Stef's Blog - a native London Southlander and unrepentant 'Conspiraloon™' who doesn't trust anyone, not even himself. Sometimes I take pictures. I also enjoy swearing immensely and think much faster than I can type, so each post comes guaranteed to include at last one confusing typo. OK?
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
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
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 -
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.
When I was a kid I was, as many teenage boys are, fascinated by the history of warfare. I read the books. I watched the films. I made the models. I played the games.
If I had devoted as much time and energy to something useful I'd probably be fluent in about five or six languages
Of all the campaigns and wars I studied, one conflict struck a particular chord in my impressionable, totally fucking naive teenage brain...
The story of the plucky state of Israel...
The three million against the two hundred million.
A handful of desperate refugees, armed with nothing but some rusty WW2 surplus, living with the constant threat of being wiped off the face of the Earth by the Communist-armed Arab hordes
A nation of citizen-soldiers who just wanted to grow oranges but who, in a stroke of righteous irony, reluctantly mastered the techniques of Nazi blitzkrieg to save themselves from ultimate annihilation
From an indoctrinated teenage war geek's point of view, the Six Day War was an impressive and inspirational feat of arms
Especially when you remember how those pesky Arabs were preparing to douse Israel with rockets armed with poison gas
now where have I heard that one before?
I totally bought it 100%. Hook, Line and Sinker. The whole myth
And why shouldn't I?
I didn't know any Muslims or Arabs and the Jews I knew seemed alright to me
And all the books, films and television I saw told the same story
But when I got a little older I started asking myself some questions the books, the films and the television didn't seem to cover...
What had the Arabs to do with the Jewish Holocaust?
What right did the Israelis have to Palestine in the first place?
Why was it that Jews, of all people, thought that recreating Lidice or Oradour-sur-Glane in Palestine was the way to go about solving anything?
Wasn't the expression 'Never Again?' supposed to apply to everyone?
and so on and so on
It also started to become clear, as I did some more grown-up study, that the Israelis weren't quite as outgunned as I was told they were, quite the opposite
And then I found out about stuff like the King David Hotel Bombing, the attack on the USS Liberty, the Lavon Affair, the Balfour Declaration and all the other staples of Anti-Zionist lore
Much of that anti-Zionist lore stands up to critical scrutiny a lot better than any of the Zionist bollocks I was fed as a kid
I still feel, years later, like a complete dick for believing so much propaganda
The news, after the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, that the executioners had been trained by Israelis was just the icing on the cake.
After all, the Israelis have had sixty years of solid experience of really getting to the heart of what it takes to prevent terrorism. Anyone who doesn't want London to have that carefree, at ease with itself, Tel Aviv vibe just has to be bonkers
Short of some kind of Apocalypse, the state of Israel is not going away (and yes there are some loonytunes Christian Zionist whackjobs who are banking on just that eventuality)
But, personally speaking, I don't want to see any Apocalypses or the annihilation of nations.
Some small, tiny little, tweaks to the way the Israeli state goes about doing things; such as losing the racist apartheid shit and not bombing the crap out of people as part of some deranged, futile exercise in collective punishment, would be just fucking peachy though
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