Best Ebay auction description EVER?!!

.

This one definitely needs recording for posterity...

Absolutely flawless SG3000s dating back to 1979 & comes with original hard case that is also in great condition. This guitar comes from a very serious collector’s selection. It is totally 100% original and probably the finest example you will ever see outside of Yamahas museum. The colour is metallic black and the gold hardware is in lovely condition, just like the rest of this awesome guitar!

The owner is selling his entire guitar and amp collection over the next few months and donating all money to charity. He believes that money will be worthless within 12-18 months and has decided to spend his time informing as many people as possible about what he has learnt over the last couple of years regarding the lies we have all been fed. There is no reserve on this guitar, so if you are someone who thinks investing is still worthwhile in this dire financial world then please get bidding and know your money will be going to a good cause.

Feel free to visit the below to find out if he knows something you don’t??

www.thetruthwillout.com

www.projectcamelot.org

www.divinecosmos.com

Cheers for the link Paul

.

Chaos at Heathrow's new passenger terminal enters fifth day...

A new Messiah in waiting

A scary thought just came over me whilst commenting on another blog on the subject of global warming

Having a little background in Earth history, a healthy mistrust of oligarchical dynasties such as the Windsors, the Goldsmiths and the Rothschilds and therefore their envirofeudalist spawn, and having visited Greece last month just a few days after the Parthenon was covered in six inches of snow, I'm just a teensy wee bit sceptical about the Man Made Global Warming thing

my comment went something like this...

"the new fad in 2009 might actually be how we’re all going to stop the climate getting cooler

…tax rebates on 4×4 ownership, fines for cavity wall insulation and double glazing, energy saving lightbulb crushing parties, all sorts of fun stuff

it’s all also worth pointing out the ‘debate’ is all about ‘climate change’ these days NOT ‘global warming’. The arse-covering has already been put in place in the language that is being used"


I must confess to being quite amused by the thought that the entire climate change industry might be obliged to one day rapidly turn 180 degrees and start extolling the virtues of pumping as much crap into the atmosphere as possible


What wasn't so amusing was the follow-on thought as to the identity of the person most eminently qualified to lead such a movement to try and maintain the Earth at its most correct temperature for the last 650 million years; as designated by the David Rothschild and his chums (that would be, of course, today's temperature), through the energetic promotion of deliberate Man Made Global Warming

It could only be one person couldn't it?



strange times make for some seriously fucking strange alliances

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Finsbury Park is Happy and Gay

Lord Patel has mentioned that at first glance he thought the images published of this week’s delightfully OTT police raid on Blackstock Road were actually pictures of the check-in staff at Heathrow’s new Terminal 5 getting ready to go to work in the morning...

Your friendly Metropolitan Police force - why deal with a problem when it's only small scale when you can sit back for a few years and then go really over the top lulu mental bananas instead?

Personally, the sight of 600 police all crammed together in an unfeasibly small area and butched-up in gear clearly sourced from the small ads in the back of Soldier Civilian Contractor of Fortune or Leather Daddies’ monthly reminded me of something else

But I couldn’t put my finger on what straight away

"On second thoughts, if we're going to raid some hooky mobile phone shops in Finsbury Park, we'd better make that six hundred..."

First off, I thought maybe I was thinking of a scene from an old Busby Berkeley musical...




But no, not enough helmets, too many sequins

Then I thought maybe I was reminded of a scene from The Producers...



Too much thigh, too many women

But I was getting close

And then the penny dropped…

The Leiebstandarte Ian Blair

and remember, it's only subliminal if you don't notice

.

Terrorism Act 2000, Section 58, Subsections (1)-(4)

58. Collection of information.

(1) A person commits an offence if -

(a) he collects or makes a record of information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, or

(b) he possesses a document or record containing information of that kind.

(2) In this section “record” includes a photographic or electronic record.

(3) It is a defence for a person charged with an offence under this section to prove that he had a reasonable excuse for his action or possession.

(4) A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable -

(a) on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 10 years, to a fine or to both, or

(b) on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months, to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or to both.


Which basically means anyone can be locked up in this country for up to ten years for the crime of possessing anything from a phone book to a DVD or even a photograph of a public building without the State having to demonstrate any criminal intent whatsoever or even any connection to people with criminal intent

Good eh?

Have you seen that episode where Murdoch and B.A. turn an ambulance into a tank using only a Swiss Army knife? A snip at only 6 months in Belmarsh

Still, as long as They only use this kind of legislation to stick it to wogs there's no harm done is there?

.

Dummies pt2

A few weeks ago I was sorting through a pile of old books deciding what to keep and what to trash.

Now back when I was a wee nipper of a lad I had a perfectly normal teenaged boy’s interest in the mechanics of blowing shit up.

So fond was I of the mechanics of blowing shit up it was even one of the reasons why I did degrees in geology and geophysics; in the vague aspiration that one day they would enable me to use dynamite on a semi-regular and legal basis. I used to stay on after school with a group of like-minded boom connoisseurs and make all sorts of amusing substances and rocket-powered whatsits under the careful supervision of a friendly chemistry teacher who enjoyed nothing more than combining his twin loves of pyrotechnics and teenaged boys (but that’s another story) on his otherwise lonely Friday nights

Once a year, my and virtually every other school I knew in London, would organise a day trip to Boulogne or Calais which served absolutely no other purpose than to allow their pupils to buy and personally import satchels full of French bangers and shitty flick knives to throw at each other's faces for months afterwards...

Now that's what I'm talking about

Boy like things that go bang. We give them toy guns. We sell them violent games and movies. We take them to firework displays. When they grow up a little we recruit them into our fucking armies to make things, and people, go bang for Godssake

British teenagers honing their car bombing skills with the aid of some old Dinky toys and a box of French boomsticks - if only the hands in this video were Brown this could have easily formed the basis of a high profile terrorism trial, if only...

To cut a long story short, until a few weeks ago, I had a small pile of books, 30 year old books admittedly, sitting in my place, on the subject of making things go bang

Not any more

I slung them out

Actually, I shredded them and then slung them out

Because, the thing is, nowadays the mere possession of a provocative book, or a CD, can get you some serious time inside if the authorities decide to single you out

As with the lies that spun dummies into supporting the occupation of Iraq, there is now apparently no need to prove any malicious intent or even the capacity to manufacture or use the stuff mentioned in a book or CD. The mere ownership of media which are in themselves not necessarily illegal (or even practically usable) can be spun and used to put people away

And I’m not fucking stupid enough to think that this sort of treatment is going to be restricted solely to Brown people indefinitely

There is the small problem of me still remembering some of the stuff in those books, which I suppose means that my brain could be classified as illegal media until the day I die - but that's nothing a steady diet of aspartame-laced beverage products can't cure

And it’s not just books or CDs that can be used to bang people away. We’ve seen everything from tourist maps to camping equipment to food and kitchenware being used as ‘evidence’ to lock people up. It would seem that, in a country awash with illegal guns and drugs, that a well-funded multinational supercrime network such as Al Qaeda has decided to pass up on importing boring old AKs and Semtex and is planning to crush British civilisation with sacks of flour, copies of MS Flight Simulator and useless FBI produced terror manuals instead

-

All of which is a potentially self-incriminating, 500 word long preamble to posting this blog button featuring Khalid Khaliq I received in the post yesterday…



The background to which can be found on the J7T blog here

I don’t know the guy. I don’t know if he’s a saint or a sinner but what I do know is that locking people up for owning a CD is bullshit. So even though I only usually decorate this blog with sidebuttons which feature either ironic or fishy themes I’ll make an exception and haul this one up for a while

-

edit: two candidates for 'Quote of the Month' on the subject of Khalid Khaliq's imprisonment, as seen in the The Sun's readers forum of all places...

"I don't know enough about this individual man to really say anything about him in particular.

Generally, though, it is wrong to even jail someone for the possession of an Al-Qaeda manual. The only justification for jailing someone is if it can be proven that such an individual sought to use such a manual as a guide to commit a crime.

I mean think about it, I have a copy of Mein Kampf on my bookshelf. That doesn't make me a Nazi."

and, in a similar vein...

"I've got the Hobbit, but it doesn't mean I'm going to slay any dragons this week"

Yeah? Says who?

.

Dummies pt1

There’s a story I used to tell about how I was passing through the security check at Stansted airport two or three years ago when a little old (white) lady in front me was taken to one side to have the contents of her handbag checked.

The Sikh guy checking her bag took out two bottle of tomato sauce and set them on a table. The old lady started to look a little nervous and asked the guy if there was any problem with taking sauce onto the plane – and the guy replied…

‘You can’t take two bottles. Just one. That’s the regulations – only one bottle of sauce per passenger’

The lady looked even more worried and straightaway the security guy said…

‘Nah, I’m only kidding. Of course you can take them onto the plane’

…and he very carefully repacked her bag

The Condiment of TERROR!!

I was unfortunate enough to be traveling in Stansted and passing through its security (sic.) procedures again a few days ago. My Other 1/2 started giggling next to me in the line for no obvious reason, looked at me and said..

‘Remember that old lady? She couldn’t even take one bottle now’

She was, of course, correct

-

Actually, that was the second time that morning my Other 50% broke out into spontaneous laughter. The first time happened a little earlier on as we trundled around the outside of the airport looking for somewhere I could legally puff on a roll-up. Off She started giggling for no immediately obvious reason and then she looked at me and said...

‘Remember that Sharon Stone quote from Basic Instinct? “What are you going to do? Charge me for smoking?” Well they can now. Ha! Ha! Ha!’

-

A couple of days after traveling through Stansted I was chatting with a few people about the new security (sic.) measures that have been imposed on us. The people I was talking with agreed that they were a pain but a price that had to be paid for all our safety. I mentioned the results of US TSA tests which established that most of the dummy bombs carried by its inspectors were not picked up by airport security and got onto planes.

The point I was trying to make was that if there really are hundreds of suicidal plotters out there trying to get onto aircraft with bombs at least some of them would be getting through and blowing planes out of the sky regularly. The response I got from the people I was talking with was…

‘Well that doesn’t sound good. The security measures need to be increased so that they catch all of the dummy bombs’

The more I tried to explain how flawed that response was the angrier the people I was talking with started to get

I gave up

.

You cant picture this

Cheers to Ian for sending me a link to this video of someone being hassled in the West End for using a video camera to add to the expanding archive of people being hassled for using cameras in public places. I think it might be quite interesting but only made it through the first two minutes before getting so wound up I had to turn the damned thing off...

Current.tv on UK Photo Restrictions

.

Intermission

Stop the War … maybe next year, eh?

A few more pictures from last Saturday’s Stop the War march, nothing special…

Those interesting chaps from Neturei Karta modeling their latest Springtime leisureware collection

a somewhat dazed and confused Walter Wolfgang (Britain's oldest terror suspect?) wandering around in the mistaken belief that things will get soooo much better once his beloved Labour Party is in government

There’s a pretty accurate write-up of the feel of the event, complete with some typically distractive and grindingly tedious Left-wing infighting about George Galloway’s alleged homophobia in the comment section, over here

One of the biggest downers of the march was witnessing just how entwined Man Made Global Warming has become with Left Wing inactivism. The perverse belief that sidelining the very long list of genuine, proven crimes against the environment and subordinating them to one great big steaming pile of CO2 bullshit is somehow against multinational corporate interests appears to be depressingly widespread amongst political inactivists.

On the plus side, Lord Patel and some of his staff were attendance; dispensing stock market tips and signed photographs to the adoring masses. To be honest, that's the only reason why I bothered attending, even merely as a spectator

A few marches back, whilst listening to that hypocritical old fucker Tony Benn spouting away, I was struck by a powerful sense of déjà vu. I realised that I had stood in virtually the exact same spot in Trafalgar Square, listening to the same hypocritical old fucker spouting exactly the same old stuff, twenty-five years before

Only twenty-five years ago the people listening to that old fucker spout weren’t penned-in, monitored and manipulated to anything like the degree they are today

I’ve said this repeatedly to anyone who will listen to me but the only demonstration that came anywhere near to effecting change in government policy since 1997 has been the Fuel Protest of 2000; specifically because it featured an element of passive resistance

None of the Stop the War demonstrations, even the monster march before the invasion of Iraq, came anywhere near attempting anything like what was achieved by the fuel protestors

Coming down to London, noncing around with a placard for a few hours and then going home in time for tea and Pop Idol ain’t going to change anything. Viscount Tony and his pals know that but for some peculiar reason they keep on participating and supporting the same old ineffective rituals year after year

"You've all done very well. Now fuck off home and don't be a nuisance to anyone"

That’s not to say that the people who participate in those rituals are under any illusions. The handful of protesters I spoke with on Saturday acknowledged the impotence of what they were doing but participate anyway on the basis that it is at least something.

I’m not knocking their intentions but until things get a lot worse, people outside of the traditional, controlled Left-wing get involved and some pro-democracy (sic.) oligarch lays in a decent sound system and some nibbles so that people can stand their ground for a few days, these marches ain’t going to change dick

.

Socialism for the Rich

The results of someone at CNBC fucking up and giving a raving Financial Loon (the bow tie should have been a warning) some mainstream airtime...



High points of the clip include:

• use of the expression 'Socialism for the Rich'

• the squirming anchor people asking questions such as 'Does that mean people should be buying Monsanto shares?' and 'Won't shorting investment bank stock make the situation worse?' - not that any bankers have fucked up any perfectly viable businesses with a little predatory shorting themselves
  

• watching the clip and wondering why the 'KILL' button wasn't working

.

It's the bankers stupid #728

I found this little nugget of financial commentary via Lord Patel’s blog…



A spot on explanation of what's going on in the US and over in the UK imho

Putting it as simply as possible, for the umpteenth time, this how The Bankers screw us all...

• They print themselves loads of lovely, worthless paper money

• They use that money to buy genuinely useful stuff like public utilities, broadcast media, food production and natural resources, or lend to it people and governments forced to borrow as the result of prices going up because The Bankers are creating so much money

• They blow the whole fucking thing up

End result, They own everything useful at no cost whatsoever. Everyone else owes them a shit load of money that has suddenly become very scarce and gets stuck into enjoying a lifetime of neofeudalism

How can anyone predict that this is what will happen and that it will happen deliberately?

Because that's how and why it always fucking happens

As Thomas Jefferson put it 200 years ago...

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."

The only problem with this genius plan is that people might get just a teensy weensy bit pissed off when, finally, they realise that they’ve been screwed over royally

There are two tried and tested solutions to that eventuality...

Number One - Fool people into venting their frustrations on other groups of impotent saps

And Number Two… .



I'm sure you get the idea...

.

Bread and Circuses, mostly circuses...

Jan Smuts' statue, Parliament Square - the placard and the sentiment are not permanent features

Towards the end of the afternoon, after most of today's Stop the War marchers were heading home, I was hanging around with a chum in Parliament Square, chatting with a couple of protesters, when we were approached by an African guy holding a photo album.

He wanted to show us some pictures

And very unpleasant they were too. The album was filled with page after page of photographs of victims of atrocities carried out, so our new friend claimed, in the Congo. I've been shown a few albums like that in my time and I couldn't be 100% sure that the pictures really were taken in the Congo

But it doesn't really matter. There's no-one denying that millions have been killed there. The guy with the album claimed eight million, 'official' western estimates usually never equal or exceed the magic six million figure

Once we'd finished looking at his snapshots the guy looked up at us and said in earnest, broken English

'The west takes our resources and kills our people. Please, they can keep taking our resources but stop killing our people'

That's not asking for much is it? And fucking heartbreaking to hear someone say that to you

The guy wasn't after money from us or even a few poxy signatures on a petition. He just wanted people to know what's going on in his country

And as he walked away, one of the protesters we were chatting with said something like

'Eight million people and it barely gets a mention in the papers!'

No it doesn't.

Come to think of it, our papers don't even serve the self-interest of the majority of their own domestic populations, let alone ordinary people in Central Africa.

Did the news that a major US investment bank has just died on its arse; bringing the prospect of a complete meltdown of the economic system on which we all currently rely that little bit closer, make it to the top of the news bulletins yesterday? Did it fuck. All the television channels and newspapers were full of this cobblers...




So, thanks to the anonymous commentator who left a link to this image under my previous post...



it really hit the spot, today of all days

.

Stop the War Protest 15/3/8 - Placards of the Day...

Saying it like it is

British 9/11 Truth Tesco Value Range Placard

.

The Cult of the Suicide Copper

It is now widely known that Lemmings do not actually commit mass suicide

Unlike British policemen

I'm starting to lose count but I think that's four so far this week

WTF!?


maybe whatever dark, destructive ailment that's been affecting our military police over in Iraq is now spreading to their civilian counterparts over here

maybe it's all just a coincidence

but we Loons hate Coincidences Theories


-



and on a less perplexing and more amusing note, this story (rated as being one of BBC Dorset's top news stories on the page reporting the death of Inspector Neil Monro) has its amusing moments - as any story featuring cross-dressing kleptomaniac postmen would naturally do...

A Dorset postman was caught wearing stolen women's underwear after his bosses became suspicious that packages were going missing, a court heard...

the postie in question has not (so far) topped himself

.

Stay in the pink with ciggies and drink

Quite a few people seem to be getting hot under the collar about yesterday’s announcement of tax rises on alcohol and tobacco.

Naturally, as a Fully Paid-Up Conspiraloon, I firmly believe that this is all part of the plan – with people distracted by and talking about the prospect of 4p on a pint of beer whilst, meanwhile, the entire country is teetering on the brink of an economic precipice

'Attention Passengers! The Captain regrets to announce that he's just had to put up prices in the bar'

and, anyway, once people have thought the latest tax rises through they’ll start to realise that things aren't quite as bad as they first seem…

• even with the tax rises, beer and fags prices are still rising at a slower rate than the cost of transportation, heating and food

• given that government inflation figures are bent and hugely understated, the promise that tax rates on beer and fags will rise by only 2% above the official rate of inflation over the next four years is effectively a promise that the tax rise will actually be significantly less than the true rate of inflation

• illegal drugs continue to be exempt from direct taxation and are, especially hard drugs, becoming an ever-more affordable alternative/ supplement to alco-pops
  
  

so, looking on the bright side, whilst beer and fags are, admittedly, on the pricey side they still remain a relatively affordable alternative to eating, keeping warm or living a largely despair-free life; plus there’s always the option of getting off your face on some lovely, lovely cheap smack instead

yummy

edit: Handy, cut out and keep guide to cocaine and heroin UK street prices 1997-2007 as quoted in Hansard...


of course, if you were to adjust for inflation, the 2007 prices would be something like £20-25 in 1997 money - representing a real slap in the face for anyone who claims that NATO interventions in places like Kosovo and Afghanistan are fucked-up, pointless failures

and, for the really curious, here's a BBC published menu of fare...



a few things worth noting...

- whilst we in the South continue to pay more for our houses, top hats, cigars and fizzy, weak beer than our friends in the North, our drugs are often more keenly priced

- a tab of ecstasy costs about the same as a bottle of alcopop in a club but contains a lot less artificial colouring and sweetener and is therefore possibly less neurologically harmful as well as being cost-effective

- people who live in Birmingham don't need to take LSD

.

If you go into the woods today...

The idyllic British countryside – now under serious threat from having its rights of way clogged by fly-tipping of unwanted establishment corpses

It would seem that, sadly, but predictably, the conspiracy ghouls are out in force already concerning the tragic death of Chief Constable Michael Todd

Personally, I think that any continued speculation about the circumstances surrounding this tragic death will serve no other purpose than to inflict needless additional suffering on his friends and loved ones

Essential British Outdoor Kit #22: Gin

Why can't people simply accept that Todd took his own life/ died accidentally, surrounded by a mound of suicide notes/ not surrounded by a mound of suicide notes, by drinking half a bottle of straight gin (no tonic or lemon) and slitting his wrists/ not slitting his wrists/ taking some pills/ throwing himself off a mountain and was clearly in a disturbed state of mind/ not in a disturbed state of mind in the days leading up to this tragedy, as already so clearly established by the mainstream media?

Essential British Outdoor Kit #37: The patented, ‘cuts when blunt’, self-wiping David Kelly pruning knife

.

Loving 'It'

This discarded magazine caught my eye on the tube the other day…


There are a few titles with a similar look and feel knocking around these days, though I’ve never actually seen anyone reading them. They turn up in doctors’ waiting rooms, hairdressers and lying around on public transport

A few of us Conspiraloons have discussed this peculiar publishing genre in the past without coming up with any concrete answers about what they’re all about.

You could argue that they’re simply the modern day manifestation of the ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ of the 19th Century and before; crafted to meet a basic human desire for a little death porn and the simple, honest pleasure that can be had from reading about other peoples’ misfortunes – the more fucked up and bizarre the better

An early edition of 'Take a Break' magazine - featuring 'Real Life and Celebrity Stories' from the mid 15th century - and a piss easy crossword

But the big difference between these modern magazines and what went before is the way they’re presented – all bright and colourful, with a cover picture of a smiling attractive woman and titles like ‘Take a Break’, 'Pick Me Up' and ‘Love It!’

Love It!?…

‘I’ve wanted to kill myself over marriage split’

‘A can of cola put me in a coma’

‘Cheating hubby was branded a rapist’

Love It!??

WTF is 'It' when 'It's' at home?

'Love it!' ... for optimum effect, best read whilst under the influence of some additive-packed snack product or doctor-prescribed anti-depressant - that should fuck your up brain nicely

Week in week out reams of this stuff is published with a consistent mix of mutilation, death, betrayal and misery; presented in the same cheery format, very carefully aimed at a particular segment of the general public.

No, I don’t pretend to know what it’s all about but the combination of the pathologically morbid with the cheerful visuals reeks of having a deliberately disconcerting psychological impact – the kind of fucked up shit those cheeky chappies over at Tavistock famously pioneered. It's hard to believe that such an unmistakable and frequently-used format is being applied by chance.

Now that's what I call a 'Pick Me Up' - A sinister manifestation of psychological class warfare? or simply profitable bollocks? or both?

Who knows what’s going on? Maybe someone is deliberately fucking with working class women’s heads or maybe this stuff really does just sell well

Whatever, it creeps me out big time

and remember, it's only subliminal if you don't notice...

.

Nuclear Pirates

There's been a little discussion over at the Conspiraloon Alliance blog about the latest 'Dirty Bomb' bollocks that has been fed to and faithfully regurgitated by the mainstream media




Nuclear 'Dirty Bombs' are, of course...

a) less lethal than bombs made out of the equivalent weight of regular explosive...

"Because a terrorist dirty bomb is unlikely to cause many deaths, many do not consider this to be a weapon of mass destruction. Its purpose would presumably be to create psychological, not physical, harm through ignorance, mass panic, and terror. For this reason dirty bombs are sometimes called "weapons of mass disruption". Additionally, containment and decontamination of thousands of panic-stricken victims, as well as decontamination of the affected area might require considerable time and expense, rendering affected areas partly unusable and causing economic damage."

(especially if people have been scared shitless of the things by a steady preparatory diet of terrorist fear-mongering from government, terror 'consultants' and the media beforehand)

'Dirty Bombs' are also...

b) non existent

Not that non-existence is considered a reasonable defence by the Crown Prosecution Service when deciding whether a case should go to trial or not - as demonstrated by the Red Mercury 'Dirty Bomb' trial a year or so ago

Inspired by tales of (t)errorists trying to get their hands on useless Dirty Bombs and non-existent Red Mercury, I started compiling my own version of other substances that MI5/MI6 might believe to be on Al-Qaeda's Terror Shopping List...

- Kryptonite
- Dilithium Crystals
- Soylent Green
- Unobtainium
- Fubarite
- Flubber
- Oxy-Gum...

Oxy-Gum was the substance that enabled one of my childhood heroes, Marine Boy, to breathe underwater and use his propeller boots and sonic boomerang (also on Al Qaeda's probable wish list) to maintain peace and security in the Earth's oceans

and imagine my delight when, on searching through Youtube for Marine Boy clips, I discovered a classic episode of Marine Boy entitled 'The Nuclear Pirates' dated c.1967 which dealt with the very subject of piracy of radioactive materials on the high seas and the sophisticated anti-terrorism tactics employed by Marine Boy in thwarting bearded (naturally) nuclear pirates...




Synchronicity is a very wonderful thing

.

The New Normal

Once upon a time, round about 1940-41, when Britain was at war with a genuinely scary and capable regime that had occupied most of Western Europe and was bombing British cities on a nightly basis; virtually unopposed with an eventual death toll of something like 60,000 civilians, government posters like this were all the rage...




As discussed in this blog and elsewhere, things are a little different these days and our government and other interest groups with a stake in the War on Terror now fall over themselves to out-compete with the shadowy terrorists in trying to scare the crap out of people

This is the 'New Normal' that the likes of the 'Dame Pauline Neville-Jones Fan Club' of ex (sic.) spooks, cops and Lobbyists claim we now have to live with

Fuck 'em...

-

and on the subject of exponents of the 'New Normal', someone calling himself Peter Power has waded in to the ongoing shenanigans associated with Peter Power's Wikipedia entry....

Cmain (talk) 11:37, 27 February 2008 (UTC) : You may say that you are not answerable to J7, but so long as you serve, by your news media appearances, as a propagandist for an increasingly secretive and repressive state we consider you a legitimate subject for our scrutiny.

Peterpowervisor (talk) 21:45, 7 March 2008 (UTC): So I am a "propagandist for an increasingly secretive and repressive state". Gosh.--

Admirers of quality British Romantic-Comedies will instantly recognize that 'Peter' has attempted to employ the Hugh Grant Debating Manoeuvre which simply involves repeating what the other bloke says and sticking 'Gosh' on the end. Unfortunately, this does not really qualify as a counter-argument and is probably best not relied upon as a defence when actually accused of anything serious or, come to think about it, anything not so serious either...

Gosh.--

edit: Hugh Grant in Richard CurtisLand (his finest work imho)...




.

Coercion

I'm still working through links folk were thoughtful enough to leave me whilst I was away for a bit

And next up comes this prophetic morsel on Wikileaks (thx Tony) first posted last month, four weeks before the appallingly lame Jacqui Smith made a public announcement to essentially the same effect whilst thoughtfully dropping the C word...

National Identity Scheme Options Analysis Outcome (pristine)

A paragraph from the British Home Office document describing methods of coercion to get the national ID card scheme adopted.

I'm feeling safer already

.

Feeling Odd?

Legendary pie-aficionado and Flickr regular Thomas Hawk recently made a comment about a certain poster being used in the latest Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorism publicity campaign

I won’t reproduce the original poster here but the text reads…


Thousands of people take photos every day

What if one of them seems odd?

Terrorists use surveillance to help plan attacks, taking photos and making notes about security measures like the location of CCTV cameras

If you see someone doing that we need to know

Let experienced officers decide what action to take


Hmmm, given that I and most of my chums a) take pictures of stuff in public places and b) look a bit odd, it’s difficult not to take this latest heap of fear-mongering bollocks personally

It’s also worth remembering that here in the UK we have something like 25% of all the world’s CCTV cameras and that most of those cameras are privately controlled, by poorly-regulated c*nts. So it’s a bit rich, or rather a bit fascistic, when our publicly funded police force is essentially easing towards criminalising anyone who might take photographs of those wretched, corporately-operated, things

Anyway, Thomas’ post (itself picked up from another blog) was picked up by Boing Boing and people have started to post ‘remixes’ of the original poster







There is also a chirpy radio ad to accompany the poster campaign that can be accessed on the Met site here (transcript here)

When a time comes when it’s virtually impossible to distinguish between real anti-terror publicity and satirical anti-terror material that’s a time to start feeling really quite uncomfortable about where we are being led (if, perish the thought, you haven't already)




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Fans of dystopian sci-fi movies will, however, with all these Orwellian ‘public service’ announcements about generic terrorists and the accelerated blurring of state and corporate power and interests, be feeling right at home…

"Quaid, activate the reactor Quaid…"

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edit: and whilst on the subject of not being able to distinguish 'truth' from satire and dystopian sci-fi, cheers to anon for this little nugget...



Next Week on Fox News - Al Qaeda only 'months away' from completing a Death Star?...

edit#2:

Everyone's friend Henry the Hoover - unlike the Al Qaeda Dalek, a Weapon of Love not War

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A woman with a very deep cleavage discusses Michael Parenti

I'm still working through links people were kind enough to leave me whilst I was away last week (thx to all)

Some of those links are proving harder to grapple with than others...

Thanks to anon for leaving me a link to this video of prolific Youtube poster 'Guru Rasa Von Werder' discussing Michael Parenti (who I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago)



I'm only guessing here but I suspect that the reason for the link being posted lies more in the visual than the audio content, which is a tad free-form and rambles a little

Anyway, Guru Rasa's Youtube homepage is worth a quick peek and proof positive that those engaged in The Eternal Struggle may present themselves in a variety of forms, sometimes with their baps hanging out

An invite to become an honorary member of the Conspiraloon Alliance will be winging Rasa's way shortly

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The Love Boat

A fragment from a conversation I had with an American called Mike, a fellow passenger on the distinctly less orange than it used to be Easycruiseone, off the coast of Greece last week…

Mike: I’m glad to know that not all you Brits hate Americans

Stef: What makes you say that?

Mike: On the first night on board an English guy punched me in the face

Stef: Are you sure he did it because you were American?

Mike: I don't know. He’d been drinking heavily all evening, walked up to two of us in the bar and called me a (whispers) cunt…

Stef: That’s never a good sign

Mike: We don’t use that word much in America, particularly when talking to a guy, so first I assumed he was talking about the philosopher …Immanuel Kant…

Stef: (not sure if the Kant line was a joke or not) We use that word a lot more in the UK. Normally when describing guys we seriously don’t like – it’s kind of a fighting word

Mike: (delivering my chosen Line of the Week) So, when a very drunk English guy walks up to you out of nowhere and calls you a cunt you should get ready for a fight or flight?

Stef: (still not sure if his leg is being pulled) Er, yes

Mike: Well, I did neither and he punched me in the face (takes off glasses and displays a stonking black eye)


Mike then went on to explain that a couple of days later the owner of Easycruise, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, appeared in the bar and asked Mike how the cruise was going. To which Mike replied ‘Really great - aside from that drunken English guy yelling obscenities, punching me in the face and getting thrown off the boat on my first night - really, really great’

It’s nice to know that there are some things we Brits still do well




As last week marked Easycruiseone’s first cruise of the year, Stelios actually popped on and off the boat and mooched around the bar and dining areas a couple of times to see how things were going.




Sadly, I wasn’t around to witness the original punching or Stelios’ reaction to the story as we were avoiding the bar and dining areas of Easycruiseone like the plague. The reason being that whilst sleeping and traveling on EC1 is very, very cheap (£10 per person per day) – eating, drinking, or doing pretty much anything else on the boat ain’t.

Which, combined with a strict ‘No food and drink to be brought on board’ policy resulted in the more tight-arsed passengers (i.e. most of us) scaling new heights of inventiveness when it came to smuggling food and drink on board – fried cheese pies hidden in camera cases, shore-bought ouzo decanted into mineral water bottles and people with so many croissants stuffed underneath their coats they looked like suicide bombers.

By round about Day 5 the more cost-conscious passengers were getting seriously tired of this game and mutinied. I passed three or four chunkier-looking fellow voyagers in the lounge surrounded by half a dozen take-away pizza boxes chomping away merrily, in plain view of the staff, whilst exuding a certain je ne sais fuck you air about them.




Anyway, thumbs up for Easycruiseone, thumbs down for the onboard economics and cheers to Stelios for subsidising our week away in the fallacious expectation that we were going to spend over the odds for stuff on board (amount pre-authorised on our credit card = 50 Euro x2 x7 = 700 Euro vs. amount actually spent = 10.50 Euro on three cups of coffee)

Nice one




Other things I learned whilst in Greece last week...

• Any Greek man who pretends he was christened anything but George is probably lying
  
  
• The typical completion time for any Greek building project ranges from approximately 30 years to never
  
  
• Do not refer to cheap kebabs as 'dogburgers' in the presence of American tourists - they will sometimes take you literally
  
  
• Greek retail staff are suspiciously courteous and honest in their dealings with tourists; passing up on opportunities that their average Italian equivalents would consider to be open goals
  
  
• On the subject of Greece vs. Italy comparisons, the Greek equivalent of Operation Gladio was Operation Sheepskin - because self-determination is far to precious a thing to be left to a country's indigenous population...

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Breaking Stories from the Onion News Network

Cheers to anon for those

I'm posting links to these vids partly because I think they're funny but mostly to illustrate how people are jerked off with bullshit even by outfits which pretend to be hip, well-informed and a little bit subversive (the emphasis being on the little)

For example, the first video about Diebold machines leaking the presidential election results early subliminally communicates the following...

• Hillary Clinton is not in with the 'Shadowy Overlords'

• There actually is a difference between Republican and Democratic Presidential candidates which requires election results to be rigged in the first place
  

• The influence of the 'Shadowy Overlords' only stretches back as far as Eisenhower
  

The second video is also pretty funny but the hidden payload is a subliminal confirmation that all the hundreds (thousands) of people identified by the US government as terrorists who've been killed since 2001 really were all terrorists. Hmmm...

cf. The Daily Show's Jon Stewart - the King of Truthiness Comedy Gatekeeping

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