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.

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.

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.

Keep The Aspidistra Flying - Orwell On Advertising

"The interesting thing about the New Albion was that it was so completely modern in spirit. There was hardly a soul in the firm who was not perfectly well aware that publicity — advertising — is the dirtiest ramp that capitalism has yet produced. In the red lead firm there had still lingered certain notions of commercial honour and usefulness. But such things would have been laughed at in the New Albion. Most of the employees were the hard-boiled, Americanized, go-getting type to whom nothing in the world is sacred, except money. They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket. And yet beneath their cynicism there was the final naivete, the blind worship of the money-god. Gordon studied them unobtrusively. As before, he did his work passably well and his fellow-employees looked down on him. Nothing had changed in his inner mind. He still despised and repudiated the money-code. Somehow, sooner or later, he was going to escape from it; even now, after his first fiasco, he still plotted to escape. He was in the money world, but not of it. As for the types about him, the little bowler-hatted worms who never turned, and the go-getters, the American business-college gutter-crawlers, they rather amused him than not. He liked studying their slavish keep-your-job mentality. He was the chief among them takin’ notes."


Has George Monbiot linked the normalising effect of advertising to consumer fetish in yesterdays Guardian piece? Is Occupy Madison Avenue next? 


My own thoughts some months ago are over here. The entire .pdf of Keep the aspidistra flying is available over here. It's my favourite Orwell after Down and out in Paris and London.

Nobel Peace winner Tawakul Karman talks to Al Jazeera

It's easy to dismiss the Nobel peace prize awarded to Tawakul Karman (and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee) as unconnected to the X Factor and TV dinner lives of the West but this year is a great example of an activist in a part of the world, that along with Bahrain and Syria is buried under a daily dishing of brutality that exists in large part to pipe the oil into the West's vehicles. 

Everything is connected. Listen to her. There's no daylight between her and say the words of John Lennon or any of the other greats that invariably the system seems to find a way to place a bullet in.

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.