Political Puppets

So, where is Mitch McConnell, the right-wing US Republican Senator and Trump enabler?  You know the guy - he's about three hundred years old and looks like a startled turtle that just been evicted from its shell.  Well, he hasn't been seen in an age - he's allegedly in hospital recovering from a fall, but, increasingly, people are suspecting that he's actually dead and has been for some time.  Some people claim to have spoken to him on the phone and his family has released some highly dubious 'proof-of-life' photos of him in hospital.  But with modern AI, that sort of thing can easily be faked.  Assuming that he is brown bread, why is everyone so reluctant to admit it?  Personally, I think that they are stalling in the hope that they can, in some way, resurrect him in order to keep up the Republican numbers in the Senate.  What form such a resurrection could take is the question, though.  Obviously, conventional medical attempts must already have failed - there's only so many times you can put thirty thousand volts through someone's heart without response before you have to concede that they are stone cold dead.  So, it is clear that unconventional measures will have to be employed.  They could, of course, go down the Frankenstein route and try massive multiple organ transplants to get him going again.  The problem with that lies in the sourcing of the organs as rejection is always a possibility.  They've doubtless learned from that fiasco with the late right-wing talkshow host Rush Limbaugh - there was an attempt to bring him back from the dead through simultaneous multiple organ transplants shortly after his demise.  The only fresh organs they could come up with at short notice were from a recently deceased young black man.  Limbaugh survived the operation and even revived, but he just seemed to know that he had the organs of a black person inside of him and rejected them in spectacular fashion - he literally exploded!

But what are the other options for brining McConnell back from the dead?  Well, there's always that old favourite, the Voodoo route.  Now, strictly speaking, this wouldn't bring him back to life, but rather see him raised from the dead as a zombie.  Which could have its advantages, from a political point of view, as a zombie McConnell would be completely compliant to the orders of his master.  Just the sort of Republican congressman that Trump likes.  Of course, there are those who might worry about the idea of a zombie McConnell, fearing that he'd start rampaging through congress, cracking open colleagues' heads and feasting on their brains, (although, some would argue, he'd probably starve if relied solely upon congress for his diet).  But it's only movie zombies that do that sort of stuff - traditional zombies created through Haitian Voodoo rites are compliant, slow-moving and rarely violent.  So, who knows, perhaps even now there are a bunch of Voodoo priests dancing around his hospital room, performing all sorts of arcane occult rites.  After all, if we're to believe Trump and Vance, the US is already infested with pet-eating Haitians, so by the law of averages, some of them would have to be well versed in Voodoo.  Personally, though, I think that they are going to go for the puppet option.  That's right, they're going to turn McConnell's dead body into a life size puppet.  That's why the delay and all the secrecy - they have to embalm him first, then replace his skeleton with a jointed metal framework, then work on attaching the strings, so that he can be manipulated like a puppet in a sixties Gerry Anderson TV series.  It wouldn't be the first time, although previous attempts have been somewhat less sophisticated - they apparently kept the Queen Mother going for several years as a simple puppet, with a stick up her arse operating her head and mouth, and a couple of sticks operating her hands, Muppet-style - she was always seen standing behind a balcony so they didn't have to worry about making her walk.  

Now, I know what you are going to say: 'Why didn't they do the same thing with Senator Graham instead of annoincing his death?'  Which is a fair question.  But there's an obvious answer: Graham's death was sudden, coming out of the blue, without a lengthy hospital stay to use as cover.  The same sort of thing happened with Princess Diana - there was just so much press attention surrounding her sudden death in a car crash that the authorities were forced to admit that she was dead almost immediately.  Believe me, if they'd had the chance of engineering a long hospital stay, then she'd still be with us today, jerkily wandering around on walkabouts, an embalmed smile permanently on her face, but posing no threat of embarassment to the Royal Family as she'd at last be completely under official control.

Hamasutra - the Art of Sex and Terror

So, just what is the 'Hamasutra'?  It's a word that sprang into my mind the other day for no good reason.  As they sometimes do.  The 'Hamas' bit suggests a connection to the militant Palestinian group of the same name.  You know, the one that is frequently dismissed by politicians as being a terrorist group, yet still enjoys the support of Palestinians in Gaza, despite the Israelis having used its presence there as an excuse for their destruction of the region and its people.  My best guess is that the 'Hamasutra' is some kind of sacred text which, like the similar sounding 'Kamasutra' is concerned with the arts of love and sex.  Except that, with Hamas allegedly being a terrorist organisation, maybe it is a guide to the best way to combine violent terrorism with sex.  Which is quite possibly why we've never heard of it - I mean, a text which advises people on how best to get off while killing Jews (the most likely targets of Palestinian terrorism) would be sure to be suppressed by the Israeli government.  Indeed, maybe that's what the whole bombing and invasion of Gaza was really about, (because, you know, we live in an age where nothing can actually be about what it ostensibly and most obviously is about).  Despite having thought that they had successfully seized and destroyed every known copy of the 'Hamasutra' since the creation of Israel, they'd gotten word that surviving copies had surfaced in Gaza and were inspiring a whole new generation of Palestinian would-be terrorists with its promises of achieving peak orgasm via violence.

But what would the practicalities be of such a philosophy of sexual fulfilment through violent terrorism?  Would it, at its simplest, involve jerking off whilst gunning down some IDF personnel?  Timing your lovemaking to coincide with the detonation of the bomb that you had made and planted on a bus, perhaps?  (With advice to book a hotel room as close to the detonation point as possible so that you don't just get the thrill of hearing it as you reach a climax, but also feeling the shockwaves vibrate through your bodies).  Could it be about actually being able to carry out an assassination whilst having sex?  The art of being able to sight a sniper rifle on a target while in the 'sixty nine' position?  Or firing a rocket launcher while being 'pegged'?  I mean, that would require some incredible calmness techniques in order to keep your aim steady while being porked up the chutney.  Of course, it might be that the actual physical sex act isn't the focus of the 'Hamasutra' but instead the sacred text is about training oneself mentally and physically to be able to develop a physical sexual response to committing an act of violent terror.   Just the pulling of that trigger or the setting off of that bomb would induce an orgasmic experience taking the terrorist to heights of sexual ecstasy unknown to the non-violent.  Moreover, thanks to the discipline that the text teaches, the only sign that the terrorist is experiencing such sexual highs would be a slight curling of the lip, or maybe even just a slow blink.  Whatever the truth, it's all a terrifying prospect: clearly, every copy of the 'Hamasutra' must be seized and burned! 

A Question of Identity Solved

I finally had a decades old mystery resolved in the cereal aisle at Lidl earlier this week.   Ever since I moved to Crapchester, many, many years ago, I've been plagued by complete strangers on the street shouting 'Frank!' at me - they are clearly disappointed when I don't respond.  Because, obviously, my name isn't Frank.  Nor is 'Frank' an alias I've ever used in any of my nefarious activities.  To be fair, these incidents tailed off over the years and I can't now recall the last time it happened, but it has still bugged me.  Who is 'Frank'?  Why do people think that I'm him?  Why the fuck do they feel it necessary to shout his name across the street?  I speculated that, perhaps, I was living some kind of Jekyll and Hyde existence, transforming periodically into 'Frank' and associating with the sort of idiots who bellow that name at complete strangers, but having no memories of these deprivations when I turned back into me.  Either that, or I had an evil doppelgänger roaming the streets of Crapchester trying to ruin my non-existent reputation.  

Anyway, earlier this week I was in Lidl one evening, doing my shopping, when this bloke starts shouting down the aisle at me.  He clearly thought that he knew me, although he was a complete stranger.  He approached me and insisted that he knew me and that he'd recently trimmed my hedge (he was a gardener and tree surgeon).  He seemed taken aback that I didn't recognise him and that I assured him that I didn't have a hedge to trim.  He was adamant, though, that he'd done this job for me at my house on one of Crapchester's estates (one quite close to the branch of Lidl we were in, as it happens).  Eventually, I convinced him that he was mistaken, but he insisted that he'd done this job for someone who looked like me (and more disturbingly, dressed like me).  So, I had to ask him, was this guy called Frank, by any chance?  He was pretty sure he was, but double checked by consulting his client list and work schedule on his phone:  yes indeed, this double was called Frank!  So there you have it, it turns out that 'Frank' is a flesh and blood bloke - with a hedge - who happens to look like me.  Which I find perplexing - like most people I like to think that I'm unique.  Sure, I have brothers to whom I have a family resemblance, but none live, or have ever lived, in Crapchester.  Even more perplexing is the fact that my previous job often took me to the housing estate in question, probably to the very street where this guy lives, yet I never saw him, nor did anyone there mistake me for him.  But hey, with the central mystery solved, why create more side mysteries?  I'm just going to leave it there - maybe grow a beard and change my wardrobe, just to make sure I'm not mistaken for him again.

Pan-Dimensional Waste Disposal

So, there's an obvious solution to all of our problems with the waste and pollution created by our modern world.  One which has clearly been sign-posted by quantum physics and its theory that a multitude of  parallel universes co-exist alongside ours.  That's right, we dump all of our shit - both literal and figurative - into one of these parallel universes.  Preferably one that it is uninhabited, obviously.  Well, mostly uninhabited.  I mean, just so long as the bit where we're doing the dumping doesn't have any life developed enough to complain to the local council, or take us to court, we'll be OK.  All it needs is for those scientists at the Large Hadron Collider, or somewhere, to open up a portal to these other universes and we're away.  Just imagine it - a clean earth, at last.  No more landfills, no more shit in the rivers and ocean, no sewage treatment plants, no having to seal away radioactive waste for thousands of years.  We can crap and consume to our hearts' content, secure in the knowledge that we can export all of our waste, no matter how toxic it might be, to somewhere that we don't have to think about.  It's a concept that could revolutionise every form of waste disposal.  Just imagine if a miniature stable portal to this hypothetical dump universe could be mass produced - every home could have an inter-dimensional waste disposal unit.  No more weekly bin collections or having to sort out the recycling.  Just send it all into another universe.  Sewers would become obsolete - the waste pipe of every toilet would feed into one of these portals.  It really would be a case of 'flush and forget'.  Think of the water that could be saved this way.

We could do the same thing on a larger scale for industry.  Instead of dumping their toxic waste into the nearest river, factories could just dump it into a river in another universe.  Same with nuclear waste and medical waste.  Of course, the downside of this is that, if developed commercially, you can guarantee that the makers of this technology would cut corners to maximise profits and do only the most cursory checks to ensure that all of our waste was going to an uninhabited universe.  I mean, they aren't going to want to waste money searching through literally thousands of other universes in the hope of finding an empty one.  If the likes of Elon musk were behind it, for instance, you can just bet that it turns out that we're basically taking a dump all over Narnia and, before you know it, hordes of vengeful mythical beasts will be surging out of our wardrobes and shitting all over our houses in retaliation.  The biggest risk will come if the inhabitants of one of these parallel universes were to develop this technology first and start randomly dumping their shit into the first alternative universe they find.  We could be faced with the horrific prospect of a phantom arse suddenly appearing in your living room, just as you are sitting down to watch Eastenders, and taking a huge steaming dump all over your TV, before disappearing.  Or worse, all over you.  Which is why it is essential that we get in first in this potential inter-reality shit-throwing contest.  If we can take pre-emptive dumps into as many alternate universes as possible, then we can, hopefully, bury any of these bastards under a pile of our waste and effluent before they can hit us.  You know it makes sense.

I'm an Expert Trout Stretcher and These are the Basic Mistakes You Are Making When You Stretch Trout at Home

An expert is sounding the alarm about the costly mistakes people are making in the increasingly popular field of trout stretching.  The cost of living crisis has made more people turn toward trout stretching as a means to make the average trout go further, but employing the wrong techniques, or even the wrong trout, could quickly spell disaster for the average home trout stretcher.  Spotting the most elementary mistakes in trout stretching is vital if one is to avoid the pitfalls which could lead to a compromised trout.  Bert Burkeson, a fully qualified expert trout stretcher at Trout International Corporation has shared the most common signs that your trout stretching endeavours are likely to go wrong in a new YouTube video.

"The most obvious mistake that people make is using the wrong sort of fish" he says.  "You'd be amazed at how many people think that any old fish will do - 'well, they all have scales, so must be the same', they seem to think.  But remember, this is trout stretching we're talking about, not salmon stretching, or halibut stretching and certainly not mackerel stretching.  The other day I even saw a video on TikTok where some guy was trying to stretch a sea bass using trout stretching techniques and wondering why it wouldn't work!  I ask you!"  

Bert has also warned against attempting to stretch supermarket bought trout.

"Such fish are typically prepared by cutting off their heads and tails before sale, rendering them completely unsuitable," he cautions.  "If a trout is to be successfully stretched, then it must be freshly caught and whole, otherwise it will have no integrity and simply tear apart during the process."

Ensuring that you use the correct equipment is also vital, says Bert.

"You should only ever attempt to stretch trout using a specially manufactured trout stretching deck which can securely hold the two ends of the fish during the process," he says.  "I'm afraid that tying a piece of string to the tail, then securing the other end to a doorknob, then tying a second string around the head and securing its other end to a radiator on the opposite wall, as advocated in some instagram posts, gently pulling the door open and shut to facilitate stretching, just won't work.  The fish simply won't be held securely or rigidly enough and the stretching motion will be insufficient for an even stretch." 

Expanding on this point, Bert has emphasised the importance of employing the correct technique, even when using the recommended equipment.

"The biggest mistake of the novice trout stretcher is over eagerness," he opines.  "They go in there impatient to get the trout stretched as quickly as possible and wonder why they end up with a torn trout.  Patience is the key.  Once the fish has been securely mounted on the stretching deck, it is essential that the maximum stretch is set correctly, based upon the length and girth of the fish - over-stretching will yield sub-standard results.  Once this has been set, the stretching cranks need to be operated in unison and very slowly - preferably at the rate of only one-eight of an inch turn every hour for the best results.  Too fast will adversely effect the flavour of the stretched trout."

Bert guarantees that following these simple guidelines will ensure success for any amateur trout stretcher - even novices.

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...

It Defintely Didn't Happen to Me

Back in the days when I used to read crackpot nutrag Fortean Times, one of my greatest pleasures was the 'It Happened to Me' feature, where various readers related their 'strange' experiences.  The fact that so many of them were so obviously made up, riddled with inconsistencies, inaccuracies and contradictions, just made the column all the more entertaining.  A good indication that it was all a fabrication was when an item started along the lines 'This didn't happen to me actually, but to my sister/brother/cousin/neighbour/some bloke at the bus stop, who told me about it.'  Many of them were really simply stories about coincidences, sorry, strange coincidences, although why any coincidence should be stranger than any other is the real mystery.  Coincidences, no matter how unlikely they seem, are simply a matter of statistics: even if the odds of them happening seem remote, the laws of statistics dictate that they must happen at some point.  There were also a fair number of ghost stories, UFO sightings and strange creature sightings, none of them very convincing, not to mention plenty of conspiracies.  My absolute favourites, though, are the ones that involve such exotic entities as 'shadow men' - quite literally shadows with a life of their own - which seem to spend a lot of time scaring young children in their bedrooms.  I think the key to these is the fact that what are being related to us readers are decades old childhood memories of things that supposedly happened as they were drifting off to sleep.  While dreams, especially vivid one, can, at such a distance in time, can be confused with actual memories, the fact is that even memories of real, recent, experiences can be highly unreliable.  I speak from the experience of twice having to give witness statements to the police within a short time of an incident and finding myself questioning my recollection of the events, the order in which they occurred, even the timescale.  So, not surprisingly, I don't give much credence to these sorts of stories.

A variation on the 'shadow men'  are the 'stick men', which are, yeah you've guessed it, quite literally life sized figures looking like the stick men which we are often drawn to represent human beings.  Once again, these stories always seem to be relating events from many years ago, which immediately renders their veracity suspect for the same reasons as outlined above.  Sometimes these 'stick men' are abnormally tall and have a habit of chasing people who see them (apparently even to their front door, according to one particularly barmy story).  I find these accounts impossible to take seriously.  Not just because I'm a natural born sceptic, but also there is something inherently ridiculous in the idea of giant 'stick men' running around, unnoticed by anyone other than drunks coming home at dawn or people driving on lonely roads - the usual types of witnesses to these supposed events.  But some of the strangeness involves apparently regular people, rather than 'shadow men' or 'stick men', encountered by the contributor, who turn out to be somehow 'weird' in vaguely defined ways.  Some of my favourites amongst these involve encounters with strangers while out walking in remote places.  Strangers who seem to appear out of nowhere.  Sometimes they simply walk past the author of the piece, sometimes they stop and speak, quite normally, to them then, after they've walked on, the author turns to look back at them - and they've vanished again!  There were no turnings or paths they could have taken, the writer assures us - which, as someone who spends a fair amount of time out walking in the country, is nonsense: there are all sorts of paths and routes which can be taken off of the established paths, but which don't seem immediately obvious to the casual walker.  

What all of this comes down to is that it is clear that, at some level, we all need a bit of mystery in our lives.  In the past, religion was the go to place for mysteries for the average person.  But with religion's hold weakening, especially here in the western world, people are forced to turn elsewhere for mysteries: UFOs, Bigfoot, mysterious big cats, lights in the sky, 'stick men' and so on.  Some can even find mysteries in their everyday lives in the form of 'strange' coincidences or encounters with 'vanishing' people while out on a walk.  I'm glad they do and even gladder that some of them write their experiences up (or even make them up) to publish in places like Fortean Times as they provide me with endless entertainment.

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...

The Radioactive Chapati Conspiracy

There was a piece in The Guardian today about how scientists fed radioactive chapatis to unsuspecting Punjabi women in Coventry during the 1960s as part of an experiment on iron absorption.  While the article focused on the ethics and legality of experimenting on people without their consent, I couldn't help but feel disappointed that it didn't include commentary from any right-wing crackpots spinning conspiracy theories that it was all part of a secret plot by the then Labour government to create a race of 'Super-Asians'.  I mean, it writes itself really - a new race of Asians who can work harder and longer than any white person, for a lower hourly rate.  It would explain everything: the mass unemployment amongst the traditional working classes of the eighties wasn't the fault of Thatcher's economic policies, but rather down to the rise of the new 'Super-Asians'.  In turn, this lead to the disenfranchisement of the white working classes, resulting in them turning to the extreme right.  Race riots?  Well, they certainly weren't formented by the extreme right in this alternate reality, but rather were acts of self-defence by white workers against their super-powered Asian oppressors.  Fast forwarding to last summer, how come, despite being besieged by mobs of white rioters with firebombs, no Mosques or hotels full of asylum seekers weren't burned down?  Because they were being protected by groups of the these 'Super-Asians', using their super strong breath to blow out the flames and their super speed to snatch firebombs from the hands of rioters before they could throw them.

Doubtless, it would be claimed, these 'Super-Asians' were also more virile than white men, hence the explosion in their numbers during the seventies and eighties.  Their super powers mean that they can just outbreed white Brits, turning us into a minority in our own city.  Worse, their powers of mind control are probably why so many white women fall for them, bearing their children, further 'diluting' the race.  To the demented of the extreme right, those radioactive chapatis are the explanation for several of our cities 'falling' to the Asians, as the 'Super-Asians' forcibly took them over.  No doubt, in their warped world, Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, only won by using his hypnotic superpowers to get people to vote for him.  (Ignoring the fact that the women who were secretly irradiated were of Punjabi origin, while Khan is of Pakistani descent - but hey, they're all the same, aren't they?).  Mind you, some British politicians of Asian descent are definitely not 'Super-Asians' - Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman come to mind, although supporters of Boris Johnson might argue that the only way that he could have been deposed was via Sunak using his superpowers to undermine him.  But, as noted, the article didn't include anything like this, which was very remiss of the author, as I'm sure that we would all welcome yet another crazy right-wing conspiracy theory that stokes racial divisions and reinforces culture stereotypes.  It's what we need right now, something that can explain all of the country's problems by tracing them back to some radioactive chapatis fed to Asian women in the Midlands by radical leftist scientists, who were themselves probably hippies off their faces on LSD.  I mean, it makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

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....

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.

The Loons Out of Space?

Apparently, Liz Truss doesn't want to be Prime Minister again. Which is a stroke of luck as neither does anyone else.  Even saying this demonstrates a staggering degree of hubris on the part of someone whose utter incompetence and unfitness for the job resulted in her becoming Britain's shortest serving Prime Minister.  The very notion, after the economic chaos she instigated, that there might be any chance of her getting another chance at the job is ludicrous.  But then, of course, the very idea of her becoming Prime Minister in the first place seemed ludicrous until it actually happened.  All those ridiculous puff pieces the right-wing press started running about her, bigging her up as a potential PM, despite her lack of actual achievements in ministerial office, when it started to become obvious that Johnson's days in Number Ten were numbered, seemed simply to be the usual right-wing wet dreams.  But it turned out to be the start of a concerted campaign to get a candidate vacuous and malleable enough to carry their crackpot extremist free market economic agenda into power.  So, I was reluctant to completely dismiss the similar puff pieces appearing in the press late last week trumpeting as to how Truss was planning a 'comeback' and how it would cause problems for Sunak.  Even the BBC's Laura Kuensberg got in on the act, (mainly because she had an interview with Truss on her TV show).  As it turned out, though, the promised 'comeback' simply turned out to be Truss whining on about how she wasn't given a chance and how her plans were derailed by the left-wing economic establishment.  Indeed, those well known Marxists at the Treasury, Bank of England and securities markets.  

Surely her backers must have grasped by now that reviving the corpse of Liz Truss is futile?  In both political terms and public opinion she is a busted flush - she played her hand and got called out.  But then again, Boris Johnson still has his fanatical backers who seem to regard him as the once-and-future-king, despite the fact that he left office in disgrace, the architect of his own downfall, and has spent his time since further alienating the electorate with his money-grubbing and self-aggrandising antics.  But even if their supporters can't resurrect the careers of either of these two, there still seems to be an endless supply of horrendous right-wing reactionary Tory MPs out there ready to take their places if the opportunity arises.  Where do they all come from?  I've often idly thought that perhaps they are the result of a radioactive meteorite having fallen in the Tory heartlands some fifty or sixty years ago, causing horrible and grotesque mutations in the surrounding population.  Much in the manner of H P Lovecraft's 'The Colour Out of Space'.  Maybe we've reached the stage where the mutations are no longer physical, but instead psychological, the strange radiations of the meteorite twisting the minds of newly born Tory children, imprinting cruelty, madness and a complete lack of empathy into them.  Which, in turn, drives them toward extreme right wing politics and economics.  More recently, I've found myself speculating that perhaps the meteorite was found by crazed libertarians and removed to London, where it is now housed in the labyrinthine cellars beneath 55 Tufton Street, its evil radiations pulsing their way up through the floors into the various crazy right-wing think tanks housed there.  I have no doubt that it is attended by robed acolytes, who regularly descend into the cellars and worship it as a deity.  Then again, I could well be completely wrong and all those Tory MPs are just naturally bastards.

Golf Pro Reiko - More Strangeness From Japan

As ever, I've been watching a whole load of, well, stuff, lately, from 'Billy Jack' movies to Edgar G Ulmer's Beyond the Time Barrier (1960), taking in the likes of The Return of the Blind Dead (1973) and The Unseen (1980) along the way.  But the accolades for weirdness, as usual, go to the Japanese, whether in the form of an episode of something called The Space Giants, (apparently a re-edited and redubbed for US TV version of a sixties Japanese TV series), or another of those 'Sukeban'-style TV series with bad girl protagonists.  Indeed, it was the latter that made the most impression on me.  While the protagonist of Golf Pro Reiko, (the first two episodes of which I recently saw on a streaming service), might not dress in a sailor suit type school uniform, fight crime with a yo-yo or carry a rocket launcher in her backpack, like her eighties TV contemporaries, her adventures are no less bizarre.  Of course, you have to bear in mind that these episodes were in Japanese with no English sub-titles, so there's a lot of supposition on my part as to what was going on.  But, as far as I could discern, Reiko is a teenage girl in, I think, Yokohama, who is on the cusp of being accepted onto the golfing pro circuit when her father, a professional golfer, throws a tournament for money, (I think).  In disgrace, he commits suicide, leaving Reiko and her mother distraught.  Reiko goes off the rails and joins a gang, using her golfing skills in their turf wars with rivals.

Not only does she use her golf club to hit people, but she also puts her swing to good use, teeing off various missiles at opponents and also blazing golf balls.  Her childhood friend, who has the hots for her and wears a suit that looks several sizes too large for him, is forever trying to prise her away from the gang and getting beaten up by them for his troubles.  (He takes an astonishing number of beatings over the course of two episodes, yet seems to sustain no injuries other than cuts and bruises).  Eventually, as far as I could make out, Reiko gets another chance to go pro, but has to go and rescue some of her friends who have been captured by a rival gang which, it turns out, is being led by another old childhood friend, I think.  Anyway, she uses her golfing skills to free them, (more of those blazing golf balls), but is subsequently framed for the murder of what I think was an illegal bookie involved with her father's fall from grace.  Which is where the second episode left off.  I haven't yet sought out further episodes, (most of the twenty plus episodes are, I believe, currently to be found online), so I don't know how it pans out, but I'd confidently predict that the series as a whole charts Reiko's continued struggle to choose between gang loyalty and golfing success.

While not as outright weird as Star Virgin (what is?), or as disturbing as Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs, or even as charmingly bizarre and off-the-wall as Sukeban Deka, the juxtaposition of teenage gangs and golf certainly marks Golf Pro Reiko out as falling firmly in the tradition of Japanese pop-culture what-the-fuckery?  As with series like Sukeban Deka, everything moves at a frenetic pace, accompanied by very serious-sounding voice over narration every so often, (doubtless emphasising, if Sukeban Deka is anything to go by, the moral choices being faced by the main characters at crucial points in the narrative), and lots of opportunities for the heroine to demonstrate not only her bad girl credentials, but also her more traditionally feminine and caring side.  Like many Japanese TV shows and films, particularly those aimed at adolescent audiences, Golf Pro Reiko leaves the western viewer perplexed by the underlying philosophy, attitudes and mixing of the mundane and bizarre side-by side: one moment its a teenage soap, the next a violent gang drama with surreal elements like blazing golf balls.  As always, you are left asking, what were they on when they made this?  Whatever it was, I definitely want some.

British Bigfoot?

Bigfoot - have we ever talked about the legendary anthropoid here?  I only ask because I was reading Gav Crimson's review of direct-to-DVD British Bigfoot/gangster crossover movie Wreck (2020), (while, coincidentally, half-watching a sort-of-Bigfoot movie on B-Movie TV, Demonwarp (1988), where Bigfoot turns out to be an alien), in which Gav noted the lack of a British Bigfoot history that the film makers could have drawn upon.  Now, something stirred at the back of my mind: I was sure that I had read somewhere of just such a UK Bigfoot mythology.  Indeed, a quick web search confirmed that it wasn't a false memory brought on by watching the likes of Konga (1960) or Trog (1970) too many times - they might not be Bigfoot, but giant apes and prehistoric troglodytes running amok in Britain are close enough - there really is something of a British Bigfoot tradition.  While not as well known as those ubiquitous 'big cats' that supposedly stalk the British countryside, there nevertheless have been numerous alleged sightings of a hairy ape-man type creature known variously as The Shug-Monkey, the Beast of Bolam, the Big Grey Man, the Man-Monkey, and the Wild Man of Orfor, depending upon the locale. These locales range from Cornwall to the Scottish Highlands.

Of course, one of the objections to idea of such a creature existing, undetected, in the UK is the country's lack of any equivalent to the vast forests of the North West US, or even the mountain ranges of Tibet, where its cousin the Yeti supposedly resides.  Yet, the fact that modern Britain is increasingly urbanised doesn't seem to bother the British Bigfoot, which has been spotted in the likes of Kent and Sussex, both pretty densely populated counties.  So, could such a creature exist in the UK?  I sincerely doubt it.  The same objections that undermine the existence of those 'Big Cats' apply - a lack of a suitable food supply, for one. If there really were these large predators wandering around the British countryside, then I'm pretty sure that we'd have regular reports of farmers losing large numbers of livestock.  Not only that, but we just don't have the climate for Bigfoot here - just about every Bigfoot movie I've seen features buxom female teenagers hiking in US forests and taking their tops off.  As far as I can make out, it is the sight of naked female breasts that attracts Bigfoot - it is the only time they attack and they always go for the exposed knockers.  Let's face it, in drizzly, overcast Britain, there is no way that local woman are going to be getting their norks out in the woods on a regular basis.  Personally, I suspect that British Bigfoot sightings have a lot to do with too many childhood readings of Stig of the Dump.  That and an increasing number of hairy homeless people being forced to live in the woods as a result of austerity over the past ten years.

Ghosts and Ghouls?

It isn't just the UFOs though, is it?  Digital TV 'factual' channels also seem to be full of stuff about the paranormal and unexplained.  Not that any of it is unexplained - there is one programme called, I think, NASA's Unexplained Files, supposedly about anomalies and weird shit going down on recordings taken by NASA astronauts and the like.  The trouble is though, that every time I've seen an episode, by the end, they've always explained it all away in scientific terms, thereby obviating the title.  Mind you, this is taking us back to the UFO shows, while I really wanted to talk about their paranormal equivalents.  The problem with the paranormal programmes is their lack of any supposed visual evidence to show us - while the UFO shows have their grainy mobile phone footage of fuzzy looking lights, the paranormal programmes have no equivalent footage of ghosts, for instance.  About the best I've ever seen is supposed CCTV footage of poltergeist activity: chairs moving around, cupboard doors opening and shutting, accompanied by knocking noises.  The trouble is that this sort of stuff can so easily be faked with something as simple as fine threads attached to door handles and chair legs and being pulled from off screen.  I know that they always claim to have had this stuff 'analysed' by 'experts' who claim they can detect no fakery, but the fact is that you can't see the fakery in the tricks performed by stage magicians, so this is hardly conclusive.

This, though, is the big problem with paranormal phenomena - the lack of evidence in the form of photos or videos.  Back in the day, there was always the excuse that cameras, particularly film or video cameras, were expensive and uncommon, making it unlikely that anyone encountering such phenomena would be unlikely to have such equipment.  Today, however, just about every smart phone has a video camera and just about everyone has a smart phone.  So, where are the videos of ghosts and apparitions?  This is so problematic that, when writing his 'Rivers of London' novels, Ben Aaronovich felt it necessary to furnish a fictional explanation of 'magic', by its action, destroying microchips, thereby preventing the videoing of ghosts, etc.  But in the real world, there are no such constraints - simply falling back on stuff like 'ghosts can't be photographed', won't wash without a proper explanation.  Not if these paranormal investigators want to be taken seriously, that is.  Anyway, possibly my favourite type of these paranormal shows are the self-made ones featuring ghost hunters.  You can find loads of them on You Tube and there is a series of them which show regularly on the American Horrors channel on Roku.  

They always feature a group of these self-styled investigators visiting some old building, or graveyard, by night, hoping to record paranormal phenomena.  Inevitably, they never do.  Instead, all they seem to do is to try and scare themselves by suddenly exclaiming 'Did you hear that?', then playing back an audio recording, to which I reply, 'Yes. I heard that - it is typical, normal, nocturnal noise, probably made by the wind, local nocturnal fauna or just the building's components contracting as the temperature drops'.  In one episode I saw, even a car horn sounding was taken as 'evidence' of something spooky going on: 'We're miles from any busy roads', they exclaimed.  Yes, but there are, nonetheless, roads there - you drove down one to reach this location, not to mention the fact that sound carries remarkably long distances at night.  Apart from trying to hype up normal sounds as something sinister, these ghost hunters are always carrying various devices with meters on them which register, well, I don't really know and, in truth, neither do they.  At best, they might register electromagnetic fluxes, but these don't provide evidence of anything, let alone the supernatural.  There seems to be a cottage industry out there knocking out these 'ghost detectors', one not actually backed by any science.  In the final analysis, though, if forced to make a choice of viewing one or the other, I think that I prefer these paranormal show.  If nothing else, the people involved seem less fanatical and don't engage in wild conspiracy theories.  That said, it is still all bollocks.

Anger Mismanagement

Do we need to start reclaiming anger for men?  I mean, in this present age of 'wokeness' there is increasing pressure upon men, especially young men, to be 'in touch with their feelings', or their 'feminine side' and to be generally reasonable and calm.  The onus is now on being conciliatory, seeing both sides of the argument and avoiding conflict.  Could it be that men are being emasculated by this world of the woke, turned into meek and ineffective ciphers by this political correctness gone mad?   I remember that not so long ago we had various right wing knee jerk reactionaries telling us - via the tabloids - that what the youth of today needed to sort themselves out was a bloody good war.  Participating in World War Two, Korea, the Malayan crisis or Aden, they'd tell us, had done them no harm at all.  In fact, it had made 'men' out of them.  Of course, today's pundits are far too young to have fought in any of those conflicts and unlikely to have served in the Gulf wars or Afghanistan.  Instead, their memories of conflict probably lie with clashing with the Anti-Nazi League while on National Front marches.  Their idea of having 'seen action' is throwing bricks through the windows of Asian-owned shops and their idea of an inspirational war leader would be Enoch Powell.  So their advice to the woke youth of today would be that they need more hate and anger in their lives.

Which leaves me suspecting that the general rise in hate seen on social media in recent times, not to mention the increasingly intemperate nature of political discourse, is actually all part of a plot on the part of some shadowy organisation to raise male anger levels.  Just look at all those middle aged, middle class white men who get worked up about Greta Thunberg.  I mean, what other reason could there be for grown men to apparently feel so intimidated by a teenaged environmentalist that they get angry to the point of their heads exploding, if it isn't simply to set an example for younger men s to whole to work oneself up into apoplexy over nothing?  It's the same with Brexit.  After all, nobody rational would surely have promoted committing economic suicide by leaving the EU, unless it was actually part of a larger project to promote anger.  Even the Daily Mail and the other right wing tabloids make sense in this context - their ludicrous 'journalism', forever scapegoating minorities and stoking up hate is designed purely to promote anger.  Trust me, it's happening.  There's a cabal of sinister behind the scenes manipulators out there who believe that the only way to make 'men' out of modern male youth is to make them so angry over the most trivial issues that they turn puce, foam at the mouth and risk having a stroke. 

The Third Secret

So, the other day I was watching, (or rather, half-watching, because it was background to me doing something else), one of those conspiracy theory programmes on some digital TV channel or other.  It was called Forbidden Histories or some equally pretentious title and, despite claiming it would offer new revelations about some historical 'mystery', you knew that it was going to be bollocks as it was being presented by that lightweight pillock Jamie Theakston.  Anyway, this particular episode was about the 'secrets of Fatima', (which, coincidentally, had come up in conversation with someone a few days earlier).  These, for those who don't know, these were three visions and prophecies imparted to a group of Portuguese children by an apparition of the Virgin Mary in 1917.  Two of these secrets - one a vision of Hell, the other a prediction that World War One would shortly end, but that a second global conflict would occur in the near future - were revealed in 1930 in the memoirs of one of the children.  The third secret was supposed to be revealed by the Vatican in 1960.  Except that it wasn't, leading to speculation that it involved a revelation so disturbing and devastating that the church had decided that the public had to be protected from it - the end of the world, the assassination of a Pope or the collapse of the Roman Catholic Church, were all favourite candidates among the conspiracy nutters. 

In 2000, the Vatican did finally reveal the third secret, which turned out to be a vague vision of the future whose elements, half ruined cities, huge crucifixes and an apparent martyrdom of a figure who might have been the Pope, could be interpreted to fit any of the scenarios favoured by the conspiracy theorists.  Except that they weren't satisfied by the revelation, claiming that it just wasn't dramatic enough.  There have been all sorts of allegations that either what was revealed wasn't the 'real' third secret, or that it was only part of the third secret and that the real version is far more dramatic.  Of course, this is always a problem faced by conspiracy theories: they build up expectations around 'secrets' and suppressed knowledge, which can never be fulfilled.  The revelations, when they come, are always an anti climax and are inevitably followed by allegations of cover ups and the like.  The truth, it seems, remains elusive, (as it always must for the conspiracy theorists, or they'd be out of business).  But the whole business, as presented on this TV programme, set me thinking: just what sort of 'revelation' would the so called Third Secret have to contain for the Catholic church to go to such extreme lengths (presenting a fake Third Secret) to suppress it?  What would they think would disturb their congregation so much?  The only answer I could come up with is that it predicted a gay Pope.  Such a revelation would rock the church to its core, threatening the whole fabric of its belief system.

Maybe that's what that last vision really was: the Holy Father getting it on with another guy.  (Would he be 'giving' or 'receiving' though? Which would be considered more Christian, to be receiving the love of his flock or giving out his love through administering a good 'pounding' to a Monsignor?)  Or perhaps those kids in Portugal saw a vision of a future Pope involved in a gang bang with a conclave of Cardinals.  Or, (and let's dial up the offensiveness here), they saw him getting down and dirty with the leader of another faith - cavorting with the Archbishop of Canterbury, enjoying a tryst with the Dalai Llama or even embracing the Grand Mufti.  The sub text here would be clear: not only should the church embrace homosexuality, but it should also use the power of gayness to unite with other faiths, to create one global, all encompassing religion celebrating a non-gender specific deity of universal sexual orientation.  I mean, sod the apocalypse, this is the sort of thing that would really disturb the Catholic church.  Imagine, an openly gay Pope would inevitably result in huge numbers of Catholic priests coming out of the closet, not to mention ordinary churchgoers finally feeling that it was safe to come out as gay or lesbian.  Churches painted in rainbow colours, Bishops in full regalia hanging out in gay bars.  It just doesn't bear thinking about.  Yep, if you ask me, that's what the Third Secret of Fatima is really about.

Zombie Bear Apocalypse?

So, according to David Davis a hard Brexit won't result in in the UK turning into a Mad Max style post apocalyptic wasteland.  Which was a pretty strange thing to say, as nobody had actually suggested that it would.  I certainly don't remember it being mentioned as an option by the 'Leave' side during the referendum.  I might have voted to leave if I'd thought that there was a chance that we'd all end up driving weird and wonderful V8 powered custom cars around the place at will, firing guns in the air, wearing black leather and sporting wild hairstyles.  But, strangely, I don't recall Michael Gove ever mentioning such a possibility.  Still, it is interesting that even an arch leaver like Davis thinks that many people think that Brexit will be an apocalypse on the lines of a nuclear holocaust or zombie uprising.  Not that these are the only types of apocalypse which might befall us all.  Now, I don't know whether it has anything to do with any of the various medications I'm currently taking, but lately I've been experiencing some especially vivid, and occasionally disturbing, dreams.  Most unusually, I actually remember quite a few details of them when I awake, wherwas usually they quickly fade from memory.

Anyway, in last night's I seemed to be caught up in some kind of apocalypse, running around deserted streets and buildings with an ever changing group of fellow survivors.  What we were all running from and what had caused all the devastation remains unclear, although at one point some bears were involved. Whether it was some kind of zombie bear apocalypse, or whether they were incidental to the main threat, I don't recall.  The most vivid part of the dream that I can remember involved me kicking in some doors and barricades to effect an escape from some bears via an abandoned house.  When I reached the street on the other side, I looked around and the others had disappeared.  I looked for them, but there as no sign of them.  When I went back to the street I suddenly and inexplicably found myself on a moving train with a different group of survivors, although I recognised their seeming leader from somewhere.  They seemed to know me.  Looking out of the window of the train, I saw we were running parallel to a river and I glimpsed two exhausted looking giants duking it out on its edge.  Perhaps it they were the cause of the apocalypse.  Then I woke up.

The other dreams haven't been quite as bizarre.  One, which was deeply disturbing, involved me witnessing an especially brutal murder.  Thankfully, I don't remember too many details of that one.  Another started at some kind of family party in an old house and proceeded to encompass a trip to some extensive catacombs below the house, where secret and half-forgotten rooms housed all manner of artifacts.  In one there was an extremely well preserved old-style mail coach, for instance.  Yet another dream involved all sorts of antics at a pub.  Not my usual local pub interestingly.  Not only did it look anything like my local, either inside or out, but it also seemed to be near the sea.  Everyone kept calling the landlord 'Twatty'.  Whether that was a proper name, a nickname or a description, I don't know.  I'm left wondering what tonight will bring - David Davis' Brexit apocalypse, perhaps?