Park Life

At their height there was an estimated 30,000 Isis in Syria, the numbers now estimated by the Pentagon are between 6-10,000 proper Jihadi's...A string of defeats and partial closing of the Turkish arms corridor (Russia wiping out tanker convoys of Isis oil) has greatly diminished their battle posture. Aleppo, Mosul and Raqqa are becoming last stand scenarios. A far cry from the heady days of a caliphate stretching half way across Syria and Iraq. We can only wait and see what new fandango is cooked up as it seems Isis's fighting days are nearly over as a proper force.

The leaders are obviously religious zealots I don't think that's up for debate....A lot of the others seem to be pretty much clueless about Islam. According to the documents, which were acquired by the Syrian opposition site Zaman al-Wasl and shared with the AP, 70 per cent of recruits were listed as having just "basic" knowledge of Sharia — the lowest possible choice. Around 24 per cent were categorized as having an "intermediate" knowledge, with just five per cent considered advanced students of Islam. Five recruits were listed as having memorized the Quran. At the height of Isis' drive for foot soldiers in 2013 and 2014, typical recruits included the group of Frenchmen who went bar-hopping with their recruiter back home, the recent European convert who now hesitantly describes himself as gay, and two Britons who ordered "The Koran for Dummies" and "Islam for Dummies" from Amazon to prepare for jihad abroad." http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-documents-leak-recruits-islam-sharia-religion-faith-syria-iraq-a7193086.html ISIS wannabes are so ignorant about the culture they’re pledging their lives to that they are ordering books like “Islam for Dummies” before joining the terrorist organization. About 70 percent of ISIS recruits only have “basic” knowledge of Shariah law, the Islamic legal system, according to an analysis by The Associated Press of more than 3,000 internal documents from the terror network." http://nypost.com/2016/08/15/isis-fighters-are-using-islam-for-dummies-to-prepare-for-jihad/ Omar Mateen, the man who killed 49 people in Orlando, pledged allegiance to ISIS, but authorities found no evidence he had any ties to the group. ISIS later claimed a truck rampage in Nice, France that took 85 lives. But the driver, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, reportedly ate pork, abused drugs and alcohol and ignored all forms of prayer. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/isis-recruits-islam-report-article-1.2751962

I feel like a Klingon Warbird itching to de-cloak in the midst of the half asleep Federation fleet.

There was a thing called the women's movement, you can go back a hundred years....For want of a better term it was 'grass roots'. That's long gone. It was colonized by Capitalism and turned into a 'lifestyle product/choice'...Catchphrases, branding, signs, cod ideologies, faux outrage...Product placement...Facade. This is not a feminist..This is pure articfice...Although along with Oprah Winfrey and startlingly Beyonce she will be found in many lists of modern feminists. These are actors and entertainers playing the role of feminists in the best tradition of the 'hyper real'.

All culture is created. People don't wake up one morning with new ideas they read them in magazines or see them on the telly. Pretty much everything me and you believe in was given to us and we probably can't verify most of it. The hyper real is in operation all around us. Go to somewhere like Brighton. Pretty much all of the trendy town center is not real....It's 'the real' which is a Capitalist creation to sell ideas and product. Capitalism colonizes ideas like say the early women's movement and then flips it back against women to sell them product (lifestyles). All these lifestyles are copied - monkey see monkey do. Captialism has created a mirror of the real which has nothing to do with any of us basically...Hang the DJ etc........ To cut to the chase Feminism has been weaponized into a tool to control society at large. After the early post 2nd world war days they needed quick re-population so the nuclear family was all the rage. Around about the 60's they switched it...Magazines were suddenly full of women alone on beaches, buying cars (for themselves), free love...Most of this stuff is staged....At the nexus the moment of hyper reality is in a studio with lights and recording equipment....With actors and pr men and social psychologists...The moment of creation is fake....

Eh?

Distractions they certainly are. They put a lot of mind addling nonsense out there while the machine grinds on cracking human skulls and starving millions of people, buying up the water supply, big agro business putting farmers out of business so they can colonise the food production of the whole planet...OoooOO does my arse look big in this? Gender politics is probably the biggest psy-ops of all time.

Reeeezes.

There is no right and left. That sums it up for me.

It's worthy to note that most presidents don't know what is actually going on and the bits they do find once in office turns their hair white.

“The most important source of ISIS financing to date has been support coming out of the Gulf states, primarily Saudi Arabia but also Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates,” (According to Dr. Günter Meyer, Director of the Center for Research into the Arabic World at University of Mainz, Germany, Deutsche Welle)"

As me and Gemmill predicted a month ago the establishment have stepped in.

Yeah but we now have to deal with this hybrid Reazes.

Renton killed Leazes and nicked all his ideas. It was Stalin - Trotsky thing. Also a bit like in voodoo where the soul of the person you kill infiltrates your soul. He's been eating garlic like a fucker under that desk.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isis-syria-iraq "That doesn’t mean the US created Isis, of course, though some of its Gulf allies certainly played a role in it – as the US vice-president, Joe Biden, acknowledged last year. But there was no al-Qaida in Iraq until the US and Britain invaded. And the US has certainly exploited the existence of Isis against other forces in the region as part of a wider drive to maintain western control. The calculus changed when Isis started beheading westerners and posting atrocities online, and the Gulf states are now backing other groups in the Syrian war, such as the Nusra Front. But this US and western habit of playing with jihadi groups, which then come back to bite them, goes back at least to the 1980s war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which fostered the original al-Qaida under CIA tutelage. It was recalibrated during the occupation of Iraq, when US forces led by General Petraeus sponsored an El Salvador-style dirty war of sectarian death squads to weaken the Iraqi resistance. And it was reprised in 2011 in the Nato-orchestrated war in Libya, where Isis last week took control of Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte. In reality, US and western policy in the conflagration that is now the Middle East is in the classic mould of imperial divide-and-rule. American forces bomb one set of rebels while backing another in Syria, and mount what are effectively joint military operations with Iran against Isis in Iraq while supporting Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against Iranian-backed Houthi forces in Yemen. However confused US policy may often be, a weak, partitioned Iraq and Syria fit such an approach perfectly."

Polls tightening again today. I'm gonna call Florida for Trump. Think the polls have been wrong about Florida from the start and although Trump might be down on numbers I think more of his vote will turn out. If he takes Florida he'll need to get the momentum of Nevada and Michigan where it is close. I do hope for Clinton's sake that the polls haven't been rigged thus far to influence voting patterns. It is accepted that people who aren't sure tend to go with who the polls say is in the lead.....Now if that has been the case then a lot of the polls will just be wrong.

Always do a week walking in Austria. The scenery and flora and fauna are something else. Pure air too.

You can cut through a lot of shit by going straight from the Greeks to Nietzsche and then his later French counterparts Derrida and Foucault....Throw in a bit of Jung for good measure but not too much. Trump is the epitome of 'Will to Power'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_and_reception_of_Friedrich_Nietzsche According to philosopher Rene Girard,[22] Nietzsche's greatest political legacy lies in his 20th century interpreters, among them Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari), and Jacques Derrida... Foucault's later writings, for example, revise Nietzsche's genealogical method to develop anti-foundationalist theories of power that divide and fragment rather than unite polities (as evinced in the liberal tradition of political theory). Deleuze, arguably the foremost of Nietzsche's Leftist interpreters, used the much-maligned "will to power" thesis in tandem with Marxian notions of commodity surplus and Freudian ideas of desire to articulate concepts such as the rhizome and other "outsides" to state power as traditionally conceived."

Yeah prefer the spitting frothing Youtube version.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_the_Absurd Don't go straight in with Beckett as it is a bit out there although 'Murphy' is light and humorous in parts. Start with Sartre as there is a welcoming field of the familiar. 'The Age of Reason' is a beautiful novel I've read and re-read. The Age of Reason[1] (French: L'âge de raison) is a 1945 novel by Jean-Paul Sartre. It is the first part of the trilogy The Roads to Freedom. The novel, set in the bohemian Paris of the late 1930s, focuses on three days in the life of a philosophy teacher named Mathieu who is seeking money to pay for an abortion for his mistress, Marcelle. Sartre analyses the motives of various characters and their actions and takes into account the perceptions of others to give the reader a comprehensive picture of the main character." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre Age of Reason and The Reprieve and Iron in the Soul' read in that order.

That's all been dealt wiv starting in the 60/70's with Sartre, Camus, Ionescu, Genet etc.. and ending with Beckett about 30 years ago... If I catch myself striving for meaning I punch myself in the bollocks.

Gun Control. The gun control legislation sponsored by Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa., backfired in the Senate after Republicans filibustered the measure. The bipartisan bill would have significantly expanded background checks in gun sales but fell shy of the 60-vote threshold to end debate, receiving only 54 votes. "

Broadly agree but Obama figures are skewed because he got a lot of 'small' things through and the larger ones like Obamacare ended up being nothing like what was initially intended. GOP got rid of the 'safe corridor' funding that would help insurance companies in danger of being overwhelmed etc... http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/12/17/Congress-Weakens-Obamacare-Limiting-Bailout-Funds-Insurers American Jobs Act. In the minority, Republicans still shut down President Obama’s 2011 jobs plan. It would have imposed a 5.6-percent tax on all income over $1 million to pay for new “stimulus” spending by the government. The Democrats’ majority couldn’t pass the measure, which failed 50-49. Cap and Trade. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress in 2010, but their “cap-and-trade” legislation stalled in the Senate. Republicans filibustered sweeping restrictions on the use of fossil fuels aimed at cutting carbon emissions and the measure failed to reach Obama’s desk Minimum Wage. Republicans launched a filibuster in 2014 to derail a Democrat proposal that would have mandated an across-the-board federal minimum wage of $10.10. Paycheck Fairness Act. Republicans blocked the 2014 Paycheck Fairness Act four separate times. The bill would have leveled harsher penalties for discrimination and required employers to account for any pay gap between male and female employees. The bill never made it to a final vote, though, failing 52 to 40. The last thing I want to be doing is defending Obama up in here.