The latest issue of Hustler is looking like a must-read...
It must be true. I read it in Hustler
Inside:
Explosive Evidence about 9/11!
Plus
Exposed! 62 Republican Perverts
Quite a few fellow online conspiracy sadsters are hailing the Hustler 9/11 article as a major breakthrough for the 9/11 Truth movement.
Hmmm…
Call me negative but if an article calling for a fully independent inquiry into the 7/7 bombings were published in Asian Babes or Razzle along with a feature entitled ‘Veronica shares her creamy nougat’ I’d hardly be whacking off with glee at the thought some kind of progress was being made.
There again, I am quite partial to nougat
A shameless lift from t-mix's blog...
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Now that's what I call entertainment
A couple of days ago I met with a friend who had travelled into London via Charing Cross station. We went downstairs to buy a Tube ticket. It was the first time that the cost of the new cash fares on the Underground really sank home.
The minimum single cash fare is now four quid!!?
Read it and weep
It was embarrassing. I actually felt a need to apologize on behalf of the city.
And all this from a Mayor who once, an Age ago, was responsible for pioneering a low cost public transport policy.
Of course, most Londoners aren’t paying four quid for a single. The cost is something like half that if you use an Oyster card.
For the moment
But once everyone has been strong-armed into using Oysters the cost of using those will be jacked up. Then everyone will be paying through the nose for public transport with the added benefit having a detailed log of their movements held on a privately owned database that will be used for only God, and the faceless fuckers running the system, knows for what purposes.
Marvellous.
One thing that’s worth bearing in mind when personal rights and liberties are being discussed is that personal freedom is about a lot more than new laws, CCTV cameras, data mining and all the more obvious encroachments that are taking place.
In our society you are only as free as you can afford to be.
For most people, having their energy bills rise by 40% in a year, paying four quid for a short metro ride or servicing the interest on their mortgage or credit card is a whole lot more restrictive than having their right to protest taken away from them.
Of course, if people get round to thinking that they are being gradually and deliberately transformed into virtual slaves on a virtual plantation then that right to protest might start looking a tad more important.
But that’s still a while away yet.
.
You were a Kodak Moment once and, by God, you'll be one again
There’s an intriguing new corporate video from Kodak doing the rounds on Youtube at the moment...
Whether it is, as it claims to be, a video produced for internal use within the company or an attempt at viral marketing is not entirely clear.
What is clear is that...
brrrrr, nasty...
- It features the moderately unexpected line ‘And Celine Dion will sing the theme song while riding along on a unicorn through a field of baby animals under a big blue sky’
.
Whilst on the subject of Norm Chomsky and the art of gatekeeping for pleasure and profit…
Just before Christmas, the Daily Show’s John Stewart did an interview with that Grand Poobah of Neoconservatism William ‘Call me Bill’ Kristol.
It promised to be interesting
Unfortunately, I missed the actual screening on TV so I had a trawl around Youtube to see if I could find it.
Eventually, I did, but only after clicking onto the mouldering remains of a half dozen earlier attempts to upload the interview...
I’m seeing far too many of these message from Youtube these days which is a pretty bad sign of things to come on the video-sharing front. I enjoy video clips of swearing hamsters and David Hasselhoff as much as the next surfer but there is more to life than stuff like that - not much, but a little.
Anyway, the Stewart-Kristol interview is currently up here...
And it’s a nigh perfect example of corporate media gatekeeping
'Why can’t I view the planet from Jupiter!?'
On one level, Stewart appears to be socking it to Kristol and his neocon War on Terror horsecrap. The most effective segment goes something like…
BC: Bush was right that with aggressive tactics on our part we wouldn’t be attacked … for the last five years which is something he deserves credit for … I think
JS: I disagree
BC: Really?
JS: Yeah. In 1993 they attacked the world trade centre and they didn’t bomb again until 2001. That’s what? Eight years? So Clinton deserves more credit than Bush it would seem
BK: Well, unfortunately they attacked in Africa in 1998
JS: If we’re going to add in attacks in Africa we gotta go Spain, we gotta go England and then we’ve got to say that they have attacked us, quite frequently
BK: Well, you know we’re in a global war. They want to kill us and they want to kill a whole lot of other people
JS: That’s why I thought we should have gone after Al Qaeda
But when you think about it for a second, Stewart isn’t socking it to Kristol at all. Not only does he not finish Kristol off after he contradicts himself but, on top of that, Stewart finishes the exchange by essentially confirming and reinforcing Kristol’s deceits. …
That’s why I thought we should have gone after Al Qaeda
Stewart doesn’t disagree with Kristol’s worldview. He’s just quibbling over the tactics.
Stewart pulls stuff like that far too often for it to be accidental
And that’s why William Kristol is perfectly happy to appear on the Daily Show and receive what appears to be a drubbing, time and time again.
'Nice work John''Nice work Bill'
Does that stop me watching the Daily Show? Nope. I think John Stewart is funny. But that doesn’t stop me thinking that Stewart is as much of a c^nt as Kristol. Arguably he’s worse. Stewart comes across as a man capable of knowing better. Kristol doesn’t.
per my previous post -
'I've also just discovered that Google returns no results with the following word sequences:
Leica bollocks
Purple Leica bollocks
Over-priced purple Leica bollocks
An omission which I trust the busy little Google searchbots will rectify shortly'
And, lo and behold...
/ well-pleased
.
It's a sad fact of human nature that many people, possibly most people, derive a perverse sort of pleasure ogling things they can never reasonably expect to afford. Car buffs get off on torturing themselves by flipping through motoring magazines or attending trade shows and lusting after Ferraris and Lamborghinis. Camera nerds do exactly the same thing, more often than not with Leicas.
The fact that Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Leicas offer astonishingly poor value for money; costing ten times as much, yet delivering only a marginal improvement in performance, whilst being right buggers to use, in comparison with less exclusive products doesn't matter a jot. People are drawn to conspicuous consumption, and the notion that they can assert their individuality by spunking huge wads of cash, like lemmings are drawn to cliffs.
Well, Disney Lemmings anyway
And Leica has just brought out its new, top of the line, M8 digital rangefinder camera
The most entertaining user review of the Leica M8 that I have read to date can be found here -
The article really takes off about halfway down when the reviewer compares two pictures taken of the same heavily moustachioed man, one taken with the new Leica and one without, and discovers that the Leica has the magical property of rendering clothes made from man-made fabrics as various shades of purple, regardless of whether they actually are purple or not.
Well, that's saved me five large...
Leica M8 Body = £3,012.69
Leica SUMMILUX-M f/1.4/35mm Lens = £2,069Bizarre colour casts in pictures of people in shellsuits and cheap business shirts = priceless
Not that a camera which makes people dressed in nylon appear to be bright purple doesn't have its attractions. It does but they are rather specialist,
And for any photo nerds out there who read and trust on-line camera reviews and forums posts, the peculiarly specialist, frequently obscure and occasionally pornographic photopoo site includes a tortuously detailed, and rather damning, account of how all the major on-line photographic sites managed to post gushing reviews of the M8 whilst somehow failing to notice the purple nasty thing, or the orange blob thing, or the fuzzy image quality thing, or the pisspoor build quality thing.
I've also just discovered that Google returns no results with the following word sequences:
Leica bollocks
Purple Leica bollocks
Over-priced purple Leica bollocks
An omission which I trust the busy little Google searchbots will rectify shortly
Aside from all this specialist photographic geekiness, the Leica M8 thing has also served to further reinforce a few hang-ups I nurture about people and the zany things they do
- People are capable of astonishing levels of dissonance, especially when they have a lot invested in something, no matter how flawed it may be. What else can you say about someone who tests a £3,000 camera body, discovers that all the pictures come out the same colour as a Jimi Hendrix album cover and concludes, as this review does near the bottom, that 'this makes for an incredible black and white camera ... when shot with an M8 and converted to Black and White appropriately this can add a tonal depth and richness to an image which is quite remarkable'. Remarkable indeed
- If reviews and forum posts in supposedly impartial sites are polluted with shills boosting iffy cameras, and they are, why should anyone think that producers of other goods, or services, or news stories, especially news stories, behave any differently? I don't
-
Caveat:
Obviously, generalisations about the essential unreliability of on-line photographic sites and forums could not possibly apply to the mighty Ken Rockwell's photography site. Ken's opinionated ravings and equipment reviews, his psychedelic take on what constitutes an acceptable degree of colour saturation, and his new found taste for posing his new born child with expensive optical equipment are a genuine and constant source of pleasure for me. The man is a Legend.
Norm Chomsky on 9/11 and JFK Conspiracy Theories...
Fortunately the clip is less than five minutes long, as exposure to an intellect such as Chomsky’s for any longer would render the viewer blind and mute, possibly permanently.
As one adoring commentator put it
Superb. Again shows himself to be a real thought leader and truly unique intellect. If he speaks we should listen.
My favourite part of the clip is where he explains that ignoring information that doesn’t fit in with your preferred explanation for an event is the correct, scientific way to go about things.
Oh no, on second thoughts, maybe my favourite bit is the part where he concludes
And even if it were true (a 9/11 conspiracy), which is extremely unlikely, who cares?
That’s pretty good too
I am the proud owner of three of Chomsky’s most popular books and have never managed to reach anywhere like halfway through any of them. If I were younger and less self-confident I would be inclined to believe that the fault was mine and that I was incapable of keeping up with a genius’ train of thought. But I’m not, so I’m inclined to believe that it’s actually Chomsky’s fault because he really is a lousy communicator who really is full of crap...
