Thanks

All being well, I'm off out of the country for a couple of months as of the end of next week. And, if those couple of months go well, for a much longer period after that

Much is up in the air, much is uncertain, but that's the plan

Which means that this blog will be parked in suspended animation, for at least a while, in a few days. Not dead as such, just sleeping

Which is going to be a shame

I've genuinely enjoyed the input of the interesting collection of people who've taken the time to post comments and links here

We are most definitely not the only ones who can see and, no, you don't have to be a completely irrational nutcase to disbelieve Mainstream Narratives

And apologies to people who've written to me or posted links which I haven't followed up as promptly as they thought I might. Anything someone takes the time to show me gets looked at but there are only so many hours in the day to respond and react

Thanks to all,

Stef

.

Just So Stories

Armand Marie Leroi - currently locked in a fierce competitive struggle with Richard Dawkins

I've just finished watching British television's latest homage to the Genius of Darwin...

What Darwin Didn't Know

Documentary which tells the story of evolution theory since Darwin postulated it in 1859 in 'On the Origin of Species'.

The theory of evolution by natural selection is now scientific orthodoxy, but when it was unveiled it caused a storm of controversy, from fellow scientists as well as religious people. They criticised it for being short on evidence and long on assertion and Darwin, being the honest scientist that he was, agreed with them. He knew that his theory was riddled with 'difficulties', but he entrusted future generations to complete his work and prove the essential truth of his vision, which is what scientists have been doing for the past 150 years.

Evolutionary biologist Professor Armand Marie Leroi charts the scientific endeavour that brought about the triumphant renaissance of Darwin's theory. He argues that, with the new science of evolutionary developmental biology (evo devo), it may be possible to take that theory to a new level - to do more than explain what has evolved in the past, and start to predict what might evolve in the future.


It was essentially no more than the usual collection of fibs, half truths, fantasies and non sequiturs but it made a nice change having someone other than Richard Dawkins presenting the same old fundamentalist bullcrap

And, no, Armand didn't fill in any holes but he did attempt to pass off some absolute whoppers whilst pretending to do so

There was one slightly novel element. It was I think the first time I've ever heard a TeleDarwinevangelist admit that this most beautiful and truthy of scientific theories is currently capable of predicting absolutely bugger all and only 'works' retrospectively

Ah well, it's only a century and half old. Give it time

You can only imagine how far Newton would have got trying to pull that kind of shit

"Isaac was fucked if he knew what was going to happen next"

.

What can lift the Economy?

Would somebody pleeeeeeeeeease tell me this is a fake

.

Soto del Henares

Everything's f*cked up

The BBC's financial guru Robert Peston could learn a thing or two from this very articulate and thoughtful young man...





the last 30 seconds are worth waiting for imho

.

First they came for the smokers...

I went for a long walk around North Central London today - Islington, Hackney, Tower Hamlets

And I saw dozens and dozens of the same poster plastered all over phone boxes and bus stops

This poster...



there's also a link to a related wesbite

www.dirtypig.org

Last night I got involved in an extended, extended by me anyway, chat with someone in the comments under one of my posts on the subject of big government vs small government

I maintained that the relative size of government is an irrelevance and a distraction from more significant concerns

I would, however, argue that when government starts spunking money taken off people under threat of imprisonment (i.e. tax) on expensive cross-media marketing campaigns which tell those same people that they are dirty pigs then, yes, the people employed doing that are probably better employed in a private sector sweatshop - preferably somewhere nasty .

.

If you won't broadcast the Gaza appeal then I will myself

Mr Tony Benn is one of the long list of state-sanctioned dissident, but only a little bit dissident, voices I am at best ambivalent about but I did enjoy this clip; more for the obvious discomfort of the State Broadcasting Company frontperson than anything Mr Benn says...





Apparently the BBC isn't supporting the Gaza aid appeal because some of the funds raised might end up being misused by a terrorist government

So, you know what to do about paying your state television tax next time it's due

And cheers to anon 22:41 for this link to a piece by John Mearsheimer which sums up the motivation for, and the results of, the recent slaughter pretty well...

Another war, Another Defeat

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Pudsey is a c*nt

Here's something I learned today, whilst doing a google image search for 'Palestine, Teddy Bear' to find an image to illustrate the news that the BBC wasn't going to take part in a Gazan fund-raiser, I discovered this little gem...

"The Israeli Armored D9 — nicknamed Doobi (Hebrew: דובי‎; lit. teddy bear) — is a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer that was modified by the Israel Defence Forces, Israeli Military Industries and Israel Aerospace Industries to increase the survivability of the dozer in hostile environments and enable it to withstand heavy attacks."

The humour presumably comes from the fact that D9s are not furry and real teddy bears don't crush people to death

note how its thick metal plating has enabled this armoured bulldozer to withstand heavy attacks from unarmed female peace activists and emerge victorious

.

Obama the Builder

hmmmmmm, mucho gusto Tavistockomente

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She's being far too modest

What? Only a little bit fascist? I think Keren's trying to hide her light under a bushel there

I also think that it's pretty unlikely that anyone would lay out a picnic lunch on an open hillside if they thought the people being butchered on the other side of the valley represented any real threat to their safety at all

There are currently 670 comments underneath this clip of espresso slurping slaughter-tourists and I haven't yet seen much in the way of a Hasbara 'explanation' debunking it in any way. So, I'm obliged to conclude that this is on the level




What I have seen, and am starting to see more frequently, is comments which cross the line between Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism

Militant Zionism is an ideology which people can choose to accept or reject, regardless of their ethnicity, and it is reasonable to hold people responsible for the ideologies they choose to follow

Pouring abuse on someone just because they belong to a particular ethnic group is pretty hard to justify, morally or logically

To give in to base Human emotion and become a race-hater is to play the Zionist game. It is to reduce yourself to Their level

Keren Levy is an unpleasant piece of hateful trash because she chooses to be one, she wasn't born one.

.

Blowback

I've already linked to this video by way of a comment under an earlier post but this speech given by George Galloway earlier in the month, whilst the assault on Gaza was in full swing, has been bugging me since I first saw it





The punchline, where George threatens Britain with a horde of 'radicalised' British Muslims, comes about 4:20 in

It's also worth remembering, as illustrated by this recording of Gorgeous George on the radio, that Galloway supports the US and UK governments' Official Narratives of the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks.

An opinion that the shifty fucker is perfectly entitled to

However, it is clear that George is not above attempting a little of bit of radicalisation himself, and in a manner that is perfectly in keeping with the objectives of the State.

Anyone daft enough to follow a c**t like that onto a battlefield is more than likely to look around at some point and discover that George is nowhere to be seen

The State has absolutely no fear of violently radicalised youth, Muslim or otherwise. In fact, it is positively gagging for it

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Fuckwits

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telegraph has only just noticed that the UK is fucked...

"For the first time since this crisis began eighteen months ago, I am seriously worried that British government is losing control."

Currently selling for about twenty five quid for a 15kg sack - it's less fuel intensive to prepare than rice and, once you've got used to it, it's tastier, pleasantly crunchy too - I'd start thinking about avoiding the rush and getting some in

Ambrose seems to be surprised

As are all the other mainstream journalists

For three, four, five years now this blog and countless others have been seething with impotent rage and have been predicting the financial and economic disaster which apparently has caught Ambrose and all his chums by surprise. We've also been predicting the social disaster that will follow in the aftermath




We 'conspiracy theorists' saw what was coming not because we are psychic, or lucky, but simply because this is how these managed financial collapses always play out

Only the banksters have really fucked the duck and gone global this time

"The ultimate challenge is to shape the common concern of most countries and all major ones regarding the economic crisis, together with a common fear of jihadist terrorism, into a strategy reinforced by the realisation that the new issues like proliferation, energy and climate change permit no national or regional solution."

Oh yes, Old Twuntchops is back

and he's bad, really, really fucking bad

-

And it's not just the mainstream media which sat back, or pointed the wrong way, and let this happen

I've got a personal beef with the people behind UK-based blogs which represent the establishment-friendly faux Left Wing opposition on-line. The kind of people who retain some childish faith in our current electoral system and who have enthusiastically spent more time vilifying 'Conspiraloons' who question the Official 7/7 and Domestic War on Terror narratives than concerning themselves with the criminal fucks who conspire, yes conspire, to control our government.




The establishment-friendly Left in the UK saw all its wildest dreams come true over the last 11 years....

- The Tories were kicked out of power
- People were taxed, lots
- Government spending was increased, lots

...and now they haven't got a fucking clue why things have got worse instead of better

A huge swathe of what was once acceptable political thought and analysis, by the Old Left anyway, has been dismissed as 'conspiracy theory' and removed from mainstream discussion. Only ideological scraps remain for mainstream left wingers and conservatives to fight over - restricted mainly to how government can best fund all the monopolies that have been privatised.

Human affairs are, apparently, random and uncontrolled. Bad things, such as economic slumps and currency collapses, must be endured, and mitigated wherever possible, like a force of nature.

The weather, on the other hand, we apparently can control. So spending lots of time on that, whilst the banksters continue sticking it up our rear end, is promoted enthusiastically

I won't be linking to examples of the kind of tossers I'm talking about because they deserve fuck all traffic, even the meagre trade a referral from me would bring them

They had virtually fuck all to say about the murder in Gaza and have absolutely fuck all to say about the current financial crisis.




They haven't the first idea of how the world works and they are completely bereft of any ideas or insight; as is appropriate for a bunch of privileged fuckwits who think everything happens by accident and nothing bad is ever going to happen to people like them

Wrong Wrong Wrong

and, yeah, they fuck you at the drive-thru

.

A legendary performance by Israel

The most recent reports quote something like 1,300+ Palestinian dead vs 13 Israelis who lost their lives in the recent slaughter in Gaza

However, at least four of those Israelis were killed by their own forces. Adding them onto the Israeli casualty count effectively overstates Hamas' existential-threatening striking power by at least 40%

1,300 against 9

And there are still some fuckers out there claiming that this was some kind of defensive action

In all of the blood-stained history of colonial Britain the gold standard for slaughter was the Battle of Omdurman when, as in the wildest dreams of contemporary neocon psychopaths, an army of Muslim insurgents stood in open ground and offered themselves up to be slaughtered by the thousand with the most modern weapons available to the British invaders




It was less of a battle and more of an exercise in geometry as General Kitchener's troops methodically arranged the arcs of fire of their artillery and machine guns to cut down as many people as possible before tea time

The casualty figures for this legendary one-sided slaughter were

9,700 Sudanese vs. 47 British


... 1,300 Gazans vs. 9 Israelis

Hmmm, definitely comparable

though, of course, Kitchener's men didn't butcher anywhere near as many children.

.

That tired old cacca just isn't working any more

It is in the nature of most Conspiraloons to be glass half empty kind of people

And I, and a few folks who have commented on this blog, and a few folks who have written to me directly, have recently expressed a sense of despair about what's going on in the world




There's a sense that global events are heading towards some kind of ghastly, unstoppable climax

Well, yes, I think they might be

But, looking on the bright side...

No, there really is one, honest

It's really quite easy to forget that the last six months or so have been a terrible time for Official Narratives and the interests that control the US, UK and other governments...

• The Georgian attack on Ossetia was a disaster. Western neocon interests got their arses kicked and, just as bad, it was clear from Day One that a significant number of ordinary people in the West weren't buying the round the clock propaganda about the conflict that was being directed at us

• Ditto for the recent disagreement between the Russians and the Ukrainians over gas supplies. We plebs were clearly supposed to blame the Evil Russians for cuting our energy supplies off, but a large number of us just weren't having it

• The fucked up false flag attack at Mumbai was another disaster. Whoever was behind it (I wonder) made a complete dog's cock of the entire business and it's proven to be so difficult to stitch together an even vaguely credible attempt at an official narrative that the mainstream media are behaving virtually as if it never happened

• The jury at the Jean Charles de Menezes inquest refused to play along with an official whitewash and during the inquest we discovered that, yes, the police were fully aware that JCdM was not carrying a bomb but his execution was ordered anyway, by an unidentified person who overruled the policewoman who was nominally in charge of the operation

• During the show trial of the alleged 7/7 helpers it was revealed that the alleged 7/7 bombers weren't carrying the bombs and that their personal IDs recovered from the carnage weren't anywhere near them, or the bombs, when the bombs exploded

• The global reaction to the recent assault of Gaza has gone terribly for the Israelis. The old excuses and rationalisations just aren't cutting it any more and the shills they've been putting on the television, in the newspapers and the net have been soundly thrashed and exposed for the lying fucks they are, time and again

• It also seems pretty likely to me that the inevitable economic crash that the Powers that Be knew was coming got under way a lot earlier than scheduled. There is a good portion of the infrastructure of a police state in place but it is nowhere near complete and the UK government, for example, has been frantic in trying to roll its ID card and other controlling measures out. Too late now I think.

I'm not forgetting the victims of these fucked up false flag attacks and bullshit but, on balance, recent attempts at staging once dependable false flag attacks and bullshit have gone far from well for the people behind them

So, chin up. There's a tremendous learning process at work. It's most concentrated on the net but its effects are rippling out beyond

-

And, as I was discussing with a few folk yesterday, when I first engaged with net-based alternative explanations of how the world works, conspiratorial internet sites and blogs were littered with stuff about crop circles, UFOs and other, mostly nonsense, stuff which was frequently blended in with serious parapolitical material about 9/11 and the machinations of our ruling class.

Now, a few years later, you are much more likely to see material about how our money system works and the first, tentative steps to figuring out new social and economic ideologies than pictures of pie tins hanging off pieces of string

Yeah, you can fuck right off for a start

And, just for clarity's sake, I don't know if aliens are in and out of this planet like Piccadilly Circus or not; though I doubt it. What I am certain of is that trying to hitch space-alien-crop circle-bullshitainment onto matters of life, death and exploitation is at best misguided and at worst willfully wicked and deceitful

Somehow, in spite of all the nonsense, all the disinfo, misinfo, sabotage and bullshit, the people I'm running into on-line are better informed, better focused and more savvy than they were five years ago. They are also more restless and trying to figure out how they can apply their new consciousness and understanding to the 'real' world

This is good news and a (small) reason to be optimistic

Honestly

.

Every little helps

I may be a deranged old Man Made Global Warming sceptic but that doesn't mean for a second that I condone the environmental rape and pillage of our planet's ecology.

Which is I why heartily recommend that everyone download and installs the following as their default print, and screen, font as a matter of urgency. We literally only have minutes to save the Earth...

ecofont

broadcast to everyone you write to what kind of person you are - with ecofont (David Mayer de Rothschild approved!!)

The secret's in the holes

.

Photo of the Day - A First Class Miracle on the Hudson

"Has anyone noticed the ugly reality captured in the so-called “Miracle on the Hudson”? One of the first photos shows that first class passengers were offered first-class rafts to ensure that they’d survive in comfort, while the economy class passengers were forced out onto the metal wings to fend for themselves..."




The sad thing that I noticed was that none of the peons herded onto the wings had clambered over to the c*nts on the raft and started beating the shit out of them

Maybe that's why they don't let you take nail scissors on flights any more


.

Obviously one of those self-loathing Labour MPs...

Mainstream Conspiraloons #626 - Napoleon Solo

The Man from L.O.O.N.C.L.E.

I know who was behind Bobby Kennedy's murder, by his actor friend Robert Vaughn

Good, I always liked his TV show. And if the Way of the Conspiraloon is good enough for the last surviving member of the Magnificent Seven it's good enough for me

A quick reminder of why shooting RFK, unlike Obama, in the face would have been an excellent idea as far as some people were concerned...


"Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities...

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."

Robert F. Kennedy
University of Kansas
March 18, 1968

June 6th 1968

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Cornettos

Over the last few days I've received some disheartening emails from a few people who correspond with me in the context of this blog. It wouldn't be right to go into specifics but they share a common theme of people grappling with the realities of their own mortality

Which has got me thinking about Cornettos




About two years ago I was sitting in a hospital with my mother and my father

My father was suffering from cancer and had been in and out of hospital for three years; first for some surgery and then as a result of, surprise surprise, an infection contracted in the hospital after the surgery

My Dad would often complain about having a dry throat and he wasn't eating very much. We had got into the habit of picking up some ice creams from the hospital shop to share with him

So, there we were, all three of us eating Cornettos when his consultant appeared and sat down at the end of his bed. Then the consultant said something like...

'Well Tony. Your test results are in and, um, it seems that there's no more we can do for you. Now's the time to do whatever it is you want to do and to put you're affairs in order. OK, um, I've got to pop down to surgery now but if there's anything that I can help you with you know how to get hold of me. Righty ho, bye'

and then he fucked off

We were still holding our ice creams

which we proceed to finish off, in silence, being careful to pop the wrappers in the bin afterwards

There are a couple of reasons why I'm writing that story down

First off, because the image of me sitting there eating ice cream whilst my father was being told his number was up is one that will stay with me to my own dying day. Whenever anyone suggests that there is a Creator and that he has seriously warped sense of humour, I think ice cream

Secondly, for a moment after hearing the news, I thought about chucking my half-eaten treat into the bin but I checked out my parents and they continued chomping through theirs. And I remember thinking, fuck it, if I were to stop eating ice cream just because I know someone I care for is going to die, or that I'm going to die, I'd never eat another fucking thing, or do another fucking thing, ever again. Why should having a better idea of when the inevitable is going to happen make any difference?

though, it has to be said, that's the last Cornetto I've ever eaten and subsequently, whenever given the choice, I've always plumped for a cup rather than a cone

-

I pasted up that link to the Sheldrake video a few posts back because, for all his faults, what Sheldrake and plenty of others are suggesting is that we, in spite of all of Dawkins' reductionist protestations, really haven't got the foggiest idea of what Life is all about. It might not all be just about selfish genes. I personally think that there probably is something else going on. Sheldrake and Co. are also reminding us along the way that Life is a wonderful, as well as a mind-bogglingly mysterious, thing. It is easy, particularly in hard times, to forget that

I cannot prove it scientifically but I am sure that Life is worth living, every day right up to your last, that it is the hard times rather than the good which bring out the best in people and, short of serious, debilitating pain, I would never consider condoning the termination of my, or anyone else's, existence prematurely

I'm glad that video resonated with a least a couple of people who clicked on the link and for anyone else who clicked but didn't feel the vibe, apologies, I'll try and find something else one of these days

-

edit: and as luck(?) would have it, half an hour after I put this post up, I was walking down the road and noticed this newly chalked graffiti in the entrance to a boarded up pub...

.

Well, it's not as if there's much else going on is there?

And today's 'Is it Real or is it Daily Mash?' news story comes from....


The Daily Telegraph!!


FFS

.

The Anti-Dawkins

"Wibble"

A conversation between MegaLoon Rupert Sheldrake and Bruce Lipton...

WARNING!!: The following video contains traces of West Coast American New Age Hippies - which may be harmful to people with an allergy

The conversation continues in Youtube friendly bite-sized lumps here (Segment #3's my favourite)

If you're interested in out of the box thinking about the Science of Life, Rupert is certifiably out of his box. Whilst I personally don't buy everything Sheldrake comes up with I share his suspicion that there is some organising principle or force missing from the mainstream life science narrative. Sheldrake is a source of more interesting and challenging ideas, and warm humour, than Dawkins could even dream of...


"...The previous week I had sent Richard copies of some of my papers, published in peer-reviewed journals, so that he could look at the data.

Richard seemed uneasy and said, “I don’t want to discuss evidence”. “Why not?” I asked. “There isn’t time. It’s too complicated. And that’s not what this programme is about.” The camera stopped.

The Director, Russell Barnes, confirmed that he too was not interested in evidence. The film he was making was another Dawkins polemic.

I said to Russell, “If you’re treating telepathy as an irrational belief, surely evidence about whether it exists or not is essential for the discussion. If telepathy occurs, it’s not irrational to believe in it. I thought that’s what we were going to talk about. I made it clear from the outset that I wasn’t interested in taking part in another low grade debunking exercise.”

Richard said, “It’s not a low grade debunking exercise; it’s a high grade debunking exercise.”

In that case, I replied, there had been a serious misunderstanding, because I had been led to believe that this was to be a balanced scientific discussion about evidence. Russell Barnes asked to see the emails I had received from his assistant. He read them with obvious dismay, and said the assurances she had given me were wrong. The team packed up and left..."

.

Mark Regev in action...

Did I just hear that right?

A quality selection of Hamas built WMD - as NOT used to break ceasefires

.

NWO Conspiracy Bullshit

I've been meaning to write a post on the subject of what constitutes a 'conspiracy theory' but Deek Jackon's latest has saved me at least half the effort...





He does work in a dig at religion but, unlike that gigantonormous bell-end I refer to in my last post, Deek makes the point that abuse of the perfectly natural spiritual instinct is merely the means to an end. That end being fucking people over

If you could somehow re-engineer the human mind and eradicate all religious belief tomorrow, there's absolutely no reason to think that the fucking over would stop, not for a second

-

edit: and here's some more NWO bullshit...





.

Economy in meltdown. Gas supplies Failing. War in the Middle East... but the Big Dick says there's nothing to worry about

I've got a crisp fiver in my pocket that says that's the last thing he's going to do...

well, the daft old cock is definitely right about one thing - farting on about God definitely is a distraction from all the shit that's going on in the world

.

Pissing in the Wind

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed discusses 7/7 and 9/11...




.

When you realise just how truly crooked our system is it would be very easy to fall into despair

I just saw this Ron Paul clip on Lord Patel's blog...



as Lord P. points out, the almost cinematic silence at the end speaks volumes

It's not as if Paul was saying things his audience didn't know already

.

This one's for Melanie Phillips

.

Let's Play Top Ziotrumps!!

Merkava III MBT

Primary Armament: Rheinmetall 120mm Smoothbore Canon
Secondary Armament: 3 x HMG / 1 x 60mm Mortar
Top Speed: 65km/h
Combat Weight: 65,000 kg
Crew: 4

Forklift Truck

Primary Armament: 1 x Fork
Secondary Armanent: 1 x Wooden Pallet, stacked with millet and dried milk
Top Speed: 30km/h
Combat Weight: 2,500 kg
Crew: 1 (dead)

Latest IDF combat patch

.

If you want to win people over try not treating them like stupid dicks (or decapitating their children)

Anyone who's been trawling through the online news coverage and blogs commenting on the current Israeli assault on Gasa can't have helped but noticed that the GIYUS/ Hasbara astroturfers are out, pasting their mendacious justifications for slaughter, in force

What disgusts me most, aside from the slaughter itself, it just how fucking stupid most of their comments are

The tone of these troll comments seems pitched at someone with the intelligence of a 5 year old, or written by someone with the intelligence of a 5 year old




I'm not sure if that's because the racist, supremacist cocksuckers think us Goy are that stupid or if it's because they are that stupid

or, maybe, which is more than likely, a bit of both

Maybe you just can't get decent help these days

What I can say for sure is that, for me anyway, their efforts are having the exact opposite effect of the one intended

-





You do not win the kind of conflict the Israelis and Palestinians are engaged in with tanks and planes.

Those tanks and planes can kill a lot of people, sure enough, but for each person you kill another two or three vengeance seekers rise up and take their place

In the kind of conflict the Israelis and Palestinians are engaged in you either reach an accommodation with, or exterminate, the insurgent population before they out-breed you

The Israelis know that. Anyone with even a basic knowledge of military history knows that.

I, and a fair few other people, have a sick feeling that we know which long term, final, solution the current Israeli regime is aiming for

At the end of the day, no amount of feeble, patronising online trolling can hide the nature of the war that is being waged

This is not just a Hellfire missile. It's a specially programmed, melt in your classroom, school-seeking IDF Hellfire missile...

-

And, no, I'm not going to include in this post the almost mandatory 'I'm not Anti-Semitic but...' or 'There's a difference between Zionists and Jews...' style disclaimers.

When I mouth off about the excesses of the elites, paid shills and killers of other states, including the one I live in, I don't feel under any obligation to say 'I'm not anti Anglo-Saxon but...', so fuck that



.

Newstopia explains the Reserve Bank

The Feckless Unemployed

I've just spent ten minutes typing out a response to question someone asked me underneath an earlier post and, f*** it, that makes it long enough to be a post of its own...

Anon - 05 January 2009 13:00

Stef, what do you make of this statement? (something I hear quite a lot in certain social circles):

Although it is true, there was a whole program on BBC dedicated to it. I said that we don't do the jobs on average as well as they do. That's not opinion, that's fact. There are plenty of stats flying around about workforce productivity in the labour market comparative to earlier years. A trip to Google might suffice.

The jobs will likely be filled at one point or another, although I wouldn't expect it to be the kind of speed at which they were taken a year ago. The sad truth is that a British citizen can quite effortlessly gain 15k a year through benefits, so why earn 11k at subway and have to work for it? Unemployment has far too many benefits, no pun intended.

As for those who are employed, take builders for example... It's pretty common knowledge that if you want an excellent individual job done you don't employ British labour. It's par to say the least, where as the foreigners really earn their money and do a great job (talking averages here), and do it a lot cheaper.

The absence of the immigrants means that we're not going to be filling jobs as fast, we're going to lose out on productivity, and it's going to waste money for corporations. Be that on recruitment, productivity, employment (maternity rights, anyone?), and general service. And that affects our economy.

A lot of people slate the Polish for reasons they don't understand, but they were actually a great benefit to our nation - and they expect very little.

Stef - 05 January 2009 14:32

There's a lot of talk in the press about one group of benefit scroungers, the 'feckless' unemployed, and fuck all talk about another group of benefit scroungers, exploitative employers, who can get away with paying shit wages and benefits because the shortfall in what they give their staff is picked up by the welfare state

The DSS, that would be the rest of us, effectively subsidises lousy companies

So maybe, just maybe, a large part of the problem is not that the benefits are too high but that the wages are too low

Anxiety Culture

It's also worth remembering that the expression 'productivity improvement' is largely a euphemism for paying people less money to produce more output

Maybe you could argue that was a good thing if that money made was reinvested in productive infrastructure or paid out in dividends to the people who took the risks and created the jobs in the first place.

What usually happens in practice is that the financial benefits of 'productivity improvements' are trousered by senior management who have no problem with paying people more to do less; provided they are the people being paid more and doing less

By any measure, income inequalities in the UK have increased over the last 10-15 years off the back of this kind of mentality

And, as well as being inequitable, it's unsustainable because, sooner or later, once you've ripped off ordinary people past a certain level they can no longer afford to buy the goodies that make your system go round. They can start borrowing, of course, but that can only work for so long; as we're currently in the process of finding out

People forget now but about 10-15 years ago the press was full of talk of a 'leisure bonus', as new technologies promised to reduce the amount of time people would need to spend at work.

Fifteen years on and now we're being told that we won't be able to afford ever to retire

What happened?

Imagine for a moment you're a member of the Evil Overlord class. Can you imagine anything worse than the prospect of the plebs having more free time on their hands and becoming financially independent?

Fuck that

Think about the kind of useless jobs so many of us are engaged in. Jobs that offer no real benefit to society as a whole and absolutely no sense of satisfaction or self-worth to the people doing them.

Anxiety Culture

The Evil Overlord class would have us believe that any job, however pointless and soul destroying, is worth having just for its own sake

Bollocks to that

It's also worth pondering upon the fact that the vast majority of jobs people would identify as being intrinsically worthwhile and offering a sense of self-worth to the people doing them usually sit at the bottom of society's pay scales. And, speaking as someone who's held down a couple of highish paying jobs in his time, I can absolutely guarantee that higher pay is absolutely in no way intrinsically linked to high ability, high intelligence, high integrity or high commitment

Migrants play along with this shit because they're economically desperate and easily exploited. Neither of these qualities strike me as something we should be encouraging in our society; however profitable they may be for The Few

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On not trusting anyone, not even yourself

I think it's fair to say that anyone who has used the Internet has been sucked in by at least some disinfo bullcrap at some point in their surfing

There is, after all, an awful lot of it about

Mind you, there's awful lot of it about in the longer-established media.

I had a jaw-dropping conversation with a couple of people just before Christmas who patiently explained to me that the reason why Jean Charles de Menezes got shot was because he jumped over a ticket barrier and ignored repeated challenges from the police to stop running. They absolutely refused to accept anything different from me

And they never use the Internet

As it happens, I personally believe that the majority of 'serious' mainstream news coverage qualifies as disinformation to some extent or another

but back to the Internet...

I raise the subject of disinfo because I received a couple of emails from chums yesterday morning pointing me towards a video nasty of the alleged aftermath of an Israeli bombing attack in Gaza

The video struck me as being suspect for several reasons

- it was pixelated as fuck
- there was no supporting information about who allegedly took the footage, or where, or when
- the accompanying text on the original hosting site said 'copy available for download spread'

Because I'm a person who has never felt comfortable about giving or receiving commands, the thought of anonymous fuckers who I don't know from Adam urging me to spread/ duplicate/ forward something has the uncomfortable air of a chain letter about it to me

What the Internet was invented for...

As a general rule, if a video clip, or creepy letter, is strong enough I am perfectly capable of deciding whether I'm going to circulate it or not, and to who

And it comes as absolutely no fucking surprise to discover that the video in question was subsequently 'exposed' as a fraud by those reptiles over at Little Green Footballs.

They would be the same reptiles who exposed the doctoring of photos of the Israeli airforce plastering Lebanon in 2006

Lebanon 2006 - before and after 'shopping'. As you can see the impact of the Israeli air attacks has been exaggerated to an outrageous degree by visual trickery

It's a funny game this disinfowar business. Expose a little photoshopping of the aftermath of a Israeli bomb attack and all those cluster bombs, cluster bombs which are still killing people two years on, simply melt away

We should, however, be thankful for the efforts of Little Green Footballs, the Hasbara crowd and all the other shills, cheats and trolls out there.

They're doing us a favour

They're reminding us not to be gullible fuckwits

Just because someone is making noises you want to hear or offering up material that seems to support your pre-existing beliefs that is no reason to throw your critical faculties into the toilet.

If you don't trust this video

...then why the f*** should you trust this one?

If you don't apply the same level of rigour to your own beliefs as you apply to those beliefs you disagree with then you're allowing yourself to become a hypocrite and a fool

And I'm not excluding myself from the list of potential fuckwits.

Like I said, we've all been there and will almost certainly be there again

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