Kepler-186

Going the Aussie Rules is a blokey blokes thing to do. Think I read Matt Nable was a Rugby League player and has had some battles with mental health.

Elements Of The Left is a great name for a new band.

“Colin from Portsmouth is on the line….” Bit of gear from the Exploding Heads.

Ha ha yes boys Darwin Nunez!

Guardian article about the Republicans using a new hit song Rich Men North of Richmond without the singer’s permission at the presidential debate recently. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/25/rich-men-north-of-richmond-oliver-anthony-republicans?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Totally. Must’ve been quite something to watch the film when it was initially released given the climate. Two weeks before The Beatles debut on the Ed Sullivan show. Peter Sellars was only 50 odd when he passed away in the early 80s.

Dr Strangelove Had only ever seen clips and never watched the whole film. Funny as fuck especially the “scientist” with the dodgy arm. A stellar cast including a young James Earl Jones. Group Captain Mandrake as the urbane British officer is outstanding too. 8/10 Kodi Seren Real Debrid

Thanks for that! Read an article on Fentanyl at the weekend. Republicans want to bomb Mexico and destroy the narco terrorists.

My mate is visiting Glasgow and bumped into Peter Mullan. Big Celtic fan. Stig’s post has got the banner.

“God save us all from your Roman popery!”

Article in The Post on the crisis in legal aid on Merseyside, as @Anubis will no doubt confirm. Replicated across the country no doubt. https://open.substack.com/pub/liverpoolpost/p/youre-accused-of-a-crime-arrested?r=7i95q&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

New Bandits (2023) Brazilian crime series on Amazon Prime. Got the subtitles on with the original dialogue. It’s a bit mental but entertaining. 3 episodes in and going to keep watching. 7 out of 10 so far.

Thanks mate. Will watch that Painkiller at some point.

I had the book Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty,” by journalist Patrick Radden Keefe on audiobook. It covers the rise of the Sackler dynasty and the subsequent fall from grace. They’d pulled a similar trick with diazepam or Valium in the 60s. Thought this series was just based on that but there’s a book Dopesick that is the source material.

I got around to watching this just this week and thought it was brilliant. As you say Michael Keaton is ace and the actress Kaitlyn Dever was great too. Quality 8/10

US company plans to developed an updated version of the PBY Catalina flying boat. https://www.businessinsider.com/company-plans-to-build-new-version-wwii-catalina-flying-boat-2023-8?amp

Think Gnasher has recommended it but TraumaZone 1985-1999 is quality. Still on iPlayer. Red Penguins: Murder, Money and Ice Hockey is good as well. A Storyville episode. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000q5hp

Yeah it was on Standing Room Only.

Yeah their best aircraft was probably the Buccaneer. This is a great little vid about them.

Great site Hush Kit. Run down here of the 10 worst British military aircraft designs. https://hushkit.net/2016/03/02/the-ten-worst-british-military-aircraft/

This is an excellent article about Oppenheimer and one of his contemporaries, Rabi, who is played by a Jewish actor in the film, and the thoughts of Tabi’s family at seeing people they knew intimately portrayed on film. “If you’re a member of any dynasty prominent in twentieth-century political history—with Roosevelts, Churchills, Windsors, and Kennedys at the forefront—your relatives are certain to be reincarnated in a nondocumentary film sooner or later. The halo effect of those families’ global fame sometimes also encompasses lesser participants on the periphery of momentous events. So when I read that Christopher Nolan, the British-American director best known for his Dark Knight Batman trilogy, would make his next feature about the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, what excited me most was personal. Often called the father of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer was a longstanding intimate and colleague of I. I. Rabi (rhymes with “hobby”), winner of the 1944 Nobel Prize in Physics and a first cousin of my paternal grandfather. To this day members of the Rabi branch of our Stammbaum, whom I call my nuclear family, still refer to the physicist by his nickname, Oppie. I immediately flew to IMDB and found that, alongside the Irish actor Cillian Murphy in the title role, Rabi was to be played by David Krumholtz, whom I’d seen as a Seventies porn producer in the raunchy HBO miniseries The Deuce from 2017–2019. I was curious what Rabi’s direct descendants would make of his cinematic embodiment and those of other people portrayed in the film, whom they knew far better than I did. Thus I invited Rabi’s younger daughter, my cousin Margaret Rabi Beels—an eighty-eight-year-old retired social worker and family therapist who lives in Manhattan—to attend an advance screening with my wife and me along with her husband and their son.” https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/07/21/oppies-problem-oppenheimer/

We used to build shit etc. etc.

From The Post (yesterday’s was paywalled ) https://open.substack.com/pub/liverpoolpost/p/liverpool-has-become-the-guinea-pig?r=7i95q&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post By Jack Walton I’ve not been long outside Town Hall when a short gentleman in a blue cap takes the loud hailer and launches into a tirade about the massacre of poultry. The bird flu pandemic of the mid-noughties, he explains at some volume, was a government plot, and the mass efficiency with which our feathered friends were dispatched offers insight into what might be coming for us. Let’s rewind. Last week, the Liverpool Echo ran a news story with a fairly innocuous headline: Plan to divide Liverpool into 13 neighbourhoods gets approved. And perhaps the Echo wasn’t expecting this minor municipal shake up to attract global attention. It appeared — on the face of things — to be about that most thrilling of topics: a council meeting, at which it was proposed (and approved) that Liverpool be diced up into 13 zones for the purpose of delivering services more efficiently. Each of those zones will be assigned a service manager, and the budget for the scheme is £1.2 million. Council leader Liam Robinson ensured it would see improvements in things like how “we sweep the streets and empty the bins”. That said, if you were a member of Liverpool’s People’s Resistance, you would have read something quite different. Liverpool’s People’s Resistance is a Telegram channel (Telegram being the favoured social media messaging app of the conspiratorial-minded, owing to its comparative lack of regulation, compared to say, YouTube). Back in 2021, The Post revealed how Liverpool’s People’s Resistance (LPR) were harassing head teachers over school vaccine programmes. Today it has 1,290 members, and is one of a number of such forums to have sprung up locally in wake of the pandemic. In response to the Echo article, LPR members shared worried comments that Liverpool was at the centre of a massive “communist-style” plot to restrict the movement of its citizens. And that the city’s residents were being used as “guinea pigs” by the World Economic Forum. According to one comment in the group, the proposed changes were “part of the World Economic Forum's plan to install 15-minute cities by 2025”. The WEF, a business lobbying organisation that meets annually in Davos, Switzerland, has in recent years become a bugbear of conspiracy theorists who believe it wants to take control of Western nations and immiserate their populations. But it wasn’t only the comments section that was pulsating with fury. Jim Ferguson, the Brexit Party’s former candidate for Barnsley — now a self-styled social media influencer with 68,000 followers —- picked the story up too. “This is about nothing more than controlling the population of #Liverpool,” he tweeted. “Fight it.” Ferguson’s tweets were seen by well over 350,000 people. Media figures as far away as Canada were sharing the news. Soon after, a leaflet was circulating the LPR page, advertising a protest. People were to gather outside Town Hall on Tuesday night, as the council’s neighbourhoods committee gathered to discuss the new policy. “This can’t be true. They're trying to lock us up in our own areas. Break free Liverpool and stay strong,” read one comment. Needless to say, we had to head along and see what it was all about. There’s between 30 and 40 people here when I arrive, gathered directly outside Town Hall. They have banners reading “AN ATTACK ON OUR FREEDOM” and “GLOBALISTS FUND CLIMATE SCIENTISTS FOR CLIMATE HOAX OR THEY GET DEFUNDED”. As councillors arrive to attend the meeting they’re met with chants of “treasonous traitors”. A number of speakers take turns and I recognise one of them from LPR who targeted school teachers during the pandemic. And while the protest today isn’t especially feisty, it clearly has the effect of intimidating some councillors. Eventually, the council members discussing the plan had to be ushered to safety out a side door, with the Echo reporting that “some [were] understood to be fearful of the crowd outside”. We’ve since heard that some councillors had received abusive and threatening texts and emails from those involved in the protest. Moreover, The Post has discovered that a member of Patriotic Alternative, a far-right, fascist group — whose neo-Nazi leader cites Mein Kampf as his favourite book — was in attendance at the meeting, having heard about it on Telegram. It goes to prove a worrying point: that among these conspiratorial protest groups, many of which sprang up during the pandemic, there are some overlaps with the organised far-right. Regardless, I’m here to ask the pressing questions. Is Laura Robertson-Collins, the council’s new cabinet member for neighbourhoods, in cahoots with a shadowy global cabal? A man named Paul is kind enough to explain. Paul — in his mid-60s — is a veteran of these kinds of events. Thirty-odd years ago he “woke up”, realising that “everything you’ve been told about everything, the opposite is true”. White-ponytailed, smartly-dressed and well spoken, Paul explains how Liverpool City Council’s plans are essentially a gateway to “15-minute cities”. He asks: “Have you watched The Hunger Games?” I say I haven’t, but I do know it involved people being divided into zones and fighting to the death. “That’s the way it’s going,” Paul says. “I don’t know if it’ll end up with fighting to the death but it isn’t good.” It’s a little hard to hear Paul talk, because by this stage another man has seized the microphone and is directing his ire directly at the doors of Town Hall. “Demons!” he shouts. “Demons!” But over the furore Paul explains that the new Liverpool neighbourhoods policy will act as a gateway to the creation of a 15-minute city, which is the term used in urban planning for a city in which everything an individual needs is accessible within 15-minutes by foot, bike or public transport. Fifteen-minute cities have become a popular talking point among conspiracy theorists in the last two years. Those in favour of the idea argue it isn’t really an international communist plot, it’s merely a means of making it easier to walk to the dentist. Though if you’ve watched GB News lately, you’ll have heard that “creepy local authority bureaucrats would like to see your entire existence boiled down to the duration of a quarter of an hour”. Paul and many others — whose politics are at the more conspiratorial end of things — see it as a plan to keep individuals restricted to specific zones, which they won’t be allowed out of. There is no evidence that this will happen. Paul says the plan is being laid out by the World Economic Forum, aided and abetted by the Club of Rome, which is a group of businesspeople and intellectuals who meet to discuss pressing global matters, also in Switzerland. The 13 neighbourhoods in Liverpool will merely be the start, he tells me. In the not too distant future our bank cards will be designed to not work outside of our zones and spy cameras on lampposts will track your car number plate if you venture beyond Kensington, say, to Everton. Then you’ll be arrested. Accompanying Paul is his partner Angie. She’s newer to all this, only picking up an interest in the World Economic Forum and its modelling behaviours during the lockdown around three years ago. Paul has been “drip-feeding” her information ever since. “It’s really unbelievable,” she says. What are the council plans in service of, I ask? “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Paul replies. Try me. “It’s a global Satanic plot to destroy everything created in God’s image,” Paul explains. But why? “Because they’re Satanists. They worship Lucifer, Belial, whatever you want to call it.” As if on cue, a man in a yellow top barrels past with the loudhailer demanding the “Satanists” currently sat in Town Hall come out and answer for their crimes. “Those people probably think he’s mad,” Paul says, gesturing to a group of maybe 15 onlookers who have gathered on the other side of the road. “But everything he’s saying is true. I wish it wasn’t. But it is.” He concludes that roughly 80% of the earth’s population is set to be wiped out. This all sounds extremely troubling. I certainly wouldn’t want to be arrested for leaving my home in the Georgian Quarter to get my flat white in Lark Lane. But here’s the twist. Not only is the 15-minute city conspiracy theory unfounded — it really is just about being able to walk from your front door to the shops — but Liverpool City Council is not proposing 15-minute cities. They just want to make bin collecting more efficient. A lot of intellectual missteps have evidently occurred for us to get here. So how did we get here? Michael Marshall, founder of the Merseyside Skeptics Society, says demonstrations about 15-minute cities are where the anti-vaxx movement has ended up. The conspiratorial protest groups that coalesced during the pandemic are still active, just focused on other topics. “When millions of people didn’t die by the end of the 2020s they had to find something else to gather around,” Marshall says. Now, he tells me, social media channels like Telegram and BitChute are their main gathering zones, where they can discuss ideas in the comfort of like-minded people. Fifteen-minute cities have become the topic du jour. And just while we’re on the subject Marshall, who edits The Skeptic magazine to challenge unfounded conspiratorial thinking, says the World Economic Forum isn’t quite as exciting as its critics believe. “The World Economic Forum is a global body that pushes sustainable development goals,” he says. “In reality it’s a plutocratic exercise that most governments only pay lip service to.” Although he does concede that Klaus Schwab, its founder, has “a great bad guy name”. The common thread through all of this is a fear of being controlled. Which brings me to Dave, who I meet outside Town Hall. He speaks softly, and says he became interested in this sort of stuff in 2016, when he realised he could no longer trust the mainstream media. He explains that social media has been able to provide him with more accurate news, stories of the kind major publications exist to silence. He’s very polite, and thanks me for my interest in the topic, handing me a yellow leaflet outlining the threat posed by 15-minute cities, which is of particular concern to him, given the “control”. What’s this got to do with the new Liverpool neighbourhoods policy, though? “I haven’t actually looked at the Liverpool zone proposals, but I do know that once they start talking about that sort of thing it’s not good,” he replies. Unlike Dave, Leane Miles is not soft spoken. As soon as I say I’m a journalist she accuses me of “spreading disinformation and lies” (before even finding out where I work). Soon enough though I’m able to placate her, and we make friendly chit-chat about a Chinese-inspired plot to have 900,000 overhead drones monitoring the British population at all times. Leane abandoned mainstream news channels earlier than Dave, around 15 years ago. She’d lost a child to care and was in a difficult place in her life. After that, she developed an interest in 9/11 and came to realise that “we weren’t being told the truth”. Today she’s travelled from far afield — Yorkshire — with her friend to take part. I ask what’s brought her here. “It’s about those 15-minute cities they’re in there [Town Hall] bringing in.” Is that what they’re discussing, I ask? “Don’t you read the paper?” she says, referring to the Echo piece. “Aren’t you a journalist?” I explain that, while I personally can’t see why 15-minute cities are such a bad thing, the council aren’t actually discussing 15-minute cities anyway, they’re discussing creating new neighbourhood zones. Hopefully, it’ll improve the delivery of services. “But once they start,” she says. “It’s only ever heading one way — isn’t it?” The detail that jumps out to me, although we only brush past it, is about her child going into care. It’s often said that traumatic life events can shake a person’s sense of personal significance and potentially lead them into conspiracy theory belief. That in the feeling of power brought by being “awake” to truths that others aren’t, they might rediscover that self-confidence. I think it’s worth bearing that in mind when having these conversations. Tempting though it is to mock, the story is often more complex than you realise. And mocking isn’t likely to win anyone over anyway. What’s also striking at this gathering to protest Liverpool’s new policy is how few people actually want to talk about Liverpool’s new policy; the one that’s sparked mass fury online and brought them here. Dave prefers to talk about Sustrans, a charity that works schools to encourage active travel, Paul is into the World Economic Forum, spy-lampposts and transhumanism, and Leane briefly regales me on the perils of black magic. But curiously little on the nuts and bolts of what’s being discussed just a few metres away. I wonder if the council meeting may actually be a little duller than they’re letting on. “Ultimately, it’s about hiding from the complexity of reality,” Mike tells me. “If a bad thing happens they want someone to blame. Say you like to drive your car and now you’re being told to drive it less because it’s causing pollution. It must be a bad guy’s fault!” Later in the evening, I log onto the Telegram to see the Liverpool People’s Resistance channel. I read discussions of a job well done. One member shared a tweet by the Echo journalist David Humphreys, who was in attendance at the council meeting, and documented how events played out from inside Town Hall on Twitter. In the tweet, Humphreys corrects one of the protestors who described proceedings as a planning meeting (it was actually the neighbourhood committee) and relays the message of one speaker: “He claims 15-minute cities are totalitarian and compares them to the Chinese regime.” “Great stuff,” writes a woman called Eileen in response. “The scum echo are sharing our message.”

Snap general election today in sunny Spain, and Vox the far right ultra nationalist party may get into government in coalition with the Popular Party. https://english.elpais.com/spain/2023-07-23/spain-votes-with-vertigo.html Some analysis of Spain’s and southern Europe’s economics and political situation since 2008. https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2023/07/23/spain-another-swing-to-the-right-in-europe/

What’s your Top 5 British war crimes? Bush: I got a coalition of the willing. I got 40 nations ready to roll, son! Reporter: Like who? Bush: Who the fuck said that? Huh? Huh? Like who? England. Japan's sending Playstations. Stankonia said they are willing to drop bombs over Baghdad. Riggity Row is coming. Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation. So, I'm not doing this by myself, and I'm not disrespecting the UN, even though they don't got no army. Go sell some medicine, bitches! I'm trying to get that oil...[coughs, trying to cover up saying oil] hole!