Time Travelling Crackpots

So, Charlie Kirk was some kind of time travelling Messiah, sent to our time to ensure that the 'right' timeline came to pass. but he was 'monitored' constantly by 'agents' of dark forces.  No, that's not an outline for another satirical piece for The Sleaze, nor the plot of a forthcoming Christian graphic novel (soon to be a major film), but the is actually the latest whack-a-doodle Kirk-conspiracy theory put out there by right-wing agitator and Trump cheerleader Candace Owens.  Apparently, this particular piece of insanity has been a bridge too far for many of the extreme right loons who follow her - they could, it seems, buy all her schtick about Kirk's widow conspiring against him, so that she could take over his neo-Nazi 'Christian' Hitler Youth style movement, but him being from the future was just too mind-blowing even for them.  Which is saying something, bearing in mind that these are basically the self same nutters who bought into all that QAnon crap and seemed to believe that pizza parlours were fronts for high level peadophiles (and Satanic child sacrifices), or that furniture catalogue listings for office equipment were actually code for child trafficking.  (That's right, you ordered a filing cabinet and instead received a pre-pubescent girl sex slave - which could be quite a shock if all you wanted was somewhere to store your paperwork).  

I suppose that we should be thankful that at least some of these fruitcakes are finally beginning to recognise that the people they have been listening to and allowing to shape their opinions are actually crackpots - those that aren't morally bankrupt, grifters or just plain evil, that is.  Unfortunately, there still seem to be a lot of Americans out there still willing to support a president who, if I'm to be charitable, is certifiably insane, or if I'm not, a senile old fool.  But hey, should we expect anything less from a people who elected a rapist as president (for the second time)?  And no, the rapist comment isn't gratuitous, it illuminates his foreign policy - is it any wonder that a man who doesn't understand the concept of 'No means no' with regard to women, doesn't understand it with regard to the territory of sovereign nations?  ('I just need to grab Greenland by the pussy').  But getting back to the original point, I do find it extremely concerning that so many people seem to be willing to believe this sort of crackpottery and to use these charlatans as their primary source of information rather than more reputable news sources.  In the UK, a lot of it, I'm convinced, is down to poor education, with the Tories spending the better part of fourteen years ensuring that the education sector does anything but teach students critical thinking skills.  In the US, a lot of it, I suspect, is parochialism, with many, many people having no apparent interest in anything going on outside of their state borders, let alone their national borders.  Consequently, they have little idea of the bigger international picture and the fact that, in today's world, isolationism really isn't an option. 

 But many of them, (including well-educated yanks of my acquaintance), never seem to read a newspaper or watch a TV news broadcast, preferring instead to get their information from online sources of dubious provenance.  Their defence is that you just can't trust that mainstream media which has its own agenda and biases, etc.  Which is true, to some extent, but easily countered by gleaning your daily news intake from a variety of news sources with differing perspectives and political affiliations.  I've found that the internet makes this very easy to do - I generally look over news aggregators like the MSN homepage when I open my browser and subsequently get a pretty good and balanced overview of what's going on in the world.  But apparently, those crackpot sites and pure propaganda outlets they seem to favour are easier to read.  Probably because they don't ask you to think about what they are saying, offering no nuance or dissenting opinions and presenting as fact what are actually either speculation or the rantings of some highly dubious crank.  Who wants the boring truth when you can get fantastic lies, like Charlie Kirk being a time traveller?

The Unified Conspiracy Theory: A Proposal

So, according to some newspaper reports, many UFO reports were actually disinformation put out by the US government in order to distract attention from various secret aircraft development programmes.  Like the ones that go on at the so called 'Area 51'.  Well, I never, I would never have guessed, was my reaction.  (OK, it was more along the lines of 'No shit, Sherlock?' or even 'Fuck my hat, I never knew that!', but I'm trying to clean things up around here).  These are the most stunningly obvious 'revelations' I've come across in a long time.  At the same time we've got self-styled former MoD 'UFO expert' Nick Pope bemoaning the fact that the whole of UFOlogy is being brought into disrepute by all those nuts claiming to talk to aliens and the like, who are turning it into a quasi-religious cult.  Yeah, I think you are trying to shut that stable door just a little too late, Nick.  At least fifty years too late.  I've remarked here before that UFO sightings just aren't as much fun as they were when I was a kid, when they tended to be simple glimpses of shiny things flying behind cars, or landed in fields.  Now, the whole thing is a multi-million dollar business that requires a constant stream of sensational multiple sightings, abductions and implanting of alien devices.  Oh, not to forget the conspiracies and cover-ups - they are essential to modern UFOlogy, regardless of the lack of evidence for them.  Indeed, it is the conspiracies which are already being used to try and discredit the newspaper story about the US military creating UFO reports as disinformation and distraction.  The UFO nuts are already dismissing this as a conspiracy theory, deliberately leaked to the press, in order to discredit them, as they are getting too closer to the 'truth'.  That's the trouble with conspiracy theorists: you can't reason with them as they'll just pull another conspiracy theory from their arses to counter any holes you knock in their original crackpot beliefs.

Anyway, I'm beginning to ponder as to whether it is possible to come up with a 'unified conspiracy theory' that somehow incorporates and reconciles all the other major conspiracy theories.  It seems a daunting task as such a theory would have to encompass  UFOs, Bigfoot, Yeti and other cryptids, 'mysterious' celebrity deaths, assassinations, shape shifting lizards, all the Q Anon devil worshipping child sacrificing pedo nonsense, the hollow earth, fake moon landings and much more.  On the face of it, much of this craziness contradictory, but I remain convinced that it should be possible to come up with an overarching theory that links together all of this stuff, from the weird phenomena to the moon landings to Elvis not being dead in a coherent manner.  It would mean abandoning some of the fundamentals of individual theories, such as UFOs being alien craft and things like Bigfoot and Yetis being prehistoric survivals, for instance.  To this end, my first stab at this 'unified conspiracy theory', would see these supposed 'apemen' as being reincarnations of those 'mysteriously' slain celebrities - part of their journey of ascension to a higher level of existence.  Quite literally higher as they always seem to live in mountainous area.  Perhaps the altitude and thin air is needed for their transformation to their next manifestation as non-corporeal entities - the shining things we see in the sky and call UFOs.  Maybe, released from the confines of conventional space and time, they can travel back along the time lines and actually instigate their own deaths in order to kick-start their transformation - was the shooter on the grassy knoll actually a manifestation of future JFK?  Could that person who got Princess Di's driver so drunk that he crashed actually her, but from the future?  Or maybe she was that 'paparazzi car' that supposedly chased the limo, causing it to crash?  Did future evolved John Lennon 'possess'  Mark Chapman and guide him to shoot 1980 John Lennon?  OK, so I still haven't been able to work in the fake moon landings or the lizards, but just give me time...

Natural Born Sceptic

I'm a natural born sceptic.  I learned a long time ago the perils of believing things because you'd like them to be true, instead of following the actual facts.  The media these days is full of stories about 'miracle cures' for diseases, scientific research that could be the key to longevity, of how scientists studying 'near death' experiences have 'proved' the after life exists and many more.  The problem is that, when you start looking into these things with a critical eye, asking what the actual facts are, you quickly find that the stories are all fanciful extrapolations by journalists.  Sure, the research they talk about actually exists, but its findings are rarely so clear cut as the stories want you to believe.  Indeed, the conclusions made by the researchers are actually far more modest and in fact they don't claim to have proven the existence of the hereafter, found a cure for cancer or found the fountain of life.  At best, they might be stages in the path to achieving all of those things, but it isn't going to happen any time soon.  But at least these stories, deceptive though they might be in their presentation, have some basis in truth, so the casual reader might be forgiven for believing them.  The web, however, is also awash with utterly fake stories, written to sound credible, which a lot of people seem to simply accept at face value, when even the most cursory research would reveal their fakeness.  It scares me how unwilling, or unable, so many people are to apply any kind of critical thinking to what they read and sea.  Look for hard, credible proof, if it isn't there, then the story is fake.  They seem quite happy with simply accepting the supposed authority of the piece in question.  

Take the story that giant human skeletons were found in the US around the turn of the last century - this one is often stated as fact, claiming that the bones were publicly displayed, had baffled archaeologists or were evidence that American Indian legends about races of giants were true.  But if you actually look into the story, you'll find that there's not one iota of truth to it - it all seems based upon anecdotal claims made about the discovery of these skeletons by miners.  But there is no physical trace of such bones, no photographs, no record of them being displayed.  Even the size of these 'giants' is disputed, with the earliest reports claiming a more modest size for them - taller than average, but not giants.  But the story has been embellished by successive generations of tabloid journalist, with their exaggerations now being presented as fact.  It's the same with much of the nonsense that surrounds UFO sightings and alien abductions - when you get down to it and start looking for facts, you find them to be very thin on the ground.  Again, it's all anecdotal with no independent witnesses or physical evidence.  Conspiracy theories are the same: they simply don't stand up to scrutiny as they are inevitably based upon a wilful misinterpretation of actual facts, the invention of 'alternative facts' and an unwillingness to accept logic.  Most damning is the fact that, even where these people claim to actually have hard evidence, they are never prepared to expose it to independent scientific investigation, Why?  Because they know that it can't and that would undermine their whole warped belief system.  Instead, they fall back on the excuse that the scientific establishment is all part of the conspiracy to suppress their 'secret knowledge'.  In fact, anyone who uses logic and reason to discredit their pet theories is part of the conspiracy.

I was put in mind of all this by an article in The Guardian I recently read. It was a review of a new 'documentary' that 'compellingly presses the case' for the existence of aliens and government knowledge of them.  It was clear that the author had been impressed by the parade of retired military types and government employees all earnestly testifying as to the 'truth' of these claims.  Nonetheless, they had, eventually, to concede that it was all short on actual proof.  Even the supposed former government 'insiders' didn't seem to have any direct experience of any of the stuff they claimed was being covered up by the authorities.  It was all 'I was told' or 'There was this project I couldn't get access to', which puts it into the realm of being purely anecdotal evidence, which is far from being proof of anything.  But hey, they used to work for the US government and said that they used to have high security clearances, so they must know something, mustn't they?  Well, not really.  Here in the UK we have Nick Pope who, like me, once worked for the MoD in Whitehall.  According to him, he ran the 'UFO Desk' and saw all these reports about sightings and knew how seriously the military took them.  Since leaving the MoD he's traded on the supposed 'authority' this has given him to churn out books about UFOs and become a regular 'talking head' on crackpot TV shows - he's the UK's self-styled 'UFO expert'.  Interestingly, I once spoke to the guy who took over that 'UFO Desk' after Pope left and he told me that everything that Pope had claimed was utter bollocks.  Moreover, I'm pretty sure that I had a much, much higher security clearance than Pope ever had (I worked in Defence Intelligence at the time) and I can't say that I ever found myself exposed to any evidence of crashed saucers, alien technology or abductions.  Then again, maybe I'm part of the conspiracy...

It Was All a Hoax!

I'm not going to be a hypocrite about this - I'm sorry that 'they' didn't recruit someone who was a better shot to try and kill Trump.  I ask you, where is the justice in this world?  Lee Harvey Oswald, a poor shot with a crappy rifle, somehow managed to pull off a near impossible shot from the book depository in Dallas in 1963 and blew JFK's head off, yet a guy with an AR15 gets a clear shot at convicted felon Trump, (also found by a court to have molested a woman), from closer range and only hits his ear and a bystander?  FFS, who are they trying to kid?  The Trump assassination attempt was clearly a set-up.  I mean, just look at the timing - it dominates the news cycle just as a pro-Trump judge throws out the documents case against him, (in which prosecutors had him bang to rights), in a bizarre ruling and evidence of his close involvement with Jeffrey Epstein is coming to light.  How very convenient that someone tries to off him and it diverts attention from these things.  Too convenient.  Believe me, the whole thing was staged - nobody got shot, they were all crisis actors and the supposed assassin was dead before he reached that roof.  They just dumped his body there with a rifle before the rally started.  The so-called 'eyewitnesses' who claimed to have seen him climbing up there?  Again, crisis actors.  Obvious ones at that - just look at that weirdo with the red beard and wild hair they interviewed: nobody looks like that for real.  He was some casting director's idea of what a hick Trump supporter might look and sound like.  Besides, I'm sure I saw him in a porno movie once - that beard is distinctive.

If you ask me (and I know that nobody is, but I'm going to tell you anyway), they shot the whole fake assassination attempt in advance in a studio, with the whole Pennsylvania venue replicated there.  They probably employed some top Hollywood director to shoot it - like they got Stanley Kubrick to shoot that fake moon landing - and ensure they got those neatly composed shots of a supposedly wounded Trump raising his fist defiantly, in front of the American flag.  Yeah, maybe they got Michael Bay to do it.  Anyway, at the appropriate moment, they cut this pre-filmed footage on the live broadcasts - some blank shots being fired at the venue was probably the cue.  It was also, doubtless, the cue for all those crisis actors making up the audience to react appropriately so that when the feed switched back to the live event, so it looked seamless.  Because, obviously, they were all crisis actors and it was all fake.  Just like at Sandy Hook.  According to Alex Jones and all his Trump supporting trolls, that is.  The very same trolls who are busy on social media denouncing claims that the Trump shooting was staged as 'sick', 'bad taste' and 'offensive'.  Pity they weren't so sensitive to the feelings of the relatives of all those kids who were killed at Sandy Hook, eh?  But hey, the hypocrisy of the US' right is apparently without limit.  After all, Trump has spent most of his time in politics inciting violence against his opponents, (remember January 6th, anyone?), his rhetoric is laced with violent imagery and his supporters seemingly love to tote large guns in public.  So why is it such a surprise that, having engendered such an atmosphere of violence in America's political discourse, Trump himself should become a target of violence?

But no - it's all the fault of the Democrats and 'Extreme Left', (look, the US has no idea of what the 'left' actually is, let alone this mythical 'Extreme Left').  Apparently they are the ones who have been using violent language and making threats against their opponents.  Like I said, the right's hypocrisy has no bounds.  But also like I said, I won't be a hypocrite on this issue: if the assassin had succeeded, then I wouldn't have been shedding any tears for Trump.  He's scum.  Worse than that, he's dangerous, rabble rousing, grifting scum without a conscience.  Not that I'd wish violent death on him - personally, I'd rather see the fat bastard expire from a massive coronary on stage at one his rallies, his rabid fans cheering as he turns purple.  But, while I'd in no way endorse political violence or assassination, (certainly not in what is still supposedly a democracy, anyway), I'm afraid that if you spend your time indulging in violent political rhetoric, there's a fair chance that you'll fall victim to someone who thinks that you've legitimised it with your words.  Personally, I think it high time that President Biden took advantage of the Trumpist Supreme Court's ruling that presidents have immunity from prosecution for official acts, by declaring that Trump constitutes a threat to American democracy and ordering his assassination by someone competent.  Problem solved - and it would all be legal.  According, ironically, by a Supreme court dominated by Trump appointees.

More From the Loons

It appears that I was wrong about the Houthis - they aren't, as I assumed, a bunch of alien brigands menacing mankind whose occupation of part of Yemen has resulted in military strikes by the earth's combined military forces.  I was alerted to my error when I saw the term 'Hamas and The Houthis' trending on Twitter, (yeah, I know, Twitter, but I still can't quite kick the habit) - it became clear to me tat they were actually a musical act of some kind, supporting the well known Middle Eastern singer Hamas.  I should imagine that they end their performances by blowing up the venue and slaughtering their audience.  Especially if they are performing in Jerusalem.  (I know, I'm a fascist.  Again).  The sad thing is that there probably are people out there who actually believe this sort of thing, such are the levels of sheer ignorance on display on social media.  (As ever, of course, one should add the proviso that those who use social media are a relatively small proportion of the population and their views aren't necessarily representative of the wider population.  Moreover, those who are most vociferous on social media are themselves a small proportion of social media users and don't necessarily represent the views of the majority).  I mean, just look at this latest Twitter nonsense about 'Disease X' - a bunch of idiots have completely (and deliberately) misconstrued reports about preparations being made, in light of the experiences of the Covid pandemic, to be able to more rapidly develop new vaccines to combat any future new viruses, (ie 'Disease X'), to instead to try and spread misinformation and panic about government conspiracies to unleash new diseases on the world.  Because, obviously, that's the way to 'control' us all even more.

Then we have that hairy loon Neil Oliver spouting shit about 'turbo cancer', a non-existent condition that only effects those who have been vaccinated.  (I have to say here that if not being vaccinated turns you into a raving idiot who looks as if they've been living in a cave for the past four years, like Neil Oliver, then I'll take every shot on offer).  Of course, nothing can beat the absolute toss that some of those QAnon/MAGA freaks in the States sign up to, one of my favourites being that a pizza parlour was somehow a front for a Satanic paedophile network providing underage sex slaves to the entire (Democratic) Washington establishment.  All on the basis of no evidence whatsoever.  It fascinates me how some people can buy into such obvious nonsense.  But then again, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they also still believe that Trump is a patriotic, clean living, honest as the day is long American and not a lying, traitorous scumbag fraudster who molests women.  But getting back to that pizza business, I'm left wondering if they would believe conspiracies centered on other fast-food franchises.  Could they be convinced that MacDonald's are practicing human sacrifice and using human flesh in their burgers?  At the start of every working day each branch's High Priest, dressed as Ronald MacDonald, slaughters a child to ensure a good day's training?  Could it be that MacDonald's are behind illegal immigrants flooding across border from Mexico, sourcing the meat for its products from them?  Then there's Burger King.  Do they practice occult rituals designed to summon up Cthulu and the Old Ones?  Are their burgers being prepared by things with tentacles?  Sure, I know its all a bit tame compared to their fantasies about paedophilia and pizza, but you never know, these fruitcakes are scarily gullible.

Right Wing Fantasy Island

Apparently Aaron Spelling's exasperated pitch to ABC for Fantasy Island, after several other series proposals had been rejected, was 'What do you want? An island that people can go to and all of their sexual fantasies will be realized?'  Which I'm assuming was also the pitch that those behind all those crazed conspiracy fantasies that currently pass for political discourse amongst the US right-wing made to the crackpots for their ultimate utterly ridiculous masturbatory fantasy.  And so 'Epstein Island' was born.  That mystical place where plane loads of liberals and celebrities are flown to in order that mysterious millionaire Mr Roarke, sorry Epstein, can make their most perverted sexual fantasies come true.  Perhaps Donald Trump was there acting as his sidekick Tattoo, shouting 'It's the plane!' before waddling over to Epstein to greet that week's tranche of guests.  (Because, of course, that's the only rational explanation as to how Trump's name appears on passenger lists for Epstein's private jet - he was merely an employee following orders).  Yes indeed, with that 'Epstein List', (actually simply a list of everyone mentioned in a court case related to Epstein, with no indication that any of them are actually guilty, let alone accused, of any wrong doing), which the right-wing nutters have been wanking themselves silly over on social media this past week, we know that they were all there partaking in underage orgies.  Even Stephen Hawking.  Now, to most rational human beings, the inclusion of his name on this so called 'list' is confirmation that the majority of the great and the good who were wooed by Epstein, were there to boost his ego by association and to help him try to spread his influence by offering to 'assist' them with various charitable, scientific or humanitarian projects.  

I mean, what the fuck do you thing Hawking would have been able to actually do in terms of sexual depravity?  Such a question doesn't deter the demented, of course, who all started screaming that he could have been a voyeur, getting his kicks from simply watching kiddies being sexually abused.  Obviously, bearing in mind that in Fantasy Island Mr Roarke was apparently able to perform supernatural miracles in order to allow his guests to fulfill their fantasies, even temporarily giving them superhuman powers in some cases, maybe Epstein was similarly able to temporarily restore Hawking to full health.  Or perhaps he was able to temporarily transfer his mind to the body of some strapping male porn star.  Then again, perhaps he was simply able to create a 'sex machine' which would do the deed while transmitting all the sensations directly into Hawking's mind - if it was successful, Hawking would doubtless have been doing 'donuts' in his electric wheelchair, while his electronic voice box blared like a ship's horn.  But, in reality, he was most likely simply the guest of a shady millionaire business man trying to gain influence.  As were the majority of the other people being linked with Epstein.  Not that I'm denying that Epstein was involved in criminal activity, including procuring girl, possibly underage, for some rich clients.  But, in reality, the likes of Epstein often spend a lot of time making out sure that they are seen to be associated with all manner of other politician, industrialists, businessmen and celebrities - not only is it a way to get access to influential people, it also generates great publicity.  Best of all, it provides a sort of insurance: while the contacts might be quite innocent, their association with Epstein means that if he runs into trouble over his shadier activities, they will likely be implicated too.  Which, in theory, would mean that they would move to head off any investigations before they became public.  At least that, I'm sure, is what Epstein hoped, but the real world rarely works that smoothly.

But hey, no matter how crazed all the 'Epstein Island' bunk might sound to the rational, it has got the right-wing freaks foaming at the mouth.  They love it because it all seems to play into their own fantasies that anyone who doesn't stand somewhere to the right of Adolf Hitler is a depraved murderer and peadophile.  It gives them licence, they think, to spin all kinds of wild allegations about public figures they don't like on the basis of no evidence whatsoever.  What fascinates me is just how depraved and warped some of the activities they ascribe others actually are - what kind of mind can come up with such fantasies?  Is this whole Epstein affair some kind of mass projection of the extreme right's own darkest and most repressed fantasies onto their enemies?  Are they just disappointed that they weren't the ones allegedly being invited to Epstein's version of Fantasy Island?

The Alien Fakes Are Coming...

How many more of these fake alien videos are we going to have to endure?  Because they are all fake, you know.  This latest one, the Mexican alleged mummified aliens, is no different - some obviously fake alien bodies (they look as if they are made from papier mache) and the usual unverifiable 'scientific tests' that 'prove' their alien origin.  I have to say, I do admire the sheer nerve of the grifters behind it, who generated all manner of publicity by presenting all this horse shit to the Mexican parliament.  If I was Mexican, I'd be bloody worried as to the calibre of my elected representatives if any of them swallowed this obvious hoax.  Bet then I look at some the denizens of our own House of Commons.  But, but,,they subjected these 'aliens' to 'scientific tests' I hear all the crackpots out there splutter.  Sure, they had tests on samples carried out by a lab that, when questioned independently by journalists, refused to share their results with third parties as this would be breaking their confidentiality agreement with their clients.  Which means we have to take the word of these 'Ufologists' that the test results showed the samples were not of terrestrial origin.  Of course, if they are confident of these results, why don't they simply allow testing by other independent, reputable scientific bodies who will share their results publicly and allow them to be scrutinised and peer reviewed?  That, surely, would be the best way of establishing their veracity.

That's the problem with all of the supposed UFO evidence that reaches the public arena - a complete lack of actual, verifiable, facts.  But facts based on hard evidence are the enemy of the conspiracy nuts.  They find them very challenging, so they just try to avoid them at all costs.  They're like like those creationist freaks who wander through natural history museums, denouncing the fossil record they are presented with as being 'fakes' and the 'devil's work'. Rationality doesn't come into - inconvenient truths can simply be arbitrarily dismissed, regardless of the body of evidence backing them up.  Which is why it is impossible to argue with conspiracy fantasists - they simply retreat further into their fantasy world, claiming that anything that contradicts their world view is simply further evidence of a conspiracy to cover up 'the truth'.  Yet these people keep managing to get air time and the ears of politicians.  While we might think the idea of presenting these fake aliens and questionable test data to the Mexican parliament seems strange and perhaps a reflection of eccentricities of Mexican politics, let's not forget that not long before this, we had UFO 'experts' making all sorts of claims about crashed spaceships and secret contacts between aliens and the US government to US legislators.  Not surprisingly, these extravagant claims weren't backed up by a shred of evidence.  I mean, at least the Mexican cranks produced some faked alien mummies....

Mark of the Debit Card

I finally had the misfortune to see one of Mark IV's quartet of 'end times' themed films.  Made between 1972 and 1983, these crudely made religious movies have proven popular with certain Christian denominations in the US.  The one I caught was the second, A Distant Thunder (1978), which followed the first, A Thief in the Night (1972) after a gap of six years, with the continuing cast members looking correspondingly older but, sadly, no better actors.  This one follows the heroine of the first film, Patty (played by Patty Dunning - most of the main cast seem to play characters with the same first name as their own), and her friends in trying to deal with the aftermath of 'The Rapture'.  With all the devoted Christians - including Patty's grandmother and their husbands - having ascended to heaven, the US starts to slide into chaos as the Book of Revelations is enacted.  In the makers' warped version of Christianity, converting after the event won't help: anyone who couldn't be bothered to accept Jesus into their lives and unquestioningly follow the tenets of some cracked fundamentalist theology has to suffer as Armageddon looms.  'But what about God as love?' asks Patty of her silver haired granny in a flashback.  Apparently, according to grandma, that only applies before 'The Rapture' and to people who give over their lives to Kick Ass 'Take-No-Prisoners' Christ and his war on any rival belief system.  Being secular, showing tolerance to the beliefs of others or merely mildly questioning the scriptures will get you condemned - first on earth during the 'End Times', then eternally in Hell.

The world view of these people is truly terrifying, rejecting out of hand science, reason and even compassion if it conflicts with their own narrow belief system.  Even more scarily, though, is the fact that these beliefs seem to persist: A Distant Thunder lays out many of the fundamentals of the current conspiracy fantasies that seem to grip so many idiots.  There's the whole 'World Government' created via the UN and trying to control our lives on the pretext of saving us - post 'Rapture' the United Nations Imperium of Total Emergency (UNITE) is created to govern the world during the emergency, restricting free movement and rationing food, fuel and access to vital services.  If you don't comply with UNITE's edicts, you get rounded up by their armed paramilitary and taken away.  Sound familiar?  Then there's 'The Mark of the Beast' - if you don't agree to be stamped with it, you lose your access to food and services.  Going back to Patty's grandma - the old codger makes an analogy between the mark and having to use a credit card instead of cash to buy things - both are a form of control.  Another familiar refrain - only yesterday I saw on Twitter all the usual nutters fawning over Piers Corbyn, (a crackpot of such magnitude that he makes his brother, the cult leader Jeremy Corbyn, look sane and reasonable), for his 'defiance' of attempts by 'them' to impose the 'cashless' society by paying with cash at a card payment only supermarket.  All the same nonsense about 'state surveillance' and the like were trotted out, (I'm pretty sure that neither MI5, GCHQ, the CIA or the WEF have any interest at all in the fact that I bought some yoghurt at Lidl yesterday and paid with a card).  The 'cashless' society is the modern 'Mark of the Beast' and the WEF the new UNITE, it seems - and social media is the new Mark IV productions, spreading and sustaining this nonsense.

Chasing the Crackpot Clicks

It seems that, if I want to get the big traffic, I'm following the wrong tack completely.  At least, that's the lesson I'm taking away from from encounters with various YouTube channels that keep turning up on my YouTube homepage.  As I've noted before, YouTube's algorithm has some curious ideas as to what I want to see, as all manner of stuff apparently unrelated to what I've actually been watching turns up: animal videos, 'fashion'/suspected softcore porn, boating and legal videos, to name but a few.  Sometimes I end up clicking on the 'Do Not Recommend This Channel in Future' Option - most specifically when it started inserting Arsenal FC videos into my feed.  Recently, I've noticed that some of the channels it persists with but that I simply ignore, had started drifting away from their ostensible subject matter into the world of crackpot conspiracies. In some ways, for at least two of these channels, this shift isn't quite as illogical as it might seem.  It really isn't that big a jump to go from, for example, being a health professional providing health information (and gaining prominence for doing so during a pandemic), to disseminating Covid conspiracy theories and Anti-Vaxxer misinformation.  If you want to ramp up those views, that is, which for a monetised site, of course, means a potential boost in revenues.  It also gets you noticed by the rest of the Covid conspiracy nutters 'community' on YouTube and guest appearances in places like Russell Brand's channel, (a Mecca for crackpots).  This, in turn, drives more traffic.

The shift from making videos about exploring the lesser known bits of Britain and their history to endorsing the lunatic 'Freemen of the Land' movement might, on the face of it, seem a little more radical.  But, when you think about it, it is a logical extension of a form of conservatism that seeks to reject the modern world and its rules and regulations.  Plus, the cynic in me can't help but suspect, which other conspiracy demographic would be suitable to court as a potential new mass audience?  The fact is that while the conspiracy crackpots might be, in terms of the real world, be a pretty small demographic, online they've found a home - they can amplify their voices disproportionately through platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, creating a reach and awareness of their lunacies impossible in the pre-internet days.  It isn't so much that that they have been able to gain masses of new recruits, but rather that they are now aware of each others existence and can organise more easily.  It also makes them a huge potential audience for those online creators hungry for clicks.  Hence the number of these YouTubers now pandering to the conspiracists, even if that wasn't their original audience.  The way, of course, was paved by the likes of the aforementioned Brand, whose career as a stand up and actor seems to have stalled badly - when was the last time he was on mainstream TV, for instance - leaving him with his YouTube channel as his main outlet.  How best to build his audience there - just extend his trademark ranty style into hardcore conspiracy crackpottery and get all those crackpot hits on his videos.

The sad fact is that there is a big potential audience out there for the sort of moronic gibberish these people put out, regardless of whether they are sincere about it or just cynical grifters - the crackpots can't seem to differentiate the two.  (Not that it makes any difference as to their motivation - it is all still dangerous disinformation).  So, maybe I should stop taking the piss out of conspiracy fantasies (they aren't 'theories' in any proper sense of the word) and start embracing them instead?  After all, it isn't as if I haven't come up with a few myself, for satirical effect, over on The Sleaze.  (Although, no matter how crazy I try to make them, I always end up finding something similar, but even more insane, already in circulation).  Thankfully, though, I gave up chasing the easy clicks long ago - I'd rather put out stuff I actually believe in for an audience that shares my interest, even if they are small in number.

UFO Madness

This last weekend we learned that there seem to be a lot of people out there who seem to believe that Independence Day was a documentary.  Mention the term 'UFO', even when used in its purest sense of meaning airborne objects whose nature and origin have not yet been established, and social media suddenly fills up with every crank, kook and weirdo out there, banging on about how they are vindicated in their delusions that there has been a worldwide cover-up of alien contacts.  The US Air Force's shooting down of three so called 'UFOs' (actually most likely balloons, probably from China), however, poses some problems for the UFO crazies.  Most obviously, the very fact that these objects were so easily brought down using conventional Air-to Air missiles rather goes against all their claims that supposed alien spaceships are incredibly fast and nonrecoverable, even capable of 'dematerialising'.  If they were that high tech, then I'm pretty sure that conventional warplanes wouldn't be able to catch them, let alone destroy them.  So the UFO nuts have to resort to their tried and trusted fall back position: that these recent 'UFOs' are evidence of a 'false flag' operation by the US government to fake an alien threat so as to create a world government - really a front for the UN, WEF, Bilderberg Group or whoever the current object of their paranoia is - in order to defend against them.  This particular 'theory' has the advantage of pulling in all manner of other crazy conspiracy freaks, mostly from the extreme right.

Then again, they speculate, these recent incidents could just be a distraction from, well, whatever it is those God damned liberal commie pinko bed-wetting bastards want to distract us all from at the moment. Be it the war in Ukraine, the toxic train crash in Ohio, the fact that Joe Biden died years ago and his embalmed corpse is currently running the US as a puppet whose strings literally are being pulled by the WEF/UN etc, or the fact that there's a secret trans plot to turn America's men gay through exposure to gender neutral pronouns.  Who knows?  Perhaps it is all a plot to discredit the whole UFO community by deploying obviously fake UFOs to be shot down, thereby enabling the government to dismiss all UFO sightings as surveillance balloons?  If you'd been looking at Twitter any time over the past couple of days, you'd have some or even all of this nonsense.  All accompanied by the sort of deliberate misinterpretation of known facts, outright fabrications and scientific illiteracy we've come to expect from these cranks.  As it is has become increasingly obvious even to the most irresponsible outposts of the media that the objects shot down by the USAF were of terrestrial origin, (something obvious to most of us from the get go), the UFO community has had to start deploying some of its 'big guns' to try and save face.  That charlatan (in my opinion) Nick Pope, for instance, has been doing the media rounds dampening down the alien expectations, telling everyone that the 'UFOs' were probably not extraterrestrial in origin.  No shit, Nick.  But hey, if nothing else, we've learned that here in the UK, at least, our skies are safe, with Rishi Sunak assuring us that the RAF are ready to shoot down any Chinese spy balloons straying into our airspace.  Not that they are ever likely to trouble us as, thanks to thirteen years of Tory governments, the UK has sweet FA worth spying on.

Not Eurovision

Another year, another Eurovision Song Contest avoided.  I'm sorry, but I've never grasped the appeal of the thing.  Besides, this year there really wasn't any point as everybody knew that Ukraine was going to get the sympathy vote and win.  Something which seemed to enrage a lot of people on Twitter. Apparently it 'devalues' the competition when entrants win on the basis of having been invaded by a hostile power rather than their artistic merits.  Whereas, of course, the usual situation of entrants winning on the basis of purely politically motivated voting was presumably OK?  I mean, since when has anybody won the Eurovision Song Contest on the basis of artistic merit?  Of course, a lot of those decrying Ukraine's win were Russia's foreign legion of Putin supporters who tirelessly peddle the Kremlin line that Ukraine's government are a bunch of Nazis and that all the atrocities committed by Russian troops are just Western propaganda.  While a lot of the accounts putting this stuff out are undoubtedly Russian bots, there are still a disturbing number of actual people who are happily following the official Russian line - the sort who boast about how, while their neighbours were putting up Ukrainian flags, they had 'bravely' put a Russian flag up on their house.  One is left wondering just why they are doing this?  Are they deluded?  Do they actually believe it, in the face of all evidence?  Maybe they are just hardcore conspiracy freaks and/or committed contrarians, who just have to take a different line to everyone else in order to 'prove' their intellectual superiority.

Whatever their motivation, begrudging Ukraine's victory in something as trivial as Eurovision has surely to represent a nadir for the pro-Putin brigade.  But, as I said, I avoided Eurovision altogether, taking the opportunity to instead catch up with some old movies I've had on hold for a while now.  Just for a change, I avoided the usual exploitation in favour of more mainstream fare.  I've been meaning to rewatch The FBI Story (1959), with James Stewart, for years now.  The last time I saw it, I must have been in my teens - even then I knew that it was a highly fictionalised account of the FBI's formation and work.  Seeing it again brought home just how whitewashed Mervyn LeRoy's film was.  Literally whitewashed, in fact, with regard to its account of the Ku Klux Klan - their only victims in the film are white journalists and Jewish families.  Black people, apparently, didn't exist in this version of America, not even to be victimised and persecuted.  It couldn't even get its timelines straight in its accounts of its involvement in bringing down some of most notorious criminals of the thirties: Machine Gun Kelly was one of the first, not the last, of them to be caught and Ma Barker was unarmed, rather than toting a Tommy Gun, when she was mown down in a hail of bullets.  But hey, J Edgar Hoover himself was a 'special adviser' on the film, (in reality he dictated most of what was shown on screen, in order to ensure an entirely favourable impression of the FBI under his directorship), even appearing as himself, at one point arresting Alvin Karpas in person, (he didn't in reality).  Overall, The FBI Story is a fascinating piece of period propaganda from an era when wanted to believe the fiction that we really were being policed by infallible, whiter-than-white, good guys.

The other movie I caught was the George Peppard-starring 1968 thrill House of Cards.  Directed by John Guillerman this was another variation of the classic Thirty Nine Steps plot of an innocent man going on the run from both police and villains, having been framed for murder.  In this case, the protagonist has been engaged as a tutor to the eight year old son of the widow of a prominent French General, who discovers that his employer's in laws are a bunch of fascists planning a coup.  While it might not be hugely original in plot terms, the film is very well made and engaging while it is running.  It features some excellent location shooting in Paris and Rome, with the action climaxing at the Colosseum.  In one of those curious Hollywood conventions, the French characters are mainly played by  British actors, (well, they were all foreign to US audiences), with the exception of the chief villain, who was played by Orson Welles.  Despite getting third billing, Welles, in common with many of his latter day film appearances-for-hire, is only in a few scenes, although he, as ever, makes his presence felt.  Despite being a pretty decent film and coming from a major studio - Universal - House of Cards seems to be one of those films which has slipped into obscurity.  A curiouNot Eurovisions situation, as its production values and cast suggest that it was seen as something of a prestige production back in 1968.  Ah well, with Eurovision over, it was back to seventies sleaze today: a double bill of Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977) and The Playbirds (1978).

Rewriting History

I blame the prevalence of those bloody conspiracy fantasies, (they most certainly don't deserve to be referred to as 'theories').  Continued exposure to them, particularly, of late, in mainstream media, seem to have completely addled the brains of many US citizens. Because this, surely, can be the only explanation for so many people in the US apparently still believing that President Biden wasn't fairly elected and has somehow 'stolen' the election from Trump with falsified poll results.  Oh yes, not to forget the attempted insurrection at the Capitol by fanatical Trump supporters this time last year - that was actually a 'false flag' operation organised and carried out by liberals pretending to be crazy ass right-wing crackpots.  History, it seems, is being rewritten in front of us - and not ancient history, but the events of only twelve months ago that we all witnessed live on TV.  But it is the continued popularisation of conspiracy fantasies which has laid the ground for this, with their continued undermining of established and provable fact and their replacement with infantile fantasies about evil cabals manipulating the media, faking moon landings, pandemics and lying to us about the fact that the earth is really flat.  (Actually, there really is a cabal of individuals attempting to manipulate the media and governments, but they do it in plain sight.  But because they are simply the super-rich trying to make themselves and their cronies richer and not shape-shifting lizards drinking people's blood, or secret societies of peadophiles, nobody seems interested).

What next, I wonder.  If it looks as if Trump might be indicted for some of the shit he perpetrated during his term as president, might we have the spectacle of him and his people categorically denying that he ever was president?  Will we hear him denouncing claims that he occupied the Oval Office as 'fake news' and dismissing TV footage of him as president as propaganda faked by the liberal news media?  At the rate things are going, I wouldn't rule out seeing Rudy Giuliani standing outside a garden centre decrying former 'President' Hilary Clinton for her disastrous single term in office which she is now trying to cover up with baseless claims that his client Trump had, in fact, been president during those four years. We could see history rewritten on the largest scale yet, with all the usual extreme right wing fruit cakes busily manufacturing 'evidence' to try and convince the American people that there actually had been a Hilary Clinton presidency.  You can just see all the usual suspects ranting away on their podcasts and internet misinformation, sorry, 'news', shows about how the mainstream media have been involved in using their airwaves to perpetrate some kind of mass hypnosis to make America forget President Hilary Clinton and convince them that Trump had actually been president when, in reality, he had spent the past four years playing golf.  Crazy?  No crazier than people still believing that the presidential election was 'stolen', believing that Brexit was a good idea or voting Boris Johnson into Number Ten.  But remember folks, no matter how much they try to brainwash you, just remember that the world is not flat, Paul McCartney is not dead and they really did land on the moon.

Selling the Fantasy

You've got to admire those wrestling commentators - the way they are able to pretend that what is going on in the ring is somehow real and has consequences.  I've just been watching a bit of AEW and I have to take my hat off to Jim Ross and the guys for the way in which they maintain a tone of utter sincerity, regardless of how ludicrous the stuff going on in the ring is getting.  They really get into it, listening to them you could almost believe that they guy taking a pasting is genuinely at risk and might have their career ended.  Never mind that we all know that they'll be back in the ring next week, taking another 'career threatening' hammering.  Just for that moment, you can suspend disbelief, thanks to the fact that the commentary team are playing a blinder.  It gives an insight into how people get drawn into those conspiracy fantasies by all those online and TV fantasists, who make similarly plausible and impassioned pitches for their particular brands of madness.  Because often, I find myself wondering how could anyone believe any of this shit?  But after watching some of these fantasists (and wrestling commentaries), I can begin to see how it is possible to make the utterly fake seem, even if only for a moment, plausible.

Whereas the wrestling commentators sell the onscreen action by getting more involved, more impassioned and excited as it goes on, more often than not turning to outrage as the blatant cheating of the heels pays off, the key for the conspiracy fantasists is to stay calm, to seem reasonable - but still get outraged when they reach the bits about how 'they' are duping and manipulating us all.  I was watching one the other day - it was the way in which he kept presenting things as 'facts', without ever backing them up with any evidence.  It was the matter-of-fact way he pronounced these utterly ridiculous utterances - 'Facebook has banned pictures of goats on their platform - following them with an resigned sort of shrug, not to emphasise the ridiculousness of what they have said, but rather how the actions of the alleged perpetrator of these non-existent acts fly in the face of good old common sense.  It is this demeanour of faux authority which disguises the fact that what you are actually listening to are the demented ramblings of an idiot, rather than the sage pronouncements of a wise man.  The question remains, of course, as to the extent to which they actually believe in the shit they are selling.  I mean, those wrestling commentators know that it is all fake and that they are selling the illusion in the name of entertainment, but is it the same for the conspiracy fantasists?  Surely they must know that they are peddling dangerous fantasies, otherwise why the need to employ all those techniques to make it seem sincere?  Or are they just as deluded as the people they sell it to? 

Conspiracy Fantasies

I made the mistake of sneaking a look at one of those crazy conspiracy sites the other day.  Just to what bollocks this particular 'famous' conspiracy fruit cake was spouting nowadays. The answer was, of course, all the usual shite:  satanic child abusers, peadophile celebrities, how the Nazis were misunderstood, the Jews are evil child abusers, blah, blah, blah.  Although he seems to have been slowed down due to his site keep getting shut down by hosts.  The 'new' aspect to his particular brand of utterly uninformed and factually deficient nonsense was the depressingly inevitable jumping on the anti-vaxxer bandwagon.  That and what at first sight might seem a surprising animosity toward the Q Anon mob.  Except that it shouldn't be surprising as the Q Anon movement represented a rival strand of US-based  conspiracy theory, (actually, let's stop calling them 'theories', it implies some kind of parity with actual scientific theories, which are evidence-based and testable - 'fantasies' is a better description), with a massive fan base, from which this character was effectively excluded.  He wasn't and never would be part of their pantheon of 'gurus'.  So, obviously, they have to be dismissed as a bunch of nutters who have been led astray by false conspiracy gurus, (who are undoubtedly reality in the pay of 'them', that vague enemy that manipulates the media and establishment institutions for equally vague, but definitely nefarious, purposes).

But to get back to his new anti-vaxxer allegiance, this is also utterly predictable.  After all, the anti-Covid vaccines have been developed by conventional science which, as all good conspiracy fantasists know, is completely false.  If you are one of these nutters, then you really can't afford to be in favour of vaccines if you want to keep your whack job credibility.  What's really depressing, though, is looking at the comments from readers of this crackpot's blog, where they double down on the anti-science madness.  Apparently the vaccine is only for mugs - it can't possibly work because Covid itself is fake, obviously.  None of them have had it, or if they have, it was no worse than a cold.  Oh, and does anybody actually know anyone who has died from it?  It's all fake!  One again, I find myself thinking those uncharitable thoughts that I'm glad these arseholes won't get vaccinated because then, if we're lucky, they'll contract some new variant and die, thereby removing their madness from the gene pool.  Except, of course, that they probably have had the vaccine, but can't own up to it among their loony friends.  Not only is hypocrisy a characteristic of conspiracy fantasists but so is a lack of logic. Anyway, the long and the short of it all is that I really need to stay away from these sites.  Their parades of ignorace, worse than that, smug self-satisfied ignorance, just does my head  in.

Where Was Batman?

Where was Batman?  Superman?  Or Wonder Woman, for that matter?  You would have thought that at least Spiderman  might have turned up to defend the US Capitol Building from marauding fascists.  I feel terribly let down by the superhero no-show yesterday.  Clearly, popular culture has been lying to me all my life - it had led me to believe that whenever truth and justice were threatened, men (and women) in capes would turn up to set things right.  Damn it, not even Captain America, the very embodiment of American values, representing all that is good and great about the US, couldn't be bothered to turn up when his country was truly in need.  Yesterday's events in Washington DC were so serious that even The Fonz was moved to use Twitter to call for President Trump - the instigator of the attempted insurrection - to be executed by communist partisans and his body strung up, (he tweeted that Trump was like Mussolini and that his tenure should end the same way).  God bless Henry Winkler.  I mean, things are so bad that The Fonz loses his legendary cool, yet Batman is nowhere to be seen.  To be fair, we did have Micheal Keaton tweeting some pretty tough anti-Trump rhetoric, calling for the insurrectionists to be dealt with appropriately.  For a moment I hoped that perhaps he might follow this up by leaping into his Batmobile, (which I'm sure he kept after his eighties Batman films), driving it up the steps of the Capitol, before leaping out, dressed in his Batsuit (which he has probably been trying on prior to his rumoured return to the role), and beating up random Nazis.

In what had already been a weird week, what with former Bond girl Tanya Roberts dying, coming back to life, then dying again, yesterday's assault on democracy by a bunch of fascists, acting at the out going President's behest, just tipped things over the edge.  If this is how 2021 starts, how much weirder is it going to get?  But, to be serious - because this is a serious situation - what happened yesterday epitomises just why I have such disdain for conspiracy theories and those who nurture and spread them.  They poison the political discourse, their drip-drip-drip of poison into the ears of those vulnerable to them eventually divorcing from all rationality.  They undermine the very idea of objective truth, the concept that there are facts we accept as true.  They destroy the communal values upon which our societies are built.  Their insidious rewriting of history, regardless of the existence of evidence which contradicts them, warps the perceptions of their followers to the point that they become trapped in a crazed alternate reality in which the truth becomes a conspiracy against them. Within hours of yesterday's events, social media was already awash with nascent new conspiracy theories claiming that it wasn't really Trump's fascist army storming the capitol, but Antifa infiltrators pretending to be Nazis and white supremacists in order to discredit Trump and his scumbag followers.  This, despite the fact that the arseholes caught on camera committing acts of domestic terrorism were clearly identifiable from their social media profiles as long established right-wing extremists.  Really, this is madness.

Which brings me to my main point: if you are one of those people still buying into these conspiracy theories, if you are one of those people still supporting Trump, or believing that the election was rigged, then please, please seek psychiatric help now.  I'm not joking.  Really, I'm absolutely serious.  If you are still believing all this conspiracy shit then you are ill.  Mentally ill.  You need help.  It isn't your fault.  You couldn't help it.  You were abused.  You have to accept that Donald Trump is not your friend.  He never has been.  He is an evil old man who has poisoned your mind.  He has effectively groomed you, making you all sorts of promises while, all the time, feeding you lies in order to warp your mind so that you do his bidding.  But it isn't too late.  You can still get help and I urge you to do so.  Really.  I'm not joking, this isn't satire.  You need help.  Equally, if you are one of those people who has helped to disseminate the harmful conspiracy theories that Trump et al have peddled, or are one of those who have used a public platform, be it a blog, podcast or social media, to give such theories credence, you need to take a long hard look at yourself - and seek help.  Do it now.  Do not hesitate.  You are sick, you need help.  But don't worry, there are people out there who can help you.  I urge you to step back from the abyss and seek them out.

Faking Santa?

For various reasons I won't go into right now, conspiracy theories have been on my mind of late.  The whole moon landing hoax conspiracy theory to be specific.  Make no mistake, the idea that the moon landings were faked is and always have been utter bollocks, but I'm always left wondering what other real events people believe were faked.  Well, according to some of the conspiracy nutters, everything, from Nazi concentration camps to the current pandemic have been faked by, well, them, in order to - well, they never really seem very clear on what 'them' are trying to achieve.  The thesis that the moon hoax bunch posit is that either the US knew that landing on the moon was unfeasible, or that something went wrong with the real mission, forcing them to fake the whole thing in a film studio.  (I'm not going to get into the technicalities of refuting this guff, other than to say that it certainly was technically feasible to put men on the moon in 1969 and that, far from planning a cover up in the event it all went wrong, President Nixon actually had a statement prepared for such an eventuality).  So, while pondering such things and desperately trying to come up with a Christmas themed story for The Sleaze, I asked myself what if these conspiracy theorists 'uncovered' that Santa Claus was actually being faked by 'them'?  Maybe even the whole of Christmas is just a construct designed to divert people's attention from something or other.

Anyway, what if Santa died, from coronavirus maybe, like in the NHS ad, would the government move to fake his annual activities so as to ensure that public morale during the pandemic doesn't take another knock?  Would they employ actors dressed in red suits to go down chimneys, or fake footage of his North Pole workshop in a TV studio?  Of course, what I'm grasping toward is the idea that conspiracy theorists are the sort of people who, having suddenly found out that Santa isn't real, assume that they had previously been duped by a high level conspiracy, regardless of the fact that Santa never existed in the first place.  Is any of this making any kind of warped sense?  Because, you know, I'm really at a loss for a Christmas themed story this year - inspiration is very hard to come by under present conditions.  It is either this or some kind of Brexit-linked story. You know the sort of thing - Santa banned from the UK because he's too continental, or all his presents are trapped in a container at Felixstowe, the search for a new 'British' Santa?  All possibilities, but I really have to come up with something soon and the faking Santa conspiracy appeals simply because it is suitably surreal, the sort of thing we've traditionally specialised in at The Sleaze.  I'll have to sleep on it and see if my subconscious can hone the raw idea into something more like a viable story.

Close Encounters of the Crackpot Kind

Have you noticed that various of the supposedly 'factual' digital TV channels are currently chock full of series about UFOs and aliens?  OK, I know that many of them have always carried such stuff, but of late Blaze TV seems to have nothing but such programming on and Quest is beginning to go the same way.  Look, I tune into these channels to watch stuff like repeats of Shed and Buried, Wheeler Dealers (when it was still good and had Edd China on it) and Storage Wars.  What I don't want to see is a bunch of cranks showing us fuzzy video shot on a cheap phone and claiming that it constitutes incontrovertible proof of alien visitations.   While I usually avoid such TV shows like the plague, I did recently watch a couple, just to check whether they had improved and actually involved any facts these days. Jesus, that was a mistake!  Absolute bollocks!  I wouldn't mind, but regardless of the title or channel it is showing on, every episode seems to involve the exact same 'experts' spouting the exact same fantasies.  In particular, Nick Pope seems to turn up on every one of them.  Now, while I never crossed paths with him, (I was in Metropole House and late Old War Office Building, while he was in Main Building), he and I were both in the MoD in Whitehall in the late eighties/early nineties - he claimed that he manned the 'UFO desk' there and had access to all sorts of classified stuff about alien visitations to the UK.  If we are to believe him, it was like the UK equivalent of the X-Files, with investigations going on left, right and centre.  Interestingly, I was once on a training course with his successor at said desk, who told me that, in reality, UFO sightings were only a small part of the work and all that they did was to respond to letters from the public with a form letter stating that, unless it could be shown that UFOs presented a threat to the UK, the MoD wasn't interested in the phenomena.

To be clear, I'm not saying that such reports weren't investigated somewhere in the MoD, (I'm assuming that the RAF would have run their own investigations as a matter of routine), but they weren't going on in Main Building.  Nor am I saying that Pope is a liar, but I have read one of his books and it was utter shite. In my opinion, obviously.  But to get back to these programmes, what Pope and the other experts do on them is pounce on some alleged UFO sighting then weave some complex narrative around it, a narrative that has no factual basis other than some unsubstantiated 'eyewitness' accounts.  These narratives, having been established as 'fact' are them used to drag all manner of other stuff into their conspiracy.  In one episode I saw, for instance, they managed to conclude that a now defunct RAF establishment, based around an old country house, was somehow the epicentre of the British 'Area 51'.  'The house is now abandoned by the RAF, so why can't we access it?  Why are there security fences around it?'  Well, probably because it is still a valuable piece of Crown Estate and they don't want it vandalised.  The fact that it was once the HQ of the RAF's 'Provost and Security' organisation was held up by Pope (yes, he was inevitably involved) as 'proof' that it must have been used for secret and sinister purposes.  Really?  I would have thought that, as a former MoD employee, he would be well aware that this was simply the official name for the RAF Police, the Air Force's equivalent to the Military Police who are simply responsible for the security of RAF bases, investigating criminal activity by RAF personnel and arresting drunken air men.  They then tried to link it with the 'CCC' an underground government complex several miles away, which was also, apparently, the home some kind of sinister government organisation. ('CCC' actually stands for 'Corsham Computer Centre', which apparently processes data in connection with the Royal Navy - it is perhaps significant that the Navy's design offices are based in nearby Bath).

Many of these programmes focus on particular UFO sightings and try to 'prove' that they can't be explained in any terms other than alien visitation.  Once again, their 'evidence' relies entirely upon those unverified and, to be honest, unverifiable, 'eyewitness' accounts.  I know from personal experience of having twice (in separate incidents) had to provide the police with witness statements.  I like to think that I have a pretty good memory (it got me through enough exams back in the day), yet I was surprised by how, only a short time (less than hour in both cases), many of the details had become vague in my memory.  The exact order of some of the events, for instance, were suddenly unclear.  It taught me that memory cannot be relied upon, at least not for details.  Now, if my memories can become so vague in such a short period of time, asking people to recall events that took place years, decades even, earlier is going to be problematic.  What doesn't help these shows is that also always seem to focus on the same few incidents - if I hear anything more about Rendlesham Forest, for instance, I think that I'm going to go mad.  In one of the episodes I saw, though, they did highlight a case I wasn't familiar with - an alleged encounter between RAF night fighters and a UFO in the 1950s.  Even the most cursory research on my part revealed another problem with the approach these programmes take: the exclusion of witness statements and other evidence which contradicts their narrative.  In this particular case, it turns out that the crews of the two aircraft involved have given accounts in which they deny that they made any contact with anything anomalous that night.  But that never gets mention by Pope (yes, him again) in the show.  it would undermine the UFO guys' ability to delude themselves and construct their complex alternative reality.  Worryingly, their thought processes and 'logic' are pretty much the same as those of people who believe in really dangerous stuff like the 'Q Anon' cobblers, or that Joe Biden didn't really beat Trump, despite evidence to the contrary.  The world is in danger of drowning in these conspiracy theories.

The Queen's Last Orgy

So, the Queen has finally emerged  from her Covid-proof bunker under Windsor Castle, doubtless surprised to find that her realm isn't now a grim wasteland populated only by bands of roaming zombies, to perform her first Royal visit since the start of lockdown.  And where does she go for this visit?  Porton Down.  That's right, she visited the secret government chemical and biological lab in Wiltshire.  No doubt to be given the latest secret Covid treatment which is handed out only to the super-rich and Tory donors (usually the same thing), to ensure that they don't perish during the pandemic.  Because, you know, these secret Covid treatments really exist and are being withheld from the public.  I know, because every conspiracy nut and Trump supporter I encounter online tells me that it is true.  But getting back to Her Majesty, I do wonder how she has spent all those months locked down in that Royal bunker?  One can't help but have visions of some kind of geriatric version of the last days of Sodom, with Her Majesty sat on her throne in full regalia, presiding over wild bacchanalian orgies, with the nobility of England shagging each other on the banqueting tables without inhibition, in between the silver platters of roast swan.

Then again, maybe it all ended up like the last days of Hitler, with an increasingly deluded monarch barking orders into phones to armies and navies that no longer exist thanks to Tory defence spending cuts, when she wasn't ranting at her assembled entourage.  The main difference between Windsor Castle 2020 and Berlin 1945 was that it didn't all culminate with Her Majesty poisoning her corgis and Prince Philip before shooting herself.  Sadly, the truth is probably far more mundane - she and Philip probably spent lockdown catching up with the TV soaps.  Mind you, bearing in mind that she's the Queen, they probably shipped in the casts of the soaps to perform new episodes live for her.  That's obviously what the likes of Danny Dyer were doing during the lockdown TV production hiatus - Royal Command Performances at gunpoint.  Still, if nothing else, being locked up in that bunker did at least mean that the Queen was spared the ordeal of having to have personal audiences with the Prime Minister.  They probably had them on Zoom instead, meaning that she could just mute Boris Johnson for the duration.  Which must have been a blessed relief for her.  Long live the Queen (and she doubtless will, thanks to the super secret anti-Covid serum she received at Porton Down).

Not Believing in Elephants

I see that the nutters were out again on Saturday, gathering in Trafalgar Square to worship at the feet of the likes of David Icke.  Apparently, even Right Said Fred were there, supporting the pandemic deniers.  I don't what shocked me more: that they are Covid denying loonies or that they are still a thing.  They join various other has-been nineties pop icons like Noel Gallagher and Ian Brown in aligning themselves with the crackpots and contrarians.  As someone who always steadfastly resisted the alleged charms of Oasis and The Stone Roses, I'm actually glad that they've 'come out' now as the utter knobs I've always thought that they were.  Mind you, an equally disturbing development is that Jedward have emerged as the principle pop-world advocates of common sense.  The world, truly, has gone mad.  Of course, the crackpots would say that the madness lies with the rest of us accepting the existence of the current pandemic, when it is obviously just a conspiracy on the part of 'them' to oppress us, steal our data via things like track and trace apps and track us via microchips injected into our bodies under cover of vaccines.  The problem is that they don't seem to see the irony in the fact that they are spreading their message using technology which, itself, is incredibly intrusive.  Social media, like Facebook, is designed primarily to gather your personal data, while access to most of the wider web is controlled by corporate behemoths like Google which, likewise, are intent upon gathering your data and exploiting it for profit.  As others have pointed out, Ian Brown uses an iPhone to post his Tweets on the 'conspiracy' - a device manufactured by a company that not only seeks to capture your data, but whose business model - using cheap labour in China and elsewhere to manufacture goods sold for premium prices in Europe, Japan and the US - is fundamentally exploitative.  

So, if you are worried about having your data stolen as a result of the pandemic, you are too late.  We've already given it away to social media operators, our mobile phone services, web providers and countless other tech companies.  That's the irony: people spent years worrying about 'Big Brother' and state intrusion into their privacy when, in reality, it was private corporations who actually wanted all that data, for the purposes of profit rather than surveillance - and we gave it to them willingly.  If you are worried about being watched - you already are, by Google, Facebook, Apple etc.  Getting back to our specific loons - the ones in Trafalgar Square, that is - it seems that their main criteria for not believing in the existence of the pandemic is that they, personally, don't know anybody who has had Covid, let alone died of it.  Jesus!  I've never met anybody who has had beriberi, but I don't doubt that it is real, (although I have no bloody idea what the fuck it is).  Although, as it happens, I do know several people who had Covid-19, one seriously enough to be hospitalised. Thankfully, though, none of them died.  But this, apparently, is how we are now supposed to judge the veracity of anything - whether or not it actually lies within our own limited and very narrow personal experience.  This solipsism extends beyond Covid:  I've encountered a number of people who refuse to acknowledge that disproportionate use of force by US police against black people is real, because they've never, themselves, seen such instances.  The reliable testimony of others, fact-based evidence and scientific studies are no longer good enough.  

Now, I know that Aristotle refused to believe in the existence of elephants, as he'd never seen one himself and descriptions of them that he had heard sounded too ludicrous to be real.  But he lived in age where there were no photographs, film or video - the only representations of things you personally hadn't seen or experienced came, primarily, in the form of oral histories, paintings and sketches or sculptures - all of which included a fair amount of the artist's imagination and were themselves based on third, fourth or more, accounts.  Today, we have no such excuse.   But such a refusal to accepts facts, evidence and expert testimony lies at the heart of conspiracy theories, which are all about feeding the ego.  They are a way of saying that the facts don't conform to my personal views, so therefore I'm going to ignore them and substitute alternative facts not based upon evidence or drawing on the experiences of others.  Which is why these loons don't base their opposition to lock downs and other measures brought in by governments to combat Covid on actual facts or rational arguments, but instead upon their personal prejudices.  Which is dangerous.  So, what can we do about these crackpots and the threat they obviouly pose to public health, (not to mention rational thought)?  Well, as they aren't susceptible to reasoned argument, (they wouldn't be subscribing to conspiracy theories if they were), I think that we need to stop them from passing their obviously faulty genes on.  Personally, I favour running through the crowd at Trafalgar Square with a set of bolt cutters, castrating all the men.  I know tat won't solve the problem of the female loons passing on their genes, but it would be a start.  A radical and drastic solution, I know, but we're living in extraordinary times.  We have to act quickly and decisively.  Besides, bearing in mind that this mob is affiliated with the far right, then we'd only be doing to them what they'd like to do to many of us.  So, grab those bolt cutters now, in preparation for their next demonstration...

Triple Boris

So, did Boris Johnson really recover from that bout of Covid-19?  Is there a cover up?  I mean, just look at the facts: the paucity of updates once he went into intensive care, the lack  of pictures - surely a self-publicist like Boris wouldn't have been able to resist such a photo opportunity: stricken PNM bravely combats killer virus while surrounded by NHS staff.  Then the cursory announcement that he's out of intensive care, yet still no actual statements from the man himself.  The only recent update being that he was now able to walk about a bit.  Look, it is quite obvious that the real Boris Johnson actually succumbed to the coronavirus, but to avoid public panic, the government covered it up while a clone was prepared under cover of him being in intensive care.  That's what all this stuff about him managing to walk is about - the clone Boris is clearly having to go through an accelerated development curve in order to pass as the real thing in short order.  No really, I have it on good authority that there is a revolutionary, but top secret, programme, whereby they can grow a clone to  adulthood from someone's tissue in only a few days.  Then it's just a matter of developing the mental faculties and implanting the memories.

Trust me, this is the only rational explanation for Boris Johnson's recent supposed stay in hospital.  After all, the odds against him recovering from a bout of coronavirus are pretty slim: he's overweight and a man in his fifties - two big strikes against him.  So I think that it is pretty clear that he is being replaced by a clone.  Perhaps more than one - that way he'll be able to multitask and get more done during this crisis.  If they created three, for instance, one could actually do the Prime Ministerial work, one could bugger of on holiday to the Seychelles, while the third impregnated several women.  If nothing else, it would mean that we had one Boris devoting his entire time to doing his actual job, rather than dividing his time between that and his other activities.  I know that a lot of people are going to say that this is far fetched, but, you know, it is no crazier than all those conspiracy theories about 5G spreading coronavirus which are doing the rounds.  With a little bit of effort, I think that we could get some traction for this clone theory - before you know it, the Daily Express will be reporting it as fact and declaring that with three Boris Johnsons at the helm the UK won't just leave the EU, but utterly destroy it.  Remember, you heard it here first.