phillyharper.com

“Party leaders advocate sweeping reforms. Now it’s your turn. Tell us in 100 words what you would do to improve the way our country is run. We will publish the best ideas”

That’s the challenge those folk over at The Times have thrown down, so I’m going to have a crack of the whip. Reason being that when I first saw the challenge I wondered how many people above the age of 40 would dish out their old world wisdom; I haven’t done any research but I’d hedge a guess at it being the majority. I’m 23, and the old world hasn’t corrupted me yet, so here is my effort to represent the young.

Make Westminister a public museum to the ‘old system’. The sweeping reform must be the complete abolition of the current political system. We don’t need politicians any more, technology lets us represent ourselves.

Employ direct democracy through an open source web application so that everyone can have their say and shape policy like the masses shaped Wikipedia. Collaborate online with new ideas for all aspects of life, vote on new policy, new diplomats and new public servants. Everything is monitored by the public, including the budget. We don’t need crooks, liars and mercenaries, we can do this ourselves.

99 words

The expansion

Young people are turned off by politics because it’s completely alien to them. It’s so slow and arduous, where are the ideas? Where is the fun? Where is the creativity? It’s a bunch of old people in suits being boring, they’re the definition of boring, and they’re constantly watching their back so they don’t trip up by saying “I smoked a joint in school.”

None of us care that you smoked a joint in school. None of us care that you took ecstasy at a rave in 1989. We don’t care that you’re gay, straight or bi. We don’t even care if you’re into nazi sex orgys or hardcore pornography (as long as you pay for it). What we care about are ideas, and your total lack of them. In fact, you’re entire work place soaks ideas up like a rabid nappy then ejects them into the Thames to be washed out to sea never to be seen again.

The houses of parliament hasn’t become a political arm wrestle, that’s exactly what it is. On one side are people with ideas, and on the other are people who oppose them. The entire shape of the debating chamber ensures an “us vs them” atmosphere remains constant. Left wing, right wing, pro-choice, pro-life, athiest, theist, conservative, liberal, it’s all opposition politics that ensures you achieve next to nothing. Congratulations on acting like children for the past 400 years, especially the last 10 years where we had the unfortunate ability to watch you act like children on BBC Parliament.

While you’re desperately keeping up appearances, having nervous breakdowns, and tearing down anything anyone comes up with,we’re collaborating online. We’re not terrified of our own ideas, you guys are. We’re not terrified of being wrong, you guys are. You guys aren’t capable of working together, we are. You guys wear a uniform, we don’t. You guys work in a little boys club, we don’t. Your workplace is invite only, ours isn’t. We’re coming up with more ideas than your system has splattered together throughout it’s entire history. You just don’t “get” what we’re doing and you don’t get the significance of it.

You represent us to fight for our causes. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we don’t need representing any more, we all have a voice and we can even aggregate and analyze that voice. We’ve already been doing it for at least five years. The first part of your job is obsolete, you just don’t know it yet.

Secondly, if we remove the bells and whistles from your job description, essentially, you guys decide how much money to take from us and where that money should go. You redistribute wealth in a manner (I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt here) you think is in the nations best interest. Well we can do that ourselves with technology, it’s our money, so we can be as transparent as we like. We need an application that allows us to see exactly what’s going on, where money is coming in, where money is going out, where it’s needed, where it’s not, who is too rich, who is too poor, who is corrupting, who is working hard, who is half assing, who is developing ideas, where money is missing, where there is a surplus. That’s not an exhaustive list of things it needs but I expect the gaps will be filled in by some other collaborator I’ve never met. Special thankyou to whoever that person might be.

Don’t worry, we can design it and build it ourselves, you needn’t be a part of it. We’ve already put together the biggest encyclopedia the world has ever seen and built an operating system from scratch. Your pity isn’t needed here. I just represented myself and put forward my own idea, you weren’t involved and more people listened to me than there are members of parliament. See how easy it is?

I’m not worried about it really, I know that if it doesn’t happen now, it will happen later. Online progress is unstoppable. Manifest Destiny 2.0.

The world needs our ideas more than ever. You’ve had your crack of the whip and from our angle it was a piss poor effort. Admittedly, you didn’t have the best tools at your disposal but nevertheless you all managed to look like idiots. Especially Harriet Harman and Hazel Blears, you two really did take the biscuit.

For hundreds of years we were convinced the world was flat. It isn’t. For hundreds of years you people lived and breathed party politics thinking it works. It doesn’t.

We don’t need you. Go and get real jobs and fiddle the private sectors expenses all you want, just don’t expect anyone to believe the myth that you represent us. You don’t.

I saw a huge advert for iPhone on the back of the times. The conclusion I came to was simple, if you charge people for things that are free elsewhere, you end up with a budget big enough to advertise your over priced service to the masses. Hence iPhone being everywhere, Android being nowhere. Android is better than iPhone… but they don’t have the budget to tell you that yet.

I decided to correct the advert, click it for the full size

I wonder if someone is getting fired or promoted for this? Link

If you have a way to print this I think it would look pretty nice as a poster. Click the image for the full size.

Baltimore Christian Conservative Examiner: Another missing link or another red herring?.

I had to read this article twice just to be sure it wasn’t satire, but apparently people are actually this ignorant. It seems a hard line creationist chimed in his two cents on the recent unveiling of the so called “missing link” (it’s not the missing link, but an interesting addition to our fossil record). Sentences like this make you wonder about the education in the world. The conviction in the statement is hilarious. Read more »

Governments get away with the most heinous crimes imaginable, so heinous that no one would ever believe that such trusted institutions would be capable of thinking them up.

Statements like this are often met with an angered scepticism, people are immediately turned off at the prospect of hearing something they don’t really want to hear.  The phrase “conspiracy theory” has lost all meaning whilst gaining an almighty power, it only needs to be mentioned in reference to your argument and you instantly lose all credibility. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Nobel prize winner or Joe the Plumber, analyse something too much and you’re the conspiracy guy, interpret an event any other way than the mainstream and you’re the conspiracy guy. It didn’t happen, shut up, move on, who are United playing this weekend? Can’t we stop throwing the baby out with the bath water each and every time someone dares to present information radically contradicting the norm?

Conspiracy theories have a funny tendency to become conspiracy facts given enough time. The Freedom of Information Act means we can learn how crooked our government were 30 years after they got away with being crooks. Isn’t there a way to speed the process up?  They’re commonly known as conspiracy theories, but in the spirit of debate, I’d like to present a conspiracy fact.

On November 18th 1997 the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board (a conspiracy I won’t go into on this occasion) made public a series of documents relating to Kennedy’s assassination that had previously been marked top secret and classified. A total of 1521 pages of top secret military records covering 1962-1964 were released. Amongst the pages was one rather juicy and damning document called “The Justification for US military intervention in Cuba” which later become known as “Operation Northwoods.”

Operation Northwoods was a plan to justify a US military intervention in Cuba during a time when tensions between the US and the Soviet Union were running high. The Joint Chiefs of Staff planned to stage a false flag operation to gain domestic and international support for a war with Cuba. That means the US military were prepared to blow something up in a  United States city and tell the world that Cuba did it to provoke Fidel Castro into a war. To quote the document itself  “World opinion and the United Nations forum should be favourably affected by developing the image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere.”  Sound familiar?

I’ve uploaded the entire document for you to read here, but I thought I’d quote some of the most damaging suggestions for the false flag operation which were signed off and handed to the President. These suggestions are taken word for word from the document itself.

4) We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington.

The terror campaign could be pointed at refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized.

Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement, also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.

8 ) It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight.

a. An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone.b. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Eglin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will being transmitting on the international distress frequency a “MAY DAY” message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow ICAO radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the US what has happened to the aircraft instead of the US trying to “sell” the incident.

So there you have it, rock solid proof that the US government considered blowing up airliners and tourist towns to get support for a war they wanted. J. F Kennedy, one of the best presidents the US has ever had, saw the plans and dismissed out of hand and later demoted the man responsible for them. A year later, Kennedy was assassinated.

So what’s your point?

My point is that just because you don’t know about it, or it seems unlikely, or because it’s scary, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Were there conspiracy theorists who were laughed out of the room for suggesting that the government were prepared to blow airliners up to gain support for their war?

There are plenty of well respected architects, engineers and scientists who believe that the official explanation for  9/11 is a farce, and those people have plenty of scientific evidence to back up those claims. They believe that 9/11 was a false flag operation to justify a war in the Middle East which we now know was based on a lie, there were no weapons of mass destruction. Colin Powell went to the UN to sing the world a merry tune about how there were WMD’s when the United States government knew there weren’t. Time has turned that conspiracy theory into a conspiracy fact.

Given there’s proof the US government at least considered conducting false flag operations in the past is it crazy to suggest they’ve planned and implemented them in the present? There’s no leap of faith required, just take a look at the evidence and decide.

A super good friend of mine sent this across because she knew I’d absolutely love it. It ticks every box in creating a USA! moment. See if you can spot them all…

Since Autumn 2008 things haven’t looked their best. We’ve heard it mentioned so often it’s become entirely boring to hear; something is wrong with our finances. We’ve got an efficient and rabid media chasing down names and pointing at banks but some juicy and infuriating details are glossed over. I thought I’d share some of the more interesting points of the disaster. Read more »

Tonight I am going to see Mark Thomas, he’s a comedian activist, or maybe he’s an activist comedian. The show is called manifesto and the premise is simple, get the audience to write suggestions down which might improve our lives and then work those suggestions into the performance. After his tour around the UK he’ll hopefully have a manifesto written entirely by the people, or more specifically, by the small number of people who came to see his show.

Each audience gets to come up with a policy, which I will include in the final manifesto and then campaign upon. So here is your chance to propose your policy or policies for the future. All I want is an idea that you think will improve our lives, it can be silly, serious, economic, plagiarised, original, bold, simple, complex, obvious or morbid.    -   markthomasinfo.com

Apparently we’re to fill in a form to suggest our suggestion but who the hell fills out forms these days? I haven’t used a pen in years, they’re so last century. Maybe my first suggestion is for all forms to be abolished, and instead everything is filled out in digital forms.

I’m not one for long arduous ideas, so I’m going to give an internet friendly numbered list of things I want changed, and if Mark Thomas doesn’t change them I’ll label him a failure. They’re definitely not listed in order of priority. Read more »