Photos of Ghosts, Louis Wain & Julian Assange

PFM are a soulful psychedelic Italian synth pop band

This is their 1971 album Photos of Ghosts

Powerful strings and playful percussion

It’s folk, jazz, trance, & psychedelia

Like Gong and Frank Zappa this PFM album is fun & out there but not taking itself too seriously

Here’s more PFM

I happened across PFM in a book on the occult.

Amongst others its list of occult artists features Austen Osman Spare.

On the radio this morning Benedict Cumberbatch was talking about being in the new Spiderman film, and the biopic of artist Louis Wain

Mr Cumberbatch said Marvel Comics are like the new Shakespeare, that audiences crave good characters and good story above explosions and special effects.

He pointed out that Louis Wain liked to anthropomorphize cats – before himself anthropomorphizing covid by saying the virus doesn’t care about cinema release dates – naughty.

The interviewer asked Benedict about getting into character to play play Dominic Cummings. But sadly they missed an opportunity to talk about another character he famously played, Julian Assange

Julian lost his case against the US government on Friday. He is fighting extradition to the US. He is guilty of running WikiLeaks which exposed multiple US war crimes.

The spineless BBC has done little to provide balanced reporting on the case. It is far too busy providing the government with the cover it needs to bring in a new domestic vaccine passport system which will further open the door to central bank digital currencies and full on government surveillance of all we do in our daily lives.

It is ironic that as Elon Musk and Boris Johnson are having more children and using the government to enrich a small number of big time capitalists, that those who wish to report on the government’s total lack of meaningful transparency and pathological hatred of citizens’s rights and privacy like WikiLeaks and Assange are being attacked and having their lives destroyed just because the US and UK are unable to play fair.

Of course the CIA agent who killed a British teenager by driving on the wrong side of the road is going to avoid facing criminal prosecution in the UK and will instead beam in via video link.

And Prince Andrew is happily not co-operating with US police and criminal justice system

The police are only handing one in ten reported rapes to the crime prosecution service (CPS) and even then the victims that eventually do get to court feel let down by the insensitive nature of CPS.

Does the police think nine out of ten women and girls who allege rape are simply lying?

Or is it the CPS that is itself not structured to give women a fair chance of getting justice?

Meanwhile the UK military is denying those who have been raped in the military the chance of a hearing before a civilian court.

The conviction rate in military courts is even lower than in the already hostile UK civilian ones.

On top of all that, today Dominic Raab went on the radio to push for his reforms to the justice system. He wants to dismantle the human rights act in order to more easily deport foreign offenders.

There is little media scrutiny of the legal system which produces miscarriages daily. For Raab to use an already defunded dysfunctional system to spuriously deport people is entirely coheres with his psychopathic arc.

He even had a go at one of his Tory colleagues who compared the introduction of vaccine passports to Nazi Germany. There will likely be some sort of Tory rebellion tonight but it won’t achieve anything because the opposition party will likely back the government.

Raab likes to get upset about any mention of the Holocaust but of course has no empathy for the 90% women whose rape allegations are rejected or the people he very likely is so keen on wrongfully deporting.

He quietly claims victim status as he seeks to pull UK out of the Convention on Human Rights and allows ongoing torture of Julian Assange who has only ever published true stories about what is done by Governments with public money and in the public’s name.

Apparently the track below has a Stephen Sondheim influence from South Pacific or West Side Story.

Mr Sondheim just passed away and was a huge influence on Sam Mendes who ran the Donmar Theatre in London before becoming a renowned film director. Mendes and Nick Clegg were both in Footlights at Cambridge. Clegg went on to work for suspicious Leon Brittan before becoming deputy PM and now off at Facebook.

Mendes did a lot of work with Blair, Alastair Campbell and Kevin Spacey. I assume he will have therefore been considered for some work for the Clintons.

I always felt American Beauty was a Democrat movie.

I wonder if Weinstein was involved.

And if Sam is in Ghislaine’s black book.

Reports from her trial claim the book will remain sealed. But it is already in the public domain.

Check the sounds of the kid who speaks at the end of the tune. Apparently the Nice’s album was named after a fake food critic. I love the way the kid says Inevitable!