Those coming from Central Asia, Bahrain, Qatar or Saudi Arabia to the Olympics, interested to see what life in a democracy feels like, will find it seems exactly like life at home in their dictatorship. 17,000 soldiers will be glowering over the venues, checking identity documents, stopping and searching. The mlitary will occupy residential buildings, be buzzing overhead, rolling down the streets and patrolling the river. There will be missiles on land, sea and air, though nobody knows what the threat is that this is supposed to counter.
What will make our dictatorship resident visitors feel especially at home is the contempt for the ordinary citizen. Not only will they have the military all over them and be subject to frequent stopping and questioning, they will be expected continually to get out of the way of their betters. Special VIP lanes on the road will allow officials to sweep by, while normal citizens will simply have to sit in gridlock and stew. Who cares? The military will stick missiles on your roof if they wish. What they are going to shoot down, and which bit of London it will land on, is not to be questioned.
Here in Ramsgate we are losing our regular train service to London completely for the duration. All the HS1 trains are being commandeered to run a shuttle service between Ebbsfleet and Stratford. 22 trains a day from Ramsgate are simply cancelled. Slow trains are available, but a journey normally 70 minutes will become – at the fastest possible – 2 hours and 35 minutes. A large number of commuters will simply be unable to get to work anything like on time, and have to spend door to door over seven hours a day in travelling as well as their working day. Nobody was consulted. Quite a few don’t yet know – there has been no determined effort to tell people. Leaflets are available in the ticket office if you ask for one.
But the leaflets might as well just say, “You are fucked, and we don’t care”.
The extra 3,500 military personnel it was today announced will be used at the games cover a shortfall in Group Four personnel. Group Four were providing 4,000 paid staff and 6,000 unpaid volunteers. It is the unpaid volunteer numbers which are short by 3,500.
Most people are not stupid. They may volunteer happily for sport or for charity, but to work for nothing to make tens of millions of pounds of profit for Group Four as it exploits them, plainly does not have universal appeal. Those 2,500 who have volunteered to work for nothing for G4S are the idiots in this story. How gullible can you be?
Bob Russell, MP for Colchester, today in parliament made the excellent point to Teresa May that Group Four (or G4S as they now call themselves) should not be employed because of their role in aiding and abetting Israel’s illegal activities in the West Bank and human rights abuse there. With breathtaking chutzpah Teresa May replied that it was this kind of valuable international experience that made Group Four the right company to provide security for the games.
Which brings me back to my point at the start. Those visiting from oppressive regimes will feel absolutely at home. That is the one and only thing you can trust Teresa May to ensure with grim efficiency.
‘We believe the attack on Clinton is related to the current political upheaval in Israel, an attempt to kill Clinton, blame Iran and take the focus off the domestic political meltdown.
We also feel the bus attack in Bulgaria, killing 6 Israeli citizens is highly suspect for the same reasons as well.
Israeli radio broke the story Sunday night, midnight, but never mentioned it again. This has been confirmed by sources inside Israel
The real story as we have been able to learn is this; About 16 hours ago, Secretary Clintons convoy, traveling from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, was attacked. There would have been a minimum of 3 to 5 vehicles, with Clinton probably traveling in a bulletproofed Chevy Tahoe or Israel built Toyota Land Cruiser.
This follows the story earlier of an attack on a bus loaded with Israeli tourists that exploded in Bulgaria. Six were killed. Netanyahu said he would respond by attacking Iran. It is our opinion that this was a Mossad “false flag” operation much as was the Clinton assassination attempt. Bulgarian security services are trained by the Mossad. There are dozens of Mossad agents operating in Bulgaria which still has in place massive Soviet era security services that follow all tourists and check on every “overnight” guest in Bulgaria.
In fact, you can’t leave Bulgaria without meal and hotel receipts being reviewed. Bulgaria is considered, next to North Korea, the most “watchful” nation on earth.”
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Veterans Today
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0Xpz9FyZq0#!
Mark Golding, I got your message but I couldn’t decrypt the attachment. I’ve sent two replies.
Bilal Taheeri
assalamu ‘alaykum. Thanks for your reply. What seems clear to me is that the Syrian rebels are helped by Muslims who have an intense, unforgiving rage against the dictators who have oppressed them.
In their rage, they have chosen to ignore the fact that they know, that all of the oppression of the colonial powers, including bthe Muslims when they were themselves oppressive colonial powers, as in Burma, was achieved by working with people from the target nation who were prepared to sell their country for their own financial, political, or like this collaboration between NATO and political Islam, revengeful purposes.
in this the rebels of Syria etc are no different from any other oppressor. They are prepared to sacrifice their fellow Muslims for their own ends.
Like George Galloway I detest the dictators, but there are different ways of achieving the same ends. I have personally found these type of people personally vindictive, and their masajids generally vindictive, although I sympathise with them for their detestation of oppressive regimes.
Thanks Clarke for chipping in.
Indeed they are in loss, except those who believe and do good deeds, and speak the truth, that God is One, and enjoin patience.
I enjoin patience on the Syrian rebels, not to side with NATO, because the enemies of Islam have always consistently taken advantage of political association and always betrayed the Muslims.
Bilal, as you know from the Qur’an, the Muslims’ lot will only change when they reform themselves. But we do not like the prescription and nothing changes. Jihadists say that we have to change from pacificism to fighting, but they have chosen a collaborative, secretive, unconcensus path which will fail, even it delivers a toothless government like Egypt or Iraq.
When it fails it will blame the people who they did not consult and build trust with, and whose families they scorned the lives of when they launched a civil war from their villages and towns.
The strategy of the colonial powers is to offer to redress the grievances of the Muslims in order to lure them into their continuing subservient bind.
It reminds me of the new NHS employment contracts, where the privatisers are arguing that there is a ‘moral’ argument for ceasing to pay sick pay, because it isn’t right to pay people for what they haven’t earned. Welfare state => dustbin.
The company I am working for has provided a 50 page new employee handbook which lists using the internet to complain about unfair treatment at work as one of the many forbidden things. All the company says about what it has to abide by is that: ‘The company will behave in a reasonable manner at all times’.
Well if the company, government, Jihadi Muslims, behaved in a reasonable manner at all times, then people would not get on the net to complain about them, would they?
The only way to maintain justice in this world is if the ordinary people can question, complain, approve of the political institutions that act on their behalf. Without this safeguard, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Companies and governments should welcome all criticism and never try to control it. That is the sure sign of oppression, when political institutions try to control and deny reasonable complaints and criticism. Where are we as human beings going?
“Where are we as human beings going?” “=> dustbin.”
A US State partially (?) funded, once secret, plan for a post-Assad Syria is 6 months on from its inception.
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http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/07/20/inside_the_secret_effort_to_plan_for_a_post_assad_syria
Damascus terror bombing: Made in the USA
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“Washington’s closest allies in the Arab world, the dictatorial feudal monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, set up a $100 million fund to place FSA members directly on their payroll, while the US announced it was sending “non-lethal” aid to these same forces, including sophisticated communications equipment, night vision goggles and US intelligence.”
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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/may2012/pers-m12.shtml
Regarding the alleged assassination attempt on Clinton is Israel, El Al flight EL75 to Hong Kong mysteriously returned to Ben Gurion about an hour after take off. The plane was met by heavy security and delayed for about 10 hours. There has been a news blackout on this event.
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http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2012/07/22/el-al-flight-recalled-to-israel-after-security-alert/
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I wonder if there is a connection between the two events.
Good thinking Yonatan – and not the first time – you’ve won a place in my inner circle of intuitive thinkers – Welcome & thank-you.
Mark
From the same article in your link above:
“Thus, the pretexts for the US invasion of Iraq are reprised in a perverse new form. The presence of Al Qaeda, backed by Washington, and the supposed existence of “weapons of mass destruction” in Syria must be answered with US military intervention.”
Saudi and Qatar fund political Islam in alliance with the US.
Then the presence of ‘AlQaida’ paint on the ground will be used to justify military intervention and seizure of Kurdish Iraqi oil-fields by US troops previously in Iraq and now based not far away in Israel.
The carrot of de-stabilising the governments of Iraq and Regional Kurdistan, the promises of re-drawing the old UK 1918 colonial boundary lines, the sheer volume of dosh on tap for the selected few, on a scale per individual similar to dollars dropped onto Iraq, these, I suppose, are the additional motives of these footsoldiers of jihad.
As the World Socialist website suggests, these are not the people who will become the new US Client Regime in Syria.
Politics pays and money is hard to find. In this climate gawads are easily found. Gawad means people who sell their religion and or country for a piffling worldly gain.
We have to come to terms with the fact that the whole exercise of the war in Afghanistan was a similar deception for the same ends.
Another Israeli protester self-immolates in Yehud, east of Tel Aviv
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/07/22/252198/israeli-man-sets-self-on-fire-in-yehud/
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This is the second individual to self immolate, in the protests, which are subject of the media black out too.
Clark,
The thing about derivatives is basically this. There wasn’t enough real money so they invented imaginary betting money and linked that to real money. If the quadrillion dollar derivative betting market collapses it will take out more real money than actually exists. Simples!
Anon, that isn’t simple. Firstly, what is “real” money? Air, water, gold; these things are real. Tables and chairs are more a matter of definition. Money is a human invention, or rather, a set of inventions. If it wasn’t for the behaviour of humans en masse, no one would need money at all. Plants, and animals other than (most) humans, don’t need money.
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Secondly, until we have a definition for “real” money, we can’t define “imaginary” money. Thirdly, who are “they”? Are any of “them” actually some of us? Fourthly, “linked” in what way?
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I’m not really asking for answers to these questions, I’m just pointing out my problems with economics as a subject in itself. My own view is that money should be used as a tool by democratic governments to influence human behaviour.
Hello everyone.
I’ve only just found this site and have spent the weekend reading this thread in particular and all the links.
I had a question regarding the BBC and it’s coverage of the riots and wondered whether I should post it here or on a more related thread.
Cheers.
B_B
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/showdown/themes/grandbargain.html
Blue_Bear, hello and welcome. Post it here. All the other threads are closed.
Clark,
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You or I can define things any way we want. Sadly that doesn’t make any difference. “They” are Wall Street/London/Big Finance who invented the derivatives games with the help of tame, supposedly exceptionally bright mathematicians who were given enormous amounts of money to ignore the obvious question – ‘What happens if the market goes down and the derivatives market then goes into “suck” mode instead of “blow”?’
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Unless and until we have a big reset then we are stuck in the game. But then the game is loaded in our (USA and the West) favour – yes it may not seem like that right now as the system teeters on the edge.
The derivatives market is simply gambling on future events, on an astronomical scale, where the future was always expected to be bigger than the past. The gamble was lost (the swan was black) it seems.
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The Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction are primed and have partly detonated. If we get a full chain reaction it is game over for the current system. Who knows what happens after that.
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“Growth” is required to defuse the derivatives. And with real world oil price (not the paper WTI) firmly back above $100 with the world in deep trouble and treading water that’s acting as a brake upon future growth. Barring some sudden increase in cheap oil, world recovery pushes up oil prices until the world economy collapses back down. Ben Shalom Bernanke wrote papers about this long before he became the boss at the Fed.
Another way to look at money is as a form of collective insanity. When you get arguments from the world’s governments such as “we can’t possibly reduce our use of fossil fuels that are heating up the globe because it will cost too much money and crash the economy”, collective insanity seems like the best description.
Anon at 9:01 pm, “…gambling on future events, on an astronomical scale, where the future was always expected to be bigger than the past. The gamble was lost…”
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Fuck, I could have told them that! It’s bloody obvious!
I suppose what I really mean is that it’s bloody obvious if you look at real things instead of money. You can always create more money, but real things obviously get used up, and get spread out more thinly as the population grows.
Money is a human invention
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Money is a human control construct, and despite its ubiquity, it remains a mystery to the ninety nine percentiles, who along with the rest of the drivel buy into the ticket and get on with tolerating all manner of injustices and humiliations to acquire the said money.
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Interestingly enough money is also associated with sex and getting laid, in fact at it most raw prostitution evidently is the oldest trade in the “history”.
Clark,
The West actually has massively reduced its use of oil over the last few years thanks to soaring prices and economic depression. In fact its really only China that has supposedly been soaking up the OECD’s consumption decline. Of note, neither Saudi production figures nor Chinese consumption figures are audited by the IEA or anyone else. If you only had access to audited IEA country information you would think world oil production has declined substantially in the last few years rather than being on the so called “undulating plateau”. Funny that….
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Curiously much of the recent claimed gas and oil production increases reported by the US EIA are not reflected in the state level recording (the quaintly named but all powerful RailRoad Commission of Texas database for example) and this has been pointed out by many analysts and covered at The Oil Drum.
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“Fuck, I could have told them that! It’s bloody obvious!”
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I wish you’d been advising the big European banks, Clark, who kept giving money to Irish banks and didn’t seem aware that the bubble was about to burst …UCD economist Morgan Kelly said we were about to get (at least were negotiating for) a cut of 30 billion off our bank debts (become sovereign debt via the Irish Gov’t’s guarantee) to European Banks, and who shut that down?
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Timothy Geithner.
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Can’t give a link, as all I’m getting is this:
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2011/0507/1224296372123.html
“…the game is loaded in our (USA and the West) favour – yes it may not seem like that…”
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Yes it does seem like that. A week’s worth of my UK pounds buy me more than a week of living in most other countries; the poorer the country, the further my UK money goes. “Our” money is worth more than “theirs”.
Nice one Clark.
I really enjoyed reading the thread btw and will work my way back through the rest.
Basically I wanted to know people’s opinions of the BBC and in fact all of the mainstream media’s coverage of the riots. In particular those outside of London. I live very near to where the 3 lads got killed in Winson Green and despite the fact that we stayed in on the nights of the trouble, we heard the noise and saw the helicopters, the burnt out cars and smashed up shops. We were glued to News 24 and were shocked to see how far behind the BBC/Sky/Channel 4 were with every piece of news. We were being told by friends and family not to go out but there was nothing on the mainstream news. Eventually we found Sangat TV and stuck with that as they were up-to-date and following what was going on – despite the lack of help from the Police. We estimated at the time that the BBC were at least 20 hours behind the events and Birmingham was barely mentioned at all. I appreciate that London is very important but why were there so few resources available for following the riots around the country. All it did round here was scare people more because we knew that something was going on but we couldn’t get confirmation of what it was. The most embarrassing moment came when Sangat were filming on the Soho Rd and Channel 4’s “Midlands” correspondent wondered into shot asking “how did you guys get here?”! She was about 20 hours late! And she wasn’t even from the BBC who are supposed to have a new facility at the Mailbox. They can get reporters onto the streets of Baghdad in hours but not Birmingham 🙁 Because of a lack of information from the right people, trouble escalated and spread to West Brom the next day. I got a taxi into the City that day and the driver said Wolves would be the following day and it was. Still the BBC were 24 hours behind and only Sangat and pirate stations knew what was going on.
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I’ve just worked out why you leave full-stops inbetween paragraphs 😉
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I was also disgusted with the way that the police pushed the looters away from the City Centre in the afternoon it all kicked off, towards Hockley, then Handsworth, then Winson Green – all areas which have seen riots and disturbances over the years. I would suggest it was either incompetence or a deliberate attempt to stir up trouble – or protect city centre shops at the expense of smaller, independent shops in mainly “ethnic” areas. The police say they didn’t have the numbers. Well that’s because they were all in London! Either way, parts of the trouble moved from the City Centre to Winson Green and 3 guys got killed. Other gangs moved towards Aston and Lozells where there has also been a history of riots and a police helicopter almost got shot out of the sky.
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It was disappointing to see how badly the areas outside of London were covered by the media and sad to see what the police did. The politicians were just as bad. Nick Clegg got booed out of the City Centre and had to get back in his car because of the abuse. David Cameron made a pathetic attempt a day later but only visited the police headquarters then went home!! That’s leadership. I’d have loved to have seen Boris pull one of his brooms out in Birmingham. He wouldn’t have been able to get back inside his Jaguar.
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When I hear people say the riots were just a bunch of kids looking for a five-fingered-discount it makes my blood boil. Although there were undoubtedly some kids on the rob, there are much deeper reasons for some of the violence including age-old community relations, police behaviour, poverty, lack of youth programmes and lack of work – plus fear instilled by police and politicians. And because of the lack of leadership and lack of policing, it’s only going to happen again. The guys who killed the brothers in Winson Green got let off with the police getting caught lying!!! This is comparable to the Tomlinson or Duggan case in my opinion and I hope this story gets the coverage it deserves as again it’s a case of politicians and police setting community relations back another 20 years.
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Although Sangat was an incredible way of keeping up-to-date with what was going on, some of the presenters were more inclined to sensationalise and almost incite aggressive behaviour and this can only be expected when the mainstream media complete ignore what is going on. But it shows an apetite for unbiased, local news coverage and I suspect other kinds of coverage/entertainment. The West Midlands has a population comparable with a small country, the same with the North West. I hope that smaller TV and radio channels can help via digital technology to give people more access to news in their area and fill the void that the BBC cannot. Hopefully getting more of an understanding of the methods of the government and the police at a local level which can then be fed into the wider public consciousness.
I can’t decide if the BBC’s behaviour was a misguided attempt to keep things calm or a sinister plot to increase tensions. Or just incompetence and a London-centric media.
Phew! Sorry for the essay.
Further to the riots documentary non-controversy, it seems it was the courts/judges themselves who blocked it to avoid prejudicing an ongoing trial; for non-drinkers of the Guardian Kool-Aid, the case was that of the somehow mown down vigilante-a-likes, the court returning what seems a perverse verdict on the basis of police officers possibly committing perjury causing the collapse of the case on the specific charges. It should be noted that the documentary used actors, repeating verbatim quotes, from self-alleged participants, shoplifters etc. it had no bearing or reflection whatsoever on the case before the court however very extraordinary legal powers were used to suppress the documentary and super-suppress the fact of its suppression. I hinted, wondered above, incorrectly, that either the Guardian or LSE themselves played a part in invoking the ban, due to some strife with the Zio-Beeb critters over the program, which does not seem to have been the case … not then some falling out amongst thieves/crooks.
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Craig Murray blog posts, it seems are similar to buses, nothing for ages then several come along at once.
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Could we have a sort of on-site swear-box, proceeds to Palestinian causes, should jesus, mohammed, or any other mythical pseudo-deity or any holey works of fiction: bible, torah, talmud, koran be mentioned, quoted or accorded greater weight or meaning than The Beano. Thanks.
I’ve just watched the film “The Whistleblower”. I can recommend it (although others may have seen it and want to pick – justifiable – holes in it).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Whistleblower
Kathryn Bolkovac’s home page is here: {http://www.bolkovac.com}
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I had a niece working with the International Red Cross in post-war Bosnia and I’ve often wondered what on earth she saw and heard. She was working to identify the – recovered – bodies of those who had ‘gone missing’ and inform their families.
Israel, according to one of the Sunday papers is desperately worried re-security at the London Olympics. They say an Iranian attack is a strong possibility (sic)!
This means either Israel is on the point of launching yet another false-flag-attack as seen on 911-or they are keen to secure new security contracts to augment their already predominant role in the War on Terror security apparatus.
Or it means both…..
Odds are they’re gonna pull one methinks.
If you live in Ramsgate..well you best stay indoors!
Blue_Bear, this link should land you in the middle of threads from that time:
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http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2011/08/page/2/
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Craig was appalled at the violence, and strongly disagreed with many people who comment here. Jon, one of our other moderators, went out on his bicycle with his camera, and got some pictures in Birmingham.
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The thing that puzzled many people was why the police held back from intervening in so many places for so long. It was almost as if the riots were permitted to spiral out of control.
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As to mainstream media coverage, others will have to help you more with that. I don’t have a TV or a licence, and I don’t get a paper. My main source of information came from comments on this blog.
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PS Your “essay” is just fine by me. We’re way down this thread, and Craig hasn’t posted for days. I’m certainly not going to intervene or complain about “Off Topic” here. But when a thread is young, Craig prefers us to stay somewhere near the topic.
About the nature of BBC and UK News i found Herbie’s post in the middle of the thread very resonant. To find it do a [ctrl-f] for Thames Television.
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Gotta scuttle – best made times all ;