"If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough"
And this year’s Robert Capa Golden Claymore award for the most sensitive spam share tip must go to this quality email forwarded to me by a chum…
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As the old saying goes - No pain. No gain
Well, it looks like I’ve already fallen foul of the new offence of looking at torture porn on the Internet…
It’s amazing what they’ll print in Vogue these days.
There are some nice high-res scans of the full set here. Alternatively, Vogue have put them all together in a tasteful flash animation; including some loud police siren noises and feet hovering up and down above models’ necks.
Serious social commentary or the manifestation of a fucked-up superficial mindset taken straight out of Zoolander?
Let me show you Derelicte. It is a fashion, a way of life inspired by the very homeless, the vagrants, the crack whores that make this wonderful city so unique.
Truly we live in an age where parody is virtually obsolete
And let’s face it, the fashion industry does have a track record for this sort of thing. Ever thought that those black SS uniforms looked kind of cool? Well, you can thank Hugo Boss for that.
Whatever the thinking behind the Vogue photographs, it’s all very peculiar … and strangely arousing.
‘One of the senior officers in charge on the day Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead by police is to be promoted.
I know! Why don't we shoot him in the face!
I’m all for female empowerment but this seems a trifle excessive.
"I admire you as a policeman, particularly your adherence
to violence as a necessary adjunct to the job."
Or maybe the MPA are Judge Dredd fans
Which is also more than possible.
I can also remember confusing Judge Dredd with Judge Dread, the chubby white reggae star who spent his entire career singing about how very big his willy was and who, to my knowledge, didn’t execute anybody as part of his act.
9/11
Every man and his dog is writing about 9/11 today so I’ll pass on that one. This piece on the Rense site sums up my feelings on the subject pretty well anyway...
This, by no means, constitutes an endorsement of Rense’s site BTW. Sites like his do an excellent job of conflating serious political ‘truth seeking’ with moonbat nonsense about space aliens and remote viewing. Whether by accident or design, that kind of behaviour serves the ends of only one group of people I can think of, and I’m not part of it.
They hate us for our freedoms
Fortunately, in spite of 9/11,7/7 et al, our leaders have managed to prevent Islamic Terrorists from changing our sacred way of life because they hate it so
well, mostly
Dave Gorman, King of London-based Rock Balancers, has shared a little story via Flickr about how he was stopped and questioned under anti terror legislation whilst taking pictures of Battersea Power Station.
Well, he could have been planning an attack on an uninhabited building site and, let’s face it, pictures of Battersea Power station are pretty hard to come by
I can’t wait to hear about what happens to the person behind this blog…
… on their first contact with the police
Policeman: ‘Excuse me sir, can I ask you what you’re doing?’
LPB person: ‘Taking pictures of tiny little plastic people acting out scenes of London life in public places’
Oh, to be a fly on the wall for that one
Um, what other Freedom!!! related links are there lurking on my desktop …
Oh yes
The Young Explorer’s Biometric Recognition Set – because it’s fun to be scanned
'The Young Explorer's Full Body Cavity Search Kit' can only be just around the corner, so to speak.
and
After all, just because something is impossible there’s no harm in spunking away millions and establishing police state style surveillence trying to make it happen.
Is there?
Nor is there any harm in the State Broadcasting Service censoring and editing people’s comment in the ‘Have Your Say’ section of its website
Actually, it is kind of fun seeing what the unseen censors decide to take out.
The headline that never was
Can you just imagine the anguish in newspaper offices up and down the land when faced by the temptations presented by the victim's name in this undeniably tragic news story
Boy ‘executed’ in city shooting
Someone’s bound to crack eventually
Enviro-Arse
Without going into the full back story now, I for one am not entirely convinced by the global warming thing and detect a far from subtle stench of globalist manipulation behind the entire climate change circus. I can still remember back to the late 1970s and early 1980s when the same types who are pushing the pollution and global warming story were farting on about resource depletion and global cooling. Only this time round they’ve got some serious backing.
World climate does change, sure enough, it always has, but my money is on global cooling in the near future and unless we can figure out a way to control the heat output of the Sun or change the Earth’s orbit there’s fuck all we can do about it…
Russian Scientists Forecast Global Cooling in 6–9 years
We’d all be better off thinking about ways to deal with the changes that will undoubtedly happen rather than doing the Canute thing but right now there’s no money in that line of thinking so no one can be bothered.
On the bright side, I’ve just popped my postcode into the Environment Agency’s post-Katrina interactive London flood map and the good news is that if London is swamped by rising sea levels most of Lambeth will become the New Atlantis (the only difference with the old one being that no one will spend any time looking for it), leaving my flat as a desirable beach side property. Best start building that marina in my back yard now.
Filth
(connossieurs of 1970s politically incorrect schoolboy humour will note that this comes dangerously close to the classic - Lawrence Lykes, The Cockwell Inn, Tillit, Herts - that I still use regularly when signing onto mandatory on-line registration forms)
The day after I wrote a blog posting about how Lambeth is the kind of place where you can stab a woman in a frenzied attack at nine o’clock on a weekday morning, run off covered in blood and not get caught, a fat, brightly coloured envelope plonked through my letterbox.
It was an information pack from Lambeth Council.
My favourite part was the selection of six complimentary Lambeth Life postcards we’re all presumably supposed to send to friends and relatives around the world to make them jealous.
Clearly, the producers of the cards come from the Blairesque ‘If we only think and express happy thoughts nobody will notice how shit everything really is’ school of philosophy.
NB Triumph of the Will was made in 1935
The booklet of useful council services that came with the cards kind of took the edge off the ‘only think happy thoughts’ process a little; filled as it is with contact details of drug therapy units, battered wives shelters and mental health councillors.
Anyway, inspired as I was by these postcards I thought about producing my own competing set, spent five minutes rooting around my Flickr photostream and came up with my own selection of Lambeth Life photos suitable for use in a souvenir postcard collection. OK, a couple come from nearby Southwark but much of there is pretty shite too…
Of course, this is only a representative selection. For example, I could have chosen any one of dozens of pictures of yellow murder boards and crime scene photographs from my extensive collection; though I did stop adding to it a little while ago because it wasn't funny any more.
Could I have come up with a similar haul of pictures ten or twenty years ago? Yup, no argument there. But it would have been a lot harder. Much harder. What people take for granted today would have been considered unusual back then.
So, even if I were to forget the war on terror, the invasions, the erosion of civil liberties, and levels of corruption that would put Italians to shame, I'd still have a sackful of issues about what our current government has done to my city, and presumably lots of other people’s cities.
Our schools are shit, our hospitals are bankrupt, our underclass is burgeoning and our police are off chasing pixies. And all this in spite of the fact that we've never spent more on our public services.
The mantra ‘Well, it’s better than Thatcher’ just won’t cut it anymore.
On one level, the causes for the range of problems I see all around me are numerous and complicated. On a higher level they all boil down to the basic issue of a tiny number of people having a right old laugh at the expense of the rest of us. And who out there would have the balls to suggest that the entire New Labour project is not buried so far up the arse of that tiny ruling elite that it can’t see daylight?
So, forgive me for not getting too excited about the possible demise of Tony Blair and not buying into the notion that everything will be back on track and hunky dory once he has been dealt with.
Per the BBC News website 7th September 2006:
Arabic TV channel Al-Jazeera has broadcast what it says is unseen footage of Osama Bin Laden meeting some of the 9/11 hijackers.
…
Al-Jazeera also showed "suicide" videos by Wael al-Shihri and Hamza al-Ghamdi, two of the hijackers who crashed planes into the World Trade Center.
Per the BBC News website 23rd September 2001:
Saudi Arabian pilot Waleed Al Shehri was one of five men that the FBI said had deliberately crashed American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Centre on 11 September.
His photograph was released, and has since appeared in newspapers and on television around the world.
Now he is protesting his innocence from Casablanca, Morocco.
He told journalists there that he had nothing to do with the attacks on New York and Washington, and had been in Morocco when they happened. He has contacted both the Saudi and American authorities, according to Saudi press reports.
He acknowledges that he attended flight training school at Daytona Beach in the United States, and is indeed the same Waleed Al Shehri to whom the FBI has been referring.
But, he says, he left the United States in September last year, became a pilot with Saudi Arabian airlines and is currently on a further training course in Morocco.
News of the first fatal stabbing of the month in my area still trickling in…
A man who stabbed a woman to death in a "frenzied" attack as she walked to work is being hunted by police.
The 55-year-old victim was attacked in Wickham Street, Kennington, south-east London, on Tuesday morning.
A witness saw her fall into the road after a struggle with a man, who then repeatedly stabbed her.
I particularly enjoyed the line
One local resident claimed there had been another serious stabbing close to the murder scene a week ago, when a friend of his had been stabbed in the face by a man of similar description
Ah well, I guess all our police are busy dealing with more important, scarier, more liquid things. I, for one, am a lot more afraid of exploding hair gel and ricin-coated tooth brushes than having a knife wielding psychopath wandering outside in my neighbourhood somewhere.
And is it really only a couple of weeks since Sir Ian Blair gave that interview? …
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair has said parts of London are returning to an era of neighbourliness and low crime. He said residents in Haringey, north London, are now happy to leave their front doors open and unlocked. Sir Ian said community-based Safer Neighbourhood Teams were making people feel as safe as they did 25 years ago. He also likened neighbourhood police team leaders to "the sheriff" who dealt with matters in their area
A quick recap on Sir Ian Blair's take on the state of law and order in London...
Be very, very scared of hordes of terrorists. Don't be worried about the knife-wielding crack-fuelled psychopaths
What are the chances of one country having two completely useless, yet apparently unstoppable, fantasist pricks in charge of key aspects of our security both with the same surname?
Maybe I’ll pass on popping out to the local convenience store for that pint of milk tonight. No, not the one that was firebombed with two blokes inside it a few months ago, the other one.
Not the crime scene in question as there's no f^cking way I'm
wandering around there tonight
Take yesterday for example.
The Top 5 UK and Ireland news stories as selected for me by Yahoo when I first flipped on the Internet for the day…
The full scoop isn’t yet in on the Stingray that did for Steve Irwin, but five pounds says the fucker was a Muslim.
Even if the ray wasn't a member of Al Qaeda that's still an impressive 4/5 score for the War on Terror.
And what about our Poor Bloody Infantry. We’re losing one here, one there, every couple of days and for what? Southern Iraq’s gone tits up and there’s so much heroin pouring out of Afghanistan via the Balkans into the UK you can get fixed up in London for roughly the same price as a pint of premium lager.
All this probably goes a long way to explaining the rash of Army Recruitment ads we’ve seen in the national media over the last few months. At least I think they're for the army. Most of the ads seem to concentrate on the sports facilities and the rigorously heterosexual nightlife available to the modern British Infantryman and have a vague Club 18–30 air about them. Even the material that focuses on the combat side of things seems quite coy about the whole Middle East/ furious native thing and prefers to depict soldiers noncing around in thick, rather European-looking woodland… or skiing.
Something similar went on in 80s when squaddies were being picked off one by one on the streets of Belfast. No imagery of Northern Ireland, plenty of shots of beach sports in Belize and Cyprus.
3rd Para Battlegroup, Helmand Province , Afghanistan
I guess if I could remember that far back I could probably dig out some recruitment posters from 1915 that portrayed Ypres as being just like Butlins, only more Belgian.
As some people who shrug their shoulders when I get into a lather about all shit the going on in the world around us say to me
‘Nothing changes. It’s always been the same. And it always will’
Some videos to share
When someone first sent me the link to this unauthorised video of a Depeche Mode song I thought it would be a cover of the Son House track of the same name only more, er, German. How wrong I was. The classic Depeche Mode leather-clad scheisse porn vibe we’ve all come to love is there sure enough but they’ve also come up with some new lyrics… and a new tune.
So it’s not really the same at all
Of course the biggest problem with any anti-Bush, or anti-Blair, activism like this video is that it helps feed the lie that Bush, or Blair, are individually the cause of all the World's woes. A lot of Labour party supporters are currently kidding themselves for example that everything will be just fucking peachy once Blair is removed.
If only things were that simple.
A clip of MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann explaining point by point why he thinks Rumsfeld, Bush et al are Nazi scum. As with much of Olbermann’s recent output most of what he says applies to the UK as much as the US.
I know a lot of Americans labour under the belief that the media here in the UK is a lot freer and more informed than in the States. As a general rule of thumb that may be true but we have no-one, but no-one, saying the kind of things Olbermann is saying in the US, albeit to a small audience, over here in the UK.
George Carlin is also fairly annoyed - can you tell?
And the number of mainstream British comedians delivering material like Carlin's is ...?
That's right
Fuck all
-
and of lesser social import…
