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

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

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

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




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

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

Maybe you just can't get decent help these days

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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Newstopia explains the Reserve Bank

The Feckless Unemployed

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

Anon - 05 January 2009 13:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stef - 05 January 2009 14:32

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

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

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

Anxiety Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happened?

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

Fuck that

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

Anxiety Culture

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

Bollocks to that

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

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

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On not trusting anyone, not even yourself

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

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

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

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

And they never use the Internet

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

but back to the Internet...

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

The video struck me as being suspect for several reasons

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

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

What the Internet was invented for...

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

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

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

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

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

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

They're doing us a favour

They're reminding us not to be gullible fuckwits

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

If you don't trust this video

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

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

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

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

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Plus ça change pt231

Some classic Retroloonery from Harry H. Corbett, who really gets going about two minutes in...

...from a visual gag featuring a bag of underpants falling on someone's head to talk about the machine-gunning of trade unionists in the space of 60 seconds. British comedy was certainly different back then. Certain other things clearly haven't changed at all

Steptoe and Son was, of course, miles funnier when you found out that the two actors really did hate each other

cf. "In 1976 as Prime Minister, Wilson wished to have Corbett awarded an OBE, but the middle initial "H" was lost in the bureaucratic process, and the award went to the Sooty puppeteer Harry Corbett instead."



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No-one saw it coming. Well maybe not quite no-one...

Back in 2001/2 a couple of friends were thinking about buying houses and asked for my opinion on the future prospects of the UK housing market

My take was that, even back then, the cost of housing was moving ahead of historical affordability levels and there was no way that house prices could keep rising faster than people's wage rises.

I guestimated that house prices would peak in the Summer of 2003, then fall back 10-20%, quite sharply

Which, of course, didn't happen




or rather it did happen, but in nothing like my estimated timescale

My mistake was that back then, before my full-on Conspiraloonery days, I assumed that the people responsible for our government and banks were not amoral sociopaths; fully committed to the path of deliberately wrecking millions of lives

Only an amoral psychopath would have encouraged the boom to continue beyond the 2002/03 levels, to a point where the inevitable economic correction would have to be so large it would become a national, and international, calamity

Make no mistake, a ghastly economic crash was a 100%, guaranteed, dead cert, inevitable consequence of the way our economy was being run, and anyone who says no-one saw it coming is either a liar or a fucking idiot

Now, as it happens, I've concluded that only a minority of the people who claim that no-one saw it coming are liars.

The majority really are fucking idiots; easily manipulated, greedy, dissonant, fearful idiots

You can take pretty much anything you've even seen written or said in the mainstream media about economic and financial affairs over the last ten years and forget it. It was all Wrong and yet the people who earned a living peddling Wrong are still at their jobs peddling a new brand of Wrong. For all the good they did anyone, they may as well have stayed at home, playing with themselves and eating cheesy wotsits, and not bothered going into work for the last ten years

Better than a career in journalism or banking, especially when combined with self-abuse

The same also applies to millions of people employed in the service sector over the last decade. A ridiculous number of people have been whacking off, playing silly games and kidding themselves that they were engaged in meaningful work.They enjoyed an undeservedly high standard of material living off of worthless IOUs paid to foreigners who've been working in sweat shops and fields on their behalf.

So preoccupied did the British become with getting rich (sic.) off the back of shuffling paper that we took to importing several million immigrants to wait on us and wipe our kids' arses

This was all bonkers and wrong on so many levels

And there came a point where you would have to be an idiot yourself to believe that no-one in a position of power saw the inevitable collapse coming

It is also worth remembering that the infrastructure for a full-blown police state was being rushed-in at the same time the debt bubble was being inflated to calamitous levels

I now firmly believe that the people responsible for our governments and banks truly are amoral psychopaths, engaged in deliberate economic and social warfare against the rest of us, and the quality of my spooky predictive powers is now several orders of magnitude greater than it was seven or eight years ago

Put simply, if everything really was the result of a cock up rather than a conspiracy why is it that the apparent cock ups virtually always end up favouring the same class of people?

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And whilst on the subject of dissonant bullshit...

There are some interesting parallels between the mainstream coverage of the recent economic boom and the Man Made Global Warming narrative

Each involved people looking at graphs of recent upward trending data, extrapolating those trends way, way up and fabricating explanations as to why this time it is different and why the upward trend was going to continue for the foreseeable future.

Both groups of rampers, economic and MMGW, have had the bulk of the mainstream media, industry and government on their side

In opposition to the people who believe that Man Made Global Warming, like house prices, could only go up there was a minority of people arguing that global mean temperature, like house prices, is cyclic, that there are signs a turning point has been reached and a downturn could well be on the cards

If and when it is established that a turning point has been reached, we will doubtlessly be told that (virtually) no-one saw it coming and that the Man Made Global Warming advocates were acting on the consensus of opinion of the majority of the experts

Bullshit

As with predictions about which way the economy was heading, consensus counts for absolutely fuck all

Either something is right or it isn't

And popular climate 'science', as it is currently practiced, has a lot more to do with politics and story telling than hard, testable science

There's a world of difference between hard sciences like chemistry and physics, which involve testable, repeatable processes and the more complex, chaotic natural sciences, such a climatology and evolutionary theory; which involve making up stories to explain that which has already happened and which is unlikely to happen again in quite the same way

It is easy enough to whip up an experiment to prove or disprove a theory about gravity. A lot harder to come up with something repeatable and testable which explains where wombats came from or if it is going to snow in New Orleans next week

Which is why the often-repeated claims that Man Man Global Warming is all about hard-science are bollocks

Staring at graphs of natural systems and kidding yourself that you've come up with a computer model which tells you what's going to happen next, be it with the weather or the financial markets, is a mug's game and will inevitably end up with only one result.

My favourite comment from the 1,000 or so posted underneath this recent article. Reference to to 'serious' scientists, i.e. scientists who agree with the views of the commentator, is as good an indicator that the writer is an utter twunt as any I know.

And, remember, whenever commenting about MMGW underneath news articles, any stories about unusually cold temperatures or heavy snowfall are examples of 'weather'. Any stories about unusually high temperatures or Hurricane Katrina are examples of 'climate'. 'Climate' stories are inherently more significant than 'Weather' stories'

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A few days ago Lord Patel, because he knows I enjoy this stuff so much, sent me a copy of the latest press release from the Met Office. It's a corker...


30/12/2008 11:38

Met Office (National) (Met Office)

Pacific Continues to Influence Global Climate

2009 is expected to be one of the top-five warmest years on record, despite continued cooling of huge areas of the tropical Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon known as La Nina.

According to climate scientists at the Met Office and the University of East Anglia the global temperature is forecast to be more than 0.4 C above the long-term average. This would make 2009 warmer than the year just gone and the warmest since 2005.

During La Nina, cold waters rise to the surface to cool the ocean and land surface temperatures. The 2009 forecast includes an updated decadal forecast using a Met Office climate model. This indicates a rapid return of global temperature to the long-term warming trend, with an increasing probability of record temperatures after 2009.

Professor Chris Folland from the Met Office Hadley Centre said: "Phenomena such as El Nino and La Nina have a significant influence on global surface temperature. Warmer conditions in 2009 are expected because the strong cooling influence of the recent powerful La Nina has given way to a weaker La Nina. Further warming to record levels is likely once a moderate El Nino develops."

These cyclical influences can mask underlying warming trends as Professor Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, explains: "The fact that 2009, like 2008, will not break records does not mean that global warming has gone away. What matters is the underlying rate of warming - the period 2001-2007, with an average of 14.44 C, was 0.21 C warmer than corresponding values for the period 1991-2000." ENDS


Wow! Warmest year for four years! Maybe...

Outstanding!

The Met Office has now taken to reporting predictions, predictions from people with an unparalleled record for making shit predictions, as if they were fact.

They're getting pretty desperate now

and really beyond parody

And, sure enough, this prediction was faithfully reported as 'news' by the press agencies straight away

The implication of the Press Release it that the deep ocean is acting as a huge heat sink, hiding all that 200 years' worth of alleged surplus warming out of the way for the time being. I would love to see some data that proves it's actually warmer down there - because everything I've seen to date points to nothing of the sort

As with the now discredited ramping of the housing and debt markets, this MMGW thing is now getting beyond the point where the people ramping it can claim honest error. Their subjectivity has become quite blatant. We're heading into outright dishonesty now.

Just like our fucked up financial services industry, the MMGW lobby is trying to tide itself over with some short-term fudging; in the hope that things will somehow turn back their way before the fudging is more widely comprehended

And, as with the now discredited ramping of the housing and debt markets, I'm not claiming for a second that the majority of people who have Faith in MMGW are being deliberately dishonest - the boundless human capacity for self-delusion, dissonance, religious belief and self interest can account for much of what is going on

But not all of it

There is no good reason to believe that the top people behind the MMGW agenda, or our economy, do not understand the inevitable consequences of what they are doing

and there's every reason to believe that they do understand what they are doing

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The Banking System explained...

Children's entertainment sure has changed a lot in forty years

cf. The Wonderful Wizard of Troy Ounces

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A bad case of Gas

Colonialism can be an infuriating business.

No sooner have you displaced the indigenous population to some carefully selected, apparently barren, godforsaken craphole of a 'homeland' when, time and time again, some joker discovers a whole heap of oil or gold or uranium or water or whatever underneath it.

Which means that you have to start the entire process of relocating everyone to another godforsaken craphole of a homeland all over again. You might even find yourself thinking about some more, um, final solutions. Especially if available space is a bit tight

Now fuck off!

So, imagine my complete lack of surprise on coming across this two year old article today -

"An unexpected energy windfall on Israel's doorstep promises to resolve Israel's energy security concerns for years to come. Unfortunately for Israel, it is the Palestinian Authority that controls the licensing of these reserves..."

and no surprise either to find out that 'BG' Group (that's the colonial arm of British Gas hiding behind the acronym) is in on the deal

Many of those on the state-sanctioned Left vociferously argue that religion is the cause of all wars. Which is sort of Truthy; provided you consider that, to some people anyway, thieving stuff is a religion

Ah well, blaming all the shit that goes down on competing groups of Sky God believers does make for a good story.

Who gives a fuck if it's true or not

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The Jack Palance Guide to Middle Eastern Geopolitics - Lesson 4

edit: the Bill Hicks version...

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