All previous experience indicates that the latest expert estimate of the money spent by the UK on bombing Libya – up to £1.75 billion – will prove in time to be an underestimate.
Yesterday saw the heaviest NATO attack of the entire war, on the very centre of Sirte, leading thousands of civilians to try to flee. They are largely unable to do so because of a cordon of checkpoints set up by their attackers, slowing movement to a standstill and very occasional crawl. This massive bombing was coordinated with what we must now call the Libyan government – the former TNC. That a military action by NATO rationalised as protecting civilians from the Libyan government, ends up with a far greater bombardment of civilians on behalf of a different Libyan government, is too terrible to call ironic. NATO’s mandate to “protect civilians” from the UN actually expires on Friday, so all this week we will see a massive crescendo in NATO bombing of towns before that deadline.
But let us put that cost to the UK in context. The whole world economy is being shaken, and the livelihoods of billions damaged, by the problems of French banks having to write off Greek debt. If as expected Greece repudiates 50% of its debt, the capital written off by French banks will be in sterling approximately £4 billion. The £1.75 billion would make a big hole in that. I am certainly not suggesting that money should have been given to Greece instead of blowing up Libya, I am merely pointing out that this is a significant amount of money to waste in terms of global capital sums.
Remember we did not have that £1,75 billion – we borrowed it from the banks, adding to the international debt crisis and your and my tax burden for the rest of our lives, and our children after us. And remember the UK contributed under 25% of the NATO effort in Libya – total wasted will be pushing £10 billion.
NATO members are at the absolute heart of the world financial crisis. The colossal squandering of incredible – and in some cases unaccountable – sums in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya are fundamental to the lack of fiscal control in these economies. Not a single media pundit has mentioned it.
Clark, I have to keep restoring my computer to an earlier date. I suspect people who are actively opposed to mainstream media and governmental propaganda are prime targets. My suspicion is from previous experience that they target computers from the registry end based on purchase details since each computer has its unique registration code and purchasers names and addresses are logged against this at time of purchase – it might be presumed as an anti-terrorist measure. Still thinking of changing operating systems, but not got round to it yet.
Look at the language used here by the BBC. The verb chosen is ‘pound’.
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28 September 2011 Last updated at 17:31
Nato strikes Gaddafi stronghold
Nato aircraft pound one of the last pro-Gaddafi strongholds, Sirte, as National Transitional Council fighters advance on the city centre.
Smoke and explosions
Profile: Sirte Challenges after Gaddafi
Libya conflict: Q&A
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15095594
Very disturbing Mary.
Have you signed this guy’s petition to get out of NATO and abolish it?
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/16747
Yes will do but uneasy giving my details to HMG.
John Goss, this is very weird, a couple of weeks ago I had nothing to do and went into my computer to get rid of anything I no longer required, went into pictures and folders and came across two pictures and some folders with strange symbols under them!!!. One of the pictures was off a middle eastern man with a very haunted look on his face and the desert behind him, the other picture of a strange looking man. I did not download any of them!!!, I showed them to my wife she said “thats strange”, I deleted the lot. I only put windows XP pro on about six months ago, I have no idea where they come from ?.
John Goss and Guest, I never noticed being particularly targeted for visiting alternative news sites, but I haven’t used Windows for two years or more. I fully expect that governments / secret services keep a number of Windows “backdoors”. I also expect that they reserve them for times of “national emergency”, rather than showing their hand.
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“Common or garden” viruses and “Windows Exploits” are available on the open market. Usually, Windows gets a virus thus:
(1) You open a malicious attachment on an e-mail; this can even come from someone you trust, if their own system is infected.
(2) You visit a website that installs malware. It might be a bad site, a good site but compromised, or it could be a bad or compromised advert (ie from a different domain) on an otherwise good site.
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Frankly, Windows is so insecure that it isn’t worth fretting over where the infections come from. Just make sure that you keep backups of all your personally valuable files.
Oh, other major infection routes are:
(1) installing dodgy software off the Internet or “cracked” CDs, and
(2) teenagers in the house using MSN, AIM etc. Some of them send each other infections, apparently as a sort of joke!
Clark, thanks for the explanation. I’m always willing to listen to what seems logical. Especially from people with knowledge of the industry.
Should we and will we follow this American example? It is a movement that seems to be taking off.
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https://occupywallst.org/
“(2) teenagers in the house using MSN, AIM etc. Some of them send each other infections, apparently as a sort of joke!”
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Clark, I am the only person on this computer. No way anyone else could/has downloaded anything. The whole lot was in one sub-folder I didn`t know existed!. I didn`t open any of the folders inside the sub-folder that I found, there was about six of them, plus the two pictures!.
See this.
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http://wideshut.co.uk/occupy-the-city-wallstreet-protest-comes-to-london/
There has been an arrest in the US for a plot to fly remotely controlled aircraft filled with explosives into the Pentagon and the Capitol. The man has been entrapped.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15101449
Mary, I think that the Occupy Wall St protest is a very good idea, and if I could I’d join the Occupy the City protest. Remote controlled planes? What, like drones? Impossible! Where’s my tinfoil hat?
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Guest, sorry, I’ve no idea how those items got there. You should ensure that your anti-virus software is up-to-date, and then do a thorough scan.
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If you still have any of the pictures, you could use Tineye to find where on the Internet they might have come from:
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http://www.tineye.com/
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Of course, it’s probably best not to open any suspicious files with your installed system. You could boot a GNU/Linux LiveCD and examine them with that, and then search for the images with Tineye. You can e-mail me for more detailed advice.
Agree about the far fetched US ‘plot’.
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Link to two articles about the situation in Sirte. One is reporting ‘thousands killed’ as the result of the NATO bombing.
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http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1317280663.html
Hi Craig,
French bank exposure to greek sovereign debt is generally given as £50 billion. So a 50% write down would be £25 billion, not £4 billion. According to WSJ, French and German banks have a further £576 billion on loan to Greek individuals and companies, loans which are obviously at risk from a Greek economic meltdown. See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703798904575069712153415820.html for an interesting colourful chart of who ows what to whom. It becomes clear why the main fear about Greece is the threat of contagion.
Simon
Clark, thanks. I deleted them all when I found them. I only tell you all in case you come across the same. I use Kaspersky and its always up to date and I do regular scans, the first thing I done when I put XP pro on was to then put Kaspersky on and done an update, its a mystery!. I am going to put Linux on, soon. By the way, there was also a copy of the blue avatar in that sub-folder, the one that is above someones name when they post on Craigs site, I know other sites have the same blue avatar, this one
http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/path_to_url
I never downloaded that!.
Mary, thanks. I think that is a bit of a problem, giving details to HMG. I think they have all there is on me, so a bit more won’t make any difference. I’m always going to be opposed to their wars and greed. If they ever visit me I’ll tell them to their faces. But I can understand why it might not always be prudent for everyone.
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The FBI sting is almost laughable. The 26 year-old would-be attacker is probably a fantasist with low self-esteem, bolstered up by government entrapment. However, if he did plot this himself, or anyone else involved in sabotage and destruction, he deserves the full measure of the law (which appears to be up to 20 years).
“The Dangerous Cult of the Guardian”
http://www.jkcook.net/Articles3/0573.htm#Top
Interesting links on the Wall Street Journal page that Simon Boddy linked to:
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Syria Opposition Seeks No-Fly Zone:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203405504576599150728062020.html?mod=WSJ_article_MoreIn_World
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Iraq Completes Deal to Buy F-16s (video):
http://online.wsj.com/video/iraq-completes-deal-to-buy-f-16s/F58EA6D1-350C-47A4-8A65-AA43AD6A0F4A.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_mpvidcar_2
Guest, a friend came over last night. We did some browsing, and then, just for curiosity, we explored the “Internet cache” on my computer (Ubuntu 8.04 / Firefox). My friend was very surprised to see many images and files that had noting to do with the sites we had browsed; I’d seen this sort of thing before. Of course, there were some pictures of scantily clad women; they seem to get everywhere.
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We tend to think of “downloading” as something we do deliberately, like saving a specific file from the Internet, but “downloading” is just a flash word for copying, and everything you see from the Internet, and a whole lot that you don’t see, is copied to your system by your web browser.
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What is odd about what happened to you is that some files ended up in one of your personal folders, instead of in the place reserved for them called the “Internet cache” (Internet Explorer calls the cache “Temporary Internet Files”, various sets of hidden folders). A save of a web page triggered by touching a specific keyboard “hotkey” could have caused this.
Clark, I don`t remember exactly where I found them. I was going through “My Documents” “My Computer” “My Network Places” at the time, and just clicked onto something while exploring around and came across it, I was taken aback by it. Wish I taken notice of where they were now!!!. It makes you think what you could be accused of doing in a court of law, does it not!!!. Scary.
Guest, you wrote: “It makes you think what you could be accused of doing in a court of law, does it not!!!. Scary.”
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Indeed. I’ve been wondering about that for years, since I looked through my Internet cache and found things I’d never seen while I was browsing.
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http://sillydog.org/mshidden.php
Clark, That link is “Scary”.
After reading what you have said about Linux, I decided I would give it a go. I found this web site, read the whole page in the link, it makes you think!!!, “United States of America’s Department of Defence”
http://www.osdisc.com/cgi-bin/view.cgi/products/linux/lps
Clark, Guest:
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Most web browsers support some form of HTML pre-caching. This means that they will download html, images and even code from sites you haven’t visited (based on the links of the page you are currently viewing, the idea is to speed up response times while browsing). In addition to that, pre-caching can be forced by CSS, Javascript and PHP tricks. Some web services like google also use it heavily.
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You can find some more info about the HTML implementation of it here (this does not refer to the CSS, JS or PHP implementations). It also shows to to disable the HTML function if using Firefox.
developer.mozilla.org/en/Link_prefetching_FAQ
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As it is virtually impossible to stop all the methods from working, if you are really concerned you could just turn of browser caching altogether, but this will impact on the speed of you browsing. If you install the browser addon Adblock+ it should stop all the naked ladies from appearing in your cache, unless you go directly to those kinda sites.
Guest, thanks for the “Dangerous Cult of the Guardian” link.
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CheebaCow, yes, all browsers maintain a cache, but the behaviour of Microsoft products described on the SillyDog link illustrates Microsoft’s attitude to users; you click the “Delete” button for your browsing history, and your history then looks deleted but really it’s just well hidden. This could be a service for corporate or government clients, or (less likely) for Microsoft itself, but it is certainly opposed to the interests of users!
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I’d read of pre-caching; thanks for explaining it further. I’ve moved my Firefox cache onto Ubuntu’s “/dev/shm/” RAM-drive. For the uninitiated, a RAM-drive is a filing system in the PC’s RAM, the contents of which can be maintained only while the power is on. I used to do the same thing in Windows, but occasionally my preference would be overruled and a hard-disk cache would be set up.
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Even with caching switched off or moved to RAM, “virtual memory” behaviour might write browser data to the “swap file” on the hard-disk. And, of course, our ISPs log our internet traffic, which will include “fetches” produced by browser pre-caching.
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This whole subject illustrates that it is possible to draw false inferences against someone based on the contents of their hard-disk or the Internet traffic logs kept by their ISP.
Ref Libya – The Jewel in the Crown
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And this from Ambassador Cretz.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/sep2011/pers-s30.shtml
{ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Cretz}
@Clark Another link http://bit.ly/oXVN22 Facebook tracks you even after logging out
And here is one with Nigel Farage in the EUP: http://bit.ly/nSSne6
Clark:
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Storing your cache in RAM, very clever. When I get some more RAM I might just start doing that. Thanks for the tip.
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Sunflower:
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Facebook have already changed their cookie behaviour after the bad press, so the cookies don’t track you. But the *good* news is they can still track you by IP every time your computer downloads one of those ‘like’ icons placed all over the web =P
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If you have Adblock installed you can add the following rules (4) to block all web communication to the Facebook servers (will break Facebook if you use it):
||fbcdn.com/*$domain=~facebook.com
||fbcdn.net/*$domain=~facebook.com
||facebook.com/*$domain=~facebook.com
||facebook.net/*$domain=~facebook.com
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I don’t even have a Facebook account but they have blocked over 2000 connections from the FB servers since I added them.
CheebaCow, thanks for the Facebook blocking tip.
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More RAM? Internet Explorer recommends 50 to 250 MiByte for the cache, and the most I’ve ever found Firefox using was 62 MiByte. I only ever have discarded PCs; this one has has 768 MiByte of PC133, of which Ubuntu 8.04 is currently using 267 MiByte (and no swap), including Firefox’s cache in RAM.
@ ALL – AN APPEAL FOR SANITY.
I am a lawyer and I, believe, a person with a conscience.
For over 6 months I have watched and followed the newS reports on Libya. For over 6 months I have observed the US and NATO bombing the Libyan people. I am compelled in all conscience to ask a few questions:-
1. Is there a plausible explanation for the need to have started the bombing of the Libyan people?
2. Is there a credible reason for continuing the bombing of Libya?
3. Is the bombing directed by NATO the act of democratic countries that genuinely want to implant their western democracy in Libya – or – is the bombing motivated exclusively by oil interests?
4. Is this merely the shedding of blood for oil – by having “heroic pilots” without fear of any missiles or counter-attack from the ground below drop tons and tons of bombs on the Libyan people?
5. Are these actions, on an objective standard of law, and on a moral basis of humanity – truly criminal and unconscionable actions.?
Hitler bombed London, because he wanted world domination and Britain, along with other nations first had to be defeated. That was Hitler’s “credible” explanation acting on behalf of the “Aryan race” as he believed justified Nazi aggression. Britain fought back with anti-aircraft guns and with RAF planes. What does Libya as it stands, 6 months after being bombed, have to fight back with?
Will a day come when terrorist attacks are directed at Western targets and the victims on the civilian end are then told that the attacks were by way of revenge for attacks and deaths in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Libya and in the Muslim nations?
I have no desire for a perpetual round of war-mongering, terrorism and violence – no desire for any religious jihad. However, as rational human beings, can we not discern, that when a family is taken from a person, a wife, a husband, children, homes bombed, then these are precisely the seeds being sown that one day might mature into terrorist fruit? Should people of conscience in the West not urgently be insisting that the cycle of violence needs to end?
THE BOMBING IN LIBYA NEEDS TO END NOW!
PS. If a bomb was dropped by a Libyan aircraft directed specifically on a family living in a house in Kensington – and the attack was repeated to ensure total destruction – then seeing the reports of the deaths on the BBC – what would we all feel but a sense of grief, outrage, and compassion about the loss. What are our honest feelings any different when a Libyan family is so targeted and killed? Watch:
http://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/news/2011/10/01/kweildi-family-murdered-by-american-euro
then answer.