The Thomas Friedman mindfuck...

It's a heavy burden being the world's most influential columnist. Women expect you to live up to the legend. And we're not talking about a mustache. We mean size. Cock size. When you write like Friedman does, women expect a whopper. They're looking for a head the size of a Grannysmith apple and a shaft that dangles like a baby's arm, with veins thick as ropes. If you can't deliver, you've got to turn to modern science for help. The only catch is that, if you do elect to go with the surgical option, you've got to keep it a secret from your co-workers. Especially from your secretary. Otherwise, it could be embarrassing:

Call to Barron Center Clinic, New York City, (212) 686-7546:

* eXile: Hello, is this the Barron Center?
* Barron Center: Yes, it is.
* eXile: Can you tell me if you offer male enhancement procedures?
* Barron Center: Yes, we do, that's what we specialize in.
* eXile: Okay, good. Can you tell me a little bit about your procedure, how much it costs, that sort of thing?
* Barron Center: Yeah, sure. I can give you a quick overview. We offer two different procedures, one for lengthening and one for widening. Most men will usually want to have both procedures done on the same day. Some men want one or the other...
* eXile: I'll probably want both.
* Barron Center: Okay, well, most men usually do. We do them in our surgical center here in New York. It's outpatient. Most people will go back to work two or three days later.
* eXile: Okay.
* Barron Center: The increase in length will be approximately one and a half inches, with an increase in circumference of anywhere from 30% to 50%. The cost of both procedures in the same day is $6900. If you want to do the length and the width separately, it's $5900.
* eXile: $6900.
* Barron Center: Are there any questions you want to ask?
* eXile: Yes, are there any side effects, particularly involving hormonal disruptions? If heard stories about facial hair falling out, mustaches thinning...
* Barron Center: I've never heard of anything like that [launches lengthy speech about "pretty low" risk of serious infection]... But the kind of thing you're talking about, I've never heard of.
* eXile: Because the thing is, I'm a television personality, and I can't afford any alterations in my appearance.
* Barron Center: I've never heard of any problems of that sort, with regard to facial hair...
* eXile: Mustaches.
* Barron Center: ...mustaches, anything like that.
* eXile: Okay.
* Barron Center: Okay?
* eXile: Um, is there any chance that you could send me a brochure? Some written material?
* Barron Center: Sure, absolutely! We have a full-color brochure, with before and after photos...
* eXile: I'll be wanting to look at those.
* Barron Center: (uncomfortably) Sure... And what is your first name?
* eXile: Thomas.
* Barron Center: Thomas. And the last name?
* eXile: Friedman.

From there we went on to give our sunny Barron Center representative (whose name turned out to be "Howard") Friedman's work address at the New York Times bureau in Washington: 1627 I St., NW #700, Washington, DC 20006. Having thus made sure that this plainly-marked envelope would land on the desk of Friedman's secretary, we then went on to ask about possible dates for surgery. Howard told us that "the earliest free dates" would be between the 24th and 27th of April. We paused as though to look in a planner, then told him that the 26th looked good to us. He said great and made a note of it. We told him we'd call back to confirm.

Like CIA spies leaving careful records of the movements of phantom agents, we then went on to make plane and hotel reservations for Friedman on the dates in question, making sure to leave Friedman's direct line at work -- (202) 862-0372 -- as a contact number each time. Explaining that "delicate circumstances" prevented us from going through our usual travel agent, we called Travel Express, Inc. (202-628-8638) on H street in Washington -- just around the corner from Friedman's office -- and made arrangements to buy a set of Delta shuttle tickets to and from New York for the dates of April 26 and 27, respectively. To the question of why we needed to buy shuttle tickets through a travel agent, we had a ready answer:

* eXile: The thing is, I need a first-class seat for the trip back. I was hoping you could find me the back end of an international flight, say a 747 coming from Switzerland, you know, stopping at Kennedy on the way to Washington.
* Travel Express: (woman's voice) Uh...
* eXile: You see, I'm having surgery, and I need to sit in a comfortable seat on that flight.
* Travel Express: (pauses) Um... I'm not seeing any of these flights, either International or Dulles.
* eXile: What about the 28th?
* Travel Express: No, no...
* eXile: Oh, they just don't exist.
* Travel Express: It's just the aircraft that they use...
* eXile: Right. Is there a business class on the shuttle?
* Travel Express: No. It's all the same.
* eXile: Hm. Well, I guess I'll take the shuttle tickets, then. Can I buy them through you?
* Travel Express: Oh, sure, sure. (long pause on both ends of the line; then, helpfully) You know, I could get you an emergency exit aisle seat, they have more room -- but no, if you've had surgery, you won't qualify. You have to be able to assist others in case of emergency.
* eXile: No, I definitely won't be able to assist anybody, I --
* Travel Express: What leg is it? The left or the right?
* eXile: I, uh, I'd really rather not get into it.
* Travel Express: Well, it could determine what side of the aircraft you'd sit on. If it's your right leg, you could sit on the left side of the plane.
* eXile: It's, ah, sort of on... both sides, I can't really explain it on the phone. I'll just take any seat, any seat is fine.
* Travel Express: Uh, okay.

Once that deal was finally done -- again giving the name, phone number and address of Thomas Friedman -- we told Travel Express that we'd be back that afternoon to pay in cash. "It has to be in cash," we said. The agent gave us the exact address and directions and said she'd expect us later that afternoon.

The hotel room we reserved was at Morgan's in New York, a "superior" suite for $225 a night. The customer service rep who took the reservation was flamingly gay and we gave him, too, the name and coordinates of Thomas Friedman. There was only special request:

* eXile: Does the hotel have room service?
* Morgan's: Yes, of course!
* eXile: Because I'm going to be having surgery, and I'm not going to want to move too much.
* Morgan's: We absolutely have room service.
* eXile: What kind of cuisine is it?
* Morgan's: Um...well, I would say it's probably like a Fusion or European cuisine, very good, I'm sure.
* eXile: That's good. I'm going to need to eat.

Although we didn't have the credit card to confirm the reservation ("Tom" had left his wallet in his coat in another room), Morgan's promised to fax us a copy of the reservation agreement immediately so that Tom could "show it to the travel desk."

The last remaining step to make the whole thing work was to let the cat out of the bag. Posing as Bradley Pfeiffer, travel agent for Travel Express, Inc., we called Friedman's office and got his secretary on the line:

* NYT: Thomas Friedman's office.
* eXile: (in drippingly gay voice) Oh, hello! This is Bradley Pfeiffer from Travel Express, Inc. I'm just calling to confirm Mr. Friedman's reservation, that he'll be picking up his airline tickets this evening or this afternoon?
* NYT: Um...ah, for what flight?
* eXile: Oh, this is his trip to New York, in April, April 26th? The reservations were booked through the Barron Center Clinic in New York, and --
* NYT: Oh, I'm sorry, Bradley, I've got him on the other line. Can I call you back?
* eXile: It's (202)-628-8638. [Actual Travel Express Number].
* NYT: Okay. But he made this through American Express?
* eXile: No, actually, the reservations were made through the [speaking loudly] BARRON CENTER CLINIC in New York directly. We do a lot of work with them.
* NYT: Okay, I'll find out the details and call you back.
* eXile: Okay. That's Bradley Pfeiffer.
* NYT: Okay. Bye
* eXile: Bye!

All the pieces were now in place. The secretary would switch to Friedman on the other line and ask him about the trip to New York on April 26th. Friedman would immediately deny that there was any trip to New York and demand to know what was going on. The secretary would call Travel Express, Inc. back, ask for Bradley Pfeiffer, and find out that there was no such person. Intrigued, she would explain the situation to someone at the travel agency, perhaps even a manager, at which point she would learn that, in fact, a man calling himself Thomas Friedman had in fact reserved a roundtrip ticket to New York. The agent may recall the man mentioning surgery. Actual plans had been made, and those phone calls had really been placed -- but why? From there neither side would be able to unravel the mystery any further, until...

Sometime later that afternoon, a fax would arrive from a hotel in New York showing reservations for a suite on April 26th. Or no fax would arrive and Friedman's secretary would get a phone call from another gay-sounding man claiming to be a clerk at a New York hotel with the chilling name of "Morgan's." With any luck, the secretary would mistake the hotel clerk for the mysterious Bradley Pfeiffer and begin shouting accusations at him. Or perhaps after three ominous and inexplicable phone incidents Friedman's secretary will have already called the phone company and made sure the *66 function in the office was operational. In either case, the inquiry would eventually lead back to the actual Morgan's hotel, where it would be determined that someone identifying himself as Thomas Friedman really had called to make reservations for the 26th. Again, there would be plain evidence of not insignificant effort being put into some sort of bizarre, elaborate deception, but the reasons for it would doomed to remain a complete mystery.

The whole thing comes together finally when the envelope plainly marked "Barron Center Clinic" arrives on the desk of Friedman's secretary in a few days. Unless she happened to write it down at the time -- which was unlikely -- Friedman's secretary would not be likely to have immediately recalled the name "Barron Center Clinic" in the wake of the mysterious Bradley Pfeiffer call. She might even have tried to remember this detail later, perhaps under Friedman's own frantic questioning, and been unable to. But it will all come back to her the instant she sees that giant red letterhead marked with the Barron Center name on the 8x11 envelope. Instantly she will hear that bright gay voice enunciating clearly from above, like a Greenwich Village Mr. Clean: "Actually, the reservations were made directly through the BARRON CENTER CLINIC...BARRON CENTER CLINIC...BARRON CENTER CLINIC..." It will all come back to her: the plane reservations were supposedly made by this clinic... the answer to the mystery will have arrived...

With any luck, she will open the envelope before she finds Friedman to tell him. If she does, it will suddenly all be clear to her. Friedman's ignorant denials in particular will make a lot of sense. The surreptitious telephoning, the two-bit travel agency, the "hotel" in New York... it will all fit. In the best-case scenario for the joke, she never brings it up again to Friedman, and never gives him the envelope, or lets on that she's seen it. The whole incident will live on within her in the form of a lingering empathetic suspicion. Better yet, she eventually tells someone, and it gets around.

In the worse case, she tells Friedman, and they both call the clinic together. They'll get Howard on the line and find out that an impostor had called to inquire about surgery. That will be all there is to find out, but they won't know that. What will be next? What other plans have been made in the columnist's name? What ambiguous tidings will arrive with the next ring of the office phone? Vigilance will be the word of the day -- and embarrassing mistakes will be made.

Either that or they're onto us, and reading this on the internet a week later. What the hell. At any rate, they'll have been freaked out for a good three days or so. And it's not like they can do anything to us here in Russia when they find out. Gotta love that globalization, eh, Tom?


From The eXile

213 things Skippy can't do

Specialist Schwartz, Discordian Saint and inspiration to all O:MF students out there, especially those of you in the military.

Read, and be awed.

213 things Skippy can't do

So you all know

I'm going to be tinkering with the blogger template for the next few days, to come up with something a bit more spiffy. Don't get me wrong, I like the black background, very easy on the eyes compared to most others (like staring at a bulb, reading on a white one), but it is more than a touch boring and there are skilled programmers and stuff out there who can likely make good looking templates in their sleep. So if you see the site format change a few times in the next couple of days, it will just be me playing with the layout here. I've already found a few that I like, but like most things in life, the road test is everything...

"Clash of the Civilizations" is political

Thank you to the Guardian for this particular story.

Of course, anyone who took the time to watch the Edward Said lecture videos I posted earlier this month probably already knows this, but even so this shows a level of common sense at a citizen level that is not being replicated among policy makers.

For example, "tensions between Muslims and westerners arise from "conflicts about political power and interests" - endorsed by 52% overall." Similarly, a majority believes that education can help alleviate conflict and that common ground can be found between western society and Islamic ones.

Sadly however, about a third (or slightly less) of people seem to believe that tensions arise from cultural and religious differences and that conflict is inevitable. Perhaps if some of these morons got the aforementioned education, then they might see how this would be considered a self fulfilling prophecy. Muslims/Westerners must be violent fundamentalists/savage unbelievers and because of this, we cannot trust them. And when you act like someone is your enemy, they'll soon start playing to the role as they feel threatened. To quote Abbe Galiani:

"Foresight is the cause of Europe's present wars. If one would take pains to foresee nothing, the whole world would be tranquil, and I do not believe one would be worse off for not waging wars"

Some things never change....

"Our culture engages historians, sociologists, psychiatrists and the media to . . . impose upon us a common view of reality. The reason for this imposing of socially-approved views is fear: As a culture we are afraid that unless we can force the majority of us to comply with particular givens, everything we have achieved and everything we believe we understand will unravel. The truth is that without the continual reinforcement of commonly held cultural views of ‘reality,’ most of our beliefs and some of our ways of living would unravel. . . . In fairness, we need to understand that there can never be a common view of reality because each of us is capable of seeing only so much and no more. . . . a commonly-held world view is not a possibility, not now and not ever. . . . We are stuck with the social illusions into which we are born. . . . From this evolution-of-illusion we get politics, religion, fads and all manner of cultural blindness. We pass our blindness down from one generation to another until it becomes so firmly entrenched in daily life that nobody asks whether this or that aspect of our social belief system might simply be wrong.

— Anderson Reed, from Shouting at the Wolf (p. 142-143, 148)

No Fellowship with Tyrants

"There is no greater crime than to murder a fellowman, especially a friend. Still who would say that he commits a crime who assassinates a tyrant, however close a friend? The people of Rome, I tell you, think it no crime, but the noblest of all noble deeds. Did expediency here triumph over virtue? No, virtue followed in the train of expediency. . . . There can be no such thing as fellowship with tyrants, nothing but bitter feud is possible: and it is not repugnant to nature to despoil, if you can, those whom it is a virtue to kill; nay, this pestilent and godless brood should be utterly banished from human society. For, as we amputate a limb in which the blood and the vital spirit have ceased to circulate, because it injures the rest of the body, so monsters, who, under human guise, conceal the cruelty and ferocity of a wild beast, should be severed from the common body of humanity."
— Cicero, from "No Fellowship with Tyrants"

Something about the supposed left wing and "liberals" that constantly disappoints me is how quick they currently are in jumping in bed with dictators as soon as they see they have a common enemy, usually in the current US administration.

Now, don't get me wrong. My sympathies lie with the centre left, economically, and most certainly with social libertarianism. If anything could be used to describe my political affiliation, it would most likely be unaligned liberal.

However, there are two problems with the left today which not only piss me off no end, but also make me ashamed to associate myself with such people. The first is the disastrous flirtation with Communism for the last 80 years, and the second is the current pre-occupation with a very postmodernist line of political thought.

Now, I'll agree that the socialist critique of liberalism at the start of the 20th century was vital in moving beyond simple political and economic liberty to understanding other barriers to personal freedom. But association with the Soviet Union, among the older elements of the left, was a huge mistake and nearly unforgivable. For example, one would have to think about the many campaigners within the CND over here, who were intent on disarming the UK of its nuclear weapons, without campaigning, like the noble END did, demanding the Soviet Union, with its history of state suppression and disregard for human rights, do the same. Or the Labour members who pressurised Parliament into recognizing the German Democratic Republic, with no conditions attached concerning its own human rights record.

Fortunately, the collapse of the Soviet Union helped to mostly halt this, though there is a disturbing trend of Marxism still present among Universities, as well as residual powers in the ideals of those early days, no matter how terrible they turned out.

The second problem, however, is far more subtle and relies on cultural relativism and the creeping movement of distinctly postmodern ideas concerning the truth and morality into the public discourse. To create a somewhat unrealistic strawman, the argument seems to go that people do things differently abroad and, being tolerant and liberal as we are of others lifestyles, we should not interfere. And I would agree, with a certain caveat that a lot of other people seem to have forgotten, so long as they do not bring harm or danger to others without their consent.

Stoning a woman to death for being raped is not right. Allowing a man to keep his wife in a state of near slavery is not right. Female circumcision is not right. Monarchy, despotism, racism, homophobia, sexism and state repression are not right, no matter who uses them and where they come from.

A perfect example of this mindset comes from French "intellectual" Michel Foucalt who, when asked about the bloody silencing of dissent in Iran under Khomeini, answered:

"They don't have the same regime of truth as ours, which, it has to be said, is very special, even if it has become nearly universal. The Greeks have their own. The Arabs of the Maghreb have another. And in Iran it is largely modelled on a religion that has an exoteric and esoteric content...It's often the case that people say something that, at a factual level, isn't true, but which refers to another, deeper meaning, which cannot be assimilated in terms of precision and observation."

Gotta love that, "they don't have the same truth as us", so its perfectly alright for the frothing lunatics decide to kill unbelievers if they want. I think I can hear Camus spinning in his grave somewhere....

And this has carried over, to the point that demanding other states respect human rights, equality and do not discriminate can be considered as "cultural imperialism". It actually strikes me as rather racist, that somehow human rights are only reserved for those who are white and of European descent.

Whats equally strange is that those who actually came up with the ideas of Universal morality going hand in hand with cultural relativism, originally, before it was perverted by those with an agenda, were the European philosophers of the Enlightenment, who were trying to use these as points to defend the people of the New World from imperial slavery and racism.

Ask yourselves this: why am I, and many others, outraged when we hear of American forces torturing prisoners or indiscriminately bombing civilian areas? Because they are against human rights, they are atrocities which we should rightly be disgusted with. So whats the difference when the Chinese try to enforce their hegemony over Tibet, or Putin suspends elections and sends death squads into Chechnya? Quite rightly, we should be more disappointed with the USA, who claimed to stand for individual freedom and human rights. But it is no less reprehensible when other do it too.

If the left is ever going to be taken seriously, it needs to shut up the idiots in its ranks who engage in pointless American bashing to score points with foreign dictators, who are often worse than the United States. While its a moral duty to oppose it when it does wrong, this duty should be extended globally. When it is not, it is shown as nothing more than hypocrisy.

From the Situationist International

We should not simply refuse modern culture; we must seize it in order to negate it. No one can claim to be a revolutionary intellectual who does not recognize the cultural revolution we are now facing. An intellectual creator cannot be revolutionary by merely supporting some party line, not even if he does so with original methods, but only by working alongside the parties toward the necessary transformation of all the cultural superstructures. What ultimately determines whether or not someone is a bourgeois intellectual is neither his social origin nor his knowledge of a culture (such knowledge may just as well be the basis for a critique of that culture or for some new creative venture), but his role in the production of the historically bourgeois forms of culture. Authors of revolutionary political opinions who find themselves praised by bourgeois literary critics should ask themselves what they’ve done wrong.

Guy Debord

Cain beats the Mainstream Media once again

Now, a very interesting story appeared on Yahoo's newswire the other day.

A former British National Party election candidate and a dentist stockpiled explosive chemicals in advance of a civil war in Britain, a court has heard.

Ex-BNP candidate Robert Cottage, 49, wrote of assassinating Tony Blair and bought dangerous chemicals together with friend David Jackson, 62, Manchester Crown Court was told.

Sound familiar? It should do, because I wrote a lengthy article on it on this blog about two months ago, when the arrests first went down and no-one outside of a few relatively minor internet outlets could be bothered to pay attention.

The mainstream off of the internet is still not paying attention. While the Independent have quite rightly put this on their front page, the Guardian has buried it quite deeply within its UK politics section, as has The Times and The Sun, while the Express and Daily Mail do not even have this on their websites.

Please note, for my foreign readers, this is a week after a suspected plot to kidnap and murder UK Muslim soldiers by Islamic extremists (which is most likely a concoction of MI5 as part of its turf war with Special Branch) hit the front pages of every newspaper and gained extensive national coverage. But this, oh this story is hidden away and kept quiet, even by supposedly leftist and independent papers like the Guardian. I wont even go into the reasons why papers like the Mail and Sun, who say they oppose the BNP but create a climate where their message is palatable, would do such a thing.

Anyway...Cain: 1. MSM: 0

Your move, gentlemen.....

Russians eat alien? Uh, sqeaking shark?

Another piece of modern weirdness, delivered as promised by the Pravda science section of their English language site. Much thanks to the person on the PD.com boards who posted this:

Village residents from the Rostov region of Russia caught a weird creature two weeks ago after a strong storm in the Sea of Azov. The shark-looking creature was producing strange squeaky sounds. The fishermen originally believed that they had caught an alien and decided to film the monster with the help of a cell phone camera. The footage clearly shows the creatures’ head, body and long tail. The bizarre catch was weighing almost 100 kilograms, the Komsomolskaya Pravda reports.

However, ufologists and scientists were greatly disappointed when they found out that the fishermen had eaten the monster. They said that they were not scared of the creature so they decided to use it as food. One of the men said that it was the most delicious dish he had ever eaten.

Chairman of the Anomalous Phenomena Service, Andrei Gorodovoi, stated that the creature, which he could see on the short video, was an anomalous being. However, it could hardly be described as an extraterrestrial form of life, he added. Gorodovoi rejected the version about mermaids too. “There are many legends about mermaids living in the Sea of Azov. Nevertheless, specialists of the Service for Anomalous Phenomena have never confirmed those fairytales. On the other hand, we do not deny the possibility of other forms of life in the Sea of Azov,” the ufologist sad.

A spokesman for the Rostov-based zoo, Alexander Lipkovich, contacted local ichthyologists and asked their opinion about the Azov alien. “They said that the fish bears resemblance to a sturgeon. It was an extremely interesting individual. I have never seen anything like this before in my whole life,” the specialist said.

Here is a video of said creature, from where the above picture was presumably taken.

The Myth of the Clash of the Civilizations

Edward Said does an excellent talk on the flaws and problems with Huntingdon's moronic "Clash of the Civilizations" theory of international politics, much beloved by policy wonks in the USA.

5 parts to this brilliant dissection and criticism:

Incunabula

One of the more fascinating conspiracy theories I have run across....not least because its fairly smart, involves some interesting science and, somehow, has remained fairly low key. Its also far more intricate and plausible than the standard Freemasons/Satanists/Illuminati/NWO (not to be confused with NWA....a horrible social faux pas to make in conspiracy circles, trust me) type ones.

Its hard to explain without trying to retell the story, so I'll just link you to it. There are pdf books as well as mp3s to listen to. However, I will say to read through the catalogue first, or everything else will make little sense. Also, look out for embedded links within the text and pictures provided.

Finally, keep a critical mind and have fun....

Incunabula

Classy asshole

http://www.xkcd.com/

Sign it. Well, if you're a UK citizen

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/faithschools/

Faith schools remove the rights of children to choose their own religious, philosophical and ethical beliefs. They also sanction ethnic segregation and create tension and divisiveness within society. Schools should be places where children are given a free education, not centres for indoctrination. Creationism and other religious myths should not be taught as fact regardless of the funding status of a school. Abolishing faith schools will provide children with more freedom of choice and help to promote a fully multi-cultural, peaceful society.

Socrates versus Jesus

Nothing beats educated satire

Confession to Conspiracy and other goodies

Kindly provided by Sondra London, Conspiracy to a Confession by Kerry Thornley is available at her site

"The story that appears on the site was edited by Sondra London with Thornley's authorization, from a manuscript he originally called The Dreadlock Recollections, which he completed in 1989. He lived long enough to see the first eight chapters published under the new title on this domain in 1997."

Also, there is a collection of what appears to be otherwise unpublished Erisiana. I've certainly not seen it before, and Sondra says she doesn't know that anyone else has copied it, so here is some unseen material for your perusal, available here.

Finally, if these interest you, there is plenty more material available here to keep you occupied for a while.

Much thanks to Sondra London, who emailed me yesterday to let me know about these articles.

Current US strategy and why an attack on Iran is likely

This is a very interesting strategy paper that was written in the 80s by Israeli journalist Oded Yinon, who had close links to the Foreign Ministry there.

A lot of people have been touting this as proof of an Israeli/US conspiracy to divide and conquer the Middle East, based on this paper. However, I am not so certain this is the case.


While no doubt both the USA and Israel have had far from exemplary records in recent history in that region, to present them as acting in concert, based on this plan is just not plausible. The USA, riding on the back of a wave of anti-Arab sentiment and successful campaign, decided to go into Iraq, for a myriad of reasons, most of which were never truly explained to the public.

Israel, on the other hand, apart from the continuing problems of the Palestinian territories, has only undertaken a limited campaign in Lebanon, one which was not successful and has in fact undermined the leadership there and played into the hands of Syria, who may well be welcomed back into Beirut soon, by an official, Hezb'allah dominated government.

Now, both of those can be read in the context of the paper. But Israel refusing to attack Syria, despite been given a green light by the USA (as well as several pieces of dubious evidence pointing to Syrian-backed terrorist groups working in Lebanon), yet they have refused.

Israel is quite unstable, in terms of its political parties who take control of government. In the last 11 years, they have gone from Left, to Centre, to Right back to Centre again, with all these parties dependent on coalitions to maintain a hold on power. As such a strategy as this would come from and be backed by the right wing Israeli politicians (Likud, for example), it would require a right wing party to have a secure grip on their government, as such a strategy would have to take place over the long term.

The US political system, on the other hand, is the very epitome of stability. Democrat, or Republican, regular elections, the Executive only removable by crime, mental illness or end of term.

And its the USA who invaded Iraq, is talking of attacking Iran and tried to push Israel into attacking Syria. Its very possible that political institutions or individuals with strong links in the USA passed on this paper on to their American counterparts. But, unfortunately for the anti-semitic fringe out there, its going to be quite hard to blame "teh evil J00s" for this one.

The USA would benefit from a stable Iraq, as would everyone. The idea that the USA would purposefully go in and destabilize such a strategically vital region of the world is madness. I can certainly see them having this as a back up plan, however. Should violence spill over into Jordan and Saudi Arabia, the voices calling for setting the entire region on fire before leaving will get louder. But that wont benefit Israel, certainly not in the mid-term. Those fanatical Islamic groups have become much more powerful since that paper was written. There's no telling if the violence would spill over into Israeli territory and if it could be stopped or not. Thats the problem with anarchy on such a scale, it becomes very messy and lots of people end up being hit in unexpected ways.

Stability is in Israel's interest, for now certainly. Anti-Israeli sentiment is at its highest point ever, currently. Doing this now would be suicidal, for them. Not for the USA, however.

See how simple these things are, when you think them through?

The Dreadlock Recollections

Kerry W. Thornley was convinced that he had been involved in a CIA plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and had been handled by the recently deceased (good riddance) E. Howard Hunt, infamous CIA spook and Watergate burglar. Sometimes referred to as 'the other Oswald,' Kerry grew more paranoid with his advancing years spouting his DREADLOCK RECOLLECTIONS on park benches and sharing his written notes with his friend Sondra London. She persuaded Kerry to finish the book and serialised some of the material on the Internet. Sadly those pages have long since disappeared and, it seemed, Kerry's last writings with them.

January '07: The never before published autobiography of Kerry Wendell Thornley is finally available to all as issue 17 of Trevor Blake's OVO http://www.ovo127.com 'zine, the 240 page book is a chilling confession to murderous mind control and knowing satire of what paranoid people sound like. It is available in .odt (OpenOffice) .pdf (Adobe) and to buy in print at lulu.com.

However, it can also be downloaded here

William Godwin - Discordian Uber-Saint

"everything understood by the term co-operation is in some sense an evil."

Society is beyond hope

Presented without comment, because none could express my feelings adequately.

A rebuttal: Cain responds to ClosertoGod.net

This will probably not be of interest to most of you, but I'm putting it up anyway.

Basically, on PrincipiaDiscordia.com, there is something of a movement, or idea, called the Black Iron Prison. You can read about it here, its basically a collection of new ideas that came out of the effort to update Discordianism (in keeping with a religion of chaos, change is sometimes a good idea).

Anyway, along comes Laz from ClosertoGod.net, wanting a new entry for his site. So we direct him off to the more interesting and philosophical threads and he eventually vanishes and writes this complete and utter misrepresentation of the metaphor.

So naturally, I'm going to correct him.

The Black Iron Prison is an idea that I have come across on a website that touts the Principia Discordia and the Illuminatus trilogy books.

Not strictly true, the site is named for the book, but many of us are actually bored with discussing it and have moved onto over areas on inquiry. A small point, some may say pedantic, but important.

The idea as it was explained to me is that in life you are trapped in a prison cell, it is dark and it is inescapable but you cannot see the walls that surround you. As an unwilling convict of this invisible penitentiary, you are in a position of pain and suffering and you have no way to break free until someone points out and makes you understand that you are in a prison.

Then you misunderstood the metaphor entirely.

The prison is indeed inescapable, but not necessarily dark. That you equate it with pain and suffering, which were never originally mentioned, says a lot about both your preconceptions and metaphysics in approaching this.

Also, furthermore, the point is that you cannot escape. The prison was a metaphor for your senses and how you understand the world. You will never have perfect knowledge. You will never be able to know, be 100% certain of what is the truth and be objective about existence.

Once you understand that you are being held against your will, you may start to break down the bars of your jail window, it is a revalation, and a means of evading capture. however, your initial rapture of becoming a free man is short lived, as you will find that there is a cell outside of the cell in which you had been incarserated. While the walls of the first prison are now crumbled, there is another larger wall encasing the captive and another set of bars holding back the freedom which is sought.

How can you escape your senses? Do you posit some sort of transcendent knowledge here, or are you merely misunderstanding what has been said? I am unaware of any of the former and the latter seems more plausible.

What I have found is that this analogy is a an unenlightened one, for it tells of failure to achieve enlightenment, and you had better not try again. It touts freedom but does not deliver. It is no truth bringer or real enlightenment, and is instead a masturbatory thought process that leads in a circle, and this ends in conformity, and bondage.

Who spoke of “enlightenment”? Apart from you, of course. Enlightenment is not the point or the goal. Understanding mental processes, limitations and perceptions are the goal here. Enlightenment is a sham, a metaphysical construct for a perfection of knowledge that cannot exist in this Universe.

You already have freedom. Freedom is gained through choice and choice is contingent on subjective perception and understanding. If you do not like how you view the world, how your philosophy or ideology or chosen system works, you can change it. You cannot ever be right, but you can improve and progress. That you seek a definite goal and define freedom as the lack of external barriers (as opposed to the ability to chose) again shows flaws in your basic assumptions of what this is about.

How does this process end in conformity? If anything, it expresses the creative urge of the individual and how they can empower themselves to change their environment. That there is no perfection, no idealist Utopia at the end of the road, is an issue of your own perceptions about how the world should work. Its very presumptuous and also quite volatile and reactionary, as previous Utopian and Positivist movements have shown.

Breaking down walls is a good thing, but to find that behind every wall is another, is an idea that breads contempt, inadeqacy, and selfish behaviour, it is an idea that is a trick.

How is that so? Only if you are weak minded and fear challenges, it would seem. Who is there to direct contempt against? No-one is responsible for your position except yourself, there is no divine trickster here, you cannot blame your cell mates, for they have unwillingly been thrust into the same position as you. Inadequacy implies goals that are not met, and there is no goal here. Selfish behaviour, I cannot even see how that follows from what we have said. To what end would selfishness be in any way beneficial?

I have broken free of the BIP and I find that it is actually a lonely place, it is not populated with individuals, but it does not have any further walls and is not devoid of life. It is a free place that is to be explored and learnt from.

You have not broken free of anything. Your own philosophy drips from this tract and shows your own limitations in your thoughts and ideas. To claim you have broken free of anything is highly unlikely. A Nietzschean would easily detect the underlying Christian/Positivist philosophy in your writings and quite correctly bring you to account on it, at great length. That you probably do not realize this says so much about the invisible bars that hem in your thinking.

There are individuals everywhere, Laz. A planet of them, over 6 billion now. Many try not to be, because they would have to face responsibility for their actions, the fear of there being no control or higher power to justify their actions. But they still exist, try as they might to deny it.


Edit: Other even more excellent responses to Laz can be found here

Iran behind Karbala raid?

It certainly seems to be a possibility. Reading over Bill Roggio's blog I find it hard to see a flaw i his reasoning. But this raises an important question.

Given the USA has been blaming Iran for damn near everything in Iraq recently, why is it waiting on a Pentagon investigation before accusing anyone? Could it be the USA was bluffing and so does not in fact have detailed (or any) knowledge of Iranian operations in Iraq? And more importantly, are Iran calling their bluff as well as taking revenge for the recent consulate raid?

The MO suggests this, given the attack was carried out by troops who could pass for Americans in look and language ability, yet the bodies were found dumped by a Sunni neighbourhood. That makes no sense, as there are few Sunni groups who could operate so precisely in Karbala.

Either way, the Iranians are likely to be cleaning up possible informants in southern Iraq for this op over the next few weeks, and the USA has authorized the death of captured Iranian agents. So expect a bloody few weeks in Shiite Iraq.

Its like a little piece of me just died, deep inside...

Breaking: US Anti-War protestors shoot themselves in foot once again

Am I the only person who thinks if you want any sort of credibility in front of Congress and with the current US administration concerning Iraq, then the best bet would be to keep Hanoi Jane as far away as possible?

Geez, generally, in a highly charged political environment, its best to not play to your opponents stereotyped caricature of you and your position. Someone like her is just going to give the hawks in Congress another excuse to ignore the protesters as "moonbat liberal nutjobs who are betraying our country."

For my British readers, who may not be aware of Fonda's reputation, she was part of the anti-Vietnam war movement. She visited Hanoi, was photographed on an anti-aircraft battery used against US aircraft and took part in propaganda radio broadcasts for North Vietnam, as well as disparaging the accounts of torture by USAF crewmen who were shot down and captured.

In her defence, she says she was forced into some of these positions by the North Vietnamese and while I have not studied her claims in detail, in seems plausible. Not only was it the standard modus operandi for SE Asian Marxists, I can see some naive idealist going there without a clue as to the true nature of the regime. Many in the UK did the same with the East German Republic, something I have studied in detail and while the stakes were not as high, once you are in a "relationship" of that sort, you will be manipulated for political ends. End of story.

Anyway, back to the peace protesters. If you want to portray yourselves as people who are loyal to America and do not want to see it squander whats left of its international good will and military power in a futile gang battle in the desert towns (and perhaps have enough force to act as a deterrent to genuinely dangerous and rising nations - such as Iran, North Korea, China and Russia, who are currently acting with impunity), then for the love of sweet baby Jebus do not allow someone one step off of a traitor to endorse your march!

I was going to write a huge rant on binary value systems here too, but I'll save it for another day. That can stand alone, with what I have in mind.

So who cursed the position of Home Secretary?

Lets face it, each one since Douglas Hurd (barring Jack Straw) has hardly had staying power. Moved to the Treasury, losing the election, resigned or sacked, the position does not seem to lend itself to those who seek continuing influence and power in British politics.

In which case, we should probably look upon John Reid's (sorry, Doctor, never forget the title) current position as something of a mixed blessing, because the jumped up little Stalinist looks likely to have some problems in the near future. Or even closer than that, with the current prisons crisis, the insane deportation of genuine asylum seekers and ordering judges to lower penalties and jail time for all but the most serious offenders.

One almost wonders if he's on some sort of kamikaze mission. All its going to take is one more crisis and he'll likely be unseated (or at least, backbenchers will start to call for it). Especially if its something rather sensitive, say MI5 and the purposefully ambiguous stance of the current Government on the "Wilson Doctrine", setting out the limits of security service investigation upon MPs and Lords. Of course, Reid probably would not know of such an operation if it did exist, but thats not the point.

Of course, this all rather helpfully takes the heat off 10 Downing Street and its refusal to answer questions related to the secret email system set up there and the deleted emails in the cash for peerages scandal. This is starting to get very interesting indeed, it might be an idea to make sure you are sitting comfortably and have the popcorn within close reach....

Fear and Loathing on the Internet

We were trolling on MysticWicks with a shared account, somewhere on the edge of the internet, when the drugs started to take hold.

I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded, maybe you should takeover baiting" and suddenly there was a terrible roar and the forum was full of what looked like huge fluff bunny Wiccans, swooping and moaning and whining around our account.

"Holy Jesus, what are these goddamn animals?"

Very soon, we would both be completely twisted, but there was no going back, we would have to ride it out.

The backrooms of HIMEOBS were like a narcotics lab. I blamed Captain Da. We had two bags of grass, 75 caffeine pills, two crates of Red Bull, 5 sheets of acid and a whole galaxy of uppers downers, screamers, laughers, half a salt shaker full of cocaine...and half a pint of raw Ether.

Not that we needed that, but when you get locked into a serious trolling habit, the tendency is to push it as far as you can go.

Sympathy for the Devil was the only CD we had...so we played it on repeat as a demented counterpoint to the radio....

"Hey, there's a n00b who doesn't look like a moran, lets give him a go on the troll account."
"Are you crazy? That kid's probably an undercover mod!"

Before I could mount any argument, we were logged out and I got the MSN message "hot damn! I never trolled a forum before!"
“Is that right, well I guess you're about ready huh?”
“We're your friends, we're not like the others.”
“Oh Christ, he's gone around the bend....No more of that talk or I'll put the leeches on you.”

How long could we maintain, how long before one of us starts raving and ranting at this boy? This same website was the last known location of Giggles. Will he make that same grim connection when the Captain starts screaming about bats and huge emo kids flaming his troll?

Well, we'll just have to post him disguised links of the Last Measure. He'd report us at once to some Nazi moderator and they'd hunt us down like dogs.

Jesus, did I just type that? Or just thinking it? Was I writing? Could he read anything?

“Can you read this?”
“Thats good, because I want you to know we're on our way to Gaia.com to find the Trolling Dream. I want you to have all the background because this is a very ominous assignment with overtones of extreme personal danger. Hell, I forgot about the Red Bull, you want one?”
“Naw.”
“How about some ether?”
“What!?”
“Never mind. I want you to understand that this man signing up the fake accounts is Captain Da, he's not just some dingbat I grabbed off the Strip. Shit, look at him, he doesn't look like you or me right. Thats because he's a foreigner I think he's probably Tongan, it doesn't matter. Are you prejudiced?”
“Hell no!”
“I didn't think so. In spite of his race, this man is extremely valuable to me. This is important goddamnit, this is a true story."
“Hey, keep your hands off my fucking neck!”

Welcome to this Vicious Cabaret

Quote of the day

and Rove, their PR chief, won't talk on mic because he knows he'd come across like the scoutmaster trying to explain why he had to share a tent with your son.

John Dolan certainly has a way with words....

The Limits of Liberty: We're all suspects now - Henry Porter

On new year’s day 1990, three days after becoming president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel looked his people in the eye and spoke to them as no one had done before. It is difficult to read his words without feeling the vibration of history of both the liberation and the horrors of the regime that had just expired, leaving the Czech people blinking in the cold sunlight of that extraordinary winter.

This is what he said. "The previous regime, armed with its arrogance and intolerant ideology, reduced man to a force of production. It reduced gifted and autonomous people to nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy, stinking machine whose real meaning was not clear to anyone. It could do no more but slowly and inexorably wear itself out, and all the nuts and bolts too."

That perfectly defines the true tyranny, where the state takes all liberty and bends each individual will to its own purpose. And here is the interesting thing that Havel put his finger on: no matter how brutal or ruthless the regime, the act of depriving people of their freedom starts the stopwatch on that regime’s inevitable demise. What he was saying was that in modern times a state can only thrive in the fullest sense when individuals are accorded maximum freedom.

I agree. Individual liberty is not just the precondition for civilisation, not just morally right, not just the only way people can reach their full potential, live responsibly and have fun; it is also a necessity for the health of government. Ten years ago I would have felt silly speaking about liberty and rights in Britain with the very real concern that I have today. But I am worried. And it’s not just me. Last month Le Monde asked "Is Democracy Dying in the West?". In the spring of this year Lord Steyn, the distinguished former law lord, made a speech despairing at this Government’s neglect for the Rule of Law, which was followed by Baroness (Helena) Kennedy’s alarm call in the James Cameron Lecture.

The inescapable fact is that we have a Prime Minister who repeatedly makes the point that civil liberties arguments are not so much wrong as made for another age [my italics]. We have a Government that has ignored the Rule of Law, reduced rights and has steadily moved to increase the centralised power of the state at the expense of the individual.

So I don’t feel quite as silly or as alarmist as I might.

The relationship between the state and individual is really at the heart of any discussion about democracy and rights. In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union it was the state’s mission not just to prevent people from expressing themselves, from moving about freely and unobserved, from pursuing their chosen careers and acting upon their religious and political convictions, but to stop them from thinking freely. It needed to occupy people’s thoughts - to take up a kind of permanent residency in the mind of the average citizen. And as the many psychological studies published in the Nineties make clear, this led to psychic disrepair on a massive scale - paranoia, clinical depression, chronic internalised anger and learned helplessness.

We fell morally ill, Havel said in that speech, because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions, and for many of us represented only psychological peculiarities.

Why am I harping on about communism? It died and was buried 17 years ago, at least in Europe and Russia. We’re into another century. We’ve got Google and speed-dating and globalisation and melting ice caps and reality TV and al-Qa’ida and al-Jazeera and Al Gore. We’ve moved on.

As a character in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys says, there is no period more remote in history than the recent past. Indeed, but we need to remember that recent past a little more than we do. For one thing, our knowledge of what existed on the other side of the Iron Curtain meant we valued and looked after our own freedoms much more than we do today.

It is perhaps the absence of an obvious confrontation between freedom and tyranny that allows Tony Blair to say that civil liberties arguments are made for another age. I profoundly disagree with this. It is dangerous arrogance to say that the past has nothing to teach us and that all the problems we face now are unique to our time.

During his speech to the Labour Party conference, Tony Blair said: "I don’t want to live in a police state, or a Big Brother society or put any of our essential freedoms in jeopardy. But because our idea of liberty is not keeping pace with change in reality, those freedoms are in jeopardy."

What in heaven’s name did he mean by that? Liberty is liberty. You can’t update it. You can’t divide it. You are either free, or you’re not. A society is either just, or it isn’t. People have rights or they don’t. The rule of law is upheld, or it isn’t.

But Blair believes there is nothing that can’t be modernised, updated, pared down or streamlined to keep pace with change. And liberty is no exception to the modernising fury which serves as New Labour’s only ideological foundation. What the Prime Minister is saying in this cute little Orwellian paradox is that in the particular circumstances of the war on terror and the rash of crime and anti-social behaviour, we must give up freedom to be free.

What an odd idea! Who is to decide which freedoms are essential and which can be sacrificed to make us secure? Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Lord Falconer or the former Stalinist and now Home Secretary John Reid?

"Those who would give up essential liberty," observed Benjamin Franklin, "to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither freedom or safety." That’s exactly right because you can’t barter one for the other even though that has been the tempting deal on offer from the British and American governments since 9/11. The truth of the matter is that relinquishing our rights in exchange for illusory security harms each one of us, and our children and grandchildren. Because once gone, these rights hardly ever return.

But let’s just return to the first part of that statement by Tony Blair - the bit about him not wanting to live in a police state, or a Big Brother society. Don’t get me wrong, we do not live in either a police state or a Big Brother society - yet. But there is no Englishman alive or dead who has done more to bring them about.

The trouble is that it’s happening so very quietly, so very discreetly that few really see it. You have to concentrate very hard to understand what’s going on and put the whole picture together because so much has been buried in obscure corners of legislation.

We used to believe in innocence until guilt was proved by a court. Not any longer. That distinction disappeared when the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act came into force and police started taking innocent people’s DNA and fingerprints and treating them as a convicted criminals.

We used to believe in Habeas Corpus. Not any longer. Under terrorism laws, suspects may be held for 28 days without being charged. Now the Home Secretary wants to make that 90 days, and Gordon Brown seems to share that view.

We used to believe that there should be no punishment without a court deciding the law had been broken, and that every defendant had the right to know the evidence against him. Not any longer. Control orders effectively remove both those rights and John Reid said recently that he wanted stronger powers to detain and control, and stronger powers to deport, which would clearly require the UK to derogate from the European Convention on Human Rights.

We used to believe that an Englishman’s home was his castle. Not any longer. A pincer movement by the Courts Act 2003 and the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004 put paid to the 400-year-old principle that entry into your home could not be forced in civil cases.

We used to believe in the right to be tried by jury. Not any longer. The Government plans to remove trial by jury in complicated fraud cases and where there is a likelihood of jury tampering. It would like to go further.

We used to believe there was a good reason not to allow hearsay evidence in court. Not any longer. The anti-social behaviour order legislation introduced hearsay evidence. The maximum penalty for breaking an Asbo can be up to five years in jail. Hearsay can send someone to jail.

We used to believe in free speech, but not any longer. People have been detained under terrorism laws for wearing anti-Blair T-shirts. Walter Wolfgang was removed from the Labour Conference for heckling Jack Straw about the Iraq war. A woman was charged under the Harassment Act for sending two e-mails to a company politely asking them not to conduct animal experiments. Her offence was to send two e-mails, for in that lies the repeated action that is now illegal. A man named Stephen Jago was arrested for displaying a placard quoting Orwell near Downing Street. It read: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." And a mime artist named Neil Goodwin appeared in court recently charged under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act for what? Well, doing an impersonation of Charlie Chaplin outside Parliament. His hearing was a grim comedy. Mr Goodwin’s statement to the court concluded: "In truth, one of the first things to go under a dictatorship is a good sense of humour."

We used to believe that our private communications were sacrosanct. Not any longer. The Regulatory Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and its subsequent amendments provide such wide terms for the legitimate tapping of phones, the interception of e-mails and monitoring of internet connections that they amount to general warrants, last used in the 18th century under George III.

I could go on because there is much more, but I worry about boring you and I know I am beginning to seem obsessed. There will be many reasonable people among you who will argue that the fight against terrorism or some other compelling problem makes the removal of a fragment of liberty the best option available to us. A little bit here, a little bit there doesn’t really matter, particularly when it involves somebody else’s rights. Without thinking very deeply, we say to ourselves "if you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to fear from these new laws". Not true. There is something to fear - because someone else’s liberty is also your liberty. When it’s removed from them, it’s taken from you even though you may not be able to conceive of the circumstances when you might need it. A system of rights must apply to bank managers, illegal immigrant cockle pickers and every type of defendant otherwise it doesn’t count.

Cumulatively, these small, barely noticed reductions in our rights add up to the greatest attack on liberty in the last hundred years. No wonder the Prime Minister dismisses traditional civil liberties arguments as being made for another age. With his record he can do nothing else.

In an e-mail exchange between him and me in the spring, he suggested a kind of super Asbo for major criminals. This is what the unmediated Blair sounds like. "I would go further. I would widen the powers of police to seize cash of suspected [my italics] drug dealers, the cars they drive round in and require them to prove that they came by them lawfully. I would impose restrictions on those suspected of being involved in organised crime. In fact I would harry, hassle and hound them until they give up or leave the country."

I’m sure that echoes many people’s desire just to be rid of these awful people. But think about it for a moment: Tony Blair is a lawyer, yet nowhere is there any mention of due process or the courts. Apparently it will be enough for the authorities merely to suspect someone of wrongdoing for them to act. And the police won’t be troubled by the tiresome business of courts, defence lawyers or defendants’ rights. I wonder what Vaclav Havel would think of such a suggestion. Certainly, he would be all too familiar with the system of arbitrary arrest and state persecution that Blair seems to be suggesting.

Blair dresses up his views in a vocabulary of modernisation and inclusivity. Yet when he talks about rebalancing the criminal justice system in favour of the victim, it takes just a few moments to see that this will be achieved by doing away with the priority in our legal system of protecting the accused from miscarriages of justice. He simply wants to reduce defendants’ rights in order to satisfy public demand for more prosecutions.

It is now plain that he intends nothing less than to open the ancient charters of British rights in order to tip acid into them.

The way cabinet ministers think of themselves today and what they do are at odds. They think of themselves as reasonable, tolerant, humane and liberal people, but their actions tell an altogether different story. This brings me to the Big Brother state that Tony Blair says he doesn’t want to live in, but which has nevertheless rapidly come into being during his premiership.

Most people have very little understanding of what the ID card scheme will actually mean for them. They think that it just involves a little plastic identifier. But it is much more than that. Every adult will be required to provide 49 pieces of information about themselves which will include biometric measurements - probably an iris scan and fingerprinting. If you refuse to submit to what is called, without irony, enrolment, you will face repeated fines of up £2,500. The Government is deadly serious about this thing because of a simple truth. They want to know pretty much everything there is to know about you.

Personally, I find the idea of having a card repugnant and I cannot believe it will be long before policemen are stopping us on the street and asking for our papers. But this is by no means the most sinister aspect. Every time your card is swiped when you identify yourself, the National Identity Register will silently make a record of the time and date, your location and the purpose of the ID check. Gradually, a unique picture of your life will be built, to which nearly half-a-million civil servants are apparently going to have access.

But of course you will never be told who is looking at your file, or why. And nor will you be able to find out.

MPs must take responsibility for passing this invasive law but they cannot be blamed for the other half of the Big Brother society that is upon us. I refer to the total surveillance of our roads in a linked-up system of Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras. These cameras cover every motorway, major dual carriageway, town and city centre and will feed information from billions of journeys into one computer, where the data will remain for two years.

The decision to put British motorists under blanket, round- the-clock surveillance was never taken by Parliament. It just happened. As the cost of processing enormous quantities of data came down, the police and Home Office just simply decided to go ahead. Traffic cameras became surveillance cameras. This, I gather, is known as function creep, and, as always, half the pressure comes from technological innovation.

We are about to become the most observed population in the world outside North Korea, and absolutely no work has been done on how this will affect each one of us and what it will do to our society and political institutions.

I worry that we are not alert to the possibilities of social control. No matter how discreet this surveillance, it increases the spectral presence of the state in the everyday consciousness of each individual. I grant that it is a slow process and that it is nothing like the leaden omnipresence of the Stasi in the GDR. But I think we’re heading for a place from which we will not be able to return: the surveillance society where the state will crowd in on the individual human experience and threaten the unguarded freedoms of privacy, solitude, seclusion and anonymity. We may continue to attest to the feeling of freedom but in reality we will suffer more and more restrictions. Inexorably we are becoming subjects not citizens, units on a database that may be observed and classified by a Government which is taking control in areas where it has never dared in democratic times to trespass before.

Where this will all lead I cannot say, but I do know that it is neither good for us nor for the state. Humans work best when they have the maximum freedom, and so does government. As our Government gains more power in relation to us, confusing itself on the way with the entity and interests of the state, it will become less responsive to our needs and opinions, less transparent and less accountable.

Havel said of the Communist tyranny in that glorious but sombre new year’s day speech: "None of us is just its victim. We are its co-creators." That is true of any society. And I believe we all need now to acknowledge what has happened to British rights and do something about it.

Firstly, there needs to be some kind of formal audit made of the rights which have been already compromised. An exact account. Linked to this should be a commission looking into the effects of mass surveillance. Second, we need a constitution which enshrines a bill of rights and places our rights beyond the reach of an ambitious Executive and Parliament. Third, we should be writing to our constituency MPs or clogging up their surgeries - asking what they are doing about the attack on liberty. And fourth, all schoolchildren should be taught about British rights and freedoms, what they mean and how they were won. History, as the National Trust is fond of saying, matters. Rights and liberties are as much a part of our heritage as St Paul’s Cathedral and Shakespeare’s plays.

This may all sound rather prescriptive but I have become certain over the last two years that we need to do something to save us from our Government and the Government from itself.

This was taken from the Summerfield Lecture given at the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham, on 12 October as part of the annual literary festival. Research by Emily Butselaar

Taken from Ministry of Truth

Discordian bloggers?

How many of us are there actually out there? I know there a couple of sizeable Discordian communities on Livejournal, but well....its Livejournal. If I want that level of drama I'll start an abortion debate on a forum. Apart from Hoopla, the late RAW and myself (one of these three is far lower league than the other two, and it isn't RAW or Hoopla), there seem to be very few actually around.

Which is strange, given everyone and their dog is blogging nowadays. Especially given Discordians tendency to rant and rave at the world at large, not to mention some computer literary. We need to encourage a Discordian blogosphere. Its only fair, the various other religions and politics types have theirs, we may as well show them up at their new game.

Discordian bloggers, check tha fuck in!

Apple, or Quince?

That is the question with which the rather interesing Cu Sith Myth blog posed a couple of months back.

As the post shows, the source of the false information is none other than the Toronto Star, well known for its investigative journalism and war coverage in Ancient Greece. Or not.

Because, as anyone who has read the circle of stories that make up the entire war of Troy mythology (which is not just the Illiad and Fall of Troy, as many presume), there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the item Eris rolled into the wedding party at Olympus is an apple. A golden one, admittedly, but definitely apple.

Thats because it was one of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides, as recorded by Colluthus in The Rape of Helen (38). The irony here is that the Garden belonged to Hera and the apples had originally been a wedding gift between Zeus and Hera from Gaia. Can you see the importance, that one golden apple lead to the union of the most powerful of the gods (in admittedly a relationship that Zeus often broke), whereas the apple Eris threw divided them as they took separate sides in the all embracing war that set out how the Greeks understood their gods and their own culture. One defined the order of the Gods, the other the affairs of man. It sounds implausible, but there is no way to overestimate the importance of the Trojan War in the Greek psyche. It defined how they thought about the difference between Greece and the barbarian states, the natures of the Gods, what it means to be valiant in battle and was constantly referred to, alluded and rewritten in poetry and speeches.

Uh, anyway, back to the point. Yeah, definitely apple. No debate at all.

The death of Robert Anton Wilson

The Independent Obituary

Robert Anton Wilson, writer: born New York 18 January 1932; married 1958 Arlen Riley (died 1999; one son, two daughters, and one daughter deceased); died Capitola, California 11 January 2007.

Robert Anton Wilson, who has died after a long illness, treated his forthcoming demise as he had treated the whole of Western culture ever since he first published the Illuminatus! trilogy in 1975. For Wilson, the idea of death was a joke which might have some truth in it.

Wilson was born in 1932 in Brooklyn, New York, and raised there. He studied engineering and mathematics, without graduating, at the Brooklyn Polytechnical College and New York University. From 1965 to 1971 he worked in Chicago for Playboy magazine, a period when the journal still saw itself as the harbinger of a great liberating transformation in Western culture: free sex, free thought, free world.

He and a fellow editor, Robert Shea, spent much of their time answering correspondence from readers on political issues, much of it devoted to obsessive rants about various world-dominating conspiracies. The first draft of their three-volume novel, Illuminatus!, in whose pages dozens of conspiracy theories are treated as all being true, was written while both were still working for Playboy.

Perhaps because it so masterfully combines spoof and paranoia, Illuminatus! soon became a kind of bible for American conspiracy enthusiasts. Taking its absurdly complicated plot from science-fiction writers like A.E. Van Vogt, and its tone of hilarious desperation from writers like Flann O'Brien and Kurt Vonnegut Jnr, the basic story opposes the Illuminati, who have secretly ruled the world since the founding of the Order centuries earlier, to the Discordians, a madcap crew of anarchists whose antics may owe something to Thomas Pynchon's V (1963). In the end, the mysterious figure who "shapes" the Discordians - a Captain Nemo-like shaman who governs the world from a secret submarine - turns out to be the secret master of the Illuminati as well.

It is all a joke, of course, which might have some truth in it; it quite perfectly caught the uneasy exhilaration of the 1970s American counter-culture, which half-believed that the world was passing through a cusp into freedom, and half-knew that the roots of power were untouched by any of this flowering. Timothy Leary said the book was "more important than Ulysses or Finnegans Wake". The Fortean Times - a journal founded to honour the memory of Charles Fort (1874-1932), an earlier Yankee trickster - thought it was properly preposterous. The young Ken Campbell staged the entire trilogy, first in Liverpool in 1976, then as the inaugural production in March 1977 at the new Cottesloe Theatre on the South Bank.

The book itself has remained constantly in print. Shea died in 1983, but over the course of an extremely active literary career Wilson continued to generate harum-scarum continuations like the Schrödinger's Cat trilogy (1980-81), in which an underlying seriousness of intent does gradually surface. Wilson was never serious about world-dominating conspiracies as such; but he was absolutely serious about the realities that these superficially nonsensical theories do reflect. He was highly conscious, in other words, of the barriers that frustrate individual human beings - individual New Age Californians, cynics might respond - from gaining full autonomy in their lives. For Wilson there is indeed a "they" out there, a loose cabal of owners whose primary goal is to make passive consumers of us all.

The term "fnord", which he coined, is all about this. A fnord is a subliminal message that causes anxiety in those who encounter it embedded in stories or other material our masters want us to avoid or deny. The best way to allay this anxiety is not to think about these matters. In joke treatises and tales, into which slyly he infiltrates perfectly serious concerns, Wilson argued for decades that it was necessary for all of us to "see the fnords" that entangle our lives, and to cut free of them.

In later years, Wilson founded and/or joined a slough of fake societies, made a number of records expounding sense and nonsense equally, wrote voluminously in many journals. He was madcap, but never told a frivolous untruth; he was a kind of benign Loki figure for thousands of readers, many of whom helped support him in his last months, when medical expenses had become overwhelming.

John Clute

=======================

EDIT: Robert Anton Wilson tribute night to be held on Out There Radio on the 18th of January, RAW's (and incidentally also my) birthday. Check out http://wuog.org/OutThere/ to download the podcast.

I think the USA must be gearing up to attack somewhere...

Many call me a cynic. But it makes sense. They obviously let the Pentagon coffee boy draft the response to the Somalian air raids, because quite frankly anyone who gets upset about the UIC and allies getting the shit bombed out of them needs their heads checked. Then again, logical consistency has never been a strong point of the left or right wing, at least not for 60 odd years.

So everyone is crying foul over Somalia and meanwhile, the USA raiding the Iranian consulate in Iraq (an act of war), has dropped off the BBC front page already. Oh, wait, its reappeared, because Iraq now say they backed it. But it wasn't up in the early afternoon. And suddenly everyones favourite bogeyman, Al-Qaeda, is back on the radar.

Here is the cliff notes version of the BBC report: Al-Qaeda is based in Pakistan now and is trying to reconnect to its Middle East, Asian, European and African Horn cells.

Yeah, thats it. Shit, I'm no expert on AQ but I could have told you this and ten times more in a few off hand comments. In 2003, Al-Qaeda sent fighters who had been trained by them to Iraq, where they made contact with Zarqawi's cells and used their superior tactical information to plot attacks. In 2005 the CIA caught a man who was commonly referred to as the "Switchboard", because he was reconnecting the Al-Qaeda cells, which have been cropping up like nobodies business, and with no prompting from the core leadership since 9/11, who had communications disrupted since being ousted from Afghanistan.

Is this really news to anyone? What did they expect, that Bin Laden and Zawahiri would say "well, shit, thats us beat. Fancy a visit to the brothels in Karachi? There's this one strip club in the Shiite quarter with the most amazing...". You get the idea.

So obviously, since such old news is being reported, something is up. And that, my friends, is Iran. Dr Ali Ansari, one of my favourite lecturers up here, as well as probably the most consulted expert on Iran for the media (I'm surprised he ever sleeps, given how quoted he is), thinks this bodes bad. Really bad. And knowing how academics are careful with their choice of words, thats not a good thing to hear. Israel also started off the New Year with a plan to detonate nukes over Iran in a first strike leaked to the Times. But only little nukes. So thats all fine, then.

Some of the blame for this, I feel, goes with the Democrat hawks. Clinton, Dean and Obama, in particular, are more than up for blasting Iran back to the stone age. So thats some of the leading lights of the Dems and the Executive in agreement then, as well as Israel in a dangerous mood after its conventional defeat in Lebanon over the summer, to Iran's proxies no less.

I'd lose no sleep with Iran's repugnant and backward regime being wiped out of existence. Its the millions of innocents that would go with it which worry me. And thats not hyperbole. Iran is not very popular with the Arab states right now, bar Syria. Should Iran end up being pre-emptively nuked, there will be a tidal wave of vengeance across the Middle East from every fanatical faction. This justifies every paranoid conspiracy theory being peddled by the more insane Imams right now, about a US overthrow of Muslim regimes. Since these ideas already are gaining currency since the invasion of Iraq, this will just confirm them among the wider population. We're talking a regional powershift that could leave the USA with barely a friend in the Middle East. Radical governments hostile to the USA and Israel could be swept to power on a message of revenge and hate. International groups like Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda would profit incredibly in terms of recruits. If we could bet on anything, it would be Hezbollah unleashing a terrorist campaign against the USA.

Isn't anyone in policy saying this? It can't just be the people outside of the government who can see the obvious problems this would cause, can it?

New favourite site of the moment

http://www.violentacres.com/

What can I say? She's an excellent and passionate writer, who makes a hell of alot of sense and, when she gets going, could probably give Ivan Stang a run for his money.

Excellent stuff and highly recommended.

Now this pisses me off no end

http://p10.hostingprod.com/@spyblog.org.uk/blog/2006/12/saddam_hussein_executed_which_dictator_will_be_next.html#comments

I know, I know, I said the media should shut up about Saddam, but I'm not the media. No-one of huge importance listens to me, so my criticism doesn't apply.

Now, I didn't agree with the Iraq war. I felt it was ill-conceived, badly timed and pointless. Billions would be spent on dealing with a contained threat who was going nowhere fast, while Osama and Zawahiri were legging it over the border to Pakistan.

That said, there is no doubt in my mind that Saddam is a bloody tyrant who should have died 26 years ago and spared the rest of the world the effort. He indirectly has the blood of a million on his hands from the Iran-Iraq war he instigated. The deaths in Iraq he caused likely went into the hundreds of thousands through his brutal repression, which included torture, rape and murder, sometimes at his own hands. Revenge attacks could wipe out whole towns, with everyone taken in for "questioning", or in the case of Halabja, gassed with chemical weapons.

But making claims like "Bush is many many many times more dangerous than Hussain ever was" can only be the product of a deranged mind, unless they mean in potential, which is unlikely. Bush could be far more dangerous and cause way more death and destruction than he already has. Nukes, airstrikes, biological warfare....the USA exceeds every other nation in this respect.

Wars of aggression may have been considered by the Nuremburg trials as crimes against humanity, but so is willful genocide, of which Saddam is most certainly guilty. That people can decry Bush and Blair as tyrannical in one sentence and in the next one effectively excuse Saddam by laying all the blame on the West (a very racist way of thinking, in both senses. Evil white people and naive Arabs who cannot help themselves. How disgusting) is....incredible. How can people be so deluded?

I seem to remember a General Election in 2005, where the British public had their say on who was to represent them in Parliament. And much to my personal dismay, New Labour took the majority of seats and saw fit to keep Tony Blair in the leadership role. In America too, there were elections recently. And those Americans angry about the Iraq war turned over control of Congress entirely to the Democrats.

In Iraq, you had two choices: vote for Saddam or a bullet in the head. In Iraq, anything found mouthing off about "democracy" or "equal rights" would probably find themselves detained at a military prison, where acid, knives, bullets and sticks would all be employed to make you reconsider your position and tell who you got them from. Your family may also suffer similar treatment. Then, if you were lucky, you could have a swift execution.

And you may point out that the CIA can and do torture people and MI6 are content to hand people over to countries who do and then take notes. And thats totally reprehensible and inexcusable in a liberal democracy, I agree. But Bush and Blair are not doing these to peace protesters, or members of opposition parties, or people mouthing off in coffee shops. I have yet to see Nancy Pelosi waterboarded, or David Cameron subject to extraordinary rendition (kidnapping). By all means these should be fought and resisted and are incompatible with the ideals of freedom. But they are very low on the scale compared to a monster like Saddam.

Cicero had the right idea about tyrants. "There can be no such thing as fellowship with tyrants, nothing but bitter feud is possible: and it is not repugnant to nature to despoil, if you can, those whom it is a virtue to kill, nay this pestilent and godless brood should be utterly banished from human society." Saddam was worthy of one thing and one thing alone; a bullet in the head, and another if he was still twitching. By comparing such a monster to morons like Bush and Blair is nothing less than to dishonour the many dead Iraqis who fought valiantly against Saddam for freedom and representative democracy.

Idiots who indulge in these comparisons do no aid to their movements or causes. Their rhetoric is harmful in the extreme, irresponsible and offensive.

I am severely pissed off having read this.

Sageman - Understanding terror networks

I linked this on my StumbleUpon site, but I may as well put it up here too, as it shows some pretty hard and conclusive data concerning Al-Qaeda. The article explains it all really, and while I don't yet have the book (too busy buying Jared Diamond stuff), it is most certainly considered brilliant by many others and well worth owning. As the article explains, Sageman is an ex-CIA psychiatrist who was involved in Afghanistan the first time around, when the Soviets were there. He also managed to interview or otherwise gain data on 400 Al-Qaeda terrorists, making this study very important.

Understanding Terror Networks E-notes

Saddam Hussein is STILL dead

No, really. For a dead man, he gets alot of coverage. Wasn't there something said about...oh, I don't know, Iraq getting over his brutal rule. Presumably by having it shoved in their face every ten seconds by the world media. Sigh....the man is dead. Though reporting on him means you can ignore that this has been one of the most lethal months in Iraq (which much please the politicians), please try and report on the current issues. Please?

Don't expect updates until January

I'm outta here!

Lest we forget

Pinochet is dead

And its about 35 years overdue, too. Its been a bad couple of weeks for people with blood on their hands - Saddam to be executed, Rumsfeld condemned to irrelevance and now Pinochet has finally been buried.

Whats really surprising however, is the reaction of certain segments of the Chilean people. 60,000 people came out to pay their respects to this dictator's corpse at it lay in Santiago's Military Academy. To pay their respects to a man who had anyone to the left of Margaret Thatcher (his biggest fan, do not forget) either dismissed from the entire political process in what was a previously democratic state or worse - tortured, executed or "disappeared".

The stories tell of how they used to fly out helicopters over the ocean and just through the prisoners out, leaving them stranded at sea to either die through exposure, tiredness or whatever natural predator decided to try and pick them off. Other helicopters flew up and down the coast depositing death squads in towns in blatant acts of state terrorism - the infamous "Caravans of Death".

But he "saved" the country from Communism. A democratically elected Communist leader, however. The haste at which Allende undertook economic restructuring of the state suggests that he intended to abide by the laws of Chile and to vacate the office of President after his 6 year term had finished. His more dictatorial moves were defeated by the Christian Democrats in Congress, hardly something a new Stalin in the making would ever allow. Even if he had been making moves towards a Communist dictatorship, the only way to save the country would have been to restore power to the people via an elected leadership within a Constitutional framework - not by installing another group of dictators who were even more bloody and vicious.

But such is the nature of primate politics. Pinochet was the darling of certain groups simply because he belonged to them and not the other side. Oh, and there was the economy. But is an economy ever so important that it justifies the support of a bloody tyrant? No, never. Yes, his policies did improve the condition of life for some Chileans. But then he rounded up others and had them systematically tortured and executed. Kind of outweighs whatever plus points he may get for his economic skill.

So, another tyrant is dead and for that we should all be glad. However, the mentality that supports tyrants is obviously still alive and well, within Chile, within Iraq and within even the UK and America, where Pinochet was much loved by the political elites of Thatcher and Reagen. Kind of like Saddam, but I digress. So long as the mob mentality that calls for such leaders exists, they will continue to blight our existence. Tyrants are not born, they are made by the cries of the crowds looking for security against Them, whatever enemy, real or imagined, that they fear. And until people stop being afraid and stop looking to Authority for their safety, such leaders will continue well into the future.

Blogging during the Industrial Revolution

The single best Bible verse EVER!

End of debate, no argument, this is what makes reading the Bible worthwhile:

"Then he went up from there to Bethel; and as he was going up the road, some youths came from the city and mocked him, and said to him, “Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!” So he turned around and looked at them, and pronounced a curse on them in the name of the LORD. And two female bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths."

2 Kings 2:23-24

Thanks to ChurchHopping.com for reminding me of this verse. And people say Discordianism is weird.....

A PSA on behalf of Scotland Yard

Scarily like a dream I had last night....

Don't panic ma'am, they were only white terrorists....

Another story illustrating the essentially racist nature of the War on Some Sorts of Terror and Your Personal Freedoms.

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index.php?menuID=1&subID=815&p=2

Here are some select passages from the article.

Public perception of terrorism is often shaped by selective media coverage, which concentrates exclusively on a particular version of 'terrorism', while ignoring incidents that fall outside this framework.

A revealing example of this process occurred last week when two men appeared separately in Burnley Magistrates' Court, charged under the 1883 Explosive Substances Act with possession of an explosive substance for an illegal purpose.

One of the accused was a BNP council candidate in last May's local elections in Colne, named Robert Cottage. In a raid on his house, police found what they called "the largest amount of chemical explosives of this type ever found in this country".

The other was a retired dentist named David Jackson, who was allegedly found in possession of a rocket launcher and a nuclear biological protection suit.


OK, I'll let that thought sink in. A member of a UK politically extreme party and a dentist had more WMDs then we have found in Iraq.


But what is striking about their court appearance (they were remanded until October 23) is the failure of any mainstream newspaper or media outlet to report it at all.

Thats because it doesn't fit in with where the funding on terrorism is going - towards looking at swarthy folk from overseas who threaten us (despite Al-Qaeda actually recruiting from converts, including Indians, Latinos and Jamaicans) and doesn't fit into the narrative the mainstream media have built up over modern terrorism.

But consider this: who was the biggest terrorist threat in America in the 90s? If you said the Christian Identity Militia movement, then you get a cookie. This movement has even bankrolled far right and violent organizations in this country and carried out the Oklahoma bombings in 96 and a string of lesser bombings, robbery and murder since its explosion onto the world scene in the 1980s, the same time as Shi'a terrorism was making its presence known throughout Lebanon and most of the Crescent and the nutter "Rabbi" Kahane was printing books and founding groups dedicated to essentially genociding Arabs.

Do you see a pattern here? Because I do, and so does noted terrorism scholar Bruce Hoffman. In his book, Inside Terrorism, he gives a precise account of how terrorism since the 1980s has increased in incidence among all three faiths and probably religion at large. What I found particularly interesting was the great lengths the supposedly fractured Christian Identity movement had made in biological and chemical weapons in order to bring about Armageddon. I'll repeat that: biological and chemical weapons in order to bring about Armageddon.

And the losses of the late 90s for the movement (where Clinton did crack down hard on them, despite what Fox News may tell you), research, development and deployment of such weapons is continuing. Here are some choice attacks that nearly happened for you to read over:

In 2003, two antigovernment extremists were convicted of amassing a “huge arsenal of illegal weapons and explosives in Tyler, Texas, including suitcase bombs and a working chemical weapon.” They apparently possessed sufficient quantities of sodium cyanide to kill some six thousand people and had stockpiled half a million rounds of ammunition and sixty pipe bombs.

In March, two members of the Minnesota Patriots Council, a militia group, were convicted of stockpiling enough ricin to kill at least 129 people, allegedly as part of a plan to murder IRS agents, U.S. marshals, and local deputy sheriffs. According to the FBI, ricin is ranked as the third most toxic known substance, behind only plutonium and botulism.

Two months later, a man described as a certified microbiologist—who also had links to the Aryan Nations—was able to order a quantity of bubonic plague agent through the mail from a Maryland chemical supply firm. He had obtained three vials of Yersinia pestis—a bacterium credited with having wiped out one-third of the population of fourteenth-century Europe. In addition to the bacterium, police found in his home a dozen M-l carbines, smoke grenades, blasting caps—and white supremacist literature.

Taken from Pages 106-7 (Chapter 5) of Inside Terrorism by Bruce Hoffman.

Terrorism is not just an issue that affects radical nutcases in the Middle East. Anyone, anyone with a sufficiently radical, all-embracing and apocalyptic worldview can and will tend towards violence in order to bring about their fairy tale versions of the world. Al-Qaeda and Middle Eastern and Islamic terrorism is an issue, it would be foolish to deny it. But they are not the only terrorists and we failed to stop Al-Qaeda BEFORE 9/11 by ignoring them and the threat they present. While the media hypes the threat from "Muslims" (who are no more Muslim than me, unless getting drunk, going to strip joints and dealing drugs is permissible. In which case, I'm in), we have ignored the threat still present from a number of other groups, just as fanatical and insane as Al-Qaeda. In fact, apart from certain geopolitical considerations, I would say there is no difference between the Salafist movement Al-Qaeda represents and the Domionist movement nuts like The Order and the Aryan Nations work in favour of.

By virtue of the irresponsible reporting and scaremongering in offices of power, we could easily be setting ourselves up for a domestic 9/11 - or something far worse. Its time we grew the hell up and started to look at this as sensible adults. But of course, this is not in the interest of the status quo. Still, to anyone who reads the linked article, or even this blog entry, please pass it on to people you know. Knowledge is power and only by a more educated population can we ever hope to change policy.



Edit: Apparently, the BBC have replied as to why they did not give this the coverage it deserved. Here is the text of the email they sent someone who asked them about this, which I got via a forum.

[name deleted],

Thanks for your e-mail and sorry for the delay in replying. We had planned to cover this issue on last week's NewsWatch programme, but unfortunately had to drop the item at the last minute because we couldn't confirm information we needed to make sure our report didn't break the law.

The simple answer is that the national BBC should have covered this but missed the story - it was featured on BBC Radio Lancashire, where the offences occurred, but should have had wider coverage nationally. However, it's also interesting that of the national newspapers, only the Sunday Times carried any mention of the case at all.

I think this is partly down to the way the police locally handled the whole thing - and there have been discussions about the lack of information coming from them.

However, I should point out that much of the information you may have read on various websites goes far beyond what should be reported once people have been arrested and charged, and the BBC could not have given anywhere near that much detail of the case.

But I'm told there will definitely be someone covering next Monday's court hearing in Burnley.

I hope that's useful,

Ian Jolly
NewsWatch

Note: this email was dated the 17th of October 2006. Make of that what you will.

According to Mel Gibson, who is responsible for all the wars?

a) Booze
b) Shoes
c) Blue's Clues
d) Muckadoos
e) New Zoo Revues
f) Kalamazoos
g) Tom Cruise
h) Bird flus
i) Chimney flues
j) Primordial ooze
k) Tea for twos
l) CBS Evening News
m) Kangaroos
n) Heads I win, tails you lose
o) Muumuus
p) Stinkypoos
q) Clever ruse
r) Runaround Sues
s) Jews
t) JOOOOOOOS!
u) Any of the above, depending on his blood alcohol level at the time

Answers on a back of a postcard to the PFLD headquarters.

For the Conspiracy Theorist in you....

Out There Radio broadcasts.

Basically two guys, Joe McFall and Raymond Wiley, doing an hour long talkshow on conspiracy theory, the occult and the paranormal. Also, its actually pretty damn good. These guys range the spectrum, from well known theories such as the MLK assassination, South American coups, MK-Ultra etc to some stuff I hadn't even heard of, such as the death of William Cooper, the creation of strange stone tablets in Georgia proclaiming the manifesto of the New World Order and much more.

They seem pretty openminded (apart from a far too understandable dislike of Reagan), not your average bunker dwelling Christian "patriots" or anything like that (which I also listen to. But only because they are funny). They've had authors, shamans, Satanists, Freemasons, Pagans and researchers on the show, so they take a pretty broad and lighthearted view of some of the ideas and things going on out there.

Highlights I would suggest listening to include:

An Adam Gorightly interview on Kerry Thornley

An Interview with Rev Ivan Stang of the CotSG

Austin Gandy on the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

The 2006 post election analysis

My favourite mad scientist - Wilhelm Reich


But I strongly suggest checking out the entire archive of shows that they have.