Slicing Through The Madness

At the very beginning of the video clip, if you're paying close attention, the customer (little fella) hops over the fast food counter to make his complaint in person.

He is taken down masterfully by an employee safeguarding his colleagues and satisfied customers.

Then another [former] customer gets the same treatment.

Once the kerfuffle is over, it looks like his supervisor, is reaching out requesting the Samurai sword be put somewhere safe, now that the counter hoppers are in disarray.

I've never seen anything like it

Informed people know there's an ideological war brewing in the United States, and abortions, gun control, TERFS and reactionary accusations of racism-options are off the table.

You can take that to the bank but there's no way I can endorse the Federal reserve notes.

It's pragmatic to prepare for self defense.

The Madness of King George - 1995

The most recognisable landmark in Southampton is a grade 1 listed building called the Bargate. It's part of the Norman walls in the centre of the town, intersecting the middle of the high street. The walls themselves are considered top three in the country. 

Above Bar is Upper High Street and Below Bar is Lower High street, with the Bargate itself acting as a divider for the two. Below Bar heads down to Southampton Water and Above Bar heads roughly northwards to London via the Avenue.

Nestled in the Southside of the Bargate is a curious statue of George III in Roman Emperor regalia, donated by the Marquis of Landsdowne. It's so odd to see a king who went mad, dressed like Caesar. It turns out the Marquis was quite a colourful character but the motivation for the design is still a mystery so I watched the 1995 movie about King George III.

It's worth pointing out to the 'I fucking love my country' crowd (what a brain dead and banal thing to declare), that the House of Hannover/Georgian Dynasty were as German as it gets, but by the time the Royal family are changing their name to Windsor, most English are so out of their depth on basic history that it's sensible to leave them rambling about a ball sport to outline their grasp of events including WWI, WWII and the EEC.

All it takes to fool the average Englishman on history is to rebrand the problem and they'll be on their knees licking the Royal shoe and turning a blind eye to their child raping mates like Lord Mountbatten of Romsey who introduced Sir James Savile to the Royals, or Archbishop Peter Ball and Jeffrey Epstein.

George III comes across as probably one of the finest kings I've dived into historically. Naturally, he's a typical royal and also tainted with losing the American colonies, but other than that he seems to have been a servant of the people, and aware enough to know his son, the Prince Regent wasn't up to the job. A bit like Queenie, soon-to-die, if she isn't on ice already, and Prince Charles who has global ambitions for his next promotion.

George III goes a bit mad and the best royal physicians are reluctant to inspect his stools and urine, even though they were the best indicators of the day. Fortunately for George a new physician is introduced and the tough-love method of care has quite an effect on the King who makes a recovery, thus preventing his obese and gluttonous son from grabbing the throne.

There's a lot to recommend in this film, but the high point for me are the costumes which are among the most varied and finest I've seen.

Consumer Programming ™

It's hard not to feel deep sympathy for people so unhappy that consumerism is their only relief from the pain of living. 

Thanksgiving at Walmart?

It's like they're programmed.

Homo Materia Is Waiting in Line For An iPhone

According to time traveller John Titor who got a lot of things right including predicting Youtube the future doesn't like us that much. Do you think she is concerned about the rare earth Coltan wars in the Congo that led to the 5 and a half million dead just so we can all carry smartphones? The women get raped before they're killed. A goodbye gift you might say.

Crying With The Onion

Sometimes humour isn't there to entertain us it's there to facilitate bearing the unbearable. What might not be obvious to the amused observer is how fake the presenters and the commercial breaks are to the person who doesn't watch Television. 

Should we really be laughing at the blowback of a music factory churning out the least desirable role models for our children possible? From the presenters to the celebrities to the commercials. Television is diseased.

All of this becomes extraordinarily crystal clear once TV is rejected in a persons life. I'd rather have a vagrant opposite me than listen to someone else's profit agenda spewing out. At least the vagrant is real.

Regrettably the only way that the United States can comment on the Western consumer models' sickness is with humour. The Onion, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are pretty much the only serious cultural commentary on commercialised politics, commercialised art and commercialised wars and one gets the impression that because it can only be tackled with comedy that many don't know how to take it seriously.

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

Earlier, Mark pointed me to the ever interesting Adam Curtis' blog who reminds us that the Greeks have a lot more street-savvy awareness of elite rip-off techniques including rapid power swaps that we most memorably experienced when blue blood Alec Douglas Home needed to dump his title to run the UK after the Suez crisis. 

Or as The New Statesman puts it:

We British look complacently on the installation of Mario Monti and Lucas Papademos as unelected leaders of Italy and Greece respectively. Couldn't happen here, we say. But in 1963, when Harold Macmillan resigned, our unelected Queen, advised by mostly unelected Tory elders, sent for the unelected 14th Earl of Home and made him prime minister. He subsequently renounced his title, changed his name back to Douglas-Home and won a by-election in a safe Tory seat conveniently vacated for him. All that was stitched up in weeks.

I like Adam Curtis but I've not followed his latest work. He's not sussed out why 9/11 happened which makes me squirm a bit. Nevertheless I started to watch the first episode of Machines of loving Grace, and I remembered that he has a brilliant BBC film library at his disposal and a good enough brain to adumbrate a point of view that while not flawless is able to provoke new thoughts in my own. He also digs up bits of history I wasn't aware of. I knew of Alan Greenspan's Randian worship and I'm familiar with her work, but I didn't know he was part of her swivel eyed private circle. The lens on this period in New York was fascinating though once again we're reminded that the people who really took over the US after the first coup d'etat of Kennedy's death were all subsequently installed during the Ford presidency.

I put it to you that the people (string pullers/banksters) really in power used the Nixon downfall to set up a clique of players including Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle and Greenspan to set up the game for later down the road. They cut their teeth during the tail end of a volatile period and then returned with a neoconservative agenda of nitrous oxide shock doctrine debt capitalism, false flag opportunism and empire expansionism under the quintessential puppet president. George Bush 43.

Brilliant really. We've been schooled by the best. If we get through this rollercoaster to the end we'll have picked up some very useful lessons in spotting the finest manipulation, trickery and mendacity in the galaxy. 

These will be essential skills to ensure the empire can never strike back to anywhere near the effectiveness they once had.

Terence McKenna - Eros & The Eschaton (Why Consumer Culture Is Brainless Culture)

"We have to stop consuming our culture. We have to create culture. Don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are -- NOW -- is the most immediate sector of your universe. And if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered. You're giving it all away to ICONS. Icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that, you want to dress like X or have lips like Y... This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion. What is real is you, and your friends, your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And, we are told No, you're unimportant, you're peripheral -- get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you're a player. You don't even want to play that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world."

Is This The Voice Of Consumerism?

4am Materialism

Attachment is suffering.

The Bird's Nest

One of the great experiences of Beijing is the sheer velocity of construction which has had me pondering for quite some time on the implications of whole neighbourhoods flattened overnight with new superstructures going up faster than I've ever seen in my life. I've already talked about the CCTV building by Rem Koolhaas which we will never see its like again (and he knows it) but the other supermodel on the catwalk is the Birds Nest, or the Olympic Stadium. It's awesome. Period.

Here it is from some photography I took the other day. Notice the traditional peasant (migrant worker) in the foreground. I chose this pic out of the 30 or so I took because like the washing below it represents something about modern China that Noam Chomsky talks about a lot in this podcast here; the human development index for China is still quite low, around 70th if I'm not mistaken. 

There's a lot of people still running around on loose chained tricycles shifting bricks from one place to another. 

Wait till all those have offspring that want to go to college, drive a car and double China's GDP with the 'Chinese Dream' (One World One Dream).........Yeah, we need to rewire our economies and the answer might be most candid in Asian economies today. 

Not tomorrow.

I live only a stones throw from the Forbidden City and a short walk from Tiananman Square. Beijing is often a sooty and polluted overcast metropolis. It's also, in its own way the most tidy I've ever come across for its size. I've never seen a broken glass, a crisp packet or an empty packet of cigarettes on the road and that's because there is no litter. But still there are quaint signs of a rapidly disappearing life, and though I live amongst the political elite (and those who did them favours) The washing is still out on the road drying in the occasional spell of glorious sunshine. For when Beijing shines. It really does shine beautifully.

 

Sorry about the lack of links and layout at the moment as I'm using the new version of blogger and playing with new features.

Cheap is at somebody else's expense

Its been cropping up a fair bit recently but the idea that cheap is good is particularly obscene while we sit out this peak oil consumption frenzy. Cheap is only good if you can't afford anything else, otherwise it's just somebody else on the other side of the world scraping a living out of our frequent impulse-buys that end up as the pile of junk that heats the world while our collective urges are sated. I'm quite confident that oil at 200 dollars a barrell is the only answer for those oil junkies who are in complete denial about where we are. I will be having a little party around then but in the mean time here is the culture of our times on plastic bags. We worship cheap when in actual fact, we can't really afford it.