And the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2010 goes to...

Would you like to know more?

-

and if George's counter-intuitive contradiction of what he and others have been claiming for years is a little difficult to swallow, here's some independent corroboration of George's new 'Cold is Warm' paradigm from some twunt who doesn't understand how fridges work...


With All This Global Warming, Why is it So Cold?
Eric Haxthausen

"The explanation that is gaining currency among climate scientists is that low levels of Arctic sea ice during the summer are causing more heat to be absorbed in the Arctic during the fall, and changing atmospheric circulation pattern, driving cold Arctic air into Europe and the Eastern United States and funneling warm air up into the Arctic regions.

This warm Arctic-cold continents pattern is likened to leaving the refrigerator door open. The room gets colder but the fridge warms up."

-

Fortunately, there is, however, a planet-saving solution at hand.

Scrolling near to the bottom of this page of real-time UK electricty production stats, you can see that windfarms are contributing something like a mighty 0.1% of the UK's current electricty needs...



Which means that if the UK government sticks something like £300,000-500,000 a year on the average household's energy bill and gives that money to the aristocracy to build lots of lovely new windmills on 'their' land the British will have done their bit to keep global climate exactly the same as it was 20 years ago, for ever

Ooops, that's just for the electricity and doesn't include natural gas, heating oil and petrol consumption. Better make that £1,000,000+ per year per household.

And, obviously, the UK wouldn't have to build quite so many wind farms if we constructed a national grid of rechargeable batteries the size of Battersea Power Station to store up energy when its really windy so we can use it when it's not really windy

-

It's easy enough to believe that AGW Climate Change prophets like George Monbiot are essentially decent, well-meaning types who haven't quite thought things through. I'd be a lot more convinced if they weren't rich, hypocritical fuckers who are wealthy enough not to suffer from, and will actually profit from, the consequences of the corrupt 'solutions' they are advocating

.

'There was a suggestion you were rolling towards the police in your wheelchair...'

Michael Flatley is really from Chicago

Conspiraloon Round Up December 2010 pt1

So much going on in the conspirasphere, so little time to vent fully, but just enough time to place a few bets on some on-going stories...


Wikileaks


Such is Julian Assange's new found fame, even my pensioner Mum who never reads newspapers and only watches Italian gameshows on TV asked me the other day if I thought Assange was kosher on the level a straight shooter or not

The fact that she was even asking me the question pretty much answers it

Aangirfan has put together a much more detailed list of reasons to have little faith in Wikileaks

He could have saved himself a lot of time by trying to come up with a list of reasons to actually have faith in Assange

The countless debates about whether Assange is what he claims to be or not remind me of the past antics of the Shayler Being. Fans of Shayler's work will recall that he bought credibility in certain Truther circles by revealing the startling news that, shock fucking horror, MI6 planned to murder Gaddafi at one point in the 1990s. In return for this completely underwhelming revelation he was given a free pass to trample all over UK Conspiraloondom for the better part of a decade. I was still debating with people who wanted to give Shayler the benefit of the doubt even when he started claiming to be the reincarnation of Jesus AND King Arthur. Mercifully, the low cut blouse and lipstick was the final straw for all but the most open-minded and tolerant of folk. However, Shayler's ex girlfriend/ handler, who bought into Truther status at the same low low price, is still out there hard at work, playing a much longer game and with a slightly better hairdresser




To be honest, I'm a little nonplussed that so many on-line folk are willing to give Assange so much benefit of the doubt, given the nature of the official narrative friendly bullshit he's pumping out, the stuff he isn't pumping out, and the fact that he's getting so much coverage from the mainstream media.

In comparison, it's worth remembering how hard the mainstream press worked at trying to ignore, then downplay, the Climategate story last year. A leak which genuinely did piss in The Establishment's chips, a lot

When in doubt, it's always worth remembering the Golden Rule of State Broadcasting Portraiture. If someone is covered by the BBC and they're not lit, or otherwise presented, like Baltar from Battlestar Galactica they ain't threatening anyone of any importance



Eric Cantona's bank run

Fair play to Eric for calling for the collapse of the banking cartel...



...but a planned bank run ain't going to do it

Even if a mass protest did take place, managed to overcome daily cash withdrawal limits and actually killed a bank or two, how exactly would that beat the system?

The Fed in the US and other central banks around the world were actually created in the wake of staged bank crises

More dead banks and more chaos equals more consolidation and more centralised control

Sorry

Cantona strikes me as a decent man but one who doesn't fully understand how money works

Unlike a certain indecent man who does...


Max Keiser

Max, and his new best buddy and fellow precious metal salesmen Alex Jones, have been trying to whip up a viral campaign with the claimed objective of destroying JP Morgan by buying up physical silver. The story goes that JP Morgan has been selling lots of paper silver, so if Max's followers buy lots of physical silver they'll reduce physical supply, drive up the price and JP Morgan won't be able to honour its paper contracts

Curiously, in spite of all his ranting on the subject in recent years, Max seems to have forgotten what happens every time the finances of large banks go tits up, and who ends up covering all the losses. Buying a few poxy coins isn't even going to scratch a power structure that's been crafted over centuries and any immediate losses inflicted on that structure will be recouped, with interest

Max also seems to forget who controls most of the production and stockpiles of precious metals around the world. The last time I looked, I don't recall identfying many silver mines or bullion depositories that were owned and operated by anarcho-syndicalist cooperatives

Max also seems to have forgotten that there isn't actually that much physical gold or silver to go round and that if ordinary people did actually drive the price of gold or silver up to astronomical highs by buying a couple of coins each they wouldn't benefit themselves by very much but would benefit anyone who's already sitting on a few thousand coins to start with enormously

There again, maybe Max hasn't forgotten any of this

On reflection, I think he probably hasn't. I think it's more likely that he's trying to succeed where others have failed; through the power of the internet, lots and lots of bullshit and total and utter contempt for anyone who'll listen to him...

.

(Groovy) Snow

Economics 101 - Lesson #11 QE Explained

Magic Wellness Sticks - German Style

Would you like to know more?

Economics 101 - Lesson #3 Supply and Demand

.

Shillebrity Death Match #23 - Max Keiser vs. Alex Jones

Mirror mirror on the wall, who's the Truthiest of them all?

It's a heavyweight bout between Max and Alex

Jones won his previous challenge with a knock-out assertion that 'the Arabs own Hollywood!!!' but Max has got some special moves of his own

Place your bets and scroll forward 4 minutes in to see which of the these two duelling Infowarriors is going to leave his opponent speechless...

That's a knock-out @4.24

Well done Max!

The cheque's in the post and the negatives aren't

.

I can't believe it's not a proper inquest pt6

The J7 7/7 Inquest blog has now been updated to include a post about 7/7 survivor Daniel Biddle's testimony:

7/7 Inquests: Danny Biddle, the Rucksack on the Lap - and the Explosion on the Floor

The J7 post discusses the material covered in my previous post but with a lot more rigour and detail

There's also, and it's a rare day indeed when I link to this site, an interesting comment over at the UK 9/11 forum:

http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=151674#151674

There's a little bit of Carol Vorderman style numerology before the meat of the comment, which after an analysis of Biddle's testimony and train timetables, concludes with...

"A question for Mr Keith QC and his team:

How is it that Danny Biddle, disembarked from a main line train that, in your own words, arrived at Liverpool Street at 8:40 am or as confirmed by Mr Biddle, "there or thereabouts", then made his way along the platform, across the concourse, down the steps to the underground ticket barriers, through the ticket barriers and eventually onto the the Circle Line platform, ignore an overcrowded train and wait for the next Circle Line train, and then travel eight stops including Edgware Road on a Circle Line train in under 10 minutes on 7th July 2005 ?

...

I presume that, Gareth A Davies at The Telegraph to pick a single example from the media are able to explain how they had Danny Biddle still tapping out (or editing his previous draft of) a text message to work to say he was on the way at 9.17am - the same time as the MPS originally claimed for the Edgware Road incident.

9:17am is now, according to Mr Keith QC, over 27 minutes after Mr Biddle saw MSK's arm move quickly, an action he elaborated upon in his "more detailed" version given in December, by adding that it looked like he [MSK] was pulling a white cord."


Here's a link to another newspaper story that quotes Biddle being injured at 9.17am

So, to recap...

On the morning of 7/7, Mohammed Sidique Khan walked along a rush hour tube carriage, scattering bank cards and other documentation in front of his fellow passengers along the way, before standing up/ sitting down and putting his small/ large rucksack on the floor/ his lap and blowing himself up some distance from/ adjacent to the device, which was made from military grade/ home-made explosives, at 8.50am/ 9.17am

Clear as mud

Unless you're one of those people who goes for the 'Some Muslim nutters did it!!! What more do you need to know?!!' school of intellectual thought, the current state of the Official Narrative is, um, shambolic

As I and others have stated previously, the 7/7 inquest does not appear to be an objective information gathering exercise but, rather, an extended presentation of a pre-established, and seriously flawed, narrative.

The material starting to pile up at the J7 7/7 Inquests blog supports this conclusion very strongly

Taken from the forthcoming - Official 7/7 Narrative Logic Problems for Kids Vol.1
(originally intended to be a single volume, but that was before the Inquest started)

And now I'm going to ask for a favour

Without rehashing old debates, I personally have been somewhat scornful of certain other 7/7 researchers

From my high-tech secret command centre (a page of RSS feeds running on an abused netbook), I monitor postings on a large number of alternative news websites. What this sophisticated intelligence operation tells me is that those other 7/7 researchers have received, and continue to receive, considerably more promotion on-line than the work of J7 and producers of films that share the J7 ethic

That's the ethic which focuses on identifying the flaws in Official Narratives rather than promoting alternative narratives

Plugs for 7/7 (Raspberry) Ripple Effect and the musings of a certain Nazi apologist and BBC comedy act there are a plenty

Plugs for J7 and films like Ludicrous Diversion and Seeds of Deconstruction ...biff all

I can't remember the last time sites like Alex Jones', David Ickes', What Really Happened and loads of other major conspiraloon portals pointed readers to J7, if ever

You could debate the reasons for this for ages but the fact is J7 is the source of much material that a lot of other researchers include in their own work. Yet credit, or valuable search-engine fodder in the way of links, is rarely given in return.

I can't help noticing that J7 has started to heavily watermark some of the excellent material the group is generating for the 7/7 Inquest blog. I suspect that this has little to do with vanity and quite a lot to do with people ripping off and repackaging J7's work, without offering readers the chance to view the material in the context intended by the people who created it

Jaguar at Luton station car park from J7 Truth Campaign on Vimeo.

J7 is a small group of ordinary folk running themselves ragged filling in FOIs, attending hearings, sifting through transcripts and presenting their findings in as clear and as well-documented way as they can. I think they could do with a hand during a period in which they must be absolutely shagged out

So, here's the favour I'm asking for

Over the course of the 7/7 Inquest (and it's set to run for months), and assuming J7 is able to maintain its prodigious effort, please think about posting the occasional link to J7, especially the J7 7/7 Inquest blog, during your travels around the Internet.

I have no doubt that the kind of intelligent, sophisticated, empathic and physically attractive people who pass through here don't need me to elaborate on this request by suggesting that any links posted should be as intelligent, sophisticated, empathic and physically attractive as they are. So I won't

Except that bit where I just did

Cheers

S.

.

I can't believe it's not a proper inquest pt5

There's a new post up at the J7 Inquests blog:

7/7 Inquests: The Disintegration of Shehzad Tanweer

It is a thorough deconstruction of the anomalies which J7 has identified in the alleged evidence that places alleged bomber Shehzad Tanweer at the scene of the Aldgate explosion on 7/7

As well as being significant in itself, the comments underneath that post are also worth reading. There are a couple of thought-provoking observations about the nature of the damage caused on the 7/7 train carriages, and also a series of contributions from what appears to be the same anonymous commentator...

"How about he bent or crouched over the rucksack, which was on the floor, to detonate it? Or held it in his arms and triggered it?"

"You'll get your answer today when a survivor will testify that he saw Mohammed Sidique Khan detonate a bomb in his rucksack which was on the floor of the carriage. QED and time for you to put an end to your speculations"

"Are you accusing Mr Biddle of lying? What possible motive would a man who's had both legs blown off have in protecting the conspiracy that ruined his life? Don't tell me he's been 'got at'"

"The piece of shinbone was removed in hospital and passed to the scientists for DNA testing. It belonged to Tanweer. PS I was working at the forensic lab at the time."

"Are you accusing forensic scientists of fitting up Tanweer? "

"The answer to your question is no. I've only been in forensics for a mere 15 years. Can you give us a quick rundown of your forensic experience please?"


It turns out that, Daniel Biddle, the survivor who was going to 'testify that he saw Mohammed Sidique Khan detonate a bomb in his rucksack which was on the floor of the carriage' did not say that and actually referred to a small rucksack on someone's lap

This is a big difference, as the nature of the damage and injuries reported from the carriage is consistent with a large device at floor level, not a small device at waist level


Apparently, 15 years of relevant forensic experience does not equip the commentator to distinguish between statements which refer to...

Small rucksack on lap

vs.

(Large) rucksack on floor

This is no Gil Grissom we're dealing with here

The style of the commentator's attack is an illustrative example of some of the strategies that apologists for Offical Narratives employ...

• They insult and patronise in an attempt to provoke an emotional response
  
  
• They ignore effective responses to their insinuations and simply move on to a new line of attack

and above all

• They relentlessly attempt to force those who have identified flaws in an Official Narrative to generate speculations of their own

This is not the behaviour of someone who holds a point of view that they know to be well-supported. This the behaviour of someone who is either unconciously dissonant or consciously deceptive. This is what you do when you know you are defending a flawed position

And it doesn't help when, as illustrated by the following misguided comment I just saw under an Aangirfan post, truthers play right into the hands of those who would distract you from the weaknesses in their fairy story...

"Maybe they just paid the guy off and he figures he's lost his legs in a bombing so why not profit from it. Even bomb victims can be ready to serve tyranny, either that or brainwashed at some point. These people did 911, so magicking up this "witness" is hardly beyond them."


To put it another way

• Imagine you arranged to meet someone at a certain time and place
• They don't turn up
• The next day you phone that person and ask them why they didn't show
• The person says 'But I was there!'
• You say 'No you weren't'
• The person then says 'If I wasn't there where do you think I was? And why? And with who?'

Would you be so daft as to even start to answer those questions?


(It's worth noting that after nine years of bullshit about holographic aircraft, space beams, MI6 vs CIA vs Mossad, LIHOP/ MIHOP/ BUNNYHOP, etc etc, 9/11 Truthers are finally realising that it might just be better to stick with fundamental facts that as wide a number of them as possible can agree to be 'True'... DECLARATION: NO MUSLIMS PROVEN INVOLVED IN 9/11)

.

FF15MP Spot the Difference Contest #51

A. Sir William Cubitt

"The prison treadmill was invented in England in 1817 by Sir William Cubit, who observed prisoners lying around in idleness and put himself to the task of "reforming offenders by teaching them habits of industry."

B. Ian Duncan Smith

"jobseeker(s) would benefit from experiencing the "habits and routines" of working life, an unemployed person will be told to take up "mandatory work activity" of at least 30 hours a week for a four-week period. If they refuse or fail to complete the programme their jobseeker's allowance payments, currently £50.95 a week for those under 25 and £64.30 for those over 25, could be stopped for at least three months."

And if your answer was 'I can't see much difference but IDS does look like he's having sex with a goat' you can write your name on a scrap of paper and stick it in the raffle box

-

Compelling people to work for less than two quid an hour might, just possibly, bump into one or two small snags. The work has to be exceptionally unskilled, can't compete with work currently being done by people actually earning enough to exist, and it can't matter if The Compelled do, as is likely, a really shit job of it

Cubitt-style treadmills offer a tried and tested solution to these problems, especially when connected to a big windmill, or some rocks




This is an all-weather solution and doesn't involve much additional expense on stripey outfits, chains, shotguns, dogs, riding crops, mirrored shades or any of the other paraphenalia associated with managing reluctant groups of labourers in open spaces




And if any whinging do-gooders start complaining that this kind of enforced physical drudgery does nothing for upper body strength, you could always compel the feckless to alternate between treadmills and operating some of these wall-mounted bad boys...



...as once used in Dartmoor Prison, that's the one still privately owned by the Royal Family

Of course, if IDS were brave enough to be a true neo-radical he could use cranks and treadmills to interface* all of the unemployed with electrical generators, commoditise their output US prison style, draw up a few bonds and turn them over to our fabulous banking industry to make a market with.




* = something like a person-sized Skinner Box, but with an axle



.

Mainstream Conspiraloons #17 - Noam Chomsky, well sort of...

"The explicit and declared motive of the [Afghanistan] war was to compel the Taliban to turn over to the United States, the people who they accused of having been involved in World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist acts. The Taliban…they requested evidence…and the Bush administration refused to provide any"

"We later discovered one of the reasons why they did not bring evidence: they did not have any."

.

Hope and Democracy? I s**t on Hope and Democracy (redux)

All things considered, nowhere near as formidable as some principles backed by a dash of bloody-mindedness

There's a post over at Craig Murray's blog which has a stab at a reasonable summary of the current plight of the UK and which ends with the line 'I see no hope'

A moderately interesting discussion ensued in the comments underneath, on the subject of the impending national implosion and the nature of hope and democracy.

That was until Craig's devoted trolls got stuck in and people started calling each other c*nts

Personally, I've maintained for a long time now that, just on a mathematical basis alone, the UK is economically and therefore probably socially fucked for a fair while into the future.

Whilst, on the face of it, that's a pretty pessimistic point of view, I'd argue that living through some kind of unpleasantness is the only way the majority of people will realise that they've allowed the significance of their own lives to be devalued in exchange for some cheap junk, both physical or psycological

So, I believe that there's a good chance that 'things' will eventually get better but only after some serious interim grief

But this 'hope' thing?

People who need hope to get by run the very considerable risk of losing it

Should someone only do what they believe to be the Right Thing if they expect success at the end of it?

Or should they do it because they believe it is the Right Thing to do?

I'm all for picking my battles and only getting into fights that I expect to win, at an acceptable cost. That's on one level. On a higher level, if you think in terms of a war that you believe to be worth fighting, rather than the individual battles which make up a war, the fight justifies itself, regardless of the expected outcome. As long as you've been true to yourself and done the best that you can, hope doesn't come into it

If the analogy with warfare seems too melodramatic, think about commercial pilots flying stricken aircraft. If you've ever heard a crash tape there is something uniquely spooky about doomed aircrew working through their recovery routines right up to the moment their plane hits the ground. But however unnatural that behaviour might seem to be, would you rather, as a passenger, have people who behave like that up front or the kind of people who'd take time out on the way down to say, or think, 'gosh, I hope we don't crash'

Bollocks to hope

Spivs like this are in the hope-peddling business...




They are also in the democracy-peddling business

There's a lot of discussion in the Conspirasphere about the nature of, and possible replacements for, the existing money system

There's a lot less discussion about political systems

Which is understandable, given the way that such crucial subjects as economics and civics are misrepresented in our schools

We've all got a lot of catching up to do, and the money thing has been uppermost in most people's minds, but the political system is actually more important as it dictates who controls the money supply

The prevailing narrative goes that democracy is the least worst system available to us and, with the fall of communism, there are no viable alternatives on the table

Cobblers

A little while back, I was supervising a group of young kids; four girls and three boys. They were working on a project that required a series of decisions to be made. And it didn't take too long for the girls to decide that the best way to reach those decisions was on the basis of a majority vote, which they called for regularly. I enjoyed the comedy frustration of the boys for a little while before imposing a somewhat less democratic system of government

Without some constitutional basis which lays down invariable principles, democracy is open to becoming the tyranny of the majority over the minority. Or in the case of most British parliaments in recent years, the minority over the majority

And the mob is very easily bought off with some bread, a few circuses and a dash of cynical fear-mongering

Democracy, fuck yeah!

Plutocrats absolutely love unconstrained democracy. That's why they've got soldiers forcing it on people at gunpoint around the world

It's worth remembering, as many Conspiraloons already appreciate, that the founding fathers of the USA set it up as a Constitutional Republic, not a Democracy, and they thought things through long and hard before doing so.

Admittedly, many of the founding fathers were genocidal slave owners but, perversely, they do appear to have created a system which had the potential to work against their own class interest.

This is not normal, was probably not wholly intentional, and is unlikely to be repeated on a regular basis

Now, here's the tricky question

How do you impose a set of fundamental principles on a society which establish the rights of the individual and minority groups in such a way that they cannot subsequently be removed by the 'democratic' majority?

How do you do that in a democratic way?

And what's to stop the plutocrats imposing their own, deliberately flawed, set of allegedly fundamental principles?

I only mention this because I suspect it might become an issue at some point in the not too super distant future

.

FF15MP Spot the Difference Contest #23

A.

B.

Good ol' Phil

Now, as it happens, I've attended a few of the demos where these kind of offending placards have been displayed and, yes, it's always limited to a handful of demonstrators who operate outside of the mass of far more pleasant protestors (who occasionally offer to share their packed lunches with white infidels such as myself - I recommend the samosas) and, yes, the press photographers do spurn taking representative images and prefer to cluster around the half a dozen rent-a-fanatics like flies around shit

And if your answer to the Spot the Difference Challenge was something like 'at least the BNP would pull the UK out of Iraq and Afghanistan', help yourself to a sweetie from the jar at the front of the room


.

Mainstream Conspiraloons #207 - Lord James of Blackheath

"Wibble"

Now here's something you don't read every day...

"For the past 20 weeks I have been engaged in a very strange dialogue with the two noble Lords, in the course of which I have been trying to bring to their attention the willing availability of a strange organisation which wishes to make a great deal of money available to assist the recovery of the economy in this country. For want of a better name, I shall call it foundation X. That is not its real name, but it will do for the moment. Foundation X was introduced to me 20 weeks ago last week by an eminent City firm, which is FSA controlled. Its chairman came to me and said, "We have this extraordinary request to assist in a major financial reconstruction. It is megabucks, but we need your help to assist us in understanding whether this business is legitimate". I had the biggest put down of my life from my noble friend Lord Strathclyde when I told him this story. He said, "Why you? You're not important enough to have the answer to a question like that". He is quite right, I am not important enough, but the answer to the next question was, "You haven't got the experience for it". Yes I do. I have had one of the biggest experiences in the laundering of terrorist money and funny money that anyone has had in the City. I have handled billions of pounds of terrorist money."

Lord James is 72

.

Mainstream Conspiraloons #136 - Randy Quaid

I originally posted this link on the Conspiraloon Alliance blog because I thought it was too batshit for this blog, but WTF...

.

Time to go away now pt2

Cheers to Anon for the link to this series of presentations by Damon Vrabel entitled 'Debunking Money'

So far, I've watched the first in the series...

...and whilst it doesn't offer much in the way of new material for veteran Loons, Vrabel's delivery is 'concise and easy to understand'

Which might be handy, as we're now getting to the stage where those of us who have been grazing the Net for some time have a pretty good idea of what's going on with the Money thing and, rather than preaching to the choir and discussing this material amongst ourselves, we probably should be thinking about reaching out to the majority of people who are waking up to the fact that they are being rogered senseless but don't quite understand how*

Naturally, I reserve the right to pull the link to Vrabel's videos if and when I discover that he starts talking about Space Newts, dons white robes or instructs viewers to send otherwise worthless money to some bearded Loon and his followers in a compound in the Mojave Desert. That is, after all, a vaguely suspicious haircut he's sporting there



* = Something must be in the air/ water. Otherwise, how else could you account for a once unthinkable headline such as this...

Bank of England Head Mervyn King Proposes Eliminating Fractional Reserve Banking

NB Don't be holding your breath now

.

Time to go away now

Once upon a time if you wanted to bomb the crap out of someone you used to have to use something like this...




The Avro Lancaster. An iconic aircraft viewed with respect and affection by the British people who lived through World War 2. Which, given the huge number of people who died in them and were killed by them, is a pretty strong endorsement for the effectiveness of wartime propaganada

Britain built 7,500 Lancasters at a cost of something like £50,000 each (£1,600,000 in today's money).

About 3,300 of these planes and their crews of seven highly trained men were shot down during the war. Total RAF Bomber Command losses of all types of aircraft was 8,500 planes and 57,000 crew

Which was fab news for the industrialists who sold the aircraft and the bankers who created the money to buy them but, still, not as profitable as it could have been.

Back in those days, building and operating fleets of bombers required masses of skilled labour that needed training and paying

All of which reduced the bottom line severely

Nowadays, thanks to improved technology, if you want to bomb the crap out of someone you can use something like this...



and one of these...


...coming in at a higher unit cost than an Avro Lancaster, a much lower labour component and the operators pay to train themselves whilst they're still children

It would be lovely to think that all those labour savings mean that people who would otherwise be fabricating and operating machinery of mass death would consequently be employed fabricating and operating other, less unpleasant things

Unfortunately, our current System does not require their skills anywhere else either

For something like 100-150 years that System required an educated, skilled workforce to tend machinery and manage empire. Thanks to advances in technology, most of that educated, skilled workforce is now surplus to requirements and the System would like Us to, thanks for everything, go away now

And before We go away, that System would like to hoover up whatever crumbs of capital We managed to collectively accumulate over those last 100-150 years

All of which should be bleeding obvious but a lot of people just don't seem to get it and insist on believing that news like this...




...is somehow an unfortunate consequence of the harsh economic times we live in and not part of a Systematic eradication of a class of people that is now surplus to requirements

It would seem that, by some completely unguided, stochastic process, our colleges and universities are being transformed from institutions which produce educated people capable of productive work and critical thinking into factories which produce dumbed-down debt bitches primed for a lifetime of shitty, service sector jobs and neo-serfdom

Which is just what our establishment needs and wants

What a marvelous coincidence

At which point one could argue till the cows come home whether this marvelous coincidence is...

a) the result of deliberate planning by a shadowy cabal of finance capitalists conspiring away on a little island somewhere

or

b) the natural consequence of finance capitalists acting in their class interest without much in the way of deliberate collusion

But to be honest, as with most of these debates about whether or not a conspiracy is at work, when you are on the receiving end the motivations of the people fucking you are largely academic

Your first priority should be to relieve your tormentors of the means by which they are fucking you

.

Mainstream Relief Valves #17 - George Carlin

Every self-respecting Conspiraloon has already seen the following clip numerous times but it is so beautifully expressed that I've never really tired of it

It's taken from 'Life is Worth Losing', a HBO Special by George Carlin

And what struck me the last time I watched the clip is the enthusiasm of the audience response to Carlin's routine.

In a handful of minutes Carlin, articulately and passionately, summarises the essence of Our predicament. The crowd clearly loves being told about how it is getting f*cked in the rear end and whoops and cheers every time Carlin pauses for breath

And then?

They all went home

And presumably carried on getting f*cked in the rear end as usual

Which, if you think about it for a moment, is quite peculiar behaviour


'You're getting f*cked!'

'Ha Ha, That's so true. Guffaw Guffaw'

'No really. I mean it!'

'Tee Hee. Got to go home now so that I can get up tomorrow and get f*cked some more. Ho Ho'


And if you think about it for a while longer, it's simple enough to figure out why Carlin, and people like Carlin, were and are allowed to have their little rants

Just as long as they're not offering any viable alternatives

Deep Parenti

Thanks to the spectre of cognitive infiltration, the Conspiraloon™ Alliance has few in the way of heroes it can place faith in in these difficult times. Michael Parenti is, however, one of the handful of serious academics such as Peter Dale Scott, Michael Hudson and Jesse 'The Body' Ventura that the Alliance currently looks upon favourably. That is until if and when they are exposed as being the COINTELPRO scum that they possibly are

Definitely not COINTELPRO vermin, probably

As Michael P. himself said recently

'Democracy isn't about trust ...trust is something you should reserve for close friends and loved ones ...and even then you should check them out once in a while'

Thanks to The Antagonist for pointing me to an mp3 of a speech Parenti made earlier this year at the Understanding Deep Politics conference

Michael Parenti: Deep Ideology and Conspiracy

Parenti's getting on a bit and he does lose his way momentarily a couple of times in his presentation. But this is Parenti we're talking about and even a Parenti who pauses occasionally to think to himself about what's for dinner tonight and if he should put on a cardigan or not is still a class act

Highlights of the talk include...

• A listing of the intellectual alternatives to what is now termed 'Conspiracy Theory. Alternatives such as "Innocence theory", "Somnabulist theory", "coincidence theory", "stupidity theory", "incompetence theory" and the trusty old loon favourite "stochastic theory" (shit happens)

• A discussion of how the Few have managed to narrow the range of permitted public political discourse down to a point where any suggestion that the establishment is run by people of deliberate bad faith is designated as being in the same category as Elvis sightings

• Identification of what should be a blindingly obvious point that, for some logically inconsistent reason, it's OK to believe that Labour organises to pursue its own self-interest in the best way that it can but to believe that oligrach's do the same is popularly dismissed as insanity. A notion enthusiastically promoted by media owned and controlled by those self-same oligarchs

Parenti also ponders upon the fact that those who consider themselves to be of the Liberal Left have been suckered into being some of the most vigorous supporters of this kind of elite-serving bullshit thinking

It's Parenti. It's Good Stuff

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Peace through superior firepower

A few days ago I was engaged in conversation with a non-conspiratorially minded chum who works in UK property sales

Times are definitely a changing as, for the first time, he acknowledge to me that, yes, the UK possibly was headed towards a period of severe economic hardship for the massses. He was, however, confident that the UK government 'has got clever people working behind the scenes who can see what's coming and the government probably has already started spending money on starting up some industries that will help pay us out of the mess the country's in'

My response was that there is absolutely no sign of that whatsoever and that whatever industry we could think of getting into, the Asian economies can think of getting into with a much lower cost base.

Even if they consented to enduring the same standard of living as the Chinese or Indians, the wages of British workers cannot be slashed to be competitive with Chinese or Indian labour because UK property costs are so much higher. Property costs that the British have to meet directly in rent or mortgages and indirectly through the rentier element concealed within the price of essential goods and services

However, as I explained to my chum, I have seen copious evidence that the British, and other Western, establishments are preparing for the possiblity of some kind of economic collapse. They haven't invested much in the way of productive manufacturing industry but they have spent shed loads on tooling-up their police forces

But that, my chum argued, was necessary because of the threat of terrorism...

Evidently, he's still in need of a little more conspirasizing

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I've been pulled up a couple of times in this blog for suggesting that British police have become more like para-militaries in recent years. The people who've pulled me up have have referred to the pitched battles, complete with cavalry, during the miners strike and the treatment meted out to people like Blair Peach and Stephen Waldorf as being evidence that the police have always been a bit 'tasty' when it comes to dealing with people who get in their way

And, yes, these commentators have a point but, with all respect, have you taken a look at the British police recently...


Even former senior coppers and yes, though I still can't quite believe it, Max 'Have you read my book about how great the SS were' Hastings have recently written articles suggesting that having machine-gun toting police who can execute people with impunity is probably not the way for supposedly civilised societies to go...

How can the public feel safe when the police are so scared?

Of course, the police have a tough job. But to shoot dead Mark Saunders like a mad dog was an affront to the values of a decent society

Sir Max Hastings - sole liberator of the Falkland Islands and born-again bleeding heart pinko fag subversive

But even these (presumably) principled voices against the militarisation of our police compromise their argument by agreeing that, because of the threat of terrorism, there is a place for some British policemen to be kitted out with the kind of weaponry and mentality that wouldn't be out of place in a 1970s junta, but only sometimes

Now, to me, it's plain as day that the Terror threat is being at least bigged-up, and possibly at least partially instigated, by the numerous interest groups that benefit from a society collectively crapping its pants

But that's actually a moot point

Even if I believed that the Terror threat was 100% genuine and as really, really scary as our Overlords keep telling us it is, we should still reject the surveillence state and militarised police on the time-honoured bases that those who surrender liberty for a little temporary safety really do deserve neither, that freedom has a price and that if we change our society in response to terrorism the terrorists have achieved their objectives

You will hear none of these arguments being promoted by British politicians, journalists or officially sanctioned (low) pressure groups like Liberty

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The gun fashionably displayed by the group of licenced potential killers in this photo is a variant of the iconic Heckler & Koch MP5...




The MP5 can chuck out bullets at rates of up to 500-600 rounds a minute. It's black, it's scary looking and it can kill a lot of people very quickly. It's the kind of high-quality weapon that gives serious gun nuts a roaring chubby just thinking about it.

MP5s, and a smattering of the higher velocity H&K G36, are now a common sight in London in the hands of Metropolitan police officers. If you're ever at one of London's airports take a look up sometime and you'll see police officers at the mezzanine levels strutting around with their MP5s, presumably ready to cut loose from elevated positions of fire at the drop of a hat.

If you think about it for a moment that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Even if the quality of domestic terrorist was to take a quantum leap up from the kind of sad losers who make bombs out of flour and set fire to their underpants to the kind of terrorists who actually have access to guns, are the police really going to open fire with machine guns in crowded airport terminals? And, even if so, why do those armed police have to be there right in front of our fucking faces all the time?

The answer, I fear, is the same reason why the government sent light tanks to Heathrow before the invasion of Iraq. That weaponry is not there to scare potential (and, remember, allegedly suicidal) terrorists. It's there to scare us




The reason why I mention all of this now is because of this recent snippet from the State Broadcasting Company...

Police in training for 'Mumbai-style' gun attack in UK

...suspects were planning to copy the 2008 attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai*, where 10 gunmen went on a three-day rampage, killing 166 people and injuring more than 300, the sources said.

In response police armed response units are being given more powerful weapons.

Our correspondent said the UK authorities had been planning for such an attack ever since Mumbai* happened.

"David Cameron has taken a personal interest in the problem ever since his first threat assessment given to him when he took office in May.

"Now police armed response units are getting their firepower and their stocks of ammunition increased to deal with multiple terrorists armed with automatic weapons," he said.


More powerful than MP5s and G36s?!

What the fuck are they planning to start dishing out?

A few days ago I posted this clip as being a possible model for the introductory titles to any new TV series about the Metropolitan Police...

It was an attempt at weak humour

And it's weaker by the day



* = You remember the Mumbai attack, that's the one that included operatives with connections with US intelligence that the Indians are getting pissy about. A back-story that has been lavishly covered by the British State Broadcasting Company. Or, there again, maybe not.

And don't forget to read the hard-hitting, insightful and totally objective analysis from the SBC's totally unspooky Frank Gardner to the right of the article about UK police being armed with gatling guns or whatever the fuck it is they're getting. Frank's analyses are worth the State Propaganda Tax on their own

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