And so the world plummets ceaselessly onwards falling freely through space on a path dictated by the gravity of our local star "Sol" or "Sun" and at a more substantial level by our home galaxy the "Milky Way". And possibly also by increasingly massive levels of other gravitational influencing masses above even our Milky Way in the hierarchy of the Universe. And in accordance to this movement as we understand it, time moves silently and determinedly forward here on Earth at our peculiarly distinctive rate.

And so as the seconds tick towards my imminent departure from the northern hemisphere of this planet I look forward to espying in a simple sink the evidence that the Earth does indeed spin on its axis, or if it was all propaganda all along. You see propaganda is a sly beast. All through history it has occurred and throughout people have been utterly convinced by it. In Victorian Britain, the public thought that we were fighting a moral and just war of liberalisation and the spreading of good old British values.

In reality lots of defenceless women and children were put into concentration camps (the actual term was invented and named after British-created camps in the Boer War), whilst the local produce (in this case diamonds - not oil on this occasion) was taken advantage of and us Brits gained an important strategic base for ships sailing east of Africa. Then came along a chap called Hitler; a man who carried the German population in a wave of propaganda-led euphoria. The Cuban Missile Crisis began after Khrushchev saw US nukes on the Soviet border in Turkey and asked "why have we not got nukes on their coast?". The deal that resolved the crisis involved the US pulling its missiles out of Turkey in exchange for the Soviet missiles being turned back across the Atlantic. A victory for Khrushchev then? Not if you ask an American...

And so propaganda has continued evolving right up to the modern day. Is it unsuccessful now we are aware of it?

Somewhat inevitably, I say no.

I'm not talking about spin here. We all know that a government likes to put the best story across we can possibly think of. This is a form of propaganda. But at a more fundamental level it is an old magician's trick designed to make you miss the real propaganda. A magician will wave one hand theatrically making you think he is doing the trick in that hand whilst his other hand - or some other part of his body - performs the real illusion. It is called "distraction".



Take the Hutton report. This is a British inquiry into the apparent suicide of weapons expert David Kelly, who knew much about Iraq's weapons. This is a distraction. The inquiry is distracting us from the continued failure to find weapons of mass destruction which was after all how the coalition attempted to justify its invasion. But the whole issue of weapons of mass destruction is a distraction (apologies for the tongue twistery nature of all this) from the real reason the coalition invaded in the first place (depose Sadaam/make money for particular oil, arms, and communications business' which all coincidentally happen to have connections with US administration/secure a strategic base/part of the once-every-eight-years arms fair [anything to do with most arms having a shelf-life of eight years before having to be scrapped anyway?]/re-elect Bush and Blair - choose from one or all of these options; I don't know which are valid or not).

Of course this whole business is simply a distraction from a failure to provide any decent security and from the failure to expend any moral effort towards the well-being of people in the third-world.

And so the big conspiracy begins, because all that is just distraction - a mere magic trick. If propaganda is as affective as it has always been in the past then we should question it all.

How do you know the Earth goes round the sun? Have you actually seen it? Have you seen the Milky Way?

Okay, so you've seen it, but is it anything more than a pretty band of stars?...


How do you know that Newton even existed? Met him have you? Tony Blair could be computer generated as far as I know. Do you know any better?


I fucking thought not.

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Thanks to Mike for generously hosting my MP3's. It means faster downloads and massive amounts more space to host them in, so I can get more than three or four on. Hence the five you see now. Two more to come soon I hope... Also thanks to him for a short HTML-of-the-future tutorial which might have made its way to the site. But for the moment I will leave on the back burner. Mainly because it's far too bloody much effort...