That was my comment on Guardian cif.
How long before it is moderated out?
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So you didn’t see it? OK, I’ll just take your word for it then.
Alan Campbell seems to have quoted a Melanie Phillips piece from The Spectator:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/6485065/its-the-saudis-stupid.thtml
There’s a bit in Dawkins’ ‘The God Delusion’ about an ‘academy school’ run by a former used car salesman that was (is?) teaching creationism.
Yep. Equally nutty.
Mel needs a cup of tea to calm down. Saudi Arabia does all sorts of nasty stuff, and public education has deteriorated at all levels due to special interests being given too much power. Yes, it needs fixing. But I don’t expect to be overrun by Jihadist hordes anytime soon.
@alan campbell
No need to take my word for it alan, just look for some credible corroborating evidence. Calm down, the BBC don’t always tell the truth you know.
Sorry, post above was me 🙂
Mark Golding: “While not wanting to get involved in your pouncing on transcription errors and my own [] insertions let me give you the benefit of what I know against your naive but predictable Communist argument(a ruse).”
What are you talking about? Are you saying I am “naive” to think Kennedy was anti-Communist?
“HaMossad leModi’in uleTafkidim Meyuchadim (al-Mussad li’l-Istikhbarat wa’l-Mahamm al-Kha??a) MURDERED Kennedy.”
Of course they did. Is there nothing that the Zionist blue octopus hasn’t left its tentacle-prints on?
” most of what I know here – as others who follow me will confirm, most, came from a dear and wise, now very senior Jewish boss in Victoria who pioneered Post-Coding in the UK. I was privileged to listen-in at some informal discussions with executives flown-in from Israel and I paid particular attention to anything domestic, constututional or legislative.”
So, how do these “Israeli executives” know so much about what was going on in Mossad? And why do they simply informally and presumably casually spill the beans to you just as, apparently, your CIA and MI5/MI6 sources report to you as well? It seems a little reckless of them to say the least given that you have made no secret of your own reporting to President Ahmadinejad of Iran and President Putin of Russia (spot the deliberate mistake there!)
Are you sure you’re not just making this up to sound important?
Heh Anonymous, careful – you’ll be accused of being a Mossad agent merely for pointing out Mark Golding’s delusions.
Btw Mark Golding runs a phony unregistered charity. He makes money off of war porn pics, featuring dead and maimed children who probably encountered jihadist bombs.
Interesting, though, that Phillips lets slip that ‘divide and rule’ occurs in this area. My view is that it suits the UK state to have a sort of mental ghettoisation and nativisation of certain groups and that this dovetails well with the agendas of specific and well-funded isolationsists within those groups. Phillips, of course, being an ex-Marxist, is well aware of the workings of imperialism.
So it’s not to deny that there has not been a well-documented problem for many years, it is to address the problems in a rational, rather than McCarthyite, witch-hunting and frankly extremist manner.
She aims to demonise whole sections of the populace and to demonise, specifically Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran – because the Neocons, of whom she is one, have been pushing for military action against these three countries for a decade or more.
That is her basic agenda.
Con Coughlin, Richard Norton-Taylor, Frank Garner… and Melanie Phillips – whatever might they have in common?
I wonder what time Mad Mel dipped her pen into the acid to produce her piece and at what time it appeared on her blog. The Islam-hating propaganda programme (in the style of Corbin’s Death on the Med) only finished at 9 pm so did she burn the midnight oil or did she perhaps get a preview courtesy of the ZBC? She is embedded there after all – Moral Maze, Question Time, Any Questions etc.
Her husband is Joshua Rozenberg previously Legal Correspondent ZBC and now with the Daily Telegraph.
Her wikipedia page leads the reader to the conclusion that she is full of hate on many fronts. Why? What went wrong in her upbringing?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanie_Phillips
thanks
“a clutch of conservative parties”
That’s it Vronsky. Two centre-right parties (descended from the Civil War) with tribal followers, and the centre-left Labour Party which normally comes in a poor third, but has been doing well in the polls recently. Plus the Greens and Sinn Fein, followed by various bits and bobs and independents. The main objective of the lot of them seems to be to grab and then hold on to seats and to hell with the “national interest”.
We need a complete overhaul of the political system but we’re not likely to get it. The only thing we can probably count on is that Fianna Fail (which has come to believe it’s entitled to run the country in perpetuity) is going to take a bashing from which it will take years to recover. It turned huge bank losses into sovereign debt for the Irish people.
Brian Cowen was Finance Minister prior to becoming Taoiseach, and has therefore overseen much of this mess, and there is now real hatred out there for him. But as for an alternative Taoiseach, there are no obvious candidates – in any party.
“Mel needs a cup of tea to calm down. Saudi Arabia does all sorts of nasty stuff, and public education has deteriorated at all levels due to special interests being given too much power. Yes, it needs fixing. But I don’t expect to be overrun by Jihadist hordes anytime soon.”
She’s not called Mad Mel for nothing. Mad Mel is of course the same Mad Mel who was going on about how MMR vaccines have caused an epidemic of autism. Suhayl Saadi has already mentioned two good antidotes to that; books by Ben Goldacre and Simon Singh. Good recommendations, I think!
Now, of course her bandwagoneering of the Eurabia Scenario is just too much hysteria but it finds its mirror image in certain nooks and crannies of the Blogosphere where the global takeover by the Zionists is feverishly propounded and the evil tentacles of the Chosen Race is believed to be in every pie from terrorist attacks, to global banking, to earthquakes, to assassinations of prominent chief executives of superpowers in the nineteen sixties, to autism caused by vaccinations, to the death of Michael Jackson, to tsunamis, to election-rigging, to unrest in peaceful oppressive theocracies, to global warming, to auto-immune deficiency syndrome, to the death of weapons inspectors, to mass starvation in the Ukraine in the 1930’s, to the systematic gassing of six million of the people in the 1940’s to the making up of the systematic gassing of six million people in the 1940’s, to blanket control of the world’s media…
Could anyone fill me in on the things I have missed…?
Ziofeminazis?
Yep you forgot to mention that she also believes that all drugtaking is down to cannabis and that an expensive prohibition is necessarry, yawn.
That most abusers of themselves have started with the cigarette behind the school bike shed, has never occured to her.
Angry,
You forgot to sign your post 2:11am and I think you have confused the time-frame between learning and reporting – read your post again!
I also make no secret of reporting to the Whitehouse in fact secret is anathema to me – I have no secrets therefore I remain untouchable and the SIS know it. I don’t need to sound important, importance has no value when exploring the truth only hindrance.
Extremist Muslim schools: Islamism’s most worrying manifestation of all:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/andrewgilligan/100064814/extremist-muslim-schools-islamisms-most-worrying-manifestation-of-all/
though re MMR: I think it makes sense not to dose very small children with a triple vaccine all at once. Far more sensible to spread inoculations out, and to give them when the child’s own immune system has developed. Why not?
“islam’s most worrying manifestation of all” – manifested by Blair’s faith school policy, no? I see from the piece that the ‘think tank’ recommends banning schools from objecting to military recruitment. Gilligan (whose piece has as usual been puffed & subbed to paranoia) picks up on it too. Just a small amount of extremism, greeted by more extremism. Just a small amount of demonisation, causing demonised group to draw into itself, causing more demonisation. I think we can see where this one could be going.
Technicolour, I’ve looked into this very deeply and there is real evidence that separate vaccines actually put kids at greater risk and no scientific evidence whatsoever that multiple vaccines harm them. Babies get several lots of loads of multiple vaccines and have done for many decades – diptheria, tetanus, whooping-cough, etc. with no detrimental effects. Babies’ immune systems are fully developed from birth.
One of the things the Ben Goldacre book emphasises is that science is often counter-intuitive, scientists allow – encourage their study designs and findings to be critiqued openly and those opposed to such procedures in relation to their ‘own’ information (eg. allegedly Wakefield et al, G.T. Stewart wrt the whooping cough scare of the early 1980s, etc., etc.) probably have something to hide.
Goldacre also directs his fire (other sorts of criticisms) at Big Pharma, incidentally and demonstrates very lucidly the manner in which both the doyens of, eg. the ‘nutritionist’ ‘vitamin, etc. pill’ industry and Big Pharam (of which they are a part) hoodwink people.
Angrysoba, I agree with you about the list of media/ cultural pseudo-scares.
Further to Alan’s posts, and although as I said in principle I am against religious denominational schooling in the UK and also Saudi Arabia’s ‘monopolising’ influence on ‘public Islam’ in general, it is simply not true that Muslim schools in the UK inculcate Jihadism. It’s not a distortion; it’s just not true.
Even in Pakistan, the extent of the madressah problem has been exaggerated for political ends. Yes, there was a problem in relation to certain subsets of Afghan refugees from the 1980s/90s – hence the Taliban – but the problem in relation to madressahs has been exaggerated to justify attacks and the prosecution of war and also to allow the Pakistani military-industrial complex (known as ‘Milbus’: ‘Military Business’) to position itself favourably in relation to US/NATO power, weapons, etc. in relation to India.
We should recognise scare tactics for what they are. This is precisely why I think Alistair’s Campbell’s form of tabloid (not imported to the ‘qualitiy broadsheets’ as well) journalism is so very dangerous and why it has much broader implications and conseqences – esp. when such mediators of information get into positions of power and influence, as he clearly did.
Fine comment ‘technicolour’ – totally agree.
Any news on the open letter to William Hague?
has he bothered to reply yet?
“the same Mad Mel who was going on about how MMR vaccines have caused an epidemic of autism.”
‘Epidemic’ is indeed putting it too strongly, but there is sound scientific evidence linking measles vaccine (whether MMR or alone) to encephalopathy.
tinyurl.com/3579ayx
Goldacre and Singh are a good read on most topics but take too shallow a view of some, for example homeopathy. It is dismissed as having no effects better than placebo, without noting that the placebo effect is significant. I’ve never used homeopathy myself, but the case against it is not as clear as Goldacre and Singh suggest.
The issue of medical ethics arises when doctors feel uncomfortable prescribing what they know to be mere placebo, despite the possibility that the patient might be helped. Their dilemma is further confounded by findings showing that expensive placebos are more effective than cheap ones, homeopathy certainly qualifying as an expensive placebo.
Having for most of my life subscribed to the Goldacre/Singh view on homeopathy (including writing a letter to the press complaining that a homoepathic hospital in Glasgow was supported as part of the National Health Service) my view softened a little when I discovered the extent of the placebo effect. I had imagined something around the 5% level, hardly above experimental error. But then I began to encounter deadpan reports of placebo effects in 60% of those treated. Excuse a little c’n’p from Wiki (the whole entry is worth reading):
“In a dental postoperative pain model, placebo analgesia occurred in 39%. In research upon ischemic arm pain, placebo analgesia was found in 27%. The placebo analgesia rate for cutaneous healing of left hand skin was 56%.”
I suspect a measure of scientific hostility to homeopathy derives from an uncomfortable sensation of ignorance concerning the mechanisms of placebo – it sounds too much like what I’m sure you would call ‘woo’.
I’d be interested in a view from Suhayl.
“..when such mediators of information get into positions of power and influence, as he clearly did.”
Quite correct Suhayl, it is power and ‘importance’ that DO have much broader implications and consequences in any arena especially in the current ‘war on terror’ and fear-mongering that is used to justify illegal wars.
Suhayl, thanks. I haven’t looked into it at all deeply; just know several doctors who argue passionately against it (the MMR vaccine was changed in the 80’s, wasn’t it? So we don’t make good test cases). But otherwise my ignorance is surely too large for this small thread 🙂
dreoilin, hey, solidarity from across the water.
vronsky, you’re quite right; the ‘placebo effect’ is amazing when one comes to think about it.
“‘Epidemic’ is indeed putting it too strongly, but there is sound scientific evidence linking measles vaccine (whether MMR or alone) to encephalopathy.”
It’s one thing to say that there are side-effects from vaccines and another to say that there are epidemics of autism caused by vaccines. And epidemics are what Wakefield et.al and Mad Mel are talking about.
Also, when it comes to placebos, I am sure they are fine in some cases. The difference is when someone is offering CURES which have no possible efficacy. The problem with homeopathy is that its practioners don’t say it has a placebo effect but say that its active ingredients work better by being diluted to the point where no active ingredient is even likely to be found and then made more effective by hitting with horse-hair or some other weird idea.
In some situations placebos do seem to work quite well. Inhalers for asthma sufferers may calm someone down who happens to be having an asthma attack but if someone were to say that the same inhaler can cure cancer and started selling it as such and advocating that it would work better than conventional medicine then maybe they should go to jail rather than be allowed to sue people for dissing their “medicine”.
America has many truly great people – here is one lady I admire and adore, journalist Helen Thomas and my tribute to her here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igtAlG-uMPw
I agree entirely about the ‘placebo’ effect. Actually, Vronsky, if you rad the Goldacre book, he indicates that he finds the placebo effect to be the really amazing – and as you say scientifically verfied – story in all of this. The human body has profound self-healing and other powers (think about yogins’ abilitis to lower heart rates to the 20s and body tempretaures, etc.!); we have yet to learn fully how to harness those. I think what one is arguing for is to explore this effect more fully, since it may reside behind many of the dynamics we attribute to other ‘magical’ things.
Yes, angrysoba makes a very good point too.