I have seen the face of God...

and today's whimsical retro film clip comes from Network...




People of a certain age, my age, grew up with stuff like this. Not that it changed anything...

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Thought for the Day

and today's Thought for the Day comes from Harry Lime





...actually, 500 years of democracy, peace and brotherly love produced the cuckoo clock and a great big fuck-off bill

Just in case any fellow Loons still aren't up to speed with this thing, this is what's going on

• Banks engaged in billions/ trillions/ quadrillions of of nonsense paper trades amongst each other
  

• Our governments are now in the process of honouring the debts and liabilities arising from those nonsense trades
  

• Governments are underwriting the debts and liabilities of those trades with the income that will be extracted from our future labours. Those fuckers are mortgaging and swopping all our futures like casino chips
  

• Because the bank trades weren't based on anything real, the resulting debts and liabilities potentially exceed the value of everything in the known universe, plus interest

• The current system is fucked

• It will not die easy or voluntarily

None of the above is LoonTalk©, a Loon would add...

• This was all encouraged and manufactured deliberately

Here's the link to the full version of Harry's timeless soliloquy, featuring my personal favourite line...

"You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things. Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax - the only way you can save money nowadays."





Best British film ever? 'course it is

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Roll me over, roll me over, roll me over, roll me over, do it again...

Rollover, 1981

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On Her Majesty's Secret Service

The Official Trailer to the Bond film with the most memorable soundtrack and most patently inebriated lead man...



Posted for two reasons

1) the bit that goes...

'and Diana Rigg as the contessa, a different kind of Bond woman. She's got class!!'

...just before Diana Rigg gets her tits out

and

2) A very suave looking Osama bin Blofeld's curiously contemporary threat to all humanity round about 1:40 into the trailer...

Other people are reportedly big OHMSS fans too

-

and whilst I have plenty of good reasons to believe and argue that financial shenanigans are a major factor in the recent spikes in food prices, non-human parasitic funghi are playing their part also. Given the potential significance of one strain in particular, it's seems curious that this risk isn't receiving anything like the coverage that it appears to merit

Ug99 - not nice, not nice at all...

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Good Quotes from Good Movies #427

"All this anarchy for FIVE POXY GRAND!!"

(taken from a comment underneath Matthew Parris' article about this week's shenanigans - and it's about time The Long Good Friday got a look in; what with Northern Rock, those missing disks and the David Abrahams thing all taking place in the North East of England all the movie references being made have been 'Get Carter this' and bloody 'Get Carter that'...)

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"The Emma 9000 unit appears to be malfunctioning"

"You are not fooling anyone, you filthy pervert"

Over the weekend I was chatting with someone who had recently experienced some frustration with an automated supermarket check-out unit and who admitted that, for a moment, they had forgotten that they were arguing with a talking computer

A fairly standard device in late 1960s/1970s sci-fi films was to include a scene where the hero of the film would engage in dialogue with a human-sounding computer. The computer would then get stuck in some kind of repetitive loop or the voice would start speaking... v... e... r... y... s... l... o... w... l... y... ; leaving our hero in some kind of doodoo as the result of being in an environment where he was reliant on a unreasoning, unemotional box of wires

70s sci-fi films were fucking excellent

A few days before my supermarket check-out chat I was kicking my heels at Cockfosters underground station at the end of the Piccadilly Line

There were no fecking trains

The guard on the ticket barrier struck up a conversation with me and we got to chatting about all things Piccadilly Line and some of the joys of traveling on that particular route. Anyone who uses the Piccadilly Line regularly will know what we were talking about and there’s no reason to go over them here

We had plenty of time to chat because…

There were no fecking trains

What made the conversation particularly special was that every few minutes a recorded voice would blare out from the station speakers

‘There is a good service operating on the Piccadilly Line’

After about the third or fourth play of that message, the guard said to me…

‘You can’t believe how bloody annoying that message is when there are problems on the line’

London Underground have been regularly playing messages and putting up signs which talk about a ‘Good’ service across the network for a couple of years now

'Good', of course, means ‘Normal’ and the purpose of endlessly repeating such inane messages can only be an attempt to subliminally convince passengers that London Underground’s service isn’t shit

I wonder how much they stumped up to management consultants for coming up with that little wheeze

So, there you are walking around London Underground stations listening to crude attempts at low-grade brainwashing; delivered in the kind of recorded voice that we are accustomed to hearing in dystopic sci-films delivering messages like…

‘Thirty minutes to reactor core meltdown. Do not be alarmed. Everything is under control’

Anyway, I only mentioned all this because Emma Clarke the woman who has been recording the bollocks messages for London Underground for the last eight years has just been given the boot by Transport for London for recording a series of spoof announcements and posting them on her blog

Spoof announcements such as…

* "We would like to remind our American tourist friends that you are almost certainly talking too loudly."

* "Residents of London are reminded that there are other places in Britain outside your stinking shit hole of a city and that if you remove your heads from your arses for just a couple of minutes you may realise that the M25 is not the edge of the Earth"

* "Would the passenger in the red shirt pretending to read the paper but who is actually staring at that woman's chest please stop. You are not fooling anyone, you filthy pervert."

* "Would passengers filling in answers on their Sudokus please accept that they are just crosswords for the unimaginative and are not in any way more impressive just because they contain numbers."

* "Passengers are reminded that a smile is actually a friendship signal, not a sign of weakness"

* "Do not drop litter on the train. Please use the tramps provided"

* "Here we are again crammed into a sweaty tube carriage… and today’s Wednesday, only two more days before you can binge drink yourself into a state of denial about the mediocrity of your life. Oh, for goodness sake. If you're female smile at the bloke next to you and make his day. He's probably not had sex for months"




The spoof messages are still available on Emma’s home page, though it does seem to be struggling with bandwidth issues at the moment. And if you do visit I strongly recommend flipping through her blog and the fascinating insights it offers into the voice-over business. The post ‘How to make reading credit examples fun!’ which ends with the plea 'Any suggestions as to how to jazz up credit examples are very welcome’ is pure gold.


cf. Chris Morris spoof airport announcements

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New Customers Only pt2

Yet another satisfied Northern Rock customer

See also: 'You're a big bank, but you're in bad shape. With me it's a full time job. Now behave...'

Satisfied Northern Rock customer discussing recent corporate strategy decisions with a Northern Rock board member

etc etc

-

PS Best opening credits to a British film ever?



As always, I am quietly confident that everyone knows the answer to that question

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How in the world did you get hold of so much silk?

And today's readings from the Good Book and it's movie adaptation are...


Chapter. 35

"Milo had been caught red-handed in the act of plundering his countrymen, and, as a result, his stock had never been higher. He proved as good as his word when a rawboned major from Minnesota curled his lip in rebellious disavowal and demanded his share of the syndicate Milo kept saying everybody owned. Milo met the challenge by writing the words 'A Share' on the nearest scrap of paper and handing it away with a virtuous disdain that won the envy and admiration of virtually everyone who knew him."


Chapter. 28

"The escape hatches in the front and rear sections flew open while the sea was still foaming white and green around the plane, and the men scrambled out as speedily as they could in their flaccid orange Mae West life jackets that had failed to inflate and dangled limp and useless around their necks and waists. The life jackets failed to inflate because Milo had removed the twin carbon-dioxide cylinders from the inflating chambers to make the strawberry and crushed-pineapple ice-cream sodas he served in the officers' mess hall and had replaced them with mimeographed notes that read 'What's good for M&M Enterprises is good for the country'."





Movie transcript:

"Where the hell's my parachute? All right, which one of you bastards stole my parachute? Hello, this is the bombardier here. We gotta turn back. Nately, we gotta turn back now. Nately! Do you hear me up there? We gotta turn back. We're gonna turn back now. Nately, let's turn back. We're gonna turn back!

What is it this time, Yossarian?

Some bastard stole my chute!

Anything the matter?

My parachute. It's gone!

Don't worry.

What do you mean? What do I do if I have to bail out? Use my handkerchief?

That kind of humour in the face of adversity keeps America strong. I like you.

Aardvark, I' d like to kill you, but I haven't got time.

You could have my chute but I gave it to Milo.

You gave it to Milo?

He's got all the chutes. He's got a hell of a deal going for silk in Alexandria.

Maybe I do have time to kill..."

-

and what a fascinating few days it has been in the world's financial markets. I've been taking immense amounts of childish pleasure making a series of crank phone calls and sending abusive emails to friends who work in the City - paying particular emphasis on a couple of guys I had a drink with only a few weeks ago who were confidently insisting that the fallout from the losses on US mortgages had already been priced into the markets.

That's the kind of razor-sharp financial acumen which has made London the global finance centre that it is

We are now at one of the most amusing stages of the farce that is the managed boom-bust cycle when the people responsible for selling equities and financial instruments are busy telling their clients that now is an excellent buy!! opportunity, whilst quietly unwinding their own positions just in case everything really does go tits up

And maybe they're right. Maybe this isn't the Big One. Maybe the bubble won't burst just yet. It could have popped two, three or four years ago but it didn't. Only the people holding the needle really know when that's going to happen and they're not in the business of telling

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US announces change in Al Qaeda tactics

Doug McClure and the remarkable Dana Gillespie on the trail of the Al-Qaeda Fortress that Time Forgot

Whilst on the subject of War on Terror bullshit, this little snippet from Reuters tickled me...


U.S. says Qaeda safe haven inaccessible WASHINGTON (Reuters)

- Al Qaeda's safe haven in northwestern Pakistan is largely inaccessible to outside forces and unlikely to be eliminated soon by the U.S. or Pakistani military, top intelligence officials said on Wednesday.

"Al Qaeda is now in a part of Pakistan that is largely inaccessible to Pakistani forces, the Pakistani government. Always has been. And it is a very difficult operating environment for them," said Edward Gistaro, the top U.S. intelligence analyst on transnational threats.

"It is just a very difficult environment for outside forces to operate in," he added.

Al-Qaeda bases are now located in regions so inaccessible they may have their own Jurassic-era ecosystems...

Movie geeks of a certain age cannot help but notice that Al-Qaeda's reported tactics are gradually shifting away from recycled James Bond plots (coordinated global crime networks/ underground bases) and starting to be more in line with classic 'Lost World' genre movies of the 1970s





And, of course, every movie geek knows that the most effective way to penetrate lost worlds is to fly through a swarm of pterodactyls in an airship piloted by an eccentric English aristocrat and his butler.

Somebody needs to tell the people in charge of US counter-terror ops to change their tactics ASAP

In the meantime, another picture of Dana doing that pagan woman thing which, intercut with scenes of fighting dinosaurs, left a profound impression on 13 year old boys everywhere...



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Pyramid Spotting with Stanley K - redux

A few weeks ago I linked to what I thought was an amusing fan review of A Clockwork Orange

I linked to it because a) I'm a big Kubrick fan, and b) I'm also more than a little keen on symbolism hidden amongst us within popular culture.

The insight offered by the review into the possible symbolism of the movie's iconic poster was worth the admission price alone...




A couple days after I linked to the video the author, Rob Ager, pulled it off Youtube

He's just uploaded a revised version in three parts which can be seen here, here and here

Ager has included an interesting explanation for his behaviour at the start of the first segment

Apparently, he received some shit for being a 'conspiracy theorist'. Not so much from ordinary people but from professional on-line journalists




Consequently, he felt a need to withdraw his original piece and replace it with a slightly updated version

The pussy

The interesting part to me is that even in the original version it was clear that he wasn't advocating any conspiracy theories. All he was doing was suggesting that Kubrick had included some particular imagery and themes in his film




Kubrick himself was definitely into some weird stuff and his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, makes absolutely no sense unless you recognise that Kubrick was referring to a covert ruling elite who are into even weirder stuff

But two minutes spent on Ager's site will make it pretty clear that Ager is simply a movie buff who is exploring the themes and ideas in some of his favourite films

And if a film includes some peculiar symbolism, so be it




And we've come to a state of affairs where even that is reason enough for professional journalists to call him a nutter and describe his work as 'wank' not on its inherent merit but on the basis that they've labeled him a 'conspiracy theorist'

How well those fuckers have been trained

Which, given the film in question, seems more than a little ironic

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Not Part of the Secret Elite?

DEPRESSED BECAUSE YOU WEREN'T INVITED to the secret Bilderberg conference?

(yes I am, how did you know?)

NOT PART OF THE ULTRA-ELITE?

The next best thing: Get your own Secret
"Bilderberg" Conference Items right here!

http://www.cafepress.com/Bilderberg

(From Sal by way of comment on a previous post - thx)


Got to go now, Rambo III is on TV - complete with some of the most hysterical geopolitically-dated movie dialogue of all time...


Colonel Trautman: The Kremlin's got a hell of a sense of humor.
Zaysen: Please explain.
Colonel Trautman: You talk peace and disarmament. And here you are wiping out a race of people!

...

Mousa: This is Afghanistan... Alexander the Great try to conquer this country... then Genghis Khan, then the British. Now Russia. But Afghan people fight hard, they never be defeated. Ancient enemy make prayer about these people... you wish to hear?
Rambo: Um-hum.
Mousa: Very good. It says, 'May God deliver us from the venom of the Cobra, teeth of the tiger, and the vengeance of the Afghan.' Understand what this means?
Rambo: That you guys don't take any shit?
Mousa: Yes... something like this.

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Taking Liberties 9/11

Over the last few weeks I’ve had several beery, caffeine and tobacco fueled chats with small groups of people who have expressed a shared sense of frustration about the behaviour of our government and the limited opportunities there are to legally and peacefully express that frustration and do something to change things...

• You could attend some demos and waste your time annoying some rank and file policemen who probably love the current government no more than you do
  
  
• You could write a blog but that’s essentially a passive occupation and one that will never reach the majority of people who simply don’t read blogs
  
  
• You could hand out leaflets, file Freedom of Information requests, lobby and heckle media outlets to publish material that might wake a few people up.
  
  However, once again, even if you have some success you are unlikely to penetrate the skulls of the majority of people who are much more preoccupied with what they believe to be more important or more interesting things...

‘I know! Why not make a commercially-distributed feature film about the bad things that are happening in this country!’

Good thinking

And, as luck would have it, somebody has.

It’s called ‘Taking Liberties’ and the now mandatory attempt at a web-based viral campaign is underway...

including a Film Makers blog. A blog which includes the line…

“Though the death threats and accusations of us all being Hard Let/Hard Right/MI5 Agents are starting to trickle through”

It can’t be much of a trickle as I’m having real trouble finding anything on-line to that effect.

Hmmm, tempting…

I’ll pass on making any death threats, that’s not my style, and I haven’t actually seen the film, so levelling specific accusations of insecurity force involvement would be unreasonable and a little bit mental. There are, however, already grounds for caution as far as participating in the viral marketing of this movie or pointing people towards it without having seen it

Reasons why the old spider-sense is already tingling -


A glittering galaxy of celebrity gobshites…

The movie features the same old shower of ineffective tools of the state-funded, state-endorsed opposition; Titans of civil liberties such as Tony Benn, Shami Chakrabarti and Boris Johnson. The kind of people who already have copious access to newsprint and airwaves and have achieved precisely fuck all in the way of preventing the encroachment of authoritarian government in the UK over the last 10 years. Their only real achievement has been to fill a void that might otherwise have been occupied by someone with something genuinely challenging or constructive to say.

So, why anyone in their right mind would be expected to fork out eight quid and give up a Saturday night to watch more of the same useless bollocks eludes me.

"Shami Chakrabountybarti has been the director of Liberty since September 2003. After graduating from the London School of Economics, Chakrabarti worked as a barrister at the Home Office, before joining Liberty on 10 September 2001. She spent the following two years campaigning against the anti-terrorist measures which followed the 9/11 attacks in the USA, such as ATCSA, and is a prominent opponent of recent counter-terrorism legislation. She is a frequent contributor to BBC Radio 4 and to The Independent newspaper on the topic of human rights and civil liberties." - I had an interesting chat with a friend of mine yesterday who has direct personal experience of the kind of solid, 'effective' campaigning Shami has been engaged in, in the context of this story about 'sword and cudgel' brandishing peace protestors - it would be nice if that friend recorded her experience on-line at some point - you know who you are... ;-)

The marketing of the movie stinks of Michael Moore, tastes like Michael Moore, is Michael Moore…

Looking at the promo poster for 'Taking Liberties' for the first time I couldn’t help but be struck by how much it looked like publicity material for some awful piece of mainstream Hollywood tat. Some of the tag lines floating about reinforce that feeling. You know, guff like this...

‘You’ll laugh! You’ll cry! Robin Williams is The Ringtone Revolutionary. The unconventional civil liberties activist with a heart of gold’

Experience tells me that any movie which shamelessly describes itself as ‘Hilarious’ or ‘The most important film of the decade’ is highly unlikely to be anything of the sort.

The feeling of déjà vu was so strong I decided to click around a little to see exactly which other poster the ‘Taking Liberties’ poster reminded me of. I must have been lucky because it only took one click…




Oh yes, Fahrenheit 9/11. And it only took a little more clicking to establish that ‘F9/11’ and ‘Taking Liberties’ share a producer.

Well, fuck me sideways. What a small world it is.

And I have seen F9/11

The movie that was going to swing the last US Presidential election from the war-mongering Republican to the anti-war (sic.) Democratic party. The movie that explained that 9/11 happened because a) George Bush is an idiot and b) the Saudis did it.

I’ve met a few people who have actually thought F9/11 was quite good; right up until I gave a couple of examples of why it is not. My favourite being the coverage of Bush’s behaviour in that Florida school on the morning of 9/11. Moore plays the scene as if Bush is a bumbling fool paralyzed by indecision. What Moore doesn’t ask, effectively misdirecting the viewer in the process, is why Bush’s security team didn’t whisk him out of the room as soon as they heard about the first, or even the second, WTC strike...

Moore’s entire film is a work of misdirection and somehow manages to spend 2 hours talking about 9/11 without actually addressing any of the serious questions arising from that day. Which is a major achievement in itself.

And on the subject of Michael Moore, I’d like to direct trivia fans to the part of his Wikibio that talks about the making of his first film Roger and Me...

“Moore was largely taught the craft of film making by his cinematographer Kevin Rafferty, who is ironically also a first cousin of President George W. Bush“

Ironic is not the word I would have used in that context


Taking Liberties totally misses the point (probably)

OK, not having seen the movie this is a speculative concern but I’d put money on this being the case.

One purpose for which Michael Moore’s movies such as F9/11 and Bowling for Columbine are genuinely useful for is as learning tools for the study of how people are wanked-off by faux opposition. In the case of F9/11, Moore employs two techniques in particular; heaping as much blame as possible on an expendable puppet idiot (Bush) and misdirecting the audience through acts of omission…

And lo and behold, who features prominently on the ‘Taking Liberties’ poster?

None other than Tony Blair

Given that the film is scheduled for general release on 8th June and Blair is leaving office on the 27th that yields a shelf-life for presumably one of the central themes of the movie of precisely 19 days.

You couldn’t make it up

One of the depressing aspects of the opposition to the erosion of civil liberties in this country over the last ten years is how so many people on the Left have kidded themselves that what has happened is some kind of Blair-specific aberration. Once Blair leaves, so the fantasy goes, everything will be just fucking peachy and life will somehow return to normal.

This fantasy doesn’t square with reality. Blair didn’t vote for That War on his own and the same bunch of elected turds who voted for That War have just voted, amongst many other shameful votes, to exclude themselves from Freedom of Information legislation.

Admittedly, I’m not being entirely fair on all Labour supporters. Given that the Labour Party has lost half its membership over the last few years, a good number of people on the Left clearly have twigged to what’s going on and presumably understand that it’s not a Blair-specific issue.

(And I’m not invoking any conspiracy theories here but there really is something quite creepy about how so many of the decent, senior Labour MPs who could have replaced or challenged Blair (or Brnwoown) have died, Omen-style, over the years)

Even if you kid yourself that we retain the democratic tools that enable us to ultimately vote out the worst offenders, that still wouldn’t be enough. So much of our critical national infrastructure, including our security infrastructure, has been handed over to quasi-autonomous or privately controlled organisations, beyond public scrutiny or account, that it simply defies rational belief that it is all down solely to Blair and his immediate circle or that the direction our government is pursuing will change once Blair leaves.

The system is fundamentally broke but don’t expect anyone speaking to a mainstream audience to address crucial questions such as ‘Who is benefiting from this?’, ‘How are they exercising their influence?’, ‘What can we do to stop it?’

But the real killer omission I’m expecting from ‘Taking Liberties’, the omission that will have many viewers leaving the film with a nagging feeling that something wasn’t quite right but they’re not quite sure what, is the fundamental failure by all corporate- and state-permitted opposition to tackle the central issue that drives so much of the repression our government is carrying out in our name…

If people continue to genuinely believe that the UK is infested with hundreds of terror cells comprised of thousands of highly trained, well-funded, suicidally motivated lunatics with access to nuclear and biological weapons, lunatics who want to kill as many people as possible simply because they live in a free country, then no-one is going to care a flying fuck about civil liberties

(though, obviously, neutering the terrorists' core motivation by cunningly making your country less free is an intriguing proposition)

I believe that, if not entirely a state-creation, there is absolutely no doubt that the terror threat is being cynically exaggerated to serve political agendas. There is also a real risk, and there are signs that this is indeed happening, that the War on Terror will become a self-realising myth. If you kick people long enough, particularly people who believe in something, they will kick back.

Not one fucker permitted mainstream opportunities to talk about the erosion of civil liberties will touch this issue with a barge-pole. Unless someone does, this civil liberties thing will, to put it bluntly, continue to be viewed by the vast majority of people as being a theoretical concern of a few chattering middle-class Whiteboys and a bunch of chippy Pakis who have no-one to blame except for people of their own kind

And that’s the sad truth

I know at least a few people out there share the feelings I had on 7/7 and the days that followed it. Without wanting to sound melodramatic, something profoundly Evil was unleashed that day and I’m not talking about Islamic terrorism.

I really hope that ‘Taking Liberties’ tackles that Evil head on. I honestly do. But I won’t be holding my breath.

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The Law of Fives

"The Law of Fives states simply that: ALL THINGS HAPPEN IN FIVES, OR ARE DIVISIBLE BY OR ARE MULTIPLES OF FIVE, OR ARE SOMEHOW DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY APPROPRIATE TO 5. The Law of Fives is never wrong"

Alternatively

"Everything can be related to the number five if you try hard enough"

-

Sticking with the subject of that last post on the inclusion of elite symbolism in mainstream movies, for my sins, I saw The Good Shepherd last week.

Truth be told, it’s not a very good film; either as information or entertainment.

It is worth watching, however, as an example of Hollywood pretending to deal with a contentious issue, such as the role of the CIA in the post-WW2 world, and fluffing it.

Yup, there sure is a lot of fluffing, mental as opposed to physical, going on in that movie.

A few scenes in the film, as in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut before it, attempt to grapple with the unsettling fact that members of our ruling elite are frequently members of the kind of fruity little clubs that make Scientology look rational. It’s hard not to watch the homo-erotic Skull and Bones rituals depicted in The Good Shepherd and not be reminded of the persistent rumours over the years that kiddy fiddling features high on the list of that jaded elite’s favourite Saturday night pass-times.

But that’s not important right now.

One aspect of the movie that really caught my attention was the occasional inclusion of gratuitous pentagrams in certain scenes. For example …



Or…



And why not? After all, Washington itself is one enormous Great Pentagram anyway

The rather fetching Pentagram/ Pyramid/ All Seeing Eye combo anchored on the White House

I have yet to encounter anyone who seriously denies that the Founding Fathers of America were members of secret, humanist societies or that the symbolism of those societies was incorporated into emblems of state and even the very floor plan of the capital city of that state. It's so blatant as to be undeniable. So, people just don't talk about instead.

And that tradition of occult symbolism continued certainly until at least as recently as the middle of the 20th century, when the symbolism on the dollar bill was upgraded to be twice as fruity than before and the Pentagram Pentagon was built.

(It's worth bearing in mind that slapping occult symbols all over your money and government logos and waging war from pentagram/ goat's head-shaped buildings kind of hands over a fair bit of psychological ammunition to the sort of firebrand clerics who like to label America as The Great Satan)

There is at least a book’s worth of material on the subject of The Enlightenment and the historical role played by Masonic and other fraternal societies in furthering the aims of The Enlightenment through the subversion and eventual overthrow of existing ruling religious and royal elites.

And then there is another book’s worth of material concerning the motivations of these Enlightened reformers. Were they themselves elitists or were they truly egalitarian? Did they just replace one group of bastard overlords with another? Was their movement corrupted at some point? Are their successors still active today?

Whatever, I just enjoy looking for the symbolism and trying to figure out whether occurrences of that symbolism are conscious, unconscious or just coincidental

The amusing thing is that once you start rooting around the history of the last few hundred years looking for examples of members of fruity secret societies who overthrew established elites and then went on to adopt their club symbols as national symbols those examples start to come thick and fast.

Personal favourites include…

The two Joes, Mazzini and Garibaldi, who unified Italy much to the displeasure of, amongst other people, the Pope



The founder of the modern, emphatically secular, state of Turkey, Kemal Atatürk




Sam Houston, the general who won the suspiciously easy Battle of San Jacinto and consequently carved Texas off from (Catholic) Mexico




As an aside, if you accept the traditional explanation of the symbolism of obelisks as being essentially phallic and the Pentagram as sometimes being representative of an out-stretched female form then, at 570 feet tall, the San Jacinto Monument in Texas arguably qualifies as the tallest (and most painful looking) example of free-standing pornography on Earth…



Going back to Kemal Ataturk and the Turkish national flag for a moment. One question that did bug me was how something as pagan as a pentagram and a crescent moon!!! for God’s sake could have ever become associated with Islam – a religion not exactly keen on a) paganism, or b) iconography

It didn’t actually take much research to establish that, no, many orthodox Muslims haven’t embraced the symbolism of the crescent and star and, yes, they do consider it to be blasphemous.

But wait, there’s more. There’s a rather large, modern secular state that was founded by people who probably were members of fruity little clubs rooted in The Enlightenment that I haven't mentioned. And I find it quite amusing to place that country’s flag next to the Turkish one

So, if a crescent moon is a symbol of the feminine what does that make a hammer?

That doesn’t prove anything of course but it does remind me of the hoary old Universal Conspiracy Theory™, promoted by Orwell amongst others, which claims most countries are run by the same, closely allied group of people and most conflicts are acts of murderous theatre, cynically engineered by that group to keep the paeons, wherever they might be, down



Nah, way too far-fetched…

.

Pyramid Spotting with Stanley K

(edit: the following post refers to a couple of Youtube videos that are now currently not available. I dropped their author a line to ask him what's happened to them but in the meantime here's a link to the narration that goes with the vids - it's a poor substitute

edit2: the video is now back - see my post here)





And whilst on the subjects of the CIA, Mind Control, Scientologists, State-sponsored terror, the New World Order and images filched from Stanley Kubrick movies (in the last post)…

Now would be a good time to link to an analysis of A Clockwork Orange produced and uploaded onto Youtube by a seriously committed Kubrick fan (Part1, Part2)

Kubrick's track record for weaving subversive messages, often subliminal messages, into big budget, mainstream Hollywood movies; from Spartacus to Dr Strangelove to A Clockwork Orange, is a stonking achievement. And it's no surprise that he spent most of his life completely out of his tree with paranoia and chose to live in a castle.



(OK, maybe not a castle, but definitely a big fuck off house with lots of security)

As with anything produced by anyone, the Youtube analysis of Clockwork Orange does need to be taken with a pinch of salt. However, if you like Kubrick and if you like insane elitist symbolism hidden in plain view amongst us you’ll absolutely fucking love this.

My favourite part is where the narrator takes the film’s more overt message about state manipulation of ordinary people and connects that with the less than overt symbolism scattered throughout the film; particularly the All Seeing Eye/ Pyramid thing.

You know, this kind of stuff…

Buckingham Palace vs. The Dollar Bill

Meye5 's old logo - you can say whatever you like about The Establishment but it does have a sense of humour

It’s worth bearing in mind that Kubrick was an obsessively meticulous director. Nothing appeared in his films by accident. So, it is reasonable to assume that Kubrick put all of the following imagery into A Clockwork Orange deliberately...





Clockwork Orange predates the Internet and 'Internet-fueled conspiracy theories' by a good quarter of a century...

It’s also worth having a second look at the film’s iconic publicity poster reproduced at the top of this post.

And then maybe making a point of watching the film again when you get a chance. It really was made 30 years too early

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