Calling all fools - Attention all Fairies

Apparently, some fools are planning to visit the Houses of Parliament and some fairies are planning a raid on Piccadilly Circus tomorrow

Nothing unusual there then

(Thanks Brenda. Fifth successive post in response to email from friend ends...)

No Mr Bond I expect you to die!!!

Lyttelton - contemporary extinct volcano living

And thanks to Noel who, by way of sending me this semi-funny link here, has pointed out that by intending to move to a property built inside a hollowed out, extinct volcano located on a remote island I stand to qualify as a future Bond villain

The best news I’ve heard this week. The time for head shaving is almost at hand

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This is also the fourth succesive post I’ve written in response to emails from friends who can’t be arsed to maintain their own blogs.

Maybe I should start charging a fee, or at least some kind of comedy forfeit

Charlie Sheen vs The Guardian

I received an email from someone I haven’t seen for ten years on Monday (Hello Simon).

He mentioned something about seeing my name and url on Page Two of the Guardian

What!?

A quick recce to the corner shop and ten minutes later, sure enough, there I was reading a quote from this blog in the ‘Today on the Web’ section.

(Note to self - next time you start a blog don't use your name as the url - there are some strange people out there)

I had to visit the corner shop because, marvellously, the Guardian’s ‘Today on the Web’ section appears only in the print version of the newspaper, not the on-line one.

This probably goes part way to explaining why the increase in traffic as the result of the plug turned out to be, roughly, nada. Yup, still three hits a day and holding.

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Coincidentally, the Guardian was already on my mind as the result of a grubby little hit piece it published on Charlie Sheen on Saturday.

For anyone who doubts that the mainstream media, all the mainstream media, including supposed liberal and progressive rags like the Guardian, is owned and controlled by people with a shared, vested interest, this makes for a cracking read.

As I mentioned in a earlier post, Charlie Sheen came out last week during a radio interview on the Alex Jones show and voiced his doubts about the ‘official’ account of what happened on 9/11 . This interview was then picked up by CNN’s Showbiz Tonight and has been bouncing around the Internet ever since.

The mainstream British press has barely covered the story

Except for that editorial-style comment in the Guardian.

And, whether you buy into what Sheen was saying or not, the Guardian article is patently bent, composed as it is of

• 25% selective use of out of context quotes
• 75% ad hominem attacks

It also takes advantage of an opportunity to call Sheen insane. I thought that was a nice Soviet touch.

Obviously, it doesn’t actually address the substance of what Sheen was talking about at all.

So, unfortunately, the sparkle of me getting quoted in a national daily newspaper is kind of tarnished a little by the fact that the newspaper in question is, as most newspapers now are, a great big steaming pile of shit.

The fact that the pile of shit is studded with occasional gems doesn't detract from the overall shittiness of the entire ensemble.

Bummer

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Going back to the Sheen story for a minute. On one hand it is gratifying to know that some, just some, of the genuinely unanswered questions about that day are being aired in the mainstream media. On the other hand, the manner of that airing is a little worrying

• I wouldn’t trust Alex Jones as far as I could throw him, and he’s a chubby fucker
• Why did CNN finally decide to run with a 9/11 sceptic story, when it and the other news networks have been ignoring or maligning 911 scepticism for years, and why did they choose a celebrity gossip show?
• Why Charlie Sheen? Let’s face it, he is perfect fodder for distracting, ad hominem attacks

I’ve just read that Ed Asner is about to wade into the fray in support of Sheen. Whoopie fucking doo. I now have to edit a section from my previous posting from…

It’s a strange world we live in where the most scathing criticism of the repressive actions of our governments is made in a legal soap opera featuring William Shatner or the only mainstream airing of 9/11 issues is articulated by a has-been movie actor sandwiched in a show specialising in celebrity gossip.

To…

It’s a strange world we live in where the most scathing criticism of the repressive actions of our governments is made in a legal soap opera featuring William Shatner or the only mainstream airing of 9/11 issues is articulated by a has-been movie actor sandwiched in a show specialising in celebrity gossip and the bloke who played Lou Grant in the Mary Tyler Moore Show

Yippee kay yeah, the Information Dam is about the break and the Truth will finally be set free, rah! rah!

Not

Best euphemism for killing someone of the week

Part of the project to make our police indistinguishable from our army, junta style, involves the gradual adoption of euphemistic phrases contrived to take the sting out of unfortunate news. You know the routine…

• Dead innocent people become Collateral Damage
• Killing your own troops becomes Friendly Fire or, even better, Blue on Blue
• Mercenaries become Civilian Contractors
• The Ministry of War becomes Ministry of Defence

and so on.

Anyway, it can’t have escaped anyone’s attention that our police are becoming increasingly euphemistic in their official statements. I blogged a few days ago about how tickled I was to discover that the innocent man shot at Stockwell Station last year was not the victim of a Shoot to Kill policy but was in fact subject to a ‘Shoot to deprive of function’ policy

… deprived of function by being shot in the face, eight or nine times

So, thanks to my mate Ian for coming up with this week’s best official euphemism for killing people that cropped up in the report of the investigation into the death of a man who died in police custody in 1998 …

Mr Hardwick said that although there were "serious failings" by the four police officers, they did not assault Mr Alder and that it could not be said "with certainty" they had caused his death.

But their "neglect" undoubtedly did deny him the chance of life, he said.

Nice one

Ooops I almost forgot

Thanks to Peter for reminding me that I haven’t got round to posting about the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

That’s partly down to me not having so much free time lately but also because it’s a ‘more of the same’ kind of thing.

For any UK readers stumbling upon ths blog who don’t know about the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill here are a few links to bring you up to speed

• How we move ever closer to becoming a totalitarian state
• The abolition of parliament bill
• Why is the government seeking far reaching laws without parliament’s approval?
• Enabling tyranny

The titles of the articles convey the gist of what’s involved.

Basically, the UK Government is sneaking through a piece of legislation which will enable it to make laws by decree without prior submission to elected representatives.

That’s what fascist governments do.

The political climate in the UK has reached a point where I’m not entirely sure just exactly what it would take before people finally faced up to what is going on.

I really don’t know.

Someone started a flickr group devoted to opposition to the new law a couple of months ago – I joined, made a comment along the lines of ‘It’s going to happen, we can’t stop it. Just like we haven’t been able to stop any of the other crap that’s gone down’, and things have been pretty quiet there ever since. I feel a little guilty about being so openly pessimistic but what reasons are there to think any other way?

The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill is going to be passed and we will then be just that little bit nearer to the totalitarian, corporately owned state that is being assembled all around us.

And I honestly believe that nothing is going to stop it.

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Here’s a link to a speech I think that’s worth reading/ listening to…

Former Soviet Dissident Warns for EU Dictatorship

It was given last month by Vladimir Bukovsky, a former Soviet Dissident who knows a thing or two about totalitarian states and how they go about their business. He touches on the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill whilst painting a broader thesis about what lies in store for the UK and Europe. He quite deliberately skirts questions about the interests and motivations behind what is taking place, presumably because he doesn’t want to come across as nutter, but he still has some amusing things to say.

Saving Private Kember

Is it just me or does the story of the ‘rescue’ of Norman Kember and two other peace activists in Iraq yesterday have more than a little hint of Jessica Lynch about it? That would be the Jessica Lynch who was rescued from an Iraqi hospital by a Special Forces team with much hullabaloo when they could have just sent a car?

Call me cynical but lines like ‘The men were found in a room in a house in west Baghdad. There was no sign of their captors’ are just a mite suspicious. They don’t really square with all those anonymous media interviews with former SAS men talking about action movie style rescue operations we’ve been treated since the Kember story broke.

I was also particularly amused by the speed with which certain spokespeople embraced the news of the ‘rescue’ as final proof, if ever it were needed, that torturing people to obtain information was clearly a good thing

If this were a game I’d play my ‘This story is bollocks’ card with the confident expectation of receiving double points at some stage later in the proceedings.

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There’s little dispute that major media outlets on both sides of the pond now largely restrict themselves to parroting information supplied to them by vested interests. They apparently no longer feel under any obligation to assess whether the stuff they are repeating makes sense or not. The Kember story is a good example.

Having said, I have encountered a couple of choice nuggets of scathing media comment over the last couple of weeks.

First off, there’s James Spader’s courtroom speech in Boston Legal a couple of weeks ago...

When the weapons of mass destruction thing turned out to be not true, I expected the American people to rise up. Ha! They didn't.

Then, when the Abu Ghraib torture thing surfaced and it was revealed that our government participated in rendition, a practice where we kidnap people and turn them over to regimes who specialize in torture, I was sure then the American people would be heard from. We stood mute.

Then came the news that we jailed thousands of so-called terrorists suspects, locked them up without the right to a trial or even the right to confront their accusers. Certainly, we would never stand for that. We did.

And now, it's been discovered the executive branch has been conducting massive, illegal, domestic surveillance on its own citizens. You and me. And I at least consoled myself that finally, finally the American people will have had enough. Evidentially, we haven't.

In fact, if the people of this country have spoken, the message is we're okay with it all. Torture, warrantless search and seizure, illegal wiretappings, prison without a fair trial - or any trial, war on false pretenses. We, as a citizenry, are apparently not offended.

There are no demonstrations on college campuses. In fact, there's no clear indication that young people seem to notice.

Well, Melissa Hughes noticed. Now, you might think, instead of withholding her taxes, she could have protested the old fashioned way. Made a placard and demonstrated at a Presidential or Vice-Presidential appearance, but we've lost the right to that as well. The Secret Service can now declare free speech zones to contain, control and, in effect, criminalize protest.

Stop for a second and try to fathom that.

And then there’s the coverage given by CNN’s Showbiz Tonight to a Charlie Sheen interview where he rattles off a list of outstanding questions about the 9/11 attacks, describes the official account as a ludicrous conspiracy theory and basically accuses the US government of complicity.

It’s no coincidence that neither of these nuggets were broadcast by ‘serious’ news outlets.

It’s a strange world we live in where the most scathing criticism of the repressive actions of our governments is made in a legal soap opera featuring William Shatner or the only mainstream airing of 9/11 issues is articulated by a has been movie actor sandwiched in a show specialising in celebrity gossip.

Strange, strange days

Laugh to the cream of escapes

Not much blogging on this site lately…

I’ve spent the last few days operating in the real world – a few days in Rome and some time spent checking out the property market in New Zealand.

A funny thing, house prices in the part of Christchurch we want to live in have been rising at something like 20% a year. Three or four years ago we could have had our pick of where to live, now our expectations have to be considerably lower. Fair enough, that’s life. The rises appear to be largely attributable to the shed loads of English families who are packing it in here in the UK and migrating.

We are talking more than a handful here and the numbers are rising. I know this anecdotally and also because outfits I know that specialise in foreign exchange trades have been having a bumper few years changing emigres’ money up.

I only mention this because I had real trouble reconciling Gordon Brown’s budget speech yesterday, apparently everything is just fucking peachy, with my own sense of where the UK’s at. Presumably the half million or so people bailing out every year share my sentiments.

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Rome was also pretty interesting

One thing that really struck me about Rome is how even more scummy than usual it has become - the mess, the homeless people, the sheer numbers of migrants living on the margins. We were staying near Termini railway station and that area has become a kind of shake and bake China Town. Two or three years ago there were hardly any Chinese around and now the place is full of them. And, unlike the Italians, these guys are working long hours. More evidence to me, if it were needed, that the Italians, and the rest of Europe, are in the process of having the arse ripped out of their complacent, cosy little world

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Anyway, there I was sitting in this budget restaurant in Rome, reading the menu and thinking about Artificial Intelligence.

AI is one of those oxymoronic scientific disciplines that tickles me immensely. Astrobiology is another.

Ever since I first sat in front of computer I’ve been hearing about how, one day, machines will be able to speak, comprehend speach, think for themselves and generally replace the human brain in the not too distant future.

All we really needed was more powerful computers

It all goes back to that Darwinian/ Evolutionary view of how things came to be. All living things are merely flesh machines controlled by a series of simple, self-preservatory instincts – eat, drink, sleep, fuck, that sooner or later we’ll be able to replicate virtually.

It’s a very reductionist point of view.

Kind of like counting the number of notes in an opera then claiming you are now a talented composer.

Well, the computers have got more powerful and they are still as thick as pigshit as they ever were.

And that’s why, in spite of all our supposed advances, people are still having to be trained to use computers rather than the other way around. Anyone who has toyed with speech recognition or language translation software over the years may understand where I am coming from.

So, there I was in this Roman restaurant reading the tourist menu and I started laughing

Of course, the chances are that the restaurant owners had used a mini dictionary rather than translation software but the point is that the quality of the final translation would have been the same whatever they used. Yes, after years of extensive research and countless billions spent, Modern Computer AI is now at a level roughly comparable with a Chinese Takeaway menu.

Maybe we need to wait until computers are just a little more powerful. Maybe true AI will be ready in time for those day trips to the Moon in nuclear fusion powered, robot piloted spacecraft I remember reading about 30 years ago.

Kancho for beginners

I’m going to be a little busy and won’t be able to write any posts over the next couple of days. This means that I’ll have to pass on commenting voluminously on the news that Jean Charles de Menezes has been accused of rape six months after he was executed by police (sic.) in Stockwell tube station.

Obviously, the news that JCdM was almost certainly a violent sexual predator means that the police (sic.) did society a favour all along.

All concerned citizens can now rest easy.

Phew, what a relief.

Nor do I have time to comment on the news that the man in charge of those police (sic.) who did us all a favour, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, has just been caught out taping telephone conversations with the Attorney General and officials investigating the JCdM execution, without getting their parents’ consent beforehand.

And, given that it’s Sir Ian Blair we’re talking about, he’s added a dash of his own special magic to the story by illicitly recording a conversation that…

concerned the admissibility of wire tap evidence in court

What an utter arse that man is.

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On the subject of arses, I’ve just found out about a new game that I’d like to play with Sir Ian one day, preferably whilst he's speaking to an audience. It’s called Kancho, it’s Japanese and if anyone tried it on Sir Ian in this country they’d be locked up.

Which is a pity.

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And here’s a link to The Childhood Goat Trauma Foundation simply because it made me laugh

Come and take me on if you think you're hard enough

In case it’s escaped anyone’s attention, the governments of the United States and Great Britain are currently planning to commemorate the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by…

wait for it

…attacking another county

The only key differences being

• One letter of the alphabet
• The usual despotic leader but this time with a name containing far too many syllables to really work as an effective hate figure in Western propaganda. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doesn’t really roll off the tongue like Saddam or Osama does it. I’ve just written his name out five seconds ago and I couldn’t tell you how to spell or pronounce it.

Er, that’s about all the differences. The rest is the same; the copious facial hair, the reliance on bullshit intelligence, the ulterior globalist motives. The current build-up is so similar to the events leading up to the attack on Iraq I sometimes find myself blinking and shaking my head, so amazed am I that they’re trying to pull the same shit twice. Particularly when you consider how the last one turned out.

My favourite line of the week came from our Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw. A journalist asked him why he wasn’t hitting on countries like Pakistan or Israel. Countries that already have nukes put together through their own clandestine programs assisted with a little bit of thievery here and there. His answer was sublime

Pakistan and India haven’t signed the Nuclear Non Proliferation treaty so they haven’t broken any international obligations. Iran has signed the treaty.

And the moral of the story is ... don't sign any international agreements and no one will fuck with you

Tony Blair hears voices and Jack Straw is a c*nt.

Anyway, I’m one of the legions of people who has recirculated the suggestion that the timing of the impending assault on Iran may be driven by the knowledge that the Iranians will start selling their oil in Euros rather than Dollars later this month. Someone (Wolfie) left a link by way of comment on one of my earlier posts on the subject. It’s not bad…

http://www.moneyfiles.org/deruiter01.html

And I have to say the fact that the major media networks haven’t even touched the oil bourse story does add some weight to the possibility that there is something to it.

But, just in case we’ve all be suckered by some spooks feeding credible sounding but flawed analysis into the Web, here is a different take on the motives behind the coming staged attack on Iran in an article written for the Asia Times

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HC10Ak01.html

It’s a heavy-ish read but it does contain some points worth considering if you’re interested in figuring out why the mad fucks who head our governments are itching to slaughter a few hundred thousand more innocents.

The policy is to deprive them of function

Aside from watching Gordon the only other entertaining television I caught this week was BBC’s Panorama documentary explaining ‘what really happened’ when that JCdM got shot in Stockwell tube station last year.

This is all getting a bit silly now.

The findings of the IPCC investigation, the investigation that was going to find out what happened, quickly and honestly, still haven’t been made public but the police have been spinning like bastards.

And the State Broadcasting Company did its part magnificently this week. Apparently, one of the major factors why JCdM got shot was because the police radios didn’t work in the underground. The Panorama documentary waffled about this for ages…

But even as late as the last few minutes of his life, Jean's death might have been avoided. As the surveillance officers followed him down the escalator and onto the tube, they may have finally realised that he was not concealing a bomb.

Jean was not carrying a bag and was only wearing a denim jacket that was unlikely to conceal explosives.

But they had no way of transmitting the message. Their radios did not work underground.

That would be the same surveillance team who fingered JCdM in the first place and pointed him out to the execution squad on the train.

Utter crap.

As is the suggestion that a trained surveillance team mistook a Brazillian electrician for an Ethiopean suicide bomber, even after fucking about with pictures of the two in Photoshop for a while months after the event.

The amount of chaff being thrown up is truly impressive. What isn’t clear to me is how many concerned members of the public are being fooled by it.

Are people that gullible? Does anyone really care about the implications of what happened that day and since?

I liked the little touches in the filmed reconstruction, especially the bit where JCdM stood up suddenly when faced by the execution squad, in spite of the fact that eyewitness accounts state clearly that he was dragged from his seat before being executed.

I also enjoyed the way the documentary dealt with, or rather didn’t deal with, the missing house surveillance footage, the missing CCTV footage from the station, why we were being told he was a terrorist even when the police knew he wasn't, the crooked witness statements broadcast that day about unseasonally heavy coats and crap like that or, quite simply, why a lightly dressed bloke with no baggage was fingered for execution at all. Quite peculiar for a documentary that claimed to account for what went down that day.

The intriguing part is that nobody would be asking any questions about the deceits in the police account if the police had managed to get any real 'dirt' on JCdM at all. And for the first 24 hours or so after the shooting the police behaved as if they expected to find some. Let's not forget the crude early attempts by government and the police to suggest that JCdM ran when challenged because he had a bent visa or because he had been mugged a few days before.

He didn't run anywhere. He was dragged from a train seat and deliberately butchered.

I also found the account of officers calling on JCdM's immediate family in London at 2.00am the next morning, sixteen hours after the execution, and grilling them for three hours before telling them JCdM was shot to be particularly sinister.

Our police have taken to knocking on the doors of the innocent relatives of innocent victims without explaining themselves in the wee small hours now.

Nice...

The comedy highlight of the show occurred when the Assistant Commissioner spokesperson representing the police was asked whether the London Police are operate a shoot to kill policy or not. It went something like

Interviewer: So, the police are in effect operating a shoot to kill policy

Policeman: No, that is not the case. We are most definitely not operating a shoot to kill policy

Interviewer: But the policy is to kill suspected suicide bombers

Policeman: The policy is to deprive them of function

Interviewer: … by killing them

Policeman: Not by killing them. By shooting them in the head

I swear to Christ I’m not making that up. I couldn’t