The Russians call it Kompromat – the use by the state of sexual accusations to destroy a public figure. When I was attacked in this way by the government I worked for, Uzbek dissidents smiled at me, shook their heads and said “Kompromat“. They were used to it from the Soviet and Uzbek governments. They found it rather amusing to find that Western governments did it too.
Well, Julian Assange has been getting the bog standard Kompromat. I had imagined he would get something rather more spectacular, like being framed for murder and found hanging with an orange in his mouth. He deserves a better class of kompromat. If I am a whistleblower, then Julian is a veritable mighty pipe organ. Yet we just have the normal sex stuff, and very weak.
Bizarrely the offence for which Julian is wanted for questioning in Sweden was dropped from rape to sexual harassment, and then from sexual harassment to just harassment. The precise law in Swedish, as translated for me and other Sam Adams alumni by our colleague Major Frank Grevil, reads:
“He who lays hands on or by means of shooting from a firearm, throwing of stones, noise or in any other way harasses another person will be sentenced for harassment to fines or imprisonment for up to one year.”
So from rape to non-sexual something. Actually I rather like that law – if we had it here, I could have had Jack Straw locked up for a year.
Julian tells us that the first woman accuser and prime mover had worked in the Swedish Embassy in Washington DC and had been expelled from Cuba for anti-Cuban government activity, as well as the rather different persona of being a feminist lesbian who owns lesbian night clubs.
Scott Ritter and I are well known whistleblowers subsequently accused of sexual offences. A less well known whistleblower is James Cameron, another FCO employee. Almost simultaneous with my case, a number of the sexual allegations the FCO made against Cameron were identical even in wording to those the FCO initially threw at me.
Another fascinating point about kompromat is that being cleared of the allegations – as happens in virtually every case – doesn’t help, as the blackening of reputation has taken effect. In my own case I was formerly cleared of all allegations of both misconduct and gross misconduct, except for the Kafkaesque charge of having told defence witnesses of the existence of the allegations. The allegations were officially a state secret, even though it was the government who leaked them to the tabloids.
Yet, even to this day, the FCO has refused to acknowledge in public that I was in fact cleared of all charges. This is even true of the new government. A letter I wrote for my MP to pass to William Hague, complaining that the FCO was obscuring the fact that I was cleared on all charges, received a reply from a junior Conservative minister stating that the allegations were serious and had needed to be properly investigated – but still failing to acknowledge the result of the process. Nor has there been any official revelation of who originated these “serious allegations”.
Governments operate in the blackest of ways, especially when it comes to big war money and big oil money. I can see what they are doing to Julian Assange, I know what they did to me and others (another recent example – Brigadier Janis Karpinski was framed for shoplifting). In a very real sense, it makes little difference if they murdered David Kelly or terrified him into doing it himself. Telling the truth is hazardous in today’s Western political system.
Abe, I’m sure your logic is impeccable and your phrasing is very careful, but you are not addressing the point I am trying to get at – namely, that you do not have the right to decide on other peoples’ governments for them.
Funny how it goes, isn’t it ? The Brits say George III was mistaken, Abe says no [1], that’s the way to get things done.
[1] oops, nearly wandered off onto a different track there. I guess he’s heard it before, though.
The madness of King George? Abe, tomorrow night, could you give us the link to the National Anthem of Ambrosia, please? Thanks.
Motion debated on 9 September 2010:
“That this House supports the continued deployment of UK armed forces in Afghanistan.”
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm100909/debtext/100909-0002.htm#10090911002025
Voted to bring the troops home
Baron, Mr John (Con, Basildon and Billericay)
Clark, Katy (Lab, North Ayrshire and Arran)
Corbyn, Jeremy (Lab, Islington North)
Cryer, John (Lab, Leyton and Wanstead)
Edwards, Jonathan (PC, Carmarthen East and Dinefwr)
Hoey, Kate (Lab, Vauxhall)
Hopkins, Kelvin (Lab, Luton North)
Huppert, Dr Julian (LDem, Cambridge)
Lazarowicz, Mark (Lab, Edinburgh North and Leith)
Lucas, Caroline (Green, Brighton, Pavilion)
McDonnell, John (Lab, Hayes and Harlington)
Skinner, Mr Dennis (Lab, Bolsover)
Turner, Karl (Lab, Kingston upon Hull East)
Winnick, Mr David (Lab, Walsall North
I salute your courage.
The *true* cost of defence and war including the ‘war on terror’ is staggering; cost of the war in Iraq for a combined force excluding America was about $3 trillion.
That’s a lot of money but we don’t know the returns. We don’t know how much oil has been stolen from Iraq. We don’t know how many pipelines have been covertly installed under the protection of the mercenary companies.
“The madness of King George? Abe, tomorrow night, could you give us the link to the National Anthem of Ambrosia, please? Thanks”
The national anthem of Rice Pudding ? Well, why not ?
If the Punch and Judy show’s closed for the day, I’ll rest my case with a gloriously ambiguous aside from that ultimately all-(US of)American band, the Grateful Dead, c. 1970 :- “Let me make my mistakes by myself, I don’t need your help”. “Bear’s Choice”, the prison gig.
Alfred: your analysis of old Abe’s positions are sound, but don’t expect a reasonable response there. They are wasted. The rest of us might enjoy them – such as your September 16, 2010 9:03 PM post above, but such will be entirely waved away by old Abe with something like, “Ah, but all Americans can vote, and that makes it a democracy, and a good one at that.” Idiotic, infuriating, and just the sort of reply I had to make do with while wasting time trying to engage old Abe in a reasonable fashion. A completely pointless exercise.
A bit earlier you’d quoted me, and then replied, thus:
—-start
glenn: “I find it hard to believe that anyone could actually propose that a system of government is so wonderful, that it has to be forced on a people.”
Alfred: That’s exactly what Lenin and Stalin, proposed, then they did the forcing — right?
—–end
Perfect! Exactly the sort of example that illustrates the ludicrous notion that a candidate system which is supposedly so good for everyone, needs to be forcefully imposed. Equally risible is the idea that having chosen one form of government, people will gratefully accept a radical alternative, once enough bombs have been dropped upon them to bring them to their senses.
Your reasoning that old Abe is not merely some idiotic joker has weight. Perhaps he’s just some relic who considers wogs/foreigners/darkies as being very much less than human, unless they dignify themselves in some small way by tremblin’ and a-fearin’ before the white baby Jesus and the master-race that God bestows all favour upon.
The inability – and I don’t mean unwillingness, I mean total and utter inability – to entertain an argument or engage with any idea apart from his own, made me think he’s either having a very determined and long-term laugh at us (increasingly unlikely, now I come to think of it), or is a totally set individual who is unable – simply cannot countenance – any alternative world-view. Hence my half-joking references to ‘old Abe’.
This shouldn’t turn into the Abe thread, no more than it should the Angry-establishment or Teabagging Zionist’s thread. But it’s interesting to see what’s at work here. Old Abe has been thrashing at this for quite some time – for example, repeatedly insisting “I believe Jack Straw never sought to influence people” when CM revealed the on-going crime of how Straw was “favouring” several hundred Asian bigwigs at a time in a mass election bribe. Quoting extremist war criminals as if they were understood to have had the final word on conventional wisdom and morality (Blair, Kissinger etc.). And parroting the high lunacy that Haiti was responsible for its own demise, because it brought it upon itself by practicing voodoo a couple of hundred years since.
*
We’ve had our “New” Labour stooges, our Offical Story enforcers, teabaggers and now something else altogether. Interesting collection we have hanging around here.
Alfred: concerning your post of 16/9, 18:13:
The Cameron plan is is to make good use of that 45% (you claimed, I won’t dispute it for this point) of GDP of public spending, by transferring it the the decidedly inefficient public sector. I find it very hard to accept that UK military spending is 2.4%. Just the physical observation of the number of brand new military vehicles running around, noting the military force in the air (a semi-air show every single day), and the tens of billions being spent annually on our nuclear folly makes that 2.4% frankly not credible.
The workfare schemes you propose are fairly sound – a great many people live “on the social”, where the concept of actually working for a living is treated as a fool’s pastime, ingrained into culture by generations. A working person in many small places I frequent is treated like a rock-star, but snickered at behind many hands, because this is the fool who’ll be treating everyone tonight. And so it goes.
Agreed, too – burdening the individual with the full cost of their apprenticeship for a perfectly ordinary job, is a slick con. Just as with charging students for an education which will pay future employees, and the exchequer, dividends in the long run. It is simply astonishing that ruling section of society has managed to pass down the burden of education to the latest generation, having benefited from the same as a right paid on their behalf by society.
We’re seeing ladders pulled up behind the current collecting class all around. Thanks, parents – but no, children – you should do it for yourselves. Pensions, retirement age, taxes, social benefits, education, medical – there’s no example where the younger generation is not told, “Well, it’s time to put a stop to all this entitlement, starting with you.”
Dang, I meant the decidedly inefficient _private_ sector above, instead of public as I has written. Why do we sometimes write the very opposite of that which we mean? Perhaps it’s the conventional notion we are trying to disabuse overplays in the mind.
“Democracy is a good system that protects the rights of individuals in a workable way. Other systems do not. This principle is what I have been standing for. The Allies did so during WWII”
Abe, This is where what Glenn has aptly called the Readers’ Digest view of history makes a complete fool of one.
Of course the Allies did not fight WWII to spread democracy. Indeed the Nazis had many admireres among the ruling circle in Britain and France. The French financiers were especially keen on the way the Nazis cartelized the major industries and cheerfully joined with their schemes under the Vichy regime.
In England, Winston Churchill had written admiringly of both Hitler and Mussolini. The Duke of Winsor, it seems, avoided German internment only with reluctance, and P.G. Wodehouse was so enamoured of the treatment he received in German hands that he willingly broadcast from Germany to his fans back home to tell them what a swell time he was having, which indeed he was, either boarding at the manorial estate of the widowed Baroness Anga von Bodenhausen or with his wife at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin, where all the Nazi top brass congregated.
In America Charles Lindberg spoke for many, probably the majority, at America First rallies which aimed to keep America out of the war. Among members of America’s business elite, entry into the war was opposed not only by Henry Ford but America’s Ambassador to the UK, Joseph Patrick Kennedy. And Poppy Bush’s father Prescott was actually working for the Nazis, having a role in the management of the Thyssen-owned Silesian Steel Corporation located adjacent to the Auschtwitz concentration camp from which it drew slave labor. The assets of the Union Bank Corp, of which Prescott Bush was President were expropriated by the US Government in 1941 under the Trading with The Enemy Act.
As for why they did fight, the Brits had no option. Neville Chamberlain’s had the dopey idea to set Germany Against Russia in the expectation that the war would end with a great reduction in the extent of the hated Bolshevic empire, a “free hand” for Germany in Central Europe — thus overcoming the resentment that Germans felt over their lack of an overseas empire, and a Western block comprising Britain, France and Italy and their overseas empires in an alliance with the US.
That is why Britain colluded with Germany over the destruction of Czechoslovakia, and why, having given Poland a guarantee against German aggression did nothing when Germany invaded Poland except to drop some leaflets over the Black Forest. Chamberlain’s Government was indignant when a Labor MP suggested that they should be dropping bombs on Germany, replying that that would result in the destruction of private property.
Trouble was, Germany decided to knock out Britain and France before marching East. Then the Brits had no option but to fight for their survival. Churchill replaced Chamberlain and the rest is history, as they saying goes.
(The above post was by me, if it matters.)
Glenn,
I don’t much about UK public finances, but 2.4% of GDP would be about $64 billion, or about one tenth of America’s bloated spending. But there may be additional war expropriations that I’m not counting.
I’m not familiar with Britain’s private sector and its management, but back in the sixties it seemed flabby. That was when the then Lord Thomson (Sunday Times, prop.) said “there must be something wrong weith this country, it is so easy to make money here.” It was also the time that Alex Issigonis designed the Morris Minor, a classic of its time, the first mass produced car with a transversely mounted engine and front-wheel drive (Austin A40), and the mini, and Austin/Morris/British Leyland never managed to turn a profit on any of them.
In part, I think the problem, if there is one, is a result of mass higher education. In my generation, folks with a university degree mostly thought business a rather contemptible field of endeavour. Young people were overwhelmingly for socialism. They wanted to teach, be social workers, work for the BBC or MI5. A long-haired professor of economics at Aberystwyth argued that economic growth just wasn’t “worth the candle.” The impact of these attitudes on the quality business management is not hard to imagine.
Ruth said,
Re: the cost of war in Iraq
“…but we don’t know the returns.”
Good point. BP are now drilling in Iraq. They are also drilling in Libya, which they probably would not be had not Colonel Gadaffi been persuaded by the sight of Saddam dying at the end of a rope to change sides.
But they will have to pump and aweful lot of oil to make the war pay. Still whatever the national cost, many firms and individuals have no doubt made out like bandits, which is what really counts in a kleptocracy.
Can anyone tell me why the 911 Truth Movement has failed?
And why has the Truth Movement attracted only insane people in the States while attracting somewhat mainstream people in Britain?
Hello everyone!
Circumstances have been keeping me very busy and I’m only looking in here occasionally at present. Richard Robinson, I second your posts of September 16, 2010 1:21 PM and 5:53 PM. Technicolour, I’m glad you liked the Frank Zappa song (from his album Over-nite Sensation), and thanks for Sixteen Military Wives. Dreoilin, I hope the Jury Service proves interesting and not too much of a hassle.
Glenn,
thanks for many excellent points. Tip: if you’re going to attempt prayer, you need a reasonably well formed idea of what sort of a being could be at the other end, or else you will end up addressing a mere ‘sky spook’. Do let us know if that bit of plastic sorts out the gearbox problem!
Abe Rene,
I really think you should cut yourself off from the Mainstream Media for a year or two; it’s just too effective at insidiously warping our minds. These cop shows depict principled people bending the rules in the cause of Good, but our experience with Human nature teaches us that power corrupts. Again and again, interventionism has proven disastrous. After the ‘glory’ of battle has faded from our TV screens, the materialistic driving forces behind these invasions have been uncovered. As a Christian, you should have serious concerns about these acts of war. Consider what Jesus would have said about them.
Alfred,
my own view is that the power-mongers and the kleptocrats have different motives, which nevertheless converge, at least in the present. Sufficiently powerful governments are looking at the long term slow decline in hydrocarbon production over the course of decades, and are positioning themselves strategically. The money is raised for this through permitting the kleptocrats to make their shorter term profits. This is only a rough-and-ready theory, the main lesson of which is to look for convergence of interests.
“But they will have to pump and aweful lot of oil to make the war pay”.
But those who are prosecuting this occupation and benefiting from it are not paying for it. We are.
Hi Clark
Nice to see u back. check out here:
http://tinyurl.com/scientists-rule
well put together I thought.
“But those who are prosecuting this occupation and benefiting from it are not paying for it. We are.”
Absolutely. Which is why war is a never ending racket.
just pointing out that, when challenged on his blithe promotion of the acceptability of ‘collateral damage’ (a term now used to describe civilian casualties) Abe claims that it actually means ‘a minrity (sic) of revolutionaries who intend to set up a dictatorship.’
Will read rest of posts now, even though they increasingly feel like being trolled very very slowly.
Alfred: “a long-haired professor of economics at Aberystwyth argued that economic growth just wasn’t “worth the candle.”
My hair is short. And I think the point that holistic economics makes is that ‘economic growth’ for its own sake, as pursued by governments, is indeed, for most people, not worth the candle. Or the concomittant environmental destruction (cf BP), the waste of resources (cf built in redundancy), the selling of resources (cf the rain forests) and on top of this the massive increases in personal debt.
It does, of course, make around ten percent of the population very rich.
But perhaps you could define your view of economic growth? I’d be interested; I’m still learning about economics.
MJ, seconded.
Muslims attempt to kill Pope. Or was it Stephen Fry, Richard Dawkins, Peter Tatchell and Chris Hitchens?
Richard, the ‘Ambrosia’ national anthem comment related to the novel (and film), ‘Billy Liar’, about the chap who dwelt in/ escaped to a fantasy world of his own creation.
Of course, the word originally referred to the preferred drink of the Greek gods; hence its usage by the company who manufacture the milk-related products who all know so well.
Slow-motion trolling, it must be the new Mogadon.
Slow-motion trolls model themselves on the former Conservative Chancellor or the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe, who, in his hair-raising heyday was deemed to be the very personification of Morpheus and all things soporific.
“Muslims attempt to kill Pope. Or was it Stephen Fry, Richard Dawkins, Peter Tatchell and Chris Hitchens?”
Can’t you see that’s what they want you to believe ? It’s far too naive to be credible. The Dalai Lama hired the Scientologists to blackmail Ian Paisley into persuading Desmond Tutu to use his P2 contacts to feed false information to the CIA that the Vatican was collaborating (along with the Vegetarian Society, who are really a front for the Peace Convoy, who engineered the overthrow of Thatcher – you don’t think the death of Sid Rawle was just a coincidence, do you ?) in a Russian Mafia plot to hide the uranium from Niger somewhere in Hong Kong, with the help of a dissident faction of Colombian submarine-manufacturers. And then the Illuminati got so confused they decided to knock him off just to stop their heads hurting.
Of course, Howe is deemed to have awoken from his prolonged apparent – but deceptive – torpor in November 1990, an action that seemed all the more astounding given his decade-long imitation of the Mad Hatter’s dormouse.
In the end, he is likely to be remembered as Claudius to Thatcher’s Caligula. His action also, in the end, helped to save the Conservative Party from defeat in the 1993 General Election and prevented Neil Kinnock from becoming PM, thus, albeit indirectly, leading ultimately to the rise and rise of Anthony Blair (‘The March Hare’) and his cohorts within the Labour Party.
They broke the meters counting the oil. There are no returns either to Iraq or to any other country. The blackmailing Zionist bankers who twisted the arms of the UK and US to prosecute this war, get a financial and political return from this illegal trade. Cheap oil enables us to waste more.
As for democracy, it is starved. Dam-ocracy – rule by blood (arabic dam = blood)
Richard, internet trolls are like species of snake-like reptile.
In Britain, there are three species of snake: slow-worms, grass snakes and adders. Slow-worms are actually lizards, not snakes. Slow-worms and adders look quite similar on first apprehension. You can tell the difference b/w a slow-worm and an adder by inspecting the eyes; like all lizards, slow-worms have eyelids, while like all snakes, adders do not have eyelids. The trouble is, by the time you’ve got close enough to discern this crucial difference in phenotype, if the animal concerned is an adder, it may be too late.
There are many adders on the flatlands and commons of North Lincolnshire, a diorama which also is replete with the ghosts of airmen from especially the Second World War.
The crucial difference b/w internet trolls and snakes may reside in the fact that snakes are not driven by envy.
“Richard, internet trolls are like species of snake-like reptile.”
Slow-worm looks like a prime candidate.
Temptingly-spurious arguments would be the trollish equivalent of the tail, that they fling off to flail around and twitch distractingly. I saw that done once – I don’t know whose tail it was, because I hadn’t noticed the creature itself at all, I just saw a disembodied tail thrashing itself around. It’s quite a disconcerting sight, but not as dangerous as a killer dead sheep.
And, thanks for the Ambrosia. I didn’t spot it, Billy Liar is among the many many films I haven’t seen.
Oh, that’s one you need to see, Richard, it’s a classic 1960s British film – Tom Courtenay (at his twitchy, Northern best), Rodney Bewes and the gorgeous Julie Christie – it’s really good.
A disembodied tail? God! What a sight that must’ve been! Yuck! At least it didn’t rise up on the tail of the tail and begin to twirl and sing. I’m certainly glad that humans no longer sport such gross appendages.
Re: Economic growth
Tech,
When we (me anyhow), talk about things like economic growth, we don’t really know what we are talking about. Economic growth has to be measured if it is anything objectively real. The normal method of measurement is by change in GDP. The country with the largest GDP is the US, which has a GDP approximately three times that of China, the country with the world’s second largest GDP. America’s GDP is made up mainly of things like legal fees, insurance premiums, stock brokerage fees, bank charges, insane medical expenditures, almost equal to the entire GDP of China, the porn industry, Hollywood, oversized automobiles and gasoline, millions of gimcrack houses and apartments badly insulated and expensively airconditioned, etc. Eliminate all the rubbish and add up all the production that is conducive to a healthy and productive life and America’s GDP might add up to a mere 10 or 20% of the conventionally computed total.
There are other odd things about the conventional estimation of economic output. If I consume quantities of toxic fast food I help boost the GDP. If I then get ill as a result and go to hospital, I give the GDP a further boost. If my country spends billions blowing stuff up in Afghanistan that also adds to the GDP, as do earthquakes and hurricanes which necessitate reconstruction, hospitalization of the injured, burial of the dead, etc.
Then there’s the curious fact that if through some innovation, I can sell you a plastic bucket or electric toothbrush at half what the same item cost last year, the net result is a reduction in GDP (although as an innovator, my output increases at the expense of the less efficient producers who go out of business). (Statisticians aim to fix this problem by making “hedonic” adjustments to output figures when estimating GDP.)
But despite the measurement problem, one can envisage increases in economic output that are highly desirable, for there are, surely, no shortage of things on which gigantic resources might be usefully invested. In the UK, one might begin by demolishing most of what has been built in the last hundred years and replacing it with something that looks better and works better. I recall, for example, in the vicinity of Wolverhampton, mile upon mile of derelict industrial land beside the railway line (but where in England does ugliness and a confusion of unplanned development not proliferate) — an ideal site for total reconstruction: an engineered city, or many of them. Compact urban centers, roof gardens, no cars, a large tunnel beneath every thoroughfare to accomodate services (no more stupid holes in the road), e.g., all the electronic stuff; a door-to-door parcel delivery mechanism — remember those pneumatic systems for shooting capsules with bills and money and receipts around big department stores; a rubbish disposal system that reads mandatory bar-codes on every item sold and sorts things automatically for recycling; multiple sewer lines — rainwater, sanitary and industrial, with chemical sensors at every point of entry to detect illegal dumping of to toxic materials; multiple water lines — purified drinking water, clean water for other domestic uses, gray water for irrigation, etc.!
All that could, if measured right, represent economic growth, which would be very much worth the candle.
Thanks, Alfred, that’s another sterling post. I completely agree.