We have clearance, Clarence. Roger, Roger,

Someone has just, very politely, pulled me up for - or rather questioned why I have recently slapped up three posts about this bloke...

Hmmm, where do you start?

Putting it as briefly as possible for anyone bumping into this blog from outside of the UK who doesn't know what is going on...

1. Back in May 2007 a young girl called Madeline McCann was reported as being abducted whilst on holiday in Portugal with her parents

2. The subsequent behaviour of her parents, the compliant and uncritical mainstream media, politicians and other high profile public figures was, on a suspiciousness scale of 1 to 10, a solid 11.

At least some of the people supporting the McCanns in heated on-line discussions about the case behaved suspiciously like paid shills and the balance of public opinion as reported in the media - on and off line - did not seem to match with what many people were saying to each other face to face. In short, there was a distinct possibility that someone was astro-turfing for the McCanns

3. Many people, myself included, were particularly intrigued by the fact that the guy running the government 'Media Monitoring Unit', Clarence Mitchell, was seconded to assist the McCanns at an early stage. Given that Clarence's area of expertise is media management and not the intricacies of an abduction investigation or Portugese jurisprudence, this seemed peculiar indeed. He subsequently quit his post (sic.) and is now working for the McCanns full-time (?!)

"It was extraordinary how, last week, his intervention seemed to eliminate within hours any misgiving about the McCanns in the British media."

4. A few days ago, Clarence held a press conference where he produced a sketch and a description of someone he claims may have been involved with Madeleine's abduction. Given that this press conference did not include the police officers carrying out the investigation and that the sketch itself is so cliched and so generically 'evil', quite a few of us in cyberworld coughed out 'bullshit!' ... unlike the mainstream press which continues to play ball


I don't pretend for a second to understand what really is going on. Trying to figure that out and whether the McCanns were involved in the disappearance or not has become something of a national passtime here in the UK.

What I am certain of is that a whole legion of shady fuckers has been involved in the 'management' of this story over the months and that objectives other than finding a lost little girl have been actively pursued; with some interesting demonstrations of mass psychological manipulation along the way

or, as another blogger wrote recently...

"I have occasionally been asked if I think the whole Madeleine McCann thing has been an elborately staged hoax. Let's put it this way - if Pope Benedict XVI was to produce Madeleine from a frozen Plexiglas case suspended 30 feet above Times Square on Christmas morning with a pair of shackles in one hand and a handful of sand in the other, I wouldn't be at all surprised."


For my American chums - imagine the JonBenet Ramsay media circus, but with the added possibility that the US government was involved in interfering with the outcome of the investigation somehow

-

and in answer to a couple of comments about my recent output spike - most of the pictures of McCann suspect look-alikes I have posted here, subsequent to that farcical press conference, either arrived via my inbox or were shamelessly ripped off from another place, so I haven't spent much time on this at all

and here's another....

and, on top of that, it's amazing how much time you can free up if you don't watch fucking television

For some people Life is almost too mysterious, too precious and too short to bear - for everyone else there's this shite...

...and when it's pissing down outside :(

.