HUMOUR:

QUICK DUDLEY, FOLLOW THAT PHONE NUMBER:

(And you thought you were paranoid)

It was many years ago, and I was picking up the mail at the post office box for the anarchist journal 'Flashpoint' that we ran out of Saskatchewan for some years. What to my wondering eyes should appear but an envelope from the 'Government of Canada'. "Oh, this should be interesting", I say to myself. I open it up, and the enclosed ms says that it is from the 'National Library of Canada', and it demands that we send them 2 copies of each issue of the paper. It went on to describe the legal penalties should we fail to comply. Oh sure.....

"Well finally I get to have some fun". I draft a reply, pass it by for a quick review of the other people involved, and send it on:

Dear Sir or Madam,

Thank you for your interest in our journal 'Flashpoint'. We would be pleased to send you copies of our journal, as we are sure that it would be a valuable addition to the National Library of Canada. We have to inform you, however, that your institution falls under the 'institutional subscription' category. This means that the cost would be $200 for a 'perpetual subscription'. Please remit said payment by cheque or money order made out to 'Flashpoint', and I assure you that the first two copies of each issue mailed will be directed to the 'National Library of Canada'.

Yours sincerely,

bzzzzzzz

For some inexplicable reason we never heard from them again. Fast forward this video about 30 years.

Now the world is on the internet. I mean it, the whole bloody world, from Burkino Faso to Bhutan. Molly has been churning out this blog for a little over three years, and in that time I have become accustomed to certain "regular visitors". These include various corporations such as the Royal Bank of Canada, the Hudson's Bay Company, Walmart, General Motors, etc., etc., etc..The list would be very long and tedious if I were to include every company that drops by here to check out the nasty things that are being said about their treatment of their workers. Some have been suckered by some sort of present day mutation of "management consultants" into subscribing to some sort of aggregator of "who hates me this week". To say the least this sort of thing delivers far less than a simple occasional google search at 50 times the cost. But who am I to argue with public relations departments and their expenditures.

Some of these visitors have become almost old friends. A similar thing goes for certain government agencies. I am indeed very happy that institutions such as the governments of Ontario, Manitoba, BC and Canada are so thrilled with my literary skills that they feel obliged to return again and again. The same goes for such groups as the Toronto Police Force and the RCMP. Hi guys ! My favourite is actually the Defense Research Establishment in Ottawa. The latter does bring up the fact that a lot of this state attention is actually desk jockeys looking for something like "Julie Couillard's tits" (google this and see how fast you get to Molly's Blog). It's been years since the "scandal" about how the spooks in Ottawa were actually spending a lot of their time "spying on porn". No problem for me. I could think of worse things that you could be doing...like actually working.

Now, it is actually quite useless for these government agencies to come to this little cat's blog. For one thing I never publish anything that isn't already in the public domain. For another thing a lot of what is published here is actually a reprint of what is published on another site (this extended rant excluded). Why don't the spooks go to the river's source ? Perhaps they do, and the fact that they also end up here is one more example of "time serving" as they pretend to work in the course of a day. That is actually quite likely given the work habits of the average government office. Once more who am I to argue.

Then there is the obvious fact that would be apparent to any reader of this blog that "Molly's anarchism" is the furthest thing from conspiratorial politics and militant grandstanding that you could imagine. Anyone coming here here could easily see that this blogger advocates an anarchism that is totally publicly open and is opposed to the illusions of grandeur that all too many pseudo-anarchists harbour. Anarchism will stand or fall by its practical appeal to the average person, and there are no "criminal shortcuts" to convincing the general public of the practicality of its ideas. police forces would find this blog a particularly sterile field to either gather information or incite certain actions for political purposes.

When I lower myself to actually spit fury at some of the things that pass as anarchism, especially in the USA, I have certainly far too often adopted the tone of an elementary school teacher lecturing a class of brain damaged 6 year olds. Well, it happens to be true, and it doesn't matter if the (politically incorrect word warning !!!) tards have a half digested vocabulary of big words that they don't understand. They still have no common sense. One of their idiocies is imagining that they can "out-conspire the state". I have actually seen public discussions of how they can encrypt their emails so that the police can't read them. Cough ! Cough ! Cough ! I really wonder, given the mental level of the average participant in such games, if the idea that the police, if they bother to pay attention at all, wouldn't give the supposedly best suggestion ever crosses their limited minds.

All this is a preliminary to the following. In terms of "general intelligence" I have the unfortunate feeling that the average police officer is superior to the average "fashion anarchist" of the 'abolish civilization/form a black bloc/do vandalism/we are beyond leftism' variety. Maybe the cop lacks the half digested academic rhetoric, but perhaps the cop is the better for it. There are, however, sometimes some things that make me doubt this conclusion, that makes me think that the police are just as stupid as my mad comrades. The following is one of those 8 million stories in the Naked City.

Here was Molly following who has visited her blog. Once more the RCMP from Ottawa showed up. Tick it off. As the intro to this post indicated I am sometimes inclined to "send a bill", and one of my enduring dreams is that, if I ever retire and have enough time to track every visitor to this blog that i would institute a "pay for view" system. This means that all visitors from certain corporations and governments, unless they had a legitimate reason for visiting here such as a view of either the constellation Perseus or Julie Couillard's tits, would be noted, and a monthly bill would be sent. Real people would be exempt.

This visit, however, was particularly strange. The RCMP were looking for the phone number "604-822-0912". What in the name of Jesus is this, and what on Earth does it have to do with me ? I went on the search. I went to search it down myself. The RCMP spent little time on this blog in their search. The phone number is that of the (get this) 'Green College Dining Society' in Vancouver. You won't get in touch with the head chef via this number, but you will, at least, reach the kitchen. The connection to Molly's Blog is that there is a series of lectures at UBC on the Olympics and that there are "optional dinners" offered afterwards. The phone number to register for these dinners was given via a press release by the Olympic Resistance Network. The best spin I can put on this is that the RCMP want to tap the phone of the (ha ! ha!) Green College Dining Society so that they can get the phone numbers of anyone who wants the overpriced dinner after the academic lecture. Get the names of all those lefties with money to waste I guess. What this has to do with "preventing terrorism" ala the Abdul Al Hazrad Brigade, is beyond me. To me it seems like wheel spinning, adding names and phone numbers to files that have no purpose. I've said before on this blog that the attention that the Canadian police pays to the public opposition to the Olympic Games is at the expense of attention to real terrorist threats. This is just one more example.

This, of course, is infinitely stupid, on the level of those who think they can "end civilization" by firebombing SUV sales lots. This, however, is the "intelligence" that is supported by taxpayer dollars, and, as I said, it makes me wonder about my estimates of "relative intelligence" of the state and its pseudo-opponents.