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Betty Butterfield visits the mosque

2009-11-13T19:31:55+00:00

I'm informed that this dude used to be a Catholic priest.

Continue reading Betty Butterfield visits the mosque...

GUILTY

2009-11-13T11:40:56+00:00

The CIA has been found guilty in that Italian kidnap case we mentioned a while back.

'An Italian court hearing criminal charges against 26 American officials and a smaller group of Italians arising out of a CIA extraordinary rendition has ruled today. The case relates to the CIA's snatching of a Muslim cleric known as Abu Omar off the streets of Milan in 2003.'
- read the full story at Harper's.

'...a type of hell...'

2009-11-12T14:21:02+00:00

'As an Afghan woman who was elected to Parliament, I am in the United States to ask President Barack Obama to immediately end the occupation of my country. Eight years ago, women's rights were used as one of the excuses to start this war. But today, Afghanistan is still facing a women's rights catastrophe. Life for most Afghan women resembles a type of hell that is never reflected in the Western mainstream media. In 2001, the U.S. helped return to power the worst misogynist criminals, such as the Northern Alliance warlords and druglords. These men ought to be considered a photocopy of the Taliban.'

- read the full opinion piece by Malalai Joya in the Mercury News.

Malalai Joya 'was elected to Afghanistan"s parliament in 2005 and kicked out in 2007 by the warlords'.

Blather, Rinse, Repeat: An Ethnography of Conspiracy Theory

2009-11-12T10:11:13+00:00

(image by Aaron Escobar, used under a Creative Commons license)

This is the video of the talk I did at the Dublin Paracon 2009. Thanks to Mark Guerin for processing this for us!

This talk resulted from a course I'm doing right now for a MsC. in e-learning at the University of Edinburgh.

Continue reading Blather, Rinse, Repeat: An Ethnography of Conspiracy Theory...

Kat Penny Dramarama

2009-11-12T01:26:23+00:00

Jane Ruffino posted this on Facebook and it is so great to watch I basically commented, 'right I am putting this on blather.net'. I can't embed it properly for some reason but you can manage can't you?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FmVopEs9yI

My first reaction:

The guy accused Kat Penny of 'standing there' when he was clearly sitting down. The politician who dresses like Prince then seemed to imply that Kat is 'a journalist'. What is this shit?

War and the Noble Savage

2009-11-11T11:15:11+00:00

A fascinating new book from blatherbot Gyrus. I attended his talk on this a few weeks back and was seriously impressed - not least by his challenges on the orthodoxy of Steven Pinker and others self-appointed luminaries who comment on issues of violence in our society.

Continue reading War and the Noble Savage...

Hardy Bucks: As sick as a plane to Lourdes

2009-11-09T11:27:34+00:00

While I was summering in high latitudes, the whole country was apparently up in arms over Hardy Bucks, a groundbreaking documentary series, set in the western Irish city of Castletown. I was barely off the plane before the sister was on to me about the "Hardy Bucks". I thought it was some form of extreme bookbinding. But no.

There was a time when RTE would miss out on beautiful opportunities like this one, but they seem to have some good heads above in Montrose at the moment. In a rare of example of not missing out on a beautiful opportunity , RTE named Hardy Bucks the winner of the Storyland competition. I strongly suggest you watch all nine episodes... and wet yourself laughing.

Hardy Bucks on Youtube
Hardy Bucks on Facebook

Hardy Bucks on Wikipedia (includes episode guide"

Storyland: Hardy Bucks on RTE

Wilfred - the Pot Smoking Dog

2009-11-08T18:38:25+00:00

This is one of the most wonderfully twisted things I've seen in a while. Wilfred is an Australian TV show - that features a pet dog that swears, smokes pot, and watches DVDs. I don't want to give any more away. Watch it for yourself...

Wilfred on Wikipedia
Wilfred Episode guide

Bringing Cannabis to Hempstown

2009-11-08T16:03:38+00:00

From the RTE website on November 3rd:

Cannabis with a potential street value of €1 million was seized by gardaí and Revenue Customs Service officers in Hempstown, Co Wicklow, yesterday afternoon.

The 100kg cannabis - in resin form, was smuggled from Holland. But one is given to wonder if the dealers reckoned that no one would ever think of looking in HEMPstown, or if they'd been attempting an Irish answer to the idiom "bringing coals to Newcastle".

From the RTE website »

From The Irish Times »

Karzai's Smack-dealing Brother Works for...

2009-10-29T15:49:24+00:00

Hamid Karzai, 'president' of occupied Afghanistan, well-loved for legalizing rape and record-breaking election fraud, has a brother called Ahmed Wali Karzai. Now, it has been said in some media outlets for years that that guy is a prominent heroin dealer. See the junkies slumped on the ground in your street? That's where the stuff comes from. The big news, though, is that Ahmed Wali Karzai is not only a gangster but is on the payroll of... the CIA. Here's the story in the New York Times. The CIA have been paying him to run a terrorist, sorry, paramilitary force, the 'Kandahar Strike Force' but boys will be boys and gangs of drug dealers will be gangs of drug dealers, and in June they murdered the local police chief. No problem for the CIA, though. The untouchable asset Ahmed Wali Karzai is still on the payroll. It's not like he hasn't helped the Americans out. He kindly helped the DEA arrest an Afghan drug lord Noorzai in New York in 2005... so that he of course could take over Noorzai's drug business. That's the beautiful thing about paid informants.

Meanwhile, whether the media is telling you this or not, the USA continues to lose the war in Afghanistan, and has had to withdraw from Nuristan province.

IT at the CIA

2009-10-29T00:02:06+00:00

'Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Amazon, Twitter, Cisco, RIM--have nothing to fear from the creative brain trusts in the Federal business development units of SAIC, Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen or others whose names are emblazoned on shiny office towers up and down the Dulles Corridor here in Washington, who lead the IT industry in three-ring binder-bound Federal proposal production, and little else.'

- read the full story from ex-CIA agent Stephen Lee, at his blog CIA Examiner.

This music video makes me feel like I am dreaming. Same for you?

2009-10-27T22:33:17+00:00

'Violet span of welded flesh' -

In 1983, The Fall made a video for the song 'Wings', the b-side to their single 'Kicker Conspiracy'. In the bar, the band relax with a few pints. Mark in the back room, in some kind of 'alcove' (it looks like someone just wallpapered over a doorway) relates 'his' time travel experience while Brix laughs at length at something off-camera. Seeing as it was a non-album track and a b-side, there was no reason to make this video, which just adds to the weirdness. There are heads on the walls. To say nothing of the talk of wings. There are feathers in a vase... And is that an aerial shot of the pub, in a picture on the pub wall?

Barah Pal: A Visual Ethnography from India

2009-10-26T19:46:26+00:00

A photo collection by Jennifer Rosen, taken whilst filming a enthnographic documentary in Delhi and Rajasthan, Summer 2009.

Continue reading Barah Pal: A Visual Ethnography from India...

Donegal Democrat = Ireland's Daily Mail?

2009-10-26T16:03:04+00:00

Yes yes, we know that Ireland has its own Daily Mail, but since they were careful enough to distance themselves from the UK version and its delightful correspondent Jan Moir we should be careful to draw a distinction between them, eh?

Anyway, this from special blather reporter 'serafi':

Apologies for the shitty quality of the picture, it's from my soon to be old phone. Anyway, the Donegal Democrat displayed a hitherto secret homophobia with this headline. Or it might have been a typo; we'll only find out next week.

See image above.

Neapolis, Greece: Another Atlantis?

2009-10-26T10:24:56+00:00

(image by Giorgos Michalogiorgakis, used under a Creative Commons license)

Another Atlantis is on the horizon. From The Guardian:

Explored by an Anglo-Greek team of archaeologists and marine geologists and known as Pavlopetri, the sunken settlement dates back some 5,000 years to the time of Homer's heroes and in terms of size and wealth of detail is unprecedented, experts say.
"There is now no doubt that this is the oldest submerged town in the world," said Dr Jon Henderson, associate professor of underwater archaeology at the University of Nottingham. "It has remains dating from 2800 to 1200 BC, long before the glory days of classical Greece. There are older sunken sites in the world but none can be considered to be planned towns such as this, which is why it is unique."

Read the full story on The Guardian

From Blather's Map of the Weird:

View Blather.net's Map of the Weird in a larger map

Hat-tip to Mutate!

Also see:

Is Sardinia Atlantis?

Afghan women: it's worse for them now than under the Taliban (video)

2009-10-25T15:18:12+00:00

"...efforts in Afghanistan have done nothing for the vast majority of women there. Despite this, politicians, military leaders, and sadly even some misguided American feminist groups continue to use the plight of women in Afghanistan to justify more spending, more troops and more war. People who care for the people of Afghanistan have got to see this for what it is" - blog for the film Rethink Afghanistan by Brave New Films.

Part 5 of the film:

Blather.net at Dublin Paracon 2009

2009-10-21T16:23:30+00:00

The 2nd Dublin Paracon will take place at the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel, Golden Lane, Dublin 8 on Saturday November the 7th 2009. I'll be there giving a talk entitled 'Blather, Rinse, Repeat: An Ethnography of Conspiracy Theory'.

Update: online scrapbook from the talk added.

Continue reading Blather.net at Dublin Paracon 2009...

Kinderkreis: Danse Gooshers!

2009-10-19T11:50:59+00:00

'Ve vonts de munny Lewbowski'.

Continue reading Kinderkreis: Danse Gooshers! ...

Climate change in Ireland: The need to move beyond skepticism

2009-10-15T13:59:41+00:00

Photo: Dave Walsh. More about this image here...

Suffering from global warming fatigue? Considering the 30 percent drop in attendance rate at the Irish Skeptics talk on climate change in April, some might. Understandably so. Not only because of this feeling of having heard it all before... but also, living in Ireland even if you're one of the most environmentally concerned citizens, you might still find it hard to be really upset about the temperatures getting warmer. Rightly so? Well, this was actually the question addressed by Professor John Sweeney from the Department of Geography, NUI Maynooth in his talk "Climate change in Ireland: The need to move beyond skepticism".

Continue reading Climate change in Ireland: The need to move beyond skepticism...

War is Peace

2009-10-10T18:40:55+00:00

'It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different... A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This - although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense - is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: War is Peace.'

- Chapter III of 'The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism' by Emmanuel Goldstein, Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell.

Carls Sagan's 'A Glorious Dawn'

2009-10-08T09:51:43+00:00

I've had a flu this last while and spent some time in bed getting stuck into Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos', which I hadn't watched in many years. The dodgy special effects aside, it remains a masterpiece of film making. So, I was understandably all aflutter when I came across this gem:

Continue reading Carls Sagan's 'A Glorious Dawn'...

More about Bagram, Obama's Replacement Guantanamo

2009-10-06T14:33:30+00:00

'On Monday, one day after the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that the Obama administration was planning to introduce tribunals for the prisoners held in the U.S. prison at Bagram airbase, Afghanistan, the reason for the specifically-timed leaks that led to the publication of the stories became clear. The government was hoping that offering tribunals to evaluate the prisoners' status would perform a useful PR function, making the administration appear to be granting important rights to the 600 or so prisoners held in Bagram, and distracting attention from the real reason for its purported generosity: a 76-page brief to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia... submitted yesterday, in which the government attempted to claim that "Habeas rights under the United States Constitution do not extend to enemy aliens detained in the active war zone at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan."' - Andy Worthington, 'Is Bagram Obama's New Secret Prison?' read the full article on counterpunch.org.

Berlin Block Tetris

2009-10-04T19:08:16+00:00

Hat tip to Digital Urban

Continue reading Berlin Block Tetris...

Fantasies about Iran continue

2009-09-28T12:11:37+00:00

A 'secret uranium enrichment plant deep inside a mountain' the New York Times calls it. The 'serial deception of many years', the unspeakable Gordon Brown calls it, but all of this is deception itself. The existence of this 'secret', non-operational facility of the Iranians has been known to the US intelligence agencies for years, therefore they knew all about it when they issued the National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007 (pdf), you know, the one that showed that the Iranians had no nuclear weapons programme. Which means this secret plant is harmless junk from the past (Iran abandoned nuclear weapons research in 2003). The only reason Obama and Brown and all these other suits are suddenly yapping about it, like the lapdogs of war gnawing at the ankles of world peace, is because the other day the Iranians decided to tell the IAEA it was there. 'Beware politically motivated hype', says former weapons inspector Scott Ritter in his very good article in the Guardian. And never forget that the 'weapons of mass destruction' pundits were never expunged from the media after Iraqi WMDs were found not to exist, they are still taken seriously (by the media) and they'll resort to the same shite to get someone to invade Iran.

Irish Lake Monsters Ahoy!

2009-09-28T11:18:02+00:00

(image by mozzercork, used under a Creative Commons license)

Well, they might be. Tis hard to say.

Birds? American tourists? A nefarious Illuminati submarine? Make up your own mind:

Continue reading Irish Lake Monsters Ahoy!...

Latest Great Herzog Quote

2009-09-26T17:50:49+00:00

Werner Herzog's directed a 'remake' of Abel Ferrara's 1992 film Bad Lieutenant starring Nicolas Cage. Ferrara's reaction? 'I wish these people die in Hell. I hope they're all in the same streetcar, and it blows up.'

Herzog says he's never seen the original film, but 'I would like to meet the man... I have a feeling that if we met and talked, over a bottle of whisky, I should add, I think we could straighten everything out.'

Source: Hollywood Reporter.

Other great Herzog moments:
Getting shot: 'Not a significant bullet'.
'Just relax': the rescue of Joaquin Phoenix.
Penguin prostitutes in Antarctica: '...their real intention is to get the rock'.

The Sibel Edmonds Story in a Nutshell

2009-09-26T13:50:28+00:00

Former CIA and DIA officer Philip Giraldi has interviewed Sibel Edmonds (who? see the Blather series on Black Market Nukes). This is probably the most concise interview with her if you want to grasp what she has to say without watching her deposition. This story involves high level corruption in the US State Department and the Pentagon, and even touches upon Obama and Chicago. This story doesn't get much mainstream attention because it involves bipartisan corruption, i.e. from people on both sides of the American political divide. The interview actually goes a bit further than the recent deposition, in that Jan Schakowsky, the Democratic congresswoman from Illinois, gets named as the secretly bisexual congresswoman who slept with a Turkish agent who then tried to blackmail her...

The interview has been published by the American Conservative magazine.

Obama's Top Ten Financial Contributors Revealed

2009-09-25T11:16:46+00:00

And yes, you guessed it, the delightful Goldman Sachs ponied up almost a million dollars.

Full list here

Want to know why Goldman Sachs' contribution might be cause for concern?

From the Roling Stone :

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

Professor John Braine's Great Sugar Experiment

2009-09-23T09:25:56+00:00

Here, at Blather HQ, we have dedicated ourselves to scouring the wastes of the web, the jizz-troughs of the net and the sewerage pipes of cyberia to bring you, the plain people of Ireland, the news that really matters.

And so, we present the staggering findings of our one-time colleague Professor John Braine and his definitive study of sugar sachets.

As I'm sure you've all long suspected, sachet's of sugar are not quite what they purport to be; a spoonful of sugar. Here at Braine labs, we took 12 typical specimens and measured them up against the real deal, a spoonful of sugar. Some did better than others but not a single one contained as much sweetness as a proper spoonful. Let's survey the evidence.

Read the full study here

Charles Darwin movie not to be shown in U.S.A.

2009-09-20T23:45:17+00:00

(Image by Kevin Dooley, used under a Creative Commons License)

This is the trailer for the forthcoming Icon Entertainment (formerly Mel Gibson's company) movie 'Creation'; the story of how Charles Darwin wrote 'On The Origin Of Species'. It has, according to its producer, been passed over for U.S. distribution because its subject is too offensive for certain American audiences.

Continue reading Charles Darwin movie not to be shown in U.S.A....