Tuesday, November 18, 2008

[supertanker] the stakes are getting higher


At first I thought, "How the ... ?" when the story broke of the Saudi supertanker hijacked by Somali pirates. There seemed anomalies:

1. How could such a huge boat go down to a few speedboats, even with rocket launchers;
2. Where were the protective warships we read about;
3. Why wasn't the tanker accosted by gunships as it was being taken back to the Somali pirate's haven?

This is not the particular tanker above but you'll get the idea that it wouldn't be too difficult to scale - it's low to the water; it was 450 km south of the protective ring of warships.

However, the answer still doesn't seem to have come through as to why no one is doing anything. The U.S. could accost it, Saudi has the money to back an interception. So why not?

Perhaps the answer is that if there were any rescue attempt, the cargo would be sunk and whilst the pirates lose millions in this particular deal, it is better for Saudi Arabia and the company to pay out a few million in ransom and save the 995 million left over.

If that's the reason, then this thing is going to continue, isn't it? It's highly lucrative for the pirates and each new hit finances the next phase, with better and better weapons and better tactical moves. They're probably counting on the international oil trade not to get their act together and to agree to combine and fork out for protection either.

[ripping yarns] the making of

Have you a spare ten minutes?



Well ... twenty minutes?



Forty minutes?

Part 3

Part 4

Reviews here and here.
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[conspiracy theory] or blinkered philistinism


The lack of logic in the ignorant's war cry "conspiracy theory" is that it presupposes that nobody colludes.

If nobody colluded, Mr. Ig, then there'd be no oligarchies, no anti-trust laws, no anti-price fixing actions. The tendency of bookshops to run a section called "conspiracy theory", next door to the fiction section, is another ignorant move in the same vein.

Of course there's collusion and why wouldn't there be?

People who never think things through are wont to trot out this catchcry in lieu of using the grey matter and as for the blinkered, well, Michael Palin dealt with them in his Ripping Yarn of the young lad who asked where India was, only to be told by his father that it did not exist; he then argued and was admonished by his mother that: "Your father has spoken, dear."

People with an agenda, e.g. businessmen who want a global climate condusive to their sort of business are going to collude, aren't they? They're going to sit down at Round Table meetings, Bilderberg meetings and other meetings and map out strategies. Are you seriously saying they would never do that, would never have conferences with like minded people in their field?

Turning your attention to governments, can you name a western government which does not play to its richest investors and provide fast track and kickbacks? Come on. Who is the realist here - the ostrich or the person who accepts that such doings do go on? And if they do go on, then they don't go on in a namby-pamby way but full-on.

So, to maintain that some vast global conspiracy is a fiction is to fly in the face of facts. CFR, TLC, Club of Paris - they all exist and all support the global financial agenda, as does the UN and as does the EU. And yes, there is ample evidence out there. The governmental end of the spectrum deals with the social engineering aspect of it.

However, just because they support this does not necessarily mean they'll get what they want in all respects.

They make errors, other factors like the U.S. involvement in the No vote in Ireland have an effect on the result; the employment of sub-par robotic, demi-intelligent, ambitious people in key Common Purpose roles [and who else would pay vast sums of money to become a Leader when the crash comes anyway?] - that kicks in; sheer human turpitude among the masses stymies the best laid plans - there are so many factors bu--ering up the elite vision of a "utopian" future.

Is there anything sinister or satanic about any of this? Look at wartime Germany, Salon Kitty, the the sexual dissolution at the top levels, the rest of that black scene - hardly healthy, wouldn't you agree? Do you really believe that doesn't exist in the Germany of today? Where did the escaped nazis end up? What, all of them? Where did their progeny go? Are the forces which saw the rise of this horror not present in Bavaria and Austria today?

Turn this thing back on itself.

If you were an evil entity, where would you be more likely to turn your attention - helping the Old Families make obscene amounts of money in a crisis or helping out the poor with philanthropic donations? The answer is: "Both."

The greatest problem humanity has is that it can't open its mind wide enough to encompass what is only logical, after all. So it is left to the Alex Joneses and Fritz Springmeiers of the world to come out with their disreputable take on elements of truth which they discover upon scratching round.

To their credit, at least they are scratching around, looking.

An example was the recent story of the youth who was accosted by the PCSOs and that came to the notice of Alex Jones. Jones's boorish interruptions all the way through, to push his own take on the British stasi, had the effect on the listener [and who sits, looking at Jones's face during his diatribes?] of saying: "Please!"

What he had to say could well have been true and I have no doubt that Gordo is utilizing these people as a stasi-in-waiting but no one's going to accept that when it comes through Alex Jones's sensationalism. You know, it's almost as though ... well, how can I put this?

Look ... if I was employing a stasi like that and I needed to cover my tracks, then I'd certainly leak it to Jones and let David Icke get a soundbite as well.

Once the auto-deniers had done me over, no one would believe a word of it, except the dispossessed and those on my payroll anyway and so I'd be as safe as houses until the revolution which would never come except as a spectacle for the news cameras because I would have the "leaders of the revolution", the Trotskies and Lenins, well paid and in position, ready for the day.

This is the central problem. The people with the good oil, those who discover dire goings on, are so loopy in the way they disseminate it that the original message is lost.

That's why you have to proceed with caution. That's why you only build on your last piece of solid evidence, such as a man's own words. When you have to connect the dots, you have to do it in a way consistent with your evidence. When you say someone is a dangerously criminal fruitcake, you need to have something to back that up.

There is so much disinformation and so many auto-scorners in key positions in the press and blogosphere that you can afford the errors in secrecy to fall into the hands of the Jones's, to be mashed up in their wild assertions.

Nothing is that simplistic in real life; ambitious people, even do-gooders, for whom the end result turns out to be something evil, anti-human, actually believe that they are the "good people" all along and are genuinely shocked when someone calls them out for it; things never go according to plan completely and then ... well, incompetent ignorance, particularly in the PC zombies, is endemic.

Meanwhile the rest of us suffer and almost no one blames the correct causes of it until it is upon them.
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[notice] some time soon

There's little point trying to second guess this thing but the way it is going, very soon I must move to a place of my own and that's going to mean a trickle of blogging only [probably from the local library done on the Mac and transferred to stick] until I can get set up again.

At the moment I'm enjoying the support and help of a good friend but it's gone way over the agreed time and it must, by definition end some time and that time needs to be soon, according to me, though nothing has been specifically said. I think it might be all right and work might come after that but at least it allows a few weeks to find my feet again.

So I'm not closing the blog or anything dire, I'm not down in the dumps - quite the opposite, nor am I losing interest. It might be just RL circumstances which will cause this temporary hiatus. I'll keep you posted. No need for comments on this post.

Monday, November 17, 2008

[monochrome monday] unrequited love

[2001] a time wastersey


Why did we sit through 143 minutes of that? Right from the beginning I might have known that eight minutes of blank screen and music was not going to be a good idea.

It got worse. Monkeys round a pool, other monkeys round a pool, screen goes blank. Monkey discovers a bone and bones another monkey. Cut to deep space and a monolithic slab emits a piercing sound and suddenly we're off to Jupiter.

HAL says there's something wrong and we watch a pod emerge from the ship. Three and a half minutes later, the pod has gone another foot and a half. We're just staring in sheer numbed boredom at this point but can't reach over to switch off the DVD.

Then the screen goes blank and a sign comes on: "Intermission." On a DVD? We decide to stick it out in case it was just something on the film. It wasn't. It was a real time fifteen minute intermission, presumably while we went out to make popcorn. We wind forward.

"Can't remember it ever being this bad," mumbles my mate.

"I'm deciding whether never to watch it again or to watch it again just once in my lifetime."

"Yep."

Near the end, I say, quietly, "If that person in that bed points at that monolith, I'm going to vote this the worst film ever."

The person in that bed pointed at that monolith.

We silently trooped out of the room. "Did you feel yourself visibly age?" I asked.

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