When the possible becomes the inevitable - by Richard... Friday, August 05, 2011

When the possible becomes the inevitable - by Richard... Friday, August 05, 2011

I was right to avoid comment on the debt crisis in the United States. Primarily, I do not know enough about American politics to be able to comment sensibly. We see supposedly knowledgeable US analysts comment on British politics, and they invariably get it wrong, making fools of themselves. It was best that I avoided making the same mistake in the opposite direction.

But I also suspected this was political theatre – but did not have enough to go on. But in this, I was right also. According to Zerohedge, the deal is smoke and mirrors, unlikely to achieve anything of substance.

It is a psychological stop gap. It solves nothing, but it keeps the masses from rioting in the streets for a few more months says Zerohedge writer Brandon Smith. But not as many are fooled by this as you might suppose, says Smith.

With the global markets plunging, the explanation is simple – it reflects the starkness of the situation - nothing has been done to fix the core economic problems - and the same fools who caused the crisis are still in charge. This, most likely is just the start. And things like this are certainly not going to help - Italy rumoured to be restructuring, with fears of a run on the banks.

Politically, this has the smell of a pre-revolutionary situation. The economic collapse is overdue, to the extent that virtually anything could trigger it. The EU players – particularly Barroso at the moment – are beginning to lose it, and are, according to Ambrose, making all the wrong moves.

But stand aside from the strictly financial issues, and look at the determination of our masters to destroy our electrical supply. Never before has society been so dependent on mains electricity, making a loss of supply extremely serious, with huge knock-on effects – economic, social and political.

Combine an economic collapse with major electricity outages, and overlay that with the general aura of corruption and incompetence, mix in a long-term fall in manufacturing, rampant inflation and mass unemployment - and you have all the elements needed for a revolution to succeed.

What is particularly terrifying about all this though is not that our masters are only incompetent – it is that they do not realise quite how incompetent they really are. The net effect of this is that their attempts to improve the situation are making it worse, and will continue along that path.

The precise nature of the trigger, and the timescale, we cannot predict. But experience and a wide reading of revolutionary history suggests that it always takes longer than one might expect. But when the turning point is reached, events occur at a terrifying speed.

Nothing, of course, is pre-ordained. But the trouble is that the age-old aphorism - if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck ... etc., then it most certainly is a duck. Within the broad sweep of history, revolutions tend to follow a pattern, and there are certain essential preconditions.

Thus, it would be a very rash or stupid person who rejected, out of hand, any idea of a revolution creeping up and then exploding on our consciousness. And in times of trouble, it is we the people who are going to have to clean up the mess and survive - with little help from out masters.

We would be wise to be thinking in terms of what we should do when the possible becomes the inevitable.

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Racial discrimination? - by Richard... Thursday, August 04, 2011

Two members of staff at a magistrates' court have been arrested amid allegations of bribes to erase speeding records.

It follows a newspaper investigation in which a clerk was filmed apparently agreeing to take £500 in return for a promise to clear a motorist. Munir Patel, 21, boasted that he took bribes ‘all day long’ at Redbridge Magistrates' Court, East London. It is alleged that he took cash, mainly from "Asian brothers" to avoid putting details of a traffic summons onto a court database.

Now here is a thought. If Patel can be shown to have preferred his "Asian brothers", and refused to take bribes from whitey, can he be done for racial discrimination as well? We must have equal opportunities in all things, doncha know.

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Enter the fact checkers - by Richard...

A completely unknown operation calling itself ApTiquant issued a press release claiming that it had invited 100,000 web users to take IQ tests and matched their results with the type of browser they used. It also supplied extensive research data.The results claimed to show that Internet Explorer users were generally of lower intelligence.

This was picked up by the magazine PC World and then by the "copy 'n' paste" MSM, including the BBC and the Failygraph. But these oh-so-clever journalists, who are so much cleverer than us bloggers, got it wrong.

But it wasn't even the Beeb which spotted the hoax. Questions about the authenticity of the story were raised by readers, who established that the company which put out the research - ApTiquant - appeared to have only set up its website in the past month. The fact-checking was done by the readers.

Mostly, the MSM in all its arrogance ignores its readers' comments, but the story here was so obviously wrong - and demonstrably so - that the BBC was forced to do something. It thus sought alternative views for the original story, including Professor David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University's Statistical Laboratory, who said: "I believe these figures are implausibly low - and an insult to IE users".

What a pity, though, that no one thought to do the research before they published the story. But that's the MSM for you. It was lifted from a "prestige" magazine, and if you have prestige, your word is accepted – no one will question it. That is why the MSM produces so much unmitigated rubbish, and why it will continue to get caught out - it peddles prestige, not facts.

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So easily pleased - by Richard...

Why do we have so many people who are so easily pleased with the crumbs from The Man's table? How come we have bred a nation so feeble and politically naïve that they are prepared to sign up to the government's e-petitions in such numbers that they crash the website?

For want of real power, our compliant serfs go cap-in-hand to electronic equivalent of the servants' entrance and beg their masters for attention.

You would think with the experience of the exercise under the previous administration that pursuing this is worse than a waste of time and effort. It simply acts as a lightning conductor, diverting and neutralising political energy. Thus we have this crass effort, on the EU Referendum, phrased as follows:

The Daily Express is crusading to end Britain’s membership of the European Union. We want the Government to arrange for an orderly withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU either by means of an enabling referendum or directly so that the British people are once again placed in charge of their own political destiny. We would like this matter debated in parliament.

"Oh pretty please, dear masters, please, please, please, spend our money on having a totally facile talk-fest, on an issue about which you have no intention whatsoever of doing anything". There is no requirement to doff caps while signing up, but if there was, the fools who framed the petition would do it gladly.

Mind you, this petition has a little way to go to reach the 100,000 signature level needed for the issue to be considered for a debate. Similarly, the pathetic attempt to get a debate on restoring the death penalty gets 1,135 votes, as against 2,642 signatures for maintaining the ban (at the time of writing).

And even then, the wondrous organisers of the petition site cannot get their act together. There are nearly forty duplicate petitions, which will tend rather to confuse the issue. But then, when you have Labour MP Natascha Engel welcoming "the attempt to reconnect parliament with the public", you know it has to be all bad.

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