The Belly of the Beast

As a few of my photo-chums know, I’ve just spent what for me is a buttock-clenching amount of money on a new compact digital camera.

One of the main reasons why I picked it up is that it packs the widest-angle lens currently available on a compact. Wide-angle compacts are thin on the ground because a) for technical reasons they are expensive to make, and b) most people are much more interested in telephoto lenses. I think that’s at least partly because long lenses appeal to the voyeuristic side of human nature.

However, most interesting pictures, certainly the most interesting photo-journalistic images, are usually taken with wide-angle lenses. That’s because to use a wide-angle lens effectively you have to get close to and become involved with your subject and even when you do there is still a lot of space that can be filled with context. Good wide-angle pictures tell a story.

So, for example, when I got up early this morning and went for a stroll around Vauxhall to take some test pictures with my new wide-angle camera I was able to include a discarded copy of Hard On magazine in the foreground and the Royal Vauxhall Tavern (very popular with readers of Hard On magazine) in the background...

Subject and Context

But there’s a lot more to Vauxhall than pavement filth and eye-wateringly aggressive gay drinking establishments. There’s the fabulously expensive new solar powered bus station…




and the area is also littered with the latest manifestations of the Metropolitan Police’s ongoing campaign to deal with people’s perception of crime as well as crime itself. Because, as Commissioner Ian Blair so frequently reminds us, people’s fear of crime is rising even though crime itself is falling…

Leave it on show

Expect it to go

Chaucer would have been proud

Of course, Vauxhall’s most notable landmark is not the solar-powered bus station or the Royal Vauxhall Tavern or warmly reassuring posters about street crime it’s…

Old Spooky

and what’s really cool is how you can stand in what presumably is the MI6 building’s alfresco party barbecue area/ mock pagan temple and line up Millbank Tower (ex Labour Party HQ), Thames House (Meye5 central) and the Houses of Parliament

Millbank Tower, Thames House, HoP

When it comes to being in the Belly of the Beast Vauxhall sure takes some beating.

Sadly, the old Millbank Prison that once stood on the North Bank of the Thames opposite the MI6 building’s location was demolished years ago. It would have fitted in with the current physical and psychological landscape perfectly…

The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not, thus conveying a "sentiment of an invisible omniscience." In his own words, Bentham described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example

I was particularly gratified this morning to notice that a fellow Pyramid connoisseur and MI6 Building fan had clearly left his mark on Vauxhall Bridge…




and that building does fascinate me. All buildings are an encoded statement of one kind or another. Unless, that is, they are perfectly rectangular and totally utilitarian which even then is a statement of sorts (‘I’m cheap’, ‘I don’t give a fuck’).

And one thing’s for sure, the MI6 building is saying something. As well as being festooned with all sorts of peculiar little architectural features there is the small matter of the view from above...




Now I’ve said it before but to me it is reminiscent of the owl motif (aka ‘Moloch’) that crops up hidden in dollar bills, the Washington street plan and as the large concrete pagan idol, voiced over by Walter Cronkite, at Bohemian Grove in front of which past and current Presidents and Prime Ministers make mock child sacrifices (weird but true)...




On the other hand, someone has pointed out to me that it also looks like a Transformer Terrabot...



So, I have to concede that the Owl connection is hardly cast-iron

There's another possible connection/ synchronism that did tickle me though, I saw a clip from a restored print of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis a few months ago and the ‘Heart Machine’, the power plant running Metropolis is represented as the flaming idol Moloch, a furnace stoked on human flesh…



and guess what I was reminded of the moment I saw it...

Join MI6 today - it's a hoot...

Well, it was just a thought

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The Truth is Out There ... and quite a few lies too

Further to that last post about militant Muslim demonstrations which, as ably researched and documented by The Antagonist, might not be exactly what they seem to be...

Postman Patel has picked up the torch and has spent some time mooching around forums like Stormfront and posted a couple of times on the fact that the BNP is taking the bait and reacting to the planned demo (/ staged provocation?).

Curiously, a couple of the Stormfront posts actually talk about making common cause with some Sikhs and Caribbeans who might be planning to hold a counter demonstration

Ho Ho Ho

So, presumably they wouldn’t mind if some moderate Muslims turned up and joined them as well.

One of the enduring mysteries of fascism is how so many ordinary people have been conned into supporting it over the years. By its very nature fascism only serves the interests of a tiny number of people at the very top and not the majority; White, Brown or any other colour. The trick is, of course, to take people who have grievances and concerns, sometimes legitimate ones, and bamboozle them into blaming completely the wrong people for those grievances and concerns.

I have yet to meet a single British Muslim who wants to obliterate Anglo-Saxon White British culture (whatever that might be). I have, however, met plenty who wish to retain elements of their own heritage in parallel with whatever everyone else is getting on with. They would also prefer it if our country stopped bombing the shit out of Muslims overseas on the basis of lies. None of this is a threat to the identity of this Nation.

I have read a lot about how Muslims want to take over our World in the newspapers though. However, those newspapers are owned by the kind of people who sit at the very top of the Pyramid and they do seem to dwell on the outrageous statements of the same half dozen or so militant Muslims; some of whom are recent 'converts', others who appear to be more than a little 'spooky', time and time again. There's a perverse, one-sided argument going on right now. Lots of non-Muslims are being wound up into demanding that Muslims be good citizens and 99.999995% of Muslims are fucked if they know what else they can do.

The number of Muslims calling for the kind of shit everyone is worried about is absolutely tiny.

And of that tiny number there are plenty of grounds to be a least suspicious that someone is putting some of them up to it, or at least giving them coverage vastly out of proportion to their significance or sanity

To be honest, your average BNP’er should be more concerned about the impact of corporate globalisation on that Anglo-Saxon White British culture they are so keen to preserve. It’s not the fucking Muslims who want to reduce us all to an homogenous, rootless, easily manipulated cultural pulp.

Wouldn’t it be something if the White nationalists, the Muslims, the Sikhs, the Caribbeans and everyone else turned up at Downing Street on June 15 and instead of yelling at each other, like they’re supposed to, had the common sense to come together and start hurling abuse at those who would set us all at each other’s throats instead.

Just for once

Well, you can dream can’t you

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One thing that did strike me whilst reading around the issue of the planned protest was that, in spite of the fact that the organizers of this demo and their motivations are very murky indeed, there are people out there prepared to take it all at face value without any reservations

For example, Faisal Haque in his Daily Telegraph blog raised the possibility that someone, someone who isn’t a Muslim, might be shit-stirring…

“However, I believe that this demo is being organised by agent provocateurs who will fuel the Government’s propaganda that the Muslim community is full of ‘radicalised’ hotheads. It will damage community relations and will be used to justify further erosion of the civil liberties of ordinary Muslims and non-Muslims. Judging by the inflammatory postings on the petition website, it is clear that the mere advertising of this demonstration is causing a wave of Islamophobia.”

To which a couple of people commented with such astute replies as...

“David Albion's got it right. The Onanists in our government couldn't organise a bed in a bordello, let alone a decent scam along these lines. All they know how to do is put their hands firmly in our pockets.”

“Conspiracy theorys - It is utter rubbish to even consider the Govt we have would have the necessary wit to do anything like this. Best you collect your brothers and sisters together and say to them. We live in a Christian country abide by their laws and all will be well.”

All of which reminded me of something someone emailed me about yesterday. Something which may at first seem to be nothing to do with anything.

It was a link to a series of ‘UFO’ photos that has caused a minor stir on Flickr...




No, they’re not very good.

I'm very old-fashioned when it comes to this sort of thing and still prefer traditional techniques - using hand made models tossed into the air or dangling from a piece of wire rather than all this cgi nonsense…

© Billy Meier - full-time alien contactee and undisputed Master of one-armed Photoshop

One of the tricks that kept the discussion about the photos going on in Flickr is the fairly crude use of non-paid, easily opened Flickr accounts to post comments saying how convincing they are.

Hmmm, dodgy photos, fake identities... it must be some kind of a conspiracy

But, apparently, as mainstream wisdom goes, no-one is clever enough to pull a stunt like that

Bollocks

Winding people up with fake shit is the easiest thing in the World – particularly if they are packing the kind of razor sharp intellect possessed by the average Telegraph Online commentator

Curiously, and returning to the subject in hand, something similar seems to be going on with the Stormfront site. Some of the more aggressive commenting about the ‘British Oppression’ demo seems to be coming from ID’s that either haven’t been open very long or don't have much of a posting history

Hmmm…

Like I've said before there are signs that we're in for an eventful summer. Our government is making no secret of the fact that it is just itching to declare a state of emergency and rush in powers that will enable our police to stop and interrogate people without having any reasonable grounds for doing so (!?)

and it's only going to take one excuse, just one...

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Brace yourself for the outrage

Kate Moss modeling the latest, and surprisingly charlie-stain free, addition to the Agent Provocateur range of lingerie - ...

If they haven't done so already, Agent Provocateur fans might like to read The Antagonist's latest post on the British Oppression - Downing Street protest that apparently is being held on 15th June. There seems to be some question about who is actually organizing it. Though you can be fairly confident that half a dozen very stereotypically Muslim looking people will turn up and do, say or wave around something shocking that the TV and newpaper outfits will lap up with enthusiastic outrage.

The same old shit from the same old suspects

And The War on Domestic Terrorism calendar for June/ July is starting to fill up nicely. There's a Summer of Love ahead of us, that's for sure

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Not entirely a Ludicruous Diversion but...

Gregory: "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."
Holmes: "That was the curious incident."

/ big Sherlock Holmes fan

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Postman Patel has just blogged about a short Youtube video that attempts to deconstruct the only photograph that has been released of the four alleged 7/7 suicide bombers.

And fair play to him for doing so. This photograph is worth looking at and thinking about

but...

There are, I believe, grounds for caution about expending too much energy on tearing this particular photograph apart or fixating on its significance as a potential ‘smoking gun’ of security force misbehaviour on 7/7. I have tried to raise those concerns in the past and, for my troubles, on one occasion was accused of being part of the ‘7/7 Conspiracy’.

Hmmm…

First off, the picture is dodgy. No doubt. And it may have been tampered with...



But so fucking what?

Those of us who dabble with and challenge 'official' conspiracies need to have at least a rudimentary understanding of the psychology of denial - be we fighting it or, dare I say, suffering from it

Broadly speaking, the Luton photograph has one of three possible biographies…

1. the photo is legitimate and the flaws are simply the result of compression and sharpening algorithms
   
   
2. the photo is legitimate but was retouched slightly because… (insert plausible sounding official excuse here)
   
   
3. the photo is illegitimate and a total mock-up

Even if they become aware of the flaws in the photograph, the people who believe the official account, and that is the vast majority of people, will be eager to believe that photo is flawed for some perfectly legitimate reason and they will embrace any reason that they are given.

The question for 7/7 sceptics is, if the photograph is such an obvious piece of shit, why is it so 'obviously' flawed? Are we to assume that state security forces don’t have the necessary in-house photoshop skills to do a decent job?

Or is it a deliberately rubbish piece of work

And if it is deliberately rubbish, why?

The Zapruder Film - 44 years of inconclusive mental masturbation and counting...

If people want to spend time taking the Luton picture apart that’s fine. However, they should be mindful of the fact that the results are unlikely to interest anyone except for people who already have doubts. On top of that, there’s a possibility that the photo deconstructors are taking someone’s bait.

Be careful




There is one claim made by the video that is flat out wrong. Near the start it says that 7/7 Luton photograph is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain and says this is so because it is such a bad fake. Not true. Copies of the photograph are all over the web – including the Metropolitan Police’s own web site.

So, if it’s a cover-up it’s a pretty rubbish one.

As a slight aside, one thing that did freak me out a little was discovering that if you type ‘luton bombers 77’ into a Google Image Search a picture of me pops up in the first page of results...



Oooh-er, I'm not sure that I like that

And even though, and I stand on my record on this one, I am as interested in chanting monks, lunatic secret societies and all that other illuminati/ masonic/ Unified Conspiracy Theory™ stuff as the next person, mixing it in with questions about 7/7, as the person who uploaded the video does, detracts from those questions and is likely to turn people off.

If the people grappling with 7/7 and using the Net as their mouthpiece aren't searching for evidence and lines of reasoning that will reach out to and win over the majority of ordinary people then what the fuck are they doing?

Whilst poring over the only photograph that has been released don’t let that be a distraction from the much bigger, potentially more fruitful question…

Where are all the other photographs and videos from that day?

As even the person who uploaded the video analysing the sole 7/7 photograph says in the description

London is crawling with CCTV cameras. There should be 100's of clips of cctv footage showing these supposed bombers on that day. Where are they all?

You could ask the same question about eye witness accounts of that day’s events or the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes a couple of weeks later. The paucity of imagery and witness testimony from those days available in the public domain is quite peculiar and a reason for concern in itself.

The existence of one shonky picture of the alleged 7/7 bombers is not a core factor in my personal scepticism about official accounts of that day. The fact that it is the only picture is.

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A chilling read - (now slightly updated to be even more chilling)

Khalid Khaliq, 34 from Beeston, Leeds, who has been in custody for over a week and was charged late on Sunday and will appear today at City of Westminster Magistrates, central London, charged under the Terrorism Act 2000with possessing "a document or record namely the al-Qaeda training manual containing information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism".

If found guilty this carries a maximum sentence of ten years

The more I think about the wording of the charge the more I am fascinated by it. The 'document or record' doesn’t have to be illegal per se. Nor is there any requirement to prove that the person charged with holding the document was intending to do anything with it; just that someone, somewhere could find it useful. Given that juries are responsible only for deciding whether an accused person is 'guilty as charged' and are not empowered to comment on the sanity of the charge itself, it's all quite sinister. The fascinating part is deciding whether the thinking behind the charge is more Orwell or Kafka. My money would be on Kafka

Flipping through an on-line copy of the Chilling Terror Manual in question I couldn’t help but be struck by the parallels with that other chillingly infamous document ‘The Anarchists Cookbook’. It too is a pile of old crap and highly likely to cause the death or injury of anyone dumb to make use of its contents. So much so that there has been persistent speculation over the years that the version of The Anarchists Cookbook in common circulation was edited and promoted by a US intelligence agency.

Hmmmm...

/ scratches chin

I was intending to reproduce an example page taken from the Chilling AQ Terror Manual at this point but decided that I have better plans for the next ten years. So, I'll paraphrase a section selected at random instead




How to assassinate someone in a car

1. Stop his car with another car
2. Get out of your car and kill everyone in the other car

Note: Make sure some of the assassins can drive


Having read through the Chilling AQ Terror Manual (‘chilling’ to some, laughably crap to others) I think that it’s fair to say that there are episodes of The Professionals that contain information that is more likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing acts of terrorism. And as for that old copy of Bravo Two Zero you might have knocking around the house somewhere I’d suggesting binning that fucker tout suite



Alternatively, if you find yourself developing a taste for this kind of thing may I recommend ‘Tinman_999’’s Amazon shopping list entitled ‘Want a police file on you?’. Jihadists on a budget will be pleased to know that most of the books in the list qualify for Amazon Super Saver Delivery.

Tinman_999 is fifteen years old

And now strikes me as an excellent time to flush my browser's cache...

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edit: Other bloggers (well, two of them) appear to be equally impressed with today's news - including Postman Patel and The Antagonist. A comment underneath Postman Patel's post is worth repeating here...

It is worth quoting Duncan Campbell from his original article of the Guardian on April 14, 2005 entitled 'The ricin ring that never was'

The most ironic twist was an attempt to introduce an "al-Qaida manual" into the case. The manual - called the Manual of the Afghan Jihad - had been found on a raid in Manchester in 2000. It was given to the FBI to produce in the 2001 New York trial for the first attack on the World Trade Centre. But it wasn't an al-Qaida manual. The name was invented by the US department of justice in 2001, and the contents were rushed on to the net to aid a presentation to the Senate by the then attorney general, John Ashcroft, supporting the US Patriot Act.

/ scratches chin for the second time today

No doubt, the BBC and other mainstream news outlets will be commenting on the civil liberties implications of the wording of the charge and questions about the provenance and dubious utility of the training manual at some point over the next couple of days. No doubt..

edit2: Khalid Khaliq has been released on bail. His case will be heard on July 2nd. Which ties in nicely with the second anniversary of the 7/7 bombings in which the BBC has obligingly reminded us with a cut and paste job at the end of the story about Khaliq's bail...

"Fifty-two people died and more than 750 were injured when suicide bombers attacked three London Underground trains and a bus almost two years ago"

... just in case anyone has forgotten.

The reporting of Khaliq's hearing will doubtlessly be a part of the tasteful and dignified celebration commemoration of the anniversary of 7/7 in which no-one will seek to make any political capital out of the death of 52 people (strictly speaking it's actually 56) or spout any deranged horseshit at all. None whatsoever

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The Protocols of the Elders of Islam

Sadly, that interesting fan-produced analysis of A Clockwork Orange I mentioned a few posts back is currently not available on Youtube.

On the flip side, whilst trawling around trying to establish what happened to it, I found the most succinct riposte I’ve seen to people robotically dismissing what I personally believe to be open-minded and rational discussions on the basis that they are 'conspiracy theories' for a long time...

“What's 'weirdo' about conspiracy theories? There are conspiracies and people form theories about them... What would be weirder would be if the world and the Universe were exactly as they appear to us to be right now at this moment in time, on the so-called evening news.”

Nicely put, though I immediately thought of two people who would be surprised, and out of work, if the majority of people stopped believing that the world and the Universe are exactly as they appear to be right now at this moment in time…

"What you're saying Mr Dimbleby is waffle"

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Dick, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Shit loads..."

Feel free to compile your own personal lists

This gave me cause for thought about Gordon Brnwo and his latest hobby of popping the words ‘new’, ‘world’ and ‘order’ into speeches at every opportunity, or how it is possible to slap pyramids and all seeing-eyes signifying the ‘natural’ order of things all over your money, intelligence service logos or even laid-out across your front lawn, and all the other certifiably weird stuff that goes on with hardly anybody commenting how rank it all is.




Gordon understands. People don’t see these things because people know they don’t exist

He’s only a political genius.

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NB It goes virtually without saying that there is a massive difference between a Conspiracy Theory and Conspiracy Fact. Conspiracy Theories, however well documented and supported by evidence, are merely paranoid ravings, whereas Conspiracy Facts are the kind of narratives people like my heroes, those watchdogs of Western civilisation Michael Gove and Melanie Phillips, are handsomely-paid to propagate in newspapers and the state broadcasting corporation. Most notably the existence of a fearsomely well-resourced Islamic plot, directed from a cave somewhere (location unknown), to establish a global caliphate that will encompass North America and Western Europe through a two fisted strategy of subverting our cultural identity by packing our most important institutions full of Muslims AND randomly blowing up commuters with bombs made from chapati flour. Yup, that would do the trick. Definitely

This is obviously a real threat and we should all be crapping ourselves. It's not just our lives and limbs that are at risk. Our freedom and our very souls are at stake.

Hmmm... hang on a minute ... a plot to achieve global domination ... subversion of our Christian values ... a clash of civilisations. It all sounds so dreadfully familiar. Now where have I heard all this before? It's on the tip of my tongue...

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Taking Liberties 9/11

Over the last few weeks I’ve had several beery, caffeine and tobacco fueled chats with small groups of people who have expressed a shared sense of frustration about the behaviour of our government and the limited opportunities there are to legally and peacefully express that frustration and do something to change things...

• You could attend some demos and waste your time annoying some rank and file policemen who probably love the current government no more than you do
  
  
• You could write a blog but that’s essentially a passive occupation and one that will never reach the majority of people who simply don’t read blogs
  
  
• You could hand out leaflets, file Freedom of Information requests, lobby and heckle media outlets to publish material that might wake a few people up.
  
  However, once again, even if you have some success you are unlikely to penetrate the skulls of the majority of people who are much more preoccupied with what they believe to be more important or more interesting things...

‘I know! Why not make a commercially-distributed feature film about the bad things that are happening in this country!’

Good thinking

And, as luck would have it, somebody has.

It’s called ‘Taking Liberties’ and the now mandatory attempt at a web-based viral campaign is underway...

including a Film Makers blog. A blog which includes the line…

“Though the death threats and accusations of us all being Hard Let/Hard Right/MI5 Agents are starting to trickle through”

It can’t be much of a trickle as I’m having real trouble finding anything on-line to that effect.

Hmmm, tempting…

I’ll pass on making any death threats, that’s not my style, and I haven’t actually seen the film, so levelling specific accusations of insecurity force involvement would be unreasonable and a little bit mental. There are, however, already grounds for caution as far as participating in the viral marketing of this movie or pointing people towards it without having seen it

Reasons why the old spider-sense is already tingling -


A glittering galaxy of celebrity gobshites…

The movie features the same old shower of ineffective tools of the state-funded, state-endorsed opposition; Titans of civil liberties such as Tony Benn, Shami Chakrabarti and Boris Johnson. The kind of people who already have copious access to newsprint and airwaves and have achieved precisely fuck all in the way of preventing the encroachment of authoritarian government in the UK over the last 10 years. Their only real achievement has been to fill a void that might otherwise have been occupied by someone with something genuinely challenging or constructive to say.

So, why anyone in their right mind would be expected to fork out eight quid and give up a Saturday night to watch more of the same useless bollocks eludes me.

"Shami Chakrabountybarti has been the director of Liberty since September 2003. After graduating from the London School of Economics, Chakrabarti worked as a barrister at the Home Office, before joining Liberty on 10 September 2001. She spent the following two years campaigning against the anti-terrorist measures which followed the 9/11 attacks in the USA, such as ATCSA, and is a prominent opponent of recent counter-terrorism legislation. She is a frequent contributor to BBC Radio 4 and to The Independent newspaper on the topic of human rights and civil liberties." - I had an interesting chat with a friend of mine yesterday who has direct personal experience of the kind of solid, 'effective' campaigning Shami has been engaged in, in the context of this story about 'sword and cudgel' brandishing peace protestors - it would be nice if that friend recorded her experience on-line at some point - you know who you are... ;-)

The marketing of the movie stinks of Michael Moore, tastes like Michael Moore, is Michael Moore…

Looking at the promo poster for 'Taking Liberties' for the first time I couldn’t help but be struck by how much it looked like publicity material for some awful piece of mainstream Hollywood tat. Some of the tag lines floating about reinforce that feeling. You know, guff like this...

‘You’ll laugh! You’ll cry! Robin Williams is The Ringtone Revolutionary. The unconventional civil liberties activist with a heart of gold’

Experience tells me that any movie which shamelessly describes itself as ‘Hilarious’ or ‘The most important film of the decade’ is highly unlikely to be anything of the sort.

The feeling of déjà vu was so strong I decided to click around a little to see exactly which other poster the ‘Taking Liberties’ poster reminded me of. I must have been lucky because it only took one click…




Oh yes, Fahrenheit 9/11. And it only took a little more clicking to establish that ‘F9/11’ and ‘Taking Liberties’ share a producer.

Well, fuck me sideways. What a small world it is.

And I have seen F9/11

The movie that was going to swing the last US Presidential election from the war-mongering Republican to the anti-war (sic.) Democratic party. The movie that explained that 9/11 happened because a) George Bush is an idiot and b) the Saudis did it.

I’ve met a few people who have actually thought F9/11 was quite good; right up until I gave a couple of examples of why it is not. My favourite being the coverage of Bush’s behaviour in that Florida school on the morning of 9/11. Moore plays the scene as if Bush is a bumbling fool paralyzed by indecision. What Moore doesn’t ask, effectively misdirecting the viewer in the process, is why Bush’s security team didn’t whisk him out of the room as soon as they heard about the first, or even the second, WTC strike...

Moore’s entire film is a work of misdirection and somehow manages to spend 2 hours talking about 9/11 without actually addressing any of the serious questions arising from that day. Which is a major achievement in itself.

And on the subject of Michael Moore, I’d like to direct trivia fans to the part of his Wikibio that talks about the making of his first film Roger and Me...

“Moore was largely taught the craft of film making by his cinematographer Kevin Rafferty, who is ironically also a first cousin of President George W. Bush“

Ironic is not the word I would have used in that context


Taking Liberties totally misses the point (probably)

OK, not having seen the movie this is a speculative concern but I’d put money on this being the case.

One purpose for which Michael Moore’s movies such as F9/11 and Bowling for Columbine are genuinely useful for is as learning tools for the study of how people are wanked-off by faux opposition. In the case of F9/11, Moore employs two techniques in particular; heaping as much blame as possible on an expendable puppet idiot (Bush) and misdirecting the audience through acts of omission…

And lo and behold, who features prominently on the ‘Taking Liberties’ poster?

None other than Tony Blair

Given that the film is scheduled for general release on 8th June and Blair is leaving office on the 27th that yields a shelf-life for presumably one of the central themes of the movie of precisely 19 days.

You couldn’t make it up

One of the depressing aspects of the opposition to the erosion of civil liberties in this country over the last ten years is how so many people on the Left have kidded themselves that what has happened is some kind of Blair-specific aberration. Once Blair leaves, so the fantasy goes, everything will be just fucking peachy and life will somehow return to normal.

This fantasy doesn’t square with reality. Blair didn’t vote for That War on his own and the same bunch of elected turds who voted for That War have just voted, amongst many other shameful votes, to exclude themselves from Freedom of Information legislation.

Admittedly, I’m not being entirely fair on all Labour supporters. Given that the Labour Party has lost half its membership over the last few years, a good number of people on the Left clearly have twigged to what’s going on and presumably understand that it’s not a Blair-specific issue.

(And I’m not invoking any conspiracy theories here but there really is something quite creepy about how so many of the decent, senior Labour MPs who could have replaced or challenged Blair (or Brnwoown) have died, Omen-style, over the years)

Even if you kid yourself that we retain the democratic tools that enable us to ultimately vote out the worst offenders, that still wouldn’t be enough. So much of our critical national infrastructure, including our security infrastructure, has been handed over to quasi-autonomous or privately controlled organisations, beyond public scrutiny or account, that it simply defies rational belief that it is all down solely to Blair and his immediate circle or that the direction our government is pursuing will change once Blair leaves.

The system is fundamentally broke but don’t expect anyone speaking to a mainstream audience to address crucial questions such as ‘Who is benefiting from this?’, ‘How are they exercising their influence?’, ‘What can we do to stop it?’

But the real killer omission I’m expecting from ‘Taking Liberties’, the omission that will have many viewers leaving the film with a nagging feeling that something wasn’t quite right but they’re not quite sure what, is the fundamental failure by all corporate- and state-permitted opposition to tackle the central issue that drives so much of the repression our government is carrying out in our name…

If people continue to genuinely believe that the UK is infested with hundreds of terror cells comprised of thousands of highly trained, well-funded, suicidally motivated lunatics with access to nuclear and biological weapons, lunatics who want to kill as many people as possible simply because they live in a free country, then no-one is going to care a flying fuck about civil liberties

(though, obviously, neutering the terrorists' core motivation by cunningly making your country less free is an intriguing proposition)

I believe that, if not entirely a state-creation, there is absolutely no doubt that the terror threat is being cynically exaggerated to serve political agendas. There is also a real risk, and there are signs that this is indeed happening, that the War on Terror will become a self-realising myth. If you kick people long enough, particularly people who believe in something, they will kick back.

Not one fucker permitted mainstream opportunities to talk about the erosion of civil liberties will touch this issue with a barge-pole. Unless someone does, this civil liberties thing will, to put it bluntly, continue to be viewed by the vast majority of people as being a theoretical concern of a few chattering middle-class Whiteboys and a bunch of chippy Pakis who have no-one to blame except for people of their own kind

And that’s the sad truth

I know at least a few people out there share the feelings I had on 7/7 and the days that followed it. Without wanting to sound melodramatic, something profoundly Evil was unleashed that day and I’m not talking about Islamic terrorism.

I really hope that ‘Taking Liberties’ tackles that Evil head on. I honestly do. But I won’t be holding my breath.

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The Law of Fives

"The Law of Fives states simply that: ALL THINGS HAPPEN IN FIVES, OR ARE DIVISIBLE BY OR ARE MULTIPLES OF FIVE, OR ARE SOMEHOW DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY APPROPRIATE TO 5. The Law of Fives is never wrong"

Alternatively

"Everything can be related to the number five if you try hard enough"

-

Sticking with the subject of that last post on the inclusion of elite symbolism in mainstream movies, for my sins, I saw The Good Shepherd last week.

Truth be told, it’s not a very good film; either as information or entertainment.

It is worth watching, however, as an example of Hollywood pretending to deal with a contentious issue, such as the role of the CIA in the post-WW2 world, and fluffing it.

Yup, there sure is a lot of fluffing, mental as opposed to physical, going on in that movie.

A few scenes in the film, as in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut before it, attempt to grapple with the unsettling fact that members of our ruling elite are frequently members of the kind of fruity little clubs that make Scientology look rational. It’s hard not to watch the homo-erotic Skull and Bones rituals depicted in The Good Shepherd and not be reminded of the persistent rumours over the years that kiddy fiddling features high on the list of that jaded elite’s favourite Saturday night pass-times.

But that’s not important right now.

One aspect of the movie that really caught my attention was the occasional inclusion of gratuitous pentagrams in certain scenes. For example …



Or…



And why not? After all, Washington itself is one enormous Great Pentagram anyway

The rather fetching Pentagram/ Pyramid/ All Seeing Eye combo anchored on the White House

I have yet to encounter anyone who seriously denies that the Founding Fathers of America were members of secret, humanist societies or that the symbolism of those societies was incorporated into emblems of state and even the very floor plan of the capital city of that state. It's so blatant as to be undeniable. So, people just don't talk about instead.

And that tradition of occult symbolism continued certainly until at least as recently as the middle of the 20th century, when the symbolism on the dollar bill was upgraded to be twice as fruity than before and the Pentagram Pentagon was built.

(It's worth bearing in mind that slapping occult symbols all over your money and government logos and waging war from pentagram/ goat's head-shaped buildings kind of hands over a fair bit of psychological ammunition to the sort of firebrand clerics who like to label America as The Great Satan)

There is at least a book’s worth of material on the subject of The Enlightenment and the historical role played by Masonic and other fraternal societies in furthering the aims of The Enlightenment through the subversion and eventual overthrow of existing ruling religious and royal elites.

And then there is another book’s worth of material concerning the motivations of these Enlightened reformers. Were they themselves elitists or were they truly egalitarian? Did they just replace one group of bastard overlords with another? Was their movement corrupted at some point? Are their successors still active today?

Whatever, I just enjoy looking for the symbolism and trying to figure out whether occurrences of that symbolism are conscious, unconscious or just coincidental

The amusing thing is that once you start rooting around the history of the last few hundred years looking for examples of members of fruity secret societies who overthrew established elites and then went on to adopt their club symbols as national symbols those examples start to come thick and fast.

Personal favourites include…

The two Joes, Mazzini and Garibaldi, who unified Italy much to the displeasure of, amongst other people, the Pope



The founder of the modern, emphatically secular, state of Turkey, Kemal Atatürk




Sam Houston, the general who won the suspiciously easy Battle of San Jacinto and consequently carved Texas off from (Catholic) Mexico




As an aside, if you accept the traditional explanation of the symbolism of obelisks as being essentially phallic and the Pentagram as sometimes being representative of an out-stretched female form then, at 570 feet tall, the San Jacinto Monument in Texas arguably qualifies as the tallest (and most painful looking) example of free-standing pornography on Earth…



Going back to Kemal Ataturk and the Turkish national flag for a moment. One question that did bug me was how something as pagan as a pentagram and a crescent moon!!! for God’s sake could have ever become associated with Islam – a religion not exactly keen on a) paganism, or b) iconography

It didn’t actually take much research to establish that, no, many orthodox Muslims haven’t embraced the symbolism of the crescent and star and, yes, they do consider it to be blasphemous.

But wait, there’s more. There’s a rather large, modern secular state that was founded by people who probably were members of fruity little clubs rooted in The Enlightenment that I haven't mentioned. And I find it quite amusing to place that country’s flag next to the Turkish one

So, if a crescent moon is a symbol of the feminine what does that make a hammer?

That doesn’t prove anything of course but it does remind me of the hoary old Universal Conspiracy Theory™, promoted by Orwell amongst others, which claims most countries are run by the same, closely allied group of people and most conflicts are acts of murderous theatre, cynically engineered by that group to keep the paeons, wherever they might be, down



Nah, way too far-fetched…

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Pyramid Spotting with Stanley K

(edit: the following post refers to a couple of Youtube videos that are now currently not available. I dropped their author a line to ask him what's happened to them but in the meantime here's a link to the narration that goes with the vids - it's a poor substitute

edit2: the video is now back - see my post here)





And whilst on the subjects of the CIA, Mind Control, Scientologists, State-sponsored terror, the New World Order and images filched from Stanley Kubrick movies (in the last post)…

Now would be a good time to link to an analysis of A Clockwork Orange produced and uploaded onto Youtube by a seriously committed Kubrick fan (Part1, Part2)

Kubrick's track record for weaving subversive messages, often subliminal messages, into big budget, mainstream Hollywood movies; from Spartacus to Dr Strangelove to A Clockwork Orange, is a stonking achievement. And it's no surprise that he spent most of his life completely out of his tree with paranoia and chose to live in a castle.



(OK, maybe not a castle, but definitely a big fuck off house with lots of security)

As with anything produced by anyone, the Youtube analysis of Clockwork Orange does need to be taken with a pinch of salt. However, if you like Kubrick and if you like insane elitist symbolism hidden in plain view amongst us you’ll absolutely fucking love this.

My favourite part is where the narrator takes the film’s more overt message about state manipulation of ordinary people and connects that with the less than overt symbolism scattered throughout the film; particularly the All Seeing Eye/ Pyramid thing.

You know, this kind of stuff…

Buckingham Palace vs. The Dollar Bill

Meye5 's old logo - you can say whatever you like about The Establishment but it does have a sense of humour

It’s worth bearing in mind that Kubrick was an obsessively meticulous director. Nothing appeared in his films by accident. So, it is reasonable to assume that Kubrick put all of the following imagery into A Clockwork Orange deliberately...





Clockwork Orange predates the Internet and 'Internet-fueled conspiracy theories' by a good quarter of a century...

It’s also worth having a second look at the film’s iconic publicity poster reproduced at the top of this post.

And then maybe making a point of watching the film again when you get a chance. It really was made 30 years too early

.

Our next Prime Minister says it like it is

And today's quiz is...

Watch this video and see if you can count how many times Gordon Brnwoown uses the words 'New', 'World', 'Order' and how many different permutations he comes up with in just over two minutes



Short of donning a purple robe and prancing around on national television with his cock hanging out, singing praises to his Dark Lord Beelzebub, I'm not sure that he could be any more explicit about where he is coming from and what we can all expect from his reign

The new look Labour Cabinet

.

You've got to laugh...

This just tickled me

From the CIA World Fact Book - National current account balances for 2006 ranked by size...

The Top 10 -

It's from the CIA so it must be true

then 143 other countries

I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
V

Then the bottom 10 -

...and it's a bronze medal for the UK

Ha ha ha. How we laughed ...

and then we went out and bought some more crap

-

edit:

eight hundred and sixty two billion dollars...

fuck me

.

One man's cult is another man's system of government

Up until a couple of hours ago I thought these two clips were the most demented things I’d seen on Youtube in recent days...

Fat Kid on a Ride

Full Metal Jacket for the Wii

But that was before I’d seen the clip of crapck BBC investigative reported John Sweeney losing it in front of a Scientologist armed with a camcorder. If you are not one of the 472,018 people who have already seen the video it comes highly recommended. And even if you have already seen the video, fuck it, it’s still worth watching a few more times

"I’m John Sweeney and I haven’t had any dinner…"

If you judge a man by his works, particularly his more recent works, John Sweeney is not a very nice man. The problem is, of course, that the video exposing the less fluffy side of his personality has been put out by Scientologists. So, any glee at Sweeney’s embarrassment has to be tempered by the fact that Bad People are behind it

Bollocks does it

The enemy of my enemy is not my friend and I am neither with them or against them

Bollocks to all lunatics and their false dichotomies.

Choosing neither is always an option.

So, in the same way that rejecting Bush and Blair’s take on the world doesn’t make me a supporter of terrorism, I can sit back and enjoy Sweeney making a complete knob of himself completely untroubled by the fact that another bunch of knobs are recording it.

Actually, that adds to the pleasure. The rules of the media game have changed in recent years. Supposed ‘investigative' reporters working on shallow hit pieces ('Scientologists are weird' - no shit Sherlock!) are now faced with the very real possibility that their quarry might be returning the favour at the same time. The hunter has become the hunted. An altogether much more entertaining and genuinely sporting option.

Think how much more fun fox hunting would be if the foxes were carrying bazookas.

Or if a wealthy 'cult' launched a counter-strike on the entire profession of psychiatry.

Stuff like that

As the makers of South Park famously said after their recent bruising at the hands of Scientologists…

"So, Scientology, you may have won THIS battle, but the million-year war for earth has just begun!"




Another point that might be worth bearing in mind is that, without making any excuses for Scientology, the movement is perceived as an easy mark by journalists because it has been designated as a cult. And through the act of trashing cults those journalists are implicitly endorsing the prevailing and dominant social paradigms. There's no mileage, or money, in covering alternative belief systems in a positive way.

The likes of Sweeney are never going to ask questions like 'What has this group got right?', 'Why are people drawn to it?', 'How does mainstream society stack-up in comparison?'.

Nope, 'cult' members are all a bunch of brain-washed nutters. There's nothing else to learn here. End of story. Sleep easy in your beds boys and girls.

L R Hubbard - having a laugh. And if you spent your autumn years sailing around the Caribbean in a private yacht crewed exclusively by young women dressed in tight-fitting uniforms of your own design wouldn't you? In spite of his tremendous influence and all too human failings, history fails to record any instances of L Ron or Scientologists illegally invading or blowing the shit out of anyone...

We all know that cults are bad because they enrich themselves at the expense of misguided souls who think that they will be happier if they embrace the cult’s distorted worldview and become economic and mental slaves to that worldview.

Of course, John Sweeney’s employer, the BBC, definitely isn’t an integral part of a (slightly larger) system that operates in exactly the same way. No sirree Jimbob. It’s certainly not the same. Not least because most Scientologists at least seem to be happy with their choice. And without medication too. The poor dumb brainwashed bastards.

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Best Book Reviews Ever?

And whilst on the closely-related subjects of Michael Gove and great literature, I strongly recommend reading the Amazon Reviews of that rampant liberal Richard Littlejohn's latest meister work Littlejohn's Britain...



Like Gove, Littlejohn is his own man and no slave to any hidden agendas. A Christ-like figure who believes that progress in world affairs is only possible through an exploration of our shared humanity and an unrelenting focus on those qualities that bind us all together as we live our lives on this fragile, beautiful planet - rather than dwelling on those things which divide us.

And he's definitely not a cunt

The reviewers of his book clearly share my high opinion of Littlejohn and his message of peace and universal understanding...

"Wittgenstein opined that "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should remain silent". But John Little is a greater philosopher still - he cannot remain silent nor should he. This is a towering work of political philosophy"

"It's rare that I read a book that moves me to break down in public. Even rarer that I find myself tearing at my hair and clothes and self-flagellating on the bus to work. This book - which could easily be described as a masterpiece of subtle, dignified rhetoric - had me doing all of these things."

"My life is changed as a result, and, despite working in a library, I will be destroying all other books on sight, as none will ever match the greatness of this work. A classic."

and my personal favourite...

"If they ever managed to contain the feeling of having your entire body pleasured by a thousand naked lesbian virgins in writing, it would come in the form of a book like this."

-

Sarcasm aside, the irritating thing about Littlejohn is that he does address issues than need to be aired; the impact of large-scale migration into the UK, abuse of environmentalism, the steady onward creep of mass surveillance, but he does it in a deliberately divisive way and quite conspicuously points his finger in the wrong direction. He is a rabble-rouser. The epitome of a gate keeper and well-paid for his efforts.

There are similar creatures, performing exactly the same role, on the 'Left' of politics. Sometimes, like Michael Gove's chum Melanie Phillips, they will shift their position from Hard Left to Hard Right without so much as blushing. Their views are flexible, only the appetite to distract and to sow division and hate remains constant. And people swallow and regurgitate that hate, day in day out.

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Different political party ...same old shit

© alz's twat page

Tory Leader and (presumably) one day future Prime Minister, David Cameron has just spent a few days living with an Islamic family in Birmingham and has written an account of his adventure on his webcameron blog.

The part that caught my eye was this bit and it’s far from subtle use of the ‘D Word’

But there’s another side to this. Even accepting the point about language and the need for the media to think and act responsibly, do these conversations show that there is a problem amongst the Muslim community of accepting what has happened with 7/7 and other plots? Put simply is there an issue of denial?

In some parts of the community, yes. In the mosque and elsewhere I got the familiar depressing questions about who was really responsible for 9/11 and even 7/7. Dig a bit deeper and it all comes out. “CIA plot…Jews told to leave the twin towers” - even when it comes to 7/7 “how do we know the suicide bomber videos are real and not fakes?” Even if this is a view held by 5 or 10 per cent of British muslims - and I suspect it is at least that – this is a real problem which we have all got to get to grips with.

I’m not a Muslim and I have no particular affinity with Muslims any more than any other ethnic or religious group in this country. I am, however, conscious that I could be part of the next group that is demonized once the Muslims have been 'dealt with'. I am also one of those deniers that Cameron is referring to. So I am not particularly impressed with the suggestion that ‘denial’ of the official accounts of 7/7 or 9/11 is a faith or ethnicity related issue.

And it's worth pointing out that the 'deniers', Muslim and non-Muslim alike, are not pretending that terrorism isn't taking place and they are certainly not supporting it. They are not even denying that there are some very shady characters encouraging terrorism. They are exercising their right to question the state-endorsed conspiracy theories. And the evidence supporting the 'official' conspiracy theories is nowhere near as compelling as Cameron implies.

I have issues with the official account of 7/7 more because of what we haven’t been told, as opposed to what we have been told. The primary cause for concern is an absence of information and anyone daft enough to stitch a conspiracy theory together based on gaps in knowledge is playing a fool’s game. However, mistrusting official accounts, particularly when there is a track record of evasiveness and deceit, is not the same thing.

Given that the security forces have repeatedly claimed that the alleged 7/7 bombers acted independently, a genuinely independent public inquiry could be held without compromising their intelligence efforts. A properly executed inquiry that brought more evidence into the public domain would be the best way to ‘get to grips’ with the denial issue.

9/11 is a different kettle of fish to 7/7 as there is plenty of evidence, as opposed to gaps in evidence, that we have not be told the straight story of what happened that day.

Cameron pulls a particularly wanky stunt with the line

‘Dig a bit deeper and it all comes out. “CIA plot…Jews told to leave the twin towers’

This is exactly the same trick played by the BBC’s recent attempt to debunk 9/11 conspiracy theories

Many Americans of Jewish extraction died on 9/11 and I have yet to encounter anyone, Muslim or non-Muslim, who denies this. However, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported shortly after 9/11 that Israeli employees of a company called Odigo were warned away from the Twin Towers. It's still on-line and can be found here

The fact that five Israelis, at least some of whom had intelligence connections, were arrested whilst filming the WTC attack may also be relevant. They appear to have been expecting it

None of this is the same thing as proving that Israeli intelligence was behind 9/11. Just that it may have known about it in advance. There are some reports that the Israelis may have actually issued warnings to the US government.

Whatever the truth about Israeli prior knowledge of 9/11, the fact is that there are reports that some people were warned. This is not a conspiracy theory or an act of denial. The people saying it are just better informed, or more honest, than Cameron. Muddying the pond by chucking in implications of anti-semitism is plain dishonest.

Mind you, it’s no surprise that Cameron is talking out of his arse in support of the establishment of which he is such a solid part. Not when he takes advice from people like the truly scary warmonger and Blair-worshipper Michael Gove – a self-proclaimed and published expert on Islamic terror who ‘has in fact never lived or travelled in any Islamic country, knows little about Islamic history or theology, and shows no sign of having met or talked to any Muslims’

Michael Gove's tour de force 'Celsius 7/7' - a frightening expose on how and why Western society is now COMPLETELY UNDER MUSLIM CONTROL!!! Any stylistic similarities with past publications such as Der Sturmer are entirely coincidental

Anyone who retains any residual faith in the state of democracy in this country might like ponder on just how little choice we as a nation are going to be presented with come the next general election

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Support your local Sheriff pt2

The ballsed up police raid at St Agnes Place a few weeks ago reminded me of a couple of conversations I’ve had with folks on the subject of our police and how they’ve been managed, particularly over the last ten years.

Put bluntly, who benefits from our police being made to look like clowns, sometimes dangerous ones?

I don’t and I doubt that many ordinary people do either.

We all need police we can trust and rely on. We want to believe that our police forces are accountable, apolitical and competent.

And incidents like the recent shooting of PC Gray in Shrewsbury are a reminder that ordinary police officers do risk their lives on our behalf every day

But every time there’s a high-profile and well-publicized fuck up like the Forest Gate raid or the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting the profile of the police gets just that little bit worse.

A really good police fuck up has all sorts of consequences...

• people lose trust
• the police themselves feel more alienated from the people they are supposedly employed to protect
• the fuck up itself can be used to press for more spending or tougher laws, regardless of whether the absence of either had any real bearing on the fuck up at all
• and arguably worst of all, the perceived void in the capabilities of the police may be filled-in with alternative, less accountable, security organisations, some of which are privately owned

As well as periodic, well-publicized fuck ups, the process of widening the gap between police and citizen can also helped along on a daily basis by appointing spare parts like this bloke…

The UK's top chopper

and this bloke…

"Look at this plastic tub very carefully..."

… to senior positions in the police force and putting them on TV and elsewhere to spout crap at every possible opportunity

It’s also not a bad idea to blur the line in public perceptions between the police and the military. So tooling up your police as if they’re on active service in Bosnia and never deploying them in less than platoon-sized strength whenever possible is also a clever move.

Now whether this is a deliberately executed policy or not, this is exactly what is happening to our police; as has happened to most of our other public services and utilities beforehand. You run them like shit and then, directly or indirectly, you use that as an excuse to turn them over to private ownership and control.

The result being that, without realising it, monopolistic powers that we previously only gave to organisations that we could vote out are effectively transferred to organisations that we cannot vote out or hold to account in any meaningful way.

And that is perfect fascism.

(It also happens to be perfect Stalinism which is why some of the more inarticulate, slightly confused red necks who infest the Internet can sometimes be found accusing the most unlikely of organisations and individuals of being ‘Communist’ – banks, NGOs, Republicans, multinationals... I know what you mean guys but you might want to brush-up your terminology a little)

Claiming that there are vested interests out there keen to make our police look like clowns, with a view to ultimately morphing them into something nasty may seem like a bit of a stretch at first. However, it’s worth bearing in mind that we still don’t really know who shot Jean Charles de Menezes. The police took the blame but the operation was riddled with paramilitary and military personnel. And even though the fuck up at Forest Gate was driven by MI5-sourced intelligence, the police were held responsible for that one as well.

Our most accountable and visible of security forces do seem to end up carrying the can for other, murkier outfits.

I’m sure ordinary police are thrilled to bits about that.

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Support your local Sheriff pt1

And whilst on the subject of gun-toting security forces and criminality in my beloved Borough of Lambeth…

A few weeks ago I posted about a police raid on the Rasta Temple in St Agnes Place, round the corner from here.

Unusually, virtually everyone involved; including the police, local residents and even the Rastafarians who used the temple, were pretty much in agreement about what was going on there. Some unpleasant characters had taken the building over and turned it into a 24/7 hypermarket-style Class A drugs den.

However, in spite of the fact that…

• the police were actually asked to raid the place by some of the occupants
• had watched the building for six months
• observed as many as 600 people a day visiting the building
• finally got round to raiding it with 200+ stun-grenade tossing officers

…it now turns out they found pretty much fuck all in the way of any evidence that could be used in a prosecution. The police found precisely one crack pipe, some dope and half a dozen rounds of ammunition. You could find more in your average Lambeth toddler’s toy box.




This bungled drugs raid is what is known technically by academic criminologists as a complete and total fuck up and the media coverage given to the magistrates hearing last week was, mercifully for the police, several orders of magnitude lower than that given to the original raid...

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The most romantic borough in London?

The very romantic, boobie-shaped, Kennington Tube station

I find myself, in spite of the fact that I was born here, always knocking Lambeth and saying what a crap hole it is.

And that makes me sad.

Particularly because, in spite of my best efforts, I'm still living here.

So hats of to Kennington Underground station in Lambeth for being the second most romantic tube station in the London Underground network. A four year survey found that Kennington station has the second highest odds for people becoming lovestruck with fellow passengers. Which is enough to leave even the most hardened Lambeth cynic feeling all warm 'n' fuzzy inside (and a pleasant contrast to Stockwell station, also in Lambeth, where you run the highest odds of being shot in the face nine times by anonymous paramilitaries).

and in completely unrelated news, Lambeth has also recently been found to be the worst 'sex attack hotspot' in the Capital over the last five years...




So, one way or another, if you're looking for a spot of rumpy pumpy this is definitely the place to be

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The Bad, The Bad and the Ugly

Tuco's thoughts on today's bittersweet news...

"One bastard goes out. Another bastard comes in..."

Thank you Tuco

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Stranger than Fiction?

Today, of course, marks the launch of the new Ministry of Justice (minijust)

Huzzaah!

I appreciate that it could just be me but life in this country really is looking more and more like a really shite Orwell adaptation every day.

Maybe it is. I'm sure I saw an episode of the Twilight Zone that went like that once or maybe I'm getting mixed up with that chunk of Will Ferrell schmaltz I saw a few weeks ago. Maybe I'm not really writing this post at all

Confused now...

Spot the odd Blair out - Tony, Ian or Eric. Text A, B or C to the usual number. Outrageous call charges apply. Please ask an adult or a member of the state security apparatus before entering

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A spot of housekeeping for MI5?

Another day, another spate of terrorist arrests

including the widow of the alleged leader of the 7/7 bombings

And as The Antagonist notes there are strong, though admittedly circumstantial grounds, to question why…

• Has it taken the police so long to decide to collar Mrs Khan aka Hassina Patel?
  
  
• Why the security services (claim to have) stopped monitoring the Khans even though they were associated with the ‘Operation Crevice’ terror plot?
  
  
• Why the allegedly psychotic, rabidly Islamofascist Khans kept getting invites to garden parties at Buck House and tours of the Houses of Parliament, even after being linked with the Crevice crew?
  
  
• And last, but not least, why the security services lied about having no knowledge of Khan prior to 7/7, as well as claiming that the alleged 7/7 bombers operated as a self-contained unit with no additional support or accomplices?

From what little hard information that has made its way into the public domain it seems pretty certain that MI5 knew a lot more about the alleged 7/7 bombers than it claims to have. There is also a distinct possibility that our intelligence services have played a more ‘hands on’ role in at least some of the alleged plots than many of us would consider healthy, moral or sane.

And the argument that our security services have to keep schtum about everything they do to avoid compromising national security just doesn’t wash.

We supposedly live in a democracy and informed consent is an absolute prerequisite for democracies to work. We are not children and our government and security services are not our fucking parents. They, supposedly, serve us. And if we run higher levels of person risk in order to sustain informed consent, well, that’s price of fucking freedom.

And I want to be informed!!!

It's not an option or some airy fairy idealised concept. It's an obligation

We have been demonstrably lied to about the intelligence operations that were taking place before and after 7/7 and this needs to be dealt with.

Unfortunately, those people calling for an inquiry given most coverage in the national press seem to be starting from the assumption that our security services are fundamentally straight. They don’t seem to have any conceptual problem with an inquiry that does the same.

It could be because I don’t come from a class that has a vested, inborn stake in maintaining the underlying status quo of the way this country is run. It could be that I know enough history, in spite of the state education system and media, not to be so fucking dumb. Or it could be because I’m essentially a mistrustful bastard. Whatever the reason, I believe, I know, that there’s no way on God’s earth that any state-sanctioned inquiry into 7/7 is going to do anything to untangle the mess of spin, disinfo, misinfo and plain bullshit associated with 7/7.

But what it would do is provide more evidence of the kind of crap we are fed, day in, day out, for those with an open-enough mind to see.

So let’s have one. Even if it turns out to total bollocks

Assuming that is, the establishment can find someone with the brass nuts to head it up. Judging by the ongoing farce that should be the inquest into Princess Diana’s death? / autocide? (ten years and counting) it looks like they’re in short supply at the moment...



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Oyster-matics

By now, virtually everyone who travels regularly on public transport in London carries an ‘Oyster Card’. You can still pay for your fares with cash, but at a premium of 50% or more.

Some of us, though I suspect only a small minority, have an issue with being herded into using a system that records and archives a detailed log of our individual movements.

Personally, I’d be a lot less bothered about the implications of using an Oyster Card if I believed that the organisations collating and using the data were trustworthy and accountable or subject to the same level of supervision that individuals increasingly are.

But you’d have to be out of your gourd or plain stupid to even start to believe that.

There is also the small matter of the fact that the Oyster Card system now charges steals a flat £4 from you if it gets confused about any aspect of your journey. It is then your responsibility to try and get your money back

Last Friday I was using one of my Oyster Cards and, due to an electronic barrier jamming/ fucking up, I got hit for £4. There then followed a series of exchanges with the staff in a couple of ticket offices and, eventually, a phone call to Oyster Central

High points of the experience included…

Getting a statement of my account from my local ticket office

More or less since the invention of numbers, statements have shared certain features in common

• They have a starting and a closing balance
• They include all transactions between the starting and closing balance
• They give some clue as to whether each transaction is a ‘plus’ or a ‘negative’

The idea being you can see if everything adds up.

The new Oyster Card system bravely does away with all that old fashioned nonsense and just presents you with an edited selection of transactions and no means of tieing them into what money you started with or finished with



The poor gimp in the ticket office had no means of checking how much credit I had started the day with and therefore no way of checking that my balance at the end of the day was correct. He advised me to call the Oyster Help Line

The Oyster Help Line

A fairly involved call, the outcome of which turned on how much money I had on my card at the start of the day.

I had taken a photograph of a ticket machine statement which had clearly said that I had £13.30 in the kitty...




The lady on the phone told me that the ticket machine was wrong and that I only started the day with £9.30 and also that a £4 charge listed in the statement had not actually been charged…

‘Um, could you run that by me one more time’

‘Due to timing issues, the balance you see displayed on the ticket machine is not always entirely accurate’

‘And that’s not unusual?

‘No’

‘So, just one more time. When this multi-million pound system tells me that I'm starting the day with a particular balance on my card it really might be a completely different figure?’

‘Yes’

‘Well, there’s not much else to talk about is there?’

‘On that question, no. Do you have anything else you’d like to know?’

‘No … thank you’


So hats off to whoever commissioned and signed-off on the Oyster Card system and the year’s supply of blowjobs and lifetime golf club memberships they presumably received in exchange for their outstanding work. Not only have they delivered a system that includes supply of personal information to unaccountable bastards at its very core it also can’t count either

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What you're saying Mr Dimbleby is wh'affle...

Postman Patel is waxing lyrical about what I can only put down to a failure in the call-screening process on the weekly BBC phone in show 'Any Answers' yesterday.

Poor old Jonathan Dimbleby was forced to bluster his way through a call where a well-informed member of the general public raised past examples of MI5 involvement in terrorism in the context of demands for an inquiry into the 7/7 bombings.

Sadly, Lord Patel's vast and hugely-qualified technical staff were unable to find a way to record the exchange for posterity and a plea was made for assistance in this matter.

Unencumbered by huge technical qualifications and encumbered by moderate quantities of alcohol, my solution was to hold a recording mp3 player up to my computer whilst playing the clip off the BBC website. Fired by this success, I then pasted the resulting mp3 into MS Photostory along with a dozen pictures of the aftermath of the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings, skillfully left all settings at their default values and slapped the result up onto Youtube.

Well, given that MI5 is doing such a stand-up job of keeping this a free country it would be almost disrespectful not to take advantage of that freedom. Wouldn't it?

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edit: The Any Answers clip is worth listening to as much for how Jonathan Dimbleby deals with the call as for the content of the call itself

Fans of the excellent Thank You for Smoking, and most people who have seen it are, will remember that one of the key lines of the film is...

"That's the beauty of argument. Because if you argue correctly, you're never wrong"

No matter how one-sided an issue; for example, cigarettes are physically bad for you, as long as you can come up with a counter-argument, or pretend that there is a counter argument you can always keep a significant proportion of the general public baffled with bullshit.




Cue Jonathan Dimbleby, challenged by someone who's clearly read the Ballast Report and other documents that pin-down past state involvement in terrorism as well as is ever going to happen...

" ... all these assertions and allegations you are making ... we haven't got time to go into them ... are all fiercely disputed"

"... the context in which you place them is open to question and the particular way you place them is highly disputed as I am sure you will know is ..."

the mealy-mouthed fucker

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Take it. It's fine...

Many thanks to Antagonist for switching me onto a couple of video clips up on Gootube...

The first is a clip of mentalist Derren Brown passing off blank sheets of paper as money in NYC and getting away with it, at least some of the time

"Take it. It's fine"

If the techniques being used by Brown aren't immediately clear a quick perusal of the comments will give some idea of what he's up to. It's well worth understanding

It would be easy enough to dismiss what Brown does as merely an entertainment - a televised parlour game or curiousity. However, I'd argue that he is communicating something important about how easy it is to influence people and the nature of consent.

Or maybe he's just fucking with my head.

-

The second video clip may or may not document an example of the kind of thing Brown may or may not be warning us about.

Personally, I don't have a lot of time for the 'no plane' theories that crop up when discussing what really may have happened on 9/11. They are a distraction from much more compelling and less contentious issues that are easier to communicate to someone with an open mind - the 'stand-down' of the US air force, Bush's behaviour on the day, the shenanigans around WTC7, the subsequent silence concerning the short trades, the five guys videoing the attack from across the river, and so on and so on - the list is long.

However, an amusing DIY video has appeared on Youtube that lays two live video feeds from the day, side by side, at the time of the second WTC strike. One appears to show a plane hitting the building, one doesn't...



Quite odd but I've not doubt that sooner or later someone will come up with a plausible-sounding rebuttal that people will accept or reject depending on their preconceptions. That's how the 9/11 story has played out so far

What's more interesting to me is another part of the clip where the makers overlay the live commentary from different TV stations to demonstrate just how similar and synchronized the different commentaries appear to be.

Again, someone will come come up with a rebuttal; based on similar kinds of people reacting to the same event in similar kinds of ways. However, there is something about the coincidence of the commentaries and their content that got the hairs on the back of my neck sticking up, particularly the apparently superfluous line...

'This is something you have seen on live television - just unfolding'

Sure, it could be just the babblings of a news commentator trying to keep talking but there's a little part of me that saying that this is just the sort of thing Derren Brown would say...

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Giving succour to terrorists...

It's getting near to that time in history again boys and girls...

In case anyone missed the jaw-dropping interview between Jeremy Paxman and retired General Michael Rose about the ‘war’ in Iraq last night, here’s a link to the BBC page featuring the choicest quotes…

"As Lord Chatham said, when he was speaking on the British presence in North America, he said 'if I was an American, as I am an Englishman, as long as one Englishman remained on American native soil, I would never, never, never lay down my arms … The Iraqi insurgents feel exactly the same way."

“It is the soldiers who have been telling me from the frontline that the war they have been fighting is a hopeless war, that they cannot possibly win it and the sooner we start talking politics and not military solutions, the sooner they will come home and their lives will be preserved."

"The catastrophes that were predicted after Vietnam never happened. The same thing will occur after we leave Iraq."


Given the fact that Paxman’s show has been unashamedly parroting government horsecrap about fighting Al Qaeda ‘over there instead of over here’, the steady progress that is being made in Iraq and the dangers of falling geopolitical dominoes for the last three years, the look of shocked surprise on Paxman’s face was more than understandable.

My ears could have been tricking me but at one point I could swear Rose said that the insurgents were 'right' to resist the occupation.

And throughout the all too brief interview all I could keep thinking was that if General Rose was a) brown, and b) not a former senior military commander, he would have been running a moderate risk of being locked-up for 30 days without charge whilst the police rummaged through his household cupboards in search of flashlights, flour, bleach, fruit, Manchester United posters, re-usable sandwich boxes, toothbrushes and any other 'must have' terrorist accessories.

But he’s not. So he wasn’t

"If I had a choice of going up against jihadists armed with AK-47s, RPGs and Semtex or jihadists packing a few of these babies I'd take the AKs every time..."

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The Cat crept into the Crevice, crapped and crept out again

A few of the things about the Crevice trial and its treatment in the media that are bugging me...

• The scanty coverage given to the defence case
• Virtually no mention of the fact that the jury set a new record for the time it took to reach a verdict and that, eventually, the judge decided that he would accept a majority verdict
• Little reporting and absolutely no investigation into the possible validity of claims made by the defendants that testimonies were extracted under torture and that the ISI was involved in the 'plot' somehow and exerting pressure via defendants' families
  
• The sheer all-pervading dodginess of the prosecution's 'star' witness
  

Basically, there's been a total absence of rigour in the treatment of the Crevice trial. At least two or three members of the jury may have anguished about passing a guilty verdict but our media has displayed no such doubts

Which, in a sane world, would be surprising given the frankly awful record of recent terror trials...

• The Ricin Plot that never was and a prosecution case so lunatic that several jury members subsequently went on television to express their disgust and concern
• The conviction of Dhiren Barot - now serving a minimum of 40 years, basically for being a nutter
• A personal favourite - that Iraqi cab driver accused of driving around London whilst listening to 'hypnotic music' and planning terrorist jihad
• Insert your own personal favourite here - there are plenty to choose from

Does this mean that I am alluding to some vast establishment conspiracy? A conspiracy designed to perpetuate the War on Terror myth through a series of high profile trials of idiots, nutters and patsies.

Maybe, but it would not have to be as vast as some people who mock 'conspiracy theories' would like to pretend.

It would only take a few people to get the ball rolling. After that, the kind of unimaginative jobsworths and gauleiters who have always found employment and favour in the machinery of state will diligently identify terrorists, whether real or imagined, till the cows come. Aside from that all you need is a morally weak and plain ignorant general public and you're away. After a while, the myth will take on a life of its own and you'll even find there are some lunatic bastards out there claiming that they really are part of some huge, shadowy, non-existent network

Alternatively, you can reject the notion that the World really does works like that sometimes. You could also prefer to believe, along with the Al-Qaeda myth, that Europe really was overrun by witches in the 17th century and that organised Satanic Ritual Abuse continues to take place, nationwide under our very noses.

Waterboarding - 17th Century style. We've come a long way since then ... and golly gee whizz now we're going back again

Personally speaking, there's something moderately ironic about how not buying into the Al-Qaeda conspiracy theory can be scornfully discounted as being itself a conspiracy theory. Like treason, what is or isn't an acceptable conspiracy theory very often seems to be a matter of dates.

And the fact is that, as with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the British security services are intimately involved with many of the supposed Jihadist terrorists. So much so that it is absolutely impossible for anyone, including I suspect members of the security services, to tell the terrorists, agent provocateurs and dupes apart.

Of course, that's not how the story has been spun this week.

After the Crevice trial had ended it was claimed that MI5 had identified two of the 7/7 bombers associating with the alleged Crevice terrorists but decided that their role was insignificant. Later on, after the 7/7 bombings, MI5 claimed that it had no prior involvement with any of the alleged 7/7 bombers.

Which in technical terms is what is known as a lie.

And the reason being given for MI5 not keeping an eye on the two soon-to-be-alleged 7/7 bombers was because it was short of resources.

Maybe

But the reason could also be because MI5 is crap at what it does

Alternatively, maybe MI5 had other, altogether spookier, reasons for letting the two suspects go about their business unmolested and, supposedly, unobserved

Who knows? One thing I do know is that if I were to catch someone out in a lie in my personal life I wouldn't be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt in anything else they were claiming. However, different rules apparently apply when it comes to the media's treatment of MI5's output.

And it's unlikely that any independent public inquiry into the events leading up to 7/7 will shed any meaningful light on the subject. Independent public inquiries in the UK are now subject to some spiffy new legislation that ensures that they will be neither independent nor public. On top of that, those members of the public calling for an inquiry who are given the most coverage in the media don't seem to have a problem with that.

It's looking like there will be some kind of inquiry eventually and my awesome psychic powers tell me that the line 'tragic failure of intelligence' will be used at some point and that the key conclusion will be that resources allocated to state security need to be increased significantly.

It's easy to forget in the wake of the massive coverage of the Crevice verdict that this has been just one story amongst a spate of terrorism-related arrests, speeches and news stories that have taken place over the last few weeks. The timing of all these could, of course, just be coincidental, though personally I doubt it. The timings of arrests, speeches or leaking stories to newspapers are the result of conscious decisions not chance.

It is possible therefore that the stage is being set for some kind of major event. I sincerely hope my concerns are unfounded. Having said that it's not just me who is fearful for the future. The undisputed king of jobsworth gauleiters, the head of UK police counter-terrorism said as much just over a week ago...

"Nevertheless, we suffered the appalling attacks of July 2005, and the only sensible assumption is that we shall be attacked again."

"We have nothing to Fear but Fear itself ... and, of course, rag-heads armed with Tupperware"

Or to put it another way 'Give us a free hand and the resources to do what we want to or you will die. Come to think of it, you'll die anyway'




Now the thing is when our own senior policemen take to competing with the terrorists in boasting about the fearsome capabilities of those terrorists I start to have a real fucking problem telling the police and the terrorists apart

...and what are claimed to be warnings start to sound very much like a threats.

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Where on Earth do you start? pt2

Even though it’s already been reproduced in at least a couple of other blogs, I’m posting up the statement made by solicitor Imran Khan on behalf of the five men convicted in the Crevice trial. An mp3 of the statement can be found on the July 7th Truth site. Don’t hold your breath waiting for it to be reproduced in any of the state or corporate controlled media…


I'm giving this statement on behalf of those defendants convicted today, that is Omar Khyam, Anthony Garcia, Waheed Mahmood, Jawad Akbar, and Salahuddin Amin. These are their words that they wish me to read out:

In the name of Allah the merciful, the compassionate, we bear witness there is nothing worthy of worship except Allah, and Mohammed as his messenger.

This was a prosecution driven by the security services, able to hide behind a cloak of secrecy, and eager to obtain ever greater resources and power to encroach on individual rights.

There was no limit to the money, resources and underhand strategies that were used to secure convictions in this case.

This case was brought in an atmosphere of hostility against Muslims, at home, and abroad. One stoked by this government throughout the course of this case.

This prosecution involved extensive intrusion upon personal lives, not only ours, but our families and friends.

Coached witnesses were brought forward. Forced confessions were gained through illegal detention, and torture abroad. Threats and intimidation was used to hamper the truth. All with the trial judge seemingly intent to assist the prosecution almost every step of the way.

These were just some of the means used in the desperate effort to convict. Anyone looking impartially at the evidence would realise that there was no conspiracy to cause explosions in the UK, and that we did not pose any threat to the security of this country.

It is not an offence to be young, Muslim and angry at the global injustices against Muslims.

Allah says in the Qur'an, "Oh mankind, worship your Lord who created you, and those before you, that you may become righteous."

And that's the end of the statement. Thank you.


Right now, in spite all the media coverage that has been given to the Crevice trial, it’s still hard work trying to piece together what the defence’s case actually was. Any attempt at objective coverage of terrorism trials by the British media was dumped ages ago. The role of our newspapers and television is now simply to repeat only material used by the prosecution, no matter how irrelevant or nonsensical.

And every time a particularly juicy video is shown in court the BBC always seems to get hold of the tape just in time for that day’s early evening news broadcast.

Some geezer looking inside a bag of what he thinks is fertilizer. He claims to have been working under the direction of Pakistani intelligence at the time but let's not dwell on that...

But from the little that can be picked up about the defence case it has a familiar whiff about it – some angry and foolish young men shooting their mouths off, a colossal amount of irrelevant information and bullshit presented as ‘evidence’, a little overseas torture, a dodgy star witnesses and maybe, just maybe, the odd agent provocateur

-

For an example of a similar high-profile case, which doesn’t look like it will be as successful for the authorities as Crevice is turning out to be, you could do much worse that reading up on the Toronto Bomb Plot supposedly foiled last year. There are many parallels with the Crevice plot.

A small selection of the deadly haul of flashlights and barbecue grills uncovered in Toronto last year... (Also note that Canadian anti-terrorism units apparently shop for equipment at IKEA)

The most interesting aspect is the role played by Islamic convert Mubin Shaikh – the guy involved in buying the fertilizer that was allegedly going to be used by the plotters. The interesting part being that he was working undercover for the RCMP at the time - an area of activity for the RCMP that certainly wasn't covered in any episode of Due South that I've ever seen.

Next Week: Lovable mountie Benton Fraser fits up a bunch of grumpy, disaffected Pakis with the aid of some agent provocateurs and a great big IKEA bag full of cash

Apparently, the RCMP still owes Mubin $300,000 for services rendered.

Which sounds like a lot but presumably that's Canadian dollars so it only works out to something like £42.50 in real money

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Where on Earth do you start?

So, it’s been a couple of days now since the Crevice trial verdict and I still haven’t written a post on it. Which, given the past history of this blog, could be considered unusual.

The truth is that the media reaction and the spin being pumped out in the wake of the Crevice verdict is so voluminous and so all encompassing in its insanity I’m frankly left speechless.

Where on Earth do you start?

Postman Patel has had a couple of stabs at the task but he is just one of a handful of lonely voices pleading for some sanity. And we really are talking only a handful here.

My country has gone nuts

And I must confess the thought of joining the majority - just falling asleep one night and waking up as a Believer, free from all those nagging doubts and concerns - does have a certain appeal

This man believes everything he sees on Newsnight and reads in the newspapers. Why don't you?

...it's that, or migrating to an island somewhere

Answer B methinks

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Keyboard Macro redux

A word of follow-up on that picture of my keyboard I posted a couple of days ago with the explicit intention of grossing-out anyone stumbling onto this blog.

It seems to have achieved the desired objective and a couple of friends have expressed concerns about receiving emails from me written on that particular, potentially infectious, object

Yes, it really is that gross in person. Actually it’s grosser. No stage make-up or special effects were used

It is, however, my lucky keyboard and even though I occasionally change the equipment attached to it I have kept hold of it for years. And, besides, I’m sort of middle-aged now and I wouldn’t even start to know where to find all the letters if I got a new one...

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And whilst following-up previous posts, thanks to Tony for posting me a link to a flash animation that makes the best use of a squirrel, a penguin, Burt Reynolds and the Duelling Banjos music from Deliverance that I’ve seen this month.

A squirrel, a penguin, Burt Reynolds and some banjo music - this is what the Internet is for ... and grassroots social activism, obviously

I have a soft spot for Deliverance and have been lucky enough to visit the places where it was filmed, including Clayton, Georgia

Strangely enough the residents of Clayton don’t play up their town’s connection with an internationally-renowned film about inbred hillbilly mutant sodomists and I could find no reference to it anywhere. I was, however, pleased to see that one of Clayton’s half dozen stores did stock an extensive range of archery equipment...




And here’s my attempt at recreating Ned Beatty’s part in the film’s famous love scene by the banks of the Chattooga river…


though a strong case could be made that I didn’t need to share that. Ever

A case which hasn't weakened since I last found an excuse to post that photo

And whilst on the subject of the love scene from Deliverance my favourite quote about, not from, the film came from actor Herbert Coward when director John Boorman told him that one of the things his character was going to do was to rape a man...



Coward replied, "I've done worse"


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