Meanwhile in Berlin......

BNP Membership list now globally available

The worst kept secret of all time

The Guardian today and most papers this week have covered the BNP membership list leak. To the dismay of the BNP, their entire membership list, hitherto supposedly a secret on a par with the true assassins of JFK, was posted on the internet, allegedly by a disgruntled ex-member of high rank. The organisation, needless to say, has suffered a collective panic attack, afraid people will know who they are. I personally was surprised to see there were 25 listed in my Jarrow parliamentary constituency - I thought there were more judging by the numbers turning up at their local meetings.

The list has been kept a secret on the left with activists reluctant to share it – so much for free access to the benefits of civilisation (or in this case uncivilisation) – and, whilst it has been removed from UK sites, it is available from overseas sites via: http://wikileaks.org/ The Wikileaks links to the said list have proved so popular that the site crashed tonight and the home page ran a simple message: Wikileaks is overloaded by readers looking for the BNP membership list.

Whether this gauges the number of people curious to see if old Mrs Jones down the road is a closet storm trooper, or if the site is being accessed by BNP members keen to see their name in print is anyone’s guess.

The list is even available on the Pirate Bay and Minova torrent sites and as I write have 225 and 190 seeders respectively. News now is that the membership list will be given away free with The Sun this coming Saturday.

The membership list has now even been google postcoded. You simply type in your postcode and find out your nearest neo-nazi . Click on their name and a map appears directing you to their home. No doubt the members of Antifa are having a field day. Bloody marvellous when its easier to locate your closest fash than your nearest PayPoint outlet - you'll know what I mean if you're trying to get your gas card charged up in Hebburn

Of course, its not the socialist way to suggest BNP members are supporters are targeted. Whilst their ideas are noxious and abhorrent, they can never be countered by violence or the threat of it, regardless of the violence they are associated with, not least because they are a symptom of class society and the myriad social problems it throws up. The BNP can only be defeated on the battlefield of ideas and this site provides plenty of ammunition in this regard.

And if you believe that your average BNPer will give you an intellectual run for your money, consider this piece from the Scotsman, and reported on the Stop the BNP site:

"The brightest children go on to vote Liberal Democrat or Green, according to a survey.

"The study by Edinburgh University researchers has found that childhood intelligence is linked to voting preferences and political involvement in adulthood.The study – which looked at voting patterns in the 2001 general election – found that those with higher IQ ratings were more likely to vote Lib-Dem or Green in an election.

"The survey – including cognitive tests at ages five and ten – was followed up with a study of voting habits at 34. Those who voted Green had an average IQ of 108.3, with Lib-Dem voters just behind at 108.2.

"Conservative and Labour voters were further behind – with scores of 103.7 and 103.0 respectively, while voters for Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru scored an average of 102.5. Scottish National Party voters had an average IQ of 102.2. The research also showed that British National Party voters had the lowest average intelligence – scoring just 98.4. Non-voters were found to have an average IQ of 99.7."

Class Warfare can only lament that no socialist was included in the research

Tainted Food Alert in the US (video)

In China, ANYTHING made with Chinese-manufactured milk powder before September 14th was PULLED from their store shelves. In the US, these products are still being sold!

Foods at risk: ANY food manufactured in China and potentially any food containing milk powder. US food manufacturers imported millions of pounds of milk powder from China before September 14th. The FDA continues to this allow to be sold. This includes chocolate, cookies, cakes, and even things like packaged macaroni and cheese.

Background

Mike Mozart is a product designer who also runs a video blog about new developments in the toy industry. His reviews are normally light, cheerful affairs and completely apolitical.

If he appears distraught, it's because he is. Tis is serious. Mozart has discovered that the US is the ONLY country that still permits potentially melamine-contaminated food on its shelves. Even China has removed these products from its stores. This poison that killed and injured thousands of people, mainly children, may be in US food.

A few facts:

1. Melamine was added to food products manufactured in China to simulate protein content. These food products were imported into the US by the ton.

2. Melamine itself is bad, but much worse - and not reported - is that melamine is an industrial product, not a food product and often comes contaminated with a wide range of dangerous industrial toxins.There is no such thing as ‘food grade’ melamine. None of it is suitable for food.

3. The widespread practice of adding melamine to powdered milk products has killed and seriously injured thousands of children in China. Melamine injuries children by damaging their kidneys. There has already been a reported spike in kidney stones in American children.

Last year, when melamine was found in pet food sold in the US and traced to death in animals, it was headline news. This news, potentially far more serious, is being censored.

4. The Chinese government knew this contaminated food was on the shelves killing children and said nothing so as not to put a damper on the "Olympic spirit."

5. As much 20 MILLION POUNDS of food manufactured in China that contains milk powder was imported into the US this year. Also, it's not clear how many US food manufacturers use milk powder manufactured in China in their products.

6. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) refuses to test for melamine contamination - or if is has, refuses to make the results of these tests available to the public. Further, the FDA refuses to force food manufacturers to remove the contaminated food from its shelves, something they are completely capable of doing.

7. Why is this being done?

Mozart theorizes: a) to prevent a scandal before the election and b) to avoid further deterioration of the US stock market. He could have added another: profit before human safety.

Are these motivations plausible?

Needless to say, the FDA has demonstrated over and over again throughout its history that it is a political agency designed to protect well connected corporate law breakers and has next-to-zero interest in the public welfare. Knowing the parties involved - China, the FDA, the Bush administration, the US news media, and corporate America - you can be sure that none of them can be trusted to look out for the welfare of the workers.

Vote Rigging in the US

We all know the story of the 2004 US presidential election. The exit polls showed Bush was in for a kicking at the polls; John Kerry was to be the next US president, winning by a million-and-a-half votes, but by midnight in US the news was that Bush was in the lead and, next day, lacking legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded and bowed as Bush took the helm for another term. Bush was officially given a mandate to continue shredding the US constitution, increasing his own powers and those of the surveillance state, while pandering to the US corporatocracy and the merchants of war.

Those who cried foul were dismissed as conspiracy theorists by the press and nutters in “tin foil hats” by the GOP. The news media, Congress, and the Democratic Party, whilst well aware of the nationwide irregularities on election day, have never even attempted to do anything about it. Likewise, here’s a government hearing - never reported by the news media - that sums up the status of the security of the US voting system, while being suggestive of a vote rigging scam that should have sent Bush not to the White House but into the dustbin of history.

The possibility of rigged voting machines aside, there was undoubtedly a colossal and synchronised attempt to subvert the popular will of the US people. All over the US, Across the country, Repuke election personnel used a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election.

In Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the vast majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004 - more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes. Indeed, a staggering one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 turned up to cast their vote only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots. And that doesn’t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put Kerry in the White House. But Ohio was not unique. Irregularities were reported all over the country with voters finding they had been disenfranchised via registration challenges, faulty machines, turned away because voting queues were too long or one of the many other hurdles put in their way by Repuke election officials.

If this film is anything to go by the Repuke’s will be doing all in their power to see McCain takes over from Bush. Not convinced? Check out these films previously posted on this blog here : Don't be too surprised if McCain and Palin "win" next week. No matter how unlikely the outcome, the US news media stands ready to pump out a plausible

Recycle Life (Shelley's art project)

I'm posting this for my daughter Shelley. This was her final project of a three year art course at College. Anyway, she passed with a triple distinction, being also the only one on the course to choose to do a film. She even went to the lengths of getting the logo she designed tattooed onto her ankle.

Hope you do well when you start Uni this month, bonny lass. Love you xx

Oh, for anyone reading this, she'd be obliged if you could share her link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuXYVLTisW4 Thanks.

US Combat Troops - Comfortably Numb

I’ve written several times on this blog about the mental state of combat troops; i.e. about their colossal suicide rate or about the way the US Department of Defence is toying with the idea of medicating soldiers to desensitise them to combat trauma. For instance

Hidden cost of the allied invasion and Guilt Free Soldier and Suicide epidemic among US vets

My argument has always been the same, namely that humans are not naturally aggressive, that we are not predisposed to dish out violence and that governments, realising this, will do anything to conceal the true cost of war, particularly with regards combatants and their inability to handle the stress of front line combat. Today’s Herald informs us that one in six American soldiers in Afghanistan and one in eight in Iraq, that the Pentagon claims to know of, are on daily doses of prescription antidepressants, sleeping pills or painkillers to help them cope with the stresses of combat. The Herald reports:

“The findings mean that at least 20,000 troops are on medication such as Prozac or diamorphine while serving in the front line or on equally dangerous convoy escort or driving duties in conflicts where insurgents regularly target the supply chain.

“While the vast majority would have been barred automatically from combat roles in earlier wars on medical and safety grounds, the pressure to provide up to 200,000 soldiers at any given time for the two major deployments has led to a relaxation of the rules.

“The Pentagon admitted that medication was tolerated because those sent to Afghanistan or Iraq were 'younger and healthier than the general population' and had been screened for mental illnesses before enlisting.”

Common sense suggests that the real reason that medication is tolerated is because the US has garrisons totalling 180,000 men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan alone; there to secure its control of world oil, resources and to start dismissing those found to take mind-controlling drugs, or giving them administrative posts, as is the case in the British army, means the only way they could maintain their oil empire is via conscription. And if your troops are comfortably numb, then what the fuck so long as they are doing their job and keeping open the oil pipelines. Which means that any legit or self-prescribed drug that keeps a soldier deployed and fighting also saves money on training and deploying replacements. But there is a downside: the number of soldiers requiring long-term mental-health services back home soars with repeated deployments and lengthy combat tours and this costs $$$$. But what the hell, there are profits to be had and natural resources to secure.

Drug use is nothing new by any means. If soldiers are not self-mediating then their top brass are seeing they are psychologically fit to kill people they have no real grievance with. Generals, history shows, have plied their troops with medicinal palliatives at least since George Washington ordered rum rations at Valley Forge. During World War II, the Nazis fuelled their blitzkrieg into France and Poland with the help of an amphetamine known as Pervitin. The U.S. Army also used amphetamines during the Vietnam War.

Meanwhile, mental trauma has become so common that the Pentagon may expand the list of "qualifying wounds" for a Purple Heart — historically limited to those physically injured on the battlefield — to include posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The Power of Conformity

Candid Camera was a popular television program in the US in the 1960s. The program used the classic methodology of naturalistic experiments in social psychology as the source of its humorous scenarios. The resulting programs were not only entertaining, but also potentially instructive. For example, how independent is the average person when confronted with the all-powerful "consensus of the group?" Not very.

Creating a consensus quickly is the goal of every "shock and awe" propagandist. That's why it's often true that "a lie makes it half way around the world before the truth gets its pants on."

Professional liars - and I could tell you a few recent stories of them - have their stories worked out well in advance and then pump them out hard and fast long before thoughtful, honest analysts have the chance to ask even the first question.

Once the consensus is pointing in one direction, it becomes very difficult to take, hold and promote a contrary point of view, even if that point of view is accurate and the consensus is completely false.

That's why it's prudent to assume that ANYTHING you "know" that is consensus-based and was produced and is continuously supported by the so called "mainstream" news media (news, PR and/or propaganda) is probably the product of a calculated attempt to mislead.

As a simple rule of thumb, the proper response to ANYTHING that makes its way to the network news or the front page of a major newspaper is to ask yourself two questions: "Whose propaganda is this?" and "What facts are they withholding and skewing in a calculated attempt to mislead me?"

One of the most important skills in the propagandist's bag of tricks is controlling where your audience places its attention. In magic, it's called "misdirection." In politics, it's called setting the agenda.

Once you realize that EVERYTHING that's featured by the news media is most likely someone else's propaganda and that the key to successful deception is misdirection, you are well on your way to liberating your mind from a ton of nonsense and misinformation and, in the process, perhaps saving your own life some day.

Take this short test and see how powerful misdirection is and how it works:

Perception is limited - always. The challenge is not to perceive everything, it's to perceive what's important. The primary tool of the propaganda system (also known as "the news media") is misdirection, having you pay attention to the wrong things.

Cherie the class warrior

If you knew her only as the daughter of the “Scouse git”, the antagonistic son-in-law of the bigot Alf Garnett in the BBC’s Till Death Is Do Part, you could forgive her claiming to be “a socialist”. But no, Cherie Blair is the wife of ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair and stands boldly by everything he has done as PM.

I raise the matter because yesterday’s Guardian carried a full page piece on her; well, actually an interview by Martin Kettle and headed Yes, I am a socialist. However, nowhere is this statement qualified! I mean, nowhere does Kettle report her advocating common ownership and democratic control of productive wealth, abolition of the wages system, free access to the necessaries of life. There is not one single sentence that puts her within a million miles of the socialist camp. Indeed, the interview presents a person standing in stark contrast to every socialist principal I know.

Only into the second paragraph of the article we are told Cherie is a devout Catholic, attends mass regularly, so clearly believes the problems facing humanity can be sorted by divine intervention, by her and Tony praying to God, rather than by the workers uniting and taking control of their own destiny, sorting out problems themselves and with available technological and scientific resources that have been liberated from the constraints of the market system.

Asked whether it was right for Britain to invade Iraq, she says “Absolutely” and insists that her husband is “a man of integrity…doing everything he could to avoid war.” Perhaps she was in a coma at that point, in the run up to the invasion, when her husband presented to parliament and the British public the now notorious dossier on Iraq, entitled Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, and which turned out to be a report the British security services had largely plagiarised from a 10 -year-old piece a student had posted on the internet. Perhaps both she and Tony were asleep that cold February morning when two-million marched through the streets of London demanding no to war?

She says: “I’m probably the only person in the country who insists my husband is a socialist”. What, Cherie? And you’re a QC? Does that one voice in 65 million not suggest that Tony might just be a recognised die-hard defender of capitalism? NO? Well how about the standing ovations he received from CBI conferences? Perhaps the way he was quickly snapped up by the legendary and famously corrupt investment bankers JP Morgan when he stepped down as PM? NO? Okay, how about the mountain of sleaze, the cash for honours, the unreformed Tory anti-trade union legislation, student fees, treatment of the elderly, the decimation of the NHS and the education system? How about the fact that the press recently reported that the rich-poor gap in the UK is now the widest its been in 40 years and that Labour came to power claiming that the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer under the Tories?

Look, it’s not just that nobody believes that Tony is not a socialist. The truth is that nobody believes the bloody Labour Party is socialist. It’s common knowledge that the present incumbents in Number 10 are further to the right than the Tories ever were; that back in 1997 Tony whipped of Thatcher’s clothes and left her standing there bollocks naked. I mean, Milton Friedman praised your husband, not Karl Marx.

I’ve not rambled here, Cherie, as much as I could have. Suffice to say that as a QC, with your level of legal insight, you could have ripped to shreds, under cross examination, any defendant making a preposterous and wholly improvable statement about themselves and made them appear imbecilic. Just be careful about how you bandy that "socialist" word about!

Apologies for inactivity

Apologies to regular class warfare visitors. My PC has been out of action for a while - problems with the CPU overheating - and I hope to be posting again shortly.

Masked cops try to provoke violent riot

This is absolutely fuggin disgusting and begs the question just how many protests that have turned violent have actually been started by undercover cops? Though it has long been suspected, this time there exists video footage that cops do actually do this. No doubt It happens all the time.

A peaceful demonstration turns violent, the TV news flashes pictures of mayhem, the issue is completely forgotten, and the protesters are entirely discredited and their cause undermined.

Is it really a surprise to know that police*engineer* these outcomes?

Here we see three masked police, posing as radicals, caught red handed trying to provoke violence at a meeting of the so called" Security and Prosperity Partnership" in Quebec. The whole episode was caught on video

Brasscheck TV comments:

It's the oldest trick in the book and the French have a phrase for it: "Agent Provocateur".

Bizarrely, US protesters NEVER seem to get their heads out of their arses and see it coming no matter how many times it gets pulled on them.

In contrast, one labor leader at the Montebello meeting of the so called "Security and Prosperity Summit" in Quebec earned the title "leader" and not only detected this crap as it was talking place, but confronted the government-employed criminals involved and forced them to stand down.

This kind of activity isn't legitimate police work. It's thug-for-hire work on behalf of fascists.

Next time you see one of these hulking morons with a mask on his face holding a rock or stick, rip off his mask and photograph him. Don't expect a shred of help from the gutless news media exposing these vermin. They'll never follow up on the story, but the photographs are a deterrent.

Police State Britain - no one can be trusted

A quick flick thorough today’s British papers shows Police State Britain is functioning well.

The Telegraph today tells us the familiar story of Jared Ahmad, 27, arrested after completing a 20-minute journey to Salford Crescent, Greater Manchester. He claims, and I don’t doubt him, having been in that predicament myself, he was unable to buy a ticket because there was no ticket machine at the station at which he got on the train, and no conductor on board his train.

In their wisdom, the ever vigilant British Transport Police arrested him, banged him up in cell and took both his fingerprints and a sample of DNA. Both will now be stored on a national police database. There again, he did have a non-British, Moslem-sounding sounding name.

The Mail informs us that two pensioners, Mr and Mrs Richards, the latter wheelchair bound, were accosted by shopping centre security guards in Hull. The guards spotted 79-year-old Anthony Richards taking a photograph of his wife at the entrance of a new £200 million retail centre and were having none of it. They were ordered to put the camera away.

Mr Richards and his wife Betty were told the ban on people taking photos was to stop terrorists gathering intelligence, and staff were instructed to follow "anyone acting suspiciously".

There you go then, how suspicious can you get? You just can’t be too careful these days. Those pensioners might well have uploaded those snaps to the internet for Al Qaeda to see.

Mr Richards rightly observed it was load of bollocks: “It's quite ridiculous. It makes you wonder what is happening to the world. They don't stop people taking photographs in Paris of the Eiffel Tower or the Millennium wheel in London.”

This said, me and another comrade, out getting stock footage for a socialist video we were planning, did get pounced on four times by cops who ordered us to stop filming or face arrest, on one occasion taking our names and radioing them in to se if they tallied – in Trafalgar Square, outside the Houses of Parliament, across the river from the Houses of Parliament and just up from Buck House.

I digress…Shopping centre manager David Laycock backed his guards' vigilance. He said: "It's our duty of care to check that all pictures taken are for legitimate reasons. Photographic reconnaissance is a proven potential risk," he said. "It is not realistic for security staff to assess who might be taking photographs innocently or otherwise. “

Again, utter bollocks. Anyone ever been on Google Earth? You can bloody well zoom into any building in Britain, and quite close up, and measure distances in feet and inches of all the alleys and back roads in the vicinity. Any terrorist wanting to attack a shoppie could get the lay-out in five minutes flat. You can even zoom into Guantanamo Bay!

Mr Richards, meanwhile should thank his lucky stars his name is not Ahmed. They’d have had him in a headlock, handcuffed and his DNA taken in a jiffy.

Famine or Feast? Britain alone wastes 20 million tons of food a year

Crikes, the story would have passed me by if Alan’s blog hadn’t alerted me to it. I’m getting slack in my old age. Hot on the heels of two earlier postings (here and here) on world food shortages and how the UN is begging for $500 million to help provide food assistance to the world’s starving millions, comes news that Britain is throwing away half of all the food produced on farms, according to the starkest estimate yet of the amount of edible produce we

The Independent reports: “About 20m tons of food is thrown out each year: equivalent to half of the food import needs for the whole of Africa. Some 16m tons of this is wasted in homes, shops, restaurants, hotels and food manufacturing. Much of the rest is thought to be destroyed between the farm field and the shop shelf.”

The cost of the waste is put at a staggetring £20 billion ($40 billion) and eighty times the amount that the UN is asking for to feed the starving largely in Africa and Asia.

Forty-four per-cent of the population of Burundi is starving – that’s bout 4 million people. The food thrown away in the UK last year would meet the equivalent of Burundi's shortages more than 40 times over.

Lord Haskins of Skidby, a former government adviser on rural affairs and chairman of Northern Foods has urged governments to press their citizens to help "avoid disaster by dramatically reducing the ... unacceptable levels of food waste, which are a shameful feature of most modern consumer societies". He called recent controversy over supermarkets' free distribution of plastic bags "a red herring". He argued, "If consumers ate a bit less and wasted a bit less you'd help to solve the problem. If the world was vegetarian then you'd solve the problem completely." One-third of wheat grown globally is fed to livestock reared to end up on the dinner table.

Tony Lowe, the chief executive of FareShare, the national food charity, said: "Unfortunately, we live in a world where many people do not have access to food in general, and good-quality food specifically, while at the same time millions of tons of perfectly fine food are being disposed of. In the UK alone, the extent of food poverty is staggering, as millions of people with low or no income find it harder to access affordable, nutritious food."

If this is the amount of food wasted in tiny Britain, then it begs the question just how much is thrown away each year globally. Whilst we have over 800 million on this planet chronically malnourished, the simple truth must be that the earth produces enough food to make the planet morbidly obese. As ever, the profit motive kicks in and whether you are obese or emaciated depends, as ever, on your purchasing power.

Meanwhile, the Independent provides a list of ten tips to help cut the waste mountain. Note this is not ten tips to stop global hunger, like abolishing capitalism, freeing production from the artificial constraints of profit and establishing a global system of free access to the necessaries of life! While critical of the current global food “crisis” the Independent simply accepts capitalism is here to stay and suggests individuals change their personal habits. The master class gets off ‘scot free’ again!