IckeWorld
I’ve been watching a bit more of Icke’s triumphant public performance during the Hull by-election. I was hoping to be able to explore some of the points he raises in his talks, but he really doesn’t seem to make verifyable accusations as such – he creates a narrative, parrots it to an audience, but shows none of the groundwork by which he arrived at his conclusions.
He does mention the drug-running conspiracy theory set around the Iran-Contra affair – according to Icke it was the Bush and Clinton families working together in the 80s that were importing drugs to Arkansas. I’d love to see how he would go about proving this – photos of Hillary and George Jnr in flight goggles unloading the plane? This is the sort of utterly preposterous Icke feeds upon – what evidence could there possibly be to prove such a thing? Did they have Clinton/Bush letterheads on their drug contracts that were smuggled to Icke? This is nonsense.
I think this is why Icke is considered undebunkable – once you sit through 20 minutes of him talking, you soon come to realise that 99.9% of the population need absolutely no further explanation of why he is a loony. But of course that plays into the hands of those who swallow his junk – “see, they can’t disprove what Icke says, so they resort to insults”. It’s an impossible situation – it is obvious to anyone but the most extreme loony that the idea of Bush and Clinton working together to import drugs to America from Nicaragua is (a) an incredibly extreme theory and (b) likely to be unprovable if true. Is there the slightest shred of evidence to Icke’s claim? Of course there is – he said it, so therefore it must be true, because he is an extraordinary journalist with a revolutionary insight.
What Icke definitely is is a storyteller – it’s not hard to see why his invented narrative of world history appeals to his supporters. At least in terms of the themes that Icke plays on, he is tapping into legitimate fears of us all. Feel trapped by the class system? – Icke has extended it way back to Mesapotanians and the cradle of civilisation, no wonder you feel so oppressed. Worried about big brother, too much CCTV, political correctness, the modern world? – it’s all part of the NWO, so don’t worry, if we believe we can sort it out. Suspicious of modern politics? – it’s all a fraud anyway, thank goodness, these are puppets of the reptilian bogey-men.
In one 5-minute section David explains recent political history for us, as it was engineered behind the scenes by the shadowy reptilian elite. Apparently Thatcher was the choice of the elite, who then engineered Labour’s meltdown in the 80s, and then developed Tony Blair as their next puppet, and proceeded to have the tory party destroyed. Until now, when the current illuminati agenda is to groom David Cameron as their next prime minister. But Icke is constructing a grand story around what simply happened in politics over the last 20 years – in every election somebody wins and another person loses, political parties lose as well as win, crumble or regroup. Icke presents his story of shadowy influence over British politics with a sort of ‘Isn’t this too much of a coincidence to not be a conspiracy’ tone, but in what logical circumstance could the story be any different?
So much of what Icke says is designed not to convey information, but simply to sell himself. The message isn’t so much that the illuminati control the world, but that David Icke is a heroic figure and a lone voice of reason in the World. David Icke is important. And this is true – if Icke stopped lecturing and writing these books, who would pick up the gauntlet? There is no gauntlet to pick up, as Icke has manufactured these ideas in his head. Icke’s whole selling point is that he has researched ‘the world’ to a degree that nobody else could ever match – there’s a slightly tragic air to it. Icke’s best hope is that he inspires some sort of cult devoted to his ideas, and I could easily see him lording it over some sort of ‘community’ some time in the future.
Yet, during this presentation, the audience seems to just lap it up – that isn’t really Icke’s fault, and I don’t blame him for being delusional. What is lacking is the critical faculties of those attracted to his make-believe – if even a single room of people can believe what he’s saying, then the human race is dangerously gullible.
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Tags: David Icke
Doing The Dø
I’m really enjoying an album called A Mouthful by The Dø, a duo from France/Finland. The singer has a voice a little bit like the bird from The Cardigans, but more sincere and with a more genuine Scandi twang – kinda sexy. Meanwhile the music has a little bit of the old precise Air-feel to it, but is highly varied – bit of folky hip-hop, some strange anthemic chanting, and some pop songs that I think you would have to describe as a bit ‘wet’. 15 tracks on one album is very often too many, and there’s some really plodding dodgy crap late-on that should just have been binned. But most of the time it’s light-hearted stream-of-consciousness stuff that is just highly inventive and has a really clean and clever sound.
Try ‘On My Shoulders’ from their Last.fm page here…
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Tags: The Dø
It’s one of those weird coincidences – two of the more obscure musicians in my hero-list are collaborating. Of course there would be nothing weird about that in normal circumstances – the music industry is fairly incestuous and those who are chewed up and spat out by the conventional record labels seem to tend to huddle together for warmth in the shadows. But even then this is a bit of a turn-up.
The first collaborator is Jason Falkner, who would top my list of ‘people who inexplicably found no success in the mainstream’ – he seems to make audience-friendly power-pop, is a good-looking guy, and can really sing and play. I wouldn’t expect superstardom, but you’d think that at some point he would at least make the radar somewhere. He’s only notable really as a member of early Jellyfish, providing much of the guitars on their first album Bellybutton. Then he resurfaced with another Jellyfish-collaborator Jon Brion (who later found fame and success with movie soundtracks to Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love) with a band called The Grays – their one album ‘Ro Sham Bo’ is one of my favourites, but found no success and they split. And Falkner has been bubbling under ever since – I don’t think he’s made a great album since the turn of the century, but he keeps threatening to 
. Here he is performing Friend Of Mine last year – some of the guitar improv late in the song is very impressive.
Right. The other guy is Anne Soldaat, who is an ex-member of Daryll-Ann, my favourite Dutch indie band that nobody in Holland even seem to care about. Whenever I meet anyone from the country I ask them if they’ve heard about the band, and I have a 0% strike rate so far. They had a little pitch at stardom with a bit of label support in the mid-90s but soon got dropped and went away and just made some magnificent folk-rock with two albums, Weeps and Happy Traum, in the late 90s. Here’s Soldaat, with that unique guitar sound that could only come from a boy with a girl’s name, playing one of my favourite Daryll Ann songs ‘We Love Danger’ with his new band, Do-The-Undo.
Okay, so, long story short, I’ve heard that Soldaat is going/has gone to America to make an album with Falkner. It’s an idea so out of left-field that it blew me away. Maybe they met at some festival someday in the past – maybe they were always blood-brothers. But it’s news to me. It’s just special that two inspirational figures in my life are getting together to make some music which I presume is going to be awesome at a 200% level. Certainly, some magic is bound to occur here – I predict many layers of guitar, and riffs that may just cause spontaneous combustion in a sort of light pop/rock way.
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Tags: Anne Soldaat, Daryll-Ann, Do-The-Undo, Jason Falkner, Jellyfish, The Grays
Mafia
I dabbled for a few hours with a PC/PS2 game called Mafia today – it was very well received in 2001 when it was released, and I think it even won a ‘game of the year’ award for that year. Introduced with a cutscene and then told in flashback, it tells the story of a taxi driver (you) drafted into the organisation in the thirties. It’s a neat device for telling the story through a bunch of mafia ‘missions’, and allows the game to jump about a bit in terms of time, and cut to the chase to avoid boredom. The voice-acting is excellent as well – the presentation all hangs together very well.
The major ‘innovation’ of the game was a full city to drive around – I say ‘innovation’ because the game was delayed until well after GTA3 so the idea had already done better in Rockstar’s modern classic. A shame really, because Mafia does the city quite well, with lots of vehicles and pedestrians, though the blurry texture-mapped buildings often give the appearance of driving around a maze of decorated cuboids rather than buildings. But yet the game scores highly on atmos, despite the multitude of graphical glitches. The cars are vintage and unique in a game of the type, though you bounce off other cars very unrealistically, and usually to your own detriment, and on other occasions simply don’t have a fast enough car to keep up with the enemy you are supposed to be chasing.
Unfortunately I found the game so frequently annoying that I had to eventually give up. The first major glitch was the combat – one false turn in an out-of-town diner saw me on incredibly low health, and then I realised that having gone past a ‘checkpoint’ I restarted on low health after every death. I couldn’t complete the mission, simply because it was impossible to face the last foe without him shooting me before I killed him – alarm bells at that! In the end I had to jump back a save or two and replay the sections I had completed with more care. Another glitch – in a gunfight with cops my accomplices ignored the whole affair, only snapping into action at the very end of the fight to my intense frustration. The trouble with most of the chases and combat seems to be that it relies more on luck than skill – on a footchase I found that most of the time I couldn’t avoid getting shot while I fled, which led to replaying the mission until for some reason enough of the shots missed for me to stand a chance of escape. Most of the missions I played were very trial and error, and reading around the subject on the web there is apparently a car race later in the game that is near-impossible and incredibly frustrating. Having already torn my hair out on early missions, I gave up.
Yet I liked Mafia – it’s just a ‘different’ sort of game, despite relying on car driving and third-person shootouts. The living city isn’t as good as GTA by any means, but it is refreshingly different being set in the 30s. I guess that the sheer freshness of the game overrode any frustrations with the game, because Mafia was very well received in 2001. There is a sequel in the works, which I will be looking out for. **
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Let’s Manipulate A War!
I waited about 40 minutes for David Icke’s first real accusation in his stage show. He says that the ‘Carnegie Endowment For International Peace’, an American think-tank, was “exposed by a congressional investigation in the 50s …called the Reece Commission …for manipulating war, particularly the first world war”.
This is factually incorrect – the Reece committee made no such grand claims. It was formed in the 50s to investigate tax-exempt educational foundations for evidence of ‘un-American’ activities. Obviously the concern back then was not the NWO, but the cold-war communist threat. The Reece committee did uncover what it felt was evidence of a communist agenda, and there was a mild controversy about that at the time.
Icke is actually referring to a second-hand conspiracy theory, originating from Norman Dodd, the chief investigator of the committee. Dodd alleged in 1984, thirty years after the committee’s investigation, a conspiracy surrounding this Carnegie foundation which mentions the first world war.
You can watch Dodd’s ‘evidence’ on a film called Hidden Agenda, made by Ed Griffin. Dodd claims in an interview that in 1909 the commission discussed the question “How do we involve the United States in a war?” and then decide that “We must take over and control the diplomatic machinery of this country.”. And hey presto in 1914, there is war.
These statements apparently come from the minutes of meetings within the Carnegie Endowment For International Peace. But has the accuser Dodd seen them? No he hasn’t, he sent an assistant to look at them, and soon after she dictated their contents she ‘lost her mind’. Apparently these dictaphone transcripts still exist under the control of Congress.
One wonders how a researcher could look at 50 years worth of minutes and gain such an extraordinary insight into a conspiracy. Or how Dodd could be so silent on the topic at the time, only going public 20-30 years later. Any actual evidence of the foundation unleashing their dastardly plan seems to have escaped public knowledge. But no matter – the explosive testimony of one man overrides all questions of authenticity.
The film-maker who conducts this interview is Ed Griffin, who also made a couple of other interesting films. One insisted that cancer was caused by lack of vitamin B17, and that this was being held from the public by the scientific community. Another one insisted that the remains of Noah’s Ark had been found in Turkey. So he has cured cancer and found evidence for the old testament – one wonders how he could possibly have any enthusiasm for a conspiracy theory around plain old American corruption.
Of course, the other spanner in the works for Icke is that his source doesn’t even believe in an NWO conspiracy – Dodd believes that it was actually a conspiracy of communist influence, to alter American society so it could be integrated more easily into the aggressive Soviet regime. So in fact the likes of Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie, rather than NWO elite, were actually closet communists – no doubt each were ready to give up their commercial interests to the needs of collectivist society.
Maybe Icke has the evidence these claims lack – he is an ‘extraordinary journalist’ after all. Or maybe he is just swallowing hook line and sinker an incredibly sketchy third-hand conspiracy theory that doesn’t have any proof, makes totally different claims, and doesn’t even make any logical sense.
Filed under: Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism | 1 Comment
Tags: David Icke, NWO
Time For A Dip…
I had a great weekend with my daughter – the game of the moment is Endless Ocean on the Wii, which I finally managed to track down and pick up at a very reasonable £15. The game was overlooked on release, at least in the UK, and there have been no efforts to reintroduce it to consumers, but it is a wholly relaxing and really unique game.
Basically, you’re a marine diver exploring the Manaurai Sea, which I presume is a fictitious bit of water placed somewhere in the South Pacific. And while a story about local myths and the search for exotic sea creatures chugs along in the background, my daughter and I just swam around in the depths looking for marine life, which we then took pictures of with our virtual camera, and added to our glorified sticker book of all the species in the game. There’s also an aquarium where you can pick a combination of your favourite bits of sea life to show off to the visitors.
I suppose it’s a mixture of relaxing music and a slowish pace, simple gameplay and rather pretty graphics. Not for everyone then, but I love these games that defy convention for a more cerebral challenge. ***
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Tags: Wii
Vote Turquoise!
Son Of God or Shellsuit Chav?
I was having a brief look at a public presentation by ‘activist’ David Icke prior to his participation in the Hull by-election. Icke presents speeches all over the World, and writes books on a variety of controversial topics. He is famous in England for being a sports presenter who retired from the BBC and soon reappeared, always wearing turquoise, and announced on a popular chat show that he had been contacted by the ‘godhead’ and was essentially a son of God. For some reason the British public were slow to accept his divinity – perhaps he chose the wrong chat show?
Since then Icke has developed his beliefs, principally in terms of introducing the idea of the ‘illuminati’ a secret reptilian race that drink human blood and control the human race from behind the scenes. Apparently the Queen is one. Also Lady Di was murdered, 9/11 was a false flag operation etc etc – in many ways Icke is a fairly standard conspiracy theorist, and many moderate CTers support him on the basis that he is a successful public speaker, even though some of what he says is obviously quite outlandish.
I did wonder if Icke may have a chance of gaining support in the Hull by-election against Conservative front-bencher David Davis. In the end, Icke trailed marginally behind the frontrunner with 110 votes to Davis’s 19,000 odd. Mad Cow-Girl, the representative of the monster raving loony party, gained 412 votes. Not quite the glowing endorsement of Icke that his supporters may have hoped for.
Anyway I thought I’d have a look at some of Icke’s beliefs in this public presentation. He starts his show with a couple of quotes from Gandhi and one from Mark Twain which are basically designed to defend his own position as a gatekeeper for the ‘real truth’. The argument basically is that because people have been ‘right’ in the past, and sometimes marginalised despite this, this does not necessarily mean that they are wrong. Of course, it equally doesn’t mean that they are right either.
Icke refers to the flat-earthers, who supposedly ridiculed those who said the Earth was round way back when. This is a standard twisted argument of alternative theorists, and based on no evidence in particular – there was an idea that in Columbus’s times people thought the Earth was flat, but any sort of genuine analysis of opinions seems to suggest that pretty much since Pythagoras in the 6th century BC most educated people have basically believed the earth to be spherical. No doubt Icke is referring to those flat-earthers who existed before the 6th century – those foolish Mesopatanians, they were so out of touch!!!
Actually the Mesopatanians are the ancient genesis of the ‘Illuminati’ according to Icke, so the flat-earthers were not quite so stupid as they seemed. Apparently.
The irony of course is that Icke or anyone else could use the same flawed logic to now promote the idea that the world is flat – anyone promoting that theory would be ridiculed, marginalised and considered rather loopy. No doubt they would quote Gandhi and Mark Twain at the start of their presentation in support of the idea that they are the lone voice of reason. But the Earth is not flat. And reptiles do not rule the World. Or do they?
And by the same token, Icke is inferring that the more ludicrous you appear to be to the mainstream, the more truthful you necessarily are. Maybe the voters of Hull realised the logic of Icke’s argument, and inspired by his Gandhi quotes they turned to the monster raving loony candidate Mad Cow-Girl. Evidence perhaps that Icke needs to appear like more of a lunatic to appeal to the electorate.
If only such were possible…
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Tags: David Icke
Play – Squeeze. Their last great album – really ambitious, downright weird at times, and some of my favourite songs ever written.
The Bends – Radiohead. I really loved their debut album, but this one mixed their conventional rock sound with the inventiveness that took over in their later work.
Spilt Milk – Jellyfish. They’re not cool and never have been, but this album is so damned playful I still love listening to it.
Music In Colours – Stephen Duffy. His best album, made with Nigel Kennedy doing the violin parts, but there is some beautiful melodic pop there as well.
Modern Life Is Rubbish – Blur. It’s trendy to hate them now, but they were a fascinating band I think, who basically invented whatever BritPop was with this record.
Ro Sham Bo – The Grays. I just really love the arrangements on this power-pop record – it’s from Jason Falkner and Jon Brion, who now does some awesome movie soundtracks (Magnolia).
Mutations – Beck. Odelay was damned good as well, but I love stripped-down Beck where he just lets the songs and his voice do the talking.
In A Bar, Under The Sea – dEUS. Belgium’s best alt-rock band, they manage to do a great mixture of beauty coupled by utterly crazy sounds.
Brighten The Corners – Pavement. Wowee Zowee is considered their masterpiece, but I prefer the more fleshed-out songs on this one. The lyrics are nonsense poetry at its finest, the music the very definition of alternative rock.
Happy Traum – Daryll-Ann. Best album of this Dutch band, rubbish at lyrics, but great at melodic guitar rock with a totally unique guitar sound.
I like lists.
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WSOP Longings…
I’m not at the World Series Of Poker this year – I had planned to go, I had the funds to go, but in the end I decided it would be a bad idea for me at this stage. So obviously as the main event is underway I am trying desperately to ignore it, to not be jealous of the chip leaders, and to justify to myself the reason that I would miss the daddy of tournaments… again.
To spend $10,000 on one tournament you have to either be a multi-millionaire, or to have at least some sense of abandon in terms of money. I don’t have either of those traits, and neither am I sponsored. I can see a case that if you are a profile player, with a public image to keep up, you have to play the event, so I understand why many play it. But even if you knew you were the best player in the world, the odds of you making money from the main event over a lifetime probably aren’t favourable, at least not at this stage, with thousands of players arriving at Las Vegas for the event.
At the same time, I really believe that skill can raise your game to levels that other people do not understand or anticipate, and maybe to the level where you can anticipate real success in the WSOP. Most players, even really good players, think that they understand that their skill is very much secondary to the luck factor, and in that much they are right. But having watched players close up over the last three years, as part of my poker TV job, I am aware of immense skill from the best players to an inspiring degree. I think, if I had the skills and experience of the top players, I could go to the main event with some expectation of success.
But I think that this year I wanted to go just to cut loose basically, rather than go with a plan of attack and a realistic expectation. And put simply, I could have done enough money that would basically pay for a year of my current life. And I know that I feel pressure when I pay money for poker – not at the tables, but away from them. I have paid for travel and hotel accomodation for poker and let it get me down between tournaments – I am very happy that I am brave and free at the poker table, but afterwards you do start thinking about the bills, about how up or down you are on the trip, etc etc. I have tried to free myself from these pressures, but I think that is impossible – it is human nature. And I think if I went to Vegas and was unlucky enough to lose a serious amount of money, it could affect my desire and ability to ever play poker again. So I don’t want that.
I will continue to play poker, and I think that I am a pretty formidable player of the game. But I don’t want to just jump up the ladder to the highest stakes as a punt – I want it to seem like the most natural step in the world.
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Bioshock
I’ve written about Bioshock before on another blog, but I went back and finished off the game this week. Since I got a RAM upgrade in my PC the game runs much more smoothly, and I enjoyed the second bite much more. So many games that you play to a conclusion become really satisfying – it makes you wonder what they were thinking with those duller early levels. They say that TV programmes need to grab the viewer in the first couple of minutes or they switch over. Films get a longer time to engage the audience, but do games get even longer. If I don’t like a game in the first five minutes, it’s usually likely to never grab my attention back.
Bioshock wows you at the start – it begins with the aftermath of a plane crash in the ocean, and you soon swim your way to a strange outpost in the sea, and take a lift down to a strange underwater city in a serious state of disrepair, with a peculiar 40s/50s theme. Lots of Art Deco, gramophone music that sound a bit like Bing Crosby play in the background, and there is leaking water everywhere. You soon come across mutants, but also the Big Daddies – huge monsters that look like outsize diving suits and are rock hard, which are accompanied by little girls who call their keepers ‘Mr Bubbles’ and implore them to kill you quick. This combination of little girl and huge monster is the lasting motif of the game – they make a truly original counterpart. Add to that that you have to decide whether to let the little brats go free once you kill the Big Daddy – it makes for an interesting moral dilemma, as you need their ‘Adam’, their essence that you can spend for upgrades.
There’s an increasingly-engaging story going on here as well. You see evidence of previous riots, human experimentation, and the weird attempt to create a rather conservative, flawed utopia in this city. Through taped logs scattered around you learn about the dark side of this community, and the flawed dark vision of those in charge, who you eventually have to battle with to conclude the story. There are some good twists to the tale, and later on there are some really clever gameplay elements that weave around the basic setup of the plot, which I can’t reveal without spoiling a lot of the game. The further the game goes, the better it gets basically – I got extremely bored dealing with mutants in the early levels, with nothing to really appeal other than the pretty scenery. But once the story really kicks in it starts driving you on, and becomes quite addictive. Very similar experience to FEAR actually – these games need more in the early levels.
The combat is very average though. So many of the enemies are just humans who run about, it gets boring, and there’s no satisfaction – the guns seem sluggish and imprecise, and the harder mobs just take a lot more damage before they die. No real strategy whatsoever. In the end I would have stopped playing had I not turned the difficulty to easy – after that I enjoyed the scenery and story far more. It’s a shame because the game goes to great lengths to make the combat interesting – guns have a big variety of different ammo to use, and can be upgraded. There’s also a system of ‘plasmids’, strange magical upgrades that give you fire and ice beams, and telekinesis that works a bit like the gravity gun in Half-Life 2. Despite all that, I found it most effective to use the three basic guns most of the time.
It’s a beautiful game – so much effort has gone into the hugely original milieu, the scenery and the story, I can see that it is something rather special. But without the basic satisfying gameplay it’s a bit of a tiresome trudge at times. Nearly. ***
Filed under: Games | Leave a Comment
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