Gratuitous eye candy

Ivestartedsoillfinish

While I'm on the subject, it's pretty clear what the new verld order would be like. It's Nazism writ large, it's fascism. It's the UN blown up to unmanageable proportions. And to the extent it is like the UN, it's what the UN have been up to in macro form:

• sex-slave trade in Bosnia
• refugee extortion racket in Kenya
• cover-up of sex-for-food scandal in West Africa
• complicity in massacres
• oil-for-food

Then there's what they haven't been up to, which is conferring "legitimacy" on anything. Or saving lives. Or, you know, helping. At all.
They're unelected, "connected", they're the "elites", which in a fascistic system means the mediocre, the venal, the unbearable do-gooders, the pompous, the humourless, the automatons, the ahuman, the grey, the anti-life, the cowardly.

The New Verld Order

There's a good chance you'll have heard about the hearing into the "legality" of the Iraq war. It's all over the bloody news, all the time - and Christ it's boring.

But what's really going on here? Something was bothering me about all this talk, especially on the BBC. They like to be the government lapdog, after all.

And then there's the nebulous issue of "legality." What do you mean, was it illegal? There is no international law. There's the UN, which is basically a criminal organisation. And has no legitimacy - no-one is "elected." Questions of legality are non-existent. You can say with reasoable certainty what is legal within one nation's borders or another's, but across borders?

But then of course. This is softening up the public to accept a very real transnational law. The same thing that Alex Jones has been talking about for while, and has been more or less admitted to by senior politicians including Gordon Brown. A New World Order, where there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide from the forces of totalitarianism.

I'd like to think that the burgeoning forces of anarchy unleashed by the internet will kill such ambitions before they get started, but there's still some uncertainty - especially since most of the world is going down a crazy route of indebtedness, asset bubbles and hyperinflation - and hence probably war.

There's been a coup, have you heard?

Ron Paul's quite right about the CIA, and perhaps quite brave for saying such things. No doubt they have a lengthy dossier on him!

Put on your sat fat hat

This would be a decent response to the ludicrous butter-banning doctor.

QOTD

From Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, by Keith Johnstone:


Most schools encourage children to be unimaginative. The research so far shows that imaginative children are disliked by their teachers. (p 76)

We see the artist as a wild and aberrant figure. Maybe our artists are the people who have been constitutionally unable to conform to the demands of the teachers. Pavlov found that there were some dogs that he couldn’t ‘brainwash’ until he’d castrated them, and starved them for three weeks. If teachers could do that to us, then maybe they’d achieve Plato’s dream of a republic in which there are no artists left at all.

Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better and more’respectful’ teaching, if we thought of adults as atrophied children. Many ‘well adjusted’ adults are bitter, uncreative frightened, unimaginative, and rather hostile people. Instead of assuming they were born that way, or that’s what being an adult entails, we might consider them as people damaged by their education and upbringing. (p 78)

We have an idea that art is self-expression – which historically is weird. An artist used to be seen as a medium through which something else operated. He was a servant of the God. Maybe a mask-maker would have fasted and prayed for a week before he had a vision of the Mask he was to carve, because no one wanted to see his Mask, they wanted to see the God’s... Once we believe that art is self-expression, then the individual can be criticised not only for his skill or lack of skill, but simply for being what he is. (pp 78-9)

At school... I learned that the first idea was unsatisfactory because it was (1) psychotic; (2) obscene; (3) unoriginal.

The truth is that the best ideas are often psychotic, obscene and unoriginal. (pp 82-3)

An artist who is inspired is being obvious. He’s not making any decisions, he’s not weighing one idea against another. He’s accepting his first thoughts... Striving after originality takes you far away from your true self, and makes your work mediocre. (p 88)

Nothing much for me to add, and there are endlessly quotable bits in this book, but here is another one that jumps out:

People with dull lives often think that their lives are dull by chance. In reality everyone chooses more or less what kind of events will happen to them by their conscious patterns of blocking and yielding. A student objected to this view by saying, ‘But you don’t choose your life. Sometimes you are at the mercy of people who push you around.’ I said, ‘Do you avoid such people?’ ‘Oh!’ she said, ‘I see what you mean.’ (p 100)

Dead Tree Media, null points

I see this on the same day as this. As a I learn more about the issue of health, fats and carbs, I now get pretty pissed off when I see things like that written in the Twatgraph. There's just no need for anyone to be so sloppy: the writer, the editor, or the "scientist" making the claims.

Good to see Free the Animal spotting the same appalling load of bollocks.

Work is play

This is brilliant - this guy demonstrates what I mean about the ludic life. He actually says it himself - he goes in and plays. He correctly identifies corn syrup as an allergy-inducing inferior ingredient. Plus he takes on the big companies, champions small artisan-made sodas, and still comes out ahead.

Socialist surrealism

Just came across an excerpt from one of Dalrymple's books, which reminds me why I read the guy. Some of his stories are way out there. But none more so than this one, recounting a time when, more or less by accident, he managed to join up with a group of British communists on its way to the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students in North Korea in 1989:

I went several times during the festival to Pyongyang Department Store Number 1. This is in the very centre of the city. Its shelves and counters were groaning with locally produced goods, piled into impressive pyramids or in fan-like displays, perfectly arranged, throughout the several floors of the building. On the ground floor was a wide variety of tinned foods, hardware and alcoholic drinks, including a strong Korean liqueur with a whole snake pickled or marinated in the bottle, presumably as an aphrodisiac. Everything glittered with perfection, the tidiness was remarkable.
It didn't take long to discover that this was no ordinary department store. It was filled with thousands of people, going up and down the escalators, standing at the corners, going in and out of the front entrance in a constant stream both ways - yet nothing was being bought or sold. I checked this by standing at the entrance for half an hour. The people coming out were carrying no more than the people entering. Their shopping bags contained as much, or as little, when they left as when they entered. In some cases, I recognised people coming out as those who had gone in a few minutes before, only to see them re-entering the store almost immediately. And I watched a hardware counter for fifteen minutes. There were perhaps twenty people standing at it; there were two assistants behind the counter, but they paid no attention to the 'customers'. The latter and the assistants stared past each other in a straight line, neither moving nor speaking.
Eventually, they grew uncomfortably aware that they were under my observation. They began to shuffle their feet and wriggle, as if my regard pinned them like live insects to a board. The assistants too became restless and began to wonder what to do in these unforeseen circumstances. They decided that there was nothing for it but to distribute something under the eyes of this inquisitive foreigner. And so, all of a sudden, they started to hand out plastic wash bowls to the twenty 'customers', who took them (without any pretence of payment). Was it their good luck, then? Had they received something for nothing? No, their problems had just begun. What were they to do with their plastic wash bowls? (All of them were brown incidentally, for the assistants did not have sufficient initiative to distribute a variety of goods to give verisimilitude to the performance, not even to the extent of giving out differently coloured bowls.)
They milled around the counter in a bewildered fashion, clutching their bowls in one hand as if they were hats they had just doffed in the presence of a master. Some took them to the counter opposite to hand them in; some just waited until I had gone away. I would have taken a photograph, but I remembered just in time that these people were not participating in this charade from choice, that they were victims, and that - despite their expressionless faces and lack of animation - they were men with chajusong, that is to say creativity and consciousness, and to have photographed them would only have added to their degradation. I left the hardware counter, but returned briefly a little later: the same people were standing at it, sans brown plastic bowls, which were neatly re-piled on the shelf.
I also followed a few people around at random, as discreetly as I could. Some were occupied in ceaselessly going up and down the escalators; others wandered from counter to counter, spending a few minutes at each before moving on. They did not inspect the merchandise; they moved as listlessly as illiterates might, condemned to spend the day among the shelves of a library. I did not know whether to laugh or explode with anger or weep. But I knew I was seeing one of the most extraordinary sights of the twentieth century.
I decided to buy something - a fountain pen. I went to the counter where pens were displayed like the fan of a peacock's tail. They were no more for sale than the Eiffel Tower. As I handed over my money, a crowd gathered round, for once showing signs of animation. I knew, of course, that I could not be refused: if I were, the game would be given away completely. And so the crowd watched goggle-eyed and disbelieving as this astonishing transaction took place: I gave the assistant a piece of paper and she gave me a pen.
The pen, as it transpired, was of the very worst quality. Its rubber for the ink was so thin that it would have perished immediately on contact with ink. The metal plunger was already rusted; the plastic casing was so brittle that the slightest pressure cracked it. And the box in which it came was of absorbent cardboard, through whose fibres the ink of the printing ran like capillaries on the cheeks of a drunk.
At just before four o'clock, on two occasions, I witnessed the payment of the shoppers. An enormous queue formed at the cosmetics and toiletries counter and there everyone, man and woman, received the same little palette of rouge, despite the great variety of goods on display. Many of them walked away somewhat bemused, examining the rouge uncomprehendingly. At another counter I saw a similar queue receiving a pair of socks, all brown like the plastic bowls. The socks, however, were for keeps. After payment, a new shift of Potemkin shoppers arrived.
... But this is no joke, and the humiliation it visits upon the people who take part in it, far from being a drawback, is an essential benefit to the power; for slaves who must participate in their own enslavement by signalling to others the happiness of their condition are so humiliated that they are unlikely to rebel.

Comedy and tragedy. Creepy, poignant, and incendiary. Brings to mind 1984, but also Dawn of the Dead.
Slavery is deeply entrenched in people, it seems. To submit to this horror is surely worse than death.
But then so many of us in the western world do much the same - that is a pointless, strenuous, going-though-the-motion type "occupation", for our own little palette of rouge.

Why the US is finished, part 1

We've got Dubai, we've got the homeless in California, we've got the ghost town known as Detroit... all of this is coming your way. Ladies and gentlemen, our most respected and noble governments are beyond broke. Buy gold, buy pork and beans, buy guns and ammo, and head for the hills.

Why China won't rule the world, part 1

A city. Built in 5 years. For 1 million people. And no-one's moved there. The prices are too high. The response? "They don't look at it as a place to live... they see it as a place to put their cash."

That right there, ladies and gents, is the basis of the whole global property boom... and the reason its going to fall flat on its arse. And it's the reason why state intervention is comical, and why China will not be the oft-predicted powerhouse of the 21st century.

Property has never been an asset. Because of tax avoidance reasons, etc, it's been useful for some. But it's a liability. It's a place to live. You never own property anyway. Just try not paying your property taxes - you'll soon find out who really owns it.