C.J. Stone's Blog, page 6

Fake News and False Reputations: a review of Ian Hislop’s Fake News: A True History

In the eye of the propaganda storm.

The Internet is being gamed. These days you wouldn’t even need to employ real humans to do the work for you. It can all be done by robots. There was a good program on the BBC the other week. It was called Ian Hislop’s Fake News: A True History. In it he traces the fake news phenomenon back to its roots in the growth of mass circulation newspapers in the 19th century. Fake news isn’t new. A number of newspapers engaged in it. They didn’t care that it was fake: and neither did their readers. It sold. He gives a number of examples, including one where a newspaper claimed to be citing a report in a scientific journal about life on the Moon. Someone had trained a very high-powered telescope on the surface of our nearest neighbor, and through that was able to see its inhabitants and what they were up to. The Moon was occupied by miniature bison, unicorns and flying man-bats. This was in an age when astronomy was still in its infancy. Many people believed the story. It was the talk of New York and made the newspaper in which it appeared, the New York Sun, a lot of money.

From that he traces the history of fake news to the modern day, taking in a number of examples which most of us will recognize. Fake news has been used to start wars. There can’t be many people who reached adulthood before 20th March 2003 who aren’t aware of this. It was fake news about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that started the war that still shapes our world today. The irony is that a number of people now complaining about fake news online were themselves responsible for spreading that particular piece of disinformation, both people in power, and those whose job it was to supposedly report the news.

Come in Tony Blair, your time is up.

In fact if you were to trace the origins of the current rash of fake news, that particular story would rank very high on the list. How many of us, realizing that we were deliberately lied to in order to start a war that never should’ve happened, can trace our scepticism to that one example? Once you start to disbelieve what the mainstream media is telling you, you’re left with no option but to find other sources. It’s the proliferation of such sources online that has led to our current predicament. How much of is true, and how much is just complete nonsense?

Read more here

Fake News and False Reputations

In the eye of the propaganda storm.

The Internet is being gamed. These days you wouldn’t even need to employ real humans to do the work for you. It can all be done by robots. There was a good program on the BBC the other week. It was called Ian Hislop’s Fake News: A True History. In it he traces the fake news phenomenon back to its roots in the growth of mass circulation newspapers in the 19th century. Fake news isn’t new. A number of newspapers engaged in it. They didn’t care that it was fake: and neither did their readers. It sold. He gives a number of examples, including one where a newspaper claimed to be citing a report in a scientific journal about life on the Moon. Someone had trained a very high-powered telescope on the surface of our nearest neighbor, and through that was able to see its inhabitants and what they were up to. The Moon was occupied by miniature bison, unicorns and flying man-bats. This was in an age when astronomy was still in its infancy. Many people believed the story. It was the talk of New York and made the newspaper in which it appeared, the New York Sun, a lot of money.

From that he traces the history of fake news to the modern day, taking in a number of examples which most of us will recognize. Fake news has been used to start wars. There can’t be many people who reached adulthood before 20th March 2003 who aren’t aware of this. It was fake news about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that started the war that still shapes our world today. The irony is that a number of people now complaining about fake news online were themselves responsible for spreading that particular piece of disinformation, both people in power, and those whose job it was to supposedly report the news.

Come in Tony Blair, your time is up.

In fact if you were to trace the origins of the current rash of fake news, that particular story would rank very high on the list. How many of us, realizing that we were deliberately lied to in order to start a war that never should’ve happened, can trace our scepticism to that one example? Once you start to disbelieve what the mainstream media is telling you, you’re left with no option but to find other sources. It’s the proliferation of such sources online that has led to our current predicament. How much of is true, and how much is just complete nonsense?

Read more here

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Bapu: by CJ Stone

The last time I saw Bapu was the day before he died

Whitstable Views

With Chandira Hensey

No stars were harmed in the making of this story. All astrological references are completely made up.

It’s a year ago that Bapu died: January 8 2020.

His brother Noel was with him. When he arrived at the bedside, Bapu was wearing one of those positive-pressure masks to aid his breathing. The machines that had been supplying his medications and support systems were gone, but the empty racking on which they had all been mounted was still in place. The lighting was soft and there was an air of calm and serenity in the room. “He looked a damn sight better and more at ease than the last time I saw him,” says Noel. “He had been washed and shaved, and looked about as presentable as I could have hoped for.”

After bracing himself, Noel sat down on his right and took his hand. He spoke quietly…

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Captain Obeah Man

The spirit of Captain Beefheart is haunting our town.

Tankerton, a small suburb of my home town of Whitstable, sits on the North Kent coast overlooking the Thames estuary. It consists of a promenade, a shopping street, and a late-19th century housing estate of gridded streets. The population is overwhelmingly white (98.7 percent) with a significant number (22.3 percent) of retired people.

I often go there to take my sister’s dog for a walk. It was on one of these afternoon jaunts that I first caught sight of it, on a side street, on a whitewashed stretch of wall: the spray-painted portrait of a man with a moustache, a halo of stars and moons, and the single word “Adapter” floating nearby.

I probably would’ve recognised the face anyway, but it was addition of that out-of-context word which confirmed the man’s identity for me. The face, I knew, belonged to Don Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart, a singer/composer from the 1960s to the early-80s, and the word was a reference to his song ”Dropout Boogie,” from his debut album Safe As Milk, released in 1967. The word “adapter” is repeated 12 times in the song and is so insistent as to be almost like a chorus.

Read more here.

A Meditation on Mortality in the Garden of Earthly Delights

A welcome addition to the Canterbury Scene corpus.

Another version of that article I wrote about Justin Mitchell’s Garden of Earthly Delights, this time for an American website. Hopefully our American friends will get to hear the album and enjoy it as much as we do.

Read the article here: https://www.splicetoday.com/music/a-meditation-on-mortality-in-the-garden-of-earthly-delights

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Whose Face Is This? By CJ Stone

Whitstable Views

A mysterious face has made its appearance around Tankerton.

It’s a spray-painted stencil of the full-on face of a man with glittering eyes and a moustache. He appears in at least two places around the area: in one of the shelters on Tankerton Slopes and on a temporary board hiding building works on Tankerton Road. There may be others.

The image had also previously appeared on the side wall of William Hill’s betting shop. The shop front is on Tankerton Road, but the wall — a plain white stretch of plaster, large enough to tempt any graffiti artist — is on Graystone Road.

The face is accompanied by various small phrases or slogans wherever it appears. The Tankerton Slopes shelter stencil says “Nick Knox”, which I take to be the name of the artist. The building-site stencil says “777” and the lost one on Graystone Road used to say…

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ANGELS and landladies

CJ Stone contemplates how angels manifest themselves to human beings and whether they can take the form of New Age landladies.

[image error] Albert Einstein during a lecture in Vienna in 1921

Albert Einstein once said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. He was referring to the fact that the laws of physics are universal, and that our brains seem to be attuned to understanding them.

Albert Einstein can speak for himself, of course. He was a genius and probably did find the laws of physics comprehensible. Me, I find it hard enough to comprehend how my toaster works, and why my TV set keeps beaming makeover programs and reality game shows into my head, let alone how gravity works or why the speed of light is constant.

Albert Einstein also, very famously, discovered his Theory of Relativity by imagining himself to be flying on a beam of light. Time is relative, he saw. When approaching the speed of light, he concluded—while zooming along in his head at 299,792.458 km per second—time slows down.

Which means that, for creatures made of light (angels for instance) time is static, and is just another dimension to wander around in.

You’ll have to excuse that last sentence. It refers to my own personal speculations about the nature of angels, not to Albert Einstein’s. Supernatural beings do not figure highly in the body of Albert Einstein’s work.

Which is a pity. You’d have thought he could have spiced up his writings a little by adding at least the occasional other-worldly entity, if only for entertainment value.

But he didn’t, and that’s as much as we know about Einstein’s Theory of Angels.

Talking of angels: I went to this bed and breakfast place once. On the kitchen walls were all these homilies. One of them said, “dogs are angels with paws.” Another said, “cats are angels with whiskers.”

The bookshelves were filled with books about angels. One of them had a picture of an angel on the cover. It was like a Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia, a diaphanous soul in a diaphanous dress, twee and fey and not at all threatening, with a cloud of tumbling auburn hair and a pair of diaphanous, feathery wings. This seemed less an angel, more an illustration on gift-wrapping paper.

It was a New Age bed and breakfast establishment. As well as providing the bed and the breakfast (muesli, naturally) it also provided sustenance for the soul. Therapy. Reiki. Tarot and T’ai Chi. Angels, crystals, fairy-lights and incense, massage and meditation. Channeling. Conversations with angels.

The proprietor had two faces: one she kept for the office, and another she put on for her public. The public face was all solicitous concern. It seemed to shine with an inner light. It glowed from an unknown depth of happiness that spoke its own proof. “I am an enlightened being,” said the look on her face.

Her other face was calculating and sharp. It knew the measure of things. It knew how to add and subtract. It was the face behind the face, analytical and aware, cunning rather than intelligent, careful to remain hidden.

The reason I knew about the other face was because I caught a glimpse of it as she was entering her office. She beamed her beam of munificence into the room, turned and then entered the office, and, as she did, so her eyes glazed over, became steely and impassive, and the smile dropped from her lips.

Another reason I knew about her office face was because a friend of mine worked for her for a while, as a carpenter. Carpenters don’t matter. They are mere objects to be walked around. Consequently she was not guarded in his company. He often saw her other face. When I mentioned that I had seen it he said, “yes! It was like she was counting the cash.”

Which is probably the case.

One day she was in her sitting room with a house full of guests (she treated them, of course, like devotees). She was declaiming happily, that look of blissed-out wonder in her eyes. It was a practiced look.

“Watch out!” she said. “My wings are beginning to show.”

She meant that she was an angel.

She said that angels wanted to help us but were not allowed to do so unless we asked. She said they were there to serve us and that it didn’t matter how big or small the task, all we had to do was to ask. And then she gave examples. “They will help you to find the ideal present,” she said, “or to cook a nice meal, or to find lost keys.”

Angels as domestic servants.

What I object to most in all of this is that these people clearly have no idea who (or what) angels are.

Isaiah describes the seraphim as having six wings—two covering the face, two covering the feet, and two to fly by—and himself as quaking with fear and shame at the sight of them. When he saw them the house was filled with smoke. One of them carried a live coal from the fire and touched it to Isaiah’s lips, to take away his sin.

Angels are eternal beings. They move back and forth in time. Their bodies are made of light. They wield swords of fire. Their eyes spark nuclear fission. They have waged war in heaven. To look upon them would make men mad. They are elemental beings, incomprehensible to the mind. The idea that their purpose is to find your lost keys is – well – just plain stupid.

As for Albert Einstein, he traveled at the speed of light and saw time stand still. In other words, maybe he glimpsed eternity.

He didn’t, however, mention any angels. Perhaps they were all on holiday at the time. I’ve heard they like bed and breakfast.

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Beautiful Illusion

Big Brother Is Watching You

From Prediction magazine 2006

One of my favourite films is the Matrix. Not Matrix Reloaded, or Matrix Revolutions—which are just glorified cowboy movies with special effects and philosophy—but the original Matrix.

What I like is the theme of the movie, that the world is a computer-generated illusion.

At one point the character Morpheus speaks to Keanu Reeves’ Neo, after he has been released from the controlling power of the machines. He shows him the battered landscape of a post-apocalyptic world, beneath a boiling sky. “Welcome to the desert of the real,” he says.

It’s a great line, spoken with relish by Laurence Fishburne, who plays Morpheus.

When I saw the movie for the first time it struck me that it was an allegory of the state we live in.

How do we know what it real and what is not?

Contemporary neuroscience tells us that what we perceive as real is only a three-dimensional hologram happening in the brain. It is a perception of reality, not reality itself.

This is made more complicated by the fact that this secondary perception—this perception of perception—is filtered through ever more evolved and remote processes: such as language, such as culture, such as art, through the beliefs we share and the conceptual baggage we accumulate to interpret it all.

“Conceptual baggage.” That’s a good phrase. It brings to mind a perpetual tourist on a never-ending journey to a nonexistent package holiday, getting to yet another transit point during yet another change of transportation, dragging along a trolley full of the accumulated baggage of his compulsively acquired souvenir-collection. Which is how I sometimes feel about myself. Always on a journey, never arriving anywhere.

Meanwhile there’s ever increasing volumes of pointlessness to contend with. Like TV for instance.

Big Brother



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Most of us in the modern world have been brought up with TV. We spend large amounts of our day sitting in front of the box watching those flickering two-dimensional images of people pretending to be someone else. And that applies to newsreaders and politicians as much as it does to actors.

It is TV that explains our world to us. It is TV that reflects our sense of being. We live our lives as stars of our own on-going reality TV soap-opera, providing our own story-lines and our own themes while striking up endless dramatic poses for the omnipresent camera of the mind. Laughing at our own jokes. Nodding sagely at our own observations.

Big Brother is watching us, even as we‘re watching Big Brother. But who is Big Brother really? We all are.

Even the news is just a branch of the entertainment industry these days, and our politicians spend more time spinning reality to make it look like something else than they do getting on with the job.

Just one more layer to add to the shifting, interweaving web of misperception and misrepresentation that makes up our sense of being.

Strip it all away, and what is there left? Maybe none of it exists. Maybe it’s all an illusion.

This is basically the Buddhist position. The world is Maya—illusion. Attachment brings suffering. The aim of life is to disengage from the cycle of birth and rebirth, to attain enlightenment. Even the soul does not really exist. At the heart of the Buddhist universe lies emptiness, the void.

But, you wonder, why emptiness? Why not fullness?

And while the world may not be exactly as we perceive it, isn’t it just as crazy to say that it doesn’t exist at all?

I went for a walk in the woods this evening, just to clear my head before finishing off this column.

There was a fat, yellow moon low on the horizon, like a pat of butter on the infinite blue plate of the sky. Birds singing their evening prayers. Trees rustling in the breeze. A few rabbits bobbing through the undergrowth.

An illusion, maybe. But a very nice illusion.

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The Garden of Earthly Delights

The fact that Justin managed to get such an accomplished sound out of working on his own in a tiny seven-foot room stuffed with intruments makes you wonder what he might have achieved in a full-size studio with a real band at his disposal…

Whitstable Views

Reviewed by CJ Stone

Justin Mitchell’s album, The Garden Of Earthly Delights, is lovely: funny, quirky, jazzy, funky, surreal and avant-garde all at the same time. It’s like the soundtrack to a drive-in science-fiction zombie movie set in a haunted fairground parked up near Swalecliffe. And that’s just one of the tracks.

More than anything, it is a meditation on mortality and what it means to be bemusedly alive in this cockamamie world of ours. The first track is called Rapture for Rupert and is an ecstatic multilayered fanfare rising to an echoing crescendo. It sets the mood for the rest of the album.

Rupert Hayes. Photo: Lalo Borja. 2008

The Rupert in question is Rupert Hayes, of course, Whitstable’s maverick artist who died on July 9 2018. He and Justin were good friends. Rupert’s old studio went up in flames recently, so it’s fitting that Justin’s tribute should…

View original post 1,265 more words

The Garden of Earthly Delights: by Justin Mitchell

The fact that Justin managed to get such an accomplished sound out of working on his own in a tiny seven-foot room stuffed with intruments makes you wonder what he might have achieved in a full-size studio with a real band at his disposal…

Whitstable Views

Reviewed by CJ Stone

Justin Mitchell’s album, The Garden Of Earthly Delights, is lovely: funny, quirky, jazzy, funky, surreal and avant-garde all at the same time. It’s like the soundtrack to a drive-in science-fiction zombie movie set in a haunted fairground parked up near Swalecliffe. And that’s just one of the tracks.

More than anything, it is a meditation on mortality and what it means to be bemusedly alive in this cockamamie world of ours. The first track is called Rapture for Rupert and is an ecstatic multilayered fanfare rising to an echoing crescendo. It sets the mood for the rest of the album.

Rupert Hayes. Photo: Lalo Borja. 2008

The Rupert in question is Rupert Hayes, of course, Whitstable’s maverick artist who died on July 9 2018. He and Justin were good friends. Rupert’s old studio went up in flames recently, so it’s fitting that Justin’s tribute should…

View original post 1,265 more words