Don't Get Too Excited

It’s been a while since I published a blog. It’s not that I have been out of ideas, rather that by the time I get the draft in my head, circumstances have changed, the public mood has shifted and others have already blasted their thoughts into the blogosphere. But I sense a brief lull as the world holds its breath and gazes at the USA, and here in the UK people enter a Covid stupor, unsure what to believe.

Well that’s not something I’m going to help you with; you make up you own minds. But here’s the crux of the matter – how? The government tells you one thing, your mate tells you another. Extensively researched papers are published and reach a reasoned conclusion, but then some reality television ‘star’ begs to differ. And just when you think you have a handle on an issue a cleverly argued debate spins you 180 degrees.

With statistically very few exceptions, none of us are experts, so we rely on experts – or rather the people who interpret the experts – to inform us. But when the experts – or those who interpret them - disagree we fall back on preferences. Once, we relied on the impeccably neutral ethos of the news media, on meticulously impartial documentary makers. But who now believes that any reporting comes without bias?

You don’t know the reality around either the pandemic or the US election. Neither do I. Nobody does and nobody ever will because, even with the benefit of hindsight, much will remain unclear or deliberately obscured. Historians will be overwhelmed by data and will find it impossible to discern fact from fiction, truth from lie. The outcome of their endeavours will be as much determined by what they want to see as what is actually in front of them. Will history in the future consist of multiple competing accounts from which to choose? What will be taught in school?

The focus is further blurred by credible bloggers, people with their own devoted following, who pursue particular threads: climate change, green technologies, politics, conspiracies, medicine, economics, etc, etc, etc. The world is awash with opinion peddled as indisputable fact, with conjecture posing as informed conclusion. The partially sighted leading the blind.

What of ‘Citizen Journalists’, you ask? Those on-the-spotters who film events in real time and thus generate accurate records of indisputable reality? I often watch such clips and fail to agree with the version of events which the publisher claims is being revealed. And then I have to ask how it was that they were right there, phone at the ready, to film just that segment. Not the minute before, not the resolution after, but just that bit which they believe supports their case.

Who knows what to believe any more? There are some who say that there is the proof, that the presentation of many facets of every story is a deliberate, deep state tactic to prevent us from knowing the truth. I think you know my views on that; isn’t a much more rational explanation that it is what it is, a multiplicity of different viewpoints randomly informed by experience and only occasionally having the appearance of collusion?

Relatively speaking, he knows no more than you...

How do we navigate through all this fog? Well, mostly, I try not to get too excited, try not to invest too much time worrying about things that don’t really affect me and concentrate instead on what I can do to further my personal aims. I’m more parochial than global in outlook and I still have faith in the silent majority… which is perhaps why I haven’t blogged for a while.

Alarums!

Everybody loves a good conspiracy theory; Dan Brown and other such sensationalist authors have made fortunes from peddling tales of outlandish plots, secret societies, centuries-old mysteries and good old myths and legends. It’s stirring stuff, especially the dénouement when in that last race to The End we discover that we have been deceived from the beginning and the kind old professor/grandmother/ protector-of-the-faith is really the guiding hand of the whole illicit enterprise... and in the final act the Nazi gold is once again lost, paving the way for a sequel and revealing that even now we know we were fooled, we’re always ready to fall for another bout of deceit.

On the BBC news this morning, sinister dealings are revealed, that targeted social media campaigns are disseminating hated and fomenting division and ‘damaging democracy’. Naturally, such underhand perversions of the natural order are at the behest of the Russians and the Leave cartel. Did you know, by the way, of the dark masters of the Brexit Syndicate?  Oh yes; I couldn’t read to the end for laughing but I wouldn’t be surprised if the fingerprints of giant space lizards are all over those shenanigans. Turns out – allegedly – that all this disorganised, uncoordinated bumbling is really part of the plot, disguising the slick operation beneath. I say, give them all Equity cards!

But back to the hate news; is it for real, or is it that – the way I see it – that humans are just like that and they rarely play nice when not face to face? Isn’t the simpler explanation just that once wedded to an idea or even better, an ideology, you seek out that which confirms your bias? We all do it. I see the left as being the side most likely to engage in threats and violence. The left assume that only those of the right would be so dastardly. Strikes me it’s not ‘internet hate’ we should be educating kids about but that humans are a pretty shitty species. But I guess the truth can be hard to swallow.

The problem with deep conspiracy is another aspect of human nature; we can’t keep secrets. We are atrocious at it. If we really wanted to give our kids an advantage in life we would teach them how to be good liars. Then they could enter politics and happily de-couple their cognitive dissonance as they simultaneously cut the ribbon on the new school even as they pressed the button for the demolition of another. They could cut funding for the NHS while cheerily announcing an increase. And they could repeatedly tell the public the lie that Ted Heath made it perfectly clear that joining the Common Market meant loss of sovereignty.

If there is one conspiracy worthy of the name it is the grand conspiracy to cut off the head of the nation state and in particular this nation state. Many warned of this, but the official line was to deny it, to obfuscate, to change the subject and to point to trade. But look, we’ll be rich! But we’re not rich are we? Are you? Only relatively recently has it been clear we no longer steer our own course, but it has been represented as an agreed end state when it was never anything of the kind.

Leave overspent during the referendum? Oh, fuck off – Remain’s champions have lied to the public for decades and continue to lie. Most people must be able to see that David Cameron offered a referendum only because he had been backed into an electoral corner and only because he was convinced he could win it. It was supposed to have been won by Remain and a 52/48 result would have absolutely sealed the deal; there would have been no marches, no targeted ‘hate’ campaigns. We would – as a state – have meekly donned our shackles, continued boarding the EU galley and grabbed an oar.

If you want more, here are a few links to feed your curiosity:

Brits too stupid for the EU

A case for Treason?

Sovereignty and the European communities

All of the people...

The Daily Star ran a story to outrage its readers by suggesting that the navy is paying hundreds of millions of pounds to install palm-sized weapons aboard its diminished fleet. How the social media machine laughed! But the idea of a five-inch gun is not so ridiculous as it would seem. A Palo Alto firm has created an iPhone adaptation whereby you can turn your handset into a powerful sonic weapon capable of disabling an attacker at close range by temporarily disorientating them.

Right here, in the UK, you can walk into any Staples superstore and for a quite small fee, secretly 3D print whatever you like. Citing personal privacy, the company have installed self-service booths where you can just insert your design via a USB device and print whatever you wish with no fear of detection. A company spokesman said “We are happy to provide the service, but it is not for us to police what is being printed.” Amazon UK are openly selling a range of downloadable designs for 3D-printed weapons, undetectable to airport scans for £19.99 each.

Another story in this week’s round up is that Google has been secretly installing spyware into its popular Chrome browser. The software is capable of capturing audio and video via the microphone and webcam hardware installed in smartphones, tablets, laptops, PCs and even some smart TVs. As the software can also capture keystrokes, this puts Google in a position where it could harvest every aspect of your online life and sell ‘you’ on to a queue of waiting customers eager to acquire such information.

One such customer is a company based in Brussels from whom you can buy EU identities for a few thousand Euros. So an African migrant need no longer worry about making the dangerous journey to a new life of crime and welfare dependency in the west via unscrupulous people traffickers. He can now simply go online, pay the fee and the documents will be created for him. If you wonder why this organisation hasn’t been shut down by the authorities it is because its start-up was funded by and its operation is overseen by those same authorities. The solution, it seems, to Europe’s illegal immigrant problem is to make them ‘legal’ immigrants.

In other news, a secretly filmed meeting doing the rounds shows Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton behaving not so much as sworn enemies but as co-conspirators in a grand prank being played on the world. The film was captured on a smart phone about a week ago and although the sound quality is poor, Trump can clearly be seen suggesting that she refer to him as a ’volatile little man’ in her nomination acceptance speech. They both laugh. Meanwhile here at home a senior Foreign Office official is under investigation for leaking to the press the intention to quietly bury the Brexit referendum vote under a mountain of procedural complications.

Oh, what a tangled web... 

If you do a search online you can find all of these stories and many more variations on such themes. Hell, you can create your very own and spread the rumours. But the one thing which may prove difficult for even the most diligent researcher is trying to disentangle the truth from the Gordian knot of lies, obfuscation, blind faith, ideology and simple misdirection that permeates The Information Age. As Abraham Lincoln might say today, you really can fool all of the people all of the time.