End of week

It's a good source of pictures, the rigint message board.

I seed a book which mentions the origins of the word "meritocracy". English word, coined in 1958 by Michael Young in his classic satire "Rise of the Meritocracy". It was meant to be a warning, not a blueprint. That often happens, though. There was a document of some sort, all details have fled my memory, which was written by an educationalist (my memory says something about Exeter University), which was a list of predictions for the trends in education. Four had then come true. When the rest had been fulfilled he refued to write a second list on the grounds that it was meant to be a warning but was being treated as a blueprint. He eventually did write one, but only after all the things on it had coem true. I read about it in Rory Bremner's book, I think.

Something appropriate while I look for more details of that educationalist:

(On edit: he was Ted Wragg.)

Stephen Headaches?

Hugh Apart from the children, you mean? Not really.

They both laugh weakly.

Stephen Right. I want to try you on a course of these: one twenty times a day. Have you ever taken them before?

Gets out a plain cigarette from a drawer.

Hugh Um - what is it?

Stephen It's a simple nicotinal arsenous monoxid preparation taken bronchially as an infumation.

Hugh Infumation?

Stephen Yes, you just light the end and breath in.

Hugh What, like cigarettes?

Stephen You know them, then? Yes, actually, it's a bit hard to admit, but they're basically a herbal remedy.

Hugh Oh, herbal cigarettes.

Stephen That's right. A leaf originally from the Americas I believe, called tobacco.

Hugh But medicated.

Stephen Medicated? No.

Hugh These are ordinary cigarettes?

Stephen That's right.

Hugh But they're terribly bad for you aren't they?

Stephen I hardly think I would be prescribing them if they were bad for you.

Hugh Twenty a day?

Stephen Yes, ideally moving on to about thirty or forty.

Hugh But they give you lung cancer and bronchitis and emphysema.

Stephen Where on earth did you get that idea?

Hugh Everyone knows that.

Stephen Are you a doctor?

Hugh No, but it stands to reason doesn't it?

Stephen What on earth are you talking about? "Stands to reason." You wouldn't even know what a pair of lungs did if a doctor hadn't told you. It's taken mankind thousands of years to work out what the heart is for, what a blood vessel is, what the kidneys do, and now you're telling me because you've read a few weedy magazine articles that you know more about the human body than a doctor?

Hugh Well no, but - it can't be natural, can it?

Stephen Perfectly natural leaf.

Hugh Yes but setting light to it and inhaling the smoke, I mean ...

Stephen More natural than Baked Alaska or nylon socks.

Hugh Yes but you don't inhale nylon socks. At least I don't.

Stephen You wear them next to the skin.

Hugh But you can't seriously be recommending cigarettes.

Stephen Why the buggery sod not? A bit of leaf smoke to loosen the lungs, ease that tightness and clear the head. Perfectly sound.

Hugh I suppose you're going to tell me that cholesterol isn't bad for you next.

Stephen What's cholesterol?

Hugh It's ... well, you know -

Stephen Yes I know perfectly well what it is, but I don't suppose you'd so much as heard of it until a few years ago. You'd die without the stuff.

Hugh Yes but too much is bad for you.

Stephen Well of course too much is bad for you, that's what "too much" means you blithering twat. If you had too much water it would be bad for you, wouldn't it? "Too much" precisely means that quantity which is excessive, that's what it means. Could you ever say "too much water is good for you"? I mean if it's too much it's too much. Too much of anything is too much. Obviously. Jesus.

Hugh But I thought the balance of informed medical opinion held that -

Stephen You thought, you thought. You didn't think, did you? Cigarettes are healing, natural and effective.

Hugh If you don't mind I think I'd like a second opinion.

Stephen That's your privilege.

Hugh Right.

Stephen (Pause) My second opinion is that they are also cheap, nutritious and stylish.

Hugh Really?

Stephen And if you're interested in a third opinion they're soothing, harmless and sexy.

Hugh Well, I must say that does seem to clinch it.

Stephen Alright then. So twenty a day, rising over the week.

Hugh And the tightness in the chest?

Stephen Should disappear completely.

Hugh Tremendous. Well you're the doctor.

Stephen What?

Hugh You're the doctor.

Stephen Whatever gave you that idea?

Hugh Well I mean - you did.

Stephen God, you are pathetic aren't you?

Hugh Um.

Stephen I'm a tobacconist. Isn't it obvious?

Hugh But the -

Stephen Yes, it looks more like a doctor's surgery than a tobacconist's.

Hugh Why?

Stephen Why? Because you're the kind of idiot that falls for that sort of thing. It's the same reason that cosmetics sales staff wear white coats, because pratts like you think a Swiss name and something called a "skin treatment" must be better for you than a tub of cold cream which is all you're in fact getting. You're a credulous git, Mr Pepperdyne. A stethoscope and a plausible manner doesn't make me a doctor. I'm a conman and you're a moron.

Hugh You are a doctor then?

Stephen Could be. What do you think?

Hugh You really want to to know?

Stephen I'd be fascinated.

Hugh I think you've taken a reasonably good idea and overworked it. I think what started out as a fairly interesting and amusing statement about our susceptibility to received ideas has become something vague, ill-thought out and rambling. And I think it's time to finish it.

Stephen Well do you? I think you've comp -

Blackout

"what manner of beasts cowes be"

Well, blow me down with a feather, I have a comment from Ben Fairhall. I assume he was looking for blog that link to his own. I only wish I could tell him more about the double Ms found at Temple Bruer, Brueria, but I only read about them yesterday in a little book I came across just across the way in this here library. "In Search of the Knights Templar" by Simon Brighton, that's where I read it. They were positing, I believe, that "M" means Mary and therefore a double M is probably Magdalene. Incidentally I went to Mary Magdalene CofE Middle School, when I wasn't playing truant, and the town is dominated by the third tallest church spire in the country, that of St Mary Magdalene. I'm a fount of local knowledge. James the first, for example, caused trouble by hanging someone without trial when he stopped here on the way to be crowned down london way. The castellan during the civil war was supposedly a Mason. I'm going off on a tangent, here. Rosemary Robb, does very good book on the local legends, albeit with too much focus on ghost stories. And how fortuitous that Ben Fairhall and remarksman/retardsman have come together here, with their complementary positions on matriarchy and various feminine esotericisms.

I know other things about Brueria. I know it has seven streets, or possibly houses. I know of my family connection to it. I know it was one of the four sites the Templars confessed to holding an idol at within England. I know that some relic was brought from there to Newark Castle, before it was smashed out of the hollow in the wall where it had been hidden and taken off by a member of the royal family in 1906. Those dungeons are still now occasionally opened to the public, although a bottle dungeon with a hole in the wall isn't a particularly edifying sight.

Ah, I've become distracted. I've been back to the New Deal office and have the usual collection of observations to impart.

"Titles are hard." -- Marge Simpson

She's right. You may notice that my titles are mostly random. So are the background images in an Adam Curtis documentary, but mine are of less artistic merit.

There, I've got one. Random, of course. I read it in a book about the civil war, during which our town put up a heroic resistance. The London militia, who were on the other side, came out of London and the immediately dropped their weapons and raced into the fields to see "what manner of beasts cowes be". It's a good story, that. Reminds me of an episode of "Goodnight Sweetheart", a mediocre BBC sitcom.

I've been trawling the web for articles by former San Francisco Bay Guardian columnist "nessie". Found a few. Still quite a few AWOL, though. If you know where any are, make sure to inform me.

But back to the New Deal office. Someone reappeared who had previously got himself a job, or rather the temp agency had got him a job. He's been sacked. Crashed his forklift into a steel column. For those who haven't seen the German short film "Fork Lift Driver Klaus", I highly recommend it.

I managed to occupy the greater part of the afternoon wandering around town. The old Wimpy is still in place. Haven't been there in ages. Didn't think Wimpys were still around. There's a local company, I imagine they're local, called "AVG UK". Anti-virus something or other. They have an office just beneath the A4E office. A4E/Instant Muscle, officially, I believe. They have another office a couple of streets away. Both upstairs behind security doors. The one below A4E would make a good place to watch us in the office. Remember the Stanford Prison Experiment? The BBC did a version of it a few years back and the results were the opposite of those the Americans reached. A world run by empathy, rather than the abuse of power.

There's a local charity called the Emmaus Trust. Don't know who they are.

A nice thread in soc.men. I like to provide links. I think that's enough for one day.

Edit: Something else, I see Senator Alvaro of Columbia has been brought down in circumstance that remind me of the Barry Seal affair. That is all.

EDOM

I'm trying to remember a song. I can't remember the tune or any of the words and I think I never knew the name of song or "artist". There's a woman singing in it. It was on the radio. Smooth FM. Your life, your music. I prefer Lincs FM. From the Humber to the Wash. Hits and Memories. The Wash, that's where Bad King John's treasure sank. I'm not a big fan of that Gwen Stefani. Remember the video to "Don't Speak" by No Doubt? Prescient.

It's very annoying not being able to remember that song. I'd forgotten it before but I heard it walking around Wilkinson's only to forget it again.

I heard on the news, on Smooth FM. Gerry McCann has a blog. It's rubbish. I prefer ben-fairhall, who seems to have focused very much on that missing girl. I don't like the McCann homepage. Something about the big picture of the all-seeing eye with its iris defect. There are lots of double Ms carved into the walls at the Templar Preceptory in Temple Bruer, apparently.

Day following Bank Holiday...

Nice Bank Holiday yesterday, perfectly servicable, reading about the machination of the Secret State against Harold Wilson.Back to work today. Carrying stuff all morning, being annoyed by some little toy which talks whenever it hears a noise in the afternoon.

As it's the day immediately following a bank holiday I'm too busy to do any more.

Here's a link to be going on with.

A censorship called dig-nit-y

What a nice dream I had. Everything was all snowy.

I bought a copy of Nexus yesterday, now that they've finished their bizarre "the popeis evil and so is jesus" stuff. Corporatocracy not as interesting as padeophocracy, but good anyway.

Here's the RMs Foul Play.

Incidentally, something related: the manipulation of letters pages. I've done it myself, going to the letters pages to avoid the bias, the propaganda of the proprietor, etc.. Can't trust anything these days.

Jenny Kleeman, a Dispatches reporter, filmed much of this Channel 4
documentary while working undercover in New Labour's spin machine. Kleeman began working in Labour's London press office dealing with local and regional media
early in 2005. She quickly uncovered a series of deceptive tactics used by the party to influence the local media. This was part of a wider New Labour communications strategy to by-pass the (often very critical) national press and attempt to speak directly to the electorate through regional and local media. Kleeman was first tasked to work on media monitoring. In this job she was part of an orchestrated effort to influence the content of local newspaper letters pages. Working from an internal New Labour manual titled 'Making the Media Work for You' the idea was to exploit readers' high trust in the letters pages as a way of pushing New Labour's message. The tactic here was to get 'unobtrusive party members' to put their name to pre-scripted letters defending Labour's policies on the NHS and education. The sample of published letters the research team uncovered, all bearing the same phrases concocted by New Labour's spin doctors, suggests that this cynical exercise met with some success.

Another day, another wasted day.

"Human blood is a commodity." -- US Foreign Trade Commission, 1966.

Apparently, anyway.

Back at A4E today, doing very little. Indeed upon leaving the building there were a couple of girls in front of me who'd also been on the course, one of them's a model apparently (although obviously unemployed to be there), saying how they couldn't believe they'd been there all day and done nothing, "absolutely nothing". They went through a list of things they hadn't done and it seemed quite comprehensive.

Befoe that I'd spent the last session of the day's play going off to get an application form from Homebase, which took a surprisingly long time on a surprisingly hot day. Got back to A4E at just the right time to be let out again almost straight away. That application form is now resting snugly in my bin. Well, the pile of rubbish on the floor of my flat, anyway.

When I got home I took to reading Fortean Times. Something in there about modern art, a man shitting a 500 Euro note. Reminds me, I once read about a man who had tinned his own shit and sold it to the Tate for more then its weight in gold. ("He done a guff, I saw it!") I walked past a shop today which offers cash for gold and silver. That must be how those inflation-obsessed survivalists are planning to cash in their precious metals.

I see that all the local school uniforms now include blazers. Was all jumpers in my day. Very posh, they are. No doubt expensive.

There is a staff member at A4E called Sarah. Been in hospital, I hear, so has neglected her job. Sonia's off now. Was last week too. The intellectual quality of our little group of dole scroungers has gone down, so I'm not recounting their ramblings as I have done recently. Placements and agencies have left only people whose idea of conversation is "I've got a big cock, you should know you had it in your mouth".

Of course I've had a look at the papers today. I never apply for the jobs in them, of course. We are legally required to search for jobs up to 90 minutes travel away, but I don't think anyone does. Besides, there are plenty of unemployed people there. No advantage in us "getting on our bikes".

There's a sign up at A4E. A list of people who got jobs while at the company. Five of them. From months ago.

There was an advert in the Evening Post. Roshni, a local women's shelter type service. Obviously, no jobs going for men. Section 7 of the sex discrimination act, again, "discrimination is alright if it's not against women".

A lesson in job adverts: "enhanced disclosure" means a Criminal Records Buraeu check. To see if you're a perv and so on.

Defenestrate. Good Consultants on the radio last night. Propagandistic rhymes with communistic. Stars with jars.

Aero.

There are few sights so serene as a swan sailing majestically along the Grand Union
Canal.

Except, that is, when it is being chased by a gang of hungry,
knife-wielding Eastern Europeans.

Will the Mail never learn? And will the foreigners never learn? One of those things can break your arm with a single wing.

Bubbly chocolate bar.

Aerogel. Aeromar. Saw corpses hanging from meat hooks in a UFO. Human ones, that is. In COSCON by Branton.

Aerogel. Insulates. Alum-effected concrete. Good insulator. All those Roman buildings, all concrete, all survive. Not many of the tower blocks of the 70s do. It's a common news story, Soviet tower block falls down. The KGB needn't have bothered, then they wouldn't have had to kill Litvinenko. If that was why they did it. We knock ours down here. Flat roofs. Modernist architecture. Lets the water in. Unless the concrete is waterproof, which the Roman stuff was but ours isn't. Supermen. Freaks. Like in the X-Men, but realisticer. Why else would they kill Litvinenko? Something to do with drugs? Murray says drugs. I read his book.

Did I mention that I've been to Temple Bruer?

I know where the idol of the Templars was kept, of course. Heard it from someone. Saw the dungeon in which it was kept. I mention that on my website, I think. I don't mention how I heard of it, of course.

I see agent provocateurs are still on the go. Not the shop. Like Gloria Steinem.

Anyway, it's back to A4E (or A3, if your prefer) tomorrow. Until them there's this and this, which I've been meaning to get around to reading for a long time.

FF: I like to think in terms of the non-corruptible. What can't be corrupted? Now, Herbert Marcuse said in a speech once, he said, well, you can even commodify the forces of love. This was in 1969, 1970. We all said, "No, impossible!" 'Cause we never dreamed that Jimi Hendrix would be doing a Ford commercial. You know, we didn't believe that was possible. To quote Jesus, or at least to quote somebody who was apparently quoting Jesus, “See, and then you'll see. Hear, and then you'll hear.”

Wit: Yes, back to Paul. I think.

FF: Paul, yeah. Corinthians 13.

Wit: Which is a spectacular piece of writing.

FF: Yes, but getting people to read the Bible. To see or hear. You encounter this kind of resistance. It's just like pushing away the 9/11 Truth tape. You know? You can agree or disagree, but they don't even want to look. It's what Erich Fromm called Escape From Freedom.

Wit: Yes, that or creeping chicken shit-ism.

JB: Terminal Mama’s Boy-ism.

Wit: Yes, people that resist every form of 9/11 Truth seem so juvenile to me. Silly. But they’re all kind of nuts because they secretly—unconsciously—know Dad Did It.

FF: In this neighborhood, here in the East Village, the shutting down churches, removing services and shelter for the poor. In order to make condos. It epitomizes evil.

Wit: Especially the condos with wall to wall carpeting.

FF: A friend of mine once pointed out to me--who does Jesus curse out most in the Bible? Rich people. "It's easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to get into heaven." He went to the temple and threw out the money changers. First thing, he comes into town on the donkey, comes into the big city as a country guy. He's already wanted by the authorties, 'cause he's making speeches out in the hills. This guy is dangerous! Because he’s different than everyone who has come before. He's not saying the kingdom is coming. He said, I am the kingdom, it's here. And the first thing he does—boom!—they do a direct action. Straight to the temple! Throws the money changers out, and by accounts I’ve read—holds the place for days. This most assuredly earns him his happy designation as an insurrectionist.

Wit: Yes, that's what G.K. Chesterton says in Orthodoxy. In Jesus’s life there’s an example for every rebel—"a boast for all insurgents everywhere.”

Something inside so strong

Saw a Pilger film on the Telly last night. Never been a big fan of his. Too shallow. I'm more of an Adam Curtis man, honestly. Pilger just gives a catalogue of injustices, certainly deserve attention and certainly very sad, but not particularly educational for anyone well enough informed to be watching his programme.

I got a free pair of shoes out of the New Deal today. Should think so too. The ones I got out of them a couple of years back are falling apart.

The higher you build your barriers
The taller I become
The farther you take my rights away
The faster I will run
You can deny me
You can decide to turn your face away
No matter, cos there's....
Something inside so strong
I know that I can make it
Tho' you're doing me wrong, so wrong
You thought that my pride was gone
Oh no, something inside so strong
Oh oh oh oh oh something inside so strong
-- Something Inside So Strong, Labi Siffre

Good song, that. The soundtrack to that Pilger film, it was on. Adam Curtis tends to use tunes hijacked from the theme music of John Carpenter music. I immediately recognised the music from the start of "They Live". Even so, in non-musical ways Curtis is better. Always good to use stock footage. Curtis is the master of that. I though his last series, about the perils of negative liberty, disappeare dup its own backside honestly. The previous ones, the Century of the Self and the Power of Nightmares were fantastic, though.

One interesting thing about negative liberty: the one who established the doctrine received a letter from one Anthony P Blair. The Reverend (retd), as Private Eye would call him. Blair had misunderstood the doctrine and had adopted what he though was the conclusion of the man he was writing to, namely that positive liberty is doomed and counterproductive. He wrote wanting to know if it must be so. He never received a reply, due to the ministrations of the grim reaper. Perhaps if he'd received a proper defence of positive liberty he would be different, but I'm more inclined to believe he misunderstood because he was reading what he wanted to read. He hates positive liberty, therefore he interprets it as the inevitable superiority of the dark side.

Mind you, I don't believe in this negative/positive liberty rubbish.

You know, trying to use blogger is a nightmare.

Nothing today.

Busy.

Keel dem nig-nogs

Feds train clergy to "quell dissent" during marshall law.

From "The History of Planned Parenthood":

First, birth controllers hoped (correctly) that black leaders would be easier to manipulate than Catholic leaders had been. The movement planned to win black cooperation by placing blacks in highly visible positions. Sanger described this to Clarence Gamble in October 1939. In that letter she described how "colored Ministers, preferably with social service backgrounds" could be used and added ominously, "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out the idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."

Don't know why I put those together. Just seemed like a good idea.

This, this and this too. Old hat, I know. Suppose I'd better stop living in the past. Worry about the Future of America. Family Security Matters, you know. Even so, interesting things sometimes happen in the past. Why are you wearing that silly man suit? I didn't like that film. Harvey, was it? Or am I thinking of Farscape again?

I'll do better next time, I dare say.

Franz Carr was quite fast

I notice I' ve slipped into a pattern of providing very short pieces of information. I've never been on for verbosity, but I should include more information. My big note book is more or less indecipherable, even to me. I'll get it up on the interweb one of these days. Lots of stuff in it.


Of course it's been an A4E day today and I heard that one of my fellow sufferers is from a place called "Seven Hills". Well, I immediately thought, Rome, Constantinople, Temple Bruer, Twin Peaks. Well, the first two. Temple Bruer is a place of Templar significance, Brueria to the confessing Templar devil-worshipping sodomites, formerly home to one of my ancestors, still housing the remnants of a Templar prefectory and it has seven streets. Or houses, I forget which. Was one of the four homes of the Templars' idol in Britain.

Reminds me of a story I heard last week when I was there. One of them went for a job, with one of his mates, as tree fellers. They were sent away because there were only two of them. Bum bum.

The Consultants were on the radio last night. Well worth staying up for. Especially Chicken Brown. I like a bit of musical comedy, me.

I wanted to say something about Damu, Semiramis and Nimrod the Abyssinian, but I've run out of momentum.

As for attaining higher consciousness through drugs, Fortune warned that "it is one thing to unloosen the girders of the mind, and quite another to get the rivets tightened up again, and unless one is prepared to go through life rattling like a cheap motor-car it is unwise to seek this method of development, speedy and effectual though it is."
-- The most recent rigint blog.

No progress

Little time, I always seem to be in a rush.

I have been reading "No Logo" by Naomi Klein, which is passable but not that good. Too much optimism, too little journalism. She's right about one thing, though, feminism distracts from proper activism, or as she calls feminism and its satellites in the movements for lesbian media attention and so on, "identity politics". She's far too feminist, but it's always good to see someone realise that feminism is the enemy and a distraction at best from what's really important. She'd have a fit of the screaming abdabs to think such a thing, no doubt, but she has at least noticed that feminism facillitated the rse of corporatism. Of course, she thinks this was coincidence. The CIA sponsored feminist movement just happened to play the most important role in aiding the rise of the corporatocracy, if that's not a coincidence I don't know what is. A coincidence and a half, is that.

It's Private Eye day again. I haven't finished it yet of course, but I notice the phrase "Johann Hari is a big daft cock". Well, that's what I've been trying to tell you. I see from Google that he's Amnesty International's journalist of the year. I've never been fond of Amnesty international. I don't sully my mind with the unpleasantness of reading his newspaper anymore, I wouldn't wrap my chips in it (that, after all, would be against EU law), but I remember what he's like. Unfriendly to facts, big on insults. Bitchy, in fact. Looks like a woman, too, albeit an incredibly ugly one. Very soft featured. Soft featured but hard hearted, having got involved in a legal tussle on the internet because someone had the affrontery to suggest that he made up a lie he told. The truth is he's told lots of lies, made up lots of things and is an alround scum bag. I once wrote a letter to the Indy refuting one of his articles, but it was never published. They aren't as open to criticism as Fortean Times.

One of his lies was over Kenneth Joseph, a lie which he picked up from the Moonies (who RI readers will be wary of) to support his beloved imperial adventure in Iraq. He used to work for Geoffrey Archer, too. I don't suppose he'll have the guts to sue Private Eye, they have a reputation for fight back and he has a reputation as a big girl's blouse.

Spelling Nagorno-Karaback...

Well, what to say. There is a new volunteer at the shop, a Jap, replacing the girl with the nice arse. Off to the Reading festival, that one.


Nagorno Karabakh is a place in Armenia, or Azerbaijan if you're an Azeri. The people there are ethnically Armenian christians, not Azeri muslims. They calim to be the longest lived people in the world, as do the inhabitants of a small island off the coast of Croatia. Nagorno is, incidentally, up near the site of the legendary Eden. Probably just a coincidence.

Well, that was short.

One more thing, then.

I've noticed, thanks to Channel 5, that American football commentators are humourously inept. Like the Chinese writing signs in English.

Jose Padilla has had his brain wiped, I see. Reminds me, "Cape Wrath" is on Channel 4 tonight.

Jubilee Arch

I've been reading, I think I said, "Enemy Combatant" by Moazzam Begg. He's far too Muslim for me, but then so is Ed Husain who wrote "The Islamist". He says something very interesting, though. According to him the Taleban first started to gain power when they forced a warlord to release his harem of child sex slaves. (The Taleban and al-Qaeda are very different organisations, at one point ObL had to smuggle his cameramen over the mountains to get them past Taleban checkpoints because the Taleban consider photography to be sinful.) Nice to see our armed forces helping out the child slavers, though, isn't it? Like attracts like, I suppose. I'm not normally one to heroise the Taleban, but The Man from Uncle does things they were acting to stop, and I know whose side I'm on. Not just a brotherhood of drug dealers that called the CIA and their false flag operatives to the aid of their brothers in arms and fellow pederasts drug dealers in Afghanistan. Still, I don't think what Begg thinks, that Afghanistan was a perfect Muslim state which is why the Americans were so long targeting it and conspiring against it. It was only the drop in opium production that prodded the Americans into action.

Something else, just as interesting, Begg mentions. The Americans, he says, were running a training camp in Hungary before the invasion of Iraq, training up insurgents, supposedly to fight Saddam. I wonder whatever happened to them.

Speaking of Ed Husain's "The Islamist", I think he'd quite right about perverts and the hijab. The hijab doesn't enforce modesty (for women) and a lack of sexual thoughts (for men). Quite the opposite. It turns people into perverts and sexual agressors (I once read a study about overcrowded rats showing that overcrowding and stress cause homosexuality, sexual violence and other distasteful things (the rats hang around in gangs and act agressively and that)). The women just show off by having different coloured burqas and hijabs and whatever else (and the girl I mentioned before who insisted on wearing a burqa instead of a shalwar kameez so she could use her clothing as a medium to brag about her modesty). Good book, that.

They Ford was a good employer. I've been reading "No Logo". He was sued by Dodge, I believe, for his supposedly generous practices (thieving from the heavily laden pockets of his business partner by offering employees discounts and so on). Perhaps the union would have supported him, but I don't think they have those in America. Except, perhaps, ones run by the Mafia. I hear that Ford believed it would be good for the economy for workers to be well-paid, a manifestly sensible opinion which is under-believed today. It's mentioned by someone or other in EP Thompson's "Making of the English Working Class". Carnegie was meant to be a nice guy too, with his free libraries and so on. Of course, when his workers tried to unionise he hired mercenaries and had them killed. Not my type of ragged trousered philanthropist.

There is power in a factory, power in the land
Power in the hands of a worker
But it all amounts to nothing if together we don't stand
There is power in a Union

Now the lessons of the past were all learned with workers' blood
The mistakes of the bosses we must pay for
From the cities and the farmlands to trenches full of mud
War has always been the bosses' way, sir

The Union forever defending our rights
Down with the blackleg, all workers unite
With our brothers and out sisters from many far off lands
There is power in a Union

-- Billy Bragg

A video came into the charity shop today, we get alot because people are abandoning VHS for DVDs, it was a Graham Hancock video of a programme called "The Quest". Him searching for an ancient civilisation or some such. I don't like him. I read "Underworld" and "The Sign and the Seal" (always been interested in Abyssiania, land of Prester John, oldest Christian land, land of Sheba and the Templars, and so on), but on the whole I'm not impressed. Those books were alright, but no match for something like "Exploration Fawcett" or "Mysteries of Ancient South America). He's too mealy mouthed, that one.

Copious Notes...

Quick Saturday post from my notes.

DNA testing is unassailable, we are told. Not so. For starters the reliability of DNA testing relies on the method of testing used, so an unreliable method can be used an accepted at face value in court. Moreso, though, DNA is basicall hearsay. See Zain and Gilchrist, both of whom sent men to their death by testifying in court that these men were guilty of crimes they were innocent of. Zain was basically a fraud, Gilchrist a hate-filled ideologue.

I have been readin "Enemy Combatant" by Moazzam Begg. The CIA tried to recruit him, he says. Said they look after their own. Not like MI5, I hope. Look at what happened to Marty McGartland. They became convinced that he was a liability so they told the IRA that he was a mole for them and for Special Branch. Special Branch weren't in on it. The MI5/IRA arrangement is well know. From the start of the troubles there was an agreement that MI5 would leave alone the IRA leadership and the IRA wouldn't go after the royal family. They were friendly with each other and both sides wanted McGartland dead, at least after MI5 had let on to the IRA that he was a spy. The IRA grabbed McGartland and dragged him off to a tower block to kill him. He survived, albeit with several bullets in him having gone out the window of the tower block and fallen all the way to the ground. His mates in Special Branch got him onto witness protection in Tyneside but MI5 told the local police he was a paedophile and a terrorist and they started harrassing him. He ended up with more IRA bullets in him, but still survived. Best not to be looked after like that.

Why did the business plot against FDR fail? Plenty of similar plots succeeded. The obvious answer is that they approached the wrong man when they approached Smedley Butler. Who's David Sharp? Name just came into my head. Perhaps FDR really was set up to keep out the Kingfish. The plot against him went perfectly. Perhaps that was the idea. Give FDR street-cred by making out that he's the enemy of fascists everywhere, rather than their willing tool. In other words the plot was never intended to fail, hence their approach to this known "anti-war General". Perhaps the motive were even more sinister than the gaining of prestige for FDR, although I don't know what they might have been.

I find this on the interweb:

In 1966, more than thirty years after General Smedley Butler, another
former Marine Commandant, General David Sharp, offered this remarkable
statement:

"I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody,
dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed,
exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own.... And if
unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves"
refuse to share with the "have-nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they
get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and
above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans."

I, like all conspiracy theorists, like linking things together. Like the six degrees of Bergerac in the Tao of Bergerac on the Radio. Hence, I see links between "The Underworld" by Graham Hancock, the first File of CRIM-RAM by Branton and the following website: Mother and daughter in Malta. The Hypogeum of Hal Saflienti. Branton tells us about secretary, later involved with a UFO organisation, who saw a hairy beasty in a massive subterranean canyon. And there's the missing school-children, of course. I've just finished reading "Mysteries of Ancient South America" by Harold Wilkins, having so often seen the likes of Kolosimo and Childress cite it.

I once dialled 888 on a telephone, why doesn't really need going into, but someone answered. I can't remember who or anything the like, though. Sorry. I just don't think anyone should have answered. It was a BT landline, incidentally. Google is characteristically unhelpful.

Kosovo. Interesting intervention. The beacon of humanitarianism, if you believe that. Of course it has nothing to do with it that the Kosovo Liberation Army, those champions of the oppressed, control a major heroin pipeline, as it has nothing to do with the fall of the Taleban that they had just instituted an effective ban on opium production. Nothing at all. My previous conclusion that the invasion of Kosovo was to implement an electoral system based on Proportional Representation may have been mistaken. I'm inclined to think it was all about the drugs, as most things are. Gary Webb. So on.

Nice and cool at this time in the morning, but that's enough for now.

As Duckman would say...

...humada humada haha hawa.

Who have thought it. Nazis, naked Bush, Paglia and the Smithsonian. Don't get all of those together everyday. If it was less hot I'd have more to say about that. I find it odd that there are pictures of most prominent Americans naked and covered in pins lying in a vault of the Smithsonian somewhere. Reminds me, I once heard a story about the Smithsonian taking a boat full of ooparts out to see and chucking the lot over the side. As ever, friends of science. Destroy the "Enemies of Reason" (upcoming TV programme in England), but keep the Nazi-influenced posture porn. Paglia supported it. I think there may be something important about the fact that the posture photos only came to light when they were taken at a non-elite university. Skull and Bones were looking at them, apparently. Good way to do things: get all the potentially powerful people together when they're young, photograph them naked and release the photos if they get out of hand later on. I'm not aware of any getting out, though. Perhaps they just put them in voodoo dolls. Perhaps they were all just stashed in the Smithsonian. Nazi experimentation. Perhaps the entire modern elite is a result of eugenic breeding. In America, at least, I can't see any form of eugenics producing David Cameron.

You open an umbrella inside and it rains. I heard yesterday that "mush" is a gypsy word.

Political Compass: First-generation immigrants can never be fully integrated within their new country.

Not true. All those seperatist Muslims were born here. The ones who came from abroad came because they wanted to be here and wanted to fit in. They saw themselves as what they had chosen to be: Englishmen.

I'll look in my notes for something interesting to post next time.

Return of the

Interesting and mercifully short day at A4E. A bit of a reunion, the place is packed and mostly with people who were on the two week course when I started the long course or with people who were on the course when I was on it previously.

Up late last night. Stayed awake to listen to repeats of Paperback Hell and The Consultants on Radio Four. That's me, party animal. I'll be up late again tonight as the BBC is showing a good film, "Citizen Ruth". I recommend it.

As usual the day was boring and largely consisted of sitting around an unusually crowded room reading the papers. The only interest was the conversations I was eavesdropping on. Foreigners popped up, for example, stories in the vain of the old man arrested for saying "bloody foreigners" when a couple of foreign girls blocked the path of his wheelchair. Specifically the stories were of a group of foreigners having raped an Englishman in Lincoln and the overjoyed nature of the Ambitions personnel agency at EU enlargement. Opening the border brought in a load of foreigners only too happy to do rubbish temporary jobs for incredibly low wages, deppressing the wages of the English worker and getting the Ambitions staff accustomed to abusing the staff. Foreigners are happy to be abused. The staff at A4E are very friendly towards the agencies, especially Ambitions (who dominate the local temporary work market) and claimed to have found twenty or thirty people work through them, but in that small room of actual workers with actual experience of Ambitions there were four people out of less than a dozen with bad experiences. One man had his forklift licence taken by Ambitions, never trust an organisation named after something the Bible condemns, then had a week's wages confiscated to part-pay the ransom money the agency were demanding to hand back the licence. The consensus among non-staff-members was that employment agencies are a bunch of cunts, with which I heartily agree. Equally no-one was too fond of foreigners, although most of them would have taken a foreigner over someone from Ollerton.

There are signs up in the A4E office. One is typical Birtspeak/pseuds stuff (for Private Eye readers), the others promise immediate retribution against users of bad language, another demands PC time be booked. It's rubbish, of course. No-one books PC time (there is no way to do so), and just today I've heard the words "cunt", "fuck" and "wank".

Another little piece of information I picked up: one of the men on the course, I didn't notice which one, spent six years married to a Red Indian from Oregon. That led to more talk about foreigners, foreign women liking Englishmen (largely for their passports) and Iraqi men marrying Lithuanian women to get EEA (EU) passports so they can't be booted out of Britain.

Additions to your vocabulary: main drag - main road; skanked - ripped off, especially by a temp agency.

The last of mohicans is on a New Deal course. At least, it's the only mohican I've ever seen. Outdated haircut. Of course, I've not had a haircut since I had it all cut off a few years back, so I've got very long hair.

I'm meant to be doing a tech cert. I don't know what one of these is, but it would seem that I've done most of the work without anyone realising. Funny old world.

Lost Highway

The shop was overstaffed even by its usual standards today, so it wasn't good when the area manager turned up by surprise with her usual coterie of family members and half-wits. The assisstant manager seems to have gone a bit paranoid. Thinks the other assisstant manager is conspiring to increase sales on her day off to make her look bad. May be true.

Tuesday. Strange name, that. Reminds me of Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, famed Devon plumber and reincarnated Tibetan lama. This one was a girl, though. Another trainee from A4E, although I've never seen her before, who turned up late and didn't come back after dinner. Decided against it. Wasn't going to be allowed on the till. Long history of stealing to fund her mother's drug habit, combined with total innumeracy, mean she's not really suited to till work.

I would write more but it's too hot. Something interesting. Vanguardism. Demiurge/animus. Something along those lines.

Economics

I should probably, now I know more, explain the economics of a charity shop.

I don't really like economics. Always reminds me that the Department for International Development, the government's aid arm, funded a pop song in Tanzania to advocate the privatisation of the water supply in Dar-e-Salaam. That reminds me, I wonder whatever happened to Belize telecommunications. Last I heard Belize was being held in contempt of a Florida court and was being fined several million for it.

Powers and principalities. Pays not to ignore the Bible. There's a very big one at the charity shop, on a high shelf in the attic. If you ignore it perhaps it will fall on your head.

Much like the Sword of Damocles or the government, then. Look what the government are doing to the farmers again. First get the cattle infected with foot and mouth (which, again, came from a government lab, just like the 2001 anthrax in America and the last foot and mouth outbreak). It's a non-fatal disease but they still feel the need to fill quarries and landfills with the carcases of cattle and incinerate them, even thuogh the smoke carries the disease further than any wandering beast could.

I notice retardsman has been opining again. The number plate I found at the rigint board (always a source of useful information),

hopefully when your shopmate (!) draws you from yr shell, she'll be well
armed :O)

Well, my thoughts exactly. The downside of having control of yourself is that the controlling half of the bicameral mind isn't very creative or personable. The other half is a dangerous psychopath, though. Jekyll and Hyde. I've no inclinations towards being a teenage mutant hero turtle. I always prefered Bananaman, and I haven't been a teenager in years now.

Anyway, economics.

Around these parts there are lots of charity shops. Pretty town, this, plenty of rich people as long as you stay away from the sink estates and retreat to the bunker at weekends and nighttimes. There are plenty of old people, plenty of fashionable women and plenty of Polish immigrants. Seemingly endless numbers of them, in fact. The occasional Portugoose, but mostly Poles. Thousands of 'em. These are all good customers.

The staff are mostly free. The shop, for some reason or other, has two assistance managers but no manager. The rest of the staff are volunteers who get no recompense beyond a free meal. It's probably quite easy for a charity shop to make money as they pay nothing for staff or for most of their stock. The shop consists of three floors. The top floor is just a storage room for junk. Most of this stuff is supposedly there waiting for Christmas but I've seen a box of Noddy memorabilia and a couple of flags. Most of the stuff has just been stuffed up there. Big shelves full of trophies, books, cuddly toys, a Sega Megadrive 3. A teddy bear which counts down from ten, very much in the manner of a bomb, when you squeeze its hand and then shouts "welcome to the year 2000". And, of course, lots of Christmas stuff. Racks full of winter clothing. Jumpers. Coats. The odd leather jacket.

We are not, I should point out, allowed to reject anything someone wants to donate. Might hurt their feelings, apparently, if we tell the truth instead of taking their tat. Then they won't come back next time when they have more stuff to bring us. Won't come back as a customer. The fact is that, along with having too many staff (perhaps inevitable when you don't have to pay them) we have too much stuff. Far too much. We don't really want anything else. We've started accepting electricals (which was previously illegal) but we're trying not to let anyone find out in case they start bringing stuff in.

Every monday a van comes with dozens of bin-liner type bags full of stuff picked up by a van. Every tuesday another van comes from some other branch of the charity with more tat which they couldn't sell and takes anything we couldn't sell. Every day people bring in bags full of their old stuff they don't want any more. The rotate system, by which stuff unsold at one shop goes to another, is particularly stupid in that our shop always has more than it can handle and now has more (for this system has only just started) but its run because the shops we swap with live in areas full of skinflints who never donate anything. Most of the tat they send here gets put in bags and sold to a rag and bone man who strips it down for buttons and zips to recycle and packs off the stuff too bad even for him to the third world, where they worship a statue of their generous benefactor as if he was Lt. Cmdr. Spicer, RN.

As I say, the shop has three levels. The second floor is storage, the ground floor is the shop and the first floor is where we hang clothes, put price tags on and all that.

That's enough. Too hot. Where's all that rain when it's needed?

A new week

Bad things about going to the charity shop: girl who works there, and her brother who's a new recruit, keep trying to get me to talk. "Draw me out of my shell", as she puts it.

Good thing: people are too stupid for it to be possible to sell decent books, so I get them for free. I see they have the Silmarillion, Tom Bower's book about Tiny Rowland/LonRho and a Marilyn Monroe book by Anthony Sommers, of JFK assassination fame.

I could do with some new books anyway. I've just finished "The Islamist" by Ed Husain and "Murder in Samarkand" by Craig Murray. Pity I don't have more time to read now.

Christians are not distinguished from the rest of mankind either in locality
or in speech or in customs. For they dwell not somewhere in cities of their own,
neither do they use some different language... . But while they dwell in cities
of Greeks and barbarians as the lot of each is cast, and follow the native
customs in dress and food and the other arrangements of life, yet the
Constitution of their own citizen­ship, which they set forth, is marvelous,
and confessedly contradicts expectation. They dwell in their own countries, but
only as sojourners; they bear their share in all things as citizens, and they
endure all hardships as strangers. Every foreign country is a fatherland to
them, and every fatherland is foreign. They marry like all other men and they
beget chil­dren; but they do not cast away their offspring. They have their
meals in common, but not their wives. They find themselves in the flesh, and yet
they live not after the flesh. Their exis­tence is on earth, but their
citizenship is in heaven. They obey the established laws, and they surpass the
laws in their own lives.”
-- Henry Melville Gwatkin, Selections from Early
Christian Writers

Crowley: We should not protect the weak and vicious from the results of their own inferiority.

I have read a bit of a book, I won't be reading more of it, something to do with fascism. Makes out that the Biblical warnings about menstruating women are foolish and misogynistic. I direct you to the XI degree of the Typhonian OTO, the Eye of Horus.

Too hot for typing.

RAF typist who hurt thumb is awarded eight times more than soldier who lost leg

I see Beslan has turned out to be a false flag attack after all. I'm not surprised. I remember the early news coverage which made it quite clear the Russians were behind the massacre. Obviously the script hadn't got around at that time. I'm very much a believer in the idea of scripted 9/11 and so on.

K-PAX was a film. They Might Be Giants were a band. Birdhouse in Your Soul was a song. A bluebird is a symbol of mind control.

Otherwise this is quite a good book. It was written by a moonie.

Time well wasted

The Great Circle of Time turns once more and Shamballah is once again rising, its superrace of Nietzschean master men once more towering over the prostrate figure of earth-bound humanity. In short, it's Thursday.


Good day, for a day at A4E. Had a bit of a walk around town, wasted most time by reading the papers. Unfortunately the last half hour was hijacked when they gave us, there were only two of us by then, a quiz to do. Three sheets of paper, one with pictures of Mister Men to identify, one with screen captures from films of 2006 to identify, one with the bisected faces of celebrities to identify. I didn't do well, I'm glad to say. I'm not sure I got any of the films right, certainly no more than one. Never seen any of them. I don't know my Mister Men, either, I'm afraid, and I wouldn't have got any of the faces if it hadn't been for Terry Venables and Brian Clough.


I was reading some blog or other not long ago about the links between the New Labour saga and the Harry Potter series of books. Private Eye gag in this fortnight's issue: Tony Blair and the Deathly Honours List.


Something to annoy Tom Smith and anyone else believing that feminism is mandated sexual equality: Section 7 (2)(b) of the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975. In short, mandated sexual inequality.

Ever alert for the call to action

Too hot for my liking. I wish it was winter again.


The trouble with realising that you're dreaming is that you wake up. That's my experience, anyway. As soon as I realise I'm dreaming I'm awake.


I had a dream once, but I didn't know it was a dream at the time. I was bitten by a snake, then realised it was harmless and laughed hysterically. The I woke up. I think the symbolism there is obvious. The snake stick of Moses, the crucifixion of Christ (the death of sin on the accursed tree, which is prefigured by the staff of Moses).


I normally find it easy enough to interpret my dreams, they come from my head after all. Not counting messages from God, of course. I don't think retardsman knowns as much as he makes out. As Frankie Howard said in Carry On Doctor, "what is mind, no matter; what is matter, never mind".


I like the interweb. Good place ot find things out, although not the only one. I haven't finished Private Eye, yet. On the list of bad things about being on a New Deal programme that's just behind having to shift heavy bags and boxes up and down stairs in boiling hot weather. No time to read. But I've spotted something interesting. The three government cronies arrested in the cash-for-honours affair didn't have their DNA taken. This is probably just typical favourable treatment of the government's mates, but perhaps not. Who knows what might turn up if these persons' DNA profiles got into the government DNA database. Who knows what they've been up to and what forensic traces they've left behind. They don't take DNA after every arrest, the police say. Well, obviously not, but they'd take mine if I was arrested and they'd take yours too.

Talking of pretty women, I've not normally been into cartoon women but I did once see a thread on the subject on the Straight Dope message board and the only two contenders as far as I'm concerned are the bitch from "Dog City" and Nico (papa...) from the computer game "Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars. (Known in America and Broken Sword: Circle of Blood, for no apparent reason.)

Sticking with cartoons... Banana man. I don't suppose he's got another name in America. Too centred around bananas, probably created by the Banana Marketing Board. It's Britain's favourite fruit, by a distance - the custard cream of the fruit world. I understand America only has one type of biscuit, not called a biscuit, and therefore talk of gypsy creams and custard creams, hob-nobs and digestives will be lost on them. Pity, really. Jammy Dodgers, too. Rich Teas. Good biscuits. I see there's such a website as nicecupofteaandasitdownaswell.com, which is nice. Reminds me of a newsgroup I used to post in many moons back: alt.chips.salt-n-vinegar. The consensus was that this was the American use of the word "chips", meaning crisps, but most of the users of the group were English meaning the English usage was just as well accepted. That group died, I think, same goes for alt.dont.get.even.get.odd, which was good for a time. Now, where was I? Right, yes, custard creams have been many times voted biscuit of the year. Deserve it, too. Terrific, that bananaman. All the best satire or parody can be taken straight, like Nebulous on the radio. Apparently a kid came up to Orwell one day and asked why those pigs were so cruel. Orwell was over the moon, because he realised that it was most important the book was good enough that even a kid without education would enjoy it as a straight story,not just someone who understood the political parts.

"This is 29 Acacia Road.
"And this is Eric, the schoolboy who leads an exciting double-life.
"For when Eric eats a banana, an amazing transformation occurs.
"Eric is Bananaman, ever alert for the call to action."
-- Bananaman, BBC