It’s fascism whether it applies to people you like or not:

Sixteen people banned from entering the UK were “named and shamed” by the Home Office today.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said she decided to make public the names of 16 people banned since October so others could better understand what sort of behaviour Britain was not prepared to tolerate.

The list includes hate preachers, anti-gay protesters and a far- right US talk show host.

“I think it’s important that people understand the sorts of values and sorts of standards that we have here, the fact that it’s a privilege to come and the sort of things that mean you won’t be welcome in this country,” Ms Smith told GMTV.

“Coming to this country is a privilege. If you can’t live by the rules that we live by, the standards and the values that we live by, we should exclude you from this country and, what’s more, now we will make public those people that we have excluded.

The Independent: Named and Shamed

The UK just gets more and more fascist.

This week marks the beginning of the “terrorism preparedness” drills Top Officials 4 and Vigilant Shield 08:

VS-08 will be conducted concurrent with Top Officials 4 (TOPOFF 4), the nation’s premier exercise of terrorism preparedness sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, and several other linked exercises as part of the National Level Exercise 1-08. These linked exercises will take place October 15-20 and are being conducted throughout the United States and in conjunction with several partner nations including Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, as well as the Territory of Guam

As usual, the truthers are shitting their pants in anticipation of a false flag terror attack and/or a preparation for the declaration of martial law. Nevermind that these threats failed to materialize during Operation Noble Resolve last August. (Aside: does anyone have a list of times that Alex Jones has “cried wolf” about terrorist attacks and/or declarations of martial law?)

Critics on the war on terror often remark on how our reaction to 9/11 is exactly what the terrorists wanted. We now cower in fear of terror attacks, give up freedoms, and question each other loyalty. I can’t help but wonder if the reactions to these drills aren’t exactly what the police state wants: a constant state of fear and loathing. Besides, “they” don’t have to declare martial law. We’ve been living under martial law since at least the 80s, when Reagan escalated the war on drugs to its current paramilitary status. But even before the effective beginning of martial law in the 80s, the US has had a long history of government repression. The real question is not whether the United States is becoming police state, but to ask if it has ever been a democracy.

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A giant, smiling Lego man has been fished out of the sea in the Dutch resort of Zandvoort.

Workers at a drinks stall rescued the 2.5-metre tall model, which had a yellow head and blue torso.

“We saw something bobbing about in the sea and we decided to take it out of the water,” said a stall worker. “It was a life-sized Lego toy.”

A woman nearby added: “I saw the Lego toy floating towards the beach from the direction of England.”

The toy was later placed in front of the drinks stall.

From: ABC News.

(via t0tem7).

Al Gore can go screw himself. Worth the watch if you’ve boughten in to the global warming media frenzy. Or just want some fodder to hit ignorant hippies and fear-mongers over the head with.

I was not aware of some of the misrepresentation going on in this doc, though the whole thing is not to be dismissed. I love being proved wrong when I jump to conclusions! Thanks, barry!

Produced by Channel 4, U.K.

Available in better quality via sweet, sweet DivX over at Joox.net (link).

So, we look to the top of this pyramid and we come back to the same occultic orders. Britney, Christina, and Justin all came through thecastle gates of Walt Disney; a Freemason and FBI asset. It was WaltDisney that crafted the film ‘Sons of Liberty’ to conceal the Masonic involvement in the Boston Tea Party and train us in Masonic worship; much like all of Mel Gibson’s films. Braveheart is a concealed story of the creation of Freemasonry in Scotland and England by the Templars.

Freemason, O.T.O. Illuminist, Alan Moore has now taken his place as a meta-programmer. He casts a trauma-based mind control programmer as a hero and now people dress up as him at protests.
Phoenix Pictures, whose icon is a code for Lucifer, makes films about Nazi worship, child labor camps, and genetic modification of human. These are all top billing films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sigourney Weaver. The Nazi film was written by Stephen King. We are being programmed and our programmers are occultists that worship Lucifer. Deal with it.
So, when we get to films on prophecies like Revelations we find that it is a matter of interpretation. People are being programmed to believe a certain phrase will play out in a certain fashion. The Left Behind series is a prime example.

Full Story: Waking the Midnight Sun.

The Ministry of Defence funded a secret study to ascertain whether people with psychic powers could help protect the nation, it emerged last night.

The MoD arranged the tests to discover whether volunteers were able to use psychic powers to “remotely view” hidden objects. The studyinvolved blindfolding test subjects and asking them to “see” the contents of sealed brown envelopes containing pictures of random objects and public figures. [...]

Surprisingly 28 per cent of those tested managed a close guess at the contents of the envelopes, which included pictures of a knife, Mother Teresa and an “Asian individual”.

But most subjects, who were holed up in a secret location for the study, were hopelessly off the mark in their guesses. One even fell asleep while he tried to focus on the envelope’s content.

Full Story: Scotsman (via Hit and Run).

It seems that people in the UK are on a rampage against surveillance cameras… but not to worry, the authorities have a solution:

Speed cameras in the Scottish Borders may soon be monitored by security cameras to protect them from vandals.

Brilliant.

Hit and Run has coverage.

via Mind Hacks:

Obscured TV is a website that is streaming old TV documentaries. They don’t have permission to do it, but they believe the programmes are too educational to be left gathering dust in a TV company warehouse. As they have so many classic psychology and neuroscience documentaries in their archives, I can only agree.

Just a word of warning if you’re skeptical about these sorts of things – it requires that you install some ActiveX plugin, which is seems painless to install and works OK, but only works in Explorer.

If you’re happy with doing that, have a look at this page which has a list of ‘human interest’ documentaries – largely taken from UK TV.

7 Seconds is a stunning documentary on densely amnesic patients Clive Wearing who has been the subject of some ground-breaking research on the neuropsychology of memory, but also inspires some profound thoughts on identity and remembering.

The Real Rainman, My Family and Autism and Make me Normal profile a number of remarkable individuals with autism, and Teenage Tourettes Camp is a compelling documentary on some UK children with Tourette syndrome who go to a camp in the USA especially for children affected by the disorder (it is both touching and wickedly funny in places).

Another page with documentaries from the Horizon series, includes The Man Who Lost His Body, a documentary about a man who loses his sense of proprioception – the ability to sense where your limbs are, and God on the Brain which contains a memorable scene where Michael Persinger attempts to give Richard Dawkins a religious experience by stimulating his temporal lobes with magnetic fields.

Get them while they’re online, as the site probably won’t stay up for long!

Link to ‘people’ documentaries.
Link to Horizon documentaries.

Above is small clip from a much larger video now available from GPod: “‘The First Transmission’ – 240 minutes, TOPY, UK, 1982, advertised in the first edition of Thee Grey Book and sold at a minimum donation of P.23 (requesting a signed declaration to absolve TOPY of all legal responsibilities).”

Download and more info: GPod.

Nagi Noda has directed this Coca-Cola ad, which I believe is airing in the U.K. and Australia. We witness a girl drinking cola then progressing in iterative static poses down through the house and out into the garden. Here other people are encountered in similar sequential mode, providing a dizzying display of colour based on the Coke branding. The characters interact and the static scenes are seamlessly intercut with live action throughout the continuous long shot.

For anyone familiar with The Invisibles, by Grant Morrison, Noda’s commercial struck me as extremely reminiscent of the issues in which Ragged Robin gets stuck in and outside of time. Interesting to watch if you’re a fan of the comic or the concept in general.

Watch an embedded video via the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

A WOMAN is pregnant with the UK’s first baby designed not to inherit a hereditary form of cancer.

The woman carrying the child decided to use genetic screening to ensure that she does not pass on the eye cancer.

[...]

The mother, who suffers from the disease, chose to conceive her child by IVF, even though she and her partner did not have fertility problems, to allow doctors to remove a cell from embryos and test them for the cancer gene. Only embryos not carrying the defective gene were then transferred to her womb.

Full Story: Scotsman.

Sufferers from depression who do not respond to existing treatments could soon benefit from a new procedure in which electrodes are inserted into the core of the brain and used to alter the patient’s mood.

Later this year, scientists at Bristol University will conduct the first trials of the so-called deep brain stimulation method on sufferers from depression. They will use hair-thin electrodes to stimulate two different parts of the brains of eight patients who suffer from an extreme form of recurrent unipolar depression – where mood only swings in one direction.

If the trials are successful, deep brain stimulation could be extended to the estimated 50,000 people in the UK who suffer from depression but cannot be helped by drugs or electroconvulsive therapy.

Full Story: Guardian.

“Entanglement” could occur at any temperature and not just in systems cooled to near zero according to new calculations by a team of physicists in the UK, Austria and Portugal. Vlatko Vedral of the University of Leeds and colleagues at the universities of Porto and Vienna have found that the photons in ordinary laser light can be quantum mechanically entangled with the vibrations of a macroscopic mirror, no matter how hot the mirror is. The result is unexpected because hot objects are usually thought of being classical. The finding suggests that macroscopic entanglement is not as difficult to create as previously believed and could have implications for making room-temperature quantum computers in the future

Full Story: PhysicsWeb.

Meditation expert Matt Clarkson from the UK is conducting an experiment in which Web site visitors will be asked to take part in a meditation to psychically influence leaders of the G-8 summit to make poverty history.

The experiment has been designed to coincide with the G-8 summit being held at Gleneagles where poverty in Africa and the issue of global warming will top the agenda.

Visitors to the Web site www.ThinkAndMakePovertyHistory.com will be taken through a 15-minute guided meditation that involves the use of their emotions, their imagination and the focusing of their will and intent to apparently make real changes in the world.

Link.

Initially the story talks about parents beating their children to death in an attempt to exorcise them, then it goes into ritual murder and such.

“Members of the workshop said for spells to be powerful it required a sacrifice of a male child unblemished by circumcision,” the report said.

[...]

There were also claims that youngsters were being smuggled into the UK as domestic slaves and for men with HIV who believed if they had sex with a child they would be cleansed.

Link.

Check it it out:

Have you ever noticed how so many anarchist ideas remain on the internet? Have you noticed that the few anarchist publications around get more contributions than production help, and that so many ideas never make it into any of them? Have you also ever noticed that many people won’t take the time to search for anarchist ideas even though they may agree with them? We think we have some ideas to get anarchist ideas off the internet, have unlimited printing and distribution possibilities, and to put anarchist ideas into the hands of curious people.

This isn’t a new idea, it is based on Schnews in the UK and fax spammers of the 90’s. The idea is to use people’s existing printers and copy machines for a radically decentralized printing and distribution network.

I’d love to see something like this dedicated to magic as well. We’re working on getting an occult and sacred text library running on Key23, and a small form occult propaganda would be a nice additional section.

Link (via Last Word Blog).
Read the rest of this entry »

Huh.

For 250 years, the cryptic inscription has exercised the minds of Britain’s finest theologians, historians and scientists, including Charles Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood and, most recently, the Second World War code-breakers of Bletchley Park.

But an anonymous American researcher was credited yesterday with the best stab yet at what the letters D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. – carved on the Shepherd’s Monument at Lord Lichfield’s Shugborough estate in Staffordshire – might actually signify.

The answer appears to be “Jesus (As Deity) Defy” – a message left by an 18th century Christian sect Priory of Sion, which was forced to keep its views secret since the Church of England thought they were heretical. On first impressions, this rather perplexing answer may disappoint those who believed the letters pointed the way to the final destination of the Holy Grail, the cup Jesus is said to have used during the Last Supper. But Shugborough Hall was holding on to its hopes last night, since the Priory of Sion was the spiritual successor to the Knights Templar, who were known as the keepers of the Holy Grail.
The stone monument, built around 1748, contains a carved relief of Nicholas Poussin’s Les Bergers d’Arcadie II in reverse. Beneath it are the letters. The researcher, who applied standard codebreaking methods, initially came up with the message “Jesus H Defy” but says the H stands for Christ, hence the translation into “as deity”. This is said to give the message a meaning of defiance against prevailing Christian norms.

Link.

This one’s old, but interesting. At first glance this story from Yahoo! news seems to be a legitimate but bizarre news story.

MANCHESTER, England — Here’s some good news that vegetarians can really sink their teeth into: Researchers have developed genetically engineered fruit trees that bear real meat!

Fruit from the new Meat Trees, developed by British scientists using gene-splicing technology, closely resembles ordinary grapefruit. But when you peel the large fruit open, inside is fresh beef.

But actually, it’s from Weeky World News. Thanks for the tip, Grant!

this being 5/23 it seemed like a good day to kick back and listen to some discordian music (there’s plenty of catch-all discordian links here if you’ve yet to encounter discordian thought. or not thought. or thought that is both not & not not at the same time.)

So Madghoul’s contributions are in purple. Another friend(Lefty, aka ‘daughter of chaos’)’s comments are in salmon. (This turned out to be a bit more complex than I originally thought and I had to call in back-up)

l: so what is discordian music
l: whats one good example

w: I don’t know – anything that’s pro-discordia – like the KLF or Mr. Bungle
w: eris inspired stuff

l: skinny puppy?
l: atari teenage riot?
l: butthole surfers?
w: yeah they’re all good ones

m:What do think about throwing Skinny Puppy into the mix? They have that hard techo-industrial edge that seems Erisian inspired. I’ll leave that one up to you.

w: I’d say king missle & tism.. crash worship

l: tism for sure
l: what about uuhhh
l: you know who tism sounds like to me is ……
l: dread zepplin

What I found interesting is the first band both M & L thought of: Skinny Puppy.. Cevin Key and Nivek Ogre’s upcoming album “The Greater Wrong of the Right” has the underground salivating.

KLF is only the tip of a discordian juggernaut that most recently has manifested as Blacksmoke, whose hard industrial sounds are a far cry from classics like “Doctorin’ the Tardis” and “3 A.M. Eternal.” As “The K Foundation” these timelords published The Manual on how to get a number one hit in England, which, although dated, makes for an interesting read. Along with Negativland, they pushed at the edges of copyright law. They also burned a million quid, and filmed it.

Alternating between rock, goth, and semi-industrial, the discordian inspired band Tapping the Vein presents a mythical epic that crawls through the skin in a subtle yet tranquilizing way, before ripping you to a new reality.

Jack Off Jill, though now disbanded and often thought of as nothing more than angry chick rock, presented a meddley of Erisian, screw-the-norm, music with their cd Clear Hearts Grey Flowers, turning anger into flippant protestation against hierarchical society and a stagnant reality in true discordian fashion.

Going back a bit now, there’s the very strange sounds of Genesis P-orridge & Psychic TV, the discordian element coming through most clearly in works like “Towards Thee Infinite Beat” or the work he’s done with the industrial-tribal act Pigface. Another seriously tribal experience, certainly the most incredible concert I’ve personally attended, is Crash Worship.

Also check out the discordian hip-hop stylings of Noah 23 and the other releases out of plaguelanguage (and don’t miss the ginsberg sample in his track Magnesium Viper)

(As for me, I intend to spend the day downloading and listening to the 23 tracks of Latent Chaos , unless someone has another musical suggestion..)