The BNP controversy

Ok I have been a bit out of it again. Sorry for that. I haven't finished some of things I was going to do yet.

I'd just like to say a few words about the BNP controversy that's taken over in the last few days since Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time. And I hope I'm not saying anything too obvious.

If anyone has seen the Question Time last Thursday, it's important to remember something that some will already know, but some won't and that Griffin himself mentioned.

And that is that a lot of people in global 'right'/Nationalist movement have effectively disowned Griffin some time ago. Although there's a rather polite article on his site today, people like David Duke and so on see Griffin as, in Griffin's own words a 'sell out' and his behavior as highly suspicious.

It's also important to remember that the history of what is sometimes termed 'fringe politics' is a history riddled with infiltration and agent provocateurs. I know Michael Collins Piper wrote a book about his own experiences called The Judas Goats, and I would like to read it sometime.

There is genuine concern about the radical direction of government that may as well have come out of the early Soviet Union. There's also genuine concern about the very basic fundamental things that make up society, the most precious institutions are being torn apart, attacked and reassembled under a new edict of social modernity aka a kind of anti-culture, a kind of anti-nationalism. Like it or not immigration, culture and race is a part of that discourse. That's nothing to do with being quote/unquote "racist".

There are genuine questions and real heart-felt disagreements people have with the way society and government has gone in many areas and the massive damage that's been inflicted. That's the reality, and it's a painful reality we've been talking about for years on here. And if people want to know why it's happened, and why would a country do that to itself ? That's because "WE", are simply not in control. There are other forces in control.

To make matters worse, everything's become mired in a culture of fanatical political correctness, where little old ladies get interrigated by the police if they don't like a gay parade, all to enforce a set of top-down cultural norms based on sickening lunacy.

So the collapse of government into a rancid quango of remote elites and political lickspittles (New Labour) dispensing extraordinary radical policies and tearing up the rule of law, while at the same time trying to hide what they are doing by giving you new 'values' of 'diversity' and 'tolerance', 'social responsibility' and so on.

And I think there real issues of what society means at all anymore or what the nation state means. And I'm sorry to say I think partly that's the idea by the government and media.

So of course any nationalist or 'ultra'-conservative party is going to gain some political momentum in that environment. And some people won't like or understand what I'm going to say here, but in principle it's not a bad thing at all. The problem I see, is that I think there's a real question mark about what exactly Nick Griffin does represent.

Nick Griffin seems to be there on the BBC getting the publicity he is because he's saying all the wrong things, not the right ones.

From supporting the atrocities in Gaza, to this focus on Islam to this rather evasive blur about what they even stand for, some of the things Griffin says are very difficult to separate from what Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have said and that has to be some sort of clue at least about what's happening here.

And I can't help but be concerned that good conservatives, good nationalists are being fed a line, with a caricature Lord Haw-Haw party that's just going to take them in the wrong direction again.

There is possibly an effort to make the BNP attractive by creating a media hysteria about them.

And the idea that the BNP and Nick Griffin are controlling that is a nonsense. This is all a creation of the media. I.e not the real issues underneath are NOT a creation of the media, they are absolutely real and therefore there is strong possibility that the 'solution' being presented, could be bogus.

Paul Craig Roberts on Iran

From a couple of days ago, very interesting article by Paul Craig Roberts

Sunday, 21 June 2009
Iran Faces Greater Risks Than It Knows
by Paul Craig Roberts

"Stephen Kinzer’s book, All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, tells the story of the overthrow of Iran’s democratically-elected leader, Mohammed Mosaddeq, by the CIA and the British MI6 in 1953. The CIA bribed Iranian government officials, businessmen, and reporters, and paid Iranians to demonstrate in the streets.

The 1953 street demonstrations, together with the Cold War claim that the US had to grab Iran before the Soviets did, served as the US government’s justification for overthrowing Iranian democracy. What the Iranian people wanted was not important.

Today, the street demonstrations in Tehran show signs of orchestration. The protesters, primarily young people, especially young women opposed to the dress codes, carry signs written in English: "Where is My Vote?" The signs are intended for the western media—not for the Iranian government.

More evidence of orchestration is provided by the protesters’ chant, "death to the dictator, death to Ahmadinejad." Every Iranian knows that the president of Iran is a public figure with limited powers. His main role is to take the heat from the governing grand Ayatollah. No Iranian, and no informed Westerner, could possibly believe that Ahmadinejad is a dictator. Even Ahmadinejad’s superior, Khamenei, is not a dictator, as he is appointed by a government body that can remove him.

The demonstrations, like those in 1953, are intended to discredit the Iranian government and to establish for Western opinion that the government is a repressive regime that does not have the support of the Iranian people. This manipulation of opinion sets up Iran as another Iraq ruled by a dictator who must be overthrown by sanctions or an invasion.

On American TV, the protesters who are interviewed speak perfect English. They are either westernized secular Iranians who were allied with the Shah and fled to the West during the 1978 Iranian revolution or they are the young Westernized residents of Tehran.

Many of the demonstrators may be sincere in their protest, hoping to free themselves from Islamic moral codes. But if reports of the US government’s plans to destabilize Iran are correct, paid troublemakers are in their ranks.

Some observers, such as George Friedman, believe that the American destabilization plan will fail. However, many ayatollahs feel animosity toward Ahmadinejad, who assaults the ayatollahs for corruption. Many in the Iranian countryside believe that the ayatollahs have too much wealth and power. Amadinejad’s attack on corruption resonates with the Iranian countryside, but not with the ayatollahs.

Amadinejad’s campaign against corruption has brought Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri out against him. Montazeri is a rival to ruling Ayatollah Khamenei. Montazeri sees in the street protests an opportunity to challenge Khamenei for the leadership role.

So, once again, as so many times in history, the ambitions of one person might seal the fate of the Iranian state.

Khamenei knows that the elected president is an underling. If he has to sacrifice Ahmadinejad’s election in order to fend off Montazeri, he might recount the vote and elect Mousavi, thinking that will bring an end to the controversy.

Khamenei, solving his personal problem, would play into the hands of the American-Israeli assault on his country.

On the surface, the departure of Ahmadeinjad would cost Israel and the US the loss of their useful "anti-Semitic" boggy-man. But in fact it would play into the American-Israeli propaganda. The story would be that the remote, isolated, Iranian ruling Ayatollah was forced by the Iranian people to admit the falsity of the rigged election, calling into question rule by Ayatollahs who do not stand for election.

Mousavi and Ayatollah Montazeri are putting their besieged country at risk. Possibly they believe that ridding Iran of Ahmadeinjad’s extreme image would gain Iran breathing room.

If Mousavi and Montazeri succeed in their ambitions, one likely result would be a loss in Iran’s independence. The new rulers would have to continually defend Iran’s new moderate and reformist image by giving in to American demands. If the government admits to a rigged election, the legitimacy of the Iranian Revolution would be called into question, setting up Iran for more US interference in its internal affairs.

For the American neoconservatives, democratic countries are those countries that submit to America’s will, regardless of their form of government. "Democracy" is achieved by America ruling through puppet officials.

The American public might never know whether the Iranian election was legitimate or stolen. The US media serves as a propaganda device, not as a purveyor of truth. Election fraud is certainly a possibility--it happens even in America--and signs of fraud have appeared. Large numbers of votes were swiftly counted, which raises the question whether votes were counted or merely a result was announced.

The US media’s response to the election was equally rapid. Having invested heavily in demonizing Ahmadinejad, the media is unwilling to accept election results that vindicate Ahmadinejad and declared fraud in advance of evidence, despite the pre-election poll results published in the June 15 Washington Post, which found Ahmadinejad to be the projected winner.

There are many American interest groups that have a vested interest in the charge that the election was rigged. What is important to many Americans is not whether the election was fair, but whether the winner’s rhetoric is allied with their goals.

For example, those numerous Americans who believe that both presidential and congressional elections were stolen during the Karl Rove Republican years are tempted to use the Iranian election protests to shame Americans for accepting the stolen Bush elections.

Feminists take the side of the "reformer" Mousavi.

Neoconservatives damn the election for suppressing the "peace candidate" who might acquiescent to Israel’s demands to halt the development of Iranian nuclear energy.

Ideological and emotional agendas result in people distancing themselves from factual and analytical information, preferring instead information that fits with their material interests and emotional disposition.

The primacy of emotion over fact bids ill for the future. The extraordinary attention given to the Iranian election suggests that many American interests and emotions have a stake in the outcome"

It's not just the Labour regime melting down

Gordon Brown's government is just in total tatters.

I remember some time ago under Blair when Labour had a particularly bad day, the BBC's Andrew Marr said you'd have to go back to the days of Michael Foot to find a time when Labour had such bad publicity. I can't even think what would be a comparison now.

Labour are in massive trouble, and Gordon Brown, who I do feel sorry for, appears to be a complete lame duck just waiting to be hung out to dry. Apparently even the Guardian are calling for Brown to resign.

However it's important to realise that the MP's expenses scandal has not only damaged politicians, it has also massively damaged the media itself.

The Guardian have been hit very hard by this and are in a very difficult, very compromised position, and they can't create an adequate explanation to their readers why they didn't break the 'story' themselves.

And the problem is the entire journalistic establishment knew all about this for ever. They just didn't care a hoot. And they didn't care a hoot because, as I've said on here a number of times now: it's not a serious issue to begin with.

It's just not important.

Now's it been made important to get rid of the government and the rest of them don't know what to do, and are starting to look even more under strain than the politicians.

If you want to get a picture of how desperate this is for them, about a week and a half ago the Guardian published an article by Andrew Rawnsley claiming this cynicism about MPs is 'bad for democracy', and what I came away from that article is that they simply don't know what to say at all about this.

In the atmosphere surrounding this they can't explain to their readers adequately why they didn't break it themselves, but at the same time it's not a serious issue to begin with.

Now on top of that because it's gone the way it has, and because it's attached the usual childish fantastic reasons why it wants to believe this is a serious issue, The Guardian is actually in a state of real cognitive dissonance on this, and it's probably why they have gone even more potty, like a cat with worms, than they normally are.

So understand what the Guardian is doing. It's jumping just like the politicians have been jumping and it's trying to rescue its own battered credibility.

The Media's attack on Susan Boyle

Ok I'm sorry to do this, but I want to comment again on Susan Boyle and some of the stuff going on in the press, because it's actually gone out of control now, and it's starting to look ridiculous.

There's a considerable effort going on to manipulate this into something else from all quarters of the media which really concerns me. The level of rhetoric around this is actually frightening.

The Guardian has serious problems with Susan Boyle as we've already seen, so today let's start with Amanda Platell in the Daily Mail, assuming she actually wrote this article it's so extraordinary.

In a shocking commentary, Platell suggests that it was inevitable that this "middle-aged woman with learning difficulties" (again constantly reminded about this -j) would "unravel before our very eyes" , that she would 'break down' (really not sure what this means) and that this would create more 'freakish' spectacle. Ultimately Platell concludes, it was "wrong to take an awkward, 48-year-old virgin with a good but not great voice, (but clearly demonstrating worrying signs of stress) and thrust her on to the national stage ".

Does this sound like someone normal, someone reasonably comfortable with themselves and their life writing this ?

Platell even says that isn't it good that "David Wilson, Professor of Criminology at Birmingham City University, warned in last week's Mail that Susan was too fragile to take the pressure."

Professor of Criminology ? What was Susan's crime ?

And I find it mindboggling that Platell suggests that Boyle is 'not qualified' or you have to be a certain sort of person to be allowed to perform or something and that certain sort of person will be able to deal with the stresses of fame afterward.

There's many top name celebrities who really haven't been able to deal with the rigors of incredible success either, long before Susan Boyle came along. If Amanda Platell had a memory longer than a few minutes she might like to check the Daily Mail's archives. I'd say Boyle is doing rather well.

A tiny bit of what Platell is saying about Cowell is true. No question that Cowell and his researchers knew exactly what was going on very early on, and loved what they saw and went with it. No question there's been 'presentation' shall we say. But you know something ? That's not the crime here. And as far as I can tell from what I've read, that presentation, although by no means should be seen as the entire person, seems reasonably in accord with Susan's background.

And I should say as well, if it's that crooked in the way Platell suggests, then guys, you can't help but ask the question, why not make it so crooked that she just wins ? You see that's what's missing here. That's what's conspicuous.

Of course the other thing that's very conspicuous are these pages and pages of astonishing vitriol written about this woman. Which as far as I can see, a lot of journalists want to deride Susan Boyle through various articles designed to not look like they are trying to do that, by seemingly chastising others for doing so. The mysterious: 'them', 'those people', 'them out there' are doing it. Or in particular 'we' did this to Susan or 'we' did that. I'm not aware I've done anything. Amazing. And they don't think anyone is seeing straight through it.

You see, if you really think she is pathetic, why are you writing this stuff? That would say a lot more about you than Susan Boyle. There's a clue guys to one of the big issues in this.

They want us to believe Simon Cowell is bad, for in their analysis, creating a 'freak show', which I think is a seriously unpleasant injection, and just not correct in Boyle's case. I'm just not aware of Susan Boyle being a 'freak' in a 'freak show' other than the likes of Amanda Platell wanting to tell us that.

And what Amanda Platell in the Mail, Tanya Gold, Joan Smith et al in The Guardian and others like them don't seem to understand is Simon Cowell's not putting a gun to your head making you repeatedly write this shit over and over. And folks I'm not defending Cowell who's clearly a very slippery and shadowy character.

He's not making you tell us again, and again and again and again, how she 'should' suddenly be defined at the outset by her alleged learning difficulties. And then you tell us she is 'cracking up', 'breaking down' and we are failing our 'duty of care' then you repeat stuff about 'hairy angel', 'spinster', 'vulnerable', 'insecure', 'wanting to fit in' (which I don't agree with) and the that whole thing has been a 'freak show after all' and all about humiliation, is akin to 'bear bating', and presumably she's the freak either way even if the creation of the freak show is not her fault. Platell tells us the dream has become a nightmare. Apparently she can't win.

I just find this extraordinary. It's so utterly vile, so difficult to disguise as anything other than bitter poisonous vitriol it really makes we wonder about those writing this stuff, apparently trying to feel better about themselves at Susan Boyle's expense.

And what's fascinating is Platell is effectively asking us to believe Susan Boyle doesn't exist, but guess what folks ? Platell starts her article by telling us how Diversity (with that name to boot) does.

You see this is what's wrong guys. You can't have it both ways.

Part of Platell and the others must also really think Simon Cowell is wonderful, as his evil machinations have created such an easy target for them to bash. Platell and her ilk thinks it's safe territory and won't reflect on them, and because everyone is doing it in the media that makes it ok.

Wrong. Everyone isn't doing it. Everyone isn't calling Susan Boyle every name under the Sun and thinking that behavior is normal. Same way everyone isn't saying how terrible the MP's expenses scandal is either. I'm not. And Platell who I who I once used to like, should be very careful of copying others, you may just fall off a cliff and embarrass yourself.

You claim that Susan Boyle was humiliated. Funny. I see it the other way round. I see journalists humiliating themselves over this in trying to tell us this stuff. You claim Boyle 'didn't know what she was doing'. Funny. I see it the other way round and you don't know what you're doing or you just wouldn't be doing it.

What Platell doesn't get, she really doesn't get, is who's being manipulated here. She just can't get it. They all think they are powerful and telling the 'truth'.

What happened with Susan Boyle was a phenomenal thing, perhaps one of the greatest pieces of entertainment media in a very long time. It was brilliant and astounding and an amazing global success, with a wonderful message to it. I just wonder if that message became a little bit dangerous, and later down the line there was an attempt to reel it back in at least as far as this show goes, with dubious headlines being leaked out about Boyle, and a new atmosphere that would be fed to the press. And I just don't think a lot of people in the media understand this.

The level of this everywhere from the Guardian to the Mail is what's really bizarre, and maybe it's because Boyle represents a complete rejection of most of these journalist's lives, and she makes them very uncomfortable. This is then spun maliciously into a list of flaws about Boyle, which we are now suddenly 'supposed' to see her through, despite her incredible achievements on that show.

I very much doubt Amanda Platell, Tanya Gold and Joan Smith are ever going to hold themselves up to that criteria, and would see it as 'completely unacceptable' and an outrageous 'moral abomination' yet they are quite happy to hold Susan Boyle to it.

I said this at the time. People like Boyle are not well liked because they are a bit quirky or whatever, I actually think they are seen as slightly threatening.

There is a strength in her image and meekness, and it's symbolic. And that initial performance that captured the imagination of the world reminds everybody that the world is a complex place rather than a world of brainless stereotypes. A little bit of that may be ok, but in the end it's not liked. Power wants a world of brainless stereotypes, and from any angle Susan Boyle doesn't represent one of their 'cool' ones.

And that's why she was punished in the final. And everything she stands for, her background, her Britishness, her independence and incredible popularity can all be trumped with a 'modern' meaningless nothing word like 'diversity' as a far more suitable message to everyone.

There is a mistake people make, especially people in the alternative news. Not everything the media does is bad. Sometimes light breaks through, but it typically doesn't break through for very long, and may indeed break through for other reasons that we can all easily be too cynical and circumspect about later on, but it breaks through nonetheless.

And in the end, the Simon Cowells of this world don't decide whether people have talent or have a special gift or not. Their talent, their gifts, their personality and their soul stand up all by themselves.

The things that are underhand, cynical, and outright twisted about all this are that Susan Boyle didn't win Britain's Got Talent and that the British media have been so easily manipulated into attacking her, and exposed as ridiculous, insecure bitter cretins in doing so.

BGT Final: Cruel PC joke to play on Susan Boyle ?

Ok, I'm sure I'll get criticised for talking about this, but I just wanted to comment on Britain's Got Talent again. I saw the front pages of the newspapers today and was almost flabbergasted to see that Susan Boyle didn't win it.

I said before I was always wary of Simon Cowell. I don't like the guy. It's more than just his pantomime bad cop part he plays on that show. Cowell's role as both producer and judge reminds me of a politician in government, presiding over something where his control or ability to influence a lot of variables outweighs our ability to give him the benefit of the doubt.

There's something both nauseating and sinister about his almost-camp denigrations of performers, and the way we are supposed to listen to what he's got to say about anything seems to be based around the fact he's simply on the panel.

After watching some of the clips of the Britain's Got Talent final that people have uploaded, there's seems me little question that Cowell knew exactly what was going to happen with Boyle.

Indeed, if we go back, a large part of that earlier show with her was constructed or produced shall we say around her image, and some people I know have said they thought it was incredibly cynical of the producers to do that, knowing this would initially get a certain reaction by the audience. The only I thing I would says is it's not a crime to create or facilitate new, uplifting and phenomenal entertainment that way, but I think it's playing with fire to then to turn the tap off right at last moment.

Obviously, which I didn't know at the time when I first posted about this, this woman has become a phenomenon across the entire internet. Even in the ultra-cynical circles of alternative news, John Stadtmiller of RBN dedicated a radio show to Susan Boyle at the time.

So anyway I had a look at this dance group Diversity's performance who did win. It's very good. And it's great achievement. But there's a lot of dancers who can do that kind of stuff at a very high level, in fact they had another act on the same series called Flawless. It's not that unusual or novel or lends itself that well to concentrated stardom.

I used to dance in an amateur capacity (very amateur) for some years, dance is incredibly tough and a wonderful wonderful thing, and I'm not knocking any of it, but it also somewhat strains reality to see Diversity or frankly any dance act trump Susan Boyle in the kinds of stakes that we would lean towards if this were being run properly.

Again I don't want to take anything away from them and their tremendous abilities and performance, but to me 'Diversity' winning is more about diversity winning, and you can't help but feel there could be a little sinister message being beamed out that it's all about multicultural, multiracial, pro-immigration beats little British quaint white woman Susan Boyle, in her little village which is presumably full of bigots.

That seems to be the message we are supposed to go away with, and which is also a really cruel and utterly inappropriate joke to make at Susan Boyle's expense, and at the expense of her global army of fans.

Also I didn't understand why Boyle was advised to sing that same song again. As good as it was in the final she had already given the performance of a lifetime with it once, no need to repeat it. She should have had a different song for the final, and people have dug up other wonderful things she's sung so it's not like she has to sing that song again.

I'm not too sure as I'm not familiar with these kinds of shows, I've read different things, but people I know who know this show better than I do tell me that the public voted in this final, and that Diversity were therefore the public's choice. Please correct me someone if that's not correct.

Personally, I just find that very difficult to believe. To me it seems to strain reality that she didn't win this show based on the incredible public support she's had. Of course she is a winner anyway with a fantastic career for her, multi-million pound record deal with Simon Cowell and an army of fans around the world so on, but still I just can't see how she didn't win the competion.

But Piers Morgan might have let the cat out of the bag.

People who only appeared on Earth in the last few years might believe that Piers Morgan is just a sort of celebrity socialite and personality in his own right. But of course he does have an impressive track record of being a rightly outspoken critic of the Iraq War, so outspoken he was effectively set up to take him out of being the editor of the Daily Mirror.

Morgan took the Mirror (one imagines kicking and screaming) from being a worthless moron's rag not fit to wipe your ass with, to become perhaps the most outspoken anti-War newspaper in living memory for the time he was editor.


And Morgan seemed to be aware that some sort of tide had been turning against Boyle, and suggested he knew a decision had already been made, and spoke out against that correctly, saying,

"Susan I'm not supposed to favour anyone in this competinon. As a judge I should be impartial. But you know what ? Forget it. That to me was the greatest performance I've seen in Britain's Got Talent history. You should win this competion, I loved it."



Indeed Cowell didn't seem to like it, saying "I don't know who's going to win". I don't believe that.

Susan Boyle should have just won plain and simple.

And I'd just like to comment on some of the commentary I've seen on this in the press today, particularly in The Observer, hard copy of which I was reading earlier, the level of which was actually outrageous.

The journalist started by repeatedly asserting Susan had some difficulties during birth, and therefore had learning difficulties. Unfortunately I can't find the article online on The Guardian's site today, it seems to be only in the hard copy of The Observer. But it was just gratuitous and he repeatedly kept referring to this. So what was the point of it ?

I mean is it ok to start by characterizing this Observer writer as middle aged, having a bald spot, a fat gut and small dick, and that everything he's writing about must be seen through that lens ? That's the level of it. Absolutely shocking, and I have no idea why they wrote what they did in the way they did. They should make a public apology.

Project Camelot

Anyone remember WING TV ^(site) ? A guy in a hat who called himself Victor Thorn and his girlfriend Lisa Guliani. This was for a while a not terrible grass roots alternative media program which at times had some interesting guests and interviews, and some reasonable review sections of other alternative media, and reflections and had some energy.

Unfortunately at some point, it started to go badly wrong, becoming one of a small collection of shit-stirring potty troll sites in the truth/patriot/alternative news movement, regularly attacking others, as well as getting involved in various troll wars with other fringe sites and dubious individuals when it couldn't get attention.

In the end it collapsed in the aftermath of the controversy surrounding the arrest of then American Free Press's Christopher Bollyn.

I just came across a newish alternative news site with a woman and guy (also in a hat) who I presume are partners, in front of the camera it reminded me about that.

This site is called Project Camelot, and it presents itself as a site for government whistle blowers. One can't help noticing it also happens to be a kind of Who's Who of more out there guests from alternative talk radio.

Its slant is decidedly not realpolitick, more UFOs/Aliens/Roswell/New age/Aquarian that kind of thing. If I recall WING TV incorporated some of that stuff to some small degree too.

And Project Camelot have done some quite long and detailed interviews with different guests, and it's a nice new change for the alternative media to have almost a chat show format; face to face with guests on the couch, and the presentation works very well. And Project Camelot could be the Richard and Judy of alternative media.

Personally some of the guests which include names familiar to alternative talk radio listeners such Dr Bill Deagle and Leo Zagami, I've never been fully persuaded are bona fide whistle blowers as such, whether Project Camelot genuinely believe differently I don't know, and you're never sure if this couple know what they have walked into with this.

The famous David Icke makes an appearance on Camelot as well (in a very slightly over-talked interview by the couple interviewing - remember it's the guest people are primarily going to want to listen to, although it's by no means the worse example of this), as does Jim Marrs who's a well known figure in the American patriot movement for his work on the JFK Assassination.

I very much enjoyed their short video about the Crystal Skull, which I was always intrigued by as a child.

Project Camelot certainly seem a nice couple of people, who are interested in what they are doing, and they look like they enjoy making these productions, and I certainly think people interested in this kind of material would want to check out what they've put together and what they offer.

Their content thus far is a long way away from hard nosed political understanding, more a concentrated dose of the Rense/Icke/global consciousness type stuff, which while will appeal to fans of that genre, will be seen as a bogging down distraction to many others, kind of like dropping pornography on Iraq.

I wish them well with their area and goals, remembering there's plenty of real world whistle blowers who are not claiming to be members of the Illuminati, or claiming there are civilizations on the Moon. Even Wing TV interviewed one of them: Mordechai Vanunu* (>>>>>).

(* Edit: looking for that, a huge alternative news resource has gone down. Really important and significant shows from tons of different alt media, all annotated, including a lot of hard to find stuff has gone offline , which was at http://www.911verses.com/underground/. Real shame -j, but they have maintained their WING TV archive here).

pssst pass it round... #amazonfail like...dude

Drum rolll.......

Do you remember 'WE ARE NOT AFRAID ?"

Shhh..listen. The latest hot citizen news is in: it's called...wait for it....

DAH DAH DAH!!!!......

AMAZONFAIL!

And it's all the buzz on uber-spakwad plebplob site Twitter apparently and a bunch of blogs.

And it's all do to with the heinous crime that Amazon had apparently temporarily delisted some gay and lesbian books from their searches or sale ranks. Apparently it was just a mistake anyway, but a look at the disproportionate furor it caused, or rather we are led to believe it caused shows that some people have got real problems with their political priorities, and without question that's being supported by the media.

Amazon are a huge business, and even it wasn't a mistake I kind of doubt they would have had any political reason reason behind this.

The Wall Street Journal's blog says:

"In the message, Amazon said it excludes “adult” material from searches and best-seller lists by not calculating their sales ranks. Mr. Probst (some blogger ? -j) wrote that the “adult” classification didn’t apply to several of the targeted books and that some adult-oriented books, including a hardcover edition of “Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds,” continued to maintain their ranking. He also pointed to the blog of Craig Seymour, a writer who has noted his troubles with Amazon and sales rankings since February"

And of course the WSJ loves it, as do the media as a whole, because the whole gay issue has tremendous utility as a proxy issue, and has possibly become the de facto way of chipping away at the status quo by proxy.

Personally, and I don't mean to be rude, but I don't see some extension of the civil rights movement at all in any of this stuff.

I don't know about this blogger, and it's not all gays, but overall you do see a group of hysterical people trying to rationalise themselves predominantly, and completely the wrong way and getting certain quite important things wrong and alienating themselves even more in the process.

And we see this repeated mistake, this goof, that unfortunately some gay people do have about themselves, that's been encouraged by the media, and that the media propagate which is that: the gay lifestyle has a right to be seen as an equal partner to heterosexuality, and in pretty much any context.

Some of it may just be people who mean well, but frankly, at some point, someone has to say something as well. Sure the odd article in the Daily Mail has come close to this at times, but I don't think seriously it can or should be seen as an equal partner per se and I think trying to do that is a distortion and error for a whole bunch of reasons, and in that sense Amazon are indeed under no obligation to present any books in principle, which is what these campaigners are worried about.

Note I'm not suggesting they shouldn't be published or burnt, what I'm saying is that how others treat them is an entirely different matter. It's not an issue of equality, as the WSJ suggest:

"Neil Giuliano, president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, says in a statement: “GLAAD has reached out to Amazon.com and they indicate this was an error, so we expect to start seeing evidence of its correction immediately, and any loss of visibility of gay-themed books as a result of this error will be made right by Amazon … When people learn about the lives of gay and transgender people and the common ground we share, the culture changes and advances. It is so important that stories about the lives of our community are available, and that companies like Amazon promote these titles in an equal fashion”

Why ? I'm sure most people aren't that interested in them, and the idea that some gay romances excluded on Amazon represent some 'important' cultural fabric in general that people are 'missing out' on because they are gay is, just probably delusion if that's what's being suggested. And unfortunately we have seen several examples how the organised gay lobby globally is not a rational lobby, but an hysterical and even psychotic one, that's very much a complete renunciation of the most basic 'common ground'.

It's not just enough to blame the wider society for those problems.

If anything its real utility is as a proxy for other issues of 'diversity' and for the media to chip away at essentially Western, conservative, basically normative society.

I don't believe the gay lobby has a whole lot of power on its own or is that significant on its own. Most of that power comes from what the media grants it, and where it's supportive it is so for other reasons.

On the other hand I don't believe all gay people subscribe to the worst aspects of their own frankly dreadful representation and image.

We are probably going to talk about this more at some point, and it's something one always does with a bit of a heavy heart, as it's a topic no one really wants to talk about.

Jade Goody dies of cancer (dies of media ?)

Guardian: "Reality television star Jade Goody, who was diagnosed with cervical cancer last year, has died, her publicist said this morning"

Certainly our prayers are with Jade and her family.

I don't really know what to make about this story. I know it's not the kind of thing we usually talk about on here. As I understand it, some arrangement between Jade and the press was made as regards some of this for the benefit of her children, but I never liked the way this was presented.

Frankly I felt the media held court over a culture of death with the specific and deliberate intention to normalise that culture of death and this bizarre macabre voyeurism about someone very ill, and I don't believe anything hugely positive came out of that or that had any positive effect on Jade or those close to her.

I remember the front of the Daily Mirror day in day out for the last 2 months or more instructing us all how Jade is about to die any minute, I remember reading some column by Dr Hillary Jones (who remembers him ?) saying how it's all going to be so painless for Jade and telling us how she is going to die.

Personally I think this is grotesque. When I saw that I thought, if he hasn't been already, he really should be struck off the list from medical practice.

All this coverage has been vile. Jade obviously was very ill, but not one prayer or wish for a miracle, not even a a glimmer of hope, nothing that was even a flicker of the struggle for life.

Nothing.

I think that message is itself depraved, destructive, and disgusting. And that's the message this media and this rotten government loves to pump out, day in day out.

The Guardian reflect on some of Jade's career and recall how the 'public turned against her' after she made some off-the-cuff comment, which was almost certainly whipped up into a frenzy by this same ghoulish race-obsessed media at the time.

So the hell what ?

It's true that newspapers and so on write obituaries well before someone actually dies, but in this case, based on their track record here, you can't help the sensing 'mission accomplished' by our wonderful media.

Rest in Peace Jade.

The recent attack on the Catholic Church

I meant to get this done last night. I wanted to comment a little on this recent thing with the Bishop and the Pope and the Vatican , which I think has been conspicuous as perhaps of one of the more wanton attempts to attack the Catholic Church I've seen the media come up with.

There are sensitive topics buried in this for sure, but frankly it's also the height of vulgarity for the media as a whole, for Jewish groups, commentators and non-Jewish sympathisers, along with the likes of Angela Merkel to try to grandstand by creating a campaign out of the views of one man, against the recent backdrop of the horrors in Gaza at the hands of Israel, and the overall situation there for some time.

I think it's very conspicuous.

From the BBC, to the New York Times to the Times of London, what we have witnessed is nothing short of just another concerted vicious campaign of egregious drivel dressed up in the usual secular probity to needlessly whip up controversy using some guy nobody had even heard of, almost certainly set up to have exactly this effect, to preemptively attack the Church to make sure it doesn't step too out of line, and in particular to provide another wonderful distraction to the recent gutting of Gaza.

Of course this is all the while propagandizing the usual message to the hapless proles that the Church is secretly wicked, backward, and so on, and must demonstrate its commitment to all things we the media tell it are 'worthy' including its own castration.

Well that's what psychotic drivel is. While we understand people wanting to do what may seem like the right thing, I think it's incorrect to frame these issues around some bottomless pit of endless interfaith 'placation', and I'm kind of lost as to how the role of the Church is supposed to be demonstrated first and foremost as whatever the media tells it it should be.

It should just be itself.

And this all too familiar picture of having to pay sufficient reverence to the crimes of the Holocaust, is one that's become way outside of just basic decency, sympathy, understanding and good will. And it's not just the Holocaust, the structure of this is used over and over again.

I'm sorry to say, at least in what I've seen plucked out and presented by the media which I have no doubt could well be flawed, I can't help but be somewhat inquisitive with some of the things said or at least how their are framed, such as the Pope apparently having to express his "indisputable solidarity with Jews".

I'm no theologian but surely the Church has a indisputable solidarity to all mankind.

And why seriously was German Chancellor Angela Merkel telling the Pope what to do ? What serious explanation is there for this ? Enough of this crap already. This is silly. This is just not healthy.

Excuse my language, but Angela Merkel looks like a real f*cking joke. Even more of a f*cking joke and ridiculous puppet than she did, and that's truly saying something.

And really I find this use of the Holocaust to attack things that are inherently good, absolutely vile actually. It gets to a point of sickly awfulness.

You see there is a bottom rung of reality, and if we can't even meet that rung, what's the point ?

Now the Bishop has been sacked from his post, much to the delight of the global media establishment, despite him being almost irrelevant in this, just another ticked box on the list of things to quote Reuters of how the Pope has 'angered Jews'.

There's no polite way of saying this, but I suspect the Catholic Church should be 'angering Jews'. Not as a mission, but simply as part of its business of believing something different.

Look at the words 'ultra-traditionalist' in the BBC's version, as if that's something despicable.

Well you know what, I think that's a wonderful thing to be an' ultra-traditionalist'.

And that's after the Vatican demanded the Bishop recants, presumably after being told what to do by Angela Merkel.

So much for the Vatican secretly running the world.

And I'm going to say something else shocking now. Devastating though the crimes of WWII were, the world doesn't revolve around the Holocaust and being seen to pay it sufficient reverence in the form of tokens of appeasement and the whole thing played out like some ridiculous childish spectacle in the media.

This ghoulish fascination, this sickly surveillance to see who dares put a foot out of line, or can be coerced or provoked to put a foot out of line on the Holocaust and how that can be seized upon to attack institutions, has got to stop.

At some point it gets ridiculous and I think many good people out there who would normally be horrified and hungry for knowledge at many of the things that went on during World War II are now after being bombarded with this stream of nonsense, starting to say the Holocaust seems to be code for something else, and is that something else something I should care about ?

And the world is sick of these whining pages of drivel in the Times dedicated to demonstrating why some part of the Church is not sufficiently apologetic, acquiescent and philo-semitic enough.

The world is sick of hearing how 'good' 'Christians' worshiping at the fount of The War on Terror, Israel's sickening barbarism against Palestians and the moral, legislative and administritive deconstruction of their own societies and are 'real Christians', 'progressive Christians', 'moderate Christians'.

Frankly fuck off.

The problem for the media is (and I hate to be so sweeping but that's how it is) it's dug itself into a hole over this and tried to run with it in a million different sub-directions, tripping over itself to try to escalate the issue into some trend of not exactly 'pro Jewish' sentiment. Apparently the Vatican's has no other duties or concerns but to agree.

Personally I think the Vatican should be pro-Christian and pro-mankind, and the Pope should follow his own position, quoted in the Guardian back in August 2005 when :

"...Israel criticised Pope Benedict for not mentioning attacks on Israelis in a condemnation of terrorism. The Vatican responded with a terse statement asking Israel not to tell the Pope what to say"

But then again all of this whole sordid affair in the media shows how reasonable, and humble and gracious the Pope is, and frankly how unreasonable, vicious, hate-filled, nasty and childish and psychotic his enemies in the media and this particular campaign against him and the Catholic Church has been.

'Exposing financial corruption' !!!

We still haven't looked in depth at the financial crisis/recession/depression/crunch etc really yet, but actually there's a section of what's going on somewhat connected to all of it or actually even blamed for it as well to some degree, that's such a ridiculous cruel joke I guess we may as well talk about it. It's exemplified by an article in today's Times.

I should point out all the conservative press is guilty of this and probably most of the left press as well. So here's the story from the Times:

"THE financier who has been appointed to protect taxpayers’ money in Britain’s bailed-out banks is a former trustee of a secretive Liechtenstein bank accused of facilitating massive tax evasion.

Glen Moreno, who chairs the powerful body that oversees the government’s £37 billion shareholding in the banks, was paid hundreds of thousands of pounds during a nine-year association with Liechtenstein Global Trust (LGT), a private bank based in the tax haven.

The disclosures are an embarrassment for Gordon Brown, who last week criticised offshore tax havens and called for international action to stamp out tax evasion.

“Advising the rich to exploit tax loopholes is unpatriotic,” the prime minister has said in the past. The bank was strongly criticised by name by President Barack Obama when he was a senator"

You can read the rest of it if you want I wouldn't bother. But this idea, that somehow the press is 'exposing financial corruption' and this is presumably supposed to find a resonance with a lot of people struggling to make ends meet and so on is a very common one that is repeated constantly.

Just unfortunate then that's not what's happening at all when you see this stuff.

First off it's the height of irony that The Times, along with the Daily Mail and so on which essentially should be pro-business, pro-corporation, anti-tax, small government etc gives such a lot of space to what they purport are white collar financial intrigues (note tax loopholes are a not exactly an intrigue). But that's the clue.

Anyway in this specific example in the Times we get the usual general implicit message beamed out that taxation is an immutable destiny of the state, that tax is a perpetual duty of everybody and that there is something so utterly despicable about people who think otherwise.

The idea is that perpetually closing loop holes, and more and more draconian tax legislation is a wonderful thing and an ongoing noble quest of government and so on.

And yeah, all of the above is not aimed at any fat cats with really ridiculous money that's squarely aimed at you.

We also, in this case, get the implicit message that individuals avoiding taxes could somehow be to blame for the financial situation, along with the idea that some yet even more sinister 'reforms' of world banking are the only answer.

But enough of me writing on this.

Superb analysis of this kind of thing has been done by academic, writer and activist Noam Chomsky, and I can't recommend enough these 3 videos on YouTube where he is interviewed by Andrew Marr of the BBC on the subject of the media. (these clips are over 10 years old)

So as far as this article in The Times goes let's just quote Chomsky on this (YouTube 3:16+):

"Big business is not in favour of corruption. And if the press focuses on corruption Fortune Magazine will be quite happy with it...

They don't want the society to be corrupt, they want it to be run in their interests.

...Corruption interferes with that."

Chomsky goes on:

"So for example when I came back from India, the Bank of India released an estimate, economists there tell me it's low, that a third of the economy is black, meaning mostly rich businessmen not paying their taxes. Well that makes the press because in fact certainly transnationals don't like it.

They want the system to be run without corruption...just pouring money into their pockets. So yes that's a fine topic for the press"

And as well that brings up the whole point about big government, and big government spending and the mix of big government and big business that for the so-called 'conservative' press usually mysteriously vanishes when discussing some financial intrigue or another.

Stop Press: Catholic Church are behind the world's villainy!

It's struck me a number of times over the last year or so that there are a lot of basically good people out there who have acquired a kind of instinctive or reflex-like apathy, distrust or even repulsion toward religion but in particular Christianity, which, astonishingly is the main villain.

In America this is much worse where there appears to be a chunk of U.S society that has learned absolutely nothing from the last eight years and associates Christianity with Bush, and believes, amazingly, that Bush is the grand poobah mastermind behind the Iraq War and that the War in Iraq is some kind of Christian mission for Bush and Cheney.

I know it's amazing, and it's also the seeds of something potentially quite dangerous.

When you first see this it's so astonishing, it's so like a kind of 'backwardation' of thought, so tremendously saddening that's it's difficult to know exactly how to broach the topic, other than that you're dealing with some sometimes quite damaged and vulnerable people who want to believe something that suits them, and you when gently try to explain to them what's wrong, you can be met with a lot of anger, until reality starts to break through. And we're going to be talking more about that in detail soon.

And actually there are some interesting polls on this kind of thing, cited on a dreadful and almost otherwise worthless, but extremely revealing page on Wikipedia:

"David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Institute, and Gabe Lyons of the Fermi Project published a study of attitudes of 16-29 year old Americans towards Christianity. They found that about 38% of all those who did not regularly attend church had negative impressions of Christianity, and especially evangelical Christianity, associating it with conservative political activism, hypocrisy, anti-homosexuality, and judgmentalism.[5] About 17% had "very bad" perceptions of Christianity" (my emphasis -j)

Yeah we are gonna talk about this more directly at some point. Actually the Wikipedia article does a lot of the work for us.

And bringing this up to date there is little question that this height of irony, of letting 'Christianity' take the blame for the Iraq War has been allowed to fester in the minds of some vulnerable folks and go uncorrected in the dwindling months of the Bush presidency, if not outright brewed.

Christian fundamentalists/Christian Zionists in America are one thing, but the Catholic Church is also conspicuously regularly a subject of scorn, mistrust, ridicule, or spurious and inapplicable or juvenile moralising or even theorized as as some shadowy hand shaping events.

Most people have their own reasons about how they view religion that are personal to them, they may have had a religious upbringing, not all of them are exactly 'enamored' with every single experience of it, it's a mixed bag as it would be for everybody whatever the culture.

Others simply don't care for religion and so on. But then that brings up the question if they don't like religion and are not involved in it, where does the particular culture of dislike and scorn come from ?

As I said at the outset this can be a challenging topic for people new to it, but broadly radical hostility towards Christian institutions has a long history and irrespective of whether or not you feel about religion, in the 20th and 21st centuries the media has done a very effective job of setting up attitudes towards the Church, that are often distorted, skewed, provocative or Orwellian (note NYT's use of lanaguage) are just out and out attempts to demonize it.

And it's doing it constantly. Constantly the Catholic Church is framed and attacked (as is this extreme psychotic example) as a stuffy old villain or inanely being told it ought to be struggling with some crisis that is the fault of its own moral retardation.

And it's not lot like this stuff has gone unnoticed or something:

"The archbishop of Westminster declared that he feared contemporary society is increasingly marked by "secular dogmatism or cynicism" toward Christians. He stated: "So when Christians stand by their beliefs, they are intolerant dogmatists. When they sin, they are hypocrites. When they take the side of the poor, they are soft-headed liberals. When they seek to defend the family, they are right-wing reactionaries."

And it's funny that a lot of folks proudly claim they are 'freethinkers', and 'unencumbered' of institutional brainwashing, some even declare how they don't trust the media when it comes to something that Bush said about Iraq, or if it comes to the economy or crime statistics or this or that.

But when it comes to this they trust the media, and they trust the media's motives ?

And I've just linked to two examples, but the easiest way is just to carry on taking a look, and this is not exhaustive, this is a very very clumsy and crude quick glimpse at this:

But we are going to go with something a little different before we get back onto the mainstream, and it's something that was quite influential on me and a brilliant piece of alternative radio. Some people may say well Mr Jultra you're undermining the obvious point that you're making by choosing something like this. Well let's see.

There is a very famous debate in alternative news circles from May 16, 2006 between a fellow called Eric Jon Phelps who believes that the Vatican and the Black Pope and the Jesuits are controlling the world and perhaps one of the most interesting and perhaps one of the best non-mainstream serious political researchers and writers in the America, also a world expert on the JFK Assassination that's Michael Collins Piper.

And I should point out Mike Piper is 'controversial' as it were, and you may even find the topic of the debate they agreed to puerile or vulgar, but whatever you come away with you will not come away thinking the Vatican is behind all the bad stuff in the world and you will come away thinking Phelps probably shouldn't have come to that debate, and should be taking some medication.

The debate is fascinating listening and I think as far as we are talking about it's pretty well summarized when Mike says:

"The Civiltà Cattolica* which is a Vatican approved newspaper even went so far as to suggest that a lot of the newspaper over-emphasis on some of these sex scandals in the Vatican and in the Catholic Church which are rightly being reported I might add, they said that the over-emphasis on that was because of the mass media being disturbed about the fact the Vatican did not support the war against Iraq" (4:00+)

(* And I think I've got the name of this right, someone correct me if I haven't)

Let's look at something else, something more up to date, and bear in mind the above as we do so.

In Sunday's Guardian/Observer the Pope is reported as bringing back some bishops, one of which who held some controversial views on the Holocaust. Doesn't have to be the Guardian, Fox News has the same slant, which is far more extreme, perhaps the most extreme is the New York Times, which is almost beside itself with glee.

Of course he's not being welcomed back because of that, the fact of which may as well be a side issue or non-existent wherever this story appears, however it contains a very sensitive topic so lets have a look at some of the rhetoric from The Guardian:

"Shimon Samuels, of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris, said he understood the German-born pope's desire for Christian unity but said Benedict could have excluded Williamson, whose return to the church will "cost" the Vatican politically."

and note this that's found it's way into the same article:

"Israeli officials recently protested when a senior cardinal said Israel's offensive in Gaza had turned it into a "big concentration camp"

A big concentration camp ? I think a lot of people would find that's a very polite and rather diplomatic understatement and it gives us a clue about what is being obscured here, after all it's not like the world doesn't understand the situation in Gaza, or that we need to look far for corroboration and we can just take out pick from anywhere. For example in 2006, special UN envoy John Dugard described the situation in Gaza as one where:

"Israel has turned the Gaza Strip into a prison for Palestinians
and have thrown away the key," adding that "in other countries this process might be described as ethnic cleansing" (ynet news)

More recently scholar and expert Norman Finkelstein, who last time I checked is not a Catholic described the situation in Gaza as a 'holocaust' and Israel a 'Satanic state' and goes on pithily:

" This state invaded in 1978, again in 1982, again in 1993, again in 1996, again in 2006, and 2008, and it always destroys, destroys and destroys. And then these satanic narcissistic people throw their hands up in the air and ask, “Why doesn’t anybody love us? Why don’t our neighbors want us to be here?” Why would they? "

So it's rather difficult to take that line of protestation by Israeli officials seriously when it comes to trying to aim it specifically at the Church.

Or try this for framing an issue also from the Guardian:

"The pope sparks controversy by defending heterosexuality!" Gosh what a monstrous thing to do. How evil and outrageous and wicked the Pope is I can't believe it. How dare heterosexuality be defended, it can't be right.

A few years ago such a headline would have been a spoof, and we'd all be laughing at it. Maybe we are supposed to be today ?

Or read some of the tone in this CNN obituary about Pope John Paul II, loaded with phrases like 'controversial', and 'moral opinions alienated many' (who? why ? Pope John Paul II was one of the popular Popes in modern times)

And this is not peculiarly about your view of religion. And it's not about trying to cover up where institutions have had people in them who have done immense wrong either. And if you want more conservative critique then here is an interview by Alex Jones with Hutton Gibson.

But there is no question media perpetuates an insidious culture of this which seems to be intended to become a cultural norm among the public, and certainly there is a chunk of the public that seems to go along with it, and yet declares they are enlightened in doing so, and it's little surprise because that's how it's sold to them.

And we could go on with examples all day long about this in the media. All of which seem to be designed to obscure and play down and attack the Church, its mission, its people, its works, its cultural influence and which politically has pitted it against the monstrous horrors of communism (CNN article again - don't be too happy with anti-communism), the atrocious crime of the Iraq War (take any pick), made Latin American Catholics the subjects of assassinations and attacks for delivering the liberation message of Christianity under a reign of state terror, received upon itself horrendous massacres and tortures of Catholics in Spain at the hands of communists, to something like today of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor fighting for all our basic freedoms (note the first comment on the article - is it a real person ?) and on and on and on.

No the Catholic Church are not a force for bad in the world. The Catholic Church are not 'bad' because they don't support abortion or homosexuality, because the media 'says' that's bad.

To put it simply the Catholic Church are rightly a hugely influential force for infinite good and reason and human dignity in the world and irrespective of individual faith, that's why they are demonized, marginalized and subject to ridiculous ongoing puerile critique in the media.

War criminal Blair's attack on the alternative media.

Let's just quickly look at this: Blair's recent attack effectively on blogs like this. I guess that means we have won the arguments then.

The speech contains the usual obvious soundbytes to set the tone like 'changing context' and '21st century' (see this) and so on.

Although Blair starts with the mainstream media, naturally, none of this is aimed at the BBC, or the Daily Mail, or the 'Independent' (who Blair duplicitously pretends to complain about) all of whom by far on balance, carry out the will of the same consituency Blair represents pretty much most of the time.

The mainstream media is either so utterly impotent or so totally complicit that it poses no threat at all and can usually be relied upon to comformatably blindly report spin from the government as news or fudge the issues of the day into crap like 'Germans put bugs in our wheelie bins'. It can be relied upon to be pro ID-cards (BBC), pro CCTV (BBC), pro European world government (BBC) and so on, pro 'War on Terror' (Telegraph, BBC) etc. It can't quite be too overtly pro- Iraq war these days, although privately, with the exception of ITN and perhaps one or 2 other outlets, the integrity of the MSM's 'anti-warness' has to be questioned.

So this whole stream of waffle by Blair is aimed squarely at the alternative media, and what Blair is trying to do is blame everyone else for the correctly appalled response to his vile crimes, the crimes of his party and supporters and backers.
Blair says:

"The damage saps the country's confidence and self-belief; it undermines its assessment of itself, its institutions; and above all, it reduces our capacity to take the right decisions, in the right spirit for our future.''

Sure, so you can get a nice compliant green light to drop bombs on Iran ? So you can get guillable British citizens to line up to join the quantized human pleb grid. So no one questions what happens when a 'terrorist event' occurs and all dotingly rally behind the government and start worshipping it again ?

But it is the country, not some nebulous desirable 'relationship between media and public life' that is wholly damaged, and it is Blair and his vile supporters that have willfully and with enormous and giddy glee caused that damage to the country and to its institutions. None of that is an accident, or some misunderstanding, on the contrary it's all quite deliberate.

It's not the alternative media that decided to declare War on Iraq, and it feverishly trying to create a conflict with Iran. It is not the alternative media that is obsessed with enslaving its population into a quantized grid, or uploading medical records and then sharing them council workers, installing CCTV netwoeks in every nook and crannie and putting bugs in wheelie bins, or trying to use the mini world government of the EU to collect people's private internet data. It's not the alternative media that gave a thumbs up to the bombing of Lebanon, or to the torture of people in Uzbekistan.

The alternative media is an appropriate response to that damage that Blair, Brown, Clarke, Reid, Milliband, Falconer, Hoon, Levy, Campbell, Mandelson and many others have caused.

And the only remedy for this terrible damage is in the alternative media, not in the ghoulish grotesque ambition of the stained Gordon Brown ever sweatily fumbling for power and trying to distance himself from the attrocities in Iraq when it is politically expedient to do so, or the outgoing speeches of a vile disgraced sociopath like Blair, or the hopeless projection of worthless ideas from various pro-regime Guardian columnists onto the rotting goverment.

The country is badly badly damaged as I've said here for a long time now, there's no point arguing about it, or denying it. It's just the reality, and a dangerously reality where it is becoming altogether undesirable to live here at all or even be associated with this country.

It is a really serious situation. The rule of law is badly damaged, the meaning of the state is enormously damaged, and the governement is irrepairrably damaged because of its own horrendous actions and it is so seriously compromised as an entity now, that quite honestly it is difficult to see what point there is in contributing to this mess anymore.

It should come as no surprise that such a rotting demonic monster, this conduit of global evil Mr Blair (with the approval of Mr Murdoch and buddies) instead still has the sheer audacity to try to spin it all around and blame everyone else for his own sickening behaviour and crimes against the world and this country. And again this should serve as an another reminder of why Blair is either so corrupted personally by forces acting on him, or who's own judgement is so monstrously flawed and distorted that he is basically incapable of making a judgement at all.

Therefore the only other thing that 'saps the country's confidence and self-belief... and...reduces our capacity to take the right decisions' is the attrocious fact that Blair and his cabinet, and large swathes of his party and financial supporters and supporters in the media have been permitted to carry on as long as they have by everyone else, when they should have been forcibly removed if neccessary long ago.

Tony Blair