I had the unfortunate task of having to traverse the West End on foot with some friends last night. At one point in the evening I walked onto Oxford Street off a side street and felt a sense of panic that I haven't experienced since the first time I took a motor car onto a public road...
The Horror... the horror....
On the bright side, I did pick up a couple of new gift ideas, namely...
Betting Gift Vouchers - Brilliant! Why haven't we been able to buy these before?
and
The Liberator Motorized Attack Submarine (LMAS) - not only is it £69,999,999,970 cheaper than the Trident replacement system but unlike the Trident replacement system you can actually fire all the LMAS' weapons without having to ask the American government for permission beforehand. Lightweight, cost-effective, truly independent and just as useful as the real thing. Hamleys have got loads in stock.
A Vanguard class Trident submarine - possibly one of the most efficient ways to spunk £70,000,000,000 up against a wall so far conceived of by Man...
Some Fun Facts to remember this Christmas -
- The typical APR on a typical credit card is currently something in the region of 16 to 20%
- A typical Chinese factory worker earns something in the region of £30 a month for a 60 hour week
- All parties, however much fun they may be, come to an end. And they're normally followed by a real bastard of a headache...
My Great Grandparents enjoying Wolverhampton
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m part way through scanning a few boxes of old family photographs. So far most of the pictures I’ve scanned come from my Mum’s side of the family.
They immigrated to Britain during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Because they were dirt poor there aren’t many pictures of what their life was like in Italy before they left. There are a couple taken a little later on, after my grandfather first moved to the UK on his own, and a little money started coming in. And even those few pictures manage to convey a sense that life wasn’t that crash hot back in the home country.
Mum
Which is why people in my family will never get over the concept of polenta being sold as high-priced delicacy in poncy restaurants or the entire bijou, rustic, country-lifestyle, bullshit myth in general.
Polenta ... hmmm, yummy
A few years of eating cornmeal mush every day, crapping in fields to make up for the pisspoor soil and needing to recycle your own urine in a dozen different creative ways will take the edge off that particular fantasy quite nicely.
Life was so hard where my mum’s family came from that they considered moving to 1950s Wolverhampton to be a step up.
Sorry 1950s Wolverhampton, but that’s fucking rough.
And so, after a spell in a POW camp, armed with no English, sharing a room with a half dozen other migrants and having to report to the local police station every couple of weeks because of his resident alien status, my Grandfather started doing shit jobs for shit money that the indigenous locals didn’t fancy very much.
And things gradually got better. Never exactly brilliant, but better.
I only mention all of this because with a background like mine I’m hardly going to start picking on any recent migrants into the UK who have come looking for a better life.
And with regards to the integration issue, personal experience tells me that the first generation is never going to become entirely British but the second generation can quite easily.
Or maybe I should use the past tense. Maybe it isn’t so easy any more...
Anybody who thinks this man is a bit spooky must be nutcase
David is the 'former MI5 officer' turned whistleblower who is rapidly becoming the media's spokesperson of choice for people who doubt the official accounts of 7/7 and 9/11.
And, in an apparently spontaneous discussion with a presenter and another guest, Shayler was permitted the better part of half an hour on Sky to outline his ideas on 7/7, 9/11 and the Litvinenko poisoning
The Litvinenko Poisoning - dining out in London will never be the same again...
The video of Shayler's SKY appearance is currently up on google here
and really gets going four minutes in
And for most of that half hour Shayler is rational and sticks to the facts.
The operative word being most.
However...
- Both the presenter and the other guest seem to be more than up to speed with outstanding questions about 7/7 and 9/11 and appear to be asking questions they already know the answers to. The discussion feels 'stagey' and partially scripted
- Shayler conflates solid, tangible reasons for doubting official accounts of 7/7 and 9/11 with speculation about the 'New World Order' and its motives for executing the attacks. Shayler is not dumb and he must know full well the effect of mixing fact-based questions with hypotheses. You don't have to buy his NWO spiel to think that there's something dodgy about 7/7 and 9/11 but a lot of viewers will come away thinking that's the case.
- Shayler puts the final cherry on the cake by implying that WTC1 and WTC2 were not actually hit by aircraft. Presumably, Shayler thinks hologram-clad kamikaze spaghetti monsters did the business. Again you don't have to believe that no planes hit the Twin Towers to think that there's something dodgy about 7/7 and 9/11 but a lot of viewers will come away thinking that's the case. There are plenty of down to earth, verging on the mundane reasons to have issues with 7/7 and 9/11 without having to piss in the pool by invoking fucking holograms
Spaghetti monster shaped hole in WTC North Tower
Shayler is currently all over the burgeoning UK 7/7 Truth movement and, personally, I'm not convinced that's an entirely good thing.
(edit: Shayler is currently all over some parts of the burgeoning UK 7/7 Truth movement - The July 7th Truth Campaign which I happily and regularly plug whenever possible is blessedly Shayler-free)
Twelve minutes into the SKY discussion there is a exceptionally surreal moment when the other guest, science writer Jonathan Margolis, talks about how conspiracy theorists are people who believe in nothing and will therefore believe anything. He outlines an example of how if he put up a website that accused David Shayler of still working for MI5/ MI6/ SIS on a mission to subvert 9/11 and 7/7 truth movements he is sure that some people would start believing that Shayler really may still be a spook.
Perish the thought
Further to my last post about all of us being suckered time and time again into roughly equally divided two-party thought and political systems…
A recent story on the BBC reported on some research undertaken on global wealth distribution that came up with the earth-shattering conclusion -
The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of all household wealth
And for their next trick the authors of the report will be trying to establish if rain is wet.
And sticking with the subject of rich sociopaths…
The BBC (Berezovsky Broadcasting Company) and the rest of the UK media - organisations that refuse to entertain political conspiracy theories except for when they do - continue to regurgitate any old crap that’s passed onto them about the Litvinenko poisoning. Personal favourite morsels of crap include -
- Repeated hypothesising that thallium, sorry polonium, could only have come from a government installation and therefore a give-away that the Russian government was behind the murder. Because, as we all know, only the Russians have nuclear reactors and security of radioactive material in the Former Soviet Union has been watertight for years now
- The papers have also taken lately to banging on about how the Russians aren’t giving the Metropolitan Police carte blanche to extraordinarily rendite any Russian citizen they fancy back to the UK. Because, of course, if the situation were reversed we’d let the Russian police take anyone they wanted back to Russia wouldn’t we? Maybe we could start with all those oligarchs living in nice tax-free (for them anyway) London, wanted in Russia on fraud and money-laundering charges and generally looting their country blind.
- There have been some rumours bouncing around the Net that a possible unexplored motive for the Litvinenko murder was that the UK and Russia were about to sign some kind of beefed-up extradition treaty. The only sourced story that I have found to that effect was published in the FT last month. It’s not a treaty, it’s a memorandum of understanding, and it has already been signed but it is reasonable to conclude that Berezovsky and his mates wouldn’t have been too happy about it.
- Curiously, whilst banging on about the murders of Litvinenko and journalist Anna Politkovskaya till the cows come home our media has shown nothing like the same level of interest in the murder of Andrei Kozlov a few months ago. Kozlov being the incorruptible deputy chairman of the Russian Central Bank who was waging an active, and successful, campaign against corruption and money laundering in the Russian banking system. Nobody seems to give a fuck about him being murdered, who was behind the murder, why he was murdered, or the implications.
One thing's for sure – the streets of London are now paved with polonium and home to a whole rogue’s gallery of dodgy fuckers who have been freely going about their dodgy fucker business without any hindrance from our authorities for years now.
And on the subject of 9/11 and 7/7 ‘conspiracy theories’ and that noble Internet Truth Warrior Alex Jones...
Alex and his boys are gleefully reporting that legendary cult movie director David Lynch and actor James Brolin have now both spoken publicly about their doubts over the official account of 9/11
Lynch and Brolin have consequently joined the distinguished ranks of other entertainment titans such as Ed Asner and Charlie Sheen who have already expressed 9/11 scepticism.
Fingers crossed, maybe British stars of equal calibre; Michael Winner, Leslie Grantham or maybe the woman from the Shake n Vac ad, will one day express their doubts about what really happened on 7/7. Because that will really help getting to the bottom of things, and not turn the whole issue into a joke-circus, definitely not.
I’ve been thinking about the woman from the Shake n Vac ad a lot lately as I reckon there’s a good chance she’s now working as a courier for the FSB, responsible for securely transporting radioactive isotopes around London...
Whoopsie...
James Brolin’s most famous role was of course in Capricorn One, a thinly disguised exploration of the 'did we really go to the Moon?' conspiracy theory that starred a pair of Barbra Streisand's husbands (Brolin and Elliott Gould), a pair of black helicopters and only one OJ Simpson. Well, there is only one OJ Simpson...
No doubt NASA will finally scotch all those stories that there was something dodgy about the Apollo Program when it returns triumphantly to the Moon to build a permanent base no later than 2020. A mere forty-eight years after the last Apollo landing.
Only forty-eight years
How do you like the taste of them apples conspiro-loons!!!
Forty-eight years being the time it took to go from this -
To this -
Being a bit of a conspiro-loon myself I’m really looking forward to seeing how exactly NASA plans to transport its astronauts across open space in an unshielded tin can without them being cooked like a microwave ready-meal by Solar radiation along the way. NASA might also remember to pack a telescope on one of its Moon missions this time around.
And, finally...
After including an Orson Welles quote from The Third Man (best Black and White movie ever) in an earlier post I was inspired to see if there were any interesting Wellesian video clips available out there on the web. Unfortunately, my wishes were granted ...
Orson Welles, the man behind two of the best films ever made, paying the rent and getting a free drinkie or two in the process - 'Remember Caesar, thou art merely mortal...'
Hmmm... slaphead... glasses... it must be me
This particular test offered to locate my personality on a 'political compass' that seeks to do away with the crude concept of ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ by adding an additional dimension.
Out of curiosity I gave it a try...
Political Compass Test
It turns out that the additional dimension is how authoritarian the subject’s beliefs are.
My results, plotted on a graph, indicate that I am a Left Wing Anarcho-Libertarian. In fact, it turns out that I could well be the new Gandhi...
All extremely informative stuff - aside from the fact that I am not Left wing and I am most definitely not Gandhi.
In fact, I suspect that the test and the entire basis on which it is founded may well be bollocks.
But it amuses me to consider why.
The reason why it is bollocks and why I can score the same as Gandhi is because the test is founded on the same flawed political ideas that many of our so-called democracies are based on. Ideas that ultimately serve no other useful purpose than to divide people up into largish, roughly equally powerful groups that can be set at each other’s throats - for ever. It doesn’t matter if the differences between the groups are real or not, as long as the daft sods on both sides believe that they are real.
- Which is how you get people with fuck-all in the bank voting for capitalist political parties.
- Or people who claim that they hate fascism with every fibre of their being sticking up for planned economies and totalitarianism.
- Or when I fill in a poxy on-line psychometric questionnaire, just because my answers reveal a distaste for large, corporate monopoly (as opposed ordinary people making a bob or two) I am therefore categorised as 'Left Wing'
Lots of square little pegs happily shoving themselves into round little holes that somebody else thoughtfully made for them.
I suspect that the penny is dropping for a growing number of those square little pegs, as fewer and fewer of them are willing to endorse the farce that passes for democracy by voting for any of it. It doesn't mean that they don't care. It just means that they know voting won't make any difference.
Of course, the argument goes that they could start their own political movement.
Yeah, just like I could go into competition against Exxon.
My own version of the political compass test would include questions with a slightly different flavour than the one above. I’d include stuff like…
- Should the Many exist to serve the needs of the more intelligent, more capable Few?
- Do you believe that anyone really deserves to be worth more than, say, £1bn?
- Do you find telling people what to do more of a pleasure than a necessity?
Et Cetera Et Cetera Et Cetera...My test wouldn’t be so much fun to do though, as 98% of people would give the same answers and the results would cluster something like this...
...which is hardly the basis for a two, or even three, party political system
Hmmm, I wonder how many people would vote for the ORSF (Obscenely Rich Sociopathic Fucker) Party? I think that it's just as well for them that they go about protecting their interests in other ways.
Over to you Jarvis
I was walking near the Barbican the other day when I saw a plaque that I’d never noticed before...
The Probable Site, Where, On May 24, 1738
John Wesley
‘Felt His Heart Strangely Warmed’
This Experience Of Grace Was The Beginning
Of Methodism
The juxtaposition of the plaque, commemorating the start of the spiritual Odyssey of a leading historical figure, sitting in a neglected corner of the city surmounted by a discarded apple core and an empty plastic cup tickled me a little
So I slapped a picture up on Flickr
Almost immediately somebody wrote underneath
… must have been something he ate
A good line admittedly but it also got me thinking that we have probably lost something in the intervening 200 years. Is it an entirely good thing that nowadays if someone started talking to you about their heart feeling strangely warmed or having seen angels in the trees your first reaction would be to edge away nervously and check the visionary for signs of needle marks, a hastily grabbed kitchen knife or a bomb belt?
Still, better safe than sorry
And, to be honest, there were plenty of people around, even in Wesley and Blake’s time, who had a cynical attitude to spirituality and took a considerably earthier view of things…
I was walking through Bunhill Burial Ground a few days after photographing the Wesley plaque and couldn’t help but admire the splendidly tumescent marker raised in memory of Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe. It’s a whopper. I particularly enjoy the satisfyingly domed lumps of marble placed on either side of the main the shaft...
William Blake is buried only a stone's throw from Defoe...
William Blake Money Shot
Defoe's marker is a worthy addition to my small, but select, collection of photographs of blatantly obscene tombstones ‘erected’ in cemeteries by sneaky humanists with a subversive sense of humour...
Resurgam...
The debate between the spiritual and the corporal has been raging for longer than most people realise, even when the evidence is sticking up right in their faces - quite literally
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PS Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, should not be confused with Willem Dafoe, star of Platoon, who is still alive. However, like Defoe, Dafoe is also reputed to lie underneath an enormous obelisk. Given that Dafoe has played the role of a Messiah in a movie there may be some scope for uniting both believers and non believers under his banner at some point in the future...
Willem Dafoe - Casts a giant shadow?
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And on the subject of spiritual faith, Little People Blogspot has surpassed itself with this picture taken in Cambridge Circus – are you a winner or a sinner?
The production team of BBC's flagship news programme 'Newsnight' has recently launched a series of web-based initiatives to make their show more interactive.
Presumably this is in response to viewer numbers tanking because not many people want to stay up that late on a weeknight just to watch a bunch of public schoolboys regurgitate government and security service bullcrap.
One of the new initiatives is a regular, chatty email written by the presenters and production team sent to anyone who can be bothered to subscribe. They sometimes include jokes.
I am a subscriber.
And the most surprising thing I've read for a long time plopped into my inbox earlier on this evening.
It came from Newsnight's editor Peter Barron
The full (copyrighted) text is up on the web here but I think I'm allowed to reproduce a couple of chunks on the basis of fair comment...
Last night an amateur film-maker spoke to me about his belief that there's been a huge cover-up in the official reporting of both 9/11 and 7/7. Why, he asked, doesn't the BBC report the many discrepancies and oddities surrounding the accounts of these hugely significant events?
The reason we haven't gone deeper is that there's surely no rational explanation for the attacks other than that they were carried out by two groups of Islamist terrorists, however puzzling some of apparent inconsistencies.
I appreciate that the BBC can hardly go chasing after and reporting on every 'Green-Biro Special' that comes through its letterbox but to come out and say that it won't report certain stories because...
there's surely no (other) rational explanation for the attacks ... however puzzling some of apparent inconsistencies
For feck's sake.
FWIW here's the comment I just posted on the Newsnight webpage...
Ten minutes spent reading up on the bombing of Bologna train station in 1980 and the activities of Propaganda Due in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s will yield a well-documented example of a terrorist conspiracy executed by elements within a Western government against its own people.
These things happen.
And thorough investigation of ‘discrepancies and oddities’ is arguably the only way they will be uncovered - if and when they have occurred.
On the specific issue of 7/7
It took the efforts of an ordinary citizen to finally extract an admission from John Reid that a key time in the 7/7 Timeline, as given in the ‘Official 7/7 Narrative’, was incorrect -
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5170708.stm
The most active July 7th ‘Truth’ group that I am aware of has its homepage here…
www.julyseventh.co.uk
And a 30 minute video that attempts to communicate key ‘discrepancies and oddities’ from 7/7 can be found here…
video.google.com/videosearch?q=ludicrous+diversion
There are some people, people without access to the resources of an organisation like the BBC, who are trying their best to get clear answers to the ‘discrepancies and oddities’ of 7/7. They are not advancing alternative accounts of 7/7 but simply asking questions. Isn’t that what our journalists are supposed to be doing?
My comment is awaiting moderation. There's also a sporting chance that it has sent some automated scanning algorithm, operating in a basement just down the road from me in Vauxhall, totally berko...
Hello Boys!
Anyway, it's late. I've had a couple of drinks. So I'll leave it at that. For now.
I MEAN really!!! For FECK's sake...
It’s been a close-run contest but my coveted Mad Scientist of the Month award has to go to...
Professor Stephen Hawking
For starters, looking like the inventor of the Daleks always gives him an inherent advantage in any mad scientist contest. Plus he said some radically original things in an interview he recently gave before receiving the UK's top science award, the Royal Society's Copley Medal…
He told the BBC that life could be wiped out by a nuclear disaster or an asteroid hitting the planet.
The human race must move to a planet beyond our Solar System to protect the future of the species, physicist Professor Stephen Hawking has warned.
He said there were no similar planets to Earth in our Solar System so humans would "have to go to another star"
The saddest part of the interview came towards the end when he said, rather plaintively…
"My next goal is to go into space; maybe Richard Branson will help me."
I'm sure that the timing of his interview so close to Christmas is entirely coincidental.
Fans of classic 1950s sci-fi movies will note that Professor Hawking, lauded as one of the finest scientific minds in the country, is now trying to recycle the plot of When World’s Collide and hoping that no-one will notice.
Runners up include:
James Lovelock, the man who came up with the concept of Gaia, proving once again that a fair few environmentalists out there are not so secretly harbouring a hard-on for 90% of humanity being wiped out…
The earth has a fever that could boost temperatures by 8 degrees Celsius making large parts of the surface uninhabitable and threatening billions of peoples' lives,
"We are not all doomed. An awful lot of people will die, but I don't see the species dying out," he told a news conference. "A hot earth couldn't support much over 500 million."
That would be the plot to the most excellent The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961)
Then there’s a retro-Darwinian basket-case called Dr Oliver Curry who spent 'two months investigating the ascent and descent of man over the next 100 millennia', rescuing some key elements of Nazi racial science from the dustbin of history along the way, and concluded…
The logical outcome would be two sub-species, "gracile" and "robust" humans.
The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative.
Physically, they would start to appear more juvenile. Chins would recede, as a result of having to chew less on processed food.
Men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises.
Women will develop lighter skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, glossy hair, even features and smooth hairless skin.
They would be a far cry from the "underclass" humans, who will have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.
Now, admittedly, Dr Curry is not an Evolutionary Biologist but his fucked-up perception of how evolution is supposed to work is perfectly in tune with popularly-held, popularly-promoted misconceptions about the theory. His predictions also sound just a teensy weensy bit like the plot of The Time Machine, except for the part about the big penises and pert breasts which was probably ripped off from another movie that Dr Curry had seen. Though, as I recall, the Morlocks kicked, or rather ate, Eloi arse in the original work. Yay! Go Morlocks!
The Six Times a Night Machine ... Big meets Pert...
It’s a depressing fact of life these days that an increasing proportion of popular science is a shameless rip-off of 1950s creature features and old episodes of the Twilight Zone. So, hats off to one group of scientists who have really tried to bite into some genuinely original research...
Researchers find link between teeth and memory loss
There may be more meaning to the word "wisdom teeth" then previously thought. Dentists, psychologists and neurologists in Stockholm and Umea in Sweden and Tromso have been trying to determine why there is a link between tooth loss and memory loss...
Researchers in Japan reached similar conclusions in tests with mice and monkeys, with mice learning to find food in labyrinths without difficulty, but losing this ability when their teeth were pulled.
You sick wee fucks
Obviously, their findings are completely at odds with whole War on Terror/ Abu Ghraib/ Extraordinary Rendition thing where, apparently, pulling people's teeth out actually helps them to remember things.
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And for a little balance and to demonstrate that I’m not some kind of closet religious fundamentalist, and because I currently have nowhere else to put it, here’s a link to a Manic Street Preacher video - are you going to be a sinner or a winner?
They're Here...
Having just spent an evening babysitting, i.e. watching children’s TV, with my three year old niece I am now fully up to speed with what youngsters want this Christmas…
Everything they’ve seen advertised on television!
At one point in the evening, Junior briefly took time out from rhytmically pointing at The Box and saying ‘I want that for Christmas’ every thirty seconds to ask me…
‘What do you want for Christmas uncle?’
Which would have been almost touching if I thought she actually gave a toss.
But she’s three so she doesn’t
However, if I were to compile a list of must-buy gifts and consumerist tat to buy for her uncle and her other friends this festive season, in the same vein as all those double page feature spreads that blight the print media at this time of year, it would definitely include the following…
Stef’s Guide to the Very Best in Internet Shopping this Christmas
- Still trying to find a present for the petrolhead in your family? Why not buy them a copy of Top Gear Presenter Richard Hammond’s ‘What not to Drive’
- The reviews on Amazon are pretty positive. The most recent one reads…
A great read but it's probably best to wait for the updated edition which will include "300mph Jet Car With Wobbly Wheels". (Was this review helpful to you? Yes/ No)
- And for the Ex FSB Assassin who’s outlived his usefulness in your life why not visit - AnythingRadioactive.com. Possibly one of the few retail sites on the Internet that features the warning 'Do not eat or otherwise ingest these samples and DO NOT keep them in your underpants!'. They stock a full range of Russian-made Geiger counters (not suitable for alpha radiation detection) and are currently doing a special on ‘Exclusive Nuclear Christmas Tree Baubles’. Their ‘Nuclear Nibbles and Toxic Treats’ range, in particular, must be flying off the shelves. Though presumably not via British Airways
- The new War on Terror board game looks like a box full of family fun but a little pricey at twenty six quid, even if it does include a snuggly balaclava with the word Evil stamped on it in bright red. Apparently, the makers of War on Terror are offering an additional Evil Balaclava as a prize to the first person photographed wearing one in Parliament Square. A tempting prospect but not that tempting. It's not the risk of being gunned down in broad daylight by S019 that bothers me. That could happen absolutely anywhere. It's the twenty-six quid
- For the three year old niece in your life, a doll with a difference – The Crazy Cat Lady Action Figure. Yes, she’s now old enough to learn that Big Uncle Stef is a twisted old scrotum with a twisted old scrotum's sense of humour...
- Alternatively, a children’s gift with considerably more spiritual potency than a dancing penguin - Armor of God PJs
- And for any stressed-out chicken breeders on your Christmas shopping list – The Inflatable H5N1 Chicken Protector. Fingers crossed for a person-sized version with a smidge more headroom before that inevitable mutation we’ve all been told about cuts loose
- And, finally, not a gift recommendation but a link to Mitchell and Webb's ‘Heroin Addict Christmas’ sketch because I think it’s funny, and because I live in Lambeth....
.
The Horror... the horror....
A Vanguard class Trident submarine - possibly one of the most efficient ways to spunk £70,000,000,000 up against a wall so far conceived of by Man...
