Many of the YouTube channels displaying AI art show imaginary scenes from SF films and TV as if they were made by different directors and conceptual artists. So there’s Star Trek as created by Stanley Kubrick or Wes Anderson, Dune as conceived by H.R. Giger and Star Wars as done by all the above plus Alejandro Jodorowski the Franco-Chilean comics writer and surrealist film maker, or otherwise in the style of 60s Surrealist Science Fiction. I can’t say I’m a fan of Eastenders, and it’s seemed to me for a long time that the soap would be more interesting to me, as a Science Fiction fan, if it had been designed by Giger, the artist who gave the world the Xenomorph of the Alien movies and Sil of the Species franchise, and directed by body horror maestro David Cronenberg. He’s the director behind such grim epics as Videodrome, about an underground TV channel specialising in murder, torture and sex, that produces disturbing hallucinations in its viewers; the Fly, in which David Goldblum turned into a humanoid insect after an accident with a teleportation device; Crash, about perverts getting their kicks from motor accidents; and the Naked Lunch. Very loosely based on the book by William S. Burroughs, this is about a pest exterminator who gets hooked on the ketamine he uses to kill the bugs and goes through a series of bizarre hallucinations. These include mugwumps, reptilian alien creatures, and a gay typewriter-beetle. One of his earlier films was The Brood, in which a psychologically disturbed woman exteriorises her trauma so that it warps her flesh, generating murderous homunculi. With those two designing and directing the chronicles of Albert Square, the soap would definitely become more interesting, but possibly only to horror and SF fans. Others may well be put off.
So, I sketched out for myself a few ideas of what Eastenders and its characters might look like with Giger and Cronenberg at the helm. These include Barbara Windso, the Queen Vic’s barmaid, as a Giger-esque alien growing out of the bar, Dot Cotton andPat Butcher as creatures like Sil from Species, and the flesh of one of the Mitchell brothers warping and twisting while a mugwump looks over his shoulder. I don’t know if you can see it, but on the second sketch of the Windsor creature I did the handles of the pumps as elongated babies, following their appearance in Giger’s art. And the bottles in the optics are supposed to be bio-engineered organs like the technology that appears in Cronenberg’s Existenz and following Giger’s biomechanical aesthetic. No, I’m not trying to give anyone nightmares, just having fun crossing genres. Besides, some of the storylines in Eastenders set in the real world are far more horrific than anything created from latex rubber and CGI animation.
The Hutchison effect is supposedly antigravity and other weird phenomena generated by a variety of electronic equipment. There are a number of videos about it on YouTube claiming that it may provide free, Zero-Point energy and that it has somehow been covered by the scientific and political establishment. I came across it in the 1990s when Hutchison and his experiments were just coming on to the scene. Hutchison – I’m afraid I’ve forgotten his first name – had collected a mish-mash of electronic equipment and the weird phenomena started when he set it all working. At that point he seemed not to be claiming to know how it worked, or which piece of the equipment, if any, was responsible for it. I think the parts as a whole totalled about £250,000 in cost, and so was extremely expensive to try to replicate. He made videos about the weird phenomena he claimed it produced which circulated about the paranormal/fringe science community. One of the Magonians went to one showing of one of these films, and weren’t impressed. There was footage of yoghurt purportedly rising up into the air. They said it looked like it had been poured out of the pots and then the film placed upside down so it appeared to flow upwards. It did, however, convinced Albert Budden, who wrote a book suggesting that the ‘Hutchison effect’ as it was being called, was the principle behind UFO flight. Then it seems the interest in Hutchison and his machines appeared to die away. I was surprised to find that it was still going.
I found this video on Robert Murray-Smith’s channel on YouTube. Smith shows how Hutchison faked the footage of a plastic balls placed between two Tesla coils appeared to be levitated into the air. You won’t be surprised to hear that it had nothing to do with electronic standing waves, and everything to do with concealed strings. Smith appends his video with an apology, stating that he doesn’t want to upset anyone nor cause people who believe in alternative physics and for whom he has nothing but respect, to question their beliefs. He just wants to point out that there are a lot of charlatans out trying to fool people.
This is another UFO-related video from the History channel, which has become notorious for having abandoned history in favour of programmes about UFOs. The Vimanas were flying ships recorded in the ancient Hindu scriptures about 1,800 years ago. Some Indian nationalists and that part of the UFO milieu interested in an ancient aliens and lost high technology have suggested that this indicates that Indians knew about aircraft and space travel from far back in their history. The video shows one aircraft engineer building a model of a Vimana as described by the Hindu scriptures and then testing it in a small window tunnel to see whether it would in fact fly. The test shows that it would have generated lift, and that it therefore would have been able to take flight. The engineer very carefully tells the interviewer this, and I noticed that he doesn’t actually say whether this indicated that it existed in reality or not. I’m sceptical of the Vimana, as I think they’re probably mythological. But this test is interesting.
I’ve also been looking through a few videos about flying saucers and unusual aircraft. One of these was this video posted by Mashable on their YouTube channel three years ago. It shows a saucer-shaped drone, the ADIFO – All-Directions Flying Object – zipping about the sky. The video claims it’s far more versatile and manouverable than conventional quadcopters as it can move in any direction immediately. It’s designers are, or were, looking for a partner to begin producing the aircraft industrially.
I wonder if this isn’t the only drone like this to have been developed and that some of them may be responsible for UFO sightings.
This is a very short video of just over two minutes or so, in which Konstantin Kisin of the Triggernometry YouTube channel argues that we should also teach schoolchildren about slavery in the rest of the world, such as Black Africa and Islam. He states that he’s often asked the question of whether slavery should be taught. He replies, ‘Yes, but we don’t teach slavery. We teach transatlantic slavery’. When asked himself about slavery and its history, he talks about his family’s history as slaves in Russia. He also remarks on Britain’s great achievement of ending slavery globally. Teaching children about slavery in the rest of the world doesn’t excuse of us of our crimes, which are many, but would provide the historical context for them.
Triggernometry is a very right-wing YouTube outfit, rather like the Lotus Eaters. However much I strongly disagree with their politics, Kisin is right about this issue. We don’t seem to be teaching slavery in schools, as he says. We only teach transatlantic slavery, and this gives the impression that slavery was only something the west did to Blacks and other people of colour. But it was practiced across the world and throughout history, and its apologists were well aware of that. They argued that it would be unfair and harmful for Britain to get rid of slavery when so many other countries and nations retained it. They didn’t think emancipation would work, and so denounced it as ‘visionary’ and ‘philanthropic’. Which translates it modern English as something like ‘cloud-cuckoo land’ and ‘do-gooding’.
I doubt, however, that teaching the global history of slavery would be welcomed. In fact, I can see it being denounced by Black and anti-racism activists as ‘racist’ and ‘islamophobic’. Teaching Black African complicity in the slave trade as well as their domestic systems of enslavement would run counter to the current demands for teaching Black history. Its advocates want an inspiring Black history of great empires, inventors and freedom fighters taught to raise Black pupils’ self-esteem and inspire them to do well at school and life. Furthermore, current racial activism is based on exploiting slavery as an historical grievance and a crime which still affects Black Americans and Brits. But this would be complicated by any teaching of the global history of slavery which would show it wasn’t unique to the west.
I was also struck by this comment to the video left by @darkryder13: ‘My grandfather was born a slave in the later days of the Ottoman Empire. His region of Greece wasn’t liberated until a little after he was born. He was lucky to grow up a free Greek, but he was born with the legal status of livestock in the Ottoman Empire. And this was in the 20th century, not the 19th.’
This is interesting, as you don’t hear about the mass enslavement of the indigenous White population by the Ottomans. Thomas Sowell mentions it in one of his books as well as the fact that Macedonia only banned slavery in 1919. This aspect of the Turkish empire seems to be ignored by historians.
I got this latest comment from the pro-democracy organisation about the National Conservatives’ conference earlier this afternoon. They make the point that their real views about democracy and transparency are shown by the way they stopped left-wing media organisations like Novara entrance, despite all their rhetoric about it. Other highlights included Reet Snob stating plainly that the Voter ID laws were all about gerrymandering and a speech by Cruella in which she went on about genitals. This last was dig at Starmer. Cruella said that she and Sunak knew that 100 per cent of women don’t have penises, unlike Starmer. Who, she joked, would stand as the trans candidate at the next election. Here’s the message
Dear David,
The National Conservativism (Nat-C) Conference kicked off yesterday, proving to be just as much of a weird, far-right cringe-fest as any of us could have anticipated. Despite one of the conference’s ostensible themes being “free speech”, they’ve shut their doors to journalists.
Once again, this clique of Conservatives is showing that their commitment to freedom of expression is ankle-deep. One of their core values crumbles to dust the moment anyone disagrees with them, in which case they become the delicate “snowflakes” they claim to detest.
Byline Times’ political editor Adam Bienkov, as well as the political correspondents from OpenDemocracy, Politics JOE, Novara Media and others, all had their press tickets rejected. It’s not hard to see what those publications have in common: they don’t share the extreme views of the conference and probably wouldn’t cover it favourably.
We shouldn’t be surprised that non-Conservative media is being barred from entry. This conference is a symbol of minority rule, a gathering of election deniers, theocrats, and billionaires’ mouthpieces. They’re becoming increasingly bold about rejecting democracy outright.
Here are some highlights from the conference so far that illustrate the point:
Jacob Rees Mogg openly acknowledged that voter ID laws were “gerrymandering” elections. He actually just admitted it.
US Senator JD Vance said that the US and UK Conservative movements are on “similar trajectories“. This from one of the people that tried to overturn the 2020 US election.
Douglas Murray said that just because Germany “mucked up” nationalism doesn’t mean the UK can’t give it another go.
Suella Braverman’s weird speech about genitalia and the need to arrest protestors – ironically interrupted by an Extinction Rebellion stunt.
They may call themselves “populists” and pretend to be representative of ordinary people, but it’s all just rhetorical sleight-of-hand. These are free-market fundamentalists, Christian nationalists, and conspiracy theorists – and thepublic at large is not behind them.
As the old adage from David Frum goes: “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”
We’re already there – the mask is now fully off. The only way to counter people like this is to force them to play the game fairly. Instead of letting them “gerrymander”, spread lies, and appeal to the worst elements of xenophobia and hate in Britain, we need to fix the system that has enabled them for far too long. We know that the general public rejects this kind of politics – we just need a system that reflects that.
A more democratic, fairer politics would prevent the rise of fascism in Britain. We’re running out of time to build it. As a young person in Britain, my future depends on us changing this trajectory – there’s nothing for me in the UK under Nat-C rule.
That’s why I signed up to Open Britain’s mission and why I would encourage everyone who shares my concerns to do so too. We know the majority of people in this country are on our side. By working together, we can and will see off this creeping authoritarianism and set free Britain.
I’m not a member of Open Britain, but I’m leaving the link here for anyone who is so alarmed by this swing to the extreme right that they do want to join the organisation.
I’ve seen a couple of videos about them on YouTube already. In one of them, various attendees were claiming that it was for small ‘c’ conservatives and that while some Conservatives were there, most of the attendees didn’t belong to the party. Hmmm. The problem is, some of the speakers were very definitely big ‘C’ Tories, like Rees Mogg and Braverman. They also had the former MEP Daniel Hannan, dubbed by Guy Debord’s Cat as ‘the Lyin’ King’, a hard-line Brexiteer who’d like to sell off the NHS. Politics Joe put up a video in which they interviewed some of the people going to the conference outside. One of them was an older man, who lamented the lack of sexual restraint in modern society and said quite plainly that if a man fathered a child, he had a duty to support it. Now I didn’t watch all of the video, and perhaps this gent said something far more extreme later on, but I don’t think what he said was particularly controversial. I think the traditional attitude among intellectuals at least until the middle of the last century was that restraint was one of the key elements of civilisation. It was what made us civilised beings instead of animals. And sexual restraint, finding appropriate channels for sexuality like marriage was an intrinsic part of this. As for men supporting their children, again I can’t see anything wrong or controversial about it. Not on its own, unless it’s coupled with more extreme policies, like attacks on gay marriage. But I don’t doubt that as a whole, the Nat Cons are indeed a deeply unpleasant, highly reactionary movement.
How stupid and arrogant is Rees-Mogg? I’ve put up several messages I’ve received from Open Britain and other internet campaigning organisations giving their assessment of the Voter ID laws. Not surprisingly, they’ve been wholly negative because of the way severely normal Brits were turned away from polling stations because they either didn’t have ID, or didn’t have the right ID. In Somerset 400 people were so denied their right to vote. Open Britain has argued very strongly that this is part of the Tories’ attack on British democracy. They’ve also given sharp criticism of Keir Starmer’s plans for constitutional reform, expressing their concerns over what he leaves out, such as proportional representation and repealing the highly authoritarian legislation stifling the right to protest. There always was a very strong whiff of gerrymandering about the Voter ID legislation. The amount of electoral fraud is low. I think there have been only seven or so recent cases, and so there’s no need for it. The Tories introduced it following the example of the Republicans in America. Left-wing commenters over there pointed out that many of the people affected by the new legislation – Blacks, the young, the poor and students, the sections of society least likely to have such identification – were also the parts most like to vote Democrat. One Republican politician even admitted it was done to the nobble them.
And now Jacob Rees-Mogg has also admitted it on this side of the Atlantic.
The man one of the great commenters on this blog dubbed ‘Jacob Reet Snob’ let the cat out of the bag at the National Conservative conference. National Conservatism is the trend in transatlantic politics towards nationalism as a reaction to the collapse of globalism. Andrew Marr did a very good analysis of it for the New Statesman YouTube channel a week or so ago. Although it’s becoming influential in the Tory party, its roots are in America with the right-wing Edmund Burke Society, and its leadership seems to be American. Mogg was speaking at the conference about the threat to British sovereignty and Brexit posed by Keir Starmer’s statement that he would give the vote to the 6 million EU citizens in Britain. This has naturally panicked the nationalistic, Brexiteer right. Mogg sought to calm them by telling them that such gerrymandering never works, and rebounds on the party that did it.
Which he illustrated using the example of the Tories’ Voter ID laws.
They had, he said, been put in to stop people voting Labour. But they harmed the Tories instead, because most of the people turned away were Tory-voting senior citizens.
I found this short video commenting on Snob’s speech on the News Agents’ YouTube channel. The man in the video is absolutely amazed at Snob’s admission. He states that when he spoke to people in America about the Voter ID laws over there, they all defended it by telling him it was about protecting democracy. Presumably he didn’t meet the Republican politico who was open about it being a ruse to stop Democrat supporters voting. But there Mogg was, telling his audience that it was a piece of deliberate gerrymandering.
So why was Mogg being so open about it?
Maximilien Robespierre did an interesting video the other day talking about how bonkers Snob and the other headbangers demanding the return of Boris Johnson were. He’s part of a group which includes Nadine ‘Mad Nad’ Dorries and Priti Patel, the woman who makes up her own foreign policy. They had declared that the Tory party had been stupid to get rid of such an electorally successful Prime Minister as the huffing classicist. Well, the Tory party had done the same to Thatcher. She was massively successful, but when it seemed she was becoming an electoral liability, they got rid of her. She was replaced by her chancellor, John Major, just as Johnson had been replaced by Sunak. But Robespierre also wondered if the three weren’t also trying to scupper the Tory party’s chances at the next election by reminding everyone just how terrible Johnson was. Bozo had promised to build 44 new hospitals, of which only one has been built, if that. And that’s only one of his failures and broken promises.
Now comes this admission by Mogg, which tells anyone seriously worried about the state of British democracy that they shouldn’t vote Conservative. Is this part of the same plan to destroy the Tories’ chances from within? Cosplay priest Calvin Robinson has appeared on one video at some kind of right-wing political gathering saying that the Conservatives are no longer conservative, and the party needs to die to save Conservatism. Does Mogg share that view?
I doubt it. I think it’s just arrogance.
I think he came out with it because he either doesn’t believe it will do the Tories any harm and/or he thinks that the media won’t pick up on it and it won’t become a major issue. He probably has a point about that, as I have seen many people in the lamestream media commenting on it. The big news about the National Conservatives yesterday was about the Extinction Rebellion protester being thrown out for comparing them to fascism. I’m sure he was right and the parallels are there. But so far I haven’t seen anyone, outside of left-wing YouTubers, comment on this.
But worryingly, the Tory gerrymandering isn’t going to stop with the Voter ID laws.
Snob says in this snippet that the real problem was the postal votes.
So how long do you think it will be before they devise a plan to gerrymander those as well?
How much further can the IEA go in its desire to end government interference? From what I’ve just come across on YouTube, all the way to Rothbard and anarcho-capitalism. I came across a video this afternoon from IEA London in which they interview someone about this form of anarcho-individualism.
The IEA are a hard right, Thatcherite bunch who’ve been advocating extreme free market economics since the 1970s. They believe in complete privatisation, including that of the NHS and the reduction of the welfare state, if not its complete abolition. Usually people who hold this ideology call themselves Libertarians or, more recently, Classical Liberals. They’re fans of von Hayek and Milton Friedman and believe that by going back to the complete laissez-faire capitalism of the early 19th century business will become more efficient and people freer and more prosperous. Which is why Friedman used to go on trips to Chile to see how his ideas were working out under that notorious advocate for personal freedom, General Pinochet. Because people wouldn’t democratically vote for the destruction of the welfare state, and so this could only be done by a dictator. The American Libertarians also weren’t averse to collaborating with real fascists and Nazis. One issue of their wretched magazine in the ’70s contained a number of articles by them and real anti-Semites denying the Holocaust. It was part of their campaign to discredit F.D. Roosevelt and his legacy. Roosevelt’s New Deal created the American welfare state. He was also the president that brought American into World War II. World War II is regarded as a just war. In order to discredit Roosevelt and thus the American welfare state, they wanted to destroy the notion of the battle against Nazism as a noble conflict. And so the goose-steppers were given their free hand to publish their malign nonsense in their pages. Then, when Reagan was elected in 1980s, they got a president who believed what they did, and so didn’t need the Nazis anymore. That infamous episode in their history was quietly forgotten.
And now the IEA are going from minarchism – the belief in a minimal state – to outright anarchism. Anarcho-capitalism wants the abolition of the state and its replacement by corporations. This includes police and the courts. The police would be replaced by private security guards, while the courts would also operate as private corporations. This, of course, causes problems. In a society without the state to enforce justice, why would any criminal submit themselves to the judgement of private courts with no power to enforce their decisions? They argue that competition by the courts to give the fairest decisions would result in criminals submitting to the same courts in the understand that they, and the other criminals, would all receive fair and just treatment and so order would be preserved. Which is real, wishful thinking.
Ordinary, Thatcherite free-market economics don’t work. Privatisation has not increased investment in the utilities, but left them in a worse mess. The gradual erosion of the welfare state has just increased poverty, not made people more entrepreneurial and self-reliant. Nor has led to a revival of charity in quite the manner Thatcher expected, although I’d guess that she, like Jacob Reet Snob, would point to food banks as a sign of its success. Liz Truss’ and her cabinet were all true-blue followers of Tufton Street free market ideas, with very many of them members of various right-wing think tanks, including the IEA. The result was that she nearly destroyed the British economy and had to be given the heave-ho. Despite this, she still thinks she was right. A week or so ago she was giving a talk in America in which she blamed her defenestration on ‘left-wing activists’. This is the rest of the Tory party she’s talking about. As Frankie Howerd used to say, ‘Oh, she’s off again. Oh, don’t mock. It’s rude to mock the afflicted.’ But it seems that ordinary libertarianism isn’t enough for some in the IEA, and that some of them have an interest in privatising the state itself.
If this was ever put into practice, it would result in a dystopia straight from 90s era science fiction, like the decaying Detroit of Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop but without the cyborg policeman to fight crime and bring down the corporate bad guys.
This comes from the Warner Bros channel on YouTube, and I thought it would be a bit of fun for a Thursday afternoon. As you may have noticed from my internet monicker, I’m something of a fan of Frank Herbert’s Dune, though its the film and Tv adaptation rather than the books. Dune is an immense novel, and part of the problem with adapting it is cutting down the story into one of acceptable cinema length. David Lynch tried with his 1984 version, but even so that film goes on for something like three hours. The Dune miniseries which came in 2000 did so by turning it into three episodes. Denis Villeneuve, the French Canadian director of this adaptation, solved the problem by splitting into two parts. Part One came out a year or so ago, while Part 2 is slated to come out on the 23 November this year. Amongst other things, the trailer appears to show the hero, Paul Atreides, riding the great worms that inhabit Arrakis, his mother, Jessica, as a reverend mother of the Bene Gesserit, a female religious order intent on breeding the kiswatch haderatz, a superman with precognitive powers, and the villain’s, Baron Vladmimir Harkonnen, murdersou nephew Feyd Rautha.
I really enjoyed the first part of the movie, and am looking forward to seeing this. There are also plans for a TV series about the Bene Gesserit, which is also eagerly anticipated by the fans of Herbert’s space epic.
I posted this video on my Beast Rabban YouTube channel yesterday about the ballad ‘Where the Trouble Lies’, written by Fred Stott, a Barnsley collier to support the children of striking miners during the 1926 general strike. I found it in Roy Palmer’s A Ballad History of England: From 1588 to the Present Day (London: BT Batsford 1979). The book also contains an extract from Walter Greenwood’s autobiography, There Was a Time, about the hardship that came to the workers in his native Salford afford the collapse of the strike. Unfortunately there’s no printed music for the ballad, so it’s just me reciting it as a piece of poetry along with the accompanying piece from Greenwood. I recorded it as I thought it was once again topical now that public sector workers are striking for fair wages above the inflation rate so they can afford to heat their homes and feed their families.
The words of the ballad are:
Where The Trouble Lies
There is trouble in England on this very day.
Royalty owners say there will be while Cooks wants his way,
But its those people who above miners hold the hammer
Who say out of every ton of coal you get we only want a tanner.
It is this class of people who have got the check
Never get out of bed before ten not one day in a week
While just four hours before they awake,
For the idle rich the colliers life is at stake.
They say they need these tanners to send their kids to college,
But its hard luck for the minders to have to pay for their knowledge,
Their children but have tennis and other sorts of games
Whilst a collier can’t afford a fire-guard to keep his off the flames.
A collier’s kid on scooter general scoots,
When he has had it just a week he needs a pair of boots,
But he cannot have any although he uses cheek
For his father is a miner and gets thirty bob a week.
We miners don’t want the Earth to which they owners say we belong,
But we want a living wage, in that there’s nothing wrong.
Nor we cannot help our fore-fathers who fought and lost the land,
So a fair’s day’s work and fair day’s pay, then we shall be a happy band.
The royalties referred to were paid to the landowners, who owned the land on which the mines were situated. They were paid per ton of coal extracted. A.J. Cook was the miner’s leader during the strike. He coined the slogan ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day’.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 