Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

I'm off

It's off to foreign climes for me.  I leave, tomorrow, for a week in the sunshine of Umbria tomorrow (06.35 flight, so up at 03.35) and, with luck and a fair wind (as well as Johnny Terrorist keeping his head down for a day or two, and no 12-year-olds sneaking onto the flight or old women having nervous breakdowns and demanding to be taken to Cuba) I should, 24 hours from now, be somewhere north of Lake Trasimeno and nearing my destination.

I don't actually know precisely where that final destination is.  I know that it's half a mile from Spedalicchio, near Umbertide, and I know my way there from memory.  After that, I suppose I shall just have to search every place half a mile from the village until I find an empty one that looks a bit like the pictures.

While I love nearby Florence, Cortona, Perugia and the rest, I have been lucky enough to have been there before, and intend to spend a lot of time lazing by the villa's pool.  I have stacks of books, a few worthy but most pulpy classic science fiction series that I have always meant to read, suggested by the Traveller Mailing List: Falkenberg's Legion, Honor Harrington, S.M.Stirling and Peter F. Hamilton.  For once, I have little urge to broaden my mind.  I am all about the relaxation.

This is the first of four weeks' of holidays I am taking between now and the end of the year: I prefer to delay my gratification with the best of them.  So a month from now I'm off to Boston.  Makes the journey home more bearable if you know it's only a few weeks until the next one.  On that note, I am considering how practical a long weekend in Athens is at some point this winter.  I have been trying to visit the great Imperial capitals of Europe, and I still have Athens, St Petersburg and Berlin to go.  London was easy; Paris, Istanbul, Rome and Pella are all done. Madrid doesn't really count on the basis of underachieving, and Sweden was far too localised and fleeting in its dominance to assert a candidate, be it Stockholm or Sigtuna.

Nigerian 419 Scammer Baiting

Following a plea from an unfortunate resident of Lagos, I decided to try my hand at that most popular of internet passtimes: 419 scammer-baiting.  It is more fun than I thought.  Our tale involves curries, charity, lechery, Indians, Canadians and mooses.  And let's not forget the great British schools of Eton, Slugbash and St Dump's.  All play their part.

As my friend Jennifer said: it's a wonder that these scammers believe anyone who ever replies to them.  That, of course, is the ultimate goal of baiting them: to raise the cost and risk of their transactions to such an extent that it ceases to be worthwhile.

Here is the history of my blossoming friendship with the saintly woman we shall call Sister Sara Walliams...

Taliban Problems? Call 911

An interesting tendency during the last few weeks of the Taliban's disastrous summer offensive is that of local tribesmen phoning in the locations of Taliban raiding parties and tactical-level bases.

I had been wondering for some time why quite so much effort was going into providing Afghanistan with cell-phone coverage: several companies have been investing in cell-phone infrastructure, with good urban and patchy but increasing rural coverage the result after about a year.

It now becomes clearer.  As any viewer of spaghetti westerns knows, it's great being a bandit in a small and isolated village where the locals can't send word for help.  But the Magnificent Seven would have been a lot less necessary if the locals, with one phone call, could have arranged a helicopter assault force to rescue them within three hours of the bandits first appearing, with a nice thank-you payment in dollars from the government when the job is done.

So that's what's happening.  Johnny Taliban and his thirty or forty armed banditos roll into town, threaten the locals, steal food and money and string up some televisions from a makeshift gibbet.  Previously, all that could happen was that the locals would put up with this for a week or two, then once the Islamists had left they could make some pointless and fruitless complaint to the Kabul authorities the next time anyone was in the next town with landlines.

But now the local tribe has a mobile phone or two, even if they can only get two bars of coverage, and that by standing in a three-foot square area on top of Uncle Karzai's Camel Stop.  So when the choice is between putting up with the Taliban and losing money and livestock (as well as having his collection of Reo Speedwagon cassettes confiscated) or dialing in a quick call to NATO's Grass-Up-A-Taliban line and being paid muchos cashola as a result, your average Pushtun doesn't really need much encouragement.

The other wise move vis-a-vis the grassroots support situation was that we decided to stop trying to burn down the opium fields.  Putting at risk, not just troops in Helman province, but our entire regional strategy was a high price to pay for providing another 2.3% price-support to the UK heroin market.  But that's another story.

David Icke is Madder Than Ever

Yes, David Icke is madder than ever.

I know that it is a tricky one to call: after all, in 1991 he was predicting that the Isle of Man would be swallowed by the ocean by the mid-90s, that turquoise was the holy colour, and that he was, not to put too fine a point on it, the son of God.

For non-British people, David Icke was a major sports commentator and ex-footballer in the 1980's.  He was famously rude, but suddenly became famously nice and joined the Green Party, who made him their public face, much to their eternal embarassment.  Which is a shame, because they rather suited each other.  Imagine that John Madden suddenly announced that he was "channelling the Christ spirit", and was going to Nantucket with two wives to found a commune.

I had wondered if he was still going, and had taken a quick googlewalk through linked sites.  I first went to his own site, but it was so mad, and so filled with cheap photoshoppery, that I looked elsewhere.  I had forgotten, of course, that Icke is as mad as two badgers fighting in a sack.  And it turns out that photoshopped pictures are his new stock-in-trade.

I had thought that he was less mad.  I remember him stating in the late 90s that he'd been a bit mad before, but now he was fine and that stuff about the Isle of Man was all a bit embarassing now.  I had always suspected that his initial lunacy was linked to a change in medication for his post-professional-footballer's chronic pain, so I simply thought "extended psychotic episode, he's better now."  Ooooh, no.  he just wasn't mad enough to believe that the Isle of Man had been swallowed by the ocean without being noticed, and had found a new way to rationalise it.

Anyway, his current beliefs include (but are by no means limited to):

• The world is ruled by a reptilian race of manipulators, who want to set up a fascist government for the whole world.
• The reptiles include the Rothschilds, the British royal family, the Bush family...erm, Kris Kristofferson and, umm.. Boxcar Willie.  Really.  How deep does this rabbit-hole go?
• Speaking of which, David watched the Matrix and, not having been innoculated by previous exposure to French post-structuralism, thought it was real (509 pages.  Ouch.  Even Baudrillard only needed a couple of hundred.)
• The Jesuits shot Lincoln, and will elect a black Pope in 2008
• The Illuminatii control space.  Not sure how much.  It would seem to be more useful to control planets, but at least space is the ultimate Lebensraum.
• Oh yeah, they also funded Hitler.
• David thinks that the infamous fake, Protocols of The Elders of Zion, is real.  However, he claims not to be anti-Semitic, because they're not Jews, they're reptiles.  Nice get-out.
• Radio waves from mobile phones are being used to control our minds (uhhh.. tin foil hat, please!) and fluoride and aspartame are "excitotoxins", used to lower our brain functionality and make us amenable to being mind-controlled.

Obviously, there are one or two issues here.  For instance, if the world we perceive is an artificial construct fed to us to keep us quiet, why are the reptilian race trying to conquer it?  Why not feed us a version without them, so that those so super-smart as Icke couldn't suspect their existence.  Come to that, why do they feed us a version which has Icke in it?  Maybe Icke is Neo!

David is also a great humourist.

Icke lives in a nightmare version of the world where the aliens from V have joined forces with the conspirators from the Da Vinci Code and machines from The Matrix to oppress us.  He really should visit the cinema less.  I am not looking forward to the day when he gets round to seeing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

You really should visit his site.  It has all the usual new age loony stuff: adverts for "how to turn water into hydration" particularly appealed to me (presumably you pay up and get the answer back "drink it").

But don't trust me: I am packed full of aspartame from a Diet Coke, my mobile phone interrupted me writing this very sentence (true.. they see everything!) and I still have minty-fresth breath from my fluoride toothpaste.  So let's leave the last word to Mr Icke:

"We also see how NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasedena was set-up by Jack Parsons - a rocket engineer who was a disciple of Aleister Crowley. From the late 1940s onwards, an unholy alliance of O.T.O devotees, NAZIs and senior 33rd degree Freemasons dupe the American taxpayer of billions of dollars and fake several moon missions in order to further their work on secret 'black budget' operations - a series of secret space programmes designing space vehicles and weapons systems to thwart attacks by alien craft... For the first time on film we see the 'Baby Shuttle' - a small space shuttle which fits inside the payload of the existing space shuttle and is then released into outer space for covert operations."

Monkeys That Talk

I poo-pooed the idea when it turned up on my search logs, but I stand corrected.  "which website can you type something and the monkey says it"?  Here.  Ta to Concublogger.

Truly the crowning achievement of our civilisation.

The French Attack Dover With Rockets

Imagine that thousands of Frenchmen, with German, Dutch, Irish and Italian colleagues, decided that they hated Britain so much that they would fire rockets at it.  Imagine, then, that dozens of launchers started lobbing these rockets at Dover and Ramsgate, occasionally even Canterbury. Every day, a few British men, women and children would die in these attacks, and the force - let's call them le Parti de Dieu - would assert that they wouldn't stop until every British person was dead or had moved to America.  In this thought experiment, the French government steers clear of the whole thing, and moves its own troops south, away from the English Channel, leaving le Parti de Dieu in charge of a trip of northern France.  This goes on for years. Some cross-channel raids snatch a couple of young soldiers, who will probably be tortured to death on camera.

In this situation, we in Britain would react.  We might try the security council, and they might pass a resolution saying le Parti de Dieu had to disarm and leave the border areas in French control.  But they would ignore this reolution.  They might be getting funding, training and weapons from the Serbs and Montenegrans, who use them to divert attention from their quest for nuclear weapons capability.  Let's say that they have 15,000 missiles left, the capability to kill thousands more civilians, and the expressed desire never to stop until Britain no longer exists.

I dare say that Britain might retaliate.  I would suggest that it would take a lot less than six years of this provocation before we did.  And when we started to do so, we wouldn't stop while le Parti de Dieu was still firing rockets and calling for our destruction.  Not while they made statements like "today soldiers of the 2nd Brigade launched eleven rockets at the British tyrants, sending many of them for judgement before God.  Thus we move towards the destruction of the British state and the final annihilation of the British race.  We also demand that they cease their reckless aggression and agree to immediately stop firing at us."

As I said before: everyone with an interest in the middle east outside of the terrorist-funding states of Syria and Iran knows that Israel must be given time to deal with Hezbollah.  This is why the Saudis are not demanding a ceasefire or threatening oil supplies.  This is why the Jordanians and Egyptians, the Yemenis and Algerians, the Morrocans and Tunisians, the Pakistanis and Indonesians and even the Palestinians are all so remarkably quiet.  This is why the Lebanese Prime Minister is "refusing to negotiate" until Israel stops unilaterally: he wants rid of Hezbollah more than Israel does.  This is why the Qataris, a security council member this year, have not proposed any embarassing resolutions forcing anyone to veto an immediate ceasefire.  And every civilian who has been forced to stay in the Lebanese south, and dies under (worryingly reckless) Israeli attacks, can look to Iran and Syria for the reasons why it happened.