Posts by Kracklite
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Lipreading, and no-one mentions this?:
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Oh fuck it, I'm voting for Vespasian. He was witty, even if he is dead now.
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Hard News: The perils of political confidence, in reply to Sacha,
Ha!
NZ First leader Winston Peters told 3 News he thought Mr Key should “release them”
And this morning on RNZ Winnie was saying that the media were engaging in despicable, illegal News of the World tactics and that was all there was to it. A day is a long time in politics.
I'm not surprised, of course - not that anyone would be surprised by his antics.
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Hard News: The perils of political confidence, in reply to Sacha,
At Shirley, it's "New Cylinders" in Keyspeak.
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Whether or not the tape reveals Key and Banks chanting in unison, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn”, the suspicion that something was said and that it’s being covered up in some way has resulted in a serious backfire, it seems, hence the panic.
This rather overstates the case (it’s hardly a “-gate”), but the oblique style of Johns’ explanations on Morning Report recall these notes I made long ago on how the press reported on matters they were not supposed to report on in Imperial Russian times (it was called “The Language of Aesop”). In this case, it was the murder of Rasputin:
Birzhevye Vedomosti,
St Petersburg, 20 Dec 1916,A heavy frost. The waters of the capital are held by ice, silent, dusted with snow are the gardens. But over the still capital hover strange nightmares. In the depths of the night shots ring out in a dead garden, secret cars hurry across the city carrying corpses and live men… Fantastic nightmares weave a poisonous fog and turn into horrid reality. For bloodshed is always horrible and smoking blood is always poisonous.
The Kretovsky Island has come alive.
Crowds gather there until nightfall.
A watchman on the bridge is reported as saying that a diver went down into the bottle-green waters of the Neva for an hour but found nothing. The old riverman who knows how corpses drift tells them where to look. They first see a fur coat, hairs coming up through the ice. There was a lot of blood. His boot was a size sixteen says a watchman. Your reporter then went to the Moika palace and looked up at the windows. It was dark upstairs and the darkness of the wide window was just as secret and intriguing as the riddle of the secret events that have been occupying all our minds for the last three days.Mercure de France
Aug 1923,
“La Maisonette d’Ania,”
Zinadia GippiusA certain person visited another person with some other persons. After the first person vanished, one of the other persons stated that the first person had not been at the house of the second person, although it was known that the second person had visited the first person late at night.
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Hard News: The perils of political confidence, in reply to BenWilson,
Indeed wouldn’t they want to do it in private if they wanted any chance of real signals, and a meaningful discussion?
The essence of all conspiracy theories is that those in power are competent.
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Hard News: The perils of political confidence, in reply to Sacha,
It seems to fit in with a general strategy of hit-and-run campaigning. Get your orchestrated event publicised, say your piece in a way that can be repeated as a soundbite and never, ever be seen to be explaining or qualifying or, Geryon forbid, reacting. The recording at the cup of tea event has upset that strategy, so IMO, what we're seeing is a panicky reaction to things slipping out of control.
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Hard News: The perils of political confidence, in reply to Russell Brown,
It does come across as unfathomably contemptuous.
Unfathomably?
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Hard News: The perils of political confidence, in reply to merc,
hubris is going to always make for an Icarus moment
Put nicely by SF writer and historian Brian Aldiss, “hubris clobbered by Nemesis”.
While I'm on a brief classical roll, despite the depravity of many Emperors, I've loved the Roman custom of having a slave ride in the chariot of a general returning in a triumphal procession, whispering in his ear, "Remember that thou art a man."
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Hard News: We interrupt this broadcast ..., in reply to Rich Lock,
It also rather neatly illustrates how the real power has shifted from national government institutions to global corporates.
Also, I have to say, drawing the Weimar analogy a bit further, the pervasive disenchantment with established democratic institutions. On one hand, the Tea Party and Occupy movements are positive in that they represent “people power”, but on the other, they represent a disengagement with the traditional institutions of democracy that are further co-opted by corporations. The Tea Party itself has been thoroughly co-opted by the plutocrats now… and to extend the Weimar analogy still further, I’m worried.
In my opinion, the American constitutional system seems peculiarly and tragically ossified, with even the ancient British parliament having undergone more radical reform in recent years and that disengagement and disenchantment may get even worse. With no means to accommodate dissent, with the impossibility of gaining representation in Congress without access to a billion dollars, then America’s implosion into some dire state looks increasingly likely. I could use the word ‘fascism’, but I’m reluctant to do so – not because of Godwin (if he’s annoyed, he can start his own blog), but because it might be something else, something unpredictable.
And as you’ve noted, western governments are barely capable of putting men in space any more. But private companies are quite happily putting together thier own space programmes.
Well, since I consider exploration a noble endeavour, the shift of power from dysfunctional democracies to corporations is not an unmixed curse.
By the way, Blackwater has rebranded itself as Xe Services now, a cleverly meaningless brandname, like Executive Outcomes. Get ready for Stealth Everything. Bland brands, duckspeak, smiley-wavy…