Who F**ks you Xtra? oooh oooh

...taken back in the days when wearing a straw boater was a mandatory requirement for anyone attending a bank run

Now that Northern Rock is as good as finished and just waiting for someone to have the decency to administer the coup de grâce it's only reasonable to ask 'who's next?'

Fish of the Week

Because they pursued a similar business strategy to Northern Rock, the two most popular names in the frame seem to be Bradford & Bingley and Alliance & Leicester. Like Northern Rock, they have given out mortgages far in excess of deposits taken and have had to fund their business from money borrowed from other banks. The problem being that other banks have a fair idea of how shite many of those mortgages are and are not lending the funds required.

Or so the story goes

Personally, I haven't looked over B&B or A&L's books so I don't know how dire their predicament really is

But it doesn't really matter

As long as people think those banks are in bad shape they are in bad shape

There are predators out there who have seen how panicky depositors are and how quickly a little negative publicity has crushed a bank's reputation and its share price. The stockmarket is more than ready for a little predatory shorting of financial stocks

All you have to do is...

• Sell a lot of Bradford and Bingley shares you don't actually own at the current market price, say £3.60, with a promise to deliver the shares to the buyer in a few days time

• Hope that other speculators and nervous investors join in the sale-fest and drive the market price down to say something like £2.00 a share
  

• At which point you buy the shares you 'sold' a few days before and turn them over to whoever bought them off you.

• Bingo, you've made £1.60 a share selling stuff you didn't own, off the back of a panic you could very well have started

• And just to be on the safe side and to make sure the share price doesn't rise instead of fall, there's no harm is spreading a few malicious rumours about the company you are mucking about with - there's nothing like TV coverage of mobs of terrified grannies clawing at a bank's front doors to really enhance its share price
  

Of course, if the company you're mucking about with is inherently strong and market sentiment is generally positive, playing this sort of game is a risky business.

Though, to be honest, if I were a c*nt in a stripy shirt and access to a trading screen right now I'd be sitting here with an erection, thinking 'dead cert'...

(The Daily Mash)

It's also worth pondering upon the fact that the people who ultimately stand to lose out from all of this are ordinary savers and people with pensions. That's the not so funny thing about credit bubbles and their aftermath, everyone loses - savers and spenders alike. At least the spenders got to buy some rubbish and have some nice holidays for a while

Of course, things will start to get really interesting if and when house prices start to fall as the result of lenders like Northern Rock, Alliance & Leicester, Bradford & Bingley, and all the others, pumping less money into the housing market with their shonky, fucked-up mortgages

and then, all that debt which built-up off the back of elevated house prices will become flakier and flakier

and then...

well, fuck knows




-

edit:

There's an intriguing little quote from BBC Business Editor Robert Peston on the BBC News site here...

"Mortgage banks and building societies such as Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley, as well as the bigger banks, have seen much of the money withdrawn from Northern Rock"

Now why would Mr Peston single out A&L and B&B, out of all the players on the field, as being destinations for savers fleeing Northern Rock ? = An implied endorsement of those two banks by the State Broadcasting Company

Could someone else be worried that the knives will be out for those two institutions this week?

Total LoonThink™, obviously

And remember, it's only subliminal if you don't notice

edit #2:

At the close of today's working day it seems that Alliance & Leicester was selected as next in line for a well-deserved and potentially lucrative kicking on the stock market, though Bradford & Bingley hardly had a fun day either

And then at the end of all that...

The government announced that it was guaranteeing Northern Rock depositors' money

WTF!?

as outrageous an example of corporate welfare as you're ever likely to see

Apparently, UK taxpayers are now in the 'underwriting shitty loans made by private companies' business

What's our fee for doing that I wonder

Though this might stabilise the share price of banks which have specialised in shitty loans for a little while, it is unlikely that they will be able to continue pumping money into and inflating the housing market with their shitty loans. And it will be interesting to see just how large an appetite our government has for supporting shitty loans on our behalf in the days and weeks ahead. Rumour has it that there are one or two shitty loans out there

It would be nice to think that speculators who have shorted NR, A&L and B&B in the expectation of a share price bloodbath have been reamed by the government announcement and the positive impact it may have on share prices. However, the week is still young and I suspect much tomfoolery lies ahead...

.

Monkey Dust

One of the following videos is taken from the best and, as is increasingly turning out, the most prophetic British cartoon show ever made, Monkey Dust. The other isn't...





You Tube is crammed full of clips from Monkey Dust - it's all good

And it will be a cold day in Hell before the BBC releases Series Two or Three of MD on DVD or commissions a fourth. Way too near the mark...

Thanks to anon and Lord P. for the links

-

edit: and if you want to see something really scary you could do a lot worse than checking out this passionate appeal on the subject of lost children from US First Lady Laura Bush ('embedding disabled by request'). No rapid blinking or fidgety gestures from Laura - disturbingly so. Watching stuff like this can really bring out the David Icke in a person

.

It begins?

A few expressions and concepts that might be worth brushing up on over the next few days now that Northern Rock can't lend money it doesn't have any more and is begging for a bail out...

• 'Bank Run'

• 'Fractional-Reserve Banking'

• 'Credit-based monetary systems'

• 'Ponzi Schemes'

An artist's impression of the scene outside a typical Northern Rock branch this morning

I'm having real trouble coming up with any wise-arse comments about Northern Rock and the significance of its predicament. The kind of fuck-ups that might be just around the corner really aren't very funny at all

Not one little bit


edit: The Daily Mash is having a stab at wise-arse comments though...

CHRISTIANS PREPARE FOR RAPTURE AS HOUSE PRICES DIP

That's the differences between us amateurs and the pros I guess


edit#2: I wish I'd thought about pasting this into my blog first...



.

Apophenia (redux)

A commentator (Merkin) on my previous post asks...

Am I really ill?
That graphic of the exclusion zones showed a prick and ball in the middle.




The answer is, I think, no

I don't think that Apophenia, the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data, can be considered an illness as such. After all, who's to say that the data, certainly without further investigation, really is random or meaningless?

Take the work of twisted, and unfortunately psychotic, genius Luke Halder for example. He really was trying to paint a smiley face across America with pipe bombs...




...and if you had been an FBI agent clever enough to spot what Luke was up to you would have won a prize and not been considered mental at all

(PS you can track Lucas' whereabouts with the useful, if slightly disturbing, Federal Bureau of Prisons - 'Find an Inmate' service)

And returning to the example of DEFRA FMV Protection Zones, I too must confess that I was reminded of a picture of Michelin Man that adorned the common room in my old geology department which had been 'enhanced' by a bored Earth Sciences student armed with a bottle of Tippex...




Phallophenia?

.

Moooooo!!

Lord Patel has written a couple of posts about the latest foot and mouth outbreak here and here.

He was particularly interested by the fact that the new F&M ‘Protection Zone’ includes yet another fricking government bio-war facility. This time the Veterinary Laboratories Agency (VLA) in Woodham

To be honest I was a little confused with Lord Patel’s posts at first, as the VLA is actually 8km from the reported outbreak site and therefore falls well outside the 3km Protection Zone that was first announced by DEFRA at 11 o’clock yesterday morning




However, later in the day at 5 o’clock DEFRA updated its list of Protection Zones on the basis that

‘On 12 September Foot and Mouth Disease was confirmed at a farm in Surrey. The farm comprises a number of separate parcels of land: a single Protection Zone has been put in place extending 3 kilometres around each of them, with a Surveillance Zone of 10 kilometres radius beyond that. Footpaths are being closed in the Protection Zone. Cattle on the affected farm are being culled, together with animals on an adjacent farm.’

And the VLA falls well within the expanded area under protection...




The VLA and the latest outbreak site both also handily happen to be located comfortably within a cow's coughing distance from the M25

Bless, the Americans test and hold all their noxious shit in the middle of deserts or Alabama but the British like to play with their anthrax in facilities with shit plumbing located right next to their capital city's orbital motorway and, yes I'm looking at the map, a small river. Outstanding

Curiously, the Institute for Animal Health (IAH) – the source of August’s F&M outbreak only falls within a ‘Surveillence Zone’

I mention all this because, as I’ve already commented to people elsewhere, I was more than a little underwhelmed by the reception given to the HSE report on the August outbreak which concluded that the outbreak was probably due to leaky drains (!?)

More specifically we were told that this was the probable chain of events...

• Three organisations operate at Pirbright - Institute for Animal Health, Merial Animal Health and Stabilitech

• All three work with live virus strain O1BFS that caused foot-and-mouth disease but origin of leaked virus not known

• Waste water containing live virus entered drainage pipework

• Contaminated waste may have leaked into soil from unsealed manholes and pipes damaged by tree roots

• Heavy rainfall in late July may have led to further leaks from drains

• Contractors and their vehicles had relatively unrestricted access to Pirbright - a breach of biosecurity

• Construction work disturbed soil above drainage system

• Lorries probably picked up virus on tyres and underbodies, carried it away from site and past Woolford Farm

• Cattle at the farm tested positive for foot-and-mouth on 3rd August

Fans of the fabulously elaborate death scenes in movies such as The Omen and the Final Destination series will no doubt be perfectly at ease with this explanation

"A tragic accident that was just waiting to happen" - The HSE

but nevertheless I couldn’t help but be struck by how blasé the mainstream media seemed to be about the whole business

And presumably the explanation for the latest outbreak is going to have to be even more long-winded and append a couple of extra steps that explain how a virus with an incubation period of 2-14 days can lie low for 30+ days before saying hello to everyone again

Oh dear

Conspiraloons™ are particularly touchy about our government’s new found love for mutant killer viruses, both real and imagined, because we’re just a teensy wee bit suspicious that naughty people might, hypothetically speaking of course, feel just a little tempted to whistle up some viruses, real or imagined, as a means of making shit loads of money from the bullshit vaccine business and as a handy tool to close down entire swathes of the country at the drop of hat, as and when it suits their purposes, no real questions asked

Totally bonkers of course but we do, sadly, live in cynical times

Now would definitely be a good time for those lovable prankmonkeys the McCann's to do something amusing methinks... .


.

Conspiratune™ of the Week: Bin Laden Didn't Blow Up The Projects

Alternate, more texty, video available here

Oooh, I think I need a lie down now...

(Thanks for the link Gary)

-

edit: and whilst I'm linking to Conspiratunes™ I 've just realised that I haven't posted a relink to Rammstein's Amerika for at least a month now. Shame on me...

.

P20

The all-new 2007 edition Renault McCann - complete with plenty of boot space (family-sized bottles of Dettol and wet wipes available as optional extras)

(Thanks to anon for the link to the following left by way of a comment underneath my previous post)


I'm reproducing a comment left by 'P20' in a thread discussing the Madeleine McCann saga on the Daily Mirror's online forum. Whilst I don't necessarily buy into everything P20 is suggesting in the post, she/he raises some interesting ideas that I think are worth mulling over (even if it could do with translation in some places)...




(NB! 'Keyboard Monkey' = someone paid to make posts on the Internet whilst posing as a member of the general public)


"Guess you're ready at this point to consider that this entire charade has been an experiment, an elaborate, scripted hoax, to assess the effectiveness of combined Keyboard Monkeys and Pimp media, in assaults against the public ?

Clarrie would have been very eager to learn how many of the Ones in Twenty frequent forums. If you're not familiar with the 'Ones in 20' --- briefly, it's been estimated that on average, out of every twenty people, one will be a natural leader, able to motivate the rest. In wartime, the Ones in Twenty were removed in the belief the remaining 19 would thus be rendered obedient and easy to handle.

It's easy to pick the I in 20 out of a crowd. That's why they film protest marches, etc. A good 1 in 20 can rouse and lead a nation. Ones in Twenty are the natural enemies of governments, repressive governments especially.

Internet has changed everything. Governments fear it. But now they're being told they can use internet to their advantage. Which is where media monitoring units and the Hobshawns of the world come in. They're selling a product to governments with promises of being able to control societies remotely, using 'opinion shapers' and the like online.

I think this hoax/experiment will have scared the wits out of politicians. Because I suspect that instead of discovering perhaps Ones in Twenty in forums, they've discovered the ratio to be closer to 5 in 20, possibly 8 in 20.

What Clarrie and the s.c.u.m. have learned is that Ones in Twenty gravitate to internet forums. They teach the rest how to navigate and dissect media spin until it becomes automatic to all. Internet forums create Ones in Twenty ! And everyone develops new and vital skills via exposure to them.

Look at this forum, for example. The media c.r.a.p. doesn't have a chance here ! Yes, it's still fooling Mr. and Mrs Average who rely on Sky and Daily Mail for the news. But that same media garbage is ripped apart in these forums as fast as the media pimps can spin it. That is NOT good news for Hobshawn or Gordie or the media monitoring industry.

They've learned also that Keyboard Monkeys are worse than useless. Duh, Clarrie ... as I've told you before --- pay peanuts and monkeys is all you'll get.

At this point, the Clarries and Hobshawns of the world might be realising that for 'opinion shaping and steering' to work effectively, you need to have a superior class of Keyboard Monkey. They need to be trained. That costs money. Up goes the price of the product the Hobshawn's are trying to sell. And it gets worse (if you're a Hobshawn) or better, if you're a One or More in Twenty. Because having expended all that money, time and effort training Keyboard Monkeys, you have to keep them long enough to recoup your outlay and then some. We can see Keyboard Monkeys being head-hunted, can't we ? A new growth industry, with spin-offs such as Keyboard Monkey Training Centres. Advanced Keyboard Monkey Degrees. Phd in Monkeying. etc.

The phase I'm personally looking forward to, is the Keyboard Monkeys' Revolt. After all, like professional debaters, highly trained Keyboard Monkeys will automatically become ambivalent regarding any subject. Flexibility would be their tool. On any given day, they might be required to 'persuade' people to endorse mandatory euthanasia and to drink toxic recycled water. Who would blame them if, for the hell of it, or to pay back a despised employer or in a fit of conscience ......... the Keyboard Monkeys Crossed to the Other Side Twisted Evil

Or ........ maybe people like ourselves would accept Keyboard Monkey positions in order to sabotage our employer, especially in political matters. How would those employers know ? In order to control their Keyboard Monkeys, they'd have to pay people to monitor those Monkeys. And it's possible the monitors might have a few political or other agenda of their own.

In the end, organisations and governments will realise it's more costly and problematic to try to shape societies via online Monkeys than it to just leave the public alone. And the Hobshawns will have to find another middle-man role as a means of earning their living.

Right now, it's very possible that this entire McTan Scam is an experiment, a scripted hoax, right down to PJ searches and Portuguese media reports. The McTans may be MI5/6. They have that look to them. Madeleine may be no more than a photograph borrowed for the experiment/hoax -- with the Clarrie's of the world timing just how long each new item of media spin lasts in the cauldron that is this and other online forums. They may well be testing us, to see how swiftly and how much of this case we 'crack', as the raw data is fed to us by the pimp media. They need this information, for future reference. Because they've got lots of scams on the drawing boards with a lot more at stake that a couple of robotic actors and a million pound Fund.

They've learned a lot from this forum (and others of course). They are collating data. They now know (thanks to this and other forums) just how great a role intuition plays in the public's determination of what is and what is not 'believable'.

They've learned the importance of 'sympathetic personalities', because by now, they realise that people first began to suspect Kat and Jerry because of their 'detached' and 'unemotional' demeanor.

They've learned that WE learn fast. We might be fooled by something once, but not twice.

They've learned we're far more analytical than they would ever have expected.

They've learned that total strangers, sight unseen, from all corners of the globe, regardless of class, education, age, etc. are immediately accepting of each other and willing to share information and work co-operatively regarding complex topics, amid hundreds of details.

We have shocked the living sh*t out of them. Now let's give them a collective Big Middle Finger ! Hi Clarrie. We see you ! One word for you luvvie --- it's backfiring. And so are Gordie's chances of winning the election ! Ciao"

.

They're all Conspiraloons now - well, sort of

Many of the most vehement criticisms of parapolitical conspiracy theories come not from the 'Right' of politics but from established 'Left Wing' thinkers and writers

Which is kind of curious really

You would have thought that supposedly anti-establishment lefties would be all over a worldview that saw the human affairs as being consciously manipulated by a powerful, self-serving elite

The sticking point is not the concept of a powerful, self-serving elite but the suggestion that the members of this elite are going about their self-serving in a deliberate, co-ordinated manner...

• Conspiraloons™ believe that much of what goes on in the world is deliberately planned, or at least given a good nudge wherever possible

• Serious Left Wing intellectuals know that these things 'just happen'

This distinction goes back at least as far as the 19th Century, when thinkers like Marx and Darwin attempted to explain everything in terms of scientific forces rather than the acts of individuals, which smacked too much of religion for their tastes.

Believing that things just happen was claimed to be rational and scientific. Believing that things are sometimes deliberately made to happen by powerful forces which don't always announce what they're up to was denounced as irrational and superstitious

There has been much discussion amongst Conspiraloons™ that the powerful forces which control the world invested heavily in promoting this arbitrary and essentially false dichotomy and that the greatest trick they ever pulled was convincing the world they didn't exist

but that's not important or particularly amusing right now

What is amusing right now are the signs of discomfort being shown by journalistic gatekeepers (arguably prisoners of ideology rather than conscious shills) as they try to explain and comment on what's going on in the world without committing the mortal sin of sounding like a Conspiraloon™. Thanks to the Internet and the increasingly blatant behaviour of our non-existent controlling elites, that's proving to be an increasingly difficult act to pull off

Some evidence to illustrate what I'm talking about taken from a couple of very peculiar journalistic days at the end of last month ('borrowing' very heavily from original research carried out by a charter member of the Conspiraloon™ Alliance here and here)...


Exhibit A

Robert Fisk - the journalist who despises the Internet

Even I Question the truth about 9/11 (The Independent 25/8/07)

In which Fisk rattles off a laundry list of unanswered questions about 9/11 and inconsistencies in the official narrative

At the end of which he concludes...

Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East.

Yup, Bob airs a list of questions, the very existence of which challenge what we have been told about 9/11, but he's NOT a conspiracy theorist

Knob


Exhibit B

Will Hutton

Curb the Greedy Financiers (The Guardian 26/8/07)

Good Will Hutton has penned a piece that will gladden the heart of conspiracy connoisseurs everywhere. He points out that:

Globalisation, it is now clear, is run in the interests of a global financial class which has Western governments in its thrall

more:

The rules of the game are set up solely to benefit the financiers whether in London, New York or Hong Kong

furthermore:

It is as though Europe and America had announced an amnesty to the world's criminal gangs after they had gone on a killing spree because they feared the killing would get worse

and even furthermore:

We need a party which will speak for an interest other than self-interested, amoral plutocrats. None exists

Make no mistake, this is Loontalk™ in all but name...


Exhibit C (my extra special favourite)

George Monbiot

How the neoliberals stitched up the wealth of nations for themselves (The Guardian 28/8/07)

A cabal of intellectuals and elitists hijacked the economic debate, and now we are dealing with the catastrophic effects

How did they start? A tale all too familiar to us....

They arise in large part from a meeting that took place 60 years ago in a Swiss spa resort

To what purpose George, to what purpose?!!!

the real intent of the programme - the restoration of the power of the elite

What happens if you cross this cabal?!!?

if you disagreed, you got shot

Coming from anyone else, this could easily be dismissed as conspiracy theory, but it can't be, because George has previously come out strongly against these things.

Clearly this man has come a long way in a short time, he is one of us now, and we must cherish him. As one disciple of the David Shayler Being's previous life said:

"I tell you, there will be more joy in Conspiracy Heaven over one reporter who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance."


Maybe now's the time to start thinking about initiating a program of militant Conspiraloon™ activism - holding Conspiraloon™ Pride carnivals, writing protest songs, printing up some T shirts and aggressively 'outing' all those closet loons out there. They'd feel so much better about themselves afterwards

.

Giving up Liberty for Freedom - the Youtube critics rave...

“she's talking bullshit..this is the "whitby" version... geezer was sitting down,reading the metro paper.. out of date visa?..so what?.. . this all started wierd anyway... surveillance taking a piss when he walked out of his flats?..didnt get a good look at him?..then lets him on the bus?..failed bus bomb the day before?..wierd..”

“He wasn't IN his own country woman, it had nothing to do with a visa and eveything to do with racism, and the guy only ran when the tube came in so he catch it. He didn't run.”

“the ignorance behind those smiles.. if it was her son who was shot 8 times for no reason whatsoever shed be whistling a totally different tune. fact is in this age of "terror" a man was shot dead on the basis of his appearance. the met police are bastards”

“You stupid blond fucking cockney slutbag dirty chavvy whore, I really hope you get shot or one of your kids do, tell me how much did the pigs give you to say that shit?”

“Disgusting.”

“LOL, what a fucking ugly brain dead crack whore. God i hope that bitch stumbles upon this. She's probably already seen Terror storm because she's in it, lol.”

“i think even if it was her son she still would've been on the side of the police.........f*kin b*tch”

“Does this dumb bitch realize that liberty is freedom? God...this world is fucked.”

.

Burying Bad News (again)

Whilst pondering upon the possible wider implications of the Find Madeleine campaign/ psyop(?) I flicked through some of the other news stories from the end of last week that were eclipsed by the latest upsurge in McCann mania.

Ever since Jo Moore got busted I think it’s pretty difficult for even the most hardened ‘realist’ (sic.) to continue pretending that there aren’t amoral psychopaths working for our establishment who have absolutely no problems with ‘burying’ bad news stories by synchronising their disclosure to coincide with more sensational, populist stories.

In fact, I’d argue that times when sensationalist stories like the McCann saga are being plastered all over the media are precisely the times to be most alert and on the look out for more significant, ‘buried’ bad news stories.

After all, shouldn’t a little bit more have been of the announcement that the recent Foot and Mouth outbreak in the UK was the result, allegedly, of dodgy drains?

How exactly does Foot and Mouth make its way out of a dodgy drain and, as I understand, move uphill to nearby farms? What exactly are highly-trained scientists doing pouring F&M down a leaky drain in the first place? Why is the facility in question still in operation? What is the state of repair of other similar facilities? WTF is going on?

Or how about the news that the government has once again rejected holding an inquiry into the 7/7 bombings?

…another story that received barely a mention whilst everyone was wetting themselves in their eagerness to cover the McCann thing

"Say, that's a nice van..."

"The government remains of the opinion that a public inquiry is not necessary. We are making no further comment as legal proceedings are ongoing."


I’ve read quite a few comments from people on blogs and newspaper comment sections that support the government in not holding a public inquiry. The gist of the argument against an inquiry is summed up in a couple of comments I saw under a post in Elmer Q. Gooseburger’s blog…


“Excellent news, Mr. Gooseburger, our security officers have much better things to do with their time than fannying around at the behest of a bunch of politically-inspired self-publicists... Even as I write, I do not doubt that there are several intricate and potentially dangerous operations in progress which require their full-time application. I want them at work, not stuck in some court-room answering questions raised with the perfect 20/20 vision of hind-sight.”

“Exactly, so, Mr. Gooseburger. I suspect that one or two mistakes might have been made prior to the 7/7 bombings. I am equally sure that lessons have been learned by the officers concerned and as there has never been a war fought without SNAFUs, I don't expect that this one will break the mould, particularly as it is likely to rage for a generation or two.”


There are, or course, one or two small problem-ettes with this line of reasoning

The first being that for reasons that should be blindingly fucking obvious there is was a well-established tradition in the UK that when something horrible happens to people an investigation is carried out virtually as a matter of course.

The investigation can take any of several forms – a trial, an inquest or an inquiry by a regulatory body.

And the results are published

I have no doubt, for example, that the criminally negligent rail operators in this country would love to claim every time they accidentally slaughter a few dozen of their passengers that all necessary lessons have been learned and that external inquiries would simply hamper the process of acting on those lessons

But that would be bollocks

An awful lot of people died on 7/7 and the 'Official Narrative' of the events of that day is being used to justify fundamental changes in the way of life of this country. All without any due process or rigour being exercised on that Official Narrative.

Now if the politicians and senior security officers involved in peddling that Official Narrative had an unblemished track record for honesty I’d kind of understand, but not agree with, those people who are arguing that an inquiry would be a distraction

But there is no such track record

Cut Out and Keep DIY Debating Aid for use when spinning against Conspiraloons™ who express scepticism about the Official 7/7 Narrative - courtesy of The Conspiraloon™ Alliance

And waiting until after a war has been fucked-up to investigate the whos, hows and whys of that war is daft.

The best historical parallel I can think of is the Norway Debate of 1940. The British had just fucked-up a military operation in Norway. Quite badly. The Germans were doing rather well and poised to crush the French. None of which stopped the British Parliament tearing the existing government a new arsehole and ultimately forcing a change in leadership and strategy.

Those were the days

Or maybe the people who think that inquiries during 'wartime' are counter-productive reckon this country would have fared better in WW2 if Neville Chamberlain had stayed in charge?

Neville Chamberlain - famously crap

Aside from all that, and this is admittedly a secondary point, it’s kind of hard to swallow the idea that our senior police officers are so stretched fighting the War on Terror!! that they can’t devote some of their time to be subject to the ‘eternal vigilance’ that some of us are lunatic enough to still believe is the price of freedom.

Take Assistant Commissioner Andy ‘Whoops, I’ve just been caught lying through my fucking teeth about the public execution of an innocent man’ Hayman CBE (awarded 2006) for example

If he’s so fucking pushed that he can’t take part in an inquiry into 7/7 then what’s he doing speaking at privately-organised bollocks War on Terror conferences like this old toss later this month?

He can’t be that busy can he?

Junket superstar and (alleged) fibber par excellence, Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman wins a prize... oooooh, shiny

-

edit - I should point out that the 'Understanding Terrorism in the UK' conference featuring Andrew Hayman CBE (Confirmed Brazilian Execution) I link to above has recently been canceled due to 'appalling apathy'...

John Casson organiser of the Conference is preparing a report for Prime Minister Gordon Brown, David Cameron, leader of the opposition and the Association of Chief Police Officers which will be made available to them and the press on Thursday 6th September 2007. The purpose of the report is to alert them to the apathy.

No doubt Assistant Commissioner Hayman will now be able to devote the time that has been freed up to hunt down even more crazed jihadists than his important engagement at this crucially important conference would otherwise have permitted him to.

.