I’m not old enough to remember WWII, though I do remember the bomb damage, as late as the mid 1970’s there was still bombed out ruins in places like Plymouth in Devon, which is as much as testament to just how much bomb damage there was, as well as to how long it takes to rebuild from scratch…
I do remember the so called cold war though, in those days before the rise of the supermarket, even small rural villages had a sub post office, shop, bus stop and phone box, the sub post offices did not just do stamps and pensions and shit, they had a dedicated phone line and speaker box, and a hand cranked siren, and one of the duties of the sub-post-master was to check the speaker box worked every week, and every couple of months give the siren a quick test.
Yes, this was the cold war shit, in times of alert the speaker was to be monitored 24/7, and if the warning was given, go out and crank the fucking siren, there is your 4 minute warning folks… now kiss your ass goodbye.
At that time, it was a free-er world, you had a post office account book that held all your transactions, if your post office book said you had a thousand in the bank, you could draw against it anywhere, and the transaction was recorded in the book… no central computer.
If you’d been a naughty boy on the roads in one police district and had gotten a ban or something, just move 100 miles… no central computer.
There were central computers, the police had a mainframe, and to interrogate it they had to use the vehicle radio, speak to someone, who spoke to some one else, who was sat at a keyboard, tappety tap, and information was relayed, verbally and slow.
The police radios themselves, analogue, AM baby, I can still distinctly remember being at a party, booze and grass and lebanese and speed and acid doing the rounds, and a suspected po-po undercover drug squad type “Err, excuse me, I have reason to believe you can turn me on, errr, man…” and sure enough a raid had been set up, and as the po-po vehicles arrive outside and report this back to base on the AM radios, the signal is picked up by the moving coil in the record stylus pick-up, and amplified over the sound system, quite surreal, dubbed to Child in Time, lol, so a few minutes later po-po come storming in, to be greeted by a crowd of 150 people who are doing nothing illegal and who have nothing illegal in their possession, sure, there are baggies everywhere, down seats, in the chandeliers, out the windows, but nobody is holding… hey, no DNA in those days either, just fingerprints…. good cunster-noon aftables, how may we be of assistance… oh, and take your DS plant with you when you leave, in about 60 seconds.. lol
You know, this was WHY radio silence came in, practically anything could pick up an old AM signal, if it was strong enough, and if you were near the TX station, it was strong enough.
I’m not trying to shit you and say they were good times, the threat was certainly PERCEIVED as being real, lots and lots and lots of people took it quite seriously.
So now it is back, (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2625378/MATTHEW-BARZUN-America-NOT-stand-idly-Putin-cronies-destroy-peace-Europe.html) and it is like fucking an ex, one you didn’t really dig at the time, that’s why she is an ex, but now, in the intervening years, the bitch has gotten all Borg-ed up, Google glass surgically implanted, 17,654 page electronic EULA that you consented to by breathing in her presence, 95% of the illegal shit you did back then last time you knew her is still illegal, but now your activity is recorded 24/7 on Oculus rift TV, with DNA samples taken hourly, and anyway, you know, it was only the illegal shit you did together that made it work back in the day when you first started fucking each other.
Plus, there is a raft of whole new shit that never used to be illegal, but it is now.
Not enough to pacify that boner?
Well, there is the never used to be illegal but is now shit that is retroactively illegal, Pull out the old copy of Scorpions / Virgin Killer on vinyl that you USED to fuck to, instant sex offender for life status… god help you if she says “Oh yes daddy/sir/master” while you’re fucking her.
Hell, there is a whole raft of people being convicted of historical rapes and imprisoned right now, Max Clifford is one… now let me tell you, I fucking loathe the guy and everything he stands for, always have, but….
How the fuck can you convict on an alleged historical rape or 100, that allegedly happened 10/20/30/40 fucking years ago…. I mean, how, within the context of a legal system that is SUPPOSED to be innocent until proven guilty, then it got changed from proven guilty to found guilty, preponderance of evidence got changed to preponderance of “belief”, said “belief” being based on the shenanigans of the legal teams…. I dunno, you prefer Game of Thrones or Walking Dead, cos that’s all it is now, you are selecting which performance you prefer, and on the basis of this, a man is sentenced to imprisonment.
Like I said, I loathe Max Clifford, and I’m still not happy about his trial or conviction, it tells me that the system of justice has been abandoned completely, it is now no more than a circus, in the original meaning of that word, and we aren’t talking barnum and bailey here….. hey, I knew this anyway, been through the secret family courts, remember… but this says that even in a high profile under the spotlight public and criminal case, it has been abandoned completely, the gloves are off, the pretence is gone, and making it a hanging offence to point out that the emperor is naked employs a lot more drones than dressing the emperor up.
The information and propaganda and dogma wars that we are now fighting frankly make any traditional schisms such as sunni/shia protestant/catholic black/white pale in comparison.
We are destroying the meaning of language and the value of information, you’ll live in a chaotic soup, the meaning and value of everything is both mutable and unknowable, hell, we’ll just follow the Dow Jones and the rest of the herd.
it’s a digital / data tower of babel baby