I was invited to be on the Murnaghan programme on Sky News this morning – which I always find a great deal more intelligent than the Andrew Marr alternative on the BBC. I declined because I did not want to get up and get a 7.30am train from Ramsgate on a Sunday morning. I had a meeting until 11.30pm last night planning a conference on human rights in Balochistan [I still tend to say Baluchistan], and I have a newly crowned tooth that seems not to want to settle down. But I am still worried by my own lack of energy, which is uncharacteristic. Is this old age?
I also have some serious work to do on my Burnes book, and next week I shall be staying in London to be in the British Library reading room for every second of its opening hours. So there may be a bit of a posting hiatus. I have in mind a short post on an important subject on which I suspect that 99% of my readership – including the regular dissident commenters – will strongly disagree with me.
This is a peculiarly introspective post, perhaps because my tooth is hurting, but I seem to have this curmudgeonly spirit which wishes to react to the huge popularity of this blog by posting something genuinely held but unpopular; a genuine view but one I don’t normally trumpet. The base thought seems to be “You wouldn’t like me if you really knew me”.
Similarly when I wrote Murder in Samarkand I was being hailed as a hero by quite a lot of people for my refusal to go along with the whole neo-con disaster of illegal wars, extraordinary rendition and severe attacks on civil liberties, sacrificing my fast track diplomatic career as a result. My reaction to putative hero worship was to publish in Murder in Samarkand not just the political facts, but an exposure of my own worst and most unpleasant behaviour in my private life.
I am in a very poor position to judge, but I believe the result rather by accident turned out artistically compelling, if you don’t want to read the book you can get a good idea of that by clicking on David Tennant in the top right of this blog and listening to him playing me in David Hare’s radio adaptation.
Anyway, that’s enough musing. You won’t like my next post, whenever it comes. Promise.
I’m sorry to hear that Nevermind – playground name calling I find disturbing.
Mary – Mitt Romney prostitutes America for the Israeli lobby. That man is so out of touch with reality I fear his mind has become so polluted with religion and money his place in life remains in the bully pulpit preaching to the penitent.
There is a lot of stuff on this site about Gulnara.
http://www.uznews.net/news_single.php?lng=en&sub=hot&cid=31&nid=20844
The editors at Medialens have posted this piece from today’s Times repeating the anti Assad propaganda, ie a lie, about chemical weapons being used. Same old. Same old.
http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/thread/1348047391.html
Nevermind
Once it is known that you’re a furrinner, a Kraut to boot,
and that is why I; ich liebe dich mate.
Nevermind you are OK mate, in fact you remind of me of one of my better friends whom incidentally is called Ingo, he is from Köln, I love him to bits, and his silly morbid sense of humour. His sense of fair-play is forever outraged, and he will not mince his words. Mind he can sup some drink and there have been times when he and I have had to depart; him to the next Kneipe and I back to my hotel for a bit of R&R!
[Mod/Jon: abusive aside snipped, please don’t engage in this stuff]
Passerby, thank you for the roses, but …Ich liebe dich…, a full blown ‘I love you’ is quiet a bit of a come on here, I have to recover from that….;)
I think that there is a concerted campaign nationally to rig, try their utmost best, to keep all the PCC posts in political hands.
A debate, inviting all candidates,is organised at Norwich City Hall on the 3rd. of October, chair…BBC political correspondent Andrew Sinclair, safe hand Luke, will be put in charge, making sure that the debate runs the way the establishment wants it to go.
I have objected to the chair, it should be an impartial non aligned chair, Norwich is full of college/university lecturers who would love to do the job.
Guesses aplenty.
Craig is going to join the RESPECT party?
Hi Nevermind,
My German is a work in progress as Ingo keeps telling me, I wasn’t coming on, but conveying the regard and affection that I have for both of you Ingoes. Still made your day and that is good enough for me. (smiling thingy)
You are most assuredly correct, the choice of chairmen in hustings should fall upon impartial and learned people whom are a plenty, with the aim of conducting the meeting in the most informative and fair fashion, without favouring one party or the other. Therefore, you are within your rights to put to election the position of the would be chairman. Or at least have a choice of a name, from a pool of names of persons from differing backgrounds, whom are not necessarily earning their livelihoods hanging on the coattail of the establishment in one form or another.
there is a concerted campaign nationally to rig, try their utmost best, to keep all the PCC posts in political hands
You bet, as there is every effort to stifle any kind of independent/local initiative of any sorts from any source other than the approved carpetbaggers’ list. The dog and pony show of democracy is just that; a show.
They said;
We will introduce measures to make the police more accountable through oversight by a directly elected individual, who will be subject to strict checks and balances by locally elected representatives.
They meant it, and now they are intent on having a direct channel of communication and control without any kind of local drawback, and complications. Effectively a first step towards a national police structure, that in turn will grow much more in its paramilitary capabilities, with heavy emphasis on crowds control and compliance facets.
The old authorities which are getting replaced; although still operated under the “supervision” of the various politicos but these were not hand-picked and trusted operatives, whom could be relied upon to deliver the envisioned changes that are yet to be unveiled.
I don’t know if you would agree with this view?
The strict checks and balances are provided by selected cllr.s of all parties locally, with those in the majority ruling the roost. These are the appointed Police and Crime Panel.
Policing in Norfolk Suffolk and Cambridgeshire will merge into one, equally other regions are also looking at amalgamation of resources. Soon they will make a case to put the police under national/or even private control, my guess.
@LWTc247
Guesses aplenty.
Craig is going to join the RESPECT party?
Now that would be like dropping a bomb here. A socialist workers Party Scots double act? Not only would it be unbelievable to many, but also volatile, as George
Galloway likes to be his own man…
It would make for some heated debates, regurgitating old issues ad nauseum, scratching open crusty wounds. But it would make for one hell of a leadership contest internally…:)
Two funnies observed.
Private Eye Cover. William to Kate -‘Get your writs out Darling’
A van signwritten ‘Window and Fascade Cleaning’. Did they mean fascia or facade?
Also in the Times, an article by Tom Whipple their Science Correspondent. Sir Bernard Lovell visited Russia and after coming home from seeing observatories in the Crimea, was unexplainably exhausted. No medical explanation could be given. He was convinced that he had been zapped by some sort of radiation to disrupt his memory and powers of thought. His son has corroborated the facts. It took his father a long time to fully recover.
Perhaps that is why Craig is feeling tired. ‘They’ have got at him.
No link as I do not subscribe to Murdoch. There is a report here though.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/07/bernard_lovell_dies_telescope_inventor/
The increase in military funding at British universities.
http://www.sgr.org.uk/resources/military-university-collaborations-update-uk-situation
Soon they will make a case to put the police under national/or even private control, my guess.
The method the bean counters are going to deploy to dress up the figures, will help bring the police numbers down, or keep these steady without any further rises, and then inject civilians into police stations for various duties including custody duties etc.
The routine work is to be handed out to the G$Security groups of various interested parties whom may have invested in the politicos running for office, they will in turn be rewarded with the contracts, that will mean poorly paid civilians will be doing the “menial” and routine work for the proper police to be out there and do the policing, more profits and dividends for the shareholders.
Of course this move will also produce redundant posts in the Police force, which means some will have to go, but due to the aggregates arrived at by cooking the books, there will be a less apparent police numbers shortage.
objectives achieved;
Reduction of the public services that is normally referred to as; deficit reduction, rationalisation, efficiency, and a better personal service (the civvies will not be as condescending as the bobbies when answering the phone).
Handing out more of the tax funds to the private sector, and recycling the pounds back into whomever helped in printing it.
As the manifesto said; more for the rich and less for the punters, so these tossers have actually delivered what they intended to do from the beginning.
Hi Craig,
Simon here, from the Norwich North campaign. In Shootings in France you said it’s like JFK, we may never know. In fact, for JFK, I think we can say we do know. Lamar Waldron has amassed a huge amount of first hand material, and analysed it well. He’s sane, credible, hugely interesting, and convincing. There’s not too much more you can expect of a historical thesis. Why do we all still insist on treating this as an archetypal mystery?
The best place to start is a series of you tube videos of a bookshop talk he gave in New York…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzArIyc16-I
Warm regards
Simon
Hi Simon, are you following the twists of the local PCC campaign? They are already trying to sideline the truly Independent candidate Mervin Lambert.
Today, Archant, described as the only Independent newscaster in East Anglia, has won the bid to transmit a new TV channel from Norwich, now we have three anodyne, identical news trails to look forward to in stead of only two. Yawn!
http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/politics/new_tv_station_comes_to_norwich_as_ofcom_gives_green_light_to_mustard_1_1521848
@Anon 18th september 4.55
“http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
Record Low Arctic Sea Ice Cover (previous record smashed)”
NSIDC is accountable to and governed by the IPCC / International panel on climate chnage, who have been utterly discredited for their man made global warming reports. The scope of their reporting allegedly came down to one person typing in random figures in to a computer model, not on specific scientific empirical evidence. Climate change though is a natural phenomenon and has been going on for,what, 4 billion years??..and the rest…
Not really related but i’ve noticed that ‘The Innocence of Muslims’ is obviously designed to look unintentionally bad and amateurish. This would give whoever is behind it the cloak of amateur prankishness and incompetentness – perfect for deniability in my view. Very cynical and transparent – it’s ‘The Hangover’ of the CIA
@ Chris Jones re. IPCC – quite right.
Yet to see a single piece of real world empirical evidence for a greenhouse gas – fake physics
Venus: No Greenhouse Effect
“The flip side of the entrenched incompetence in science today is that all it takes is scientific competence to make revolutionary discoveries, or fundamental corrections to current dogma. Being a competent physicist rather than an incompetent climate scientist (which 97% of them demonstrably are)…”
http://theendofthemystery.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/venus-no-greenhouse-effect.html
I’m expecting China to build a massive radar in Mexico’s Chihuahua Cerros Mohinara plains some 2500 meters above sea level, see how the US likes such response to its plans to build one in Japan.
Panetta is trying to fool XiJinping.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia-pacific/2012/09/201291952749450754.html
If anything, the satellite ice cover over-estimates the Arctic ice cover. There are ships up there. It really is that low. Sorry I don’t buy into a scientific conspiracy to make the whole thing up. The genuine threat posed by mad made climate change seems clear to me.
Oh and Harry Huffman doesn’t understand his planetery physics. Here’s why his Venus calculations are total nonsense – http://www.skepticalscience.com/Planetary_Greenhouse.html
There appears to be an extremely well funded conspiracy that global warming is wrong though.
Hi Anon,
So why do you think the av. global temperature has been flat over the last 15 years whilst concentration of CO2 has risen?
Read (my link above) Harry Dale Huffman’s perfectly clear comparison of Earth and Venus (note the Venusian atmosphere is 96% CO2) – he shows that classical physics explains the temperature differences as being all down to solar input, i.e. NO greenhouse effect.
You do understand physics, right?
Lol ScepticalScience – the cabal’s PR site – dear oh dear….
@Anon “mad made climate change” -quite apt!
Now its man made climate change? Whats happened to man made global warming? I’m not a scientist so i have no proof to offer myself,other than the evidence of others. And there is plenty of evidence out there -30,000 recognised scientists have signed a petition denouncing the exagerated claims of man made global warming for example. There is no doubt that man creates C02 but the claims of its effects seem to have been vastly exaggerated and manipulated. To make CO2 the enemy that should be eliminated is insanity – C02 is essential for plants-without it they die, meaning that without C02 we would all die
Nobody is asking for all C02 to be eliminated. That’s your straw-man Chris.
Doesn’t matter how many people sign a document – especially when many millions more with equal, or better, qualifications disagree. I’ve read their arguments and while there are a few interesting points (especially solar radiation and the possibility of an impending Maunder Minimum decades long cooling period which is played down in the mainstream for now), the medium and long term warming physics and calculations make more scientific sense by far. I wish it didn’t.
Scouse Billy,
You are welcome to tell me where Huffman is right and the article I linked is wrong. If you know it is wrong, you must understand where it went wrong surely? I’d appreciate if you could point out their mistakes.
@Scouse Billy “Consciousness is more my area”
This is where things start to get really interesting. Consciousness as separate from the mind I presume? The phenomena that observe the mind’s thinking activities.
@Anon – i wouldn’t say it was my straw man at all – i don’t want to be proven right in any way and I don’t have any vested interest exept being an earth dweller who quites likes truth and not being lied to (white lies i can handle)
Internationally renowned government scientists and environmentalists have been spouting this kind of rhetoric for years as well as exaggerating global warming figures and effects(or fearmongering as its otherwise called)The IPCC’s initial pre hocky stick graph showed the earth was far hotter during the medieval period than it is now. The second hockey stick graph they put out in 2001 was the complete opposite. Thats called junk science from where i’m sitting.
You are actually probably right about man made climate change though – weather modification and manipulating has been going on for a very long time (we could go in to chemtrailing but it might take a while) The dangers are probably more to do with global dimming and cooling rather than warming
Scuse Billy – “So why do you think the av. global temperature has been flat over the last 15 years whilst concentration of CO2 has risen?”
Take another look at that
http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=47
But. I admit, what happens over the next few decades is more dependent on the sun than usual if we do enter a long solar quiet period. Stand by to hear a lot more about a quadrupolar sun if some top solar physicists predictions are correct. It is actually possible to plunge Europe into brutal winters for a few decades if certain conditions are met. And that is compatible with the longer term global warming trend if the sun plays silly buggers.
Chris,
I suggest you read sites other than certain well funded denial sites. Read the “warmist” sites or whatever you want to call them as well. At the moment you are just hitting me with a few denialist sound bytes which tells me all I need to know about how much you have really researched the matter – and that’s not very much at all.
If you want to discuss “chemtrails” then I might debateee you on GLP but not here.
@Mark. Please post a link to your podcast whenever one is available.