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V - A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing what he reads.
- The Five Commandments (the Pentabarf), page 00004, the Principia Discordia
A Field Guide to Critical Thinking
by James Lett
There are many reasons for the popularity of paranormal beliefs in the United States today, including:
* the irresponsibility of the mass media, who exploit the public taste for nonsense,
* the irrationality of the American world-view, which supports such unsupportable claims as life after death and the efficacy of the polygraph, and
* the ineffectiveness of public education, which generally fails to teach students the essential skills of critical thinking.
As a college professor, I am especially concerned with this third problem. Most of the freshman and sophomore students in my classes simply do not know how to draw reasonable conclusions from the evidence. At most, they've been taught in high school what to think; few of them know how to think.
In an attempt to remedy this problem at my college, I've developed an elective course called "Anthropology and the Paranormal." The course examines the complete range of paranormal beliefs in contemporary American culture, from precognition and psychokinesis to channeling and cryptozoology and everything between and beyond, including astrology, UFOs, and creationism. I teach the students very little about anthropological theories and even less about anthropological terminology. Instead, I try to communicate the essence of the anthropological perspective, by teaching them, indirectly, what the scientific method is all about. I do so by teaching them how to evaluate evidence. I give them six simple rules to follow when considering any claim, and then show them how to apply those six rules to the examination of any paranormal claim.
The six rules of evidential reasoning are my own distillation and simplification of the scientific method. To make it easier for students to remember these half-dozen guidelines, I've coined an acronym for them: Ignoring the vowels, the letters in the word "FiLCHeRS" stand for the rules of Falsifiability, Logic, Comprehensiveness, Honesty, Replicability, and Sufficiency. Apply these six rules to the evidence offered for any claim, I tell my students, and no one will ever be able to sneak up on you and steal your belief. You'll be filch-proof.
Falsifiability
It must be possible to conceive of evidence that would prove the claim false. It may sound paradoxical, but in order for any claim to be true, it must be falsifiable. The rule of falsifiability is a guarantee that if the claim is false, the evidence will prove it false; and if the claim is true, the evidence will not disprove it (in which case the claim can be tentatively accepted as true until such time as evidence is brought forth that does disprove it). The rule of falsifiability, in short, says that the evidence must matter, and as such it is the first and most important and most fundamental rule of evidential reasoning.
The rule of falsifiability is essential for this reason: If nothing conceivable could ever disprove the claim, then the evidence that does exist would not matter; it would be pointless to even examine the evidence, because the conclusion is already known -- the claim is invulnerable to any possible evidence. This would not mean, however, that the claim is true; instead it would mean that the claim is meaningless. This is so because it is impossible -- logically impossible -- for any claim to be true no matter what. For every true claim, you can always conceive of evidence that would make the claim untrue -- in other words, again, every true claim is falsifiable.
For example, the true claim that the life span of human beings is less than 200 years is falsifiable; it would be falsified if a single human being were to live to be 200 years old. Similarly, the true claim that water freezes at 32° F is falsifiable; it would be falsified if water were to freeze at, say, 34° F. Each of these claims is firmly established as scientific "fact," and we do not expect either claim ever to be falsified; however, the point is that either could be. Any claim that could not be falsified would be devoid of any propositional content; that is, it would not be making a factual assertion -- it would instead be making an emotive statement, a declaration of the way the claimant feels about the world. Nonfalsifiable claims do communicate information, but what they describe is the claimant's value orientation. They communicate nothing whatsoever of a factual nature, and hence are neither true nor false. Nonfalsifiable statements are propositionally vacuous.
There are two principal ways in which the rule of falsifiability can be violated -- two ways, in other words, of making nonfalsifiable claims. The first variety of nonfalsifiable statements is the undeclared claim: a statement that is so broad or vague that it lacks any propositional content. The undeclared claim is basically unintelligible and consequently meaningless. Consider, for example, the claim that crystal therapists can use pieces of quartz to restore balance and harmony to a person's spiritual energy. What does it mean to have unbalanced spiritual energy? How is the condition recognized and diagnosed? What evidence would prove that someone's unbalanced spiritual energy had been -- or had not been -- balanced by the application of crystal therapy? Most New Age wonders, in fact, consist of similarly undeclared claims that dissolve completely when exposed to the solvent of rationality.
The undeclared claim has the advantage that virtually any evidence that could be adduced could be interpreted as congruent with the claim, and for that reason it is especially popular among paranormalists who claim precognitive powers. Jeane Dixon, for example, predicted that 1987 would be a year "filled with changes" for Caroline Kennedy. Dixon also predicted that Jack Kemp would "face major disagreements with the rest of his party" in 1987 and that "world-wide drug terror" would be "unleashed by narcotics czars" in the same year. She further revealed that Dan Rather "may [or may not] be hospitalized" in 1988, and that Whitney Houston's "greatest problem" in 1986 would be "balancing her personal life against her career." The undeclared claim boils down to a statement that can be translated as "Whatever will be, will be."
The second variety of nonfalsifiable statements, which is even more popular among paranormalists, involves the use of the multiple out, that is, an inexhaustible series of excuses intended to explain away the evidence that would seem to falsify the claim. Creationists, for example, claim that the universe is no more than 10,000 years old. They do so despite the fact that we can observe stars that are billions of light-years from the earth, which means that the light must have left those stars billions of years ago, and which proves that the universe must be billions of years old. How then do the creationists respond to this falsification of their claim? By suggesting that God must have created the light already on the way from those distant star at the moment of creation 10,000 years ago. No conceivable piece of evidence, of course, could disprove that claim.
Additional examples of multiple outs abound in the realm of the paranormal. UFO proponents, faced with a lack of reliable physical or photographic evidence to buttress the claims, point to a secret "government conspiracy" that is allegedly preventing the release of evidence that would support their case. Psychic healers say they can heal you if you have enough faith in their psychic powers. Psychokinetics say they can bend spoons with their minds if they are not exposed to negative vibrations from skeptic observers. Tarot readers can predict your fate if you're sincere in your desire for knowledge. The multiple out means, in effect, "Heads I win, tails you lose."
Logic
Any argument offered as evidence in support of any claim must be sound. An argument is said to be "valid" if its conclusion follows unavoidably from its premises; it is "sound" if it is valid and if all the premises are true. The rule of logic thus governs the validity of inference. Although philosophers have codified and named the various forms of valid arguments, it is not necessary to master a course in form logic in order to apply the rules of inference consistently and correctly. An invalid argument can be recognize by the simple method of counterexample: If you can conceive of a single imaginable instance whereby the conclusion would not necessarily follow from the premises even if the premises were true, then the argument is invalid. Consider the following syllogism for example: All dogs have fleas; Xavier has fleas; therefore Xavier is a dog. That argument is invalid because a single flea-ridden feline named Xavier would provide an effective counterexample. If an argument is invalid, then it is, by definition, unsound. Not all valid arguments are sound, however. Consider this example: All dogs have fleas; Xavier is a dog; therefore Xavier has fleas. That argument is unsound, even though it is valid, because the first premise is false: All dogs do not have fleas.
To determine whether a valid argument is sound is frequently problematic; knowing whether a given premise is true or false often demands additional knowledge about the claim that may require empirical investigation. If the argument passes these two tests, however -- if it is both valid and sound -- then the conclusion can be embraced with certainty.
The rule of logic is frequently violated by pseudoscientists. Erich von Däniken, who singlehandedly popularized the ancient-astronaut mythology in the 1970s, wrote many books in which he offered invalid and unsound arguments with benumbing regularity (see Omohundro 1976). In Chariots of the Gods? he was not above making arguments that were both logically invalid and factually inaccurate -- in other words, arguments that were doubly unsound. For example, von Däniken argues that the map of the world made by the sixteenth-century Turkish admiral Piri Re'is is so "astoundingly accurate" that it could only have been made from satellite photographs. Not only is the argument invalid (any number of imaginable techniques other than satellite photography could result in an "astoundingly accurate" map), but the premise is simply wrong -- the Piri Re'is map, in fact, contains many gross inaccuracies (see Story 1981).
Comprehensiveness
The evidence offered in support of any claim must be exhaustive -- that is all of the available evidence must be considered.
For obvious reasons, it is never reasonable to consider only the evidence that supports a theory and to discard the evidence that contradicts it. This rule is straightforward and self-apparent, and it requires little explication or justification. Nevertheless, it is a rule that is frequently broken by proponents of paranormal claims and by those who adhere to paranormal beliefs.
For example, the proponents of biorhythm theory are fond of pointing to airplane crashes that occurred on days when the pilot, copilot, anchor navigator were experiencing critically low points in their intellectual, emotional, and/or physical cycles. The evidence considered by the biorhythm apologists, however, does not include the even larger number of airplane crashes that occurred when the crews were experiencing high or neutral points in their biorhythm cycles (Hines 1988:160). Similarly, when people believe that Jeane Dixon has precognitive ability because she predicted the 1988 election of George Bush (which she did, two months before the election, when every social scientist, media maven, and private citizen in the country was making the same prognostication), they typically ignore the thousands of forecasts that Dixon has made that have failed to come true (such as her predictions that John F. Kennedy would not win the presidency in 1960, that World War III would begin in 1958, and that Fidel Castro would die in 1969). If you are willing to be selective in the evidence you consider, you could reasonably conclude that the earth is flat.
Honesty
The evidence offered in support of any claim must be evaluated without self-deception.
The rule of honesty is a corollary to the rule of comprehensiveness. When you have examined all of the evidence, it is essential that you be honest with yourself about the results of that examination. If the weight of the evidence contradicts the claim, then you are required to abandon belief in that claim. The obverse, of course, would hold as well.
The rule of honesty, like the rule of comprehensiveness, is frequently violated by both proponents and adherents of paranormal beliefs. Parapsychologists violate this rule when they conclude, after numerous subsequent experiments have failed to replicate initially positive psi results, that psi must be an elusive phenomenon. (Applying Occam's Razor, the more honest conclusion would be that the original positive result must have been a coincidence.) Believers in the paranormal violate this rule when they conclude, after observing a "psychic" surreptitiously bend a spoon with his hands, that he only cheats sometimes.
In practice, the rule of honesty usually boils down to an injunction against breaking the rule of falsifiability by taking a multiple out. There is more to it than that, however: The rule of honesty means that you must accept the obligation to come to a rational conclusion once you have examined all the evidence. If the overwhelming weight of all the evidence falsifies your belief, then you must conclude that the belief is false, and you must face the implications of that conclusion forthrightly. In the face of overwhelmingly negative evidence, neutrality and agnosticism are no better than credulity and faith. Denial, avoidance, rationalization, and all the other familiar mechanisms of self-deception would constitute violations of the rule of honesty.
In my view, this rule alone would all but invalidate the entire discipline of parapsychology. After more than a century of systematic, scholarly research, the psi hypothesis remains wholly unsubstantiated and unsupportable; parapsychologists have failed, as Ray Hyman (1985:7) observes, to produce "any consistent evidence for paranormality that can withstand acceptable scientific scrutiny." From all indications, the number of parapsychologists who observe the rule of honesty pales in comparison with the number who delude themselves. Veteran psychic investigator Eric Dingwall (1985:162) summed up his extensive experience in parapsychological research with this observation: "After sixty years' experience and personal acquaintance with most of the leading parapsychologists of that period I do not think I could name a half dozen whom I could call objective students who honestly wished to discover the truth."
Replicability
If the evidence for any claim is based upon an experimental result, or if the evidence offered in support of any claim could logically be explained as coincidental, then it is necessary for the evidence to be repeated in subsequent experiments or trials.
The rule of replicability provides a safeguard against the possibility of error, fraud, or coincidence. A single experimental result is never adequate in and of itself, whether the experiment concerns the production of nuclear fusion or the existence of telepathic ability. Any experiment, no matter how carefully designed and executed, is always subject to the possibility of implicit bias or undetected error. The rule of replicability, which requires independent observers to follow the same procedures and to achieve the same results, is an effective way of correcting bias or error, even if the bias or error remains permanently unrecognized. If the experimental results are the product of deliberate fraud, the rule of replicability will ensure that the experiment will eventually be performed by honest researchers.
If the phenomenon in question could conceivably be the product of coincidence, then the phenomenon must be replicated before the hypothesis of coincidence can be rejected. If coincidence is in fact the explanation for the phenomenon, then the phenomenon will not be duplicated in subsequent trials, and the hypothesis of coincidence will be confirmed; but if coincidence is not the explanation, then the phenomenon may be duplicated, and an explanation other than coincidence will have to be sought. If I correctly predict the next roll of the dice, you should demand that I duplicate the feat before granting that my prediction was anything but a coincidence.
The rule of replicability is regularly violated by parapsychologists, who are especially fond of misinterpreting coincidences. The famous "psychic sleuth" Gerard Croiset, for example, allegedly solved numerous baffling crimes and located hundreds of missing persons in a career that spanned five decades, from the 1940s until his death in 1980. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Croiset's predictions were either vague and nonfalsifiable or simply wrong. Given the fact that Croiset made thousands of predictions during his lifetime, it is hardly surprising that he enjoyed one or two chance "hits." The late Dutch parapsychologist Wilhelm Tenhaeff, however, seized upon those "very few prize cases" to argue that Croiset possessed demonstrated psi powers (Hoebens 1986a:130). That was a clear violation of the rule of replicability, and could not have been taken as evidence of Croiset's psi abilities even if the "few prize cases" had been true. (In fact, however, much of Tenhaeff's data was fraudulent -- see Hoebens 1986b. )
Sufficiency
The evidence offered in support of any claim must be adequate to establish the truth of that claim, with these stipulations:
* the burden of proof for any claim rests on the claimant,
* extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and
* evidence based upon authority and/or testimony is always inadequate for any paranormal claim
The burden of proof always rests with the claimant for the simple reason that the absence of disconfirming evidence is not the same as the presence of confirming evidence. This rule is frequently violated by proponents of paranormal claims, who argue that, because their claims have not been disproved, they have therefore been proved. (UFO buffs, for example, argue that because skeptics have not explained every UFO sighting, some UFO sightings must be extraterrestrial spacecraft.) Consider the implications of that kind of reasoning: If I claim that Adolf Hitler is alive and well and living in Argentina, how could you disprove my claim? Since the claim is logically possible, the best you could do (in the absence of unambiguous forensic evidence) is to show that the claim is highly improbable -- but that would not disprove it. The fact that you cannot prove that Hitler is not living in Argentina, however, does not mean that I have proved that he is. It only means that I have proved that he could be -- but that would mean very little; logical possibility is not the same as established reality. If the absence of disconfirming evidence were sufficient proof of a claim, then we could "prove" anything that we could imagine. Belief must be based not simply on the absence of disconfirming evidence but on the presence of confirming evidence. It is the claimant's obligation to furnish that confirming evidence.
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence for the obvious reason of balance. If I claim that it rained for ten minutes on my way to work last Tuesday, you would be justified in accepting that claim as true on the basis of my report. But if I claim that I was abducted by extraterrestrial aliens who whisked me to the far side of the moon and performed bizarre medical experiments on me, you would be justified in demanding more substantial evidence. The ordinary evidence of my testimony, while sufficient for ordinary claims, is not sufficient for extraordinary ones.
In fact, testimony is always inadequate for any paranormal claim, whether it is offered by an authority or a layperson, for the simple reason that a human being can lie or make a mistake. No amount of expertise in any field is a guarantee against human fallibility, and expertise does not preclude the motivation to lie; therefore a person's credentials, knowledge and experience cannot, in themselves be taken as sufficient evidence to establish the truth of a claim. Moreover, a person's sincerity lends nothing to the credibility of his or her testimony. Even if people are telling what they sincerely believe to be the truth, it is always possible that they could be mistaken. Perception is a selective act, dependent upon belief context, expectation, emotional and biochemical states, and a host of other variables. Memory is notoriously problematic, prone to a range of distortions, deletions, substitutions and amplifications. Therefore the testimony that people offer of what they remember seeing or hearing should always be regarded as only provisionally and approximately accurate; when people are speaking about the paranormal, their testimony should never be regarded as reliable evidence in and of itself. The possibility and even the likelihood of error are far too extensive (see Connor 1986).
Conclusion
The first three rules of FiLCHeRS -- falsifiability, logic, and comprehensiveness -- are all logically necessary rules of evidential reasoning. If we are to have confidence in the veracity of any claim whether normal or paranormal, the claim must be prepositionally meaningful, and the evidence offered in support of the claim must be rational and exhaustive.
The last three rules of FiLCHeRS -- honesty, replicability, and sufficiency -- are all pragmatically necessary rules of evidential reasoning. Because human beings are often motivated to rationalize and to lie to themselves, because they are sometimes motivated to lie to others, because they can make mistakes, and because perception and memory are problematic, we must demand that the evidence for any factual claim be evaluated without self-deception, that it be carefully screened for error, fraud, and appropriateness, and that it be substantial and unequivocal.
What I tell my students, then, is that you can and should use FiLCHeRS to evaluate the evidence offered for any claim. If the claim fails any one of these six tests, then it should be rejected; but if it passes all six tests, then you are justified in placing considerable confidence in it.
Passing all six tests, of course, does not guarantee that the claim is true (just because you have examined all the evidence available today is no guarantee that there will not be new and disconfirming evidence available tomorrow), but it does guarantee that you have good reasons for believing the claim. It guarantees that you have sold your belief for a fair price, and that it has not been filched from you.
Being a responsible adult means accepting the fact that almost all knowledge is tentative, and accepting it cheerfully. You may be required to change your belief tomorrow, if the evidence warrants, and you should be willing and able to do so. That, in essence, is what skepticism means: to believe if and only if the evidence warrants.
Mar 4, 2007
Open Source Chaos: Building on O:MF
The decentralized, and seemingly chaotic guerrilla war in Iraq, the Niger Delta and elsewhere demonstrates a pattern that will likely serve as a model for next generation terrorists. This pattern shows a level of learning, activity, and success similar to what we see in the open source software community. There is no reason why a successful strategy cannot be applied to the guerrilla warfare of the mind and paradigms.
Test early and often. Try new forms of 'attacks' against different types of targets early and often. Don’t wait for a perfect plan.
Given a large enough pool of members, any difficult problem will be seen as obvious by someone, and solved. Eventually some participant of the Open Souce bazaar will find a way to disrupt a particularly difficult target. All you need to do is copy the process they used (though not necessarily the content).
Your co-developers (beta-testers) are your most valuable resource. The other Discordian and allied networks in the bazaar are your most valuable allies. They will innovate on your plans, swarm on weaknesses you identify, and protect you by creating system noise (where there is too much activity to be able to tell what is significant to target or not).
Recognize good ideas from your co-developers. Simple 'attacks' that have immediate and far-reaching impact should be adopted.
Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away (simplicity). The easier the 'attack' is, the more easily it will be adopted. Complexity prevents swarming that both amplifies and protects.
Tools are often used in unexpected ways. An attack method can often find reuse in unexpected ways.
Swarms vs. single group activity. The bazaar offers the potential of many smaller attacks that can in aggregate have an impact equal to several large attacks. Many hands make light work. Combined with system leverage, this reduce the most complex of systems to chaos in short order.
Rapid innovation. The bazaar's demonstrated ability to provide rapid innovation makes defense much extremely difficult. Rather than a single 'grand attack', we may see small attacks (less planning and training, fewer people, less support) against a plethora of targets. With a sufficient number of Discordian networks unearthing vulnerabilities (particularly ones with system's leverage), other forces will likely be outmatched.
These are the tools of the next wave of military and programming thinking. We can adapt, take these tools and put them to use. But it will require the Open Source Chaos bazaar to work. There will need to be more sticking together than apart.
We can work together as small co-operating groups, without turning into some organized official mess. Swapping ideas, running tests, making up mindfucks on the fly and applying them to different situations. Acting in concert and cooperation in order to do what we want more effectively. That is the aim. Or otherwise why do mindfucks at all, other than for your own amusement? You might as well go back to your TV sets and tabloid magazines.
Test early and often. Try new forms of 'attacks' against different types of targets early and often. Don’t wait for a perfect plan.
Given a large enough pool of members, any difficult problem will be seen as obvious by someone, and solved. Eventually some participant of the Open Souce bazaar will find a way to disrupt a particularly difficult target. All you need to do is copy the process they used (though not necessarily the content).
Your co-developers (beta-testers) are your most valuable resource. The other Discordian and allied networks in the bazaar are your most valuable allies. They will innovate on your plans, swarm on weaknesses you identify, and protect you by creating system noise (where there is too much activity to be able to tell what is significant to target or not).
Recognize good ideas from your co-developers. Simple 'attacks' that have immediate and far-reaching impact should be adopted.
Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away (simplicity). The easier the 'attack' is, the more easily it will be adopted. Complexity prevents swarming that both amplifies and protects.
Tools are often used in unexpected ways. An attack method can often find reuse in unexpected ways.
Swarms vs. single group activity. The bazaar offers the potential of many smaller attacks that can in aggregate have an impact equal to several large attacks. Many hands make light work. Combined with system leverage, this reduce the most complex of systems to chaos in short order.
Rapid innovation. The bazaar's demonstrated ability to provide rapid innovation makes defense much extremely difficult. Rather than a single 'grand attack', we may see small attacks (less planning and training, fewer people, less support) against a plethora of targets. With a sufficient number of Discordian networks unearthing vulnerabilities (particularly ones with system's leverage), other forces will likely be outmatched.
These are the tools of the next wave of military and programming thinking. We can adapt, take these tools and put them to use. But it will require the Open Source Chaos bazaar to work. There will need to be more sticking together than apart.
We can work together as small co-operating groups, without turning into some organized official mess. Swapping ideas, running tests, making up mindfucks on the fly and applying them to different situations. Acting in concert and cooperation in order to do what we want more effectively. That is the aim. Or otherwise why do mindfucks at all, other than for your own amusement? You might as well go back to your TV sets and tabloid magazines.
Mar 3, 2007
New feature: Conspiracy of the Week
Because I need something to do with my spare time.
Anyway, once a week, I'll try and give my take on a well known (or not so well known) conspiracy theory that is doing the rounds on the web (or not). They can be historical or current, topical or picked totally at random and I'll give a quick overview of the theories, what I think about them and some helpful links for those interested to follow up on.
Today, however, I'll just talk about Conspiracy Theorism in general, as quite a few people seem to not understand my take on this.
Alot of people interested in the counter-culture in general and particularly the three ring circus of Discordianism, the CotSG and affiliated Subcordian asshats, take a deep interest in conspiracy theories and the workings of secret cabals which are hostile to our very existence. I don't necessarily need to describe such groups as I'm sure you know what I mean. The Illuminati, various arms of The Conspiracy....Them, in short.
Obviously, many ordinary people do not believe in any sort of Them at all and so these groups have perhaps jeopardized their "credibility" (as if what Pinks and Greys think actually matters) in certain circles. However, a lot of people are wasting their time in this general area of inquiry. Thats not to say there are not conspiracies, because there are and they are very real, but most people have been hoodwinked into looking in totally the wrong direction for them. I certainly don't have all the answers, but I am in a position where I can quite legitimately research the linkage in the corridors of power and am able to tell you what I know.
I wont name names however....not real names. Rule 1: everyone is a disinformation agent. Its all too easy for false information to be fed to you or me, so I'll just sketch out the general 'shape' of whats going on, letting you fill in the blanks yourself. I'll also tell you what is likely not true and why I think thats the case. Firstly, the liars.
Many Conspiracy Theorists come from the Christian Patriot Movement, a collection of pig-ignorant degenerates and criminals who couldn't find their backsides with both hands, let alone highly intelligent conspirators working in the shadows. Invariably these idiots will make racist claims of "International Jewish Bankers" and...well, I barely need to go on. The sort of shit you can read in The Turner Diaries and other pieces of infantile fantasizing interspersed with horrific racist violence and disgusting characterization. If you believe anything that comes from these circles, chances are you're a brainwashed idiot duped by some charismatic leader with a Messianic complex.
Building on from example one, there is the general "Jewish Conspiracy" which is popular among the far-right (just ask Nick Griffin), the far left and various religious groups. This is quite frankly utter horsecrap....going by history, we should probably have a White Christian Male conspiracy, as these are usually the people involved in such things. Its basically scapegoating and stems from a religious need to place the blame for the death of Jesus on anyone but the Romans, who actually did him in. Anyone with any real knowledge of history would dismiss the idea of any single ethno-religious group being behind all conspiracies, or even just a large one as utter crap.
The UN is another one also taken from the far-right. Apparently they are a godless and evil organization preparing to take over the USA and occupy it with foreign troops....whereas the depressing truth is in fact the UN is nothing more than a device for the USA to legitimize its actions abroad. It doesn't always work of course, but given the powers the US gave to itself as a charter member....well, its a testament to the power of propaganda that people can think its anything but a slightly unruly tool of the USA.
Intelligence services are often a favourite one, for obvious reasons. Cloaked in secrecy, given wide powers to act pretty much outside the law, the similarities with secret police of bygone times, yeah here we are onto something more plausible. However, it should be remembered that almost always these are merely foot soldiers for higher powers and if they are doing something, its because they have been directed to do so. Running drugs, assassinations and so on, while invariably blamed on a rogue faction, do serve a greater political or security purpose.
The Satanic cult is another favourite, particularly among David Icke sorts, who can combine it with the relatively more interesting alien abduction theories. Satanic Ritual Abuse is probably one of the greatest scare stories of the 80s, one for which there is very little to no real evidence. Most Satanists are....well, jerks basically. Smart people, very quick mentally, but real assholes. The CoS is basically a money making device and the Temple of Set...well, its occult so its not my cup of tea, but its no worse than what Wiccans get up to. What is often referred to as organized Satanic abuse in fact is usually widely disorganized and carried out by...mentally ill Christians. Who, coincidentally, are the sort of people most likely to promote this theory.
Alien abduction is interesting....in the few cases where there is genuine reason to believe that is in fact what happened. However, in most cases they are part of a carefully crafted government disinformation project. Not only does it explain experimental aircraft tests quite nicely, it also keeps a whole bunch of people on a wild goose chase, either keeping them distracted and ruining their credibility, or causing the believers to fall under the sway of irrational terror and hopelessness. I'll explain more on this another time, but there is evidence to suggest that intelligence agencies have in fact staged many of these events, either as part of a general disinfo project or as covers for other activities.
International Banking is actually one of the few areas where the theorists may have a point. If you throw in the various multinational companies involved with them, as well as a few NGOs. The World Bank and IMF are essentially tools of the European and US governments, used to "crack open" foreign markets, totally undermine the economy, then buy up previously state owned companies at bargain basement prices and bleed the plebs. Its the modern day version of colonialism, only it actually makes a profit.
Secret societies are of course the number one favourite for conspiracy theorists. Been around a long time, naturally secretive....the problem is most of them are basically talking shops. Anyone can join the Freemasons and while there are a few specific lodges that have been involved in some nasty shit, the majority are quite dull. The Illuminati have never been proven to exist beyond their downfall in 1785 and the Priory of Sion were always a sham. Most of these are generally beneficial organizations anyway, the Freemasons in particular being closely aligned to Enlightenment ideals expressed by writers like Voltaire and Diderot.
So what do I believe?
I think there are certain...factions at the very top of the political-economic structure, whose membership is hard to ascertain but who can be judged by their actions. At least one is highly antagonistic, ultra-nationalist and allied with certain sectors of big business. These are closely allied with certain Theocratic nuts, with whom there is overall agreement, though each dislike the other for certain reasons relating to their own beliefs. There is one whose view could most accurately be described as Neo-Liberal, who are largely benevolent and are closely linked to a benevolent movement for world governance. And there is another who wants the same world governance, but for entirely less high-minded reasons.
And of course, within each group there are sub-groups, factions and dissent.
One final tip before I end this - don't look to fancy sounding names and titles, because thats entirely the wrong way. Look towards bland sounding committees and think tanks, with boring names like the Committee for a Free Britain or The American Enterprise Institute....also watch out, as certain groups (such as the Project for a New American Century) are likely to shed their skin and change when exposed to too much light (as when they changed into the AEI).
Apart from those, for me Conspiracy Theorism is rather like Alternate History discussion, its an interesting look into how the world could be, as well as fuel for the imagination.
Anyway, once a week, I'll try and give my take on a well known (or not so well known) conspiracy theory that is doing the rounds on the web (or not). They can be historical or current, topical or picked totally at random and I'll give a quick overview of the theories, what I think about them and some helpful links for those interested to follow up on.
Today, however, I'll just talk about Conspiracy Theorism in general, as quite a few people seem to not understand my take on this.
Alot of people interested in the counter-culture in general and particularly the three ring circus of Discordianism, the CotSG and affiliated Subcordian asshats, take a deep interest in conspiracy theories and the workings of secret cabals which are hostile to our very existence. I don't necessarily need to describe such groups as I'm sure you know what I mean. The Illuminati, various arms of The Conspiracy....Them, in short.
Obviously, many ordinary people do not believe in any sort of Them at all and so these groups have perhaps jeopardized their "credibility" (as if what Pinks and Greys think actually matters) in certain circles. However, a lot of people are wasting their time in this general area of inquiry. Thats not to say there are not conspiracies, because there are and they are very real, but most people have been hoodwinked into looking in totally the wrong direction for them. I certainly don't have all the answers, but I am in a position where I can quite legitimately research the linkage in the corridors of power and am able to tell you what I know.
I wont name names however....not real names. Rule 1: everyone is a disinformation agent. Its all too easy for false information to be fed to you or me, so I'll just sketch out the general 'shape' of whats going on, letting you fill in the blanks yourself. I'll also tell you what is likely not true and why I think thats the case. Firstly, the liars.
Many Conspiracy Theorists come from the Christian Patriot Movement, a collection of pig-ignorant degenerates and criminals who couldn't find their backsides with both hands, let alone highly intelligent conspirators working in the shadows. Invariably these idiots will make racist claims of "International Jewish Bankers" and...well, I barely need to go on. The sort of shit you can read in The Turner Diaries and other pieces of infantile fantasizing interspersed with horrific racist violence and disgusting characterization. If you believe anything that comes from these circles, chances are you're a brainwashed idiot duped by some charismatic leader with a Messianic complex.
Building on from example one, there is the general "Jewish Conspiracy" which is popular among the far-right (just ask Nick Griffin), the far left and various religious groups. This is quite frankly utter horsecrap....going by history, we should probably have a White Christian Male conspiracy, as these are usually the people involved in such things. Its basically scapegoating and stems from a religious need to place the blame for the death of Jesus on anyone but the Romans, who actually did him in. Anyone with any real knowledge of history would dismiss the idea of any single ethno-religious group being behind all conspiracies, or even just a large one as utter crap.
The UN is another one also taken from the far-right. Apparently they are a godless and evil organization preparing to take over the USA and occupy it with foreign troops....whereas the depressing truth is in fact the UN is nothing more than a device for the USA to legitimize its actions abroad. It doesn't always work of course, but given the powers the US gave to itself as a charter member....well, its a testament to the power of propaganda that people can think its anything but a slightly unruly tool of the USA.
Intelligence services are often a favourite one, for obvious reasons. Cloaked in secrecy, given wide powers to act pretty much outside the law, the similarities with secret police of bygone times, yeah here we are onto something more plausible. However, it should be remembered that almost always these are merely foot soldiers for higher powers and if they are doing something, its because they have been directed to do so. Running drugs, assassinations and so on, while invariably blamed on a rogue faction, do serve a greater political or security purpose.
The Satanic cult is another favourite, particularly among David Icke sorts, who can combine it with the relatively more interesting alien abduction theories. Satanic Ritual Abuse is probably one of the greatest scare stories of the 80s, one for which there is very little to no real evidence. Most Satanists are....well, jerks basically. Smart people, very quick mentally, but real assholes. The CoS is basically a money making device and the Temple of Set...well, its occult so its not my cup of tea, but its no worse than what Wiccans get up to. What is often referred to as organized Satanic abuse in fact is usually widely disorganized and carried out by...mentally ill Christians. Who, coincidentally, are the sort of people most likely to promote this theory.
Alien abduction is interesting....in the few cases where there is genuine reason to believe that is in fact what happened. However, in most cases they are part of a carefully crafted government disinformation project. Not only does it explain experimental aircraft tests quite nicely, it also keeps a whole bunch of people on a wild goose chase, either keeping them distracted and ruining their credibility, or causing the believers to fall under the sway of irrational terror and hopelessness. I'll explain more on this another time, but there is evidence to suggest that intelligence agencies have in fact staged many of these events, either as part of a general disinfo project or as covers for other activities.
International Banking is actually one of the few areas where the theorists may have a point. If you throw in the various multinational companies involved with them, as well as a few NGOs. The World Bank and IMF are essentially tools of the European and US governments, used to "crack open" foreign markets, totally undermine the economy, then buy up previously state owned companies at bargain basement prices and bleed the plebs. Its the modern day version of colonialism, only it actually makes a profit.
Secret societies are of course the number one favourite for conspiracy theorists. Been around a long time, naturally secretive....the problem is most of them are basically talking shops. Anyone can join the Freemasons and while there are a few specific lodges that have been involved in some nasty shit, the majority are quite dull. The Illuminati have never been proven to exist beyond their downfall in 1785 and the Priory of Sion were always a sham. Most of these are generally beneficial organizations anyway, the Freemasons in particular being closely aligned to Enlightenment ideals expressed by writers like Voltaire and Diderot.
So what do I believe?
I think there are certain...factions at the very top of the political-economic structure, whose membership is hard to ascertain but who can be judged by their actions. At least one is highly antagonistic, ultra-nationalist and allied with certain sectors of big business. These are closely allied with certain Theocratic nuts, with whom there is overall agreement, though each dislike the other for certain reasons relating to their own beliefs. There is one whose view could most accurately be described as Neo-Liberal, who are largely benevolent and are closely linked to a benevolent movement for world governance. And there is another who wants the same world governance, but for entirely less high-minded reasons.
And of course, within each group there are sub-groups, factions and dissent.
One final tip before I end this - don't look to fancy sounding names and titles, because thats entirely the wrong way. Look towards bland sounding committees and think tanks, with boring names like the Committee for a Free Britain or The American Enterprise Institute....also watch out, as certain groups (such as the Project for a New American Century) are likely to shed their skin and change when exposed to too much light (as when they changed into the AEI).
Apart from those, for me Conspiracy Theorism is rather like Alternate History discussion, its an interesting look into how the world could be, as well as fuel for the imagination.
I'm often convinced the true defining conflict of the 21st century
Will not be that of Islam versus Judeo-Christian states, or that of liberal democracies versus terrorism and dictatorships, but of the free market against the state.
There are many reasons for this, not least that the decentralized nature of groups that states seem to fight (the Iraqi insurgency, Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, the Niger Delta rebels et al) are in effect trans or sub national states, with their own criminal economy, operating in areas where there is no established government control. Organized crime, terrorism and guerrilla wars overlap and threaten to challenge the state as an institution for supremacy. This is the flipside of globalization - powers well beyond state control have been unleashed and there is very little chance of closing Pandora's box.
I've commented on the philosophical similarities between the current free-market apostles and Communists before, so I won't repeat that here. But, as you may recall, the Berlin Wall was often taken as a sign of the inherent contradictions of Communism? What does it mean then if walls are being built by India, the USA, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Pakistan, Kuwait and numerous "failed" and autonomous regions of the world?
There are many reasons for this, not least that the decentralized nature of groups that states seem to fight (the Iraqi insurgency, Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, the Niger Delta rebels et al) are in effect trans or sub national states, with their own criminal economy, operating in areas where there is no established government control. Organized crime, terrorism and guerrilla wars overlap and threaten to challenge the state as an institution for supremacy. This is the flipside of globalization - powers well beyond state control have been unleashed and there is very little chance of closing Pandora's box.
I've commented on the philosophical similarities between the current free-market apostles and Communists before, so I won't repeat that here. But, as you may recall, the Berlin Wall was often taken as a sign of the inherent contradictions of Communism? What does it mean then if walls are being built by India, the USA, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Pakistan, Kuwait and numerous "failed" and autonomous regions of the world?
Mar 1, 2007
Hersh throws a new spin on the current state of the Mid East
Remember what I was saying just a couple of days ago about the shift to a wider Shi'a/Sunni conflict being built around Iraq?
Seymour Hersh not only expands on this rather eloquently, he also throws a totally new spin on it with some rather major Iran-Contra players. I had wondered if something was in the air with the placing of Gates in charge of the military, a man who could keep his mouth shut in order to advance his career, no matter how illegal the operation. Looks like I was right to be suspicious.
Seymour Hersh not only expands on this rather eloquently, he also throws a totally new spin on it with some rather major Iran-Contra players. I had wondered if something was in the air with the placing of Gates in charge of the military, a man who could keep his mouth shut in order to advance his career, no matter how illegal the operation. Looks like I was right to be suspicious.
Kenneth Eng, AKA God
I really don't think I can do this guy justice. I'll just rip some from the Wired.com article on him and give you the links.
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Full article available here.
But please also look at his blog for some true comedic gems.
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I have become fascinated by the bizarre career of young Kenneth Eng, self-declared "Asian Supremacist," "God of the Universe," and author of the startlingly-titled Dragons: Lexicon Triumvirate and The 0th Dimension. The 22-year-old has been stirring up controversy for his columns in San Francisco's AsianWeek magazine, where he's written a column called "Why I Hate Blacks," as well as another called, "Proof That Whites Inherently Hate Us." Here's a great quote from the latter:Most Asians know that everywhere we go, white/black/Hispanic people hurl racist remarks at us. I have already received about 10 racist remarks in the past three months and I have only been out of my home a handful of times.
As Hyphen points out, it's hard to know which is scarier: that Eng published this poop, or that he's only been out of his home a handful of times in the past three months. The best part of all this is that now you can read some of Kenneth Eng's insane ramblings on his Amazon blog, where he describes himself as "striving against the mass of conformity that is the flesh all around me," and which recently included this gem:
I don't know about you, but I masturbate all the time. It's not going to affect me in any way, aside from making me need to take baths more often.
So true. You can also read his blog to find out more about Eng's life as a super-genius "God" who writes fantasy novels containing meaningless epithets like "lexicon triumvirate" in their titles. What does that even mean, anyway? A three-headed creature with a big vocabulary? A government run by three people with a passion for writing down every word they know? And what the hell does it have to do with dragons? Plus, why does the dragon on the cover of his book have a gun? I'm gloriously confused.
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Full article available here.
But please also look at his blog for some true comedic gems.
Bad faith and Discordianism
One of the basic claims of Discordianism is that we are radically free to choose and act as we wish. Its spelled out on page 00008 and has remained one of the few things almost all Discordians can agree on. You are free, not you can be free or freedom is available to you, but right now, at this very second, you are an independent agent who is capable of making choices and taking responsibility for them, because only you caused them.
However, many people try to avoid this freedom, precisely because they dread responsibility. I don't have to tell you about most of these, the conservatives who put faith in tradition, the Christians who put faith in being part of God's plan and every other person who constructs a worldview that puts them at the mercy of higher powers and the world in general. Victim mentalities, often where no victimization exists.
In short, we choose social roles and institutions and norms in order to escape our freedom, to give it away and abdicate responsibility. One of the most insidious of these is Discordianism, precisely because it proclaims freedom so openly and positively.
Many Discordians feel they should or actively do play the role of someone who is a bit “zany”, slightly unpredictable (though tiresomely predictable within a certain range) and given to bad faux-surrealism and Dada. I should point out not everyone is like this and there are some people who have always been like that. This is not directed at those people. Instead, it is directed at people who play that role because they feel this is how a Discordian should be and/or want to fit into the Discordian community more.
This is simply not true. You have an idea taken from an incomplete impression of the Principia Discordia, with an all too Cabbage-like need for acceptance from your chosen set of peers. In short, you laughed at all the wrong parts and took seriously the ones you were meant to find funny.
First off, you're falling into the “conformity of the radical” fallacy. That every radical group or gathering etc should have a narrowly defined set of behaviour and interests and those acting outside of it are “poseurs” or fakes of some description. Remember that bit in the Principia about people belonging to the Orders of Discordia just as likely carrying a flag of the counter-establishment as the establishment? Good.
Secondly, your actions and behaviour are suggesting to the rest of the world that you are playing the role of a Discordian, that you are an automaton whose only purpose is to act out the essence of being a Discordian. This is basically a paradox, you are using your freedom to actively deny it. “I'm a Discordian, I'm supposed to act crazy!” etc. A very interesting position.
Of course, Discordianism is no stranger to paradoxes. But normally they are used to illustrate a point in a humorous manner, or draw attention to some inconsistency in a viewpoint. Also, Discordians do have a commitment of sorts to freedom, as previously stated. Obviously everyone does, but to be fair its not often as explicitly stated.
The thing is, you can't escape freedom. By making a choice to act like your idea of a Discordian, you may be denying it, but you are responsible for your choice at the same time. So what you should really ask yourself is “is this really the best way to exercise my freedom? Or should I, as a free person, act as I see fit, instead of how I think others will approve of me?”
I know where I stand on the issue.
However, many people try to avoid this freedom, precisely because they dread responsibility. I don't have to tell you about most of these, the conservatives who put faith in tradition, the Christians who put faith in being part of God's plan and every other person who constructs a worldview that puts them at the mercy of higher powers and the world in general. Victim mentalities, often where no victimization exists.
In short, we choose social roles and institutions and norms in order to escape our freedom, to give it away and abdicate responsibility. One of the most insidious of these is Discordianism, precisely because it proclaims freedom so openly and positively.
Many Discordians feel they should or actively do play the role of someone who is a bit “zany”, slightly unpredictable (though tiresomely predictable within a certain range) and given to bad faux-surrealism and Dada. I should point out not everyone is like this and there are some people who have always been like that. This is not directed at those people. Instead, it is directed at people who play that role because they feel this is how a Discordian should be and/or want to fit into the Discordian community more.
This is simply not true. You have an idea taken from an incomplete impression of the Principia Discordia, with an all too Cabbage-like need for acceptance from your chosen set of peers. In short, you laughed at all the wrong parts and took seriously the ones you were meant to find funny.
First off, you're falling into the “conformity of the radical” fallacy. That every radical group or gathering etc should have a narrowly defined set of behaviour and interests and those acting outside of it are “poseurs” or fakes of some description. Remember that bit in the Principia about people belonging to the Orders of Discordia just as likely carrying a flag of the counter-establishment as the establishment? Good.
Secondly, your actions and behaviour are suggesting to the rest of the world that you are playing the role of a Discordian, that you are an automaton whose only purpose is to act out the essence of being a Discordian. This is basically a paradox, you are using your freedom to actively deny it. “I'm a Discordian, I'm supposed to act crazy!” etc. A very interesting position.
Of course, Discordianism is no stranger to paradoxes. But normally they are used to illustrate a point in a humorous manner, or draw attention to some inconsistency in a viewpoint. Also, Discordians do have a commitment of sorts to freedom, as previously stated. Obviously everyone does, but to be fair its not often as explicitly stated.
The thing is, you can't escape freedom. By making a choice to act like your idea of a Discordian, you may be denying it, but you are responsible for your choice at the same time. So what you should really ask yourself is “is this really the best way to exercise my freedom? Or should I, as a free person, act as I see fit, instead of how I think others will approve of me?”
I know where I stand on the issue.
Feb 27, 2007
A Manifesto of the PFLD
This is a march of the damned.
By the damned, I mean the excluded.
We shall have a procession of ideas modernity has excluded.
Battalions of the accursed, lead by the ignored that we have exhumed, will march. You'll listen to them -- or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten.
Some of them are philosophers, twitching, tottering, animated by abstract theorems that keep them alive. There are theologians that will walk by, though we mock them. There are magicians and scientists: they'll go by like Euclid, arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little artists. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale scholars and gaunt warriors and mere maniacs and lively spies: The naïve and the cynical and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile.
The beyond-unrespectable, but the condemned, anyway.
The power that has said to all these things that they are damned, is Dogma, is Society, is Normality.
But we shall march.
The artists and freaks will distract attention, and the clowns will break the rhythm of the whole with their mindfucks -- but the movement of the march will keep on coming and coming.
It shall not stop, no matter how much you exclude us. You cannot fight or oppose or kill what we stand for. The crazed avatars of chaos will dance in the ruins of your theories, will laugh as your impressive towers, built on imaginary sand, tumble into the earth.
We are forced into the cracks between state and church and school and corporation and here we craft our bombs of logic and surrealism, weapons more potent than any devices of war, to wage our own endless insurrection.
We never died and we never went away and we never forgot. And our numbers grow daily. You can ignore us. You can sideline us. You can mock us, deny us an equal standing, hope that we will go away and no longer challenge you. But you will never be rid of us.
We are here and we are the march of the Damned. And by the damned we mean the free.
By the damned, I mean the excluded.
We shall have a procession of ideas modernity has excluded.
Battalions of the accursed, lead by the ignored that we have exhumed, will march. You'll listen to them -- or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten.
Some of them are philosophers, twitching, tottering, animated by abstract theorems that keep them alive. There are theologians that will walk by, though we mock them. There are magicians and scientists: they'll go by like Euclid, arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little artists. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale scholars and gaunt warriors and mere maniacs and lively spies: The naïve and the cynical and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile.
The beyond-unrespectable, but the condemned, anyway.
The power that has said to all these things that they are damned, is Dogma, is Society, is Normality.
But we shall march.
The artists and freaks will distract attention, and the clowns will break the rhythm of the whole with their mindfucks -- but the movement of the march will keep on coming and coming.
It shall not stop, no matter how much you exclude us. You cannot fight or oppose or kill what we stand for. The crazed avatars of chaos will dance in the ruins of your theories, will laugh as your impressive towers, built on imaginary sand, tumble into the earth.
We are forced into the cracks between state and church and school and corporation and here we craft our bombs of logic and surrealism, weapons more potent than any devices of war, to wage our own endless insurrection.
We never died and we never went away and we never forgot. And our numbers grow daily. You can ignore us. You can sideline us. You can mock us, deny us an equal standing, hope that we will go away and no longer challenge you. But you will never be rid of us.
We are here and we are the march of the Damned. And by the damned we mean the free.
An interesting rumour has reached my ears...
Obviously, I cannot say who I heard this from, other than to say when they have given me valuable information before its later turned out to be true and that I rate them rather highly as an impartial source. I know not the only one talking about this, but many of the sources I have seen on the topic have been unknown or untrustworthy to me.
Apparently, the US government is so worried about Iranian influence in Iraq now, they have covertly switched sides and are now supporting Sunni insurgent groups against the Shiite dominated government. Not only is this a worrying development that suggests a possible future war with Iran just got more likely, it just pissed over the final credentials of The War on Terror.
Of course, among those Sunni groups you can include Al-Qaeda in Iraq, who are the main force for organizing and training foreign fighters in the country. You know, the Al-Qaeda that the National Intelligence Director just called "the most serious threat to US interests". Yeah, that one. Surprise surprise, this has bought the USA onto the same page as Saudi Arabia, our favourite cash cow for nutter terrorist groups around the world. They fully approve of this turnabout as they don't want their own Shia workers in the oil fields getting all excited and talking about Jihad.
It looks like the USA is now moving towards directing the Middle East conflict into a Sunni/Shiite disagreement. Which means on one side we have Iran, Syria, Lebanon and (nominally) Iraq, vs US allies in the region, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf States.
However, its always worth keeping an eye on the movements of Ali Larijani, the man in charge of Iranian national security policy. He's been racking up the airmiles lately, especially when it comes to Saudi Arabia. Which suggests perhaps all is not lost, that there is some back room negotiations going on. Iran knows everyone they talk to in the Arab world will eventually end up spilling the goods to the USA anyway, not to mention there has been a credible gap between rhetoric and actions when it comes to sabre rattling against their government.
For now, I think we can continue to see the USA (and local allies) and Iran trying to contain violence within Iraq. For now. However, it only takes another "black swan" event to intensify the violence to the point it cannot be contained. Hell, with the current confusion over the Ramadi park bombing, it may have already happened. No-one is going to own up to killing kids and if the US military did screw up disarming the devices there (as a BBC News Alert 10 minutes ago claimed), we could see total social disintegration.
Apparently, the US government is so worried about Iranian influence in Iraq now, they have covertly switched sides and are now supporting Sunni insurgent groups against the Shiite dominated government. Not only is this a worrying development that suggests a possible future war with Iran just got more likely, it just pissed over the final credentials of The War on Terror.
Of course, among those Sunni groups you can include Al-Qaeda in Iraq, who are the main force for organizing and training foreign fighters in the country. You know, the Al-Qaeda that the National Intelligence Director just called "the most serious threat to US interests". Yeah, that one. Surprise surprise, this has bought the USA onto the same page as Saudi Arabia, our favourite cash cow for nutter terrorist groups around the world. They fully approve of this turnabout as they don't want their own Shia workers in the oil fields getting all excited and talking about Jihad.
It looks like the USA is now moving towards directing the Middle East conflict into a Sunni/Shiite disagreement. Which means on one side we have Iran, Syria, Lebanon and (nominally) Iraq, vs US allies in the region, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf States.
However, its always worth keeping an eye on the movements of Ali Larijani, the man in charge of Iranian national security policy. He's been racking up the airmiles lately, especially when it comes to Saudi Arabia. Which suggests perhaps all is not lost, that there is some back room negotiations going on. Iran knows everyone they talk to in the Arab world will eventually end up spilling the goods to the USA anyway, not to mention there has been a credible gap between rhetoric and actions when it comes to sabre rattling against their government.
For now, I think we can continue to see the USA (and local allies) and Iran trying to contain violence within Iraq. For now. However, it only takes another "black swan" event to intensify the violence to the point it cannot be contained. Hell, with the current confusion over the Ramadi park bombing, it may have already happened. No-one is going to own up to killing kids and if the US military did screw up disarming the devices there (as a BBC News Alert 10 minutes ago claimed), we could see total social disintegration.
Feb 26, 2007
The mainstream is insane
Great article from The Guardian on the trash magazine story culture. Short, to the point and very amusing.
And they say Discordians are irrational, at least we attempt to be funny about it....
And they say Discordians are irrational, at least we attempt to be funny about it....
My new favourite piece of religious nuttery
God Help Britain, a blog filled with religious hatred bordering on insanity and need to promote Britain's rightful place in the world - so basically the erratic ramblings of the lovechild of Mad Mel and Nick Griffin.
For now, I'm content to laugh, but I may engage in some deconstruction later. Right now, after the dismantling of Mel, I am full of peace and love to all of reality (except Francis Fukuyama, I hope you choke in your sleep you shameless hack).
For now, I'm content to laugh, but I may engage in some deconstruction later. Right now, after the dismantling of Mel, I am full of peace and love to all of reality (except Francis Fukuyama, I hope you choke in your sleep you shameless hack).
New feature: The Weekly Fisking of Mad Mel
Some would say I am encouraging making fun of the politically challenged and clearly insane with this feature. And they are right. I really can't think of a more amusing way of spending my time except for dismantling the paranoid rantings of Mad Mel (cut me some slack, its Monday morning). Besides, if I cannot poke fun at someone who is foolish enough to put their ramblings into print for all to see, who can I do it to?
So, to todays feature from the Diary of Mad Mel: The War against the West
Indeed. Our support of Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt are morally reprehensible.
Oops, wrong country. Sorry about that. But wait, isn't Iran actually one of the more democratic states in the Middle East, with a government that allows elections and has multiple parties that run for seats? Of course, there is the power of the Supreme Leader and Guardian Council are affronts to constitutional republics everywhere - but no more so than the monarchy in Saudi Arabia or military dictatorship in Egypt.
There is a little tradition in history you may have heard of Mel, its called "diplomacy". Its generally accepted among its practitioners that the best way to go about its functions is not to try and act like the country you are dealing with is full of irrational murderous madmen - even if this may be the case. Now, I'm no expert, but if we want to get Iran to get something, soft words and a big stick are generally accepted as workable methods.
Some of them plausible. No doubt Iran are acting in Iraq, but as I have pointed out, attacks that clearly have an Iranian influence are not decried as such, while less obvious and unprovable assertions, such as IEDs being supplied, have been uncritically accepted by the majority of the right-wing media, who mostly ignore that Iraq was armed to the teeth with conventional weapons and IEDs are easy as hell to make. Why would an insurgent buy them from outsiders if his cousin Abdul nicked as many as his family could carry in the months when no-one was guarding the many military complexes that litter the Iraqi landscape?
You are assuming that American interests are in making the region more secure - whereas it has been suggested that in fact, with the conditions in Iraq continuing to get worse, the best idea may be to plunge the region into chaos and get out. Obviously, I disagree, but certain military personnel do not. Leaders before have willingly chosen to bite off more than they can chew. You also are making an implicit assumption that America is trying to "cover up" its problems in Iraq with Iran. That rules out a whole host of other possible motives as to why America is trying to confront Iran, including the ideology of the administration and wider geo-political aims.
Damn that pesky truth getting in the way, eh?
Defended from what? Thats a rather huge jump in logic there Mel. Iran is rightly interested in Iraq - its on its border and should the USA not keep control, violence could spill over into its own country. That Iran is using Iraq to attack the USA is a huge stretch in logic. And that is where evidence comes in.
Yes, Iraq again. We all know about the consulate raid, mostly because it was extremely foolhardy and a step off declaring war on Iran. But it details involvement in Iraq, no where else. Can you see where this is going? Iran's involvement in Iraq is more to do with it being next door to them then US troops being there. Far more.
Yes, the oh so hesitant US administration, who are well known the world over for holding evidence in high regard and considering others points of views. Come off it Mel, even you can't keep a straight face writing that sort of shit.
Nope, its a lie. Sorry, but those of us who do a little thing called "research" know by now that the translation to which you refer is a lie created out of the American Free Enterprise Institute, a Neo-Conservative think tank whose knowledge of Farsi is either abysmal or purposefully crafted to build popular support for war. Also, Iran has vast quantities of chemical and biological weapons. If it wanted to, it could have wiped Israel off the map years ago. I think something about 80-200 nuclear warheads tends to focus the mind on rhetoric as opposed to action.
You too may want to partake in "research" at some point. Its very fulfilling.
We have always been at war with Oceania, too. Oh please, this is too much! Iran, after the revolution, was invaded by our proxy in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein, if you recall correctly. They spent 8 years fighting a futile war in which over a million Iranians died, after a period of repression at the hands of another US-backed dictator. Of course their rhetoric is going to be extreme.
I notice you also use the past to justify the present. Could that have anything to do with Iranian youth now having a generally positive attitude towards the USA and the rights it supposedly stands for? But of course, you can't allow your readers to think of that. Iran has no internal politics, its a homogeneous, Israel hating state of religious fanatics through and through, right?
Like I already said, if Iran wanted to wipe Israel off the map, they have the weapons to do it. Also they're far more concerned with trying to wrest away leadership of the Islamic world from Saudi Arabia than trying to Islamise the unbelievers. How much do you actually know about modern Middle East history and dynamics, Mel?
Iran has not even managed to produce enriched uranium yet. A working bomb is years away, if that is their intention at all. I believe it is, personally, but they will have to moderate between any possible future military program and the money that could be made by using nuclear power internally and selling oil to foreign states. For states with weak economies like Iran, hard foreign currency is likely to take precedence over an abstract nuclear threat, unless the USA and Israel keep muttering their own arsenals in relation to Iran in diplomatic circles.
Demonise them? Well, yes. Lets see, torture, misleading the public, ignorance of human rights, war mongering...the sort of thing we denounce states like Iran for their use of. I think those are grand grounds for such a thing. Or dare you suggest we just blindly trust our leadership to do the right thing, like some sort of dictatorship?
Already dealt with the "second Holocaust" red herring.
So, to todays feature from the Diary of Mad Mel: The War against the West
As has often been remarked, the capacity of the intellectual classes to deny the need for action against tyranny never ceases to amaze.
Indeed. Our support of Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt are morally reprehensible.
If you want to tap into British denial of the need to confront the threat from Iran, listen to last night’s Moral Maze on BBC Radio Four.
Oops, wrong country. Sorry about that. But wait, isn't Iran actually one of the more democratic states in the Middle East, with a government that allows elections and has multiple parties that run for seats? Of course, there is the power of the Supreme Leader and Guardian Council are affronts to constitutional republics everywhere - but no more so than the monarchy in Saudi Arabia or military dictatorship in Egypt.
Particularly astounding was the suggestion that we should stop ‘demonising’ Iran
There is a little tradition in history you may have heard of Mel, its called "diplomacy". Its generally accepted among its practitioners that the best way to go about its functions is not to try and act like the country you are dealing with is full of irrational murderous madmen - even if this may be the case. Now, I'm no expert, but if we want to get Iran to get something, soft words and a big stick are generally accepted as workable methods.
and of course, there were the inevitable claims that America is fabricating evidence that Iran is involved in Iraq
Some of them plausible. No doubt Iran are acting in Iraq, but as I have pointed out, attacks that clearly have an Iranian influence are not decried as such, while less obvious and unprovable assertions, such as IEDs being supplied, have been uncritically accepted by the majority of the right-wing media, who mostly ignore that Iraq was armed to the teeth with conventional weapons and IEDs are easy as hell to make. Why would an insurgent buy them from outsiders if his cousin Abdul nicked as many as his family could carry in the months when no-one was guarding the many military complexes that litter the Iraqi landscape?
the idea that America, which is in such difficulties in Iraq, would actually choose to embark on an all-out war with Iran at this juncture, with all the appalling risks involved, not least to the world economy, simply in order to ‘cover up’ its difficulties in Iraq, is bizarre in the extreme.
You are assuming that American interests are in making the region more secure - whereas it has been suggested that in fact, with the conditions in Iraq continuing to get worse, the best idea may be to plunge the region into chaos and get out. Obviously, I disagree, but certain military personnel do not. Leaders before have willingly chosen to bite off more than they can chew. You also are making an implicit assumption that America is trying to "cover up" its problems in Iraq with Iran. That rules out a whole host of other possible motives as to why America is trying to confront Iran, including the ideology of the administration and wider geo-political aims.
It is not helped, of course, by the appallingly ham-fisted way in which the Bush administration has presented its evidence about Iranian roadside bombs blowing up coalition soldiers in Iraq. No sooner than the munitions were unveiled complete with serial numbers when General Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, popped up to say ‘that does not translate that the Iranian government, per se, for sure, is directly involved in doing this.’
Damn that pesky truth getting in the way, eh?
This is hopeless. How can the west be defended when America is not even able to present a coherent case for the involvement of Iran in Iraq?
Defended from what? Thats a rather huge jump in logic there Mel. Iran is rightly interested in Iraq - its on its border and should the USA not keep control, violence could spill over into its own country. That Iran is using Iraq to attack the USA is a huge stretch in logic. And that is where evidence comes in.
The evidence of this involvement has been known for years. This was finally rammed home when a group on Iranian officers was captured in Iraq, whose documents left the Americans aghast at the vast extent of Iran’s involvement in Iraq
Yes, Iraq again. We all know about the consulate raid, mostly because it was extremely foolhardy and a step off declaring war on Iran. But it details involvement in Iraq, no where else. Can you see where this is going? Iran's involvement in Iraq is more to do with it being next door to them then US troops being there. Far more.
The problem, as ever, is the US administration is deeply divided over this evidence and what to do about it, as it has been over Saddam Hussein and the war in Iraq, with the intelligence community trying to cover up its own incompetence and elements within the military deeply unwilling to open up another front against Iran.
Yes, the oh so hesitant US administration, who are well known the world over for holding evidence in high regard and considering others points of views. Come off it Mel, even you can't keep a straight face writing that sort of shit.
Meanwhile, Iran speeds towards genocide, with people still scoffing that it’s ‘only rhetoric’.
Nope, its a lie. Sorry, but those of us who do a little thing called "research" know by now that the translation to which you refer is a lie created out of the American Free Enterprise Institute, a Neo-Conservative think tank whose knowledge of Farsi is either abysmal or purposefully crafted to build popular support for war. Also, Iran has vast quantities of chemical and biological weapons. If it wanted to, it could have wiped Israel off the map years ago. I think something about 80-200 nuclear warheads tends to focus the mind on rhetoric as opposed to action.
You too may want to partake in "research" at some point. Its very fulfilling.
We have been under attack by Iran since 1979, when Khomeini came to power and declared war upon the west and his intention to wipe out Israel and Islamise the world.
We have always been at war with Oceania, too. Oh please, this is too much! Iran, after the revolution, was invaded by our proxy in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein, if you recall correctly. They spent 8 years fighting a futile war in which over a million Iranians died, after a period of repression at the hands of another US-backed dictator. Of course their rhetoric is going to be extreme.
I notice you also use the past to justify the present. Could that have anything to do with Iranian youth now having a generally positive attitude towards the USA and the rights it supposedly stands for? But of course, you can't allow your readers to think of that. Iran has no internal politics, its a homogeneous, Israel hating state of religious fanatics through and through, right?
Like I already said, if Iran wanted to wipe Israel off the map, they have the weapons to do it. Also they're far more concerned with trying to wrest away leadership of the Islamic world from Saudi Arabia than trying to Islamise the unbelievers. How much do you actually know about modern Middle East history and dynamics, Mel?
Now, with the clock at five minutes to nuclear midnight, we are still in disarray. Washington is mired in vicious internal in-fighting. Our elites continue to demonise America and Israel, thus paralysing our politicians and paving the way for a second holocaust.
Iran has not even managed to produce enriched uranium yet. A working bomb is years away, if that is their intention at all. I believe it is, personally, but they will have to moderate between any possible future military program and the money that could be made by using nuclear power internally and selling oil to foreign states. For states with weak economies like Iran, hard foreign currency is likely to take precedence over an abstract nuclear threat, unless the USA and Israel keep muttering their own arsenals in relation to Iran in diplomatic circles.
Demonise them? Well, yes. Lets see, torture, misleading the public, ignorance of human rights, war mongering...the sort of thing we denounce states like Iran for their use of. I think those are grand grounds for such a thing. Or dare you suggest we just blindly trust our leadership to do the right thing, like some sort of dictatorship?
Already dealt with the "second Holocaust" red herring.
People in irrational belief shocker! Have you considered you own views at all, as I'm convinced they are every bit out of touch with reality as those of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists, yet the Daily Mail sees fit to employ you. The BBC was covering them because there is a sizeable American movement who do believe in this conspiracy theory, no matter how wrong they are. Or would you rather the BBC ignored its own editorial guidelines on impartiality?
Meanwhile, we plunge ever deeper into total irrationality, with demented conspiracy theories about 9/11 being given a respectful hearing — as here on BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine show and here.When are we going to pull ourselves together?
And what does that have to do at the topic at hand? Oh yes, nothing. I forgot. It was just a small sliver of irrational hate at the end of a rant that looks like it was drafted by Richard Perle when he was 10 years old. And possibly on meth.
Feb 23, 2007
OK, so I didn't really do that much
Many of the custom blogs were simply not to my taste. Still, I may change the font colours on this one. I'd go for red, but I don't want to look too much like Baron von Hoopla's. Then again, I hate most of the other colours....decisions decisions.
I tweaked a few things, mainly for my own amusement, but nothing major has changed. The problem is wanting to keep a dark background and the sidebar more or less as it is, while finding another design or something to put in the background, just to make it a bit different.
Oh well. Normal service will now be restored.
I tweaked a few things, mainly for my own amusement, but nothing major has changed. The problem is wanting to keep a dark background and the sidebar more or less as it is, while finding another design or something to put in the background, just to make it a bit different.
Oh well. Normal service will now be restored.
Feb 21, 2007
The BBC and bias, what's really going on?
Unity seems to be on the ball with this one, as always, doing a brilliant dissection of a Fox News Lite piece on institutional bias in the BBC.
Being the avid Daily Mail watcher that I am, especially the comments section, I had noticed this general trend towards attacking the BBC of late, for its apparent left wing dominance of the media. Lots of American political slogans being thrown around too, "liberal media fascists" enforcing "political correctness" on the masses at the behest of their lords and masters in Downing Street,
Here are some of the more rabid ones, collected from the Daily Mail Watch forums, who are doing a sterling job of highlighting bullshit in the media.
A coal miner who voted for Thatcher, need I say more?
I mean, how dare the media actually report bad news about Our Glorious Leaders? Unless its Maximum Tone, of course. And even then, you can't please everyone, as the next entry proves...
Because of course, the public population was so in favour of the war. And Maximum Tone was dead set against it, obviously. Goddamn these sinister leftists, trying to trick us with their different positions!
Scotland is deeply antagonistic to the Tories, you sanctimonious little prick. The whole country. Its Labour, SNP and Lib Dems up here, for as far as the eye can see. And of course, under Thatcher's benevolent rule, puppies were handed out to crying children, beer was a penny a pint, crime didn't exist, employment was 100% and inflation hadn't even been invented yet. Right?
Anyway, the Right's attempts at the Fox News-ization of the British media are soon becoming dull. Knowing lots of Americans and taking more than just a passing interest in their politics, the sheer amount of partisan, ill-informed bullshit that passes for news over there is disheartening to see. We can only hope the same does not happen over here.
Being the avid Daily Mail watcher that I am, especially the comments section, I had noticed this general trend towards attacking the BBC of late, for its apparent left wing dominance of the media. Lots of American political slogans being thrown around too, "liberal media fascists" enforcing "political correctness" on the masses at the behest of their lords and masters in Downing Street,
Here are some of the more rabid ones, collected from the Daily Mail Watch forums, who are doing a sterling job of highlighting bullshit in the media.
I was a coal miner one of many that voted for Mrs. Thatcher, I never had any regrets. I agree with your take on what has happened to the BBC, it angers me so much. Ideas are more deadly than bombs and the end of this dictatorship of the left in our country will be very bad. When it comes to it these liberals have no guts when it comes to a scrap. Well done to you, this from an ordinary bloke.
- Frederick Mee, Rhyl North Wales
A coal miner who voted for Thatcher, need I say more?
John Major had little opportunity to enjoy his success; within months, Sterling was ejected from the Exchange Rate Mechanism and his Government never recovered.
The BBC mounted a barrage of negative coverage on everything from the NHS to sleaze.
I mean, how dare the media actually report bad news about Our Glorious Leaders? Unless its Maximum Tone, of course. And even then, you can't please everyone, as the next entry proves...
Within the BBC, opinion ran strongly against the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Most staff felt war was unjustified; feelings intensified by their contempt for President George Bush.
On Today we occasionally allowed the case for war to be made, but the prevailing tone was doom-laden. Arguing for a better balance was a thankless task: at one meeting I said our coverage was too anti-war; the editor's response was brusque.
Because of course, the public population was so in favour of the war. And Maximum Tone was dead set against it, obviously. Goddamn these sinister leftists, trying to trick us with their different positions!
The BBC in Scotland was deeply antagonistic towards the Conservative Government; our narrative was one of devastating industrial decline and Government heartlessness.
Scotland is deeply antagonistic to the Tories, you sanctimonious little prick. The whole country. Its Labour, SNP and Lib Dems up here, for as far as the eye can see. And of course, under Thatcher's benevolent rule, puppies were handed out to crying children, beer was a penny a pint, crime didn't exist, employment was 100% and inflation hadn't even been invented yet. Right?
Anyway, the Right's attempts at the Fox News-ization of the British media are soon becoming dull. Knowing lots of Americans and taking more than just a passing interest in their politics, the sheer amount of partisan, ill-informed bullshit that passes for news over there is disheartening to see. We can only hope the same does not happen over here.
Feb 20, 2007
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
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
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...
Feb 19, 2007
"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:
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"
Feb 18, 2007
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."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.
— Cicero, from "No Fellowship with Tyrants"
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.
Feb 16, 2007
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
Feb 14, 2007
Cain beats the Mainstream Media once again
Now, a very interesting story appeared on Yahoo's newswire the other day.
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.....
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.
Feb 11, 2007
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:
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
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
Feb 10, 2007
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Feb 9, 2007
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?
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
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
Feb 8, 2007
William Godwin - Discordian Uber-Saint
"everything understood by the term co-operation is in some sense an evil."
Feb 7, 2007
Feb 5, 2007
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 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.
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.
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
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
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