12 May 2020 — The New Dark Age
A must read (and frightening) document that details the UK government’s programme to control our thoughts and opinions (see also https://williambowles.info/2020/05/12/covid-19-uk-column-news-11th-may-2020/ )
From the Executive Summary:
Influencing behaviour is central to public policy. Recently, there have been major advances in understanding the influences on our behaviours, and government needs to take notice of them. This report aims to make that happen.
17 March 2020 • 18:00 — The New Dark Age
This is a work-in-progress, I’ll add/take away as the ideas/events emerge. What the government is doing is monstrous beyond words, dressed up with slick slogans – ‘Wash often for 20 seconds’, to hide the essentially benign neglect approach to the nation’s health. This is a national emergency. Banks should be nationalised, private healthcare taken over, the people mobilised. Those forced to cease work must be paid, but it’s clear, from the very beginning that business comes first (even if they’ll be no business left). The government hasn’t made it an official emergency, hence businesses can’t claim insurance (apparently, this has just changed, though the details escape me).
It’s also clear that the government is using us, the people, in a vast experiment called ‘Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs)’, because the NHS simply doesn’t have the capacity, having been starved to death for the past ten years. The fancy graphs they show us, actually hide the reality, that the only way the NHS can cope, is to slow the spread of the disease, one ‘stage ‘at a time. So you ‘suppress it’ for awhile using for example, ‘social distancing’ then you let the disease rip for awhile (more old and sick die), then suppress it again, and so on, until their ‘herd immunity’ kicks in and we can go back to being cattle once more. Nobody has ever tried to do this before, anywhere, that’s why I call it a gigantic, whole society experiment. So not only are we being treated as cattle, we are also being used as guinea pigs. Quite a menagerie this tory goverment has made for us.
Something else also changed today; the government, probably under pressure from the medical profession, is restarting the testing of people for the virus. This is vital. What I find odd though, is why is there no App available so that the infected can be tracked (voluntary of course)? This is something that epidemiologists do all the time when tracking the progress of a disease.
The following extracts are from the government’s raison d’etre that supports the government’s (non) handling of the crisis. Although dated 16 March 2020, clearly its major proposals were articulated well before Boris Johnson’s press conference last week with his two government lackeys, sorry scientists, who articulated the ‘herd immunity’ concept of disease control [sic], that is to say, sacrifice the old and the sick so that the survivors (hopefully the majority) acquire immunity.
Essentially, the report articulates the Eugenicist approach to ‘dealing’ with the crisis; sacrifice the old and the sick so that the young and healthy survive. (You can download the full report at the end of the article).
All quotes are from the report.
China’s “cruel communist dictatorship” sacrifices its economy to save the population.
The “cool British democracy” sacrifices its population to save its economy. – Anon
19 November 2019 — InvestigatingImperialism
By William Bowles
This is probably the most difficult piece I’ve ever had to write, at least about the Labour Party. My feelings about Corbyn and the Labour Party are on record, here, here, here and here, to name a few. The Labour Party is a party of Imperialism and always has been since its inception, well over a century ago. Even its high point in 1945, with the creation of the welfare state, occurred through pressure from below and just as today, capitalism was bankrupt and in crisis. The Labour government, in return for the Welfare state, saved capitalism from revolution (or collapse). The gains made during that critical period following WWII lasted about thirty years before the lords of capital started taking back what ‘we’ had tried to take from them and by 1975 we were clearly not equipped to resist. In part, the Labour Party was directly responsible, in fact it was party to the attacks on the Welfare state and the working class.
23 July 2019
A short note. I’m taking the day off today as I’m a birthday boy (74) and off to hang out by the seaside for the day with an old friend, so no updates.
Plus it’s HOT out there and London is not the place to be when in it’s in the 30s, so a sea breeze will be a welcome relief.
Bill
22 July 2019 — The New Dark Age
Isn’t it time to protect Labour Party members from the stench of Tom Watson’s hypocrisy
18 July 2019 — Investigating Imperialism
I am nothing if not an optimist, a trait that most on the Left seem to share. A belief in the future, that there is one that includes us. That things, eventually, get better, if we fight for it. ‘Unrealistic’, I hear you say, what is there to be optimistic about? The planet is going to hell and taking us all with it, and there’s nothing we can do about it! Well, maybe so, then this happened, a small event, minute even, in the scheme of things but somehow it triggered a response in me that I could not ignore and which I had to address:
28 June 2019 — InvestigatingImperialism
Apparently, if we add up all the ‘values’ that make up Planet Earth, we arrive at the figure of $5 quadrillion [1]! We’ve reduced the irreducible to the level of an accountant’s spreadsheet. Yet, it’s exactly this kind of thinking that’s created the disaster that, forget 10 years, it’s already with us and it’s been building to this since the start of the Industrial Revolution approximately 200 years ago.
24 June 2019
How could I keep away? Let me catch up with things here, mail to read, articles to source and as I’ve been writing once more as things here in this messed up world seem to be reaching some kind of terminal watershed, I think it’s time to start putting out some ideas that I hope will find traction amongst my readers and hopefully, elsewhere.
Think Collective, think Analogue (yes I know it’s a paradox).
Watch this space
Bill
18 June 2019 — The New Dark Age
I won’t be updating the site between the 20th and the 24th June as I will be out of town.
As a point of interest, the site now has 20,770 stories posted since 2010 when I moved over to WordPress. The work posted between 2003, when it first went live, and 2010, is unfortunately no longer part of this site, aside that is, from my own work which extends back to 1987 or so. I have reloaded some of the earlier work (which I still have) but it’s a vast enterprise, it all has to be ‘re-frozen’ to fit this site.
William
19 February 2019 — Investigating Imperialism
[I think it’s time to republish a piece I wrote 15 years ago, in 2004, though clearly very few took notice of it then, will it be any different this time? I doubt it, it’s probably already too late to do anything about it. What the Labour government initiated in 2004 has now reached, not only fruition but is now sweeping the ‘democratic’ West as the crisis of capital intensifies and opposition to neoliberalism intensifies. I call it what it is, Fascism. Maybe not the Fascism of Hitler or Mussolini, there are no jackboots, they don’t need them this time, they have built the corporate-security state, a state that has us all on file, a state that records our movements, a state that knows what we read, who we see, a state that now works in tandem with its corporate masters just as Mussolini’s Fascism did, a state that makes Orwell’s 1984 amateurish by comparison. Reading through it, I don’t think I need to alter one word. WB.]
24 April 2004
“Someone must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” –
Franz Kafka, ‘The Trial’
17 February 2019 — The New Dark Age
This version of my online life kicked off in March 2003, coincident with the invasion of Iraq by the barbarians. WordPress didn’t exist then, most ‘blogs’ were handcrafted as was mine. I wrote every page in HTML using a piece of software called Cyber Studio, every page viewed existed as an actual ‘flat’ file, perhaps with some links to graphics, but there was no database, or style sheets, or any of the tools used today.
Simple and fast, they’re great for text, they can be searched online just like a database-driven site but you couldn’t keep track of how the content was used, except very crudely but worst of all, when I switched over to WordPress, I ‘lost’ about 20,000 stories! Everything I’d published between 2003-2010 needed to be imported into the WordPress database, one file at a time! Not only that, I had to ‘clean up’ the texts, find any graphics they linked to before I could republish them. It’s a mammoth task and bloody tedious! The problem is that there’s a lot of good stuff ‘locked’ away that I would like to make available once more to a new audience.
It was seeing that someone had accessed my brief tribute to my friend Edward Teague (Postman Patel to many) that got me looking for the work I’d published of Edward’s including one we co-wrote on 7/7. So far I’ve located 23 stories by Edward that I’ve moved here. There may be more.
I met Edward in 2003 and we immediately hit it off. Erudite and to my mind an excellent, witty commentator on our insane times, I’ve ‘rescued’ 23 of his essays. I spent a memorable few days with Edward in his home town, Bolton, a few years before his untimely demise. He became Craig Murray’s election agent when Craig contested the intellectually-challenged Jack Straw’s Burnley seat and learnt, first-hand, just how undemocratic our democracy really is. He also introduced me to his fellow pigeon racers in his local boozer.
Find them here: https://williambowles.info/category/edward-teague/
And I have discovered that Edward’s site is still available! http://postmanpatel.blogspot.com/
Enjoy
6 February 2019 — Investigating Imperialism
First off, let me get the ‘defending Corbyn’ bit out of the way. I do defend Corbyn’s defence of the downtrodden and the dispossessed, a rare quality in Britain’s despicable, dishonest and hypocritical political class. The attacks on him accusing him of anti-semitism are reprehensible and fundamentally originate with the Zionist entity, Israel, launched by Israel’s supporters inside the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) and reinforced by that other supporter of Israel, the BBC (with the able assistance from the rest of the corporate media).[1]
26 November 2018 — williambowles.info
Update 8 January 2019
Here are Part 3 and 4 of the files ‘liberated’ from the Institute for Statecraft
integrity initiative part 4 (43.4mb zipped)
Integrity Initiative part 3 (40.1mb zipped)
I came across the graphic below released by the ‘Integrity Initiative’ [sic] which I think is worth adding in here. BTW, apparently, according to this graphic, this and other lefty websites are now part of the Russian ‘propaganda’ offensive.
And it since emerged that same duo of Institute for Statecraft/Integrity Initiative has been putting out disinfo on Jeremy Corbyn as well! This from The Canary:
The Conservative government is funding a ‘monitoring group’ that’s carrying out disinformation attacks on Jeremy Corbyn and Labour. The foreign office has now admitted providing £1.96m of public money to the Institute for Statecraft’s Integrity Initiative in the 2018/19 year. Military specialists run the unit, which has posted smears about Jeremy Corbyn and his team on social media. ‘The Canary‘, 9th December 2018
A number of documents from the Institute for Statecraft and its propaganda machine, ‘Integrity Initiative’ [sic] have been uncovered by ‘Anonymous’ (whoever they are) that reveal the objectives and the scale of this sophisticated enterprise. But already I read that some individuals are questioning the validity of these documents, that they are some kind of ‘plant’ designed I’m told, to confuse and neutralise Russian propaganda, but you be the judge (all in PDF format). For myself, it’s clear that they are real and not bogus.
26 October 2018 — Anti-Empire Report
I just got a very distressing email from Bill Blum’s former wife detailing an awful fall he sustained at home that left him immobolised for perhaps 2 days before being discovered by a friend! I wish him a speedy recovery but he needs your help with his medical expenses! Here’s the note I received: Continue reading
21 October 2018 — Investigating Imperialism
With crappy apologies to Samuel Beckett
It was just a question of time before the crap spilled over the edge of the bowl.
The basement was the first to fill up of course but who looks in the basement; out-of-sight, out-of-mind.
7 September 2018 — William Bowles
I suppose I should have had an official announcement about the move — from the hosting company I’ve been using since 2003 — and the move to this WordPress-hosted site, so this will have to be it. But the site went ‘live’ today with the rerouting of the domain, which means the original site is now dee-funct.
Readers who know the old site, will be amazed at the difference in loading times, the new location positively flies along. It does have however, a number of limitations that I didn’t have on the self-hosted WordPress site (unless I upgrade to ‘Premium’). WordPress unfortunately is now monetising tools that used to be free. The ethos that got WordPress going in the first place is now fast disappearing. It also has something called ‘Happiness Engineers’, who are I assume, employees of the parent company which is I think is called Autommatic.
So, welcome to the new site, hopefully it will inspire me as well the readers to do something.
William
26 July 2018
I ‘lost’ this essay, that is to say, it vanished into the morass of my hard disk until, quite by chance, I ‘rediscovered’ it. Written for Carol’s funeral celebration by her friends in NYC, it needs no further explanation. WB
A memory of Carol By William Bowles
20 October 2013
It’s a freezing cold night in Brooklyn and I’ve not long been in New York. It’s November or maybe it was December 1975 and I’m on my way to meet Carol for the very first time. My friend Valerie Wilmer gave me some names of people she thought I’d should meet when I got to New York. Amongst them was Carol and Rajah Blank.
So I get off the subway at Marcy Avenue which is in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and pretty much a wasteland of abandoned factories and burned out brownstones and walk down Broadway toward the East River, past a steak house called Peter Luger’s, frequented by gangsters and cops (if you can spot the difference). But in that desolate and abandoned section of Brooklyn, the wide street outside the solid brick-faced building is incongruously lined with a row of long, black Cadillacs. A single neon sign on one end of the building is the only indication that it’s a restaurant. Welcome to New York.
24 May 2018 — Investigatingimperialism
I need to continue my previous essay, it remains woefully incomplete. I kinda hinted at it in the last para but never completed the thought.
Then I got an email from a comrade and friend in NYC after I’d published it:
Thanks, but the question left unanswered is: does the road to “regroupment” or whatever you want to call run through supporting Corbyn or opposing Corbyn and the LP? To me it’s the same question that was faced in Greece 2015. Did regroupment require supporting or opposing Syriza. And in either case, why? And what is the alternative?
23 May 2018 — InvestigatingImperialism
Why should it be that in a climate that’s shifted so far to the right, that out of the morass that is contemporary Britain, there should emerge a politician who was shaped by and effectively still lives, in a world that no longer exists? It’s bizarre to say the least but how to explain it?
Click to view
The New Dark Age 