Pimp my ride - Kennington style

Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom in my neck of the woods.

I bumped into this guy and his rather special customised bicycle earlier today and I’m still giggling...

The photo really doesn’t do it justice

Fine work

Game Over

The latest 'Crimestoppers' poster campaign has hit my local area

Clearly the artist has picked up a few tips from the propaganda leaftlets we’re dropping on Iraq. The poster assumes that its target audience is illiterate and it carries a clear message that starkly depicts cause and effect

It also appears to be aimed at eight year olds…

‘Knives and Robbery are not a game’

Not good a sign. Not a good sign at all

Special Ann Coulter Souvenir Commemorative Post

Ann Coulter feasts on Paxman's soul...

It’s hard to remember now but there once was a time when BBC2’s Jeremy Paxman used to be quite a good interviewer. Or maybe my memory is playing tricks with me and he really was crap all along.

Nowadays, Jezzer just gets by through shouting at people he really doesn’t like, denying them any opportunity to respond, putting words into their mouths or asking loaded questions that aren’t really questions, taken from the ‘Do you still beat your wife?’ genre of interviewing.

These days Jeremy Paxman earns a living, and it must be said a very good living, as a second-rate Jeremy Paxman impersonator.

And Jeremy’s botched attempt at bushwhacking Satan’s most favoured blonde girl chile Ann Coulter last night must stand as some kind of benchmark of just how shite Paxman has become.

You can watch a video of the Paxo being stuffed, second by painful second, here…

Ann Coulter on UK BBC Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman

If Jeremy were a horse someone would have shot him after that.

And for anyone unfamiliar with the Joy of Coulter why not try playing…

Did Hitler or Ann Coulter say that?

at the end of which you should get the general idea (BTW thanks for that link Rahid)

And, whilst on the subject of Ann Coulter, let’s not forget possibly the finest blog title in the history of the Internet…

I F^cked Ann Coulter in the Ass, Hard

which, and I’m guessing here, was definitely NOT written by Jeremy Paxman

And was Jerusalem builded here pt2

And where am I going with this post and the last one?

First off, it amuses me that once pervasive British Israelite beliefs, their associated cultural references and architecture have been so comprehensively forgotten.

Secondly, as peculiar and dated as Freemasonic British Israelism may seem to be its influence has percolated down to present day politics.

When British forces commanded by General Allenby, a British Israelite supporter, captured Jerusalem from the Turks in 1917, British Israelites believed that the Holy City was under ‘Israelite’, i.e. British, control for the first time since the destruction of the Temple in AD70.

Basically, a lot of people thought Jesus was due for a Second Coming shortly afterwards. The signing of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, guaranteeing a homeland for Jews in Palestine, fitted in with this Millennial belief and desire to fulfill Biblical Prophecy

It is now a matter of historical record that Jesus didn’t turn up on cue.

Surprise, surprise

No matter. Even though British Israelism now appears to be dead in the water many of its core beliefs are alive and well in the Christian Zionism movement, particularly in the United States. And, however fruity and peculiar all this stuff may appear to be, we are talking literally millions of politically influential Christian fundamentalists supporting Israel wholeheartedly as a means of fulfilling Biblical prophecy and doing what they can to give the Apocalypse and the Second Coming a helping hand.

Which is pretty fucked up in my opinion.

This isn't about being 'pro' or 'anti' Israel or 'pro' or 'anti' organised religion. I would describe any movement that cites the End of Times as being one of its core aspirations as being pretty fucked up.

There's currently a lot of chatter on the Internet about the Israel Lobby and the significance of its influence over US foreign policy. There is a lot less chatter about the fact that there are many, many more Christian Zionists than Jewish ones. Nor is there much discussion about the underlying beliefs of those Christian Zionists. I suggest that this side of things gets less coverage because it is er, well, frankly, strange. And more than a little scary.

And I’m not too sure what God is making of all of this. I’d guess that he will choose to unleash the Apocalypse at a timing convenient to him and not a bunch of tele-evangelists. The Fundamentalists will, of course, claim that they are merely instruments of His Will and that the timing really will be of God’s choosing. I suppose much of it boils down to whether you believe that Biblical Prophecy is a Prediction or a Mission Statement. If it is the latter, well, they may have a point.

It’s still pretty fucked up though

-

So, what have I learned from all of this?

• I was the only person on this entire planet sad enough to go out of my way to stand on a particular point in Trafalgar Square at 5.42pm yesterday
• Sad as I am, I am not so sad as to vote for a political party based on whether they are committed to realising Biblical Prophecy or not
  
• Britain may or may not be the New Promised Land but it’s a really crap place to build solar monuments. It rained at Stonehenge at sunrise yesterday and Trafalgar Square was swathed in cloud at the most inconvenient times
• Characters in Dan Brown novels never have to deal with monuments covered in hoardings and plastic sheeting or inconveniently timed cloud cover at crucial points in the plot
• After a quick scout around I am moderately certain that the Holy Grail is not located at the tip of Nelson Column’s Summer Solstice shadow
• Sometimes, the World is driven by forces much more peculiar than we would like to believe

And was Jerusalem builded here pt1

It was the Summer Solstice yesterday

Cool

And what better time than Solstice to indulge my pet hobby of stalking around London in search of symbolic architecture and suggestive shadows?

None.

So, there I was standing in a very particular part of Trafalgar Square at 5.42pm yesterday afternoon waiting for something cosmic to happen

And it did

Sort of

Thanks to some quirks of astronomy, cosmically interesting things happen in London on Summer Solstice

For example, when the Sun is due West (or East) of you on the Solstice it is almost exactly 30 degrees above the horizon. That means it casts a shadow almost exactly equal to the height of whatever is casting the shadow multiplied by the square root of three – 1:1.732, a proportion known as the Vesica Piscis

Some fun Vesica Piscis facts

• The Vesica Piscis is made by linking two circles together, bringing the outside edge of each to the midway point of the other. The almond-shaped centre of the image is called a mandorla (Latin for almond)
• When the Vesica Piscis is displayed vertically, the mandorla forms the shape of a fish
• The word "fish" translates into Greek as "ichthys", which is an acronym for "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour " Early Christians adopted the fish symbol as their own, and used it as a secret code to identify themselves to one another
• When the Vesica Piscis is viewed horizontally it represents the birth passage. The pointed oval is a universal symbol of the Divine Feminine, and in this context the Vesica Piscis is the vulva of the Goddess, surrounded by the crescents of the waxing and waning moon
• The Pythagoreans considered the mandorla to be a holy figure. The mathematical ratio of its width to its height was believed by them to be 265:153. This ratio, equal to 1.73203, was thought of as a holy number, called the measure of the fish
• The number 153 appears in the Gospel of John as the exact number of fish Jesus caused to be caught - in a miraculous catch of fish, which is thought by some to be a coded reference to Pythagorean belief
• The Vesica Piscis symbol appears frequently in medieval art and architecture

Another interesting little quirk of the London Solstice is that, at the same time as the Sun is due West and casting a Vesica Piscis shadow, the constellation of Orion appears to holding the Sun in its free ‘hand'

So, standing at the edge of Trafalgar Square yesterday at 5.42pm at the tip of the shadow of Nelson’s Column, I could see the Sun perched on top of the Column; whilst Orion was doing his thing in the background (hidden by the glare of the Sun, and the cloud).

And without going into the detail right now, application of some basic trigonometry suggests that the shadow cast by Nelson’s Column on the Solstice echoes the geometry and dimensions of the Great Pyramid at Giza.

You can also play the same games with the Monument to the Great Fire of London, just down the road from Nelson’s Column. Built by mad keen astronomer and freemason, Christopher Wren, it is exactly the same height as Nelson’s Column (202ft) and has a big flaming golden ball on the top as a bonus clue

I’m going somewhere with all this, honestly.

-

From the 17th through to at least the early 20th century there was a popular belief in Britain that, back in prehistory, the lost tribes of Israel had settled in this green and pleasant land and, incidentally, that it was the ancient Israelites who had built the Great Pyramid. This belief was the foundation of British Israelism and followers swore blind that Britain was the new Promised Land and that London was the New Jerusalem. The intriguing astronomical alignments in London on the Solstice were taken as being expressions of Divine blessing for the New Jerusalem project.

And the British Israelites and Freemasons most certainly did set about constructing a New Jerusalem. For example, when he rebuilt St Paul’s Cathedral, Wren tilted it from the traditional East-West alignment so that it was aligned instead with Temple Church, mirroring the relationship between the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock in ‘Old’ Jerusalem.

London also started suffering from a rash of lion and sphinx statues, in Trafalgar Square and elsewhere. The British Lion is actually the Lion of Judah...

Per Genesis 49…

Judah is a lion's whelp:
from the prey, my son, thou art gone up:
he stooped down, he couched as a lion,
and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up?

The sceptre shall not depart from Judah,
nor a lawgiver from between his feet,
until Shiloh come;
and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.

Not everyone was thrilled with the British Israelism concept though. William Blake thought all this New Jerusalem stuff was bollocks and penned Jerusalem as a criticism of the notion that anyone could think a country so blighted with industrialisation and squalor could be the Promised Land...

Metropolitan Police Intelligence rated at 69

OK, the botched anti terrorism raid at Forest Gate has been done to death now but there’s one aspect of the story that, as far as I can tell, hasn’t really been covered by blogs and the alternative press.

It’s cardinal rule of faith on the Internet, and one that I largely share, that our governments are up to ‘something’. ‘Something’ that, with the collaboration of corporate media, they go to great pains to keep from us.

And, hand on heart and honestly trying to be objective as possible, when I look at events like 9/11, 7/7 or the Invasion of Iraq I believe that there really are a heap of unanswered questions that need answering.

People on my side of the room suspect that key questions remain unanswered because there was an element of complicity or foreknowledge on the part of our governments.

People on the other side of the room blow-off the unanswered questions as being merely the result of ‘human’ factors such as incompetence or bureaucracy. They conclude that if there are any cover-ups going on they are quite mundane and exist merely to obscure the fact that some senior people have fucked up. Senior people who’d like to keep their jobs.

The division of opinion largely corresponds to whether you believe that the people who run things are either predominantly deceptively wicked or plain stupid.

One line of thought that is regularly trotted out to discredit what have been perjoratively described as conspiracy theories goes something like

‘When something world shattering and horrible happens there are many people out there who feel the psychological need to create meaning out of that event. They cannot come to terms with the fact that the world is essentially driven by random, meaningless events and accidents. So, they weave conspiracy theories instead of facing up to reality’

There is, of course, some truth to that. Just after the December 2004 Tsunami I came across some websites and blogs that swore blind that the tsunami was deliberately triggered by nuclear or scalar weapons and that warnings were deliberately withheld.

It goes without saying that there was biff all evidence, or proof of suppression of evidence, that supported any of this.

So, yes, some people do make up paranoid fairy stories to account for major events. No doubt.

Having said that, wars, terrorist bombs, dubious car crashes and suicides are not the same thing as tsunamis and hurricanes. They are acts of Man, not of God. So, the suggestion that a hidden human hand or two may be behind some of them is logically more possible.

And I am more than a little suspicious of people who dismiss the more credible, evidence-backed ‘conspiracy theories’ by lumping them in with all the crap out there. At the very least, it is intellectually lazy. Unless, that is, you believe that abrogating your responsibility to make sense of the World and leaving the task to journalists and politicians is intellectually hard work.

And let's not forget that the entire Al Qaeda thing; including the official accounts of 9/11 and 7/7 are themselves nothing but government-sanctioned, credibility-stretching conspiracy theories

And, if you need confirmation of how bent and unrepresentative the mainstream media is on these matters just consider how uncritical the press is of something like the War on Terror. The media may whine about the occasional balls up here and there but it has never critically questioned the thinking behind the overall paradigm. The central myths are taken as an unchallengeable 'given'.

Anyway, back to the Forest Gate raid.

If there’s one thing about the Forest Gate raid that really stands out for me it’s the complete lack of any widespread conspiracy theory associated with it. The raid happened weeks ago now, which is a lifetime on the Internet and, so far, about the only things that pass for a conspiracy theory I’ve heard are…

• the suggestion that the raid was timed and staged to pre-empt the publication of the report on the Jean Charles de Menezes execution. The idea being that a successful high-profile raid would neutralise any bad publicity associated with the shooting
• that MI5/6 slipped the Metropolitan Police duff information to make them look stupid

Meagre fare indeed

What this all means is that even the most hardcore conspiracy theorists out there have been unable to weave an alternate narrative concerning Forest Gate. When confronted with the question ‘Were the Metropolitan Police being deceptive or stupid?’, stupid is winning-out, hands down. As in...

• The Met really believed there was an explosive chemical vest in Lansdown Road
• They threw in 250 officers because they were expecting a headline success that would look good on television
• They shot an unarmed civilian in his jimjams because they really thought he was a terrorist lunatic
• They kept the suspects under lock and key for as long as they could and spent a week searching a small terraced house because they really could not believe they had got things totally wrong
• Yes, it is really possible that they are that fucking stupid

And if last weekend’s story that the ‘reliable intelligence source’ that triggered the huge raid really was a former pizza waiter with an IQ of 69 who’s been in prison for a few years on a bullshit terror charge is true that is really, really bad news.

Our senior police officers really do appear to believe in the full-fat version of the War on Terror; no matter how hyped-up and hysterical much of the narrative appears to be. And they’re so committed to it they’re willing to grasp at straws in the process.

This is a recipe for an unending stream of fuck-ups; resulting only in increased ethnic division and plummeting police credibility.

Well, if that's the game plan I think the Met should get their hands on one of those $2,000,000,000+ nonnuclear missile armed submarines I mentioned in my last post and stick in the Serpentine (conveniently located near to the London Central Mosque). They could then directly wire up the fire control system to half a dozen imprisoned people with 'educational issues' and, based on their ramblings, automatically target and launch a first strike on any terraced house filled with bearded men in the Northern Hemisphere within minutes.

It’s the only way to be really sure.

Dr Strangelove gets a makeover

Whilst browsing around Internet news sites the other day I came across a story titled ‘Pentagon Seeks Nonnuclear Tip for Sub Missiles’ which reported that the US military is hoping to arm some of its Trident submarine launched missiles (SLBM) with explosive rather than nuclear warheads. The rationale being that an SLBM can hit a target virtually anywhere in the world within an hour.

We’re talking the ticking bomb scenario that fans of Fox’s ‘24’ have grown to know and love, as in…

"people putting together some terrorist weapon, and while they are putting it together we can take it out, and if we miss that opportunity it may show up on the streets of New York City or Washington, D.C."

This is, of course, a totally demented idea straight out of Dr Strangelove, which presumably means that it will receive full-funding and become operational within a couple of years. Donald Rumsfeld is reportedly a strong supporter of the concept

Donald Rumsfeld

How the leadership of Russia or China would react should the Americans ever be insane enough to start launching SLBMs out of the sea in the direction of Asia remains to be seen; though Putin gave a teensy weensy hint when he said

the launch of a ballistic missile with nonnuclear warheads could provoke an inappropriate response from nuclear powers and a full-scale counterattack using strategic nuclear forces

For people who can still remember all the talk of Peace Dividends at the end of the Cold War this story is a nice pointer towards what the War on Terror is really all about.

There never was going to be any Peace Dividend. There’s just too much money and influence tied up in the ‘Defence’ industry for that ever to be the case. The challenge faced by those who make a living out of War was to come up with a new menace, before your average voter began to notice that defence spending wasn’t being reduced in response to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Cue the War on Terror

And, from a Defence Industry point of view, the War on Terror is working a treat. Defence spending is now even higher than it was during the Cold War.

And, whatever your politics or opinion on the War on Terror, you can be sure that the entire business is one great big con just by looking at what the bulk of that money is being spent on.

Take the nuclear submarines for example. Any strategist with half a brain cell in the Pentagon or Whitehall knows that the Russians or the Chinese could fuck us good, if they ever chose to, without recourse to nukes. The Russians could simply turn Europe’s gas supplies off and the Chinese could stop supporting America’s colossal national debt. They could shag the West blind at the drop of hat.

The concept of large fleets of fabulously expensive nuclear-armed submarines is dead.

The plan is to turn nuclear deterrent systems into fabulously expensive anti-terrorist systems before too many people notice.

During the last Iraq War some people, including a few military people, started questioning the sense in using cruise missiles costing $2,000,000+ a pop to demolish mud huts and slaughter the occasional goat. If the nonnuclear SLBM concept ever flies that sort of disproportionate insanity will start looking like small change. And is it any wonder that our military armed as it is with hugely complex, deliberately expensive weapons systems hasn’t got the insurgencies in Iraq or Afghanistan under control. Countless billions spent on stealth bombers, nuclear submarines and God knows what else, not enough money to kit everyone out with decent body armour.

OK, this is all a bit highfalutin for a personal blog but the point is that the same kind of nonsense is taking place across the board. No matter how ludicrous or expensive the concept you are trying to sell is, if you can work a War on Terror angle into it there’s a good chance you’ll get to trough out on some public money.

Really.

Here’s something a lot closer to home than SLBMs for example

I’ve just spent an amusing few minutes running the demo videos (highly recommended) for Ipsotek’s ‘Intelligent Pedestrian Surveillance’ system being marketed in the UK and elsewhere which I read about here. Apparently, the key characteristics of 'suspicious behaviour' can be digitised in such a way that they can be automatically identified by CCTV systems...

What makes watching the Ipsotek demo videos so amusing is realising just how useless the concept clearly is. Sheer uselessness was, of course, no impediment to the system being trialed in two London Underground stations.

Look around, you’ll see useless and expensive crap like that sprouting up everywhere. And at an ever-increasing rate.

It’s there to make us safer

and poorer

and more afraid

Suspicious Behaviour

I saw a couple of peculiar looking men carrying heavy shoulder bags at London Bridge station yesterday. They spent their entire time peering through binoculars, photographing trains and scribbling in small notebooks. They appeared to be well-motivated and highly organised. Someone in authority really should get round to locking them up, or at least finding them some girlfriends...

/ adds Muslim train spotter to list of world's most dangerous sports

The things some people will do

A nice little synchronous event today...

First I read a story that disgraced glam rock star Gary Glitter has just lost his appeal against his kiddie fiddling conviction in Vietnam.

Then, a little later on, I encounter this image on Flickr dating back to happier, less complicated times...

The joys of Mindf^ck

Thanks to A.Nonymous for posting a comment that made reference to Sefton Delmer, one of the Godfathers of Modern Psywar and Cointelpro.

Quoting from Wikipedia…

COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) is a program of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States. Although covert operations have been employed throughout FBI history, the formal COINTELPRO operations of 1956-1971 were broadly targeted against organizations that were (at the time) considered to have politically radical elements, ranging from those whose stated goal was the violent overthrow of the US government (such as the Weathermen) to non-violent civil rights groups such as Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference to violent racist and segregationist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. The founding document of COINTELPRO directed FBI agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities of these dissident movements and their leaders.

Bear in mind that Wikipedia is, of course, suspected by some people of itself being a COINTELPRO operation and this definition may therefore be a fiendishly subtle deception.

…as may the story in the Guardian/ Observer that MI6 is infilitrating British Muslim activist groups as part of a ‘black propaganda’ operation.

After all, our security services wouldn’t get up to stuff like that would they? And even if they did, they would only be working for the Greater Good anyway.

Of course, not all psychological warfare is practiced by Caucasian ex paratroopers, Nazi Satanists and Daily Express journalists who have apparently become fervent converts to Islam. Sometimes, particularly in war zones, you can deliver 500lb of mindfuck in one go like this…

Being literally dive-bombed with propaganda may be stressful but it certainly saves on having to buy a newspaper every day.

Inspired by the comment about Sefton Delmer, I’ve just spent a happy and amusing half hour surfing around psywar.org – a website that claims to be…

the premiere website for the study of psychological warfare, psychological operations (PSYOPS), aerial propaganda leaflets and black propaganda!!!

Hmmm, sounds good. I particularly enjoyed its collection of information leaflets from the current conflict in Iraq.

My favourite caption in their leaflet collection was ‘The patriotism of one Iraqi man won him 30 million US dollars!!!’ but the leaflet itself is lacking in visceral impact.

And, at first sight, a couple of the leaflets appeared to be offering a confusing or counter-intuitive message until I remembered I was supposed to be reading them right to left, not left to right…

der, silly me

Anyway, a couple more favourites, such as this one which explains to Iraqi children the correct way to greet a passing Humvee…

Text translation - Throwing rocks at coalition forces may seem like fun but it is also dangerous

...as is shining laser pointers at them

One thought that did strike my mind whilst browsing the leaflets was 'If Muslims are so keen on the idea of dying in a glorious jihad waged against the infidel doesn't a leaflet like this look more like a training manual than a warning...'

Er, that’s enough psywar and 'important safety information' for now - until the six o’clock news anyway