Stef's Blog - a native London Southlander and unrepentant 'Conspiraloon™' who doesn't trust anyone, not even himself. Sometimes I take pictures. I also enjoy swearing immensely and think much faster than I can type, so each post comes guaranteed to include at last one confusing typo. OK?
It struck me recently that, considering that this is a ‘conspiraloon’’s blog, this site is far too light on UFO-related posts
...because, as we are constantly reminded, belief in UFOs and undead Elvises (Elvi?) follows disbelief in official terrorism narratives as sure as night follows day
My problem is that I've approached the subject of alien space friend visitations with as open a mind as possible in the past but have personally concluded that the evidence available to support the belief in little green/ grey/ purple visitors is on the, um, thin side
And I am amused by the fact that there are quite a few ‘rationalist’, conspiracy theory debunker types out there who are actually sympathetic to the alien UFO thing - off the back of the same Law of (apparently) Very Large Numbers which is used to make Neo-Darwinism look like it adds up.
My opinion is that the really intriguing UFO sightings which appear to have a basis in genuinely unusual events are consistent with covert testing programs and associated disinformation campaigns
The kinds of pre-historic strangeness which have been extensively, and creatively, documented by the likes of Daniken and Hancock do not require hypothetical alien intervention and are consistent with our ancestors being a lot cleverer than we have given them credit for. A misconception possibly aided by some pre-historic wipe-out event
...all very testable/ researchable imho and not an indication of any kind of lunacy, even if subsequently disproved
What's interesting is that, until relatively recently, very little consideration has been given by UFO buffs and debunkers alike to the possibility that many genuinely unusual sightings may have been of test vehicles
The fact that many of the most interesting UFO sightings have taken place near to military test sites really should have been a bit of a give away
Scooby Doo fans will have a head start in comprehending the possibility that much UFOlogy is actually a deliberate distraction from more terrestrial considerations by simply performing the following substitutions..
Secret gold mine –> Lockheed Martin test facility Holographic ghost projection device –> Cattle Mutilations Suspicious looking caretaker seen at the start of every show –> National Security Agency
which is why I'm also of the firm opinion that serious consideration should be given to the possibility that the current global economic crisis might be the work of ghost pirates and not the banking elite
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The reason why I’m raising the subject of UFOs now is that there was some coverage in the papers and the television last week about declassified British UFO sightings. We also learned that BBC’s Newsnight has a ‘UFO Editor’…
One of the declassified reports, in particular, caught my eye as it mentioned strange sightings over Waterloo Bridge
Years ago, back in the 80's, I used to walk across Waterloo Bridge most nights on the way to work. Occasionally, I would see a vaguely saucer-shaped grouping of coloured flashing lights hovering and moving around in a peculiar fashion over the Thames.
Because it was dark there were very few clues as to how far away or how big the collection of the lights was.
One night I spotted the source of these mysterious sightings... Some bloke standing in an alcove by the Festival Hall, working his highly-customised kite, pissing himself with glee
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
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...
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...
One of the following videos is taken from the best and, as is increasingly turning out, the most prophetic British cartoon show ever made, Monkey Dust. The other isn't...
And it will be a cold day in Hell before the BBC releases Series Two or Three of MD on DVD or commissions a fourth. Way too near the mark...
Thanks to anon and Lord P. for the links
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edit: and if you want to see something really scary you could do a lot worse than checking out this passionate appeal on the subject of lost children from US First Lady Laura Bush ('embedding disabled by request'). No rapid blinking or fidgety gestures from Laura - disturbingly so. Watching stuff like this can really bring out the David Icke in a person
------------------------------------------------------------ The Cult of the Amateur ------------------------------------------------------------
"If we are all amateurs, there are no experts."
Andrew Keen's new book, The Cult of the Amateur is the latest addition to the Newsnight book club. In it, the author expresses his concern for the profligacy of online amateurism, spawned by the digital revolution. This, he feels, has had a destructive impact on our culture, economy and values.
He says, "[They] can use their networked computers to publish everything from uninformed political commentary, to unseemly home videos, to embarrassingly amateurish music, to unreadable poems, reviews, essays, and novels".
He complains that blogs are "collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics, to commerce, to arts and culture".
He claims that Wikipedia perpetuates a cycle of misinformation and ignorance, and labels YouTube inane and absurd, "showing poor fools dancing, singing, eating, washing, shopping, driving, cleaning, sleeping, or just staring at their computers."
He warns that old media is facing extinction - "say goodbye to experts and cultural gatekeepers - our reporters, news anchors, editors, music companies, and Hollywood movie studios."
What do you think? We've published two extracts from Andrew Keen's book on the Newsnight website. Have a read and share your thoughts - is he being alarmist about the effects of the Web 2.0 revolution, or raising genuine concerns? Are we at the mercy of the amateur? Can kids tell the difference between credible news sources and the amateur's blog? What,in any case, can be done?
Presumably the Newsnight production team are talking about the kind of credible news sources which...
Label anyone who doubts proven liars in our government and security forces as being mentally unbalanced
When the number of people with doubts gets so large that the insanity claim doesn’t stick they try and sow a little racial division instead
Unashamedly try to stoke up enthusiasm for a couple of wars of aggression, even whilst the last couple of wars they helped lie us into are still raging
Yes, I suppose the Newsnight team must be referring to those kind of credible news sources.
I’m still waiting for Newsnight’s credible take on Andrei Lugovoi's claim last week that MI6 was involved in some way in the Litvinenko poisoning
The press conference was on Thursday morning
per Newsnight’s Thursday email, the stories covered by the program that night were
- TORY U-TURN? - BUSH AND CLIMATE CHANGE - AFGHANISTAN - MADELEINE McCANN
Then on Friday…
- ALAN JOHNSTON - CHILD PORNOGRAPHY - BLAIR IN SOUTH AFRICA - ENGLAND FOOTBALL FRIENDLY
Now you could argue that those other stories were more important than the Lugavoi press conference. I would counter by saying that if Muslims had been involved in smearing radioactive crap all over London, Newsnight would have run a hour long special on Lugavoi’s claims. Still, I’m sure the Newsnight team will get round to covering the story as soon as Alex Goldfarb faxes them with the details of what to say. That's how they've handled the Litvinenko story so far
What really baffles me is where are all these British based blogs that represent such a dangerously-flawed alternative to the established media?
I’m buggered if I can find them
If you do a Google search on the name ‘Mark Urban’; that purveyor by Royal Appointment of the finest spooky disinformation about the 7/7 bombings, Islamic Terrorism and the Occupation of Iraq, this blog, this poxy personal blog, comes in at number one
If I have achieved nothing else tapping away at this keyboard for last couple of years that achievement alone has made it all worthwhile. However, patting myself on the back aside, the fact is that the number of blogs out there that are really getting stuck into 'professionals' like Mark is tiny. If the Internet really was such a hotbed of media subversion, I shouldn’t come out on top (there’s a cracking piece on Urban Myths here BTW)
Someone recently included a link to this blog in a viral exercise to name and link to five blogs that each person in the chain approved of. My particular branch stopped with me as I couldn’t think of three, let alone five, regularly updated British blogs that I thought were worth reading that were not tainted in some way. What there is a lot of out there is a mass of really fucked off people who, even though they don’t have the time or inclination to maintain their own platform, do make their feelings clear on other people's sites, including the Internet arms of mainstream news organisations.
And the reason why those people are annoyed is that they know full well they are being systematically lied to by those mainstream outlets.
This is not some abstract game and people have good cause to feel hatred towards the whores who peddle this muck. Their lies pave the way for exploitation, war and death.
So, my suggested answer to Newsnight's question 'What, in any case, can be done?' is 'At least try telling the fucking truth for a change' and then people might stop switching off
There’s one curious aspect of the domestic Islamic terror threat that a few of us out here can’t help noticing.
And that is, even though we are repeatedly told that there are countless thousands of Islamic nutcases preaching for and organising Holy Jihad across the country, the television and newspapers only report the antics of the same handful of people.
This small group of people also seem to have an uncanny ability to turn up at public meetings and make complete tits of themselves, and by implication all British Muslims, in front of TV cameras precisely at times that are extremely convenient to our present government’s agenda.
The fact that this small group includes several recent converts to Islam is, I’m sure, entirely coincidental.
Now the problem for our government is this…
If you’ve only got a handful of assorted nutcases and possible spooks out there giving a face and a voice to the bullcrap that is the domestic War on Terror how do you best manage such a scarce resource?
You want them out there talking the kind of hate that scares everyone but on the other hand if they do talk that kind of hate sooner or later you really are obliged to arrest them
And if you do arrest them it is not as if there are thousands of other people out there who could take their place as the face of British Islamic extremism.
And so we are treated to the farce of our government, police and newspapers using the antics of an ever-diminishing number of people to justify claims such as we are facing a threat greater than that presented by Nazi Germany in WW2.
Yup, that's what the head of the Metropolitan Police said, with a perfectly straight face, a few months ago.
For fuck’s sake…
So much for British unflappability and the stiff-upper lip.
By my reckoning the Establishment is now having to collar the extremely limited supply of British-based 'Islamofascists' faster than it can find them.
So who are they going to put on Newsnight from now on?
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PS the pictures used in this post were taken from the quite unaccountably excellent Monkey Dust – which ran to three series before a) its producer died, and probably more significantly b) the 7/7 bombings happened.
Series’ Two and Three heavily featured the antics of two incompetent Jihadist terrorists from the West Midlands and their dubious controller ‘Omar’. All of which proved far too near to the knuckle in the wake of 7/7 and the Official Narrative of what happened that day. A sample clip of Abdul and Shafiq’s adventures can be found on GooTube here
Unsurprisingly, Series Two and Series Three of Monkey Dust have yet to be released on DVD by the BBC (their availability as torrents is an entirely different story). The surprising thing is that the Beeb actually broadcast the series in the first place.
Sundry links of no great sociological import which have made me smile recently...
The Internet
National stereotypes courtesy of Google - "All of these pictures were the first Google Image result for French man, French woman, Mongolian woman, Mongolian man, Korean man and so on..."
Uncyclopedia – like Wikipedia but riddled with lies. Which means that, in practice, it’s exactly the same as the real Wikipedia much of the time – I found the entry on Richard Dawkins (courtesy of T-Mix) to be particularly fact-packed and informative
Tibet - Underground Expeditions - the photographic chronicles of some loon who spends his time kayaking around sewers, placing malformed die-cast figurines at random around those sewers and photographing them. For some reason that I can't articulate this strikes me as a particularly French thing to do, even though I haven't the faintest idea what his nationality is.
I found it to be quite amusing and I thought no more of it. Being British I didn’t dream for a second that it was based on a real CIA cartoon bear character.
How wrong I was...
Ginger, the badly drawn CIA bear, is the star of the CIA for Kids webpage and gets up to all sorts of badly-illustrated adventures in CIA HQ in Langley, Virginia – walking in the garden, being issued with an entry pass, eating in the staff canteen…
Ginger checking out CIA Central, including that strange Kryptos thing
Ginger is only a little bear so he hasn’t been assigned any overseas missions yet – destabilising democratically elected Leftist governments, supervising extraordinary rendition and torture, stuff like that – or maybe he has but if he told us he’d have to kill us all with a fake heart attack afterwards.
When people think of the CIA, they think of people lurking around in trenchcoats, sending messages in code, and using cool tools to do their job. Well, to some extent that's true, but it's not the whole story. The Central Intelligence Agency's job is to help the President, the National Security Council, and all other government officials who make and carry out US national security policy. We do this in two ways:
We give accurate and timely intelligence (or information) on foreign threats to our security.
We conduct counterintelligence or other special activities relating to foreign intelligence and national security when the President asks us to.
Inspired by Ginger’s adventures I performed a few quick Google searches for other Security Agencies for Kids pages and was not disappointed -
There’s the NSA for Kids homepage featuring the adventures of the Cryptokids
Interestingly, the Cryptokids have been trademarked which opens the intriguing possibility that the US National Security Agency may be planning to diversify into the commercial cartoon business at some point.
And then there's the FBI for Kids homepage featuring Steve, Kim, Shirley and Darrell, as well as Special Undercover Agent 'Bobby Bureau' (not his real name)
Having worked through most of the activities sections in all these pages I have established that the FBI site features the best colouring-in pages and the NSA has the most challenging code-breaking puzzles – which is how things should be.
Sadly, once I started searching outside of the US I had considerably less luck. Neither MI6, Mossad, the FSB or the DGSE appear to have dedicated children’s pages. Scotland Yard has a Youth Section but it’s filled with boring stuff like features on drug-taking, violent assault and rape and, as far as I can tell, no cuddly cartoon characters, maze puzzles or photo-adventure stories
Very disappointing.
National Security in the 21st century is all about infowar and the winning of hearts and minds. And where better to start than with the young, the mentally weak and the barely literate in the way that American security agencies have done? As I’ve already mentioned in previous posts, the British should seriously consider following the US example…
Ollie the Spooky MI6 Owl (or is he a Transformer?) -
The bumbling adventures of Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair as COBRACommander -
'Hello Boys and Girls. Can you help me find the Dead Brazilian?'
Whilst on the subject of mental defectives and cute puppies, Barney the Dog’s new Christmas video ‘Barney’s Holiday Extravaganza’ is now available on the White House Homepage, along with a series of seasonal muzak MP3s performed by the USMC Band for free download.
And just in case anyone in the White House realises that producing a video of the Leader of the Free World talking to a dog about Christmas parties whilst his country is at war is just a little bit insensitive and takes it down, someone has also put a copy of the video up on You Tube for posterity...
Blavius: They are not a logical race, Wise One! They go around chopping down trees for tables, when they have perfectly good tummies to eat on. How logical is that?!
Otter Leader:Yes! The great Dawkins said we cannot tolerate those who don't use reason! How reasonable is it to eat off wood instead of your tummy?
Wise One:Well perhaps the great Dawkins wasn't so wise. Oh, he was intelligent, but, some of the most intelligent otters I've ever known were completely lacking in common sense. Maybe, some otters do need to believe in something. Who knows? Maybe, just believing in God makes God exist.
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