Verbal

To quote further from Richard Hofstadter, one of the "impressive things" about conspiracy theorists, "...is the laborious accumulation of what can be taken as convincing evidence for the most fantastic conclusions, the careful preparation for the big leap from the undeniable to the unbelievable."

Just to bring this back to the serious point underlying Gemmel's post, Oliver Kamm has an article in The Times this morning entitled "Jew hatred is behind all conspiracy theories." Quoting Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", he says that conspiracy theorists "manufacture the mechanism of history itself...Their fantasies are immune to evidence To explain away inconvenient facts, they simply invent another twist. As the cope of the imaginary conspiracy spreads, it eventually encompasses a people charged throughout history with demonic powers and malevolent designs. - the Jews." My specific problem with pap has always been the way he gets a narcissistic high from implying that Boston bombing victims are crisis actors - and chucks out utterly contemptible "evidence" of a similar sting in Woolwich. The cretinous disrespect for the victims is bad enough. But the broader point is that pap is parroting the ideas of Jew haters - look at any of the sites which carry the same "evidence" as the garbage posted by pap on here and the Jew hatred screams out.

I'm afraid, Lord Whatabout, that you might have missed the phrase "evidence-based". If you uncritically quote the ASI as your source, and not acknowledge that it is on the dry-as-dust right wing of the Tory Party, I assume you don't want us to notice that the "evidence" is being encased within a strident ideology. Why, for example, did the proportion of income tax paid by the wealthy increase under her thumb, when she was cutting tax rates at the top end? Because throughout the Thatcherite eighties began a process that continues to this day - the rich are FAR richer than they were up to the 1970s, both in absolute terms and as a measure of inequality. Her election victories were achieved at a time when the Social Democrats were formed in a breakaway from Labour and added to the way in which the Centre-Left was hopelessly divided in a way that had not been seen since Lloyd George. Anyone paying energy or water bills who believes that they are NOT the victims of private and often distantly foreign monopolies is living in a presumably happy delusional world. Does anyone still believe that the Big Bang in the City was NOT a problem for British manufacturing - the growth of casino banking at the expense of investment banking? And what the hell is the Belgrano controversy doing in there? Are the Thatcherite dinosaurs still licking their wounds over Diana Gould's trouncing of her? God, what sore losers!

Actually, righties do a much better job at resorting to tired cliches to misrepresent economic activity to justify such cuts and ignore the extraordinary degree to which the private sector has in many cases developed a junkie's dependence on the public sector. The Victorian idea of a private sector rampaging away with innovation and wealth creation is a today a myth (it was never true anyway, in the sense that unregulated capitalism in Victorian times produced some spectacular disasters - economic and physical). Government and agency contracts issued to the private sector dominate in many parts of the economy, including defence, health and what's loosely called the cultural industries. The fate of apprenticeships is a good example of this dependency culture among our great 'wealth creators'. Historically (and certainly until their sharp decline in the 1980s), apprenticeships were run entirely by companies or were organised by guilds and other craft organisations paid for by those companies. Today, apprenticeships rise and fall depending on the extent to which the government is prepared to subsidise them. But perhaps both political wings could do well to be a little more evidence-based. Take the common moan from left and right about the decline of our ability to actually make things - the Left because of Thatcherism and the Right because of the unions. Actually, Britain exports more cars than Germany, Nissan's (government-intervened) Sunderland factory alone manufactures more cars than all of Italy, and so successful is Britain's car-making that Fiat is relocating its global HQ here. So as important as the services sector is, it would be foolish to allow our routine prejudices about manufacturing to ignore the fact that a real recovery will need to be driven by other than the Barclays-to-McDonalds economy, and that the reason the car industry, for example, does so relatively well is because the real wealth creators are a skilled and committed workforce.

I see Harry's on the charm offensive again. http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2013/jun/05/harry-redknapp-board-qpr-transfers Poor Tony Fernandez. First he gets steamrollered by agents then he hires Harry to sort out the mess. A bit like setting your hair on fire and trying to put it out with a hammer.

Not quite - although to get an audience I will be adding fake blood to conceal the naturally bright orange hands that Nigerians are so famous for. Insofar as I understand the cognitively dysfunctional litany just above you, I assume our pet z-list conspiracist still maintains, despite overwhelming evidence and simple logic, that staff at ITV News did indeed "sex up" and "tamper with" the butcher's clip. So as stu0ox says, there's really nothing more to say. Pap's reputation can now be given an ignominious burial. It's like talking to a brick.

You're right of course. I suppose there are three reasons for persisting: I'm offended by the casually libellous trashing of a long-established professional news organisation by a z-grade conspiracist theorist. I'm offended by the unbelievable narcissism of conspiracy theorists in general, who get their happy endings by denying the reality of the death and maiming of others in public tragedies, and who act as useful idiots distracting attention away from the real, actual crimes and misdemeanours of those in authority. I'm assembling material for a film. Guess what it's about?

Let’s be clear about the deceptions you’re engaged in pap. You linked to the orange-hands video that had been posted on a blog called Frig Society. You could have just linked to the Youtube clip itself, but chose to link to a blogger who sounds surprisingly like you in the way he snidely suggests that the red-blooded version of the clip broadcast by the news media is a second-hand fake. Of course, what you DON’T say is that that blogger at “Frig Society” (the title of which you scrubbed in your post and replaced with the word “link”, is actually you. You continue to talk about “the person who posted” as if you had not a clue who he or she could be. Of course, that’s a lie, isn’t it? You DO make a claim about “the blood, or lack thereof, on the hands.” Here it is: So you “contend” that the image has been “sexed up”. And to underline the point, you talk about the near-impossibility of repainting the hands so that they appear (orange-y) “bloodless. Here is that claim: So let’s be really clear about this. The orange-handed clip and the ITV News clip are one and the same, the only difference being the lack of “blood” in the orange-handed clip. You’re saying, very clearly, that ITV News “sexed up” their clip – and to underline your point, you accuse them, very directly, of “tampering” with the image to produce bloody hands. Someone or a group of people in ITV News therefore deliberately falsified these images. Now it so happens that ITV News have exclusive ownership of that clip. The only way the orange-handed version of it could have been an “original” is if someone had done it BEFORE selling it to ITV News. Unfortunately for you, yesterday I posted a less polished version of the orange-handed clip, which had itself been posted by Muslim radicals at LMU. In that less polished version with the orange hands, the “ITV News Exclusive” logo can be clearly seen in the top left of frame. (Actually it floats around, which actually does PROVE that the orange-handed clip is a fake, because it reveals the use of image-stabilisation applied to the clip AFTER broadcast on ITV News). So – where do you want to go from here? In your attempt, for whatever motive, to pull the wool over our eyes, you’ve libelled staff in ITV News. They do have lawyers, you know. My suggestion is you simply do the honest, honourable thing: apologise and withdraw the allegations about sexing up and tampering.

...And right on cue, Radical Muslim students at London Met University have been found hosting the following video on their Facebook page. Depressingly, it contains every single one of Pap's paranoid "proofs" (above) to concoct its story that Woolwich was a false flag operation conducted by the Zionist State/Media using crisis actors: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc7yJzObpdY http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/exclusive-woolwich-atrocity-was-a-state-hoax-say-university-extremists-8641917.html

Pap has consistently refused to answer Gemmel’s and others’ repeated question about what his conspiracy “theory” really is. But it’s actually clear enough from his postings – even if it is (and I’m trying to be polite) hopelessly confused and puerile. So here's what lurks beneath his "questions" and "proofs of a legal standard": 1. The Coalition government, or some elements within it, wanted to stage a spectacular event in order to introduce unpopular legislation restricting people’s rights. In order to do this, they arranged for the fantastically brutal murder of a British soldier… 2. …Unless it’s all staged, of course. Lee Rigby may not be dead – just “crisis-acting”. He may not even – and this is supposed to be in some unstated way decisive – have had his head cut off! Lee Rigby and his family are probably now in a safe house, cynically laughing at all the fuss. 3. Evidence of “crisis acting” is that there is no blood around Lee Rigby’s SUPPOSEDLY dead body. The two large pools of blood, and blood trails, around the crashed car are irrelevant. Probably someone just got a paper cut. 4. Michael Adebolajo was photographed with bloodless (but oddly bright orange) hands, holding a selection of butcher’s implements also covered in vivid orange. (Heaven only knows how Pap reconciles this with the killer’s confession while he’s waving his “orange” hands about). 5. The other “killer”, Michael Adebowale, is demonstrably innocent because in the very few distant shots of him (there are no close-ups), he has no blood on his jacket. There is no known video of the attack in progress so we don’t know (a) whether the jacket was put on after the bloodiest part of the attack or (b) whether Adebowale was even the one doing the butchering. But the few distant shots in existence nonetheless prove beyond any doubt that he, like Adebolajo, is a patsy. It follows from all this, of course, that the autopsy, which highlighted the cause of Lee Rigby’s death as multiple “incisive” wounds, is also a fake. 6. The orange-handed video is absolutely without any shadow of a doubt genuine and original. There is no reason whatsoever to doubt its authenticity. The orange hands and blades are completely natural and believable. Probably just a trick of the light. 7. This was one of two videos that were then doctored by “the media” before being broadcast showing the killer’s now bloodied hands. This is conclusive, indisputable proof that the whole murder was a staged. The killer’s hands also “ghost”, which is yet more proof of media fakery. 8. All of this happened in front of hundreds of eyewitnesses, including three women, the “Woolwich angels” who interacted with the killers. These three must presumably also be crisis actors, deviously putting on a show of mock-concern for the “victim”. All first-hand witness accounts are by this definition false – and therefore must have been contracted by the mysterious powers to falsely witness the killing. The actual truth is only revealed by, and known to a few privileged investigators of “legal standard” (like Pap), through Googling. 9. The evil “media”, which routinely works hand-in-glove with the government, has been covering up this true picture ever since. 10. The two “killers” are actually patsies and will be victims of a government-controlled show trial that will unfairly convict them, just as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will be unfairly convicted in his show trial for the utterly fake Boston bombings. Pap may deny specifics and will no doubt use his evident inability at simple ratiocinative argument to do so. But the plain fact is that all of this MUST follow from his various ludicrous musings. It doesn’t look very clever, does it?

Pretty decent? You haven't answered a single one! And to be perfectly honest, I didn't read past the first line of your post in which you claimed that E Howard Hunt's 'deathbed' confession was the god's truth on JFK. Hunt's 'confession' is always the last refuge of the desperate. His own wife disowned it, saying that her sons had coached a frail old man into helping them out with a money-making scheme. If you think there was a shred of truth in it, don't you think it would be widely accepted now? The other thing about Hunt you should keep in mind is this: he co-ordinated the Watergate burglaries because of a ludicrous conspiracy theory within the Nixon reelection committee (the wonderfully named CREEP) that the Democratic Party was funded by Castro. As for Northwoods, it never happened, despite the keening wish of conspiracy theorists that it did. And I said it was the only time Kennedy 'shot down' the entire CoS. Read your own link for clarification. I don't know why you're so sensitive about being labelled a liar. Once again: you claimed you had "proof" that news organisations tampered with the video of the Woolwich killer. You knew you had no such proof, that indeed no such 'proof' exists, and you should admit that. And it's ironic - don't you think? - that someone who blunders on through the grief of others, should get so shirty when it's brought a little closer to home? I'm simply trying to discover if you have an empathy chip; and it's perfectly evident, over this and the Boston thread, that you do not. So - one more go: Would you concede that it sick to accuse the victims of the Boston bombings of being 'crisis-actors' - of making up their injuries from the bombing? Would you agree that it's sick to idly speculate about the degree to which Lee Rigby's head was severed? You're not interested in investigations 'to a legal standard'. You post stuff that would get you instantly thrown off of any investigative team for being utterly cretinous. Do you REALLY think you're postings stand some sort of 'legal standard' test? Good grief, you're far worse than I thought! And since you're so much more sensitive about your own feelings, rather than those (families, victims, and others involved in these tragedies) who've suffered just a tiny bit more than you, here's some news for you as to why people on here get exasperated with you. It's because you are evasive, deceptive, naive and self-regarding in the way you conduct yourself. This is not something you can accept, of course, because your feelings trump everything else. And I'm sure it won't stop you posting your puerile rubbish. It's a free country (despite your blatherings to the contrary) - and freedom suffers fools gladly.

Well I'm happy to concede that I was wrong. See? Saying you're wrong needn't hurt. People do it without keeling over dead. I presume from your posting style, by the way, that your the diminutive, pale one in the glasses? So let's get down to business about being wrong: Are you now prepared to admit you were wrong to suggest that the tango-handed video clip was "proof" of "tampering" by "the media"? Are you prepared to admit you were wrong to suggest that the "ghosted" hands was anything to do with "tampering", and that the more obvious conclusion was that it was an artefact of interlaced recording? Are you prepared to admit that your dark mutterings about whether Lee Rigby's head was severed or not is both irrelevant and sick? And most importantly, are you prepared to admit that the effect of conspiracy theorists' stalking behaviour on the victims and their families of tragedies like Woolwich, Boston and 9/11 is morally outrageous? I'm assuming - again, I'm sure, wrongly - that you do not have a family. But just suppose you did. And now suppose that one of those family members - a son, daughter or wife - was murdered in the street in the same way that Lee Rigby was. How much would you enjoy the spectacle of internet nobodies speculating as to whether the head was fully cut off or hanging by skin or tendon? Or how much you would appreciate your grief being written off as "crisis-acting"? When you accuse me and others of 'feigning" outrage at your gross insensitivity, and when you prioritise you own cheap thrills over the grief of victims' families, I am forced back to what I've said repeatedly on here: you are sinister. You've admitted to the paranoid psychological trait of confirmation bias, and you've displayed plenty of narcissism. You've also suggested that conspiracy theories are an addiction for you. So with the best will in the world, I say again: take a break from this, and try to get those conspiratorial voices out of your head. It is clearly not doing you any good.

Is this actually true? We only have one true skyscraper in this country, and that's barely finished. And you don't seem like the kind of technician whose talents would be in high demand in the US or anywhere else that true skyscrapers exist. I doubt you've even worked abroad. So which skyscrapers have you worked in? FWIW, I was working in the WTC plaza in the Spring of 2001, and security officers were all over why I was there and what I was doing. A lot of the offices in the WTC contained commercially sensitive material, so even if the building security didn't stop you, office security would have. (And that's leaving aside all the interior fabric removal that always accompanies building demolition). I just think that this 'I've worked on skyscrapers' schtick is another of your porkies. Correct?

Claiming the Jimmy Saville scandal as a ‘credit’ for the conspiracy theorists rather ignores the simple fact that Saville wasn’t a conspiracy. It was a classic (and familiar to anyone who’s worked there) case of a BBC ‘star’ presenter using intimidatory tactics to silence both his victims and his colleagues. But even if we allow you the Saville case on the credit side of the balance sheet, have you considered what’s on the debit side for cocnsirapcy theorists, just in the last century? 1. The Holocaust. The Nazis were the archetypal conspiracy theorists, ascribing to Jews all the evils that had befallen ‘Aryan’ Germans. So, just counting Jews alone, conspiracy theorists murdered six million people. 2. Stalin’s reign of terror. Stalin was a notorious conspiracy theorist, imagining plots at every turn. His terror campaigns alone claimed the lives of at least 15 million people (source: Robert Conquest). 3. Mao’s cultural revolution. This was a classic conspiracy theory. ‘Bourgeois’ elements had deliberately ‘infiltrated’ the Party and needed to be purged. His campaign tore through ethnic minorities in particular. In Tibet alone, 23,000 people were beaten to death. 3. McCarthyism. Conspiracy theories have always found fertile ground in the US. Senator Joe McCarthy’s version had Hollywood and the media generally, as well as government, education and the unions deeply influenced by Soviet moles. Everything and everywhere in American film was ‘infected’ by the communist menace. So thousands of lives were wrecked as McCarthy hauled people up before his committee, demanding that they admit their guilt and that they name others to save themselves. 4. The Ku Klux Klan. White supremacists, who still number up to 8,000 active members in the southern United States, who saw/see blacks as weakening the white gene pool at the behest of their Jewish masters. Murders, rapes, lynchings, beatings, and driving blacks off their land were the KKK’s methods of choice in dealing with their brand of ‘anti-White’conspirators. All of these conspiracy theorists were all of the same mindset. They saw evidence of plots in every tiny detail of life. They were paranoid, as are today’s conspiracy theorists, and they were, at the very least, narcissists, as are today’s conspiracy theorists. And I repeat: conspiracy theorists have NEVER turned up a single actual, documented conspiracy. And there has NEVER been a documented false flag operation in the United States, despite the fact that the current crop of conspiracy loons – including vicious anti-Semites, survivalists, NRA extremists, Creationists, racist ‘birthers’ neo-Nazis and Islamo-fascists – have cried ‘false flag’ at every single American public tragedy from 9/11 to date. So – great company you keep and a wonder tradition to follow in, don’t you think? Well done.

I’m not sure whether you intend to deceive or are simply deceiving yourself. So let's be clear: 1. Despite your implication otherwise, there is not a single shred of evidence to suggest that the Chiefs of Staff were in any way involved in JFK's assassination. Nothing. Nada. Agreed? 2. Despite your implication otherwise, there is no basis whatsoever for the claim that ‘JFK tried to circumvent the Chiefs of Staff at every opportunity’. That falsely claims that JFK was at constant loggerheads with the military. He wasn’t. He simply shot them down on Northwoods. Agreed? 3. Despite your implication otherwise, Operation Northwoods – often cited as the archetypal ‘false flag’ operation by conspiracy loons never happened. Agreed? 4. The laughable irony is that conspiracy theorists, having to accept that Northwoods never happened, actually turn one failed conspiracy theory into another failed conspiracy theory – namely, that the CoS were involved in killing Kennedy. Agreed? And just a comment one of your other preposterous posts. You linked to a ‘Top 10’ of ‘proven conspiracy theories’. A list, incidentally, that did not include Watergate – which is pretty astonishing! Agreed? Included in that list was the Tonkin incident. Even that site acknowledged that it wasn’t actually a false-flag operation at all, but a screw-up (an operator’s bad call on breaking waves as torpedoes) that was then covered up and used as justification for war. But the broader points are these: Not ONE of those ‘conspiracies’ was revealed by conspiracy theorists; and Not ONE of those conspiracies was a false-flag operation. And only a few of them were in the strictest sense conspiracies. The CIA’s covert ops are just that – it’s what intelligence agencies do, whether we approve of the specifics or not. Other examples involve cover-ups, corruption, pay-offs and all the other bad things governments, agencies, corporations and individuals do. So let’s look at the score-sheet for you, the Neo-Nazi, Islamo-fascist, survivalist and gun-lobby conspiracy theorists so far since 2001: 1. 9/11. No decisive proof that this was a US government or agency ‘false flag’ operation. Victims harassed by ‘theorists’, many of them rabid anti-Semites. 2. Virginia Tech. No decisive proof that this was a US government or agency ‘false flag’ operation. Victims harassed by ‘theorists’, many of who are rabid anti-Semites. 3. Sandy Hook. No decisive proof that this was a US government or agency ‘false flag’ operation. Victims harassed by ‘theorists’, many of who are rabid anti-Semites 4. Boston bombing. No decisive proof that this was a US government or agency ‘false flag’ operation. Victims harassed by ‘theorists’, many of who are rabid anti-Semites. 5. FEMA concentration camps. No evidence whatsoever that the US government has set up concentration camps for US dissidents on US soil. Hilarious! 5. Woolwich murder. No decisive proof that this was or could have been a UK government or agency ‘false flag’ operation. I remain concerned that the victim’s families will be harassed by those who think like you. Every useless scrap of so-called ‘evidence’ you’ve posted on here – every single one – has been decisively shot down, and your tactic throughout is to simply refuse to address these repudiations. Your childish claims of ‘proof’ of ‘tampering’ are accepted as ridiculous by everyone on here except you. And the fact that you're so sanguine in your implications and accusations of play-acting by the dead and injured victims and their families is an dreadful indictment of you as a human being.

I regularly see the Vulcan in flight up here in sunny Yorkshire. Only the other day it was wheeling over my head doing some impressive low-level manoeuvres. If the pilots were worried about preserving the engines they didn't show it. They were roaring away on sharp turns and climbs. Stunning, beautiful plane.

Sadly, and predictably, most of this is garbled nonsense. I'm not going to go through it line-by-line because your history of actually responding to my substantive corrections to the assumptions that underpin your wild fantasies is practically non-existent. I'll do just one, because even you may grasp it. You complain, as if you've caught a conspiratorial 'gotcha' moment, that the motion blur - the ghosting - is more pronounced on the hands than in any other part of the frame-grabbed image. Think about that just for a second (or maybe you need a little longer). Why would it appear that the killer's hands are blurred, in a clip where he's vigorously waving his hands about? The clue, if you're really struggling with this one, is the phrase MOTION blur. By the way, I didn't answer your question about source video because I thought you were being either stupid or devious. The short answer is that the tango-handed video is a wholly amateurishly colour-corrected version of one of two clips that were shot at the same time. Do you really think that some government-funded master-conspirator would futz around with half-arsed grading tools? The laughable video you hang your hat so firmly on is so cack-handedly 'corrected' that you should really slink away in total embarrassment for posting it. All that aside, it is a measure of you as a man that you whine about calling your non-existent libel lawyer out on me for referring to your posts, and you, as sinister, or you act so deeply hurt when Tim wonders whether your failure to grasp or even apparently notice simple arguments is Asperger's related - and yet you are perfectly happy to disregard as unimportant the fact that you accuse the dead and maimed victims of the Boston bombing of play-acting, or by implication the family of Lee Rigby as either co-conspirators or mindless dupes. For the avoidance of doubt, as lawyers say, I regard conspiracy theorists collectively as scumbags. I despise them immensely. Their narcissistic delight in pursuing non-existent clues leading to a vast inter-governmental conspiracy has caused immense hurt. Some of the clearest examples of this are to be found in the Sandy Hook massacre. You conspiracy theorists have rolled your eyes into the backs of your heads and rammed your teeth into the parents of the dead and badly injured children murdered in Connecticut, just for your entertainment. So, just for your entertainment, here's an example: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/gene-rosen-sandy-hook-conspiracy-155033813.html These scumbags, along with the neo-Nazi scumbags at inforwars and the dead scumbag Tamerlan Tsarnaev, would all be nodding along in agreement with your Woolwich wet dreams. Is that what you want? As other have suggested, take a break - if not from your computer, from this thread. Get some perspective and some readings from a decent moral compass. You should be deeply ashamed of yourself.

I'll not pay you anything but I'm curious as to your complete avoidance of the very basic scientific (optics of blood on dark materials) and technical (grading fx; interlaced recording) issues I've raised. (Incidentally, you inability to restore the redness of the bloody hands with colour correction has to do with the fact that you're now working with a degraded and 'baked in' image - I won't bother explaining because you'll just ignore it.) Any normal well-balanced person who had doubts about what they saw - very second-hand - would say things like: 'I don't get why there's ghosting on his hands in the frame grab.' Not 'The ghosting is proof that this video was tampered with.' Or: 'Why is there a video with his hands turned orange?' Not: there no blood on his hands and I'm going to ignore the fact that he's a black man with orange hands carrying an orange-bladed carving knife.' Or: 'How do you colour-correct?' Not: 'Each frame would need to be hand-painted by elves.' And so on. In short, a normal person wouldn't display the distinctive psychological trait of 'confirmation bias' - that is, a condition which drives the sufferer to rule out all explanations, including the most blindingly obvious ones, in favour of a narrative which, in this case, indicates conspiracy and manipulation by grand forces unknown. By the way, your latest suspicions strongly suggest that you lack the simple ability to follow the sequence of events of the murder. You do know - don't you? - that Lee Rigby was attacked by the wall in front of the car, where there are two large blood pools plus a blood trail away. You do know - don't you? - that he was pulled into the road after all this blood-letting had happened and had in all likelihood bled out by then. You do know - don't you? - that most eyewitness accounts have Adebolajo doing most of the stabbing, with at least one account suggesting that Adebowale was filming it. Etc, etc. Any normal person who perhaps had got carried away with their enthusiasm for a bit conspiracy nuttery would apologise for being so patently ridiculous - not to mention deeply insulting the the family of the victim. As I said earlier, it's not just that your posts are insulting and ridiculous in the way they blow past any reasonable and technically valid explanation, and implicitly ridicule the victim and his family - there's something sinister in them. I have my suspicions, but the fact that Woolwich has been elevated (if that's the word) to a conspiracy theory by Infowars is a clue, because you are absolutely in step with them in your reasoning. Of course, they are more specific, and less squeamish about the 'force' that's really behind this: for the bat-**** crazies on that site, Woolwich is another operation conducted under the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Infowars, as I've said before, appeals not just to right-wing fanatics in the US; it draws support from Muslim extremists like Tamelan Tsarnaev, the older Boston bomber. So: Neo-Nazis and murdering Islamo-fascists - that's the company you keep. Nice.

Conspiracy theorists usually aim higher than that. So the culprits are more likely to be the intergalactic skypilots who control the Earth's orbit (obviously).

I’m privileged to say that I saw Ron Davies play when I taken to see my first ever Division One game. It was at White Hart Lane in January 1970, and the Spurs team then was packed with stars, including Martin Chivers, Jimmy Greaves, Alan Gilzean, Martin Peters, Alan Mullery and Pat Jennings. Saints won 1-0. The goal scored was scored by Davies – with a header, of course. Ron Davies was a wonderful player, exciting to watch – direct, athletic and powerful but with the kind of skill and authority that was truly awesome. I became a Saints fan that day. He was badly missed the day he stopped playing for Southampton. RIP.

It's not surprising that you're so ignorant about video postproduction. But the fact that you parade your ignorance as 'evidence' is laughable and, I have to say, increasingly a bit disturbing. When you colour-correct, you do NOT repaint frame-by-frame. A basic setting change in RGB to pull own the R (red channel) can be done and processed within about 30 seconds, and the effect is rendered across all red-channel colour throughout the clip. By the way, Tim is dead right in saying that the attempt to grade out the blood in that doctored clip from your 'Illuminati' enthusiast friend is hopeless - orange hands, orange knife blade, and heavily discoloured red-route lines. So here's a tip to your conspiracy-loon mates: you need to use secondary colour correction to achieve the deception you're after, because this enables you to isolate parts of the image, and alter colour without changing colour in other parts of the frame. Even then, though, the quality of the source material is so poor - so over-compressed - that you still won't be able to do much that would fool anyone other than those whop wish to be fooled. The 'signs of tampering' you refer to with the ghosting is another example of your ignorance-as-evidence approach. The ghosting in the frame-grab is an artefact of interlaced recording - in other words, it's on the original phone-camera recording itself. To explain for others reading this thread (ie you can ignore what follows because it's inconvenient to you): there are two basic ways of capturing moving images digitally or on video: interlace and progressive. In progressive mode, each of the 25 frames per second is recorded in its entirety. So if you freeze-frame it, you'll see a mix of image sharpness and, depending on the shutter speed, motion blur (eg if you record with the shutter set to OFF you'll see the most motion blur because you are recording at an effective shutter speed of 1/25 of a second, and motion will blur out more than if you had set the shutter speed to the more conventional 1/50. To express this the other way around, by increasingly the shutter speed you can produce the motion-blur-free effect you see at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan). In interlaced mode, the image recorded every 25th of a second is split into two 'fields'. Each field records half of the image. If you were able to view each field, it would look like you were viewing the image through horizontal prison bars. The following field then records that part of the image covered by the prison bars. These two fields are then combined into a single frame. If you think about it for a moment, the ghosting - which is not just common but universal in interlaced recording - is the product of combining two parts of the image recorded at fractionally different times. Interlaced recording is common in newsgathering, for example, and in any form where the need to process information quickly is paramount - hence its use in camera phones too (although it is possible to record progressive). So in short this is yet more pap crap. I just can't work out whether you're a compulsive liar or you are really that twisted as to suggest the Woolwich incident was an invention.

Good grief, not this again. I'm going to refrain from saying what I think of the psychology behind this kind of thought process and just note that, once again, you're completely in-step with the right-wing, anti-Semitic fanatics at Infowars. You should consider a little more carefully the language you use to fool yourself (I doubt anyone else is taken in). You talk about the 'physical evidence'. But be honest: you haven't seen any - unless you have had special dispensation from the police investigation to go to the crime scene and also talk to the lab technicians about their forensic examinations of the ACTUAL physical evidence like clothes, weapons, injuries on Lee Rigby's body. You've just seen the camera phone stuff collected by onlookers. Nor can you 'prove' the pictures were altered in post to create the effect you claim. That (to call it what it is) is either just an outright lie or a statement of plain self-delusion. Let me tell you a couple of fairly straightforward technical things, as someone with more years in television than I care to number, including a lot of time creating visual effects. A general point is you're not seeing the original camera phone images when you look at the clip of Adebolajo ranting. I don't know - and I doubt you do - how the image was recorded, but most phone cameras, if not all of them, use some form of compression - that is, information, much of it colour, is junked in order to be able to record real time with a quite low-spec (compared to broadcast) camera. When you saw that image on the TV news, it was compressed again, like all TV pictures are when they squeezed through the transmission structure. And when you saw the cameraphone footage on YouTube, it was compressed yet again, only more so. Hold that thought... When a film crew sets out to record a visual effects sequence that is going to be pretty gory, one of the most important things they consider is costume. The reason is that dark clothes conceal the reds of blood and gore. This is simple physics, or to be more precise the physics of optics and colour; it is to do with light absorption and reflection. The killer's jacket would naturally conceal the amount of blood visible to the naked eye, and yet more detail would be lost when this effect is recorded and subject to multiple layers of compression. To a trained eye, however, a lot of the evidence of the blood spatters is still there - it just reads as different and, at first glance, hard-to-detect discolouration. I'm sorry to say that as a result of your preposterous claims, I've looked closely at the images and the telltale signs of blood are all over the cuffs of his dark jacket and down the front of it. (You can test this yourself by going into a decent colour-correction suite like Da Vinci and boosting the red spectrum). There are also patches on his jeans. In the end, though, a forensic analysis is the ONLY way to confirm this (not your idiotic noodling at your laptop) - and you can bet that it will confirm that there is a considerable amount of blood on the killer's clothing and skin. I'm not going to say any more on this subject because it is, quite frankly, disgusting to be talking with such pathetically disrespectful prurience about a life lost. I just hope against forlorn hope it'll shut you up on this ghoulish, nonsensical train of thought. Now back to the thread - yours, I think - which you have again derailed into a potential lock.

As you say, you do keep saying it. But what do you mean? Which bit of the Middle East is the British government presently ‘in’? I'm aware of no formal British military presence anywhere in the Middle East. (You presumably know that Afghanistan, from which the UK military presence is currently being withdrawn, is in South Asia.) British foreign policy on Syria is roughly in step with the EU, as it is with Israel, in the sense that the UK government supports a two-state solution. Got any better ideas? I do like your idea that we should tailor the UK's foreign policy to suit the Woolwich murderers (at least insofar as it would somehow prevent another Woolwich). Perhaps we should also ask the Soham murderer Ian Huntley how Home Office policies on child protection might be improved to suit him? You're linking two unconnected ideas. There are plenty of people in the UK - Muslim and non-Muslim - who have had serious and well-argued complaints about specific British foreign policies, notably regarding Blair's adventure in Iraq. This does NOT explain the kind of death-cult violence you saw in Luxor (1997), which targeted mostly Swiss and Japanese tourists - ie people from two countries with a definable ABSENCE of foreign policy. Yet Luxor was the prototype for what happened in Woolwich - it was an operation devised by Zawahiri, and became the defining ‘spectacular’ that led to the creation of Al Qeada just a year later, with Zawahiri's alliance with bin Laden. The extremists' objections to the West are based on an amorphous hatred of all things Western including its ‘values’; they are not what you might call ‘strong’ on which specific Western policies they supposedly object to. Read Sayyid Qutb, the founding philosopher of Al Qeada’s particular brand of extremism, if you doubt this. After his (sponsored) trip to the US in 1948-50, he wrote an article called ‘The America That I Have Seen’, in which he lambasts individual freedoms, democracy, boxing, bad haircuts and an ‘animal-like mixing of the sexes’. This piece is an article of faith among succeeding extremists, especially his compatriot Zawahiri and bin Laden – and probably Choudary too, since he can be found saying much the same things about the UK in his rants about imposing Shariah laws on every UK citizen. More rational Muslims (and others) make their feelings known about particular aspects of foreign policy that trouble them. With their declaration of hostility to all things Western, you could never satisfy Salafists with specific policy changes. And why the hell would any government or people want to?

Enjoy the EDL's crushing defeat in York: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/may/27/york-mosque-protest-tea-biscuits

Just to add some context here, there have been around 20,000 fatalities from car accidents in the UK since the tube and bus attacks on 7 July 2005. In that same period there has been just 1 fatality from terrorism on UK soil. Anjem Choudary is a vicious, corrupted individual whose influence is deeply malign. He is also hopelessly unsuccessful. The reason that number is so low has nothing to do with the neo-Nazis in the EDL and everything to do with some pretty effective intelligence-gathering and counter-terrorism work. One death in eight years, as awful and tragic as it certainly is, hardly foretells a 'dark future'. And actually, the manner of the attack on Lee Rigby shows just how far terrorists have sunk in their capabilities since 2001.