angrysoba

The Rare Old Mountain Dew

2011-12-21T09:57:00.000-08:00

Polyushka Polye

2011-10-01T10:31:00.000-07:00

Outside the Libyan Embassy in London on Monday

2011-08-26T22:36:00.000-07:00

Qadafi Duck!

Spot The Parody

2011-07-10T07:46:00.000-07:00

The World Is Not Enough...

2010-12-13T03:50:00.000-08:00

...we also want a James Bond-esque underground lair in which to keep it!

I remember being somewhat amazed at seeing this painting in Pyongyang's "Korean Art Gallery" partly because of how evidently proud the curator looked. I would have thought a more fitting emotion would have been embarrassment given how overtly megalomaniacal the painting is.

But perhaps the most disturbing painting on display was of Korean patriots trying to save the trees with the names of leaders Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il carved into them. Again, it amazed me that the guides would show us a painting like this which seems to typify the difference in value that regular Koreans are held in when compared merely to the names of their leaders.

Unfortunately the picture is very unclear. If anyone has a higher resolution picture, I would be very grateful. This picture originally came from the Daily NK site, which, for some reason, my browser won't let me view.

B.R Myers Responds to Angrysoba!

2010-12-03T19:49:00.000-08:00

I was delighted to receive an email from B. R Myers responding to a question I had posed to him on an earlier blogpost. Mr Myers had written in an op-ed piece for the New York Times that we must understand the Yeonpynong attack as an expression of North Korean ideology rather than any kind of tactical move on their part. I wondered aloud whether or not it could be both. Some analysts had suggested that it could be part of a ploy to either:

a) Position Kim Jong-un for succession by giving him military credentials.
b) As a demand to begin negotiations again in order to win concessions from the US, Republic of Korea and Japan.
c) An indication of a rogue hardline/hawkish element within the regime jockeying for power.

I had favoured (a) and had thought that evidence would soon be forthcoming that North Korean domestic propaganda was crediting Kim Jong-un with the artillery strike. Brian Myers has written to tell me that the evidence which might confirm this has simply not appeared but rather evidence which might falsify this theory has.

B.R Myers writes:

We must keep in mind that the personality cult of Kim Jong Un has not yet started in earnest. It's not even where the Kim Jong Il cult was in the 1970s…Case in point: I’ve been watching the North Korean TV news online for the past few days, and when they show photographs of Kim Jong Un accompanying his father on visits to factories, he’s usually shown in the background or off to the side, a few officials away from his father. Sometimes he’s grinning rather ignominiously over someone’s shoulder at what his father is doing. Sometimes he’s not even visible in the entourage. The sheer randomness of his appearances in the photographs of any given tour is quite striking. True, he is mentioned as the first name whenever the members of Kim Jong Il’s entourage are named, but still, it’s quite different from how Kim Jong Il was photographed with his father back in the 1980s, let alone from how KJI was photographed in the early 1990s, when he was being presented as the de facto commander in chief.

Indeed, Kim Jong-un doesn't appear to share the same warm relationship with his father as Kim Jong-il did with his, if these photographs are representative:

Mr Myers goes on to say that North Korean media didn’t emphasise Kim Jong-un’s role in the artillery barrage but instead there are grounds for saying that the succession is not an urgent priority right now. Kim Jong-il’s recent public appearances have shown him looking much healthier than at any other time since his stroke. Here’s a picture of how Kim Jong-il looked before:

Mr Myers does, however, point out that there could be some convergence of the view that the artillery attack was both ideological and tactical by saying:

But the regime's main problem, now as always, is not "How do we legitimize the succession?" nor is it "How do we get America's attention?" but "How does a military first regime justify itself and maintain popular support, if not with military successes?"

And I can't help thinking that that was my point to begin with. When I look at the photographs of the two Kims together it seems obvious to me that Kim Jong-un is being made more prominent with his Maoist uniform to stand out against the rest of the officers. The picture of Kim Jong-un pointing at whatever weird creature is swimming in the pond has the rest of the advisers cheerfully acknowledging whatever inestimably witty observation he has made. It may not be quite the same level of jovialness that existed between the Great Leader and his Dear Son but those were less austere times. It does appear, however, that Kim Jong-un is not popular among many North Koreans, which may be the reason for having him not too close to the Dear Leader at all times, just in case he needs to be jettisoned later.

Mr Myers also dispenses with (b) which was, I think, best exemplified by Andrei Lankov who has an article published at North Korea Economy Watch. He points out that the revelation of the uranium processing plant shows us what is on the mind of the regime. Coupled with the attack, it is, according to Lankov an attempt to get Washington's attention.

Finally, possibility (c) appears to exasperate Mr Myers:

This whole hardliners/hawks versus softliners/doves talk drives me up the wall, as does the talk of rogue generals. There is zero, repeat zero evidence of any significant ideological or strategic disagreement within the NK elite in regard to NK's foreign or military policy. Why Selig Harrison would suggest such a thing is obvious; for years he has been talking of how the US needs to make concessions to strengthen the "doves" in Pyongyang. The regime drops to him and other frequent Pyongyang-flying journos/academics heavy hints that such internal dissent exists (just as the USSR used to do during the Cold War), so that precisely this message will be conveyed by NK "experts" to the US State Dept...

But to take this obvious propaganda ploy at face value is to misunderstand the whole nature of a) a one-man dictatorship and b) Korean organizational culture c) ultra-nationalist regimes. The regime prides itself on its unity more than anything else. If there is internal dissent (highly unlikely) the last thing they would be doing is telling foreigners about it. This is what you get when tourism/anecdote is considered equal to or more important than research/analysis.

I very much appreciate Mr Myers taking the time to answer these questions.

Update 1:

I'm being obtuse.

This, "Mr Myers does, however, point out that there could be some convergence of the view that the artillery attack was both ideological and tactical by saying:" is wrong!

On reflection, my understanding of what Mr Myers is saying is this:

B.R Myers' point, as in his book, the Cleanest Race, is that as a military-first regime that doesn't provide enough food for its people it still must derive its legitimacy from somewhere. That is, in having military victories against an Aggressive Outside Enemy such as the Yankees and the Traitorous Puppet Regime in South Korea.
This attack was certainly trumpetted by the DPRK as a victorious strike ("merciless blows" etc...) against the invaders. This is how the regime survives; by playing on the idea that they are the only thing defending the very survival of the North Koreans even as so many of them starve.

Update 2: For more pictures of the robust health of Kim Jong-il, there is this website, Kim Jong-il Looking at Things.

Hat-tip: One Free Korea

A Devious Plan That Might Just Wor...D'oh!

2010-11-27T20:02:00.000-08:00

South Korean government plans to retaliate [for the Yeonpyeong-do Attack] with words as ammunition, believing a military strike would be frowned upon by the international community.

Now-former Defense Minister Kim Tae-young said on Wednesday at a National Assembly hearing that “a psychological war is ongoing, and we will continue that war but I cannot detail how that will take place.”

The newly launched plan for propaganda will likely be in the form of fliers, which a government source said “are already printed.”

The fliers will be flown into North Korean territory on giant balloons, a tactic that civilian groups have used in the past to send propaganda fliers, usually to tell North Koreans about life in South Korea and appeal to them to leave their country.

[North Korea] will have no idea whether it came from civil groups or the government,” a South Korean government official yesterday told JoongAng Ilbo.

Article

Yeah, why not show some pictures of those fliers that the North Koreans won't know came from the South Korean government?

B.R Myers Weighs in On the DPRK's Act of Aggression

2010-11-25T17:10:00.000-08:00

In an article titled, North Korea Will Never Play Nice, B.R Myers begins by distinguishing what is a "provocation" and what is an "act of agression":

WHILE it is cowardly and foolish not to resist an act of aggression, the best way to deal with a provocation is to ignore it — or so we are taught. By refusing to be provoked, one frustrates and therefore “beats” the provoker; generations of bullied children have been consoled with this logic. And so it is that the South Korean and American governments usually refer to North Korea’s acts of aggression as “provocations.”

The North’s artillery attack on a populated South Korean island is now getting the same treatment, with the South’s president, Lee Myung-bak, vowing that Pyongyang will be “held responsible” and that “additional provocative acts” will be punished “several times over.”

There is no reason that North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-il, should take those words seriously.

In fact, I think I also had referred to the attack as a "provocation", albeit the "worst provocation since the Korean War armistice"

Of course, he is right that Kim Jong-il needed take any words of holding anyone responsible seriously. The North Korean regime rarely has to worry about much more than a mild rebuke in the Security Council or largely meaningless sanctions.

But interestingly, he doesn't seem to agree with my own extrapolation of his idea about this attack being related to the succession.

The provocation view of North Korean behavior also distorts our understanding of the domestic situation. Analysts tend to focus too much on the succession issue; they interpret the attack on the island as an effort to bolster the reputation of Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il’s son and anointed successor. Their conclusion is that North Korea will play nice once the young man is firmly in power.

In fact, I think there is no reason why it couldn't be an act of aggression to bolster Kim Jong-Un's reputation without leading to the conclusion that North Korea will "play nice" later. Myers points out that there has been a serious of increasingly serious acts of agression that the regime sees as necessary to bolster its military-first policies and to legitimise its militaristic rulers but isn't that exactly Kim Jong-Un's problem, right now? That he doesn't have any military credentials to go with his rank of four-star general so these acts might be necessary for the succession?

Well, I concur with his conclusion anyway:

There is no easy solution to the North Korea problem, but to begin to solve it, we must realize that its behavior is aggressive, not provocative, and that its aggression is ideologically built in. Pyongyang is thus virtually predestined to push Seoul and Washington too far, thereby bringing about its own ruin.

The Chinese should take note of this, since their rationalization for continuing to support North Korea derives from the vain hope that they can prop it up indefinitely. The military-first state is going to collapse at some stage; let’s do what we can to make that happen sooner rather than later.

Like a Thief Crying, "Stop the Thief!"

2010-11-24T18:07:00.000-08:00

The DPRK's explanation for shelling a civillian village in South Korea is that the South Korean military were conducting military maneuvres in what it considered its own waters.

The problem is a dispute over where the maritime border lies. In characteristically sober fashion, the KCNA explains:

The south Korean puppet group perpetrated such reckless military provocation as firing dozens of shells inside the territorial waters of the DPRK side around Yonphyong Islet in the West Sea of Korea from 13:00 on Nov. 23 despite the repeated warnings of the DPRK while staging the war maneuvers for a war of aggression on it codenamed Hoguk, escalating the tension on the Korean Peninsula.

The above-said military provocation is part of its sinister attempt to defend the brigandish "northern limit line," while frequently infiltrating its naval warships into the territorial waters of the DPRK side under the pretext of "intercepting fishing boats."

Well, given that the DPRK have frequently been caught intruding into both South Korean and Japanese waters isn't there a little room for maneuvre?

Should the south Korean puppet group dare intrude into the territorial waters of the DPRK even 0.001 mm, the revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK will unhesitatingly continue taking merciless military counter-actions against it.

Running Dogs

It should bear in mind the solemn warning of the revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK that they do not make an empty talk.

There is in the West Sea of Korea only the maritime military demarcation line set by the DPRK.

Apparently not.

Well, even the North Koreans aren't claiming that the South Koreans shelled North Korean territory, only that they fired rounds within waters which they claim as theirs but which aren't.
Pyongyang, November 24 (KCNA) — After kicking off the war maneuvers for a war of aggression against the DPRK codenamed “Hoguk” the south Korean puppet group perpetrated on Nov. 23 such reckless military provocation as firing dozens of shells inside its territorial waters around Yonphyong Islet in the West Sea of Korea. The revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK took such decisive military step as reacting to the reckless military provocation of the puppet group with a prompt and powerful physical strike.

Nevertheless, the puppet group dared make an uproar over “a provocation” from someone and cry out for “punishment” like a thief crying “Stop the thief!”

Yes, the "puppet group" dared make an uproar about having its civilians shelled in response to military maneuvres! How brigandish!

Why Did The DPRK Shell Yeonpyeong Island?

2010-11-23T21:38:00.000-08:00

B.R Myers responds to this blogpost here.

In what is being touted the worst provocation on the Korean peninsula since the Korean War Armistice, the North Korean military have shelled Yeonpyeong Island including civilian areas.

Why have they done this?

Here are three possible theories (edited with updates and links):

a) The one I favour is an extrapolation of B.R Myers' idea that the North Korean regime can only retain legitimacy if its future ruler Kim Jong Un is given some military credentials to go with his rank of four-star general. If this is the case, then confirmation could come with some praise of the military action under his name. In which case, watch this space. Myers himself hasn't ventured a motive yet.

b) Andrei Lankov appears to believe this is an attempt to gain attention from the US. Others think it is an attempt to extort more food aid from South Korea given that it doesn't have enough to last the winter. This also seems like a reasonable possibility to me.

c) Selig Harrison seems to be going with his default belief that there are hardliners at work trying to scupper the recent brief thaw between the two Koreas:

The armed forces hawks don't like what they are seeing, and what they have done is a classic ploy in situations like this to stir things up and undermine the doves

And which doves is he referring to? Kim Jong-il?

According to this New York Times article, Lee Sung-yoon, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, disagrees with Harrison and instead agrees with me!

“There is no ‘rogue elements’ theory applicable here,” Mr. Lee said. “This is how North Korea approaches negotiations — not through the conventions of diplomatic courtesy but through raising the stakes through provocations. It’s been a potent formula, this provocation-negotiation-concession schema.”

And...

Mr. Lee and other North Korea analysts said the clash on Tuesday was likely intended to bolster the political standing and military credentials of the son. The North would likely claim, he said, that “this is how the young general showed his mettle.”

We'll just have to wait and see...

Of course, I also expect that some conspiraloon is going to wheel out the tired and tested holler of "false flag!" as if the North's sinking of the Cheonan (or previous "false flag" according to the same loons) wasn't enough of a cassus belli.

Update: Two civilians were also among the dead.

"The Simpsons" Predicted 9/11

2010-11-12T17:44:00.000-08:00

Though the Sheeple predictably wave it away as "just a coincidence"!

The clip from X-Files spin-off, The Lone Gunman, on the other hand really is amazingly similar to the conspiracy theorists' idea of what happened on 9/11.

Turn Me On, Dead Man

2010-10-12T10:34:00.000-07:00

Battle of the Crazies

2010-09-11T07:09:00.000-07:00

The Truthers and the Bigots go to war.

When a bunch of deranged and bigotted idiots become outraged at the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" such as harridan Pam Geller, Alan Partridge-like Pat Condell and the Koran-Burner-General, "Terry Jones"(!) the 9/11 Truthers have got to feel a little upstaged. Someone is clearly on "their patch" and putting their own brand of crazy in the shade.

This man is not happy!

Barry Jennings and Michael Hess

2010-09-05T04:53:00.000-07:00

A lot of 9/11 Truthers claim that the testimony of Barry Jennings proves that bombs were planted in the World Trade Center Building 7 because according to him the building shook with explosions before the Twin Towers collapsed.

Alien Entity has already produced an excellent video which instead shows it is far more likely that Barry Jennings was confused about the timeline of the building collapses.

Now, a new video of Michael Hess calling from the 8th floor of Building 7 seems to demonstrate beyond all doubt that Hess and Jennings were still in the building after at least one, probably both, of the Towers had come down.

Carter: "I Went to Pyongyang to Meet the Dear Leader But All I Got Was This Christian Missionary!"

2010-08-29T03:35:00.000-07:00

From The Daily News!

Billary At The DMZ

2010-07-24T23:54:00.000-07:00

I liked this picture that I saw at One Free Korea and Mr Stanton's caption so much I thought I'd put them both here:

Clinton announced the sanctions as she visited the DMZ, while accompanied by SecDef Gates, and while displaying her supernatural frost-projection powers against a hapless North Korean border guard. I count at least three priceless expressions in this photo.

Anyone have any better captions?

Meanwhile, North Korea threatens a "sacred war" with the use of nuclear deterrent. *Yawn!*

Kim Hyun Hee in Japan

2010-07-20T19:39:00.000-07:00

TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Kim Hyon Hui, a former North Korean spy responsible for the 1987 fatal bombing of a South Korean passenger jet, arrived early Tuesday in Japan on a Japanese government-chartered flight from South Korea to meet with the families of Japanese abducted by North Korean agents.

Mainichi

My review of Kim Hyun Hee's Tears of My Soul

Update: 25th July

Kim treated like guest of state / Critics question special handling despite no new info on missing

Some have questioned the propriety of the treatment given to one of the people responsible for the 1987 bombing of a Korean Air jetliner, as well as her contribution--or lack thereof--toward uncovering the truth behind the abduction of Japanese by North Korea.

Yomiuri

We Didn't Sink The Cheonan! (Honestly...!)

2010-07-15T17:38:00.000-07:00

Having been given the benefit of the doubt in the Cheonan sinking by the United Nations, North Korea's propaganda posters now appear to be bragging about sinking the vessel. According to the Joongang Daily, the poster of a soldier smashing a corvette (the same class of ship as the Cheonan) bearing the message "Ready to crush any attack with a single blow!" was photographed by a Chinese businessman.

According to Radio Free Asia:

The businessman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that high-ranking North Korean traders he dealt with “expressed self-esteem in relation to North Korea’s military strength” and told him, “regardless of U.N. sanctions, we [North Koreans have] never stopped reacting.”

“It’s hard to understand how high-ranking officials can adamantly deny North Korea’s responsibility for the sinking of the Cheonan while propaganda posters showing a ship being broken in half by a fist are in circulation,” he said.

Update: I am currently reading B R Myers' The Cleanest Race and this propaganda poster, if genuine, is a perfectly good illustration of one of his main points in the book. Up until now, North Korea's stance on the Cheonan issue has been to cry foul at the hostile Yankees and their South Korean puppets for conspiring to blame them for something they had nothing to do with. Korean Central News Agency even collated their own articles in a special section here. And when their Foreign Minister spoke about the incident following the United Nations' absolution of the North from any blame he said: The recent development in which the overall situation on the Korean Peninsula reached a point of explosion in a moment due to a conspiratorial farce once again reminds us of the danger of the present cease-fire and the urgency to establish a peace-keeping regime. The DPRK will make consistent efforts for the conclusion of a peace treaty and the denuclearization through the six-party talks conducted on equal footing.

However, B R Myers warns:

Too many observers wrongly assume that the (North) Korean Central News Agency's English-language releases reflect the same sort of propaganda that the home audience gets. In fact there are significant differences. For example, there the DPRK presents itself to the outside world as a misunderstood country seeking integration into the international community, it presents itself to its own citizens... as a rogue state that breaks agreements with impunity, dictates conditions to grovelling U.N. officials, and keeps its enemies in constant fear of ballistic retribution. Generally speaking the following rule of thumb applies: the less accessible a propaganda outlet is to the outside world, the blunter and more belligerent it will be in its expression of the racist orthodoxy.

In this case, the poster doesn't depict anything that could be called racist but the rest of Myers' analysis of North Korean propaganda seems to fit this episode to a tee.

Arthur Goldwag's Cults, Conspiracies and Secret Societies

2010-07-10T21:55:00.000-07:00

Kinokuniya are having a sale (20% off all imported books!) so I decided to break my pledge to not buy any more books and picked up an intriguing volume called "Cults, Conspiracies and Secret Societies" by a writer called Arthur Goldwag. Having never heard of the author before I had no idea what opinion he would have on conspiracism but I bought it anyway because I liked the cover! (Eyes right!) And also because it looked like an amusing and concise exposition of an eclectic run through of the various psychological stances people employ to make sense of the world.

As with most books I talk about I haven't read it yet but I flicked through it looking for references to Lyndon LaRouche and came to this brilliant passage that explains how conspiracy theorists like to engage in conspiracies themselves and organize on conspiratorial lines:

[T]he erstwhile science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986) and the ex-Marxist Lyndon LaRouche each claimed to have been the victims of a cabal of international bankers. Both the House of Windsor and the Bush family have been the objects of intense suspicion in conspiracist thinking. 9/11 Truthers are as likely to be right-wing racists as left-wing anarchists, but they all loathe their government with equal intensity. Some of these people are mentally ill: their personalities and ideations are shaped (or distorted) by the same pathologies; they don't so much agree with each other as exhibit the same symptoms. Because they are narcissistic, they think of themselves as gods; because they are paranoid, they are secretive and defensive; because they are grandiose, they fancy themselves the victims of vast conspiracies - or they organize and even execute vast conspiracies themselves.

Whilst LaRouche has hardly been that successful in executing his vast conspiracy he is the founder of his grandly named Executive Intelligence Review which distributes press releases such as this : "LaRouche Announces the Role He Will Play in a Post-Obama Administration". And his followers have managed to infiltrate the Democratic Party such as Kesha Rogers who has won a Congressional candidate nomination whose own press releases are shaped (or distorted) by the same pathologies as Lyndon LaRouche - in particular his belief that the British Royal Family is still running the world:

June 3, 2010 -- Let the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico be a lesson to the American people: the British and those who run British Petroleum, still consider the United States as one of their colonies. The time has come to expropriate these British SOBs, kick them out and let them take their puppet Barack Obama with them back to Britain.

Anyway, enough of this digression, I'll try to get round to reading Goldwag's book and hopefully to reviewing it too. In the meantime, his blog is here.

Update: Arthur Goldwag has helpfully provided some links to information regarding Lyndon LaRouche's antipathy towards Obama. This cocktail of racist invective, lasciviousnes and conspiracism is taken from a speech LaRouche gave in 2008:

Obama is a racist. I mean, with an African father–he wasn’t much of an African father, but was an African father of Kenya. He was part of a British operation, which took over Kenya, through MI5′s operation. But this guy was away from Kenya, and he married a Margaret Mead type, a woman who had a number of successive husbands, like Margaret Mead did. Went out to the poor, brown people, in Asia, and had sex with them! It was called “Coming in Samoa.” [groans, laughter] And she wore through a number of successive husbands, and by them, had various children. And therefore, you’ll find Obama’s ancestry, if you chase his family tree, everybody’s climbing and swinging from the branches there–from all over the world! All parts of the world! This guy is the universal man. Every monkey in every tree, from every part of the world, has participated in the sexual act of producing him. And he works for organized crime–which is a branch of British intelligence.

Some more on LaRouche here and here.

More Art From The DPRK

2010-07-10T01:22:00.000-07:00

Apparently, more like it is available at the Shinchon-Ri Museum in Pyongyang.

Cheonan Controversy

2010-07-10T00:32:00.000-07:00

North Korea has hailed as a "victory" a UN Security Council statement that condemns the sinking of a South Korean warship but avoids blaming Pyongyang.

BBC

The Korean Central News Agency gives the DPRK's official response:

FM Spokesman on Presidential Statement of UNSC on "Cheonan" Case
Pyongyang, July 10 (KCNA) -- A spokesman for the DPRK Foreign Ministry on Saturday gave the following answer to the question raised by KCNA as regards the issue of the presidential statement of the United Nations Security Council on the "Cheonan" case:

The south Korean authorities brought up the case for discussion at the UNSC, but it concluded the discussion on this issue by issuing its presidential statement devoid of any proper judgment and conclusion without adopting any resolution on it.

A particular mention should be made of the fact that the UNSC took heed of the reactions of the countries concerned including the DPRK which clarified that it had nothing to do with the case.

The discussion could not have ended up otherwise as the UNSC hastily tabled and handled the case before the truth of the case has been probed.

This clearly proves what a foolish calculation the U.S. and south Korea made when they were recklessly behaving in so great haste to do harm to the DPRK for no reason.

We take note of the presidential statement saying that "the Security Council encourages the settlement of outstanding issues on the Korean Peninsula by peaceful means to resume direct dialogue and negotiation through appropriate channels."

The "Cheonan" case should have been settled between the north and the south without referring it to the UN.

The DPRK remains unchanged in its stand to probe the truth about the case to the last.

The south Korean authorities should strictly preserve the scene of the incident including the state of seabed as they were till the inspection team of the National Defence Commission of the DPRK reaches there.

The recent development in which the overall situation on the Korean Peninsula reached a point of explosion in a moment due to a conspiratorial farce once again reminds us of the danger of the present cease-fire and the urgency to establish a peace-keeping regime.

The DPRK will make consistent efforts for the conclusion of a peace treaty and the denuclearization through the six-party talks conducted on equal footing.

If the hostile forces persist in such provocations as demonstration of forces and sanctions in contravention of the presidential statement which calls for "avoiding conflicts and averting escalation" on the Korean Peninsula, they will neither be able to escape the DPRK's strong physical retaliation nor will be able to evade the responsibility for the resultant escalation of the conflict.

KCNA

And Nature magazine has an article in which it airs the conspiracy theories over the sinking of the Cheonan.

Russia, With My Backing, Will Soon Destroy Your Ass!

2010-07-08T19:11:00.000-07:00

Interesting story in the Telegraph:

["Alleged" Russian spy Mikhail] Semenko - known as Misha - lived in a shabby flat in Arlington. The flat had been arranged for him by Mark Grueter, a former Peace Corps volunteer who had taught him English at Amur State University in Blagoveschensk in the Russian Far East in 2001 and 2002.

"Unlike many of the Russian students, he had a generally favourable attitude toward America," Mr Grueter recalled. "He didn't carry any of the xenophobia or anti-American baggage that many of them had. He wasn't really interested in politics.

"He was just interested in learning, in soaking up knowledge. When I saw him in America, he seemed happy and he seemed to really like it here. I was impressed by how much his English had improved."

Update: Mark's adventures in espionage are now told in full here.

Whoops!

2010-06-30T16:53:00.000-07:00

An article in a Chinese state publication defined the Korean War as an invasion by North Korea. It is an incredible statement for a state news publication to have made.

In its feature on the 60th anniversary of the start of the 1950-53 Korean War, the International Herald Leader, a newsweekly of the Xinhua News Agency, said the North Korean army launched the war by crossing the 38th parallel and seizing South Korean capital Seoul in three days.

The article immediately drew attention, with some placing significance on China’s first admission of military aggression by North Korea at the start of the war.

However, the article was soon removed from the weekly’s Web site as well as the sites of Xinhua and other portals. It is suspected that the Beijing government had a hand in removing the pieces, fearing the repercussions from North Korea.

JoongAng Daily

H/T One Free Korea

DPRK Propaganda

2010-06-27T04:21:00.000-07:00

Kim Jong-il in his role as comforting parent of the entire Korean people mourning the loss of Kim Il-sung

(more pictures here)

B. R Myers, whose book The Cleanest Race sits unread on my bookshelf, believes that the key to understanding North Korea is in its propaganda and that while it is sometimes almost impossible not to laugh at its po-faced naiivete, the themes that emerge are genuinely believed in. He also thinks that some of the assumptions made about North Korea are shown to be incorrect when the propaganda is carefully studied. In particular Myers points out that Communism, or even the official Juche philosophy, is only given lip-service by the Kim regime and that the real driving ideology is an extreme nationalism that has elements of racial superiority. According to him the DPRK sees Koreans as a unique race that can only be protected from a hostile outside world by the Kim family, whereas the decadent lackeys of Western imperialism in the south are allowing this unique blood to be sullied by outsiders. In an FP article in which he sketches out his theory he writes:

"Our nation has always considered its pure lineage to be of great importance," a North Korean general told his South Korean counterpart during a 2006 meeting to discuss realignment of the maritime border between the two states. "Since ancient times our lands have been one of abundant natural beauty," he said. "Not even one drop of ink must be allowed."

Kim Canute

The belief in a specifically Korean natural beauty that must be defended against a hostile outside world is sometimes depicted as in the pitcure above of Kim Jong-il on a wave-swept beach staring defiantly at the storm. Myers sharply observes in his book that Kim Jong-il took advantage of such imagery when Bill Clinton went to the DPRK to negotiate the release of the reporters Euna Lee and Laura Ling as the group photograph of Kim sitting (again with a somewhat defiant or stroke-addled expression) in front of more paintings of waves behind them shows.

This propaganda can only work, however, if foreigners - particularly the Americans and the Japanese (from whom Myers says a lot of North Korean propaganda slogans were adopted) along with support from their south Korean lackeys are depicted as incorrigibly dangerous and anti-Korean. Along the streets billboards showing the Yankee soldiers succumbing to massive Korean fists are common while children are given any and every opportunity to learn about their hated enemy.

Here's a picture I took of a children's game at the funfair in Pyongyang. I think it may be called, "Kill the Yankee Imperialist Aggressors", although Myers gives some rather more alarming examples of indocrination in his article.

Even the English-language propaganda isn't shy about using racial epithets that are completely unacceptable in the West these days. So, for example, the programme I bought for a revolutionary opera called Sea of Blood has a couple of eyecatching captions:

Myers sees something distinctly ominous about this racially-driven propaganda in the likely impossibility of an agreement being reached on the Korean peninsula.

What is especially significant and perhaps unique about North Korean nationalism is its emphasis on the vulnerability of the race. Whereas World War II-era Japan's racialized worldview equated virtue with strength, the North Koreans are taught that their virtue has rendered them as vulnerable as children in an evil world -- unless they are protected by a great leader who keeps a watchful eye on military readiness.

Unfortunately for the United States, there is no place in this for any improvement in relations between the two countries. Were Kim Jong Il to abandon his ideology of paranoid, race-based nationalism and normalize relations with Washington, his personality cult would lose all justification, while his impoverished country would lose all reason to exist as a separate Korean state.

Quote of the Day

2010-06-23T17:17:00.000-07:00

"angrysoba was never banned, but he is a pain in the ass. I really wouldn't mind if he dropped dead. Feel free to go over to his blog and denounce North Korea with him."
FGFM

Kim Hyun Hee on the Cheonan

2010-06-23T04:04:00.000-07:00

Kim Hyun Hee, believes that Kim Jong-il ordered the Cheonan sinking.

Story here.

North Korea in the World Cup

2010-06-15T06:08:00.001-07:00

Uh-oh! North Korea caught illegally broadcasting World Cup Games!

But North Korea's first game was a pretty impressive performance against Brazil in which they lost 2-1.

c/o One Free Korea

Update: Portugal 7 - North Korea 0 LOL!

Update 2: In light of the DPRK's highly embarrassing defeat at the hands of Portugal, some people are worried about the fate of the players.

A good article here:

When the US soccer team is getting slaughtered, Americans tend to turn their TVs off before the game's over. When Portugal slaughtered North Korea's soccer team Monday night, it was the government who turned the TVs off.

After Portugal delivered a humiliating 7-0 defeat to North Korea, the game's broadcast there immediately shut off. The team hasn't played at the World Cup in 44 years, and the authoritarian state's Korean Central TV Broadcasting Station aired Monday's game live, purportedly North Korea's first-ever live Cup broadcast. With the communist country's history of human rights violations that include public executions, many are worrying for the safety of the North Korean soccer team. Are those fears well-founded?

Please read on to find out.

Update 3: Well, that wraps that up: North Korea 0 - Ivory Coast 3

North Korean Art

2010-06-14T02:32:00.000-07:00

Excellent collection of North Korean art here.

And here's one I took in Pyongyang:

North Korea Kills Chinese Citizens

2010-06-08T17:29:00.000-07:00

In further attempts to shrug off its image as a country run by deranged and psychopathic leaders and to appear normal, North Korea has shot dead three Chinese citizens across the DPRK-China border at Dandong.

This has even tested the patience of the Beijing government which tries hard not to get excitable about such things.

BBC

The ever-excellent Barbara Demick has a report on this story in the LA Times:

The irony of China's protest over last week's shooting was not lost on South Korea.

"This time it is their citizens who are killed, and they show they are not so naive after all about North Korea," said Kim Tae Jin, a North Korean defector and human rights activist in Seoul. However, he applauded China's protest of the shooting. China needs to show North Korean leader Kim Jong Il "that he can't get away with whatever he wants," Kim said.

Resistance is Useless!

2010-06-08T03:45:00.000-07:00

Ahmadinejad Stresses Need for New World Order

TEHRAN (FNA)- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday called for cooperation among world states to forge a new world order.

FARS

HT: Screw Loose Change

I wonder if he'll be at Bilderberg this year.

"no, AS"

2010-06-08T00:16:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia

On page 65 of Christopher Hitchens' memoir "Hitch 22", during a chapter in which he recounts his experiences at a school for posh nobs in Cambridge, he writes:

More intriguing to me and my young contemporaries, restlessly modern as we aspired to be in the early 1960s, was the chance to walk past the Cavendish Laboratories and see where the atom had been first split, or to pass by the Rose and Crown pub, into which Crick and Watson had strolled with exaggerated nonchalance one lunchtime to announce that with the double helix they had uncovered "the secret of existence."

In the same way Hitchens crossed out the quote from conspiraloon Gore Vidal on the back of his book and scrawled, "no, CH" I had to do something similar over the twee-sounding "Rose and Crown" in the above quote as it was The Eagle in which the eminent scientists Crick and Watson toasted their discovery.

This picture is of the plaque on the wall of The Eagle and was, apparently, taken by someone going by the name of Richard Carter. So, thanks for the picture.

Andrei Lankov Predicts Russia's Verdict on the Cheonan Sinking...

2010-06-07T23:01:00.000-07:00

Speculation is high as a team of Russian experts, sent to South Korea to review the findings of the multinational investigation into the [sinking of the Cheonan] incident, returned home Monday to report to Moscow, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

But regardless of what its experts determine, a prominent North Korea expert here expects Russia to avoid taking a firm stance on the findings, as it has too much to lose by supporting either side...

..."It might have indeed been North Korea," [Lankov] said, taking the voice of the Russian government. "But the evidence is not sufficient and so it is better not to jump to conclusions and drive tensions higher. Let's forget about this unfortunate incident as soon as possible."

Korea Times

Essentially, Andrei Lankov believes Russia has nothing to gain by concluding too firmly whether or not they agree with the international investigation's conclusion into the sinking of the Cheonan.

B R Myers on the sinking of the Cheonan

2010-06-07T18:42:00.000-07:00

NRO

Crazy, Irresponsible Yankees Rule Out Nukes!

2010-06-03T20:43:00.000-07:00

In not-particularly surprising news the ~~Yankee Imperialist Aggressors~~ "United States" has ruled out blasting the ocean floor with a nuclear bomb to cap an oil-well which it abetted its neo-imperialist greed monkeys, BP, Transocean and Halliburton into bursting. As mentioned before there had been some speculation that a nuclear bomb would be the only thing to stop the oil leak not just from spewing more of its poison into the ocean but from killing off all worthwhile life on Earth!!!1! (i.e not including cockroaches and other stuff like that).

The New York Times has a story about how such "crazy" talk is just crazy talk and that there is no way the US is going to resort to nukes to stop the relentlessly oozing spill:

The chatter began weeks ago as armchair engineers brainstormed for ways to stop the torrent of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico: What about nuking the well?

Decades ago, the Soviet Union reportedly used nuclear blasts to successfully seal off runaway gas wells, inserting a bomb deep underground and letting its fiery heat melt the surrounding rock to shut off the flow. Why not try it here?

But...

Stephanie Mueller, a spokeswoman for the Energy Department, said that neither Energy Secretary Steven Chu nor anyone else was thinking about a nuclear blast under the gulf. The nuclear option was not — and never had been — on the table, federal officials said.

“It’s crazy,” one senior official said.

Government and private nuclear experts agreed that using a nuclear bomb would be not only risky technically, with unknown and possibly disastrous consequences from radiation, but also unwise geopolitically — it would violate arms treaties that the United States has signed and championed over the decades and do so at a time when President Obama is pushing for global nuclear disarmament.

So, it's all just crazy talk, eh? And yet, even the article itself points out that this is just the kind of crazy talk that the New York Times engaged in too...

But if it really is crazy talk this does, of course, raise the uncomfortable question: "Got any better ideas?"

The atomic option is perhaps the wildest among a flood of ideas proposed by bloggers, scientists and other creative types who have deluged government agencies and BP, the company that drilled the well, with phone calls and e-mail messages. The Unified Command overseeing the Deepwater Horizon disaster features a “suggestions” button on its official Web site and more than 7,800 people have already responded, according to the site.
Among the suggestions: lowering giant plastic pillows to the seafloor and filling them with oil, dropping a huge block of concrete to squeeze off the flow and using magnetic clamps to attach pipes that would siphon off the leaking oil.

Well, that's reassuring! This, on the other hand, is not:

Not everyone on the Internet is calling for nuking the well. Some are making jokes.

Friendly Fire?

2010-05-31T04:34:00.000-07:00

A no-doubt spontaneous rally in Pyongyang against the Yankee Imperialist Aggressors

Sunday, May 30th saw a big demonstration against the findings of the international investigation that blamed North Korea for the sinking of the Cheonan.

South of the border, there is also a high degree of skepticism that North Korea were responsible for the Cheonan's sinking. According to Bloomberg:

Prime Minister Chung Un Chan ordered the government to find a way to stop groundless rumors spreading on the Cheonan’s sinking, the JoongAng Daily said yesterday. Prosecutors questioned a former member of the panel that probed the incident over his critical comments, the paper said. The Joint Chiefs of Staff sued a lawmaker for defamation after she said video footage of the ship splitting apart existed, a claim the military denies, Yonhap News reported.

Almost one in four South Koreans say they don’t trust the findings of the multinational panel, according to a poll commissioned by Hankook Ilbo on May 24. North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency yesterday accused the South’s “puppet military of trying to cover up the truth about the sinking” by seeking to silence opposition lawmakers with the lawsuit.

Indeed, North Korea's Defence Commission held a press conference in which they brought up what they see as inconsistencies in the report...

The Press Conference is reported, in typically temperate North Korean rhetoric, here.

But while North Korea are furiously denouncing those who blame them for the sinking of the Cheonan and it is reported that many in South Korea don't believe the official report, B R Myers points out that anger towards North Korea is quite limited in South Korea. He points out that anti-American protests in the past have far surpassed the anger levelled at North Korea right now:

This urge to give the North Koreans the benefit of the doubt is in marked contrast to the public fury that erupted after the killings of two South Korean schoolgirls by an American military vehicle in 2002; it was widely claimed that the Yankees murdered them callously. During the street protests against American beef imports in the wake of a mad cow disease scare in 2008, posters of a child-poisoning Uncle Sam were all the rage. It is illuminating to compare those two anti-American frenzies with the small and geriatric protests against Pyongyang that have taken place in Seoul in recent weeks.

Now, this is something that could lead a conspiracy theorist to wondering whether or not the sinking of the Cheonan by the North Koreans is a cover for the possibility of a "friendly fire" incident by the United States. It is quite clear that should the United States have sank the Cheonan instead of the North Koreans then the outrage would indeed be spontaneous and stronger than that of the anti-North Korean protests right now.

One of the proponents of this view is Kim Myong Chol, who is an "unofficial" spokesperson for North Korea who lives in Japan.

Kim Myong-Chol has argued that it is impossible for the Cheonan to have been attacked unawares by a torpedo from a North Korean submarine given that the Cheonan was on naval maneouvres at the time and one of its main jobs was to detect submarines and other enemy vessels. This is a repeat of what he had asserted before, here.

Of course, what he has to say on the incident should be taken with a pinch of salt given that he then goes on to threaten:

The Korean People's Army has been put on combat readiness. Supreme Commander Kim Jong-il is one click away from turning Seoul, Tokyo and New York into a sea of fire with a fleet of nuclear-tipped North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles.

But, I'd be interested to know what anyone has to say about his accusations...

No One To Blame But Themselves...

2010-05-28T10:01:00.000-07:00

"History" North Korean-style

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea has a history of rewriting history as the title of the book above suggests. Although not always going as far as DPRK propaganda, some Western academics have also been keen to exonerate the Hermit Kingdom for its behaviour, sometimes with embarrassing results.

Given the fact that the causes of the Korean War are still being disputed sixty years after the DPRK initiated it, it isn't too surprising to see that the latest round in that conflict also can't be agreed upon. Despite the findings of the international investigation , China is still publicly saying that it hasn't been convinced of North Korea's guilt. This probably won't surprise Andrei Lankov who believed after the report was issued, that China would still declare themselves unconvinced even if showed a video of a North Korean submarine attacking the Cheonan:

However, China has now said it will not protect those responsible which presumably includes - in fact, can only refer to - North Korea, if it can be persuaded the North was responsible. It may begin to look isolated if a Russian team who have gone to South Korea to investigate end up agreeing with the earlier investigation.

In the meantime, while tensions have always been high on the Western maritime border between North and South Korea - also known as the Northern Limit Line - they look set to become more dangerous as North Korea cuts its hotline to South Korea that was originally set up to prevent naval clashes such as those detailed in this Global Security report.

Perhaps it is likely this will all "fizzle out" soon enough as Lankov says in the video and as B.R Myers suggests is wanted in South Korea.

The Russians Are Coming!

2010-05-28T10:00:00.000-07:00

North Korean Puppets Assail South Korean Puppets!

2010-05-27T17:17:00.000-07:00

When South Korea announced it was set to resume propaganda broadcasts into North Korea including the old Cold War tactic of literally blaring broadcasts from speakers from the border across the "demilitarized zone", North Korea similarly resumed its tough talk against the "puppet government" of South Korea:

Pyongyang, May 26 (KCNA) -- As already reported, the south Korean puppet military gangsters have carved slogans for anti-DPRK psychological warfare on walls of MP posts in the Demilitarized Zone along the Military Demarcation Line and are busy resuming the loudspeaker propaganda as part of the said warfare...

...If the south side sets up even loudspeakers in the frontline area to resume the broadcasting, in particular, the KPA will take military steps to blow up one by one the moment they appear by firing sighting shots because such action will be tantamount to a blatant abrogation of the north-south military agreement and a military provocation against the DPRK.
Moreover, measures will be taken to totally ban the passage of personnel and vehicles of the south side in the zone under the north-south control in the western coastal area.
The south Korean puppet war-like forces would be well advised to act with discretion, bearing deep in mind that such measures of the KPA will not end in an empty talk.

KCNA

Kim Hyun Hee: Tears of My Soul Part 1

2010-05-25T01:11:00.000-07:00

The recent sinking of the Cheonan seems to have perplexed a few people who question why North Korea would commit such a brazenly provocative act, while some analysts suggest Kim Jong-il himself ordered the mission. But it isn’t by any means the first time North Korea has acted this way. So here is Part One of a review of a book that describes another fairly recent occasion.

I first heard about Kim Hyun-Hee from a student who told me two things about the North Korean spy that didn’t quite gel. First, that she had placed a deadly bomb aboard a South Korean airliner and second that she now lived in Seoul. “But why was she not in prison?” I asked incredulously. My student said he didn’t know but ventured it may have been because she was very beautiful.

The official story of how Kim Hyun-Hee became transformed from a mass murdering terrorist who stowed a liquid bomb aboard KAL858 killing 115 people to a victim evoking sympathy brainwashed by the evil North Korean state is partly told in her memoir The Tears of My Soul. The book is apparently intended as an act of contrition with the proceeds going to the families of the bombing victims.

Kim’s story is an insight into the rise of the daughter of a North Korean diplomat which tells of her early life first living in Cuba and then in Pyongyang – making her one of the privileged elite – also shedding light onto her school and university years and her induction into Foreign Intelligence. She explains that her and other school children would be told to redact the names of those who had become “unpeople” in purges from the textbooks and of certain chores such as having to collect maggots from the excrement of public outhouses and then the excrement itself which was to be used as fertilizer in the countryside (this practice still apparently continues in North Korea but due to food shortages, it has diminishing returns).

In the Youth Corps she is made a leader with the responsibility of reprimanding others who don’t show enough zeal:

“You claim to have not met your quotas because you didn’t have enough time. And yet yesterday I myself saw you playing with other children. I find it hard to believe that you had time to play but not to work. Such an excuse shows you have violated the lesson of Our Great Leader [Kim Il-sung], who teaches us to be faithful to a group life.”
She says that others would often eagerly make stronger denunciations:

“Comrade student, you don’t deserve to study in the bosom of Father President. You should be expelled from school at once.”
She does well at school and gets herself accepted to the Pyongyang Foreign Language Center in which she majors in Japanese. Her language abilities and dedication fatefully attract the eye of Party Agents and she is inducted in to a military college to be trained as a spy with the codename Kim Ok Hwa. Her Japanese teacher there is named Eun Hae.

Kim Hyun-Hee explains that Eun Hae was a Japanese citizen from Tokyo who was abducted by North Korean agents while playing with her children at the beach and forced to become a Japanese tutor for North Korea’s spies. Although Eun Hae’s life is miserable, in which she spends a lot of time drinking and pining for her children in Japan, Kim rationalizes Eun Hae’s abduction by saying that Japan’s crimes in World War Two were far worse. There’s a remarkable account of both of them sneaking out of the military college to arrive at a nearby village in which the people live in far worse poverty than is seen in Pyongyang.

Eun Hae insisted, on Sunday evening, that we visit the village, because she had never seen ordinary North Koreans before. We found a decrepit cluster of houses and filthy children running around the streets, some naked. I was ashamed at this and tried to pull Eun Hae away. But she stared at the children with tears in her eyes…
“So this is your brave new world, Ok Hwa,” she said with unmitigated scorn. “I pity you”.

Eun Hae is, in fact, Yaeko Taguchi who the North Korean government insist is now dead.
The chapters involving some of her ninja-style training are actually quite grippingly told. She has to infiltrate a mock-embassy, break a safe and memorize a message. In order to add to the realism of the exercise she is allowed to beat the guards unconscious. She is also trained in the three Korean martial arts, taekwondo, tangsoodo and hapkido, which she later puts to good effect when she is accosted by a madman in the lingerie section of a Belgrade department store (!)

Finally, she is summoned to meet the Director of Foreign Intelligence and learns of a top secret and important mission that she is to fulfill:

“Comrades,” he said “I will start with the conclusion first. Your mission will be to destroy a South Korean airplane.” He paused, allowing the words to sink in. I felt butterflies in my stomach and stared at him.
“The order, you may be interested to know, was written by Our Dear Leader himself, Kim Jung Il [sic]. Handwritten, that is…This whole mission is in fact Our Dear Leader’s own idea…Our entire national destiny will depend on it.”
The Director goes on to explain that the destruction of the plane would prevent South Korea from being able to hold the Olympic Games as other countries will stay away in fear and that the change in the constitution of South Korea from a dictatorship to a democracy will be sent into turmoil with the country eventually falling apart and having to unify with North Korea under the leadership of the Kim family.

Well, if that doesn’t sound quixotic enough of a plan Foreign Intelligence went even further in compromising the mission by partnering Kim - who would go by the Japanese name Mayumi Hachiro - with an almost infirm and aging chain-smoker Kim Seung-il who would pose as her father, Shinichi, and having them fly from Belgrade to Baghdad and then to Abu Dhabi (where they would alight) allowing them to escape as the plane continued on to Seoul with a bomb in the overhead luggage compartment. Fortunately, if anything went wrong they each had a packet of Marlboro cigarettes to console themselves with. Each contained one with a slight ink smudge on it indicating it was laced with cyanide.

Kim Seung-il has some reservations about this strangely incompetent plan which increases his anxiety and illness. Future Axis-of Evil North Korea's agents were to fly in to Saddam International Airport to pick up this bomb while the two other future Axis-of-Evil nations Iraq and Iran were locked in a war. Unsurprisingly security is very tight and yet the two men who deliver them the bomb arrive at the airport disguised as…well secret agents…dressed in identical suits with identical sunglasses and both named Choi!

To be continued...

How Inconvenient!

2010-05-23T00:46:00.000-07:00

This picture, which appears at the Foreign Policy blog purports to show a piece of the torpedo which sank the Cheonan diplaying the Hangul script. I'm dismissive of conspiracy theories that claim the evidence is fabricated or of those who react to the discovery of Korean script on the torpedo with, "How convenient!" simply because it is in no way convenient to South Korea or any of the other countries that sent its experts to be part of the international investigation such as the US, UK, Australia and Sweden.

The DPRK has offered to send its own investigators:

The Democratic People's Republic Korea (DPRK) on Saturday urged South Korea to receive an inspection group to be dispatched by the National Defense Commission (NDC) of the DPRK to verify evidence related to the sinking of a South Korean warship in March, the official KCNA news agency reported.

But they have been refused:

According to the KCNA, Seoul's rejection of the DPRK inspectors "can not be construed otherwise than a move to prevent the true nature of its conspiratorial farce and charade from being brought to light."

The South Korean side has already given its reasons for rejecting this delegation no doubt seeing the murder of 46 of its seamen to be humiliation enough:

But South Korean Defence Minister Kim Tae-Young on Friday rejected the North's demand as "outrageous", saying it would be "like a robber or a murderer insisting he must inspect the crime scene".

South Korea said Friday the North should instead attend military talks with the US-led United Nations Command (UNC) after the command wraps up its investigation to review the findings of the investigation and determine the scope of armistice violation that occurred in the sinking.

It seems that it could also be inconvenient for North Korea in this final straw will be the end of the "Sunshine policy" of engagement with North Korea.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial insists that Kim Jong-il's regime no longer be seen as legitimate:

The larger strategic insight is to recognize that North Korea won't change until Kim dies or his regime falls. The goal of the West should be to increase pressure on the North toward the latter goal, especially given signs of increasing discontent in the North...

...The [US] Administration could also announce that its "future vision" is for a united and democratic Korea, similar to the united and democratic Germany that Mr. Obama celebrated in his famous Berlin speech. Supporters of engagement will decry this as provocative, but it will put the North on notice that the U.S. no longer accepts its legitimacy as a given.

Peace-Loving DPRK Misunderstood Again

2010-05-21T21:25:00.000-07:00

The Peace-loving DPRK

North Korea's official news agency, KCNA, reports that the kum-ba-yah-esque Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea has issued a "What? Me?" response to the South Korean investigation that concluded the Cheonan had been destroyed by a North Korean torpedo:

I will publish it in its entirety here:

Pyongyang, May 21 (KCNA) -- A spokesman for the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea (CPRK) issued a statement on Friday assailing the south Korean puppet forces for releasing extremely provocative "results of the investigation" into the sinking of a warship of the south Korean puppet navy in a bid to hurl mud at the north.

The statement noted that the publication of the above-said "results of the investigation" is another extremely ridiculous charade staged by the puppet group in a bid to hurt the dignity of the DPRK, steadily tighten the "sanctions" against it, harm and suffocate it in conspiracy with its U.S. and Japanese masters, much upset by the might of the Republic advancing by leaps and bounds toward a thriving nation.

The Lee Myung Bak group, while working with bloodshot eyes to escalate confrontation with fellow countrymen, drew the conclusion from the day the case occurred that the warship was "sunken by the north" and has since conducted intensive investigation on its basis to hatch a plot, the statement said, and went on:

In the course of nearly two month-long investigation the puppet group fabricated what it called "circumstantial evidence" with conjecture, supposition and random guess. It just produced fragments and pieces of aluminum whose origin remains unknown as "evidence," becoming the target of derision.

Greatly irony is that it deliberately linked the case with the north, talking about the results of the analysis of composition of the unidentified "evidence" without any marking and its size and type.

This is nothing but a shameful deed of those keen on escalating the confrontation with the north.

The Lee group's assertion that the above-said case is linked with the north is the last-ditch effort of those who face destruction as it is a premeditated and deliberate plot to tide over a serious crisis created due to the total failure of its domestic and foreign policies and smoothly stage the "elections to the local self-governing bodies" in a bid to maintain the fascist rule and bring the inter-Korean relations to a collapse.

The puppet forces are now kicking up such fuss as creating atmosphere reminiscent of a wartime situation in south Korea, blustering they would not "rule out a war" and crying out for "counter-measures", urgently evacuating the personnel, equipment and materials of the south side from the areas of the north side and issuing top secret order for taking steps for personal safety and making preparations for withdrawal.

This racket reminding one of an eve of a war goes to prove that the group's recent publication of the "results of investigation" was not a mere clarification of the sinking of the warship but a carefully calculated provocation to seek a pretext for igniting a war of aggression against the north together with outside forces.

The puppet group has created such grave situation on the Korean Peninsula that a war may break out right now.

Pursuant to the statement issued by a spokesman for the National Defence Commission, the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea solemnly declares as follows, speaking for the DPRK government authorities:

Firstly, from now on the DPRK will regard the present situation as the phase of a war and decisively handle all matters arising in the inter-Korean relations to cope with it.

Secondly, in case the puppet group opts for "counter-action" and "retaliation" under the pretext of the sinking of the warship, the DPRK will strongly react to them with such merciless punishment as the total freeze of the inter-Korean relations, the complete abrogation of the north-south agreement on non-aggression and a total halt to the inter-Korean cooperation undertakings.

The DPRK will never pardon anyone hurting its supreme dignity and doing harm to it, warned the statement.

Source: KCNA

North Korea Blamed For the Cheonan Sinking!

2010-05-20T08:11:00.000-07:00

North Korea has officially been blamed for the sinking of South Korea's Cheonan naval vessel after an international investigation. I had said before that it sounded a little like the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898. However, this one now seems to be the reverse as the USS Maine was initially believed to have been deliberately sunk and later found to be an accident whereas the Cheonan was initially believed to have been an accident and later declared deliberate.

One of the pieces of evidence was the fact that a serial number from a torpedo was discovered on some of the shrapnel from the blast as the Korean Times says here:

Korea has found a serial number marked on fragments of torpedo propeller collected from the scene where the petrol ship Chonan of the navy sank in March, Yonhap News reported Wednesday.

The number was written in a font used in North Korea, and investigators have concluded that the 1,200-ton corvette came under a North Korean torpedo attack near the West Sea border on March 26 before breaking in half and sinking, Yonhap quoted officials in Seoul said.

Foreign experts from the United States, Britain and Australia working as part of an international team have also agreed to the assessment that a torpedo attack sank the Cheonan, officials said.

One blog that appears to have been correct from the start is One Free Korea which originally featured this post very shortly after the first part of the wreck was salvaged.

But also, while I was being tongue-in-cheek in a previous post on Kim Jong-il's trip to China about the meaning of "frank exchange of views" between China and North Korea, I can't help wondering whether or not Kim Jong-il actually was given a dressing down by Hu Jintao or at least made to explain whether North Korea were behind the sinking of the Cheonan.

Of course, naval border skirmishes between the navies of the two Koreas are not rare, but if this is the modern version of the USS Maine then it doesn't bode well for the future.

No More Heroes

2010-05-19T00:54:00.000-07:00

Back in my university days, I bought and read Dmitri Volkogonov’s biography on Lenin to help me with an essay I was writing on the lovable old mass murderer. The question asked whether he was a revolutionary before he was a Marxist or the other way around. Taking the question literally I argued that he became a revolutionary because the Tsar had his brother executed and that he formed his own brand of Marxism later. This is no departure from standard texts on Lenin but my source, Volkogonov, had written three biographies on the three iconic figures of the Russian Revolution, Stalin, Lenin and later on Trotsky which certainly were departures from the way that they had been portrayed by the Soviet Union. Volkogonov had been known as a hard-line general in the Soviet Union when his book denouncing Stalin for his crimes was published leading to his dismissal from his job as head of the Institute of Military History at the Ministry of Defense by none other than Mikhail Gorbachev. Subsequently he wrote the biography on Lenin which dismissed its subject as a murderer and then, around the time I was writing my essay on Lenin, his biography on Trotsky was about to be published in English which was widely expected to consign him to the same league of blood-stained butchers as the other two.

But as that was the end of my formal education in history I never got round to reading Volkogonov’s biography on Trotsky and my interest in him diminished until Robert Service brought out his new tome on the man who many people had pinned their hopes on as the real hope for the Russian Revolution - Animal Farm’s Snowball and 1984’s Goldstein who could have made it all better if that dastardly Stalin (or Napoleon or Big Brother) hadn’t destroyed him. Robert Service mentions in his introduction, two biographers of Trotsky who were particular admirers of Trotsky, Pierre Broue and Isaac Deutscher, the latter of whom wrote a famous Trotsky trilogy of “literary dash” that Service himself doesn’t claim to rival.

A review of Service’s new biography has appeared in the London Review of Books by a writer called Sheila Kirkpatrick in which she says Service has written a book that is “less fun to read than Deutscher or Volkogonov” and which she takes issue with because it highlights his love affairs such as with Frida Kahlo.

Frida Kahlo: Don't Mention the affairs!

Kirkpatrick gives an interesting description of Volkogonov’s biography of Trotsky and attitude towards the three big names:

“Volkogonov was well along in his political evolution from anti-Stalinist Leninist to anti-Leninist when he wrote the Trotsky biography. Thus, while his Trotsky was a Leninist revolutionary (major revisionism in Soviet terms), Volkogonov no longer approved of Leninist revolutionaries. Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky: they were all men of blood to him now, historically almost indistinguishable from each other.”

Summing up Service’s conclusion she says:

Would the Soviet Union have fared better under Trotsky’s leadership than Stalin’s? Service takes the position, increasingly common in recent scholarship, that it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. He’s surprised at ‘the number of people who had no sympathy for Communism and yet accepted the idea that the USSR would not have been a totalitarian despotism under Trotskyist rule’. For Service, Trotsky was ‘close to Stalin in intentions and practice. He was no more likely than Stalin to create a society of humanitarian socialism even though he claimed and assumed that he would.’ He ‘revelled in terror’ and was ‘a ruthless centraliser and a friend of army and police’. ‘As soon as he had power, he eagerly suppressed popular aspirations by violence.’

And then goes on to say that Service also attacks the wishful thinkers who also wanted to believe in Trotsky despite evidence pointing towards him being just as inclined to spill blood for the revolutionary cause as both Lenin and Stalin. She finds this to be ironic as it suggests a kind of Marxist faith in the inevitability of history and perhaps an indulgence in irresponsible “What if…?” counterfactual history. I don’t think that is a fair charge, however. It is fair to make plausible guesses about what kind of leader Trotsky would have been. Service’s aim doesn’t seem to be in writing an alternative history but rather to answer those who choose to do so in a way not based on facts but on, well… faith. However, in sensing that Service has allowed a certain amount of anger into his writing she says, I think sarcastically:

It’s almost a relief to find Service finally taking a political and emotional position, after all that above-the-battle detachment. Still, it strikes me as an intellectual cop-out. Granted ‘what if’ history has its pitfalls, but does it make sense to say that, with Trotsky in power from the end of the 1920s rather than Stalin, everything would have turned out the same?... is it remotely plausible that he would have become paranoid about Jews after the war and launched the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign?

Well,now I think she is deliberately missing the point. Obviously Service isn’t saying that everything would have been exactly the same, only with Trotsky at the helm. For a start, Trotsky wouldn’t have engineered the death of Trotsky in Mexico with the aid of a delightful looking assassin. Ms. Kirkpatrick surely knows this and is being deliberately mocking.

I'm sure that Service is actually saying is that there would still have been a bloody tyranny under Trotsky although I am only about two-fifths of the way through reading his book myself. When I have finished I may well return to the subject and if Ms. Kirkpatrick is correct and I am wrong I shall be back to eat humble pie.

But first let me offer my own devastating critique of the book:

On page 15 there is a sentence: “Nearly all Jewish settlers went on bringing up their children up speaking Yiddish.”

I would suggest the first “up” is superfluous.

On pages 24-25: “but if Leiba’s difficulties with the vocabulary a couple of year later are anything to go by…”

“Year” is a countable noun and the plural is “years”! Sheesh!

On page 31, a childhood friend of Trotsky is named “Karlson” and then later on in the same paragraph as “Carlson”!

On page 48, a hectograph is described in parentheses as “[a small, rudimentary, gelatin duplicator)”

Spot the typo!

Here’s one that I don’t know if it is a mistake or not. In the chapter, “Love and Prison” Trotsky is described as incarcerated, along with his first wife, from 1898 onwards. But on pages 55-56 it reads, “It was in fact another year before they learned of their fate. In November 1898 the Nikolaev group heard that they were to serve a term of administrative exile.”

Shouldn’t that be “November 1899”?

Still, I do like the picture of Trotsky's assassin, Ramon Mercader, which appears in the book. He seems to be diguised as a hitman or secret agent.

Peering Into the Devil's Piggy Bank

2010-05-11T17:27:00.000-07:00

The U.S Federal Reserve has been so imbued with secrecy and conspiratorial occult rumours that when it is finally opened for a partial audit, for the first time in its history, I fear that this may happen:

"Marion, don't look at it. Shut your eyes, Marion. Don't look at it, no matter what happens!"

Kim Jong-il Goes to China Disguised as Kim Jong-il in Shades

2010-05-09T04:46:00.000-07:00

According to the Economist:

Mr Kim likes to travel furtively and China grudgingly humours him.

But Mr Kim’s train, say South Korea’s media, did chug over the border into the Chinese city of Dandong on May 3rd and from there headed to the nearby port of Dalian. He then proceeded to the northern city of Tianjin and thence to Beijing for meetings with Chinese leaders.

thence?

North Korea's news agency, KCNA have a thrilling blow-by-blow account of the trip.

Some highlights:

Noting that the five visits paid by Kim Jong Il to China in the new century clearly prove how much he values the DPRK-China friendship provided and fostered by the leaders of the elder generation of the two countries, Li Keqiang highly praised him for having made a great contribution to steadily boosting the China-DPRK friendship.

Thanks to the leadership of Kim Jong Il the Korean people have achieved spectacular successes in the efforts to build a great prosperous and powerful nation and achieve the reunification of the country and in foreign affairs and other fields, Li said, adding that the Chinese people are rejoiced over these achievements as over their own and sincerely hail them.

The collective leadership of China including Hu Jintao is attaching utmost importance to the China-DPRK friendship, he said, re-clarifying the steadfast stand of the Chinese party and government to steadily boost the traditional relations of friendship and cooperation between the two countries.

Kim Jong Il said that he was very pleased to see for himself while visiting China the progress made by Dalian City making a new history of modernization in the land of China through its hard struggle. He expressed thanks to the leading officials and people of Liaoning Province and Dalian City for warmly welcoming him.

Gripping stuff!

And more here, Kim Jong Il Makes Unofficial Visit to China:

The top leaders of the two parties and two countries informed each other of the situation in their countries and had a frank exchange of views on the issue of boosting the relations between the two parties and two countries and important international and regional matters of mutual concern and reached a consensus of views.

A "frank exchange of views"? Hmmm... isn't that a euphemism for a heated disagreement? Oh well, at least they ended up reaching a "consensus of views".

Oil!

2010-05-08T01:28:00.000-07:00

Oil picture

According to this Huffington Post article:

The catastrophic explosion that caused an oil spill from a BP offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico has reached the shoreline early Friday morning. The leak is currently releasing 5,000 barrels of oil per day, and efforts to manage the spill with controlled burning, dispersal and plugging the leak were unsuccessful Thursday. This oil spill is on track to become the worst oil spill in history, surpassing the damage done by the Exxon Valdez tanker that spilled 11 million gallons of oil into the ecologically sensitive Prince William Sound in 1989. Unlike the Exxon Valdez tragedy, in which a tanker held a finite capacity of oil, BP's rig is tapped into an underwater oil well and could pump more oil into the ocean indefinitely until the leak is plugged.

However, some people say that as bad as that sounds the reality is far worse. According to Glenn, in a comment on a blogpost about an election that's going on in some Western European backwater:

This is gusher - a traditional, straight up gusher - of unprecedented force and it's sitting on the sea bed, three miles down. It cannot be stopped, it will deliver 60,000 barrels (nearly 1/4 million gallons) of crude into the ocean each day soon.

The force of this, after we'd drilled 13,000 feet into the Earth's mantle, was something we could not stop - it blew every valve from the bottom all the way to the top of the rig.

If we do not stop it, all the world's oceans will be destroyed, they will stop producing oxygen, and we will die gasping very soon afterwards.

Expecting some sort of knee-jerk, pseudo-skeptic response from myself, ("Towel-whipping and high-fiving between AngryLarry aside, isn't anyone else seriously concerned about this unfolding environmental catastrophe, possibly the worst ever") he offers two links, one of which makes the case for an Apocalyptic scenario.

The first describes a situation worse than that reported to the public:

"The following is not public," reads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Emergency Response document dated April 28. "Two additional release points were found today in the tangled riser. If the riser pipe deteriorates further, the flow could become unchecked resulting in a release volume an order of magnitude higher than previously thought."

Asked Friday to comment on the document, NOAA spokesman Scott Smullen said that the additional leaks described were reported to the public late Wednesday night. Regarding the possibility of the spill becoming an order of magnitude larger, Smullen said, "I'm letting the document you have speak for itself."

But the second suggests that all life on Earth is finished!

Here are some extracts with my own snarky comments:

Glenn, I honestly don't know what to say. The guy who wrote the email seems to suggest there is nothing that can be done and that we're all doomed!

"We're humped. Unless God steps in and fixes this. No human can. You can be sure of that."

He gives one piece of advice:

"The only piece of human technology that might address this is a nuclear bomb. I'm not kidding. If they put a nuke down there in the right spot it might seal up the hole. Nothing short of that will work."

But that sounds counter-intuitive to me.

There is something I do agree with here, though:

"We're so used to our politicians creating false crises to forward their criminal agendas that we aren't recognizing that we're staring straight into possibly the greatest disaster mankind will ever see."

Yes, our politicians do create false panics about this, that and the other but they're not the only ones.

I think the amount of alarmism that conspiracy sites such as Infowars, ~~Poison~~ Prison Planet etc... like to churn out also adds to the boy-who-cried wolf knee-jerkism that many people feel when they hear stories like the one above.

Buried at the bottom of the first report is this:

Smullen described the NOAA document as a regular daily briefing. "Your report makes it sound pretty dire. It's a scenario," he said, "It's a regular daily briefing sheet that considered different scenarios much like any first responder would."

Unfortunately, the conspiracy theorizing gets worse...

Reading the link that Glenn posted there was a spoof article by the very same Huffington Post titled "Goldman Sachs Reveals it Shorted Gulf of Mexico":

The new revelations came to light after government investigators turned up new emails from Goldman employee Fabrice "Fabulous Fab" Tourre in which he bragged to a girlfriend that the firm was taking a "big short" position on the Gulf.

"One oil rig goes down and we're going to be rolling in dough," Mr. Tourre wrote in one email. "Suck it, fishies and birdies!"

While "Pure Energy Systems" agreed that the writer Andy Borowitz was a comedian and that the article was a joke, they also point out that Goldman Sachs had made investments into the company responsible for drilling into the oil field. The writer says "just because his piece was satire, doesn't mean there isn't something to it" and points to a source called "A. True Ott Ph.D" (I no longer can tell what is satire) who says:

I have confirmed that there were indeed numerous "shorts" placed on TransOcean stock just days before the "problem"...

Who would dare to quote the actual e-mails from "Fabulous Fab", unless the writer would post them as a "satire" - especially after what happened to the Wall Street Journal writers who dared expose the 9-11 short sales involving Goldman Sachs. (They were assigned to Afghanistan, and had fatal "accidents" there.)

So, Dr Ott is a Truther? Quelle surprise! He's clearly very brave for speaking out given that he knows what happened to those who exposed Goldman Sachs' hand in 9/11. Or not.

Here's his website. Please buy his goods.

I'm going to give the last word to the PES guy:

Do we have a shred of clean justice left in our corrupt government system which has been bought out, blackmailed, threatened, or otherwise brought under the control of these New World Order manipulators?

It's a dark day in which we live. But I am confident that brighter days are ahead. This time of transition is going to be a wild ride.

You Bet There Was No Insider Trading Plot...

2010-04-30T21:51:00.000-07:00

Nearly nine years, two recessions and thousands of conspiracy theories later, the U.S. government has made it official: Initial speculation after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that plotters made financial bets against airlines or other companies hurt by the events was unfounded.

AOL News

How To Piss Off Everyone...

2010-04-28T00:38:00.000-07:00

Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League is very worked up about this joke by Obama's National Security Adviser, James Jones. This seems to bear out Jon Ronson's characterization of the ADL as being overly-sensitive on some things (such as when they suggested that David Icke's saying that lizards ruled the world was code for saying Jews ruled the world when, in fact, he meant lizards!)

James Jones has apparently now apologized for the joke, which didn't seem to be offensive at all and was just a whipped-up and over-hyped moral outrage!

But Abe Foxman's not the only one incapable of taking a joke, as South Park discovered to their peril. Apparently an episode of South Park portraying Mohammed was censored by Comedy Central because they received what they perceived as a death threat from a website called Revolution Muslim.

Now, if I remember rightly, South Park is an irreverent animated comedy show which takes the piss out of just about anything and everything that anyone has ever held sacred. And that's pretty much the sole purpose of the show. This is what made it so hilariously hypocritical for Isaac Hayes, who played the character Chef, to walk out on the show due to its portrayal of Scientology in the episode, "Trapped in the Closet" (Although that story is disputed).

South Park decided to get their own back on Isaac Hayes with a character-assassination of his character - they portrayed him as a paedophile - before literally assassinating his character in the episode The Return of Chef but not before Comedy Central actually pulled a repeat of the first episode with some, such as the writer of this LA Times article, speculating it was because Tom Cruise had strong-armed Comedy Central's parent company, Viacom, into it as he was upset about being portrayed as literally refusing to come out of the closet and its mocking of his "religion", Scientology.

So, it might not be the first time that uber-edgy-cool-don't-give-a-fuck-stick-it-to-the-man Comedy Central has capitulated to intimidation of one sort or another, but it might be the first time they've done so through being threatened with physical violence for the outrage of portraying a historical figure.

Strangely the custodians of the Imam Zahdah Chah Zaid Mosque in Isfahan, Iran don't feel intimidated enough to take down their mural of Mohammed cradling the fourth caliph, Ali.

Maybe this is because Comedy Central has done what Kenan Malik describes in his book, From Fatwa to Jihad as "internalized the fatwa" that Ayatollah Khomeini put upon Salman Rushdie. In the book he talks about the way that those who had stood for free speech had won the battle by not suppressing The Satanic Verses but had effectively lost the war by being more reticent about giving offence in the future. An example of that was the decision by Random House of not publishing The Jewel of Medina on the grounds that it might cause offence and that that offence may lead to violence. A fear which did in fact come true to the owner of Gibson Square, a company that decided to publish the book.

Malik says this:

There will always be extremists who respond as the Gibson Square firebombers did. There is little that we can do about them. What we can do something about is the broader culture within which some people operate. A culture that robustly defends freedom of expression would provide few resources upon which such extremists could draw. A culture that proclaims it unacceptable to give offence, and in which politicians and intellectuals are terrified at the thought of doing so, provides the firebombers with a spurious moral legitimacy for their actions. Internalizing the fatwa has not just created a new culture of self-censorship, it has also helped generate the very problems to which self-censorship was supposedly a response. The fear of giving offence has simply made it easier to take offence.

I think this is true and, just for comparison, South Park have to work much harder to offend Catholics these days. Should any observant Catholic have made a point of watching South Park, they probably would have been offended by its portrayal of the Pope being splattered with a Statue of the Virgin Mary's menstrual blood but that's only likely to have happened if they had sat down with the perverse purpose of being offended.

Well, I think that Abe Foxman, Revolution Muslim and the Church of Scientology could do with lightening up and not getting bent out of shape over having their feelings hurt. But James Jones, Comedy Central and Viacom could do with not allowing themselves to be intimidated.

But, perhaps if there is something that we can take pleasure in it is that Comedy Central did manage to finally offend a group that believed themselves to be completely immune from taking offence: South Park viewers!

ETA: The theme tune to Team America, made by the same people as South Park

And also, Chef's finest moment:

Another Truther Goes Nuts...

2010-04-25T19:32:00.000-07:00

..and murders his wife, attempts to kill his step-daughter and then shoots himself.

One Truther site, "What Really Happened [sic].com" has already gone into self-pity mode:

Wait ’till CNN gets ahold of this story, the spectre of the “White Supremacist” will be trotted out again… it will be mentioned that Maynard was a conspiracy theorist who railed against Blacks, Hispanics and J-ws [sic]

they grizzle.

Well, he was a racist conspiracy theorizing nut and it appears his insane and bigotted beliefs were one factor that led to the murder of his wife and attempted murder of his daughter.

Truthers can whinge all they like about their portrayal as paranoid, Holocaust denying, anti-semitic, white supremacist loons (and they will), but it is those very paranoid, Holocaust denying, anti-semitic, white supremacist loons that give them a bad name.

It's too bad for them if the "mainstream media" end up reporting this simple truth.
From Screw Loose Change

Update: Someone in the comments box on the Screw Loose Change blog has pointed to a forum where Curt Maynard appears to have had something of a fanbase. It's a pretty sick bunch that liked his blog.

According to one "Mel Gibstein":

If I was going to take myself out Id take a boatload of Jews with me.

Bless You Father, For You Have Sinned!

2010-04-24T12:35:00.000-07:00

At least, that is the gospel according to Christopher Hitchens.

The same author is flaunting his fallout with Gore Vidal on the back of his book, Hitch 22. His endorsement as Vidal's "dauphin" is displayed on this pre-publication copy but crossed out. Here's a previous post on the Hitchens-Vidal spat.

Good!

2010-04-16T04:39:00.000-07:00

From the Guardian.

What is a Conspiracy Theory?

2010-04-15T20:53:00.000-07:00

Stephen Walt has an article about conspiracy theories in which he gives the most succinct description of the aims and methods of conspiracy theorizing that I've seen.

Conspiracy theories take many forms, but they generally have several common features. First, they often claim to expose the secret machinations of a small group of individuals, acting to accomplish some nefarious but largely-hidden purpose. Second, they attribute to the designated group vast and far-reaching powers, including a mysterious ability to control (rather than simply influence) a wide array of institutions. Yet a conspiracy theory (as opposed to a careful institutional analysis) never identifies the precise mechanisms by which this alleged control is achieved and normally fails to provide concrete evidence to justify its far-reaching claims. Alternatively, conspiracy theorists sometimes suggest that "the government" is engaged in some enormously-important but covert activity, like hiding captured alien spacecraft at "Area 51" or arranging to bring down the World Trade Center while getting it blamed on al Qaeda. In virtually all cases, a good conspiracy theory implies that what you think you know about the world is dead wrong, usually because the people responsible for the conspiracy have managed to convince you that up is down and black is white.

Please read the whole thing.

UNbelievable!

2010-04-12T20:45:00.000-07:00

A bit of an unusual story, according to AFP via France 24:

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has written to UN chief Ban Ki-moon, asking him to launch an investigation into the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, news reports said on Monday.

"The minimum expectation from your excellency is to set up an independent and trusted fact-finding group to comprehensively investigate the real factors behind September 11," Ahmadinejad said in the text of the letter carried by official news agencies.

But I've not been able to find it on Iranian news agencies IRNA and Press TV.

Update: Aha! The Iranian Students News Agency, ISNA has the story:

TEHRAN (ISNA)-Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for the UN Chief Ban Ki-moon to appoint a fact-finding committee on major elements behind September 11 attack.

“At least, you are expected to form an independent fact-finding committee trusted by regional countries on major elements behind September 11 attack which was carried out as the main pretext to attack the Middle East,” Ahmadinejad said in his letter to Ban Ki-moon.

He also called for probe into NATO intention for presence in Afghanistan and Iraq and results of nine-year presence and conflic.

Ahmadinejad then urged Ban ki-moon to declare the investigation results to the UN General Assembly.

He also referred to measures of some NATO intelligence and security forces based in Afghanistan and approach of some US and European media to support leader of Jundallah terrorist cell Abdolmalek Rigi and called for condemning his crimes and defending rights of Iranian nation as the major victim of terrorism.

Ahmadinejad sent a video footage of some of Rigi’s crimes, media support for him and his confessions of winning support from NATO members.

Ahmadinejad stressed millions of people have been killed, injured or displaced and drugs cultivation has been grown since presence of NATO and the US forces in the region.

To say that the 9/11 attacks were carried out as a pretext to invade the Middle East clearly suggests that Mr. Ahmadinejad has made up his mind that the perpetrators are one and the same as those who invaded the Middle East.

I hope Mr Ahmadinejad is successful in his attempts and I am sure that his government will provide a hefty amount of financial assistance for the investigation.

BBC mentions the letter to the UN but only says that Ahmadinejad is asking for the causes of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars to be looked into. Not that Iran's charismatic Prez is flirting with Troof again.

Reuters has the story here, concentrating on Ahmadinejad's anger that NATO may have been helping Judallah's Rigi.

Update 2: Some very astute commentary going on at Infowars!

Monkey_Magic says: This is freaking fantastic !!! Expose those Zionist Banking Mafia henchmen !!!

I think I'll give M_M the benefit of the doubt and assume s/he's being ironic. But look!

Keith4130 opines: With the collapse of maggot mainstream media, his voice now cannot be silenced. FU CFR and Bilderberg traitor scum lurkers.

And Sir Baby De Porky helpfully explains: In the word Nazi , ” Na ” stood for ” national socialism ” , and ” zi ” stood for ” zionism ” !!!

How does he know this?

It’s from a Eustace Mullins speech in Canada which you can see on the
” Wide eye cinema ” site !!!

Eustace Mullins, who's he?

"Eustace Mullins was a member of the Southeast Bureau editorial staff of Willis Carto's American Free Press and a contributing editor to the Barnes Review."

Oh dear, I think those names sound familiar. Maybe he didn't realize the reputation of his cohorts...or maybe not.

Aptly named "broken joe" wisely observes, Unfortunately, the U.N. will make no REAL investigation into 9/11. The U.N. is just a tool for the same bankers that conducted the attack in the first place. If the U.N. does investigate 9/11, the conclusion will be,”Iran did it,” and all the truth deniers will just say,”See I knew it was them Iranians.

S T O P T H E P R E S S! ! !

Looks like there's been a reporting error here!!!!!!!!!

The full text of Ahmadinejad's letter has been released and can be read at ISNA, which is the same place that seemed to report Ahmadinejad's call for a UN investigation into 9/11.

But, it seems two paragraphs have been compressed by ISNA's original report.

Here they are:

Following September 11 attacks, and on the pretext of fighting against a number of terrorist operatives, more than a million people in our region have been victimized and a few more millions been displaced, two members of the United Nations have been occupied by NATO and U.S. military forces, and a third country is susceptible to military aggressions. The current method of combating terrorism, even if the claims of its proponents are accepted as true, has obviously failed.

If terrorism nearly exists, isn't it possible to apply a rational method that has been efficiently used by the Iranian intelligence and security apparatus in dealing with Abdulmalik Riggi. We have emphasized time and again that settlement of problems in our region does not need wide-scale military expeditions or actions.

Excellency, you are at least expected to appoint an independent fact-finding team which is trusted by the countries of the region, to launch a comprehensive investigation into the main intentions of NATO military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, the methods used, and the outcome of their presence and engagement, with results to be presented to the General Assembly.

Ahmadinejad is asking for an investigation into the intentions of the NATO missions in Afghanistan (and Iraq) which began after the September 11th attacks and is questioning whether the wars are as advertised rather than whether the attacks happened as the US said.

Sorry Ahmadinejad (and all my readers).

Tragic Flights

2010-04-11T05:37:00.000-07:00

Two opinions inevitably expressed following Saturday's tragic aircrash in Russia which killed the Polish president and many of his top military staff are:

a) There may have been a Russian conspiracy behind it. Or a NATO one.

And...

b) This isn't surprising given that Poland's version of Air Force One happened to use the Soviet relic, Tupolev Tu-154.

Actually the first opinion is inevitable because of the spookily grim coincidence that the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, was flying to Russia to commemorate the Katyn Massacre, in which the Soviet secret police killed 22,000 Polish officers. Many of the victims on board the Soviet-era plane were themselves senior officers in the Polish military. And because of its parallels with a previous aircrash of Wladyslaw Sikorski, itself the subject of a conspiracy theory.

Well, grim coincidences do happen and Russia has been more in the business of forgetting rather than highlighting such atrocities as the Katyn Massacre so I don't see any "cui bono" motive.

The second point also seems to be a bit wide of the mark as the accident currently looks to be due to a combination of bad weather and pilot error. Nevertheless most news reports seem keen to point out the safety record of the Tu-154 such as here in the Telegraph.

The Tu-154 has a fatal accident every 431,200 flights, according to London-based aviation consultant Ascend. The Boeing 737, the world’s best-selling passenger plane, crashes every 2.68 million flights.

After doing some quick mental calculations I found the Tu-154 has a fatal accident rate of 2.31910946196 per million flights while the 737 has a fatal accident rate of 0.37313432835 per million flights. Here are some statistics of other airliners to give a comparison.

The comparisons show that although the fatality rate is higher than most commercial airliners it isn't extraordinarily high and the figures may well be skewed by the fact that these aircraft are usually operated in ex-Soviet countries with lower airport safety standards and designed to fly in the worst conditions. Just as an example, I flew to Pyongyang on a Tu-154 operated by Air Koryo - the DPRK's national carrier.

Perhaps in order to conserve on fuel when we boarded the plane the engines weren't running and so there was no air conditioner. All the passengers were given these hand-held fans to cool themselves down manually:

The plane was pretty cramped and wouldn't be my choice of chief executive jet but the in-flight meal of a half-danish and half-hamsandwich hybrid washed down with a bottle of dark homebrew-like beer wasn't (as) bad (as it sounds).

And, as a final tangent, while looking through this list of previous fatal air accidents, I happened to notice one that was caused by a murder-suicide in 1987.

Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 crashed after a former employee, David Burke, first shot his superviser, Raymond Thomson, then the pilots and finally himself. The plane descended almost completely vertically at over 700 miles per hour - breaking the sound barrier - before crashing into a field in California. Because of the force of the impact investigators arriving on the scene found it hard to believe that a plane as large as a BAe 146 could possibly have crashed there. Although all 44 passengers and crew were presumed dead (it not being possible to survive such a crash), 27 bodies could never be identified. But the crash also shows that some unlikely objects do survive crashes. A flight sickness bag was discovered bearing a message, apparently written by Burke to his superviser:

Hi Ray. I think it's sort of ironical that we ended up like this. I asked for some leniency for my family. Remember? Well, I got none and you'll get none.

Another grisly find was a revolver used to kill Thomson and the pilots which was discovered with Burke's thumb jammed in the trigger guard.

The crash was the subject of this episode of "Blackbox". Please listen to the detective who first arrives at the scene explain that nothing identifiable as part of a plane could be found, that pieces of paper seemed to be blowing gently in the wind, stuck in trees, etc...

This should put to rest arguments that on September 11th 2001, the crash site of United 93 in Shanksville was inconsistent with a plane crash meaning it was either shot down by a missile or never existed. The crash site of Flight 1771 was remarkably similar to that of United 93 and furthermore demonstrates that documents such as passports or driving licenses may very well survive such crashes while other things simply don't.

Oh My Lord...!

2010-04-11T02:19:00.000-07:00

RICHARD DAWKINS, the atheist campaigner, is planning a legal ambush to have the Pope arrested during his state visit to Britain “for crimes against humanity”.

Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.

The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.

The rest is in the Times here.

It's interesting for me that Richard Dawkins is now referred to as "the atheist" campaigner, rather than "the evolutionary biologist" (or even "the biologist" as adding the word "evolutionary" to any respectable biologist is surely redundant).

Hanami Season

2010-04-09T10:25:00.000-07:00

Hanami literally means "flower viewing" but specifically means cherry-blossom viewing. I'm no expert with a mobile phone camera but I thought this picture wasn't bad.

Blind Willie McTell and Charley Patton

2010-04-09T10:23:00.000-07:00

Here's the Band's version of one of Dylan's lost classics, Blind Willie McTell:

And here's a song by Charley Patton, who Dylan dedicated a song to on the Love and Theft album:

If you liked that song, then here's an extra one you might also like.

THEM: Adventures With Extremists

2010-04-03T08:36:00.000-07:00

I’ve just finished reading Jon Ronson’s THEM: Adventures with Extremists which provides an interesting and often humourous survey of how the New World Order looked to conspiracy theorists pre-9/11 - the book was published in October 2001 but was the culmination of five years of research which sometimes included living with those he terms extremists. For Ronson, extremists are merely those who have been called extremists by others. It’s a vague definition of the term and it applies to disparite groups from Islamic fundamentalists to Ku Klux Klan members to ex-sports commentators, but the one thing that they have in common is that they believe a shadowy, secret elite group rule the world. Ronson’s book is his journey to find out the nature of that group and, if possible the secret room they rule from.

Some conspiracy theorists may be a bit skeptical and wonder if he really is doing that or if he isn’t actually trying to convince himself and his readers that no such elite group and no such room exists, but if that is his aim he certainly appears to have a few doubts a long the way.

In a very similar fashion to Louis Theroux he seems to get on well with his subjects and usually portrays them sympathetically even if they portray themselves as parodies of nutters. In the first chapter he meets the Islamic fundamentalist Omar Bakri Mohammed, who cheerfully tells Ronson that he’ll burn in Hell and keeps threatening him with sixty lashes only to burst out laughing and say that it’s just a joke. When Ronson manages to arrange a visit to Omar Bakri’s secret Jihadi training camp (in Crawley!) Omar suddenly announces to those present, “Here I am with an infidel. Jon is a Jew!” This is met with an audible gasp. Ronson attempts to break the resulting stunned silence with a plea, “Surely it is better to be a Jew than an atheist?” – “No, it isn’t.” is the reply.

Omar Bakri’s organization, Al Muhajiroun, was a breakaway group from Hizb-ut-Tahrir and is portrayed mostly as inept and clownish. They attempt to release a thousand black balloons in Trafalgar Square with postcards urging Jihad but the messages are too heavy for the balloons, anchoring them to the ground. Interestingly there is a cameo appearance by a young disciple of Omar going only by the name of Anjem. This, of course, is Anjem Choudary, who was one of the founders of Al Muhajiroun and later the very vocal spokesman of Islam4UK.

Omar Bakri on the mic with the ever-photogenic Abu Hamza on the right

Another before-they-were-famous appearance is by larger-than-life Texan conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, whose radio show InfoWars was already being listened to by millions of people in the States but who hadn’t made it big internationally...

Ronson is visiting a family called the Weavers who had been the victims of a massive Federal police operation at their remote cabin in a place called Ruby Ridge in Idaho in which two members of the family (14 year old Sammy and his mother Vicki) as well as the pet dog were shot dead in a military-style assault involving hundreds of officers. The incident was so shocking in its brutality and size, especially when a similar siege followed at Waco, Texas that the Weavers’ home became something of a shrine to anti-government groups of various stripes. The Weavers themselves had been tarred as white supremacists as Randy Weaver had been friends with a member of a group called Aryan Nations and had been the victim of a police sting (or entrapment) which precipitated the siege. The Weavers had always denied they were white supremacists but they had believed in the New World Order and lived in isolation to escape their totalitarian clutches. The raid on their cabin convinced them and many others that the New World Order had come after them (one of those people who later visited was Timothy McVeigh who went on to destroy the bomb the Murrah Building in Oklahoma killing 168 people).

Alex Jones agrees with the Weaver family that the New World Order is conducting events such as these but says that they’re not only responsible for attacks targeting isolationists and religious cults such as at Ruby Ridge and at Waco but also the Oklahoma bombing itself and Ramzi Yusef’s bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Ronson queries Jones on this who then shows his formula for just about any event was employed back then too:

“That’s not even debatable!” He roared, “Well, I guess you could debate Oklahoma City. But the World Trade Center is not even debatable. Clinton’s Reichstag. Horror!”

So the first World Trade Center bombing was “Clinton’s Reichstag”, 9/11 was “Bush’s Reichstag” and Joe Stack flying his plane into an IRS building in Texas may have been “Obama’s Reichstag”. It’s not even clear that the Reichstag fire was “Hitler’s Reichstag” but never mind that.

Jones sketches out for Ronson some of the structure of the New World Order which often seems like a very nebulous term if not a pat political slogan used by politicians to simply mean a vision for a better tomorrow!

“The Bilderbergers,” said Alex, “Are the Roman Senate. It’s a pyramid. They’re way up there. Below them you’ve got the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations, then you’ve got us down here, the cattle, the human resources.”

“The Bilderbergers”, refers to the Bilderberg Group, which is a real group of politicians and business people who meet periodically in a five-star hotel somewhere in secret. This looks like a promising lead for Ronson who ends up in Portugal assisting a journalist called Jim Tucker infiltrate the latest Bilderberg meeting. While reading Ronson’s description of Tucker I was reminded of a set of articles written in a tongue-in-cheek style by Charlie Skelton about Bilderberg. Tucker is a big man who suffers from emphysema from having smoked too many cigarettes. Bilderberg is an obsession for Tucker who is so worried that he’s messing with the wrong people that he phones in a coded message every morning to a friend of his to let them know he’s still alive. Ronson seems to enjoy his company and some of the interesting stories he has to tell. As they watch some of the famous names pulling up to the Caesar Park Hotel, Tucker confides that Henry Kissinger – a perennial guest of Bilderberg, naturally – actually speaks with an American accent but puts on his European accent for show. He also points out that Margaret Thatcher is in fact one of the good guys that Bilderberg contrived to have removed because of her opposition to the European Union. Bilderberg are rampant globalists, you see, and they are steering the world toward a one-world government New World Order.

Jim Tucker

There are a few things, however, which somewhat perturb Ronson about Tucker and that is his penchant for off-colour jokes: “The amount of pills they make me take for my plumbing, anyone would think I was F.A.G Positive.” And lets on that the only problem he had with Abraham Lincoln was that he was an abolitionist!

Well, it soon turns out that the newspaper Jim Tucker writes for, the Spotlight, is a famously anti-semitic publication and indeed, it was published by the Liberty Lobby, a political body founded by a rabid anti-semite Willis Carto. The Spotlight was one of the most successful media for conspiracy theories, especially in the pre-Internet era and was once sued by E. Howard Hunt from the CIA for an article that accused him of being involved in the JFK assassination. Lawyer and JFK conspiracy theorist Mark Lane successfully defended the Spotlight however. Ronson is at first skeptical of the claims that Tucker is an anti-semite but in a visit to the offices of the Anti-Defamation League he is given a file on the Spotlight containing numerous Holocaust denial articles, tributes to neo-Nazi organizations and lists of books written in praise of Adolf Hitler by Spotlight editors. The Spotlight had toned itself down somewhat since its early days but really all it had done was to adopt code words such as “international bankers” and “international financiers” (in Michael Shermer’s book on Holocaust denial, Denying History, Holocaust deniers tend to use the term “traditional enemy” these days rather than saying Jews). The Spotlight has since folded and now given rise to a new “news” source called the American Free Press, which is as anti-semitic as its forerunner, and also features Jim Tucker’s writings as well as those of James Edwards, a broadcaster for the appropriately titled Political Cesspool, and Christopher Bollyn, a 9/11 Truther who believes that Israel was behind the attacks.

As many of these conspiracy theorists adopt code words for their anti-semitism the ADL has been very keen to search out even the most obscurely coded language. Ronson finds himself wondering if the ADL don’t end up going too far and becoming extremists themselves in their characterizations of some people. This really comes to a head when ex-goalkeeper, ex-sports commentator and ex-son-of-God, David Icke flies into Canada on a book tour to explain that the New World Order is in fact made up of 12-foot shape-shifting lizards. The ADL aren’t fooled and are sure that when David Icke says “shape-shifting lizards” he really means “Jews”.

Ronson follows David Icke on his travails around Vancouver in which radio station after radio station cancel his interviews at the last moment and book stores that had arranged for him to be there to sign his books suddenly retract the invitation. Icke comes across as the most sympathetic person in the whole saga as everyone else overreacts to his very presence and, no doubt, only confirm for him that the New World Order are thwarting him. It reaches its peak with a lemon meringue pie assault which backfires on the assailants.

Ronson's research also formed the basis for a TV series. This is the episode in which David Icke appears. Notice also that a car sticker outside of Alex Jones radio station reads: "It's time for another Tea Party"

But the ADL aren’t the only people who have a problem with David Icke. “DAVID ICKE IS A TURD IN A PUNCHBOWL!” According to Alex Jones. What does he mean by this?

“He talks about the global elite, the Bilderberg Group, these power structures which are all real, all true. Meat and potatoes! Something you can bite into! And then at the end of this he says, “By the way, they’re all blood-drinking lizards… Al Gore needs blood to drink. So does Prince Philip." He’s discrediting the whole thing. You’ve got a nice fruit punch. Icke takes a great big dump right in the middle of it, and now nobody’s going to drink out of that punchbowl. That’s his job, and he’s doing his job well.”

Towards the end of the book, Ronson finally manages to speak to a member of Bilderberg’s steering committee and founder member, Dennis Healey (an unlikely candidate for ruler of the world in my humble opinion, but who am I to say). Healey explains that really there isn’t that much to tell about the Bilderberg Group. But that it’s a club for influential people to meet other influential people. Well, of course he would say that and it doesn’t mean that important things aren’t being discussed away from prying eyes and ears. It certainly could be argued that a lot more transparency would be nice. But maybe the lack of secrecy would reveal the affairs of the Bilderberg Group to be terminally boring. But you can make up your own mind by reading Ronson's Guardian article about it here.

But while Ronson certainly makes some of the conspiracy theorists entertaining, he is keen to point out that there are dark sides to these ideas too. Some people such as the neo-Nazi nail-bomber David Copeland who set off a series of bombs in London targeting ethnic minorities and gay people and believe the world is in thrall to the Bilderberg Group and ZOG (Zionist Occupied Government). Since then there have been other attacks such as the deadly shooting of a guard at the Holocaust museum in Washington DC and at the Pentagon by similarly inclined conspiracy theorists.

The book concludes with a fantastic chapter on one of the most mysterious conspiracy theories at another of the suspected loci of the New World Order: Bohemian Grove in a redwood forest clearing in California. All kinds of occult rituals are supposed to occur there in a place where plans for world domination are hatched. David Icke warns Ronson that Bohemian Grove is a place where the reptilian bloodlines transform themselves back into giant lizards and that such people as Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Walter Cronkite and male members of the British Royal family abuse sex slaves who have been brainwashed through the CIA's MK-ULTRA programme. One of these victims who escaped - Cathy O'Brien - wrote a book called Trance Formation of America about her experiences. In order to infiltrate the Bohemian Grove, Ronson teams up again with Alex Jones and Jones’ producer Mike, because of Jones' apparent fearlessness. So, I was expecting some kind of death-defying adventure through the woods in which they would be flitting from redwood to redwood, avoiding bear traps and scaling electric fences. Instead, they get in by simply walking up the drive dressed in preppy khaki pants and sweaters draped across their shoulders. Apparently the key is to look Republican. But this is only after Alex Jones refuses to go in with Ronson, as he's unable to trust him.

Ronson discovers that instead of the rumoured Satanic rituals and plots to maintain world dominance there isn’t much more to the affair than a bunch of geriatric men guzzling champagne and watching a bizarre pyrotechnic display around a large stone owl shrine and then peeing against the trees. But that is not what Jones saw!

“These people point their fingers everyday. If you’re against the government you’re an extremist. You’re crazy. But this was a pagan ceremony worshipping the earth and engaging in human sacrifice.”

But another conclusion comes from one of Ronson’s sources within Bilderberg who says that neither Bilderberg nor Bohemian Grove attract the calibre that they used to with the older members simply getting older and the prospective newcomers uninterested:

“Let’s face it. Nobody rules the world any more. The markets rule the world. Maybe that’s why your conspiracy theorists make up all those crazy things. Because the truth is so much more frightening. Nobody rules the world.”

Vanity Pieces

2010-03-31T01:08:00.000-07:00

I hadn't realized that Dr Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed had a letter printed in Vanity Fair taking issue with the way he was characterized by Christopher Hitchens when the latter had also put the boot into Gore Vidal for being a conspiracy theorist.

I'll quote the whole of his letter and Hitchens' reply here:

Dear Sir—

I was bemused to note major inaccuracies about myself in “Vidal Loco,” by Christopher Hitchens (February 2010).

Hitchens’s reduction of me to “conspiracy-mongering” and as having a “one-room sideshow” institute is contrasted by the fact that I’m an academic at the University of Sussex; my book, The War on Freedom, was used by the 9/11 commission; I’ve testified before the U.S. Congress; I’ve given evidence to a U.K. parliamentary inquiry; and my institute is advised by a board of 20 leading scholars. Hitchens also bizarrely targets my first publisher, which is not “deceased” but is in fact a flourishing alternative news source.

This hit piece is merely an example of Hitchens’s projecting his increasing distance from reality onto those who object to his war-mongering.

Yours,
Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, M.A., D.Phil (Sussex)

Hitchens Responds

I congratulate Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, M.A., D.Phil (Sussex) on “growing” his résumé in the past few years. But the facts remain what they are. When he brought out The War on Freedom, its place of publication was given as a distinctly unassuming street address in Brighton. I did not say that his publisher was deceased but that its then Web site was no more. Any bloody fool can testify anywhere, but nobody has yet been fool enough to accept his argument that the attacks on New York and Washington were part of a pre-arrangement involving the United States government. (His pathetically conspiratorial rambling about the behavior of the military and Federal Aviation Administration that day has since been utterly refuted by a long and exhaustive article, “9/11 Live: The norad Tapes,” by Michael Bronner, in Vanity Fair (September 2006). Finally, I think the expression “war-mongering” is better applied to somebody who makes excuses and offers smarmy justifications for the original aggressor, Osama bin Laden.

On reflection and on a rereading of his “book,” I would change my original article and remove the word “risible.” A more apposite term for both the author and his illiterate pages would be “contemptible.”

Christopher Hitchens, B.A. (Oxford)
Roger S. Mertz Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University
Adjunct Professor in Liberal Studies at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research
Andrew Mellon Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh
Koret Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley
I. F. Stone Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley
(See how boring this can get?)

Explosion Sinking South Korean Warship May Have Killed Many: Cause Unknown

2010-03-29T04:28:00.000-07:00

One Free Korea has a post up about the mysterious explosion aboard a South Korean vessel around the disputed "maritime border" of North and South Korea.

The writer of the piece believes that an external explosion cannot be ruled out and yet it sounds quite a lot like the USS Maine incident, which I've written a few blogposts on before, and which was more likely an accident.

According to the BBC, South Korean divers have made it to the wreckage of the Cheonan but haven't heard any signs of life coming from within where over 40 crewmembers may have perished.

The speculation seems to be that it was either an accident or possibly a drifting mine - possibly laid by North Korea and never retrieved. But there aren't any "Remember the Cheonan, To Hell with Pyongyang!" headlines yet.

No word on that apparently from North Korea's KCNA who instead have a stirring story about new propaganda posters that have just been produced:

Pyongyang, March 28 (KCNA) -- New posters were produced to encourage all the servicepersons and people in their great drive to build a great prosperous and powerful nation in hearty response to the joint editorial this year and the joint calls of the Central Committee and the Central Military Commission of the Workers' Party of Korea.

The poster "Every effort for the construction of the Huichon Power Station!" created by the Workers' Party of Korea Publishing House depicted with simple and distinct stroke the heroic spirit of the builders of the power station, their hearts burning with the fixed faith that when the Party is determined, we can do anything.

The poster ardently calls on the whole party and army and all people to come out as one and dash ahead at "the Huichon speed," a new Chollima speed to contribute to hastening the construction of the power station and solving the shortage of electricity.

Among the new posters are the posters "We farmers are responsible for agriculture!", "Let's carry out rice-transplantation effectively in the right season!" and "Let the whole party and state and all people give strong help to the countryside!"

These posters show agricultural workers working hard in a vast cooperative field, keenly aware of their mission to make a main contribution to improving the people's standard of living, tractors carrying manure to fields, trucks transporting farm materials and helpers of farms. They vigorously arouse all the working people to the drive for implementing the Party's policy of agricultural revolution.

Also, B.R Myers has an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal suggesting that while it might not be the end of the world in 2012, it could be the end of the Kim regime.

Thanks to Greywolf for the heads-up on the article.

Some useless idiots give their support to the DPRK by picketing the US and "running-dog south Korean" embassies in London!

Jigsaw Vs. House of Cards

2010-03-23T03:44:00.000-07:00

The Economist has an interesting article about climate change. I'm still agnostic on whether human activity is forcing an imminent environmental catastrophe and I'm not fond of the term "climate change" which sounds almost meaningless to me. But what I did think was interesting in the article was the way in which the author thinks the two sides perceive the argument:

In any complex scientific picture of the world there will be gaps, misperceptions and mistakes. Whether your impression is dominated by the whole or the holes will depend on your attitude to the project at hand. You might say that some see a jigsaw where others see a house of cards. Jigsaw types have in mind an overall picture and are open to bits being taken out, moved around or abandoned should they not fit. Those who see houses of cards think that if any piece is removed, the whole lot falls down. When it comes to climate, academic scientists are jigsaw types, dissenters from their view house-of-cards-ists.

I'm sure there will be some climate change dissenters who will also dissent from this characterization of themselves but I have noticed that those who think "climate change" is a myth have a tendency to declare victory very hastily. Some of them certainly did after those e-mails from the University of East Angular were leaked and they did so again when the IPCC got their predictions wrong on the melting of glaciers.

The Economist takes the view that it is best to err on the side of caution with this one and assume that it is happening, partly on the basis that no one can possibly have the expertise to say one way or the other but because there are agreed upon changes that are anthropogenic the effects need to be studied.

I think I can agree with that.

Update: Greywolf, in characteristically temperate manner, enquires:

If climate change sounds almost meaningless to you, why are you ready to agree that it is best to err on the side of caution?

Well, this is a reasonable question, and I'd sooner ditch the term and replace it with what some others have called Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. This is far more explanatory. I agree with the Climate Resistance article that says the debate shouldn't be framed in terms of "climate change is happening" and "climate change isn't happening", because the proposition "climate change is happening" can easily be true in a trivial sense.

Daniel Dennett came up with a word for statements like this. He called them "deepities" which sound like profundities but are only true in a trivial sense.

I made a post on that.

Dennett uses the example of "Love is just a word" and says, sure that's true in a completely trivial sense. In the sense that "Dog is just a word" or "House is just a word" but it isn't true in any earth-shattering way (in this case he points to something called a use-meaning error).

So, I can agree that "climate change is happening" is true in a trivial sense but what's important is whether or not it is true in a profound sense. In that case I would agree with those who prefer to frame the debate as "Is catastrophic anthropogenic global warming happening?"

But I think the conclusion is the same. That it is better to err on the side of catastrophic anthrological global warming happening. In fact, the debate about whether or not it is happening seems to be a minor one compared to the one about the correct response to it in terms of hot air produced so it isn't really a mainstream argument.

Amy Goodman Harassed by WACjobs

2010-03-17T23:45:00.000-07:00

We Are ~~Cranks~~ Change have a video up celebrating their successful harassment of left-wing journalist Amy Goodman. Goodman was actually at the scene of the collapse of WTC7 and because of her reputation for investigative journalism and questioning of government abuses of power she has unfortunately become a target for 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

In the video she does agree with some of the conspiracy theorists that further investigation of 9/11 is necessary and she has specified before that such things as the toxicity of the air over Ground Zero should be looked into (something that plenty of non-conspiracy theorists can agree with). But her apparent indulgence of them JAQing off to her has led to her being pursued everywhere she speaks with them demanding that she does some investigation herself (rather than them do it themselves perhaps?) This is typified by the guy with the megaphone yelling at one of her talks captured, apparently approvingly, in this video.

Well, no doubt they do consider themselves to be radical kids fighting the power but it tends to be the kind of thing that irritates the radical left as explained here by one of the editors of Counterpunch.

Maybe they see one of the "elder statesmen" of 9/11 Truth, nutjob Kevin Barrett, as their example. Here he is in action at one of Goodman's talks asking her when she's going to investigate the "controlled demolitions". Well, nothing wrong with waiting his turn to ask a question even if it is nuttier than the nuttiest nut in Nutland on National Nutday. But her answer that she thinks 9/11 should be further investigated has led her to be focus of other Truthers.

The video continues with Kevin Barrett speaking to Goodman after the show asking her to sign a book which she politely declines to do, probably because it is written by the Holocaust-denying weirdo Eric Hufshmid.

If anything this harassment by WAC only goes to further demonstrate that indulgence of 9/11 conspiracy theorists with an "open mind" is far more dangerous than simply calling them loons and telling them to shut up and go away. But don't take my word for it. Kevin Barrett has said the same on his own website:

"Amy, you will one day find yourself on the scaffold, condemned to hang alongside the other Goebbels-style traitors and mass-murder-coverup-conspirators from the corporate media you pretend to criticize.

They, at least, make no pretense of being anything but shills for the powers that be--which makes your crime infinitely worse than theirs."

Oh well, good thing I am an NWO shill and foot-soldier for the 9/11 Lies Movement.

Thanks to Parky at JREF for the heads-up.

ETA: In Dog-Bites-Man news it turns out that one of AE9/11Truth's engineers is a nutter.

St. Patrick's Day

2010-03-17T21:07:00.000-07:00

Dislaimer: Yes, there is a bit of Yank-bashing in the song but given that the British are usually the target I don't care.

Dylan's High-Water Mark in Osaka

2010-03-16T00:48:00.000-07:00

T-shirt with tour date and venue

I finally made it to my first Bob Dylan concert last night (March 15th) at Zepp Osaka. My excitement was tinged with trepidation as reports from friends of mine of attending Dylan concerts suggest he is wildly inconsistent either putting on the best or worst performance they have ever seen and I feared the grey drizzly sky of Osaka was a dark omen.

The famously glorious weather of Osaka

That nagging worry lasted a few seconds into the concert after he strode on to stage in his cowboy hat and began playing at the keyboard. I wondered, “What on Earth is he playing?” Well, it was unfamiliar to me but it didn’t matter, the song rocked and I knew then it was going to be a good night. Later that night I Googled some lines from the song and it seems to be Watching the River Flow – a 1971 single that never appeared on any regular album.

The next song was far more familiar - if unexpected – territory, Señor (Tales Of Yankee Power), in which Bob took centre-stage on harp.

Señor, señor, do you know where we’re headin’?

Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?

Now, his voice has always been the subject of much debate and he has many detractors because of it. Over the years some heretics have even suggested he cannot sing at all, while those who once thought he could have committed a kind of apostasy by declaring he no longer can. Well, while his voice has changed over the years almost as much as his musical style it was and remains one of the most compelling aspects of his music. As he croaked out, “sen-yor! sen-yor!” I wondered how to describe his voice. I could only think of a Japanese word which seems to capture the right nuance and that is shibui. Shibui has a number of meanings, sometimes referring to wine which has an abrasive or rough character, but paradoxically it can also mean refined or - more colloquially – it can simply mean “cool”. Well, tonight his voice was strongly shibui.

The next song was I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight and it was a rare performance with the guitar (he seems not to use the guitar live so much these days).

Well, that mockingbird’s gonna sail away,

We’re gonna forget it.

That big, fat moon is gonna shine like a spoon,

But we’re gonna let it,

You won’t regret it.

I can’t tell you the names of any of Bob’s backing band, but the most prominent of the five was the energetic lead guitarist and a versatile banjo/lap steel/keyboard player. The bassist alternated between acoustic, electric and double bass and they came to the fore particularly in one segment which consisted of songs from his most recent era. I date this era from Love and Theft in which Bob’s music has tended to be some kind of mixture of blues and Cajun (?) music. The highpoint of this was High Water which has some amusing lines:

I got a cravin’ love for blazing speed

Got a hopped-up Mustang Ford

Jump into the wagon, love, throw your panties on the board

I can write you poems, make a strong man lose his mind

I’m no pig without a wig

I hope you treat me kind

Things are breakin’ up out there

High water everywhere

The best section of the show was one in which Bob hopped from keyboard, to harp to guitar on, respectively, Desolation Row, Stuck Inside of Mobile (With the Memphis Blues Again) and the brooding, Man In the Long Black Coat. On Stuck Inside of Mobile, Bob proved (as if proof were needed) what a great harmonica player he is with a mesmerizing solo. The final lines were interspersed with toots on the harp:

Now the bricks lay on Grand Street

Where the neon madmen climb

They all fall there so perfectly

It all seems so well timed

An’ here I sit so patiently

Waiting to find out what price

You have to pay to get out of

Going through all these things twice

Oh, Mama, can this really be the end

To be stuck inside of Mobile

With the Memphis blues again

The album, Highway 61 Revisited, was well represented with four songs being played from it: Desolation Row, Ballad Of A Thin Man, Highway 61 Revisited and the first song of the encore, Like a Rolling Stone. Next was Jolene, one of the best songs on the new album, Together Through Life, and one of the most popular songs of the night judging by the audience reaction.

Just before the encore this Illuminati-Bliderbergy-Eye-0f-Horusy image suddenly unfurled to a big cheer and then embarrassed laughter as no one really knew what they were cheering. What is it? Conspiracy theorists want to know...

Finally, Bob addressed the crowd to introduce the band but as he did so a guitar was passed up on to the stage with a letter attached to it. I know very little about guitars but to my untrained eye it appeared to be a Fender Stratocaster. Bob looked momentarily bewildered and said his lead guitarist will love it. Then he told the audience member who had given him the present he was just kidding and said that he liked it a lot before the band roared into a blistering Hendrix-esque All Along the Watchtower to round off a fantastic set.

Any fears that he wouldn’t be at the top of his game tonight had been completely banished and as I stepped back outside into Osaka’s wet weather I pledged to be there the next time Bob Dylan comes to these shores.

Best Song of the Night: Stuck Inside of Mobile (With The Memphis Blues Again)

Overall Rating: 8/10

Update 1: Bill Pagel has put up the set-list on his "Boblinks" website.

1. Watching The River Flow
2. Señor (Tales Of Yankee Power)
3. I'll Be Your Baby Tonight (guitar)
4. High Water (For Charley Patton)
5. The Levee's Gonna Break
6. Tryin' To Get To Heaven
7. Cold Irons Bound
8. Desolation Row
9. Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again
10. Man In The Long Black Coat (Bob on guitar)
11. Highway 61 Revisited
12. Spirit On The Water
13. Thunder On The Mountain
14. Ballad Of A Thin Man

(encore)
15. Like A Rolling Stone
16. Jolene
17. All Along The Watchtower

Altogether there are five songs from the albums Time Out Of Mind and Modern Times, neither of which I own, sadly. That explains why there were a few sections of the concert where I didn't know what Bob was playing.

There are two more reviews up on the same site from people who were also there. They seem to agree with my take on the night and have some extra details about the Great Guitar Incident!

Hopefully, some pictures and maybe recordings will also surface. If they do I'll try and update this post again. If anyone already knows of any, please feel free to tell me in the comment box.

Update 2: Super-uploader, Hide, has made this whole show available to download at dimeadozen.org (Free registration required).

Update 3: "decastro3" has made Señor available individually. More songs from the tour have been collected here. These have all been originally uploaded by Hide. So, many thanks to him!

Update 4: Blogger, Shiffi Le Soy, has a couple of great photographs from the night which seem to really capture the mood. Please also read Shiffi's excellent review here.

9/11 Truth on I'mgonnakickyoassBabble

2010-03-12T03:29:00.000-08:00

Just as CNN had Crossfire and the BBC have HardTalk, Russia Today have...CrossTalk!

But whereas Crossfire and HardTalk set up heated adversarial contests between those of opposing views this edition of CrossTalk features three 9/11 Truthers, ex-MI5 agent Annie Machon, the head of a UK organization Re-investigate 9/11 - Ian Henshall, and this blog's favourite Truther AE9/11Troot's Richard Gage!

Richard Gage says you don't have to be a scientist to agree with his "pure science, pure fizzikz" and that nobody can argue with it. That wraps that one up then.

Then some conspiracy theorist called Ian Henshall comes on to protest about being smeared and having strawman arguments made against him and guilt-by-association accusations. Then almost immediately after he characterises the "official story" as some guy in a cave directing 17 [sic] hijackers to fly into buildings and that anyone who believes it is a conspiracy theorist.

They also complain that no one will ever debate them but hang on a minute is that Richard Gage nodding along there at the back?

People debate Richard Gage all the time. For example, here is debating Mark Roberts on the TV show with the very original name, erm...HardFire!

I Am Not, Nor Have I Ever Been, a Member of the Truth Movement!

2010-03-10T10:33:00.000-08:00

Japanese Diet lawmaker, Yukihisa Fujita of the Democratic Party Japan, was a bit annoyed to have had a Washington Post editorial ridiculing him for being a standard-bearer for 9/11 Truth. So he decided to opt for a standard tactic of the Truth Movement which is to disavow any conspiracy theorizing and instead claim to be just asking questions.

He's hit back with a blogpost, translated here, in which he claims:

At no point did I draw the conclusion that 9/11 was a conspiracy, and I clearly stated that the collapse of the Twin Towers could not be judged to be a result of a controlled demolition. Rather, I stated I had made my speech in the Diet from the stance that it was necessary to investigate the origins of the “War on Terror” from the perspective of assisting the relatives of the victims of 9/11, and in relation to the war in Afghanistan and the provision of humanitarian assistance.

Is this true? (Spoiler warning: NO!)

Fujita's performance in the Diet can be assessed from the following videos. It looks like he's employing the same tedious pedantic questions and supposed concern for the Japanese victims of 9/11 when Fujita himself shows no apparent evidence of speaking on behalf of the victims' families. He merely asks why the Japanese government didn't conduct their own investigation.

Part 2 is here. He first starts out with questions about why the Pentagon didn't have a plane-shaped hole in its side about the width of a 757 and shows a photograph in which a massive gaping hole to the left is clearly visible. He continues to recycle old Truther myths about no wreckage on the lawn and the hole caused by the landing gear couldn't possibly have been made by a plane, Hani Hanjour who piloted the 757 obviously couldn't have hit the Pentagon etc...etc... all the time, no doubt, just asking questions which he would be more than happy to get the answers to. Of course, all of this has been answered, much of his questions are based on wrong premises and he may look back and be profoundly embarrassed one day. Then again, maybe everyone had an entertaining time at the Diet that day.

Part 3 blows Fujita's claim that he didn't believe in or consider a controlled demolition of the Twin Towers as he produces yet more stock material from the Truther's vault such as photographs of the firefighters talking about explosions and how it looked like there was a plan to bring down the buildings. He later gives a Richard Gage-like demonstration of free-fall to explain how WTC7 fell by dropping the 9/11 Commission Report. :-D LOL!

Thanks, I suppose, to "AfterTruth" for putting these videos up (and others about chemtrails - groovy!) even though the same person added a sneaky clip of Larry Silverstein saying "pull it" at the end and implied it was a reference to controlled demolition by referencing Implosion World's use of the term "pull". In good time-honoured lying-Truther fashion the rest of the article around the term pull is blurred but it is just possible to make out the fact that "pulling" a building in controlled demolition parlance is to literally pull a building down with cables. As with many other pieces of Truther "evidence" it has been so blatantly manipulated that it can't have been an honest mistake.

Update:Yukihisa Fujita has written a letter to the Washington Post to complain about the way that the interview was conducted, to point out that his views are not those of his party or government and that, anyway, there is nothing wrong with his views which aren't at all those of a conspiracy theorist...

I believe I am owed an apology for this attempt to damage my credibility by painting me with "poisonous thinking," "conspiratorial views," "intellectually bogus," "lunatic fringe" and "reckless and fact-averse," despite the fact that I had never stated "conspiracy" as such.

Here he is sat next to David Ray Griffin on a panel which also includes Benjamin Fulford and Yumi Kikuchi at a 9/11 Truther convention held in Tokyo in 2008.

And again.

Thanks to NagP for the finding the pictures and the letter to the Washington Post editor.

Update 2: Fujita has now been given a slap on the wrists by DPJ bigwig Tenzo Okumura.

Lordy, Lordy...!

2010-03-09T02:22:00.000-08:00

Russia Today continue to bolster their reputable news credentials by talking to none other than one of them kids wot made Loose Change, Jason Bermas. He's made a new film seeking to expose the New World Order. Rather brave of him, I think. Imagine the power the New World Order must weild and here he is blurting it out on Kremlin propaganda station, Russia Today. I would think that would upset them.

Anyway, I haven't watched it yet so if there are any interesting or unintentionally comic moments please summarize in the comments box.

I think I'll try not to watch any more Russia Today, it's making my brain bleed.

Update: While Jason Bermas was talking to Russia Today, his collaborators on Loose Change, Dylan Avery and Korey Rowe were being interviewed for ABC's Nightline. As Avery shrewdly surmises ABC had turned up at the "Treason in America" conference thanks to the news that Pentagon "rage-shooter", John Patrick Bedell was a 9/11 Truther. But instead of answering any questions for fear of providing the Mainstream Media with easy-to-mock soundbites he ends up providing easy-to-mock angry histrionics. I hope, for his sake, he doesn't behave like this at job interviews... or go there with that haircut!

The Nightline segment finally came out looking like this:

Hat tip: Screw Loose Change

Orly Taitz; The Prezdent's an Alien!!!!1!

2010-03-08T10:34:00.000-08:00

Russia Today is Crackpot TV.

Orly Taitz has done lots of research and is really bothered by something that no one really cares about. (Bit like me!)

9/11 Never Happened...

2010-03-06T18:40:00.000-08:00

...neither did the Holocaust, there are no gays in Iran, there is no nuclear weapons programme...etc...

Ahmadinejad shows off his comedy schtick!

Update 1: Actually, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency:

The September 11 attack on the US and collapse of twin towers were parts of complicated intelligence move to give enough excuses for them to prepare the ground for invasion of Afghanistan under pretext of fighting terrorism, he said.

The article is mostly about the arrest of Abdulmalek Rigi of Jundallah.

Thanks to Anonymous!

Update 2:Press TV also has the story:

The president described the September 11, 2001 destruction of the twin World Trade Center buildings in New York as a preconceived "scenario and a sophisticated intelligence measure" and emphasized that the 9/11 incident was a "big lie intended to serve as a pretext for fighting terrorism and setting the grounds for sending troops to Afghanistan."

"Depredation, bullying and killing the reality of humanity are the outcomes of the capitalist way of thinking," Ahmadinejad said on Saturday.

Update 3: As Marylander reminds us in the comments, Ahmadinejad's loony remarks are a far cry from the far more poignant reactions by many in Iran to the 9/11 attacks:

Dust

2010-03-06T02:38:00.000-08:00

A new book is being published this month on the subject of the dust from the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11th 2001.

The author, Paul Lioy, is Professor of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at Rutgers University, and an expert on air pollution and toxicity.

I expect him to confirm Steven Jones' discovery of top secret military grade magic explosives in his book.

Thanks to Big Al at JREF for pointing it out.

Girl From the North Country

2010-03-05T05:30:00.000-08:00

As it's 10 days until BD-Day, I thought I'd put up this video of Bob Dylan singing "Girl From the North Country" with the late Johnny Cash.

Thanks to mexicathug for putting up the video.

Although I'm already quite familiar with the song I didn't own a copy of it until I went to Osaka's Tower Records today where lots of Bob's CDs were being sold at very cheap prices in anticipation of Bob's forthcoming tour of Japan this month.

I bought Nashville Skyline, Bringing It All Back Home and John Wesley Harding today.

I'm sorry if this is not interesting for anyone. Have a listen to this:

Thanks to betazos for putting this version up.

Conspiracy Generator

2010-03-03T01:39:00.000-08:00

Wired magazine has a Conspiracy Generator to make any conspiracy theory you like.

For example:

Are you kidding me? The establishment of the Human Rights Industry was a total sham! Think about it! Everyone knows that it was only a Western tool to crush the Soviets. And have you noticed that the lamestream media has started to act very strangely? They obviously don’t want this story getting out. I mean, what would happen if people began asking does MI* conduct Stasi-like zerzetsen black-ops?? Well, they may be able to fool the sheeple, but the members of Still-running posse aren't swallowing their story. Look, don’t take it from me; Pierre Sane of Amnesty International is convinced as well. But we have to act fast, because there's been a lot of street theatre about. I just wanted you to be aware of this, in case I disappear.

Paul Craig Roberts' Paranoid Style

2010-03-02T00:47:00.000-08:00

Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration and snooker attire catalogue model

Crypto-Truther, Paul Craig Roberts is JAQing off about the events of 9/11.

He wants to know:

How did three World Trade Center skyscrapers suddenly disintegrate into fine dust?

and

How did massive steel beams in three skyscrapers suddenly fail as a result of short-lived, isolated, and low temperature fires?

Well, as a partial answer to the first, two passenger planes loaded with fuel crashed into the Twin Towers. which led to their collapses. One of those collapsed into the third skyscraper and set that on fire.

Of course, that makes the second slightly easier to answer too. The question is wrong. In fact none of the skyscrapers fell down as a result of "short-lived, isolated, and low temperature fires". As a former assistant secretary of Ronald Reagan I would have thought he'd be a bit more informed than that. WTC7 fell down after burning for seven hours and according to many reports the fires were not small or isolated.

Paul Craig Roberts is writing in response to a Washington Times article about AE9/11 Truth's recent "press conference". Of course, it would be cheeky to point out that none of the press turned up to it and that the Washington Times is not a real newspaper anyway, so I won't do that. Instead, I'll focus on the merits of his "argument" which is essentially to say that his compatriates are a bunch of complete idiots who'll believe anything.

There will always be Americans who will believe whatever the government tells them no matter how many times they know the government has lied to them.

Isn't there a logical contradiction somewhere in that statement? Americans believe their government even when they know their government is lying? It's a tricky feat to pull off.

...more than half of the U.S. population still believes the fantastic story that the Government has told them about 9/11, a Muslim conspiracy that outwitted the entire Western world.

What's so fantastic about it? A group of guys hijacked planes. It's been done before, many times. They hijacked them almost simultaneously. That too is not unheard of. Then they flew them into buildings. That bit was all but unprecedented but we certainly know people have attempted similar things.

What is it about what Roberts calls the Government story that he finds so incredible? Is it the Muslim thing? Surely he's not one of those people who think that Muslims can't fly planes or outsmart a "Westerner" yet I can't see what else he is alluding to that makes it so "fantastic".

Americans first heard of Osama bin Laden because the Bush regime pinned the 9/11 attacks on him.

What is this? Is he really saying here, that he first heard of Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks? Again, for someone who once had a high position in government one would expect him to have been better informed than that. Or maybe not.

Then suddenly last year a new 9/11 "mastermind" emerged to take bin Laden's place, the captive Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the detainee who was waterboarded 183 times until he confessed to masterminding the 9/11 attack.

What is he talking about? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did not "suddenly emerge" last year!

This goes on and on for the rest of the article. With Roberts excoriating the "naifs" in his supercilious manner, ridiculing everyone for their stupidity while unself-consciously exposing his own ignorance throughout building up to an eschatological crescendo:

The morons in Washington are pushing the envelope of nuclear war.

The insane drive for American hegemony threatens life on earth. The American people, by accepting the lies and deceptions of "their" government, are facilitating this outcome.

Paul Craig Roberts has noticably been becoming ever more alarmist about the near future which reminds me of one of Richard Hofstadter's characteristics of the "paranoid style" in American politics:

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.

And yes, I hope to get round to finishing off my post on Hofstadter before the apocalypse.

Every Grain Of Sand

2010-03-01T05:46:00.001-08:00

Japan: Tsunami Warnings

2010-02-27T18:05:00.000-08:00

Following the devastating earthquake in Chile which has left 214 dead according to Reuters, Japan has issued tsunami warnings for the whole east coast.

Of course it didn't take long for the conspiraloons to cast their misanthropic perspective on this natural disaster.

A "news service" called Citizens for Legitimate Government, which describes itself as "A multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist US imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order" reported the story as follows:

Massive earthquake strikes Chile 27 Feb 2010 A massive earthquake with an initial magnitude of 8.8 has struck central Chile. The quake struck at 0634 GMT about 91km (56 miles) north-east of the city of Concepcion and 317km south-west of the capital, Santiago. Buildings in Santiago were reported to have shaken for between 10 and 30 seconds, with the loss of electricity and communications. The US issued an initial tsunami warning for Chile, Peru and Ecuador. That was later extended to Colombia, Antarctica, Panama and Costa Rica. [HAARP]

Later updates mixed legitimate news with its own bizarre editorial decisions.

Chile Quake Is One of the Biggest in a Century --Tsunami unleashed by quake is now speeding across the ocean at 550 miles per hour, or the speed of a jet plane 27 Feb 2010 The 8.8 magnitude earthquake that struck off coastal Chile in the early hours of the morning is one of the biggest temblors anywhere in more than a century. Data from the U.S. Geological Survey suggests that this morning's Chile quake tied in fifth place with an 8.8 quake that hit Ecuador and Bolivia in 1906. Only four quakes have been bigger since 1900. Scores of countries around the Pacific Ocean are bracing for a tsunami unleashed by the latest quake, and which is now speeding across the ocean at 550 miles per hour, or the speed of a jet plane.

Which was immediately followed by a citation from Wikipedia...

High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program 27 Feb 2010 The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) is an ionospheric research program jointly funded by the US Air Force, the US Navy, the University of Alaska and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Its purpose is to analyze the ionosphere and investigate the potential for developing ionospheric enhancement technology for radio communications and surveillance purposes (such as missile detection). The HAARP program operates a major Arctic facility, known as the HAARP Research Station, on an Air Force owned site near Gakona, Alaska. The most outstanding instrument at the HAARP Station is the Ionospheric Research Instrument (IRI), a high power transmitter facility operating in the high frequency range. The IRI is used to temporarily excite a limited area of the ionosphere... As of 2008, HAARP had incurred around $250 million in tax-funded construction and operating costs.

The editor, Lori Price, likes to add her two cents to a number of news stories such as this one on the crisis in Haiti:

Yeah, letting the US in to 'help' is like letting loose forty child molesters on a playground. --LRP

Responsible journalism!

Update: Of course, the idiots who are calling this a manufactured earthquake probably have little to say about the fact that in 1960 the world's most powerful recorded quake struck almost the same area off Chile. The tsunami it spawned killed 140 people in Japan.

Richard Hofstadter: The Paranoid Style in American Politics

2010-02-27T18:02:00.000-08:00

Content Not Yet Approved by New World Order Agents with Above Top Secret Clearance

Steven Jones Flirts With HAARP?

2010-02-22T06:15:00.000-08:00

Hej til dig i Danmark!

At the slightly subdued looking jamboree that the Truth Movement are having for AE9/11 getting a thousand signatures for their petition to re-investigate 9/11, the three Most Scholarly Leaders: David Ray Griffin, Richard Gage and Steven Jones made a few closing remarks in which Griffin seems a bit upset with Cass Sunstein's paper on conspiracy theories and how to deal with their proponents, and Richard Gage gives an ever-so-slightly cult-esque sendoff, "unity...oneness...networks of love and connection". But Steven Jones has a giddy turn in between them when he reminds the audience that people from George Bush Senior to Henry Kissinger to Rahm Emmanuel have used the term "New World Order" and how it might relate to human-generated disasters. Jones' nervousness seems to come from fearing being thought of as the nuttiest man in a room full of nuts as he goes on to suggest that maybe, just maybe the Haiti earthquake was manufactured.

Surely this guy is an NWO shill infiltrating the 9/11 Truth Movement to make it look ridiculous. This is all too much for some Truthers.

Update: 28th February: Alien Entity has a good post at JREF putting Steven Jones' assertions that the oil reserves "around Port-au-Prince... are larger than the reserves of Venezuala" into perspective. The amounts of "proven reserves" of oil in the Greater Antilles area (which includes Haiti but isn't confined to Haiti) would be enough for seven days of the US's current consumption. Even unproven or "undiscovered" reserves are only estimated at 941 million barrels of oil whereas Venezualan oil reserves are estimated at 87 billion barrels.

So, once again, Steven Jones appears to be full of 9/11Troof.

Coincidence Theory?

2010-02-21T02:13:00.000-08:00

Is this another incredible coincidence?

You'll just have to take my word for this but on Wednesday while drinking coffee with a friend at Mr Donut, we were discussing the supposed definition of insanity that it is "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result".

I was surprised to see that this formed part of the closing remarks of Joseph Stack's rambling suicide note/manifesto before he flew a plane into an Austin, Texas office building that housed a branch of the IRS:

I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.

The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.

Given the superficial similarities to the 9/11 attacks which I talk about a lot (too much!) maybe it proves that these happenings aren't coincidences after all!

Or maybe not.

Almost any theory can be confirmed by looking for "evidence" that verifies it. Simply looking for instances that offer confirmation is a bad epistemological habit that is often used by conspiracy theorists. This is one of the lessons of The Black Swan, a book I'm reading by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who, taking his lead from Karl Popper argues that a more honest way of forming a theory (or making a conjecture) is to think up what could possibly refute it.

Well, I hope to get back to talking about that - what counts as a good, epistemologically-sound theory and a theory that is derived from bad principles. But in the meantime, here's Russia Today's coverage of the plane crash in Austin, Texas. Perhaps unsurprisingly they ask Alex Jones to comment on what's going on.

As he's being interviewed, Alex Jones first starts out saying that it is likely that Stack did this act on purpose and that it hasn't been designated a terrorist attack, but then goes on to say that the Federal government is dreaming up ways in which to demonize states' rights groups and people such as Jones by conducting "false flag" terror attacks.

Er...Mr Jones, but haven't you already said the big bad government has declined from describing it as a terrorist attack?

He then says the Undabomber has been confirmed as a bit false-flaggy and that the Oklahoma bombing was a government inside job. And, presumably to confirm this he cites Joe Biden who warned about "lone nut" attacks saying that he was telegraphing a Reichstagian event!

Er...on the other hand, couldn't Biden have been referring to just those kinds of attacks, which, unless you're a conspiracy theorist you'll probably believe are lone nut attacks - the Unabomber, the Undabomber, the Shoe bomber, the Oklahoma bomber (sort of), Lee Harvey Oswald and, indeed, the Reichstag fire! Why is Biden's mentioning of such things so obviously an example of "telegraphing" an incident such as Stack's attack on the office block in Texas which Jones is variously describing as a fightback against the oppressive tax laws and a "false flag" incident!

I think there is something suspicious here! After all, wasn't it Jones' media outlets, according to him, the first to break this story and didn't Jones predict a "staged attack" in Austin and has been doing so "for months", according to him? Could this be an example of the very telegraphing he accuses others of doing?

Where was Jones on the day this happened? From what I can see he was either at the very city in which this terrorist attack happened, Austin Texas, or judging by the graphics on the screen behind him he was aboard Dick Cheney's Death Star!

Update: Good piece in Slate by Dave Cullen about Joe Stack's parting missive.

Conspiraloon TV!

2010-02-20T07:52:00.000-08:00

Conspiraloon extraordinaire, Michel Chossudovsky, who runs the site Global Research.com is featured on conspiracy-friendly TV station, Russia Today, to explain that rabbits are eating his face!*

Actually, I think he's saying that World War Three is just around the corner when the US finally attacks Iran with nuclear weapons as he and others have been predicting since 2004. Like the boy who cried wolf he is destined to not be believed if he carries on saying the same thing so I thought I'd repost it here so no one can complain about me ignoring his alarmism like the NWO-controlled mainstream media.

* I stole that expression from somewhere but can't find the origin. If someone knows the origin, or is the originator, please tell me and I'll credit them with it.

What Is It?

2010-02-17T22:42:00.000-08:00

As Marylander asked what conspiracies are popular in Japan in the comments box of an earlier post I decided to look into them. There does seem to be some interest in secret societies and a bit of cryptohistory and I will try to get round to a post on those things at a later date.

But just to start with I want to show the photograph above. It kicked off a controversy which, while not a conspiracy per se, still has a lot of the hallmarks of a conspiracy theory.

I don't want to give away any details as I don't want it to be easily Googlable.

What do you think it is?

Thanks to Nag P. for the tip.

Friends of Kim

2010-02-16T06:25:00.000-08:00

Photo courtesy of "Waasa" via DPRK Studies

The Ricky Gervais look-alike is Alejandro Cao de Benos de Les y Pérez a self-styled "soldier of Kim Jong-il" who leads an "army of intellectuals" called the Korean Friendship Association - a group of people so blinkered and enamoured of Kim Jong-il's miserable imitation of Disneyland that they almost make Truthers look sane. Well, almost.

Here's another one of the dashing aristocrat wearing the Medal of Extraordinary Equality or something...

The KFA's role is to take Westerners, whether they be True Believers in the Cult of Kim or simply the curious to Pyongyang to engage in pro-DPRK propaganda. On one of those trips an excellent documentary was made by two film-makers a couple of years ago called Friends of Kim which is well worth watching, if you like that sort of thing.

The documentary is in eight parts and begins with a number of Useless Idiots waffling on excitedly about how they are going to discover the answer to their middle-class boredom and the horrid capitalist system that so many people are just asking questions about these days. Such questions meet radical answers here as the chubby Alejandro marches the simpering Europeans past slender if not emaciated "cheering crowds" on a "march" through Kaesong, on the Korean border.

Part 5 is especially worth watching for when "simple soldier" Alejandro starts blaring across the border, "Yankee Go Home!" and attempts to get a rousing chorus from his suitably embarrassed comrades.

There is some extremely unpleasant lies by one of the KFA's senior members who insists there is no food crisis in the DPRK. His claim is contradicted by a member of the World Food Programme who says that the DPRK have to come begging to them every year for food aid and still only get a fraction of what they need.

This seems to be somewhat confirmed by what I myself witnessed when I went to the DPRK two years ago with Koryo Tours.

Given that the DPRK is reputed to put its healthiest troops on the border, one would have thought they could find some slightly less hungry-looking soldiers as these.

But Alejandro's obnoxiousness doesn't end with his badgering tone, "We are fed up with the lies, huh? Huh?" He resorts to breaking in to the room of American journalist, Andrew Morse, stealing his videotapes and breaking his computer. Later he unabashedly explains that he did it for security reasons and plays the victim card by saying his relationship with the North Korean government was threatened by Morse's journalism.

Edit: One of the participants on the tour runs an excellent blog called nkeconwatch.

Edit: I'd forgotten about this classic music video.

Shadows Dispelled

2010-02-15T02:22:00.000-08:00

Wow! Another amazing coincidence and conclusive proof that there is some kind of cosmic force guiding this blog's adventures.

Whilst browsing the international magazines (which I only read for the articles and the amusing letters) in my local Kinokuniya Bookshop today I noticed a copy of Truther-baiting publication, Popular Mechanics. I'd never looked inside an actual print edition of this magazine although I do own a copy of the Debunking 9/11 Myths book they published. Imagine, if you will, my surprise when while leafing through it I found a little article squashed into the corner of one page illustrated by the very Lee Harvey Oswald picture I wrote a post on, last week!

The article was about a study conducted by a professor of computer science, Hany Farid, who used a 3-D computer model of Oswald's head (created from his mugshots taken in custody in Dallas) to see if the shadows in the backyard photographs were inconsistent. His analysis showed them to be "perfectly consistent". His results were published in Perception Magazine. The latest edition of Popular Mechanics doesn't appear to have made it to the Web yet, but Huffington Post did a story on this back in November last year.

But wait! If the photographs appear to be genuine after all, then that means Oswald was lying! If he was lying he really had been in possession of the rifle seen as the murder weapon of President Kennedy and it may not have been planted by the FBI or the Dallas cops! It means Oswald really had been in possession of the pistol that killed Officer Tippit! And it means Kennedy conspiracy theorists may have to ruminate their brains out to come up with an explanation.

Update: Here is a video of Hany Farid explaining the methodology behind his analysis of the Oswald photograph.

Remember the Maine!

2010-02-12T18:13:00.000-08:00

As they have done before, Russia Today are broadcasting more conspiracy silliness interviewing some kid from the organization, We Are Change, who are regular guests. In this case some new photographs taken in New York on 9/11 have been released presumably showing new evidence of explosions or a guy lighting a thermite charge with a match (or something like that).

Okay, so it's not that interesting, but I did notice when asked why the US government would want to stage the attacks themselves, the WAC guy says that false flags have been going on since the dawn of civilization and cites as one of his examples, the USS Maine! This one seems to be the precedent de jour right now so I just thought I'd mention to regular readers Mark and Peter, residents of New York, that if they head down (up?) to a place called Fort Totten they can see some 100 year-old grafitti commemorating the sinking of that ship.

I stole the following picture from this site.

Of course, as I mentioned before, there doesn't seem to be much evidence for saying the USS Maine was sunk in a false flag attack.

When did this conspiracy theory become Mainestream?

JFK and Unreasonable Doubt

2010-02-11T00:05:00.000-08:00

In the comments box to my post on Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, Mark G makes an interesting observation, which I happen to disagree with:

On the JFK assassination, I think it ultimately comes down to gut instinct: is it more plausible to believe that Kennedy was killed by Oswald acting alone, or, do you think Kennedy was killed by some larger conspiracy, possibly involving the CIA and/or the Mafia? We all work backward from that gut feeling, in terms of citing evidence and argumentation. My gut tells me conspiracy, no doubt. Your gut, apparently, tells you Oswald acted alone. If this is the case, there's no way we can possibly persuade each other.

[I was writing a response to this in the comments box which became so large it was worth making another post]

I have to disagree with this. When I first started becoming interested in politics (US and UK politics) my "gut feeling" told me that JFK had been killed in a conspiracy. I believed it was common knowledge that JFK had been killed in a conspiracy. In fact, as you have pointed out, it can be regarded as the "official line" that JFK was killed in a conpiracy.

I remember watching JFK because I expected it would tell me more about it when, in reality, the film just confused me. What the Hell is he trying to say? I wondered. The more I looked at it the more confusing the picture seemed to be. I started to wonder if this was what Oliver Stone had intended. To make it less clear than it was.

So, at what you would call high school, I took an extra-curricular course that my history teacher ran called "Who Shot Kennedy?" He laid out a case which, if I remember correctly, implicated Lyndon Johnson. I can't remember if that is what he concluded but he definitely spent much of his time trying to rubbish the evidence that Oswald did it. He pointed to photographs he said were faked such as the famous one of Oswald holding his rifle in his backyard.

I also remember that whereas almost all of us were there to find out who killed Kennedy in a conspiracy only one kid entertained the idea that Oswald shot him alone. He kept talking about Gerald Posner's book, Case Closed. It made me wonder, at the time, why anyone would take such a contrarian view that Oswald acted alone. Surely the idea of a conspiracy is more exciting, I thought. Why's this kid being so boring and trying to defend an obviously culpable US government? Anyway, I continued to believe that Kennedy was killed in a conspiracy because, well... it was what everyone else believed. In other words, my "gut feeling" was born from pure laziness and unwillingness to examine any evidence myself or arguments from the other side. I had only listened to conspiracy arguments which I didn't understand.

I later came to realize that I never understood the conspiracy arguments because they weren't really coherent and because conspiracy theorists spend much of their time doing nothing more than undermining the "official line" or rather the generally accepted historical narrative.

While conspiracy theorists like to focus in on very minor technical details that they say renders the whole "official line" false they can often only do this by obscuring or failing to look at the big picture.

Alexander Cockburn probably says this better I can, so I'll excerpt a very large chunk of an article he wrote on conspiracies:

Anyone familiar with criminal, particularly death penalty defense – I had such an opportunity for a number of years – will know that there are always anomalies the prosecution cannot account for and that the defense teams can exploit, in hopes of swaying a jury either in the guilt or penalty phase of a trial. Time and again I would see the defense team spend days and weeks, even months, back-checking on a possibly vulnerable link in the evidentiary chain that could be attacked, at least to the all-important level of creating “reasonable doubt” in the mind of a juror. Expert witnesses would be imported at great expense –- unlike states such as Texas, the justice system of California is generous in the provision of money for death penalty defense -- to challenge the prosecution’s forensic evidence. Such challenges weren’t hard to mount. Contrary to prosecutorial claims, there is far less instrinsic certainty in forensic evaluation than is commonly supposed, as regards fingerprints, landing marks on bullets and so forth.

But minute focus of a death penalty defense team on one such weak link often leads to a distorted view of the whole case. I remember more than one case where, after weeks of interviewing witnesses at one particular crime scene, the defense’s investigator had collected enough witness reports to mount a decent attack on this aspect of the prosecution’s overall case. At least this is what I thought, hearing the daily bulletins of the investigator. But when, in such instances, the camera pulled back, so to speak, and I saw the prosecution’s whole case – chain of evidence, cumulative witness statements, accused’s own movements and subsequent statements – it became clear enough to me and, in that case to the juries , that the accused were incontestably guilty. But even then, such cases had a vigorous afterlife, with the defense trying to muster up grounds for an appeal, on the basis of testimony and evidence withheld by the prosecution, faulty rulings by the judge, a prejudiced jury member and so on. A seemingly “cut and dried case” is very rarely beyond challenge, even though in essence it actually may well be just that, “cut and dried”.

Anyone who ever looked at the JFK assassination will know that there are endless anomalies and loose ends. Eyewitness testimony – as so often – is conflicting, forensic evidence possibly misconstrued, mishandled or just missing. But in my view, the Warren Commission, as confirmed in almost all essentials by the House Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s, had it right and Oswald fired the fatal shots from the Schoolbook Depository. The evidentiary chain for his guilt is persuasive, and the cumulative scenarios of the conspiracy nuts entirely unconvincing. But of course – as the years roll by, and even though no death bed confession has ever buttressed those vast, CIA-related scenarios -- the nuts keep on toiling away, their obsessions as unflagging as ever.

So, going back to that piece of evidence I mentioned earlier. The photograph of Oswald holding the same rifle which was found in the Book Depository with Oswald's prints on and with the same pistol that had been used to shoot officer Tippit (the crime he was arrested for) is highly damning. Oswald could only claim that it was a fake and since then conspiracy theorists have tried to analyse the shadows on it to argue that the head had been glued on (photoshop having not been invented). The problem for this scenario is that his wife Marina, had, tesitified to having taken the photographs and that she'd done so because Oswald had asked her to. According to Wikipedia:

However, Marina Oswald testified in 1964,[140] 1969,[141] 1977,[142] and 1978,[143] and reaffirmed in 2000[144] that she took the photographs at Oswald's request. These photos were labelled CE 133-A and CE 133-B. CE 133-A shows the rifle in Oswald's left hand and newsletters in front of his chest in the other, while the rifle is held with the right hand in CE 133-B. Oswald's mother testified that on the day after the assassination she and Marina destroyed another photograph with Oswald holding the rifle with both hands over his head, with "To my daughter June" written on it.[145]

It's unfortunate for conspiracy theorists that there is more than just one of these pictures and that those closest to Oswald deny they were fakes (a report on their authenticity is here). The conspiracy theorists then have to posit other reasons why Marina and Oswald's mother may not be telling the truth. Were they coerced? Okay, who by and under pain of what? Why was there more than one photograph taken in the backyard and why is the story so elaborate?

If the conspiracists wanted to frame Oswald, then why did they bother killing officer Tippit? And if that was part of the plan then what was the purpose of the assassination attempt on General Walker in which a bullet that matched Oswald's gun was found? Essentially, a lot of conspiracy theorists will say that, apart from the bullet matching the rifle, there was no evidence that it was Oswald, so the bullet could have been planted. But, again, what would have been the point?

Anyway, the point I am making is not just that the photographs prove Oswald did it (although the rifle may as well be smoking) but that in the bigger picture the evidence always ends up pointing the same way, towards Oswald, and only by employing ultra-skepticism towards each and every line of evidence, unreasonable doubt in most cases, can we really avoid concluding that the most likely explanation for Kennedy's death is, Oswald did it.

New World Order Gossip!

2010-02-09T04:14:00.000-08:00

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Niall Ferguson

This blog is not interested in gossip and private lives etc... etc... but as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Niall Ferguson are clearly very prominent members of the New World Order shape-shifting lizard community this is clearly BIG NEWS!!!1!

Update: As ever the Daily Mail's readership doesn't disappoint with its comments on this most important story.

He sure knows how to conduct foreign affairs!
- Willie Eckerslyke, Morecambe

so much for Tory 'family values' Lets be honest about this. They are all at it. as i have said before there is Nobody to trust , nobody worth a vote.
- Paul Taylor, Shenzhen China

So what ?
- George, Overseas

Dr Ahmed's Diagnosis

2010-02-08T05:17:00.000-08:00

When Christopher Hitchens called Gore Vidal out for being a 9/11 Truther in Vanity Fair, a number of people were quick to pick sides and defend whichever one of the two happens to be their literary hero. Those who like Hitchens tended to agree with him for calling Vidal a crackpot and those who like Vidal tended to see it as unsporting of Hitchens to lay into an old man who may have simply gone potty.

Then there are those who defend Vidal on the grounds that his Truther-esque statements may well be...er...true. In this case, no less a personage as Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed MA DPhil (Sussex) has stepped in to defend Vidal on these very grounds in an article in the Independent. It's interesting, to me at least, that while Truthers so often refer to those without the Truth as sheeple it is they who do the most bleating. In particular they like to bleat about "appeals to authority" which they like to point out as a fallacy and complain about getting ad hominem attacks from the zombified sheeple. But if ad hominem attacks and appeals to authority are unfair then what is the purpose of organizations referring to themselves grandly as Scholars for Truth, or Architects and Engineers for Truth? Surely it is to promote themselves as some kind of authority. And what is with the long string of letters after Dr Ahmed's name? Is he thinking of founding the NoDumbSchmucks for Truth movement?

To be fair, Dr Ahmed does have a personal stake in this given that Hitchens was expressing astonishment that Gore Vidal could put his name to one of Dr Ahmed's books. Hitchens says:

Vidal relied heavily on the man he thought had produced “the best, most balanced report” on 9/11, a certain Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, whose book The War on Freedom had been brought to us by what Vidal called “a small but reputable homeland publisher.” Mr. Ahmed on inspection proved to be a risible individual wedded to half-baked conspiracy-mongering, his “Institute” a one-room sideshow in the English seaside town of Brighton, and his publisher an outfit called “Media Monitors Network” in association with “Tree of Life,” whose now-deceased Web site used to offer advice on the ever awkward question of self-publishing.

If this type of ad hominem attack smarts a bit, it isn't surprising that Dr Ahmed feels self-conscious enough about his credentials to spend a good deal of his article pointing out where that boorish oaf, Hitchens, has gone wrong ("Hitchens conveniently overlooks the fact that I am at the Department of International Relations, University of Sussex...etc..."). And, just for good measure, what looks like Dr Ahmed's entire media CV is tacked on as a postscript.

But the problem with Dr Ahmed's article is that it tries to have things too many ways. First, by saying it was unfair of Hitchens to call the old guy a "crackpot" being of "crackpot" vintage and secondly to say that maybe Vidal's still got all his marbles after all, which undercuts his first plea for the defence. Dr Ahmed partly bases this claim on the discredited idea that the FBI don't want Osama bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks.

Gore describes bin Laden as ‘still not the proven mastermind.’ Hitchens thinks this is self-evidently absurd, but it would seem the FBI agree with Gore, not Hitchens: according to Sonoma State University’s Project Censored, one of the top 25 censored news stories of 2008 was that ‘He [bin Laden] has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.’

This claim largely comes from the fact that Bin Laden's FBI Wanted poster doesn't mention the 9/11 attacks. And that one Rex Tomb, of the FBI, gave the following reason for the omission:

“The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Osama bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.” Tomb continued, “Bin Laden has not been formally charged in connection to 9/11.”

Wow! Looks like the New World Order made a major slip-up in not telling the FBI to put the 9/11 attacks on the FBI poster. Either that or they're surprisingly honest about the fact that there is no reason to suspect Bin Laden.

Or perhaps there is another explanation, as appeared in the Washington Post:

"There's no mystery here," said FBI spokesman Rex Tomb. "They could add 9/11 on there, but they have not because they don't need to at this point. . . . There is a logic to it."

The point is that the FBI were sent out to Kenya and Tanzania to investigate the embassy bombings in 1998 and made Bin Laden a suspect in what they considered to be a crime. The 9/11 attacks were treated more as an act of war and one in which evidence took the form of intelligence that those investigating the attacks wouldn't want to compromise by revealing it. Or else Rex Tomb has been leaned on after initially letting the cat out of the bag.

More of that is here. In fact, one of the problems identified in not catching those responsible for 9/11 before it happened came from different investigative bodies, the FBI and the CIA not communicating enough with each other and sharing information for the simple reason that the FBI would seek to use the evidence in court, and therefore make it public, while the CIA wanted such information to remain secret in order to further discover more about the Bin Laden network.

And just in case there is any doubt the US State Department has listed Bin Laden as wanted for the 9/11 attacks.

The claims of responsibility also probably weigh in on the side of Bin Laden's guilt.

Thirdly, Dr Ahmed makes a parallel between Hitchens' past indulgence of conspiracy theories such as the idea that USS Maine was deliberately sunk by the US in 1898 as a pretext for the Spanish-American War and the Lusitania was deliberately imperiled by Churchill to get the Americans into World War One and Gore Vidal's current conspiracy theorizing about Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

This suggests Dr Ahmed has been reading Hitchens Watch where it was also said that it was rich of Hitchens to call Vidal a conspiraloon given his own crown of baco-foil. (I looked at that here.)

If Gore’s scepticism about Pearl Harbour [sic] represents a ‘crackpot’ strain, then what do Hitchens’s writings about the sinking of the Lusitania in his Blood, Class and Empire (2004) say about him? Hitchens points to how the US sank its own ship, the USS Maine, in Havana as a pretext for the Spanish-American War. This was precedent for Winston Churchill’s ‘pivotal role’ in the Lusitania deception, a ‘psychological warfare’ operation that ‘prepared United States public opinion for a war on the terrain of old Europe’ by placing the ship in the line of German fire. He concludes ominously:

‘I am reluctantly driven to the conclusion that there was a conspiracy deliberately to put the Lusitania at risk in the hope that even an abortive attack on her would bring the United States into war. Such a conspiracy could not have been put into effect without Winston Churchill’s express permission and approval.’

Talk about pot calling the kettle black? Whether either of them is right or wrong, compared to Hitchens’s repeated, heated, solemn references to ‘conspiracy’, Gore is far more measured, albeit laden with a heavy-dose of the blackest irony.

Well, all Dr Ahmed can achieve from this tactic is to show that Hitchens is as nutty as himself and Gore Vidal. But this Phyrric victory doesn't make any of his own theories or Gore Vidal's theories on Pearl Harbor or pipelines look any less half-baked.

Conspiracy theorist: Christopher Hitchens

Nobody Knows...

2010-02-07T01:10:00.000-08:00

Some blogger who goes by the appropriate handle of Nobody, has a post up attacking poor shills like me for trying to cover up the obvious inside job attacks on September 11th 2001. I haven't got round to reading the whole thing, short as it is, because it tries to make a case so laughable that I'd rather waste time writing this instead (and because Mossad pays me to write, not to read!)

Nobody first starts out with the hokey old conspiracy theorist tactic of establishing a precendent. In this case, pointing out the Franklin Delano Roosevelt must have, must have, known about Japan's impending surprise attack on Pearl Harbor (presumably meaning that FDR wasn't surprised one bit).

Nobody sketches his argument here:

It's a cold hard truth that Roosevelt wanted the US in the war and Pearl Harbour [sic] was the means he used to achieve this. And sure, he sacrificed a couple thousand of his own people. No big deal - I doubt anyone in Washington would have batted an eyelid. They wanted a war, and in a war sacrificing people - in large numbers - is just part of the game. It's done all the time. Mind you, what you don't do is sacrifice expensive hardware. That's why Pearl Harbour [sic] was full of WWI vintage ships and all the shiny new vessels were out to sea.

The hole in this theory is that the US had eight battleships docked at Pearl Harbor at the time of the attack. Some, but by no means all of them were of World War One-era but battleships were still seen as the key to naval wars at the time. The aircraft carriers were indeed out to sea, but with the Japanese still outnumbering them heavily in that department (six Japanese carriers were involved in the attack at Pearl Harbor alone!) it seems ludicrous to believe Roosevelt would allow such a crippling blow to the US navy in the hopes of fighting back with a much reduced force. Not only did they lose 2000 servicemen and women and nearly 200 aircraft, if Roosevelt were to have given the Japanese the first hit for free then he would have had no guarantee that the attack on Pearl Harbor wouldn't have been even more devestating than it was.

Besides, it neglects a very important consideration. The war that FDR wanted to be in was one against Hitler. Allowing the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor was no guarantee that FDR could get that war meaning that he could have ended up fighting the war he didn't want with a reduced military capability.

As I pointed out to Nobody, in his comments section:

How did FDR arrange for Hitler to declare war on the US?

But anyway, while I may get back to Pearl Harbor at a later date, the invoking of this - as David Ray Griffin does - is merely an attempt to set a precedent for the argument that the neo-cons/the New World Order/Deep State USA were behind the 9/11 attacks.

Nobody initially used the following photograph to illustrate one of the theories that the Twin Towers were brought down in controlled demolitions:

How this picture demonstrates that is not completely clear except that a doctored version of the photograph appeared on a paper by Dr. Steven Jones to prove that there was molten steel in the ruins of the towers which seem to prove that the towers were brought down by thermite (or thermate, or nanothermite, or superthermite or something).

Anyway, like the killjoy I am I pointed this out too:

Also, that photograph of workers at Ground Zero presumably shows glowing molten metal, right?

Wrong. It is the light of a torch and I think it might be one of the pictures that Steven Jones touched up.

So, since then I think Nobody has changed the photograph or left this one up instead.

Oh dear!

Thanks to RKOwens for putting up that and many other videos which debunk the 9/11 Truthers' silliness.

Cui Bono

2010-02-03T17:16:00.000-08:00

"Cui Bono", often translated as "who benefits?", is a favourite investigative principal of conspiracy theorists. It allows them to spin all kinds of fanciful nonsense whereby any accidental or perceived benefit resulting from tragedy can be used to finger otherwise unlikely culprits. For example, 9/11 conspiracy theorists often point to the fact that there are large gas reserves in Central Asia, particularly in Turkmenistan to argue that ultimately 9/11 was staged by the US in order to invade Afghanistan and build a pipeline through that country and down to the Pakistani coast where it will no doubt be run off with by the Yankee Imperialist Aggressors.

The pipeline has been the central character of what Ronald Weick calls a shaggy-dog story with no punchline explaining every action of the US's involvement in Central Asia. Pointing to UNOCAL's attempts to build a trans-Afghan pipeline in the nineties, some conspiracy theorists believe that the Afghan war was purely an attempt to resurrect this project. That the ensuing chaos justified troop presence there or that the US was deliberately provoking conflict. It didn't seem to matter that conflict was almost certainly the last thing prospective investors wanted to see there. I have even seen arguments that the continued US presence is deliberately stirring up conflict in order to prevent pipelines being built from Central Asia to China. Of course the problem with that little theory is that one look at the map above shows there is no need to build a trans-Afghan pipeline to move gas from Turkmenistan (or any of the other Central Asian republics) to China.

Also, the real world of geo-politics seems to work a little differently to the rules of Risk. Just because the Yankees have their black(water) armies sitting on Afghanistan doesn't mean China can't have its red armies parked there too. Or if not its red armies, it doesn't mean that it can't operate its own copper mine in Afghanistan.

However, China does seem to know at least one thing about the strategy of Risk. Let your opponents squabble with each other and build up slowly and quietly.

From 30th January's Economist:

[F]or most of the 18 years since the Soviet Union’s break-up, China has taken a back seat in the fierce competition between Russia and America for influence in this resource-rich region. In 2009, with the energy needs of its burgeoning economy continually growing, it woke up to new opportunities in its western backyard...

...In June, for example, China agreed to lend Turkmenistan $4 billion to develop its largest gasfield, South Yolotan, close to the Afghan border. This was part of a 30-year deal that should eventually bring China 40 billion cubic metres of gas each year. The same month Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin’s successor, announced a loan of $10 billion loan to the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), a security forum grouping China, Russia and four Central Asian countries, to shore up members faltering in the global downturn. In November China’s largest oil-and-gas provider, jointly with Kazakhstan’s oil-and-gas firm, bought MangistauMunaiGas, a big oil producer in Kazakhstan. In exchange, China had lent the country $10 billion earlier last year.

China needs to be careful with its plans, however. If the Truthers get wind of who the true beneficiaries of the situation in Afghanistan are, China may have to face the inept wrath of the conspiraloons who may just ask the question... Hu benefits?

Ring Them Bells

2010-02-02T18:41:00.000-08:00

Well, as Dylan's coming to Japan next month and I'm off to watch him I thought I'd put up a video of him playing live at Todaiji Temple in Nara. Todaiji temple is, in fact, the largest wooden building in the world (and its actually a smaller reconstruction of the original) housing a great big wooden seated Buddah statue. One of the pillars holding up the great structure has a hole at its base of about the same height and width of a miniature Dachshund which is supposedly the dimensions of the great Buddah's nostril. Legend has it that if you crawl through the hole you will achieve enlightenment. I've been through it twice which is, no doubt, how I came to be so wise.

The song, Ring Them Bells, is from the "Oh Mercy" album which some say signalled Dylan's return from the messy wilderness he was wandering for much of the Eighties. This is performed in the rock with orchestra genre that kids go wild for these days.

Thanks to MalibuColonyPlaza for putting up the video and more of the same concert.

Reality Deniers...

2010-01-30T23:20:00.000-08:00

Everybody knows this instinctively even if they don't all grasp it intellectually. And many people have become mentally unbalanced, sick at heart or twisted because despite their instinctive knowlege, they can't consciously acknowledge it. And the more people deny the truth, the sicker they get.

In this case, the writer is talking about 9/11 Troof, suggesting that not believing it was an Inside Job is bad for your health.

Unfortunately, as with just about every other Truther claim the evidence is against him.

As in the case of ex-MI5 spy David Shayler, who became the Messiah...

...and then became... erm... Delores Kane...

Or freakily so, in the case of Alex Jones...

Or in the case of Jimmy Walter who appears to think he's a chicken...

Or tragically, in the case of Sean Fitzgerald...

I don't cite these examples just to engage in ad hominem attacks but to show that if there is any correlation between what someone believes about what happened on 9/11 and mental imbalance then it is the Truthers who come off less favourably.

One thing I am not sure about, however, is whether it was pre-existing mental imbalance that attracted Truthers to their theories or whether the belief in 9/11 Truth made them mentally unbalanced.

There is some evidence that it was there already in this case and in this one:

Daniel Dennett's Deepities

2010-01-30T22:40:00.000-08:00

Daniel Dennett is my favourite of the "new athiests". In this talk, called The Evolution of Confusion, he explores what he considers to be one of the reasons for the existence of theology. He suggests it is an exercise that was invented by those who had trouble believing in religious dogma and who have struggled hard to try to discover some kind of argument which is intellectualy satisying. In other words, those who find a gap between their professed beliefs and their actual beliefs.

It's introduced by Richard Dawkins who similarly asks, "What's the point of philosophers?" To which the obvious answer is, "That depends on what you want to do."

Dennett explains what it is that philosophers do, which is mostly to assess uses of language in argument and when it is being misused, either mistakenly or deliberately and willfully. Why would language be misused? Dennett gives an example of Robert Wright, whose book The Evolution of God is, according to Dennett, an attempt to be obscure and to add mystery where there is none.

Dennett also coins the term "deepity" which is superficially similar to a "profundity" except that a "deepity" is true only in a trivial way according to one reading but is otherwise false according to a reading that would make it profound if it were true.

And then there are nonsensical claims which also sound profound, but are not. Although this is taken from a fictional character in a novel, Dennett shows that there are those who have put forward arguments in this form:

It is a measure of God's omnipotence that he needn't exist in order to save us.

The USS Maine and the RMS Lusitania

2010-01-30T20:15:00.000-08:00

"What's the point?"

"What's the point in trying to debunk conspiracy theories?" People ask me. "Isn't this like trying to drain the Pacific Ocean with a teaspoon?"

Well, yes it is. But just because it is like trying to drain the Pacific Ocean with a teaspoon doesn't make it pointless and futile! Sometimes they are so easily debunked that they produce a warm feeling of satisfaction in an area just behind the eyes.

Two water-borne conspiracy theories that I only recently became aware of surround the sinkings of the USS Maine and the RMS Lusitania and according to conspiracy site, Hitchens Watch, are believed in by none other than Christopher Hitchens, himself.

Greywolf writes:

Christopher jumps back in time to the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor and how this was used as a pretext for the US to launch the Spanish-American War. The Yankees finally owned up to this false flag op in 1976.

Wow! So the claim is that the USS Maine sailed into Havana Harbor and, in 1898, was deliberately sunk by the United States despite the large loss of life of those on board and then blamed on the Spanish? And not only that but owned up to 1976?

I would have thought I'd have heard of this false-flag attack if it were true and so I decided to pick up a few history books that are on my shelves and find out if they agree with the claim.

First, Niall Ferguson's Colossus, a book in which the author claims the United States has always been an imperialist power. There's only one reference - page 48:

Within just three months of the American declaration of war - the trumped-up pretext for which was the accidental explosion of the battleship Maine in Havana Bay, supposedly the fault of Spain - the Spanish forces in both the Caribbean and the Philippines were defeated.

Accidental? That's not what I was promised. Apparently the Yankees have owned up to it being a "false flag" operation. Either Ferguson has been skimping on his research or, far more likely given that he is a war-mongering neo-con, he's pushing the "accident" theory (sometimes known as the "cock-up theory of history") to deflect attention to the confessed bad behaviour of the US.

So, I picked up Hugh Brogan's The Penguin History of the USA to find out what the author has to say about the incident - on page 440, he describes how "rogue newspaper publisher", William Randolph Hearst was eager to foment a war between Spain and the US - this is more like it. Of the incident itself he says:

[Hearst] got his way. A United States battleship, the Maine, on a courtesy visit to Havana, blew up in the harbour on 15th February 1898, killing most of the crew. The explosion was almost certainly an accident, but Hearst thought otherwise. "Remember the Maine!" screamed his papers, announcing that the episode was the result of a fiendish Spanish plot.

Accident? What is Brogan playing at? Not only has no one apparently told him that the Yankees owned up to their false flag in 1976 (Brogan's book was first published in 1985!), but now he's accusing William Rondolph Hearst of being a conspiracy theorist!

Maybe we'll be on safer ground with Howard Zinn, whose credentials are solidly left-wing and whose opposition to war-like foreign policy by the United States is second-to-none. He'll skewer those dastardly Yankee Imperialist Aggressors. Page 304 of A People's History of the United States:

In February 1898, the US battleship Maine, in Havana harbor as a symbol of American interest in the Cuban events, was destroyed by a mysterious explosion and sank, with the loss of 268 men. There was no evidence produced on the cause of the explosion, but excitement grew swiftly in the United States, and McKinley began to move in the direction of war.

What?!? This isn't fair! I was promised a false-flag conspiracy theory that blamed the Yankee Imperialist Aggressors and I'm let down even by Howard Zinn. I have to conclude that Zinn must be one of the fabled "Left Gatekeepers"! Pretending to criticize US foreign policy while actually giving it a pass on its egregious conspiracies.

Unless of course, it simply isn't true that there was a false-flag incident. Where does the claim, that the US have admitted to a false-flag attack come from in the first place?

Well, looking at Wikipedia it appears there are two theories that mainstream historians propose:

1) That the Maine hit a mine laid by the Spanish navy.

2) That the Maine's coal bunker spontaneously combusted detonating nearby magazines.

1976 is the year in which Admiral Rickover conducted his own investigation essentially concluding that the latter hypothesis was the most likely. He didn't conclusively rule out other possibilities but suggested that an accidental coal-bunker fire was the most likely. His investigation formed the basis of his book, titled How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed.

(Interestingly, however, National Geographic conducted a study in 1999, ressurecting the mine hypothesis.)

In the 1920's the Cubans themselves built a monument to the USS Maine in Havana in which the sailors were honoured for their part in what the government of the time considered the US's assistance in gaining independence for Cuba from the Spanish.

So, just who believes in the false-flag theory if it doesn't form the basis of any officially accepted account?

Well, CNN tells us that it is believed in by Cuban officials who altered the monument to the Maine:

But in 1961, Cuban communist revolutionaries toppled the eagle from the top of that monument. Its mangled remains are proudly displayed in a downtown museum.

Some Cuban officials argue that the United States may have deliberately blown up the Maine to create a pretext for military action against Spain. And today, the wording on the monument describes the Maine's sailors as "victims sacrificed to the imperialist greed in its fervor to seize control of Cuba."

The theory is also hinted at by Holocaust-denying bishop Richard Williamson, who is quoted on Wikipedia as saying:

"There is serious reason to believe – that in 1898, it was not the Spaniards who sank the 'USS Maine'; that in 1917, it was not the Germans who set up the 'Lusitania' as a target; that in 1941 it was not the Japanese who set up Pearl Harbor for attack; that in 1963 it was not Lee Harvey Oswald who killed President Kennedy".

And indeed, it seems to have been Hitchens' purpose in mentioning the Maine that serves as his basis for claiming that the Lusitania was allowed to sink by Winston Churchill, who was at the time first lord of the Admiralty. He's using a standard technique in citing precedent to make a conspiracy seem more credible.

I'll leave it to David Aaronovitch to make this maneouvre more clear:

As has already been noted, conspiracists work hard to convince people that conspiracy is everywhere. An individual theory will seem less improbable if an entire history of similar cases can be cited. These can be as ancient as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and today may include references to Pearl Harbor, the Reichstag fire, and the 1965 Gulf of Tonkin incident. The plot to murder JFK is first base if you want to convince people that RFK and MLK were also murdered by arms of the American state.

As for the specific claims about the Lusitania, please read this website.

Please note: Howard Zinn passed away on exactly the same day as J.D Salinger 27th January, 2010. As with Salinger's death, I deny all responsibility.

Happy Now?

2010-01-30T18:10:00.000-08:00

Online critics of mine have suggested that it is cowardice on my part to hide behind what they assume to be a pseudonym, "angrysoba". How dare I use such a moniker from behind which I dispense my radically conventional views?

So I've decided to post my picture...

Happy now?

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