About

Why?

If you are consumed with greed, enjoy a permanent sense of superiority, are incompetent, suffer from Acute Controlling Syndrome, think ethics are for wimps, or have never created anything worthwhile in your life, the chances are you hold some kind of senior position in one of these professions: politics, the media, investment banking, multinational business, management consultancy, tax accountancy, the Law, or internet service provision.

You are the reason all those pursuits serve your interests rather than mine.

If you have all of those features in your personal make-up, then you are a seriously big wig, engaged in running the world. You are probably a sociopath, perhaps a psychopath, and definitely delusional…to the extent that your ideal world is one in which the small community and the middle classes have been wiped out, and a few very big bananas have near-monopolies on everything.

You are the reason the world is falling apart.

In order to retain your position as an influential idiot dedicated to pauperising everyone except the elite, you are going to talk bollocks almost all the time. (Trans: US – horsesh*t, French – conneries, German – Bockmist). You can get away with doing so, because most of the rest of us are too thick, bored, busy or tired to bother analysing the bollocks that pour forth from your mouth in a never-ending testicular stream.

The Slog is dedicated to the deconstruction of bollocks, and the destruction of all the scams associated with it.

Who?

The Slog was founded by John Ward. It is written, edited, published, designed and monitored by John Ward. As a result, John Ward has lost his life, but is working at regaining it over time.

The content comes from a variety of sources, almost all of them anonymous, research into data, media contacts whose stories have been spiked, and a rapidly growing army of readers – ‘Sloggers’ – who simply see stuff going on, and write to me about it. As I don’t work for the British police, this means you can write to me without Vladimir Putin knowing about it.

The address for anyone wanting to do that is jawslog@gmail.com

How….

…is it doing? I’m glad you asked me that. Since its foundation in January 2010, The Slog’s circulation has gone from 150 per day to a peak last February of 42,000 visits a day. During 2012 to date, the site has averaged 10-12,000 visits every 24 hours. In the last month, the daily average was 13 -16,000 visits.

On 1st June 2012, after two years and five months in existence, The Slog passed 3 million hits all-time.

Beginning with a 95% British audience, the site today enjoys an established position in the Anglo and euro-sphere across the world. It is screened out by China, Hufffington Post/AOL, and Reuters, frequently blocked by Germany, watched balefully by the Rasputinistas in Russia, and banned in Albuquerque. Don’t ask.

So The Slog is growing….in readership and influence. But alone, it is not so much as a pin-prick on a gargoyle’s backside.

What next?

As the MSM are largely about complicity with the Establishment, the internet must retain a large area for independent opposition. I do not believe that the future of that opposition will be effective if it consists entirely of one-man-band raging bloggers.

We need a portal with ‘NO BIAS’ over the door, and a mutualised commercial model under which those who want to stem bollocks and stop megalomaniacs can exist happily and profitably together.

Is there a Mission?

People often ask me this. I’d quite like a bamboo mission in a South American jungle somewhere, so long as Peruvian pipes were banned. But at the minute no, there is no mission. This is not a single-issue site.

But there are some beliefs.

I think the machine-driven political structures and polemics we have in the West today are sclerotic and irrelevant to most voters. The obsession with big State, no State, Left, Right, conservative and liberal is useful today only as the basis for damning critique.

That critique would show how mechanical process and mediocre selection criteria have produced bollocks. What we lack is initiative, ideas, realism, and the acceptance that only radical reform is going to make a difference.

We do not at present have any politicians, economists, bankers or media voices with enough influence to point out the obvious alternative to denialist drift – a mind-change I call Radical Realism.

I’ve come to realise over the last eight years that a political Party is not the answer (it will only be infected by power) and it is a waste of time pressuring politicians (they do not have the power any more). For me, the best approach is to apply legal commercial pressure to the bad guys. This and good journalism is destroying Newscorp: the politicians, police and legal profession were on Murdoch’s side. By and large, they still are.

Where there is a public sector and a civil service – ie, everywhere – I would divorce them from government control, and mutualise them into ownership by the employees and the other stakeholders. The leading candidate for such change is without doubt the NHS. But Andrew Lansley’s ‘idea’ is to sell it to anyone with money, and Labour’s ‘plan’ is to leave it alone to carry on being a dysfunctional money-pit. This is reason number 31,808 to ditch the British political Establishment: collect the whole set of 403,019, and get a FREE album in which to stick them for eternity. (The reasons or the Establishment, whichever most takes your fancy).

I think mutuality is a commercial form we threw away in the Gordon Gecko rush of 1980’s madness. It should be revived and, along with private venture capitalism, reduce this insane dependence capitalism has upon the world’s bourses for finance.

I think mercantile globalism alongside inflexible neocon monetarism is fatally flawed as a capitalist model. Big socialism and multinational capitalism need to be accepted as past errors, and a chance given to smaller, more communitarian entrepreneurial endeavour…in which the members or shareholders are on board, rather than on the board of some remote institution.

Profitable niche trade with the aim of national and local self-sufficiency offers more fulfilment, more balance and far less danger than global reach. Very few members of any national tribe want a foreign power reaching into their pockets. The ideas of Ted Levitt are dead. They should be buried, inside a lead casket.

Supra-nationalism has been the biggest mistake of the last twenty years. It is personified today by the European Union – an illiberal, interfering, anti-democratic gravy train – and its horribly deformed child, the euro. All this is now collapsing rapidly anyway. But The Slog remains a lover of Europe and an avowed opponent of the EU. The EU is the biggest single source of bollocks on the planet – by a considerable margin.

Finally, I think the key issues of our age are interdependent. I would list them as personal responsibility, holistic education, population control, medical realism, privacy, creativity, vision, energy innovation, and leadership.

All of these are under serious threat in a world overrun by John Birts, Lloyd Blankfeins, Herman van Rompuys, David Camerons and Barack Obamas. They neither lead, nor are they accountable.

Accountable leadership is perhaps the greatest single hope to which we can aspire. The Slog wants to promote visionaries we can look up to, not technocrats who look down on us.

John Ward, June 2012