Tag: wikileaks

Assange: Yet more “shocking” revelations about Clinton

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At a press conference Friday morning, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange revealed ‘astonishing’ details of how, in the run-up to last year’s election, prominent supporters of Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton exchanged emails with one another in which they discussed her chances of success and expressed hope that she would defeat Donald Trump. 

He then went on to highlight a number of other aspects of the Clinton campaign which he said would ‘shock to the core’ anyone who thought that she was ever a suitable choice for President of the United States.

Amongst other allegations, Assange detailed the following:

  • Clinton ‘doesn’t have a winkle’, but rather ‘some sort of front bottom’.
  • She has, on at least one occasion in the past, ‘done it with a boy’ (at this point in the press conference Assange giggled uncontrollably behind his hand for several minutes while other representatives of Wikileaks looked at their shoes and appeared to be experiencing considerable embarrassment).
  • The former candidate, said Mr Assange once he had composed himself and been given a drink of Ribena, has, in the past, ‘done a big poo’. (At this point Mr Assange went bright red and fell off his chair, appearing to bang his head with some force on his playpen. He then began crying rather loudly and had to be comforted by a member of the Wikileaks team who, between sobs, he referred to as ‘Nanny’. He then made a final, whispered statement in which he explained that he had ‘done wee-wee’, and the assembled journalists were requested to vacate the playroom so that he could be cleaned up and, in the words of another member of the Wikileaks staff, allowed to spend some time ‘playing with his computer’.)

Wikileaks is 10 years old.

Wikileaks bravely shocks world with Trump Jr email revelations

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The world has been rocked to its core by the revelation that, contrary to all its previous claims, the Trump campaign did indeed have direct contact with individuals it knew to be directly connected to the Russian Government and who offered to provide it with information damaging to Hillary Clinton. The document in question was posted on the Wikileaks Twitter account a mere 25 minutes after Donald Trump Jr had shared it on his own Twitter feed. In a series of further revelations from Wikileaks, it has also been divulged that:

  • The Titanic was sunk by an iceberg.
  • There is very little actual chicken in KFC chicken products.
  • The terrorist group behind the 9/11 attacks is called Al Qaeda.

    • Polar bears are not actually white.

  • Julian Assange doesn’t want to be put on trial for rape
  • Bonn is no longer the capital of Germany
  • Barack Obama was not born in Kenya
  • Bears shit in wooded areas
  • The Pope is not a protestant
  • Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails didn’t actually expose any serious wrongdoing
  • While Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning are heroes, Julian Assange is a bit of a fucking joke
  • Wikileaks aren’t very good at hacking
  • Vladimir Putin used to work for the KGB

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange appealed to world governments, civil society organisations and media outlets to act immediately on the revelations by helping him get out of the cupboard he’s lived in for several years so he can get to Moscow and recieve some sort of medal without having to pass through Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning on several charges of rape.

Did Sean Hannity murder S*th R*ch?

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Does this man even exist?

Did the Fox News broadcaster Sean Hannity kill the DNC employee S*th R*ch? I’m not at liberty to say. I only know what my senses tell me and what I hear from trusted sources. But if what I’m hearing is even 1% factual, then there are grave questions to be asked. Of course, you won’t see this in the mainstream media. They only tell you what you they want you to know. So ask yourself these fifteen crucial questions:

1. Why isn’t the MSM talking about the possibility that Sean Hannity murdered S*th R*ch? Why hasn’t this question been raised in the so-called liberal press or on MSNBCCNN? What are they hiding? Is the fact that there is no evidence for such an absurd proposition being used to justify silence on the matter?

2. Why aren’t there any Turkish restaurants in Mexico City? There was one, called Istanbul, in Polanco. It closed down in 2014. Why?

3. Why is Fox News trying to silence the story? They’ve shut down Bill O’Reilly and (according to some sources) had a hand in getting rid of Roger Ailes. (Don’t fall for that bullshit story about ‘death’. I’ve never ‘died’ and I suspect you haven’t either.) Maybe there’s something they’re not telling us. How long is a piece of string? Why won’t they tell us?

4. How can José Mourinho claim this year has been a ‘success’ for Manchester United when they didn’t even finish in the top 5? Could this somehow be connected to the death of S*th R*ch? No, obviously not. Why not? What are they hiding?

5. How is Sean Hannity so well-informed and sure of his sources? He knows more about it than the family, investigators who have looked into the murder in exhaustive detail and the FBI. Was he there, on the spot? Is it true that Hannity is regularly in the habit of burgling Washington apartments/is part of the Illuminati/works for the CIA/etc? Who would even suggest such things?

6. Is it possible to make good hummus if you don’t have any tahini? Of course ‘they’ will tell you that tahini is an ‘ingredient’ of hummus. Maybe it’s time you started to question what they tell you.

7. Why has Sean Hannity just chosen to take a ‘vacation’? They say it’s for something called ‘Memorial Day’, which sounds fishy. I’d never heard of such a day until last week, partly because I’m not American. Maybe it’s all part of the cover-up.

8. Why aren’t there any Memorial Day films, or movies as you people call them? It’s a good couple of years since Wes Anderson made a new film, isn’t it? Have you asked why? Why not? Why hasn’t Wes so-called Anderson made a film set in and around Memorial Day? Could the reason be connected to Pizzagate? What?

9. Does ‘Sean Hannity’ even exist? I’ve certainly never seen his ‘show’, except for some clips on the internet. We don’t get Fox News US in the UK. Why not? What are they hiding from us?

10. Given that Sean Hannity doesn’t exist, how can ‘advertisers’ be withdrawing from his ‘show’? Do these ‘companies’ even ‘exist’? What about their ‘products’? Do you remember ever buying any commodities you saw advertised during the commercial breaks on ‘Sean Hannity”s ‘show’? I certainly haven’t, partly because I’ve never seen it. I’m calling bullshit on this, for no reason whatsoever.

11. Why isn’t the mainstream media, which I don’t watch or read so I have no way of knowing whether or not this is true, broadcasting or printing blatant falsehoods with regard to the death of S*th R*ch? What’s their interest in insisting on the truth of the whole affair and respecting the wishes of his bereaved family? Why don’t they dedicate airtime and column inches to promoting baseless conspiracy theories invented by right-wing crackpots and internet trolls in the attempt to disrupt public debate? Why can’t they just report verbatim whatever inflammatory attention-seeking nonsense that cupboard-dwelling sex pest troll Julian Assange has come up with without investigating first whether or not it has any actual basis in fact? Can’t we just scrap the First Amendment and jail anyone who even mentions the fact that Trump and his team are in hock to the Russians?

12. Whatever Alex Jones says.

13. If something could conceivably be true, does that mean it is true, even when there is no evidence to support it apart from what politically-motivated people with no journalistic credentials whatsoever posted on the internet?

14. More of whatever Alex Jones says. Even though he himself recently swore in court that he’s nothing but a performance artist who makes things up for effect.

15. Did Hillary Clinton order the murder of Seth Rich? No. If you think she did, you really need to grow up and start reading a proper newspaper written for adults by professional journalists rather than, with unerring gullibility, believing any old self-serving, dishonest and manipulative conspiracy theory bullshit you come across online. Now piss off, I’m off out to take my baby daughter for a stroll in the sunshine. I hope we don’t get shot dead by the Clintons. FFFS.

Wikileaks boss appeals for ‘any’ information regarding Donald Trump

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Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has made a public appeal for “any” information relating to US President Donald Trump.

Speaking from the cupboard in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where he has for the past few years been hiding from trial on several well-substantiated rape charges, the Australian-born hacker asked for “anyone out there” to provide his organisation with “any” details relating to Trump’s “public life or private dealings”.

“We at Wikileaks would be very grateful if anyone could google Mr Trump’s name, do a screen shot of the results page and email it to us”, he said. Referring to Wikileaks’ “stainless” reputation for exposing corruption among public figures and its track-record of campaigning for transparency, he requested details such as Mr Trump’s place and date of birth, his middle name and information relating to any major controversies or scandals he may have been involved with in the past.

Mr Assange also specified that his organisation is “very interested” in allegations of Russian collusion in the recent US election (won by Mr Trump) and asked that anyone sympathetic to the aims of his organisation visit the New York Times or BBC websites, find articles containing the basic facts as they stand, print them out and send them to ‘Wikileaks, Utility Cupboard, Ecuadorian Embassy, London’.

He also urged supporters of Wikileaks to look beyond the “mainstream media” and visit sites such as Reddit and Twitter in order to track down any information relating to Mr Trump, particularly in relation to the sort of business activities he may have engaged in before becoming President and also what political program he campaigned on during the election.

Asked why, given that Wikileaks normally works by drawing on an extensive global network of secret informants, hackers and whistleblowers, he did not use other more surreptitious means to investigate Mr Trump and his alleged Russian contacts, Mr Assange paused and said that he “hadn’t thought of doing that” but that he “didn’t want to get in trouble with (at this point he appeared to adopt a comedy Russian accent) ‘you-know-who’. 

Mr Assange stressed that Wikileaks will continue to do “whatever it can” to expose misdeeds in public life, “regardless of political bias”. In response to questions as to why his organisation had not sought to investigate allegations of corruption against far-right French Presidential Candidate Marine Le Pen, and had instead endeavoured to diffuse disinformation against her centrist opponent, Mr Assange was nonplussed, explaining that he personally had been “away” for the last few weeks in another part of his utility cupboard, and that Wikileaks must have been “hacked, or something”. He appealed to anyone possessing or with access to any basic biographical information on Le Pen or any details regarding France (its geographical coordinates, the name of its capital city and any major landmarks generally associated with it) to send it marked for his personal attention at “the usual address”.

Mr Assange then excused himself, explaining that he had a “very important health-data related project” to complete for “a group of private clients”.

“Not just the Rothschilds”: Wikileaks reveals truth about Macron

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In a not-quite-a-shock move designed to shift the balance of the French Presidential Election in favour of the candidate who denies the Holocaust, Wikileaks (previously renowned as a media transparency organisation, now more widely regarded as an amalgam of mercenary hacking collective, source of digital forgeries which benefit the far-right and rape cult) has published documents that prove “conclusively” that “former Rothschild usurer” Emmanuel Macron is connected to a “secret conspiracy to dominate the planet”. 

Describing the revelations as “extraordinary and unprecedented”, cupboard-dwelling Wikileaks founder and aspiring Bond villain Julian Assange said that the documents raised “very serious questions” about the long-term goals of Macron and other “globalist neoliberals” such as George Soros “and various other jews”.

Assange also stated that as a proven and powerful ally of “at least three major world leaders”, the chances of his getting away “scott-free” with raping a “reasonable” number of women were now looking “very much improved, thank you for asking”. He then, to giggles from a number of male Wikileaks colleagues, added the words “allegedly raping”. In response to a question about the global implications of enabling a lifelong fascist to be elected as leader of one of the world’s most powerful countries, Assange replied that he found it “funny”. Asked about connections between his organisation and the Kremlin, he smirked and said “no comment” in what appeared to be a comedy Russian accent.

The Wikileaks tranche of emails relating to Emmanuel Macron (released as part of an ongoing collaboration with the Breitbart website and the Office of the Presidency of Russia) can be found here.

P.s. Someone has responded to this written-on-the-bus-in-five-minutes-in-a-blind-rage piece of hot-take satire by pointing out that Assange has claimed Wikileaks has nothing to do with the slurs against Macron. The fact that he was threatening three months ago to do exactly this suggests very strongly that he’s lying. He will do and say literally anything to get out of that cupboard (except face trial on several well-substantiated rape charges, obviously).

The Great “Earthquake” Swindle

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erthquake
If you believe this, you’ll believe anything! Notice btw that it comes from a *government* website.

It’s telling that the global warmist lobby, with their constant bombardment of fake news about floods in Thailand and drought in Africa (make your mind up, guys!) go out of their way to cover up the real stories. It turns out that those “doctors” would have you believe that “cells” within your “body” can go bad and ultimately “kill” you were lying. That’s right: “cancer” doesn’t exist. It’s a hoax that’s been played for decades, one perpetrated by the government and the mass media and believed by all those who don’t dare to question what they’re told. These are the same people who tell you that the President of the United States is married to an immigrant or that it’s (as one of these so-called “pediatricians” told me in person last week) “an act of grave irresponsibility” not to get your child vaccinated! Thank god (another fake news story that I bet you fell for!) that we have Facebook and Twitter so we don’t have to believe their bullshit any longer.

But even worse than so-called “climate” “scientists” and “cancer” “doctors” are this bunch of self-appointed experts who call themselves “seismologists”. This is a fancy name for people who want you to believe that the “earth” (which other “scientists” will tell you is as round as a baseball! – but that’s another story) can tremble and shake like a blancmange! The official story (and I can tell you, I’ve studied this in some detail) is that it’s caused by (try not to laugh) “sudden movements in the Earth’s crust”. Well I’m going to tell you a personal story, something that “happened” to “me” just this “morning”, which will show that this whole “earthquake” racket is no more than yet another official libtard hoax.

We went to our local “hospital” for a checkup with someone who calls himself a “gynecologist”. This shyster is paid thousands of euros of taxpayer’s money to tell us that as a result of a little cuddle time me and my “wife” enjoyed several months ago she is now “pregnant” and is going to have a “baby”. While we were “there” we visited another “couple” who apparently have just “given birth” (there was no actual evidence of this; there was a very small human being in the room and two beaming but exhausted new “parents” but there could be any number of explanations for that). After a few minutes of “conversation” (I noticed that the “baby” was pretending to be asleep the whole time) the “father” character drew our attention to the “fact” that the “water” in a bottle on the “bedside” was “shaking”. Sure enough, it “was”; I then “looked” at the “curtains” and they appeared to be moving – which obviously raised my suspicions! Then I “felt” with my “body” that the whole “building” (we were on the “eighth floor”, in the so-called “maternity department”) seemed (I’m being very careful with my language here!) to be “trembling”. I suddenly felt quite “scared”. Our “friend”, the new “mother”, checked on her “iphone” and said something about “the “epicentre””(it’s depressing to see how all this quakist jargon has wormed its way into the heads of ordinary sheeple) being near a place called “Rieti”, which I knew at once to be a lie, because although I’ve seen the name on a so-called map and noticed it on the front of “buses”, I’ve never actually been “there”.

We made our excuses, and “left”. I dread to think what fairy tales that baby will grow up hearing. They’ll probably tell it all the usual pseudo-scientific nonsense about “water” being “wet” and about how it gets “dark” at “night”. Personally I’m glad that I’ve seen through all that crap. As soon as “my” “child” is “born” I’m going to tell him the truth: that “hospitals” do more harm than good, that “teachers” do nothing but lie, and that so-called “parents” are the least trustworthy people he’ll ever meet. I’m also going to make sure he understands that whatever information he receives through his “eyes”, “ears”, “nose” and “fingers” is almost certainly bullshit, and that the last thing he should ever do in life – even worse than putting any faith in “experts” – is to use his “brain” to interpret the world. And you can stick your Dr Seuss, Alice in Wonderland and Roald Dahl books back where the sun don’t shine. I won’t be reading him any “bedtime stories” (in any case, if you believe that human beings “need” to “sleep”, quite frankly you’ll believe anything -and as for “breast” “milk”, don’t get me started on that junk!). Instead he’ll be staying up all night with me getting the real story from my good friends at Breitbart, Infowars and Wikileaks. I want my “child” to be brought up on a solid diet of the truth.

NB: This is a work of satire. In reality the only thing more dangerous than seismic activity is climate denial. They both serve to destroy the foundations of our existence.

Wikileaks: ‘Russian’ email claims false, Chemtrails are for real

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assangeWikileaks founder Julian Asange has revealed to Fox News that a Russian-connected source didn’t leak hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee to his organization. He also confirmed that evidence suggesting a pattern of past sexual discretion on the part of President Elect Donald Trump was false. Asange went on to assert that all and any attempts to link Donald Trump’s father Fred Trump with the Klu Klux Klan was inaccurate, and also stated that the KKK itself had been the victim of widespread misrepresentation in the past. In a separate statement given to Russia Today, Wikileaks also announced that its investigation into the recent Austrian election revealed a disturbing level of foreign intervention which may have influenced the result.  Meanwhile, a further Wikileaks press release stated that information had come into its possession which suggested that long-standing rumours of former Ukip leader Nigel Farage and his father’s involvement in the British National Front were ‘definitely unfounded’. In a separate development, a document placed on the Wikileaks website suggested that reports of mass killing of civilians as a result of Russian bombing of Aleppo had been falsified, while on Wednesday morning in a statement to the news organisation Breitbart Wikileaks said it had ‘firm evidence’ that the outgoing US administration had forged papers related to the birthplace of President Barack Obama. Asange also spoke by phone with Alex Jones of the website infowars.com and confirmed that his organisation had documents indicating that governments across the world have been manipulating weather patterns and that the chemical trails from airplanes suggest that this information is well-founded. Asange also gave a press conference Thursday from his cupboard in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London during which said he now had ‘proof’ that he was innocent of the rape charges leveled against him, promising to provide the ‘conclusive’ evidence to the international media as soon as his fax machine was up and running again. He also announced plans to merge the Wikileaks website with that of Breitbart, Infowars and davidicke.com in order to combat the rising influence of ‘fake news’ from websites such as the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times and promised to release a ‘devastating’ report handed to Wikileaks by an anonymous source which he said would ‘seriously challenge’ our understanding of both what he called the ‘hoaxacaust’ and the 1969 Moon Landings. In response to a question about the allegations from some quarters that his organization is now little more than a puppet of the Trump Government, Asange waved his arms in a wooden fashion, fell to the floor with a clattering sound and made no further comment.

UPDATE: I posted this on the Wikileaks Facebook page, and within a few hours this actually happened:

screenshot_2017-01-06-13-32-24

…it then disappeared from their page like a flash. If they’d checked the tags on the original post they would have seen it was flagged as #fakenews and #trolling. But they didn’t -they didn’t even click on the link before liking and sharing it. That’s what Wikileaks is like these days. So Assange’s claim that the emails didn’t come from Russia is almost certainly not true either. They simply don’t check their sources.

 

 

7 Amazing Facts about Vladimir Putin

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I suspect that some of the people rightly expressing outrage at last night’s horrible events in Berlin were far more sanguine about the even more horrifying events last week in Aleppo. I’m thinking in particular about the people I’ve met in person over the last few months who expressed the belief that Vladimir Putin is essentially a good leader who knows what he is doing: the English couple I got talking to over lunch last month who thought that aligning with Assad was the only possible option in terms of ensuring ‘global’ ‘security’; the Colombian IELTS candidate last weekend who felt he was cruelly unrepresented in the ‘Western media’; the Italian Quaker who believes that Putin’s sterling work in ‘growing’ the Russian economy was a good model to follow. For what it’s worth, I want to lay out some facts that challenge this point of view, one which I think is heavily conditioned by the deeply insidious pseudo-radical state propaganda outlet Russia Today and the useful fools such as Max Keiser, Julian Assange (clearly neither of them actual fools, but both of them possible tricksters), Ed Schultz and George Galloway who lend it their credibility (odd that we should still be talking about Galloway’s credibility in 2016, but still…). Other prominent pro-Putin advocates include that orange prick and other far-right demagogues like Le Pen, Farage, Salvini, etc, along with their fellow travellers such as Beppe Grillo (another possible trickster). This propaganda effort is all part of a much bigger initiative to restore Russia’s power and I doubt that my teeny little blog is going to make much of a dent in their tanks but what the hey.

You will notice by the way that the sources for these facts are reputable news organisations. For a useful breakdown of which news sources are trustworthy and which are garbage this is a very useful graph.

  1. The immediate violent reaction to the full-scale destruction of Aleppo was absolutely predictable.
  2. There is very strong evidence that Putin was directly complicit in the murder of hundreds of his own citizens in 1999 in order to instill fear and panic in the population, justify a new war in Chechnya and delay the election so he could take power.
  3. Putin is enormously personally corrupt.
  4. On the singlemost important issue facing the world today Putin is profoundly stupid. He is on record as saying that “two or three degrees” of warming could be good for Russia because residents wouldn’t need to spend as much on fur coats. Actually with two to three degrees of warming Russia would be в жопе.
  5. The Russian economy is tanking, with millions having been plunged into poverty in the last two years. Any supposed growth under Putin has been wiped out.
  6. His supposed popularity with the Russian people is partly based on electoral fraud.
  7. Putin is weaker than his slavering supporters like to pretend.

As I say, you don’t have to take my word for any of these things; please click through to the links from newspapers of record and they will confirm in the form of carefully-researched detail what is stated above (the first one is self-evident). Alternatively, if you prefer to trust in internet ерунда, there are millions of sites just like this, all just about as credible as Russia Today. As for Trump, I hope that when he gets to meet his hero his backup staff have some sort of sexual sedatives on hand as I fear that otherwise Putin might have difficulty shaking the US President off his leg.

The Age of Agnotology: The Importance of Reading Newspapers in an Era of Fake News

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Of all the possible places to try to sell a dogmatically Leninist newspaper in 2016, the gates of a small, private, right-wing Catholic university is probably not the best location. Leaving work earlier this week I was surprised to encounter an actual 21st Century Bolshevik selling Lotta Comunista (Communist Struggle). Che testardo! The front page featured an actual hammer and sickle and an exhortation to the workers of the world to put down their bloody phones for a minute and UNITE!. Inside there was a closely-written article on US energy policy that featured nary a mention of the changing climate, while page 6 featured a total of 448 individual statistics relating to socio-economic class and voting habits in the USA. At least its position on Sunday’s absurd and suicidal referendum was more sensible than that of the rest of the ‘left’: they recommend that their readers stay at home memorising ‘What is to be done’ rather than bothering to vote. If you’re so inclined you can read your way through the rest of it here.

A thought experiment: imagine a country in which such a publication was the only newspaper. Actually come to think of it I don’t have to try that hard because I’ve been there quite recently – in May, in Cuba, where the only two daily newspapers are the black-and-white 12-page Government propaganda sheet Granma (named after the tiny vessel that brought Fidel (RIP) and friends back to Cuba in 1956), and an 8-page supplement for03-cuba-fidel-granma young people called Juventude Rebelde (Rebel Youth), which is similar in look, style and content to the kind of publications the Worker’s Revolutionary Party used to try (and fail) to hand out for free. Both newspapers are hard to track down and (after a couple of days of cheap laughs, and once you’ve set aside a few copies as very cheap presents) genuinely not worth the effort. When in the 1990s the US not-an-embassy put up LED screens to broadcast subversive information to the city it must have had quite an impact. In Mozambique – also nominally a Communist country – the national newspapers are remarkably similar in style and content to the cheaper Portuguese tabloids. I once read a very depressing article (it wasn’t supposed to be depressing) about how popular A Bola (The Ball) is in Angola. In some countries, the main journals of record are ones which just report the achievements of government (rather like a lot of local newspapers nowadays in the UK in relation to local councils). In others, the only opposition newspapers are those owned by politically ambitious oligarchs . There are other channels of communication but the absence of a free press makes a country much culturally and socially poorer and less free.

Continue reading “The Age of Agnotology: The Importance of Reading Newspapers in an Era of Fake News” →

David Miliband’s secret Swiss bank accounts

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So I’m teaching Switzerland’s second richest man, apparently a close personal friend of that Indian fella who owns all the world’s steel deposits. He tells me he used to be a farmer who did the decathlon for the Swiss national team but didn’t go to the Olympics because the piglets were in flower or something, and then one day he decided to set up Switzerland’s second largest credit card company, did so, became stupendously wealthy, bought a nice place in St. Moritz (or maybe that was a nice place called St. Moritz) and is now managing director of one of the world’s biggest (maybe even second biggest) investment banks. He’s a nice guy, personable at least, although I’m well aware that while I’m talking to him thousands of minions are running round bankrupting Ireland on his behalf, which means what I’m doing is actually technically wrong in all sorts of important ways, but he asks me what I think of David Cameron and laughs heartily when it very rapidly becomes clear that our worldviews are as diametrically opposed as our income brackets. I’m to be one of his servants for the next five days and my impotent rage seems to entertain him at least. Plus he says things like I used to live in a willage and so you’d like to live in Chapan, and I’m pretty sure I can help him with that.

At 1pm precisely we part for lunch, he presumably to the toppest notchest place open near Exmouth market on a bank holiday, me to Sainsbury’s to spend one pound sixty five on a ham sandwich and a small banana. At precisely 2pm he returns, nearly closes the door behind him and we go back up to the fourth floor so I can continue to assist him in his work looting wulnerable economies. I help him with his pron. of words such as limousine, Bentley and privileged, and spend a slightly frustrating ten minutes trying to explain that the past form of the word read is not spelt red, which is confusing because I have written the word read in blue and the pronunciation, /red/, in red. But apart from that he is entertaining company, especially, or maybe except, when he shows me some photos of some charming young women he met in Wietnam and tells me his new vife is CEO of Europe’s largest (or maybe second largest) chewellry company.

Every hour exactly on the hour we have a break, so he can get on the phone and immiserate Portugal while I make some tea. At four pm I pop downstairs to check messages on my phone, which I left downstairs in the teachers’ room, except that it’s not there, except oh no wait it is, but my wallet’s missing, it’s been stolen, because the door is, as the old joke says, a jar, except it’s not at all funny, because it had my brand new one month zones one to three Oystercard in it and £130.

Back upstairs I happen to casually mention that my wallet has been robbed, to which he saliently points out that maybe, too, his bags, which he brought from Heathrow that morning in a taxi about which he did not once complain about the price, have been nicked. Curious, we go down and look. In a darkened room for which I am, mortifyingly, unable to locate the light switch, we discover that the thief has somehow overlooked his basically chewel-encrusted briefcase, which is presumably packed chock full of the details of Vladimir Putin’s, at at least David Miliband’s, secret bank accounts, the door code for the CERN laboratory and highly confidential information regarding the Swiss nuclear programme. Had they got their hands on it it would have been like wikileaks all over again, which rules out Julian Assange as a culprit, especially since neither of us have been…oh never mind.

The bag that they did take apparently just had some sports equipment and a pair of shoes in it, but he still seems pretty agitated, which is understandable, very few people like to have things stolen, or their economies pillaged, but what the hey. He sympathises with me over the loss of effectively three hundred pounds or pennies or whatever you people call them, but it eventually transpires that what bothers him is not the loss of a sweaty sports singlet and some of those black pumps you used to get at school. It’s not even any emotional attachment to his Prada bag. It’s the theft of his treasured $5,000 pair of crocodile shoes. It seems churlish to point out that he can get the money back on insurance. I suppose we both find it upsetting in our own way that somewhere on earth another crocodile is being prepared for the slaughter.