I do love a good conspiracy theory, the nuttier the better and so i like all the 'proof' that the Moon landings were faked, that the Royals are a bunch of lizards and Elvis is stil alive but sometimes the theories do have a profound effect on the rest of us such as the anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers and the 5G spreading Covid-19 and then it stops being a bunch of weirdos being weird to having real life effects.
It is easy to think that the conspiracy theory believers are a bit thick or useful idiots but that is too simple according to Psychologists who believe that there is a bit more going on.
Professor Karen Douglas, from the University of Kent, has studied conspiracy theories and those who are fooled by them and considers that people who are taken in by the theories that include the suggestion that the Coronavirus was made in a Chinese laboratory turn to conspiracy theories when important psychological needs are not met.
'People are drawn to conspiracy theories when they feel powerless or are anxious' states Professor Karen 'and related to the need to maintain a positive view of the self and the groups they belong to'.
She adds that narcissistic people are more likely to believe conspiracy theories where the central core is that something is being covered up with the general idea that authorities and outside groups cannot be trusted and are hiding the truth.
It does seem to be more prevalent in the United States but she considers that to be more political, with left and right wing groups more suspicious of anyone not as left or right wing as them and the political extreme not so fierce in the UK.
The bad news is that once a conspiracy theory has gained traction it is hard to change peoples minds regardless of how irrational or absurd the claims are, mainly because people do not like to think they have been hoodwinked and 'their group' are wrong as it to affirms or validate their political views, despite the evidence staring them in the face that they are.
Researchers term conspiracy theory believers as suffering 'schizotypy', traits that include a tendency to be untrusting, ideologically eccentric and prone to having unusual perceptual experiences such as sensing stimuli that are not actually present and is a mild form of schizophrenia.
Probably best to remember the next time someone tries to tell you that Bill Gates is trying to kill us all with vaccines or that Global Warming is a myth, hitting them with logic or evidence won't work, just smile and hide the sharp objects because you should never argue with a crazy mind.
Saturday, 9 May 2020
Special Guest Blogger: King Charles I
I was born to a Scottish King in Fife but when Elizabeth died childless and the English throne was up for grabs it was my dad James who grabbed it and i also nicked off pretty sharpish to England with him and never returned to Scotland again, too damn cold and i never understood a word they said. My downfall began when i married a Roman Catholic and quarreled with the Parliament of England who sought to curb my belief in the divine right of Kings which pretty much gave me the right to do what the hell i wanted so i dismissed the lot of them and imprisoned a few for good measure.
I did relent and recall Parliament a year later but they started up saying i couldn't imprison them without trial, couldn't levy my own taxes or impose martial law on civilians and couldn't quarter troops in their homes so i dismissed them all again, this time for eleven years.
My problem was without the Government to collect taxes, my funds were getting rather low so i began 'selling' Knighthoods to everyone who earned £40 or more and fined anyone who earned above that but didn't pay for a Knighthood.
That got the back up of pretty much everyone, the rich hated me for screwing them over for money, the Government hated me for sacking them, all and the plebs hated me for marrying a Catholic and not being Protestant enough.
Left without choice, i reopened Parliament again and the first thing they did was pass a law to make it illegal for me to shut Parliament and when i tried to arrest five of them for being dicks, they raised a damned army against me called The Roundheads so i got my own army, gave them the cool name The Cavaliers but then they got Cromwell's New Model Army involved and trumped me in the cool name and being better at war stakes and i was captured, accused of high treason and my head forcibly removed from my body.
That backfired spectacularly as what came next was the Commonwealth of England ruled by Lord Protector and religious fruitcake Olly Cromwell who disbanded Parliament and which was only reinstated 11 non-Christmas's later after he died and the monarchy restored to my son Charles II so all a bit pointless really, they should have just let me get on with it.
Friday, 8 May 2020
Why The Worrying Number Of New Cases
The start of the Governments Coronavirus briefing is always grim when they read out the deaths and infections over the previous 24 hours but i do wonder why, despite six weeks of lock-down, why over 6,000 people a day are still catching Coronavirus?
The Prime Minister is to announce a possible relaxing of the measures on Sunday although they have been keen to say it is a 'roadmap' and not what many are expecting, an end to it all.
Of course we are testing more, not the 100,000 a day the Government announced, but around 75% of that figure so more people are being diagnosed with the disease and the UK's lock-down hasn't been as severe as in other countries, we have been allowed to leave our homes for exercise unlike in Italy and Spain and many people have used this as cover to carry on as normal, we have all seen pictures of sunbathers and groups converging in parks.
Key workers, especially NHS and Care workers, are more exposed to the virus and a large number of the newly infected are from this demographic, mainly due to the woeful lack of proper PPE to wear while at work.
The lagtime between contracting the virus and symptoms showing is as much as 14 days and not everyone shows symptoms but are still infectious so the virus is still in circulation in communities despite lockdown, this much is becoming apparent in Care Homes and as the UK was one of the last places to go into lock-down, the Virus had free-reign to spread further before the restrictive measures came in.
There is no prefect way to prevent catching the virus, you could wash your hands every 20 minutes but if you touch a contaminated surface and then touch your face between washes, that's you caught, but with 6,000 new case and deaths sadly hovering around 600 per day, something isn't working right.
The Prime Minister is to announce a possible relaxing of the measures on Sunday although they have been keen to say it is a 'roadmap' and not what many are expecting, an end to it all.
Of course we are testing more, not the 100,000 a day the Government announced, but around 75% of that figure so more people are being diagnosed with the disease and the UK's lock-down hasn't been as severe as in other countries, we have been allowed to leave our homes for exercise unlike in Italy and Spain and many people have used this as cover to carry on as normal, we have all seen pictures of sunbathers and groups converging in parks.
Key workers, especially NHS and Care workers, are more exposed to the virus and a large number of the newly infected are from this demographic, mainly due to the woeful lack of proper PPE to wear while at work.
The lagtime between contracting the virus and symptoms showing is as much as 14 days and not everyone shows symptoms but are still infectious so the virus is still in circulation in communities despite lockdown, this much is becoming apparent in Care Homes and as the UK was one of the last places to go into lock-down, the Virus had free-reign to spread further before the restrictive measures came in.
There is no prefect way to prevent catching the virus, you could wash your hands every 20 minutes but if you touch a contaminated surface and then touch your face between washes, that's you caught, but with 6,000 new case and deaths sadly hovering around 600 per day, something isn't working right.
Strange Journey Of The 15 Page Intelligence Dossier
With 270,000 deaths worldwide from Coronavirus, it is quite right that we ask the question of how this came about.
Donald Trump seems to know the answer and is blaming China for it but that is widely expected to be a ruse to deflect attention from his own shambolic and embarrassing reaction which has left America with the highest death toll in the World.
When asked if he has evidence to back up his claim that it began in a Chinese laboratory, he has cited 'significant evidence' and claims a 15 page intelligence document compiled by Western Governments on China's culpability that overwhelmingly points to the virus having leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Interestingly, the US director of national intelligence issuing a very public statement disparaging this theory, as has the Australians and the British who are quickly stating that they were not part of the 'intelligence document'.
The journey of the document is especially interesting once it is not known that media outlets involved are all owned by big friend of Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch.
Last Weekend, the Australian Daily Telegraph launched a 'World Exclusive' with a leaked 15-page research dossier on the Chinese government’s fault for the outbreak, referring indirectly to the 'Five Eyes intelligence community' of the US, UK, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand intelligence services, three of which have since come out and denied they are involved.
The 'exclusive' asserts that the research dossier validates the claim by Donald Trump that the virus came from the Wuhan laboratory, a claim repeated by the Murdoch journalist who broke the 'exclusive' on the Murdoch-owned US cable TV network Fox News, interviewed by Trump’s personal favourite presenter and cheerleader, Tucker Carlson, who agrees that the dossier 'is confirmation of what we’ve suspected'.
So the dossier which was leaked from the White House to a Murdoch newspaper, is then resold back into the US political audience by the very same Murdoch media as a document with the Worlds intelligence agencies involved but was actually full of theories from an under pressure American Administration who now cite the dossier laundered through a foreign nation, as evidence.
The reaction of denial of the theory from the Australian, British and Trumps own intelligence community has been swift and the Worlds Health Organisation say that there is no evidence to suggest that the Coronavirus leaked from a Chinese research laboratory nor have they received any data or specific evidence from the U.S. government relating to the purported origin of the virus.
Trump's significant evidence is therefore his own theory, handed to a friendly media outlet with dubious links to intelligence and then repackaged back to his his own citizens as evidence.
I'm sure some will fall for it, Trump is relying on enough Americans doing just that, but the intelligence community has made a good start on dismissing it as a work of fiction, they just may need to shout it louder to make sure.
Donald Trump seems to know the answer and is blaming China for it but that is widely expected to be a ruse to deflect attention from his own shambolic and embarrassing reaction which has left America with the highest death toll in the World.
When asked if he has evidence to back up his claim that it began in a Chinese laboratory, he has cited 'significant evidence' and claims a 15 page intelligence document compiled by Western Governments on China's culpability that overwhelmingly points to the virus having leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Interestingly, the US director of national intelligence issuing a very public statement disparaging this theory, as has the Australians and the British who are quickly stating that they were not part of the 'intelligence document'.
The journey of the document is especially interesting once it is not known that media outlets involved are all owned by big friend of Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch.
Last Weekend, the Australian Daily Telegraph launched a 'World Exclusive' with a leaked 15-page research dossier on the Chinese government’s fault for the outbreak, referring indirectly to the 'Five Eyes intelligence community' of the US, UK, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand intelligence services, three of which have since come out and denied they are involved.
The 'exclusive' asserts that the research dossier validates the claim by Donald Trump that the virus came from the Wuhan laboratory, a claim repeated by the Murdoch journalist who broke the 'exclusive' on the Murdoch-owned US cable TV network Fox News, interviewed by Trump’s personal favourite presenter and cheerleader, Tucker Carlson, who agrees that the dossier 'is confirmation of what we’ve suspected'.
So the dossier which was leaked from the White House to a Murdoch newspaper, is then resold back into the US political audience by the very same Murdoch media as a document with the Worlds intelligence agencies involved but was actually full of theories from an under pressure American Administration who now cite the dossier laundered through a foreign nation, as evidence.
The reaction of denial of the theory from the Australian, British and Trumps own intelligence community has been swift and the Worlds Health Organisation say that there is no evidence to suggest that the Coronavirus leaked from a Chinese research laboratory nor have they received any data or specific evidence from the U.S. government relating to the purported origin of the virus.
Trump's significant evidence is therefore his own theory, handed to a friendly media outlet with dubious links to intelligence and then repackaged back to his his own citizens as evidence.
I'm sure some will fall for it, Trump is relying on enough Americans doing just that, but the intelligence community has made a good start on dismissing it as a work of fiction, they just may need to shout it louder to make sure.
Special Guest Blogger: Mohamed Atta
I wasn't always a terrorist, i had a masters degree in Urban Planning and planned to go into that field before i answered the call of Al Queada and flew American Airlines flight 11 into the north tower of New York City’s World Trade Center.I arrived in America in 2000 and began flight training and met up with my fellow terrorists in 2001 to finalise the hijacking plansbut i did have second thoughts.
I thought out aloud at one meeting that what Al Queada actually needed was an image update and i found that people expressed a strong dislike of being randomly blown up which could explain why we were not getting anywhere.
They seemed amazed that keeping whole populations in permanent terror makes them agree with your cause less rather than more and as our cause was to stop the Western oppression and killing of Muslim people in the Middle East, by being part of Al Queada which was actively killing Muslims in the Middle East, we were as bad as the Americans.
We pondered it over a coffee and the fact that with America's batshit crazy gun laws, with a population of 320 million and the average annual death toll of 40,000, no Americans would be left as they would all of shot each other dead by the year 10,176 but patience was never a virtue of ours so we decided what the Jahannam, we wasn't going to waste all those flying lessons so on September 11, 2001, three hijackers and i boarded flight 11, hijacked it and sent it spinning into the World Trade Center.
Things went well, despite the vast majority of us 19 in total being Saudi Arabian, America invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and both of those wars are still bubbling along nicely and Al Queada went from strength to strength but i do also have regrets.
Firstly it made The Very Hungry Caterpillar famous and i hated that book, secondly they always use that iffy passport photograph of me which makes look like a proper sourpuss and thirdly, i never did get my promised 72 virgins.
Thursday, 7 May 2020
Special Guest Blogger: King Edward I
You may know me as the evil king in Braveheart, the foul-tempered English King who marched into Scotland and started kicking all the Scottish peasants around but what the movie doesn't show is that i went to Scotland to mediate on a civil war at the request of the Scots.That's right, Scotland begged me to come up and start meddling in their affairs and being 13th Century England, we arrived tooled up and they were asking for it, actually literally asking for it.
The film also doesn't mention the previous decades where i wrote a crapload of laws that revolutionized England forever, creating the first constitution and eased the national debt with a series of stringent anti-usury laws? See, those bits never get a mention, it's all kicking around Scots ponces with blue painted faces dressed in skirts.
How William Wallace gets all the sympathy i will never know, he never drafted complex legislation so that the people can enjoy stable governance for centuries afterwards, he just shouted 'they may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom' just before we took his freedom and his head and plonked it on a spike at the Tower of London.
Although i was nicknamed The Hammer of the Scots, it wasn't just the Scottish i had a problem with though, i fought a war with the Welsh Prince Llywelyn ap Gruffudd and his equally ridiculously named brother Dafydd ap Gruffydd and after killing them both, claimed Wales as part of England and as that was going on i issued the Edict of Expulsion, expelling all Jews from England.
The Jews were minted as they were money lenders to the aristocracy and so by kicking them all out, i took over the debts and so the money came to me instead which came in handy for invading France.
I died on the battlefield fighting the Scots once again, nothing heroic, i died of dysentery and my dying wish for for my heart to be removed and carried to the Holy Land but it never made it that far, ending up with the rest of me in Westminster Abbey.
Wednesday, 6 May 2020
Rehabilitation Of Bush, But Not Blair
Even four Prime Ministers after he left office, Tony Blair is still derided and abused wherever he goes in the UK for what he did in 2001 but it seems like George W Bush never really suffered the brickbats that Tony did, not in America anyway.
On my blog here i mused why, at the Invictus Games in America, the disabled soldiers were applauding him on stage when it was a result of his lies that they were missing limbs and therefore eligible to take part in the Invictus Games in the first place.
American lefties seem to have short memories and are fawning over Bush for putting out a video calling for compassion and national unity during the Coronavirus crisis, declaring: 'We are not partisan combatants. We are human beings' which would sound better if he wasn't the guy who wasn't quite so concerned about the human beings in Iraq when he flat out lied about the weapons of mass destruction to bomb them into little biddy pieces.
Then there was Afghanistan and he didn't seem that concerned as he botched the response to Hurricane Katrina but suddenly, to some, with the awful Trump in office, suddenly Bush doesn’t seem quite so bad.
So they both are renown liars but whereas Bush didn't aim any misspelled tweets at people he didn’t like, Trump hasn't started any wars but both are as awful as each other in their own ways, just that Bush killed as many as a million foreigners in fabricated wars, Trump seems quite happy to see his own kind die as long as he can get re-elected, 71,000 and counting at present.
Maybe the Americans are just more forgiving of their warmongering leaders than us British but i hope Blair looks at Bush's rehabilitation and wonders why the former President is forgiven while he is still treated as something nasty the British people trod in and then he must go, oh yeah, the wars i lied about, that will be it.
On my blog here i mused why, at the Invictus Games in America, the disabled soldiers were applauding him on stage when it was a result of his lies that they were missing limbs and therefore eligible to take part in the Invictus Games in the first place.
American lefties seem to have short memories and are fawning over Bush for putting out a video calling for compassion and national unity during the Coronavirus crisis, declaring: 'We are not partisan combatants. We are human beings' which would sound better if he wasn't the guy who wasn't quite so concerned about the human beings in Iraq when he flat out lied about the weapons of mass destruction to bomb them into little biddy pieces.
Then there was Afghanistan and he didn't seem that concerned as he botched the response to Hurricane Katrina but suddenly, to some, with the awful Trump in office, suddenly Bush doesn’t seem quite so bad.
So they both are renown liars but whereas Bush didn't aim any misspelled tweets at people he didn’t like, Trump hasn't started any wars but both are as awful as each other in their own ways, just that Bush killed as many as a million foreigners in fabricated wars, Trump seems quite happy to see his own kind die as long as he can get re-elected, 71,000 and counting at present.
Maybe the Americans are just more forgiving of their warmongering leaders than us British but i hope Blair looks at Bush's rehabilitation and wonders why the former President is forgiven while he is still treated as something nasty the British people trod in and then he must go, oh yeah, the wars i lied about, that will be it.
Special Guest Blogger: Nelson Mandela
Something which almost everyone gets wrong about me was that i fighting apartheid for the black South Africans but i was fighting for all South Africans regardless of colour, it was just that the Black South Africans were the most downtrodden.Before i took up the fight i trained as a lawyer but i was always inspired by the writings of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong where the overiding emphasis was on everyone being equal and the Communist Party gatherings was the only place that Europeans, Africans, Indians, and Coloured's mixed as equals.
I joined the ANC after the whites only government established apartheid after a general election in which only whites were permitted to vote, and i began advocating action such as boycotts and strikes.
We then turned to more direct action such as acts of sabotage, bombing military installations, power plants, telephone lines, and transport links at night, when civilians were not present.
The police, acting on a CIA tip off of where i was hiding arrested me, the Americans had me down as a Communist and US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher both considered me and the ANC a terrorist organisation and supported the South African regimes suppression.
It was on my approaching 70th birthday that things began to change with the new President, F. W. de Klerk, releasing me in 1990 after 27 years in prison.
Together we negotiated an end to apartheid which resulted in the general election which led the ANC to victory and i became President.
I preached forgiveness with the emphasis on reconciliation between the country's racial groups and gave many speeches declaring our commitment to peace between the black and white communities.
During my lifetime, I dedicated myself to fighting against white dominating blacks and blacks dominating whites, my dream was of a democratic and free nation in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities and we have some way still to go.
Tuesday, 5 May 2020
Premier League Still Undecided
The Premier League have been in discussions on how they are going to finish the football season but they have yet to reach any agreements because the clubs towards the bottom of the league want relegation scrapped and will literally pick up their ball and take it home if they don't agree to it.
As i'm no fan of Leeds, i don't care about them missing out on promotion if nobody is relegated, feel a bit sick for WBA though, their manager Slavan Bilic is brilliantly mad.
Today's proposal is that games will be over 70 minutes rather than the normal 90 and be played at a neutral venue, behind closed doors to deter large crowds from turning up, so no fans, a sterile environment, they could just play every game at Tottenham's stadium but other suggestions include a decommissioned oil rig and somewhere unaffected by the virus which leaves pretty much the North and South Poles and who wouldn't want to see John Terry mauled by a polar bear as he stands on the sidelines.
One solution could be Richard Branson is looking to offload his island to keep his airplane fleet going, the Premier League need somewhere in the middle of nowehere to play their games...where's the issue?
It does seem that the Premier League is going to leave no stone unturned to get this football season finished but they know that for all their planning, one footballer goes down with Coronavirus and that's the final whistle on that.
Maybe they should get one player from each team who is really good at FIFA 20 and play it out that way or just cancel the season and dish out the trophies alphabetically, as an Arsenal fan i would reluctantly accept that for the good of the game you understand.
As i'm no fan of Leeds, i don't care about them missing out on promotion if nobody is relegated, feel a bit sick for WBA though, their manager Slavan Bilic is brilliantly mad.
Today's proposal is that games will be over 70 minutes rather than the normal 90 and be played at a neutral venue, behind closed doors to deter large crowds from turning up, so no fans, a sterile environment, they could just play every game at Tottenham's stadium but other suggestions include a decommissioned oil rig and somewhere unaffected by the virus which leaves pretty much the North and South Poles and who wouldn't want to see John Terry mauled by a polar bear as he stands on the sidelines.
One solution could be Richard Branson is looking to offload his island to keep his airplane fleet going, the Premier League need somewhere in the middle of nowehere to play their games...where's the issue?
It does seem that the Premier League is going to leave no stone unturned to get this football season finished but they know that for all their planning, one footballer goes down with Coronavirus and that's the final whistle on that.
Maybe they should get one player from each team who is really good at FIFA 20 and play it out that way or just cancel the season and dish out the trophies alphabetically, as an Arsenal fan i would reluctantly accept that for the good of the game you understand.
World's Intelligence Questions Trump's Intelligence
Donald Trump is not having a good Covid-19 crisis, he started off dismissing it then moved onto doing something about it weeks too late and then as the body bags from his awful decisions began to pile up, advised ingesting disinfectant so in an attempt to find someone else to blame, he tried the World Health Organisation but quickly discovered he had no support there as the other nations decided that a global health emergency is not the time to have a go at the one organisation whose job it is to fight global health emergencies.
Instead Trump has decided to point at China, where the pandemic started, and blame them for the 70,000 American deaths but instead of pointing out the way China dragged their feet alerting the rest of us about it, a position where Trump would have a strong point, he instead went straight to the crazy of Coronvairus being a result of a Chinese Laboratory experiment.
Saying he had strong evidence to prove his theory, the globes intelligence refused to believe him and said that there is no evidence to substantiate the claims.
Even the mysterious dossier of which Trump spoke of as 'proof' is full of right wing groups and media reports, many from Fox News which are reporting on Trump saying the Chinese created it in a lab which means his proof is the fact that he said it.
When Trump lapdog, Mike Pompeo, repeated the madness that there was 'a significant amount of evidence', the Chinese called him evil and his mumblings were insane and said the Trump administration was 'rushing to shift the blame, cheat votes and suppress China when their own domestic anti-epidemic efforts are a mess'.
A mess which see's Trump's madness cost 70,000 American their lives and sadly that total isn't stopping anytime soon which is why Trump is trying so desperately to get Americans to blame anyone else but him although China releasing this little video mocking him probably won't help matters.
Instead Trump has decided to point at China, where the pandemic started, and blame them for the 70,000 American deaths but instead of pointing out the way China dragged their feet alerting the rest of us about it, a position where Trump would have a strong point, he instead went straight to the crazy of Coronvairus being a result of a Chinese Laboratory experiment.
Saying he had strong evidence to prove his theory, the globes intelligence refused to believe him and said that there is no evidence to substantiate the claims.
Even the mysterious dossier of which Trump spoke of as 'proof' is full of right wing groups and media reports, many from Fox News which are reporting on Trump saying the Chinese created it in a lab which means his proof is the fact that he said it.
When Trump lapdog, Mike Pompeo, repeated the madness that there was 'a significant amount of evidence', the Chinese called him evil and his mumblings were insane and said the Trump administration was 'rushing to shift the blame, cheat votes and suppress China when their own domestic anti-epidemic efforts are a mess'.
A mess which see's Trump's madness cost 70,000 American their lives and sadly that total isn't stopping anytime soon which is why Trump is trying so desperately to get Americans to blame anyone else but him although China releasing this little video mocking him probably won't help matters.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)