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.
Clark; Hope things are well. I mentioned Children of Men the other day, and coincidentally, it’s about an infertile population.
Clark – Yes i agree, there is always the financial element to it as well – allthough many things can’t be explained away as cost cutting. But it’s true that these corporations are greedy as well as being collusive in areas that are highly worrying. I think there is a strong possibility that both of us are correct Clark..
Clark: “Carbon Cap-and-Trade” was implemented after the Stern Review
That is Lord Nicholas Stern of Brentford, former Chief Economist of the World Bank.
Nicholas Herbert Stern, Baron Stern of Brentford, Kt, FBA (born 22 April 1946) is a British economist and academic.
He is IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government, Chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics (LSE), and 2010 Professor of Collège de France.
From 2013, he will be President of the British Academy.
Richard Stern, former Vice-President, World Bank, and Brian E Stern, former Vice-President Xerox Corporation, are his brothers
Chris Jones, you have to remember that nearly all commercial products, including food products, are produced by essentially industrial processes. Even our water. Additives are put in for all sorts of reasons; to make the product flow through pipes better, to prevent the machinery from corroding or getting clogged up, to prevent intermediate products decaying in a factory environment, grief, I’m no specialist on this, there must be multiple reasons I haven’t thought of or heard about.
Each product is made from multiple other products, and the same applies to them. I live on a farm. After they’ve harvested the oilseed rape, they shove it across the concrete floor into the drying shed with a bulldozer. Stuff gets sprayed on it to keep the rats off it. And so on and so forth.
Think how much it would cost to remove all these industrial contaminants. The companies are in competition with each other, even a small percentage cost saving makes a difference to their market share.
Chris, the axis of pro-health vs. anti-health is independent from the axis of cheap vs. expensive. The two are neither aligned nor in opposition; they’re not even parallel. The manufacturers exist to make money, not food, just like the “news” media’s real function is to sell audiences (us readers) to advertisers (big corps). For the corps, making products is just a means to the end of making money. When poisons end up in our consumables, it’s just about making money, not because the corps want to depopulate planet Earth.
The corps resist regulation until there is a health scare that decimates their sales. Then they change one of their practices, and make a big public fuss about how responsible they’re pretending to be.
“No Trans or Hydrogenated Fats”
screams the new logo on the margarine from the company which stuffed trans and hydrogenated fats into their product until last month when the health implication finally got pushed past the corporate media blockade by the campaigners waving the scientific research papers that they liberated from a non-disclosure agreement by use of the Freedom of Information Act.
Zoologist 5 Oct, 5:32 pm
Yes. The Stern Review was the turning point. The environmentalists had been shouting about lost habitats, lost species, displaced people, all such stuff. Corporate media ridiculed them and governments made sad noises and spoke very “responsibly” about economics.
Stern published, and put the environmentalists’ message into money figures. The change in attitude was immediate and overwhelming. Governments ears pricked up, and even some corporations changed their published positions. The corporate media didn’t take the piss at all.
Quite frankly, I’d never seen such a public exposure of hypocrisy in my life.
Why the sudden change? Stern essentially performed a translation of language. He translated the environmentalists’ message into the language of the elite entities – money!
I don’t discount Stern just because he’s an economist. Even the elite entities are stuck on this ball of rock, just like us commoners.
Ben, good to see you. I’ll have to add Children of Men to my to-watch list. I think the pile of media waiting for my attention on the day I die will be several times as high as everything I’ve ever read, watched and listened to.
Glenn, thanks for checking my algebra!
@Clark – Unfortunately your hypothesis wouldn’t explain or excuse why known toxic poisons are allowed in food and drink by government food and safety departments.
As reported in infowars ‘At the 1997 Women’s World Conference in Beijing, the head of the U.N. Food Program said,’ “We will use food as a weapon against the people.”
Heres another link on how food is being used as a weapon – hardly a new concept when you look right back through history
http://www.naturalnews.com/033343_food_weapons.html
I’ll leave you to look at the facts in your own time Clark – plenty to learn there
@Chris Do you know anything much about Codex Alimentarius ?
One of the things on my pile of things to read.
NP Clark, but frankly I’m just about done with this thread. It’s just devolved into utter silliness from your correspondents. They’re trying to quote you/us to death while avoiding every direct point.
@Zoologist – yes, very much so – it’s another very worrying part of the UN’s attempt at food/mineral/nutrient dictatorship.If you haven’t read it prepare to be exasporated as well!
Zoo’ – Codex Alimentarius
Simple….
90% of africa is physicaly fit, healthy and NOT obese
while
90% of North America is physically un-fit. un-healthy, and obese
hmmmm long live MacDonalds…. you have all read Fast food Nation by Eric Schlosser…..an amusing little ditty
Chris:
Governments respond to corporate lobbying, and there is the government / corporate “Revolving Door”. The corps effectively hold the government to ransom; “if you set the limit too low, we will be uncompetitive and cease manufacture. You will have to pay the unemployment benefit when we lay workers off, and you’ll lose a lot of tax income”.
When a toxic substance is present in an industrial process, the more of it they try to remove, the more expensive it gets. Making anything utterly free from anything else is very difficult, in many cases impossible. Did you do “multiple extraction” in chemistry at school?
Governments set limits of toxic substances in foodstuffs. Obviously, they try to set an across-the-board limit, rather that x amount of z in this, y amount of z in something else, etc.. But substance x may be far more difficult to remove from one foodstuff than another. So a higher limit gets set. The corporations use these limits as their target rather than aiming for complete absence; it’s cheaper for them that way.
There is also outright corruption, like the Aspartame scandal. Loads of this goes on. Again, the governments need to be more responsive to the people, and less responsive to the corps. Democracy needs strengthening.
None of this implies that your allegation is groundless, but this sort of thing probably accounts for a lot of it. If you supply links to specific examples I’ll look into them when I can.
Chris, beware Infowars. I think it’s basically an Alex Jones operation. Whatever, it is sensationalist. That doesn’t mean it’s entirely wrong. Alex Jones and Infowars (I think Prison Planet is yet another one of the same group) use some good sources who don’t get much other publicity, but the in-house commentary blows things out of proportion.
Do you have a link for the whole speech please? I’d like to put the quote into context.
I’ve started on your NaturalNews link. Unfortunately the Kissinger link on that article is dead. I have to go now. I’ll check the rest of that article later.
Hey, do you like my new avatar? I wrote the program that calculated it. I’m going to change it again soon.
Addendum to my comment of 5 Oct, 8:05 pm:
We need more international government; global corporatism needs a global power to keep some control over it. But all the “depopulation conspiracy” sites I’ve seen present global government as the ultimate danger. These sites are very popular with the fringe US Right.
Governments are far from perfect ; democracy isn’t strong enough (two huge understatements!). But governments under partial democratic influence are better than unrestricted corporatism, which responds only to the profit motive.
Clark: Nice avatar. About that “Beijing, the head of the U.N. Food Program said,’ “We will use food as a weapon against the people.” ” quote, it’s all over the place. But never in context. Like any Alex Jones sap bobble-head, Chris etc. will just say “yup, yup, yup” and never question the source.
I can only think it’s so badly out of context (if it really is a quote), that the original source can never be referenced.
This is what gets me about these paranoid freaks – someone said something 15 years ago. Who said it, what’s the context? Forget about that. But it’s PROOF, by God, that there’s a massive global conspiracy to kill everyone! OMG!!
I keep asking them, how’s this depopulation programme going? Where’s the evidence that global population is doing anything but going up and up? Crickets.
OMG, it’s vaccinations! It’s putting poison in plastic! It’s FEMA camps, it’s … it’s death panels! It’s a UN takeover! It never stops with these people. They are stupid, frightened, and easily led. But most importantly, they follow a line which happily coincides with a right-wing agenda, and they are not looking at the real problems.
The real problems are concentration on wealth in the top 0.1%, poverty, GCC, NAFTA, GATT, corporate rule and so on. But they’re too busy running around being afraid of the mighty, powerful, all-controlling UN – for Christ’s sake – to even look at those problems.
@Glenn.I would call your 0.1% “the elite”.
I have said nothing different.
Why won’t you enlighten us with your thoughts on 9/11 ?
Glenn, I had a quick Google for that quote; nothing but Infowars, Illuminati conspiracy websites, “Agenda 666”, David Icke, comments on blogs, etc. Certainly nothing from the UN. It’s gotta be bollox.
Chris, I seriously suggest you chill off of this stuff. Chris, what’s your politics? I mean, if you really think the world would be better off without governments, and let the corporations do whatever they like, OK, that’d be your choice to think that.
But if you believe that we should have taxation to redistribute wealth and run things for the public like health provision, benefits, education, public transport, a proper legal system that also keeps the corporations under control; well, I really think that you should think again. This depopulation conspiracy stuff seems to serve free market fundamentalism. I don’t know who funds websites that push this stuff, or who makes their editorial decisions, but they seem to be pedalling fear of government.
Government is what people organise to make a strong enough force to control the rich and powerful. It is far from perfect, and it’s been getting worse lately. But it is notable that foreign policy is much worse than policy at home. This is because the voters don’t live in the countries affected by the violent foreign policy.
Zoologist: If you’re actually sincere (which I doubt), and you want my thoughts about “9/11”, read them here:
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/01/the_911_post/?showall=1
My post at “28 Jan, 2010 – 11:05 pm” is a reasonable starting point.
*
Clark: Precisely what I found. That quote repeated over and over, never once in context, and no references (other to more Alex Jones BS sites which in turn are empty, unreferenced “quotes”).
You go on to apparently back up my point – while the bobble-heads are running around freaked out about a depopulation myth which is manifestly not happening, they – just by chance! – are favouring a corporate line. How the illuminati etc. etc. must be laughing at their equivalent of a dog chasing its tail.
Zoologist, 5 Oct, 9:30 pm
I believe that Glenn already has:
Sunflower, 2 Oct, 6:07 pm, with correction of typo at 8:41 pm applied:
Glenn at 2 Oct, 6:52 pm, who spotted the typo and responded to the meaning rather than the erroneous words:
I’m completely flummoxed by Building 7. On the one hand, it appeared to do something completely unnatural (though weird things do happen sometimes. It’s not like it turned from a pile of rubble into a building!), and NIST (I think) kept their computer models of the collapse secret. On the other hand, I can’t think of any decent reason that a conspiracy would blow the place.
But some stuff about 9/11 is completely beyond doubt. It was basically a Saudi job, and Saudi Arabia are meant to be US allies. The pages detailing Saudi involvement were redacted from the 9/11 Commission report. Multiple investigations that could have prevented 9/11 were blocked at higher levels. Etc. etc. etc.
And no matter how it was brought about, it was used. It was used as an excuse to invade both Afghanistan and Iraq, and to shred civil liberties and due process in the US.
I fervently request that we don’t start arguing over details of 9/11. There is just too much scope for wasting our time; all sorts of critical detail is lost in the mists of time or obscured by mountains of disinformation. The meaning of 9/11 remains entirely clear, no matter how those buildings came to be destroyed. The US was hit by it’s own ally, with (at least) a fair degree of responsibility from various US parties, and it was used to justify loss of US rights and massive overseas aggression.
For goodness’ sake, stop looking at collapsing buildings (the distraction) and start looking at what it was used as an excuse for.
Q: Who lost out over 9/11 and the US response to it?
A: Ordinary people everywhere.
Q: Who benefited?
A: Unocal, Bush and Cheney’s corporations Haliburton and Carlyle Group, BAE Systems and other arms manufacturers, the international heroin trade.
“Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’
Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’
Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’
But, conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because one’s conscience tells one that it is right.”
– Martin Luther King Jr
A thoroughly entertaining read catching up with “the thread that never dies”
The relevance of the MLK quote applies to the following talk by Professor T. Colin Campbell, IMO a man that dares to tell the truth having researched the evidence and in spite of having seen “behind the curtain”.
For those that want to be enlightened I recommend highly:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1308977765978236346
Glenn, our comments crossed. I hope I haven’t misrepresented your position.
Zoologist, here is a direct link to Glenn’s “starting point” comment:
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/01/the_911_post/comment-page-2/#comment-274929
Scouse Billy, I checked out your Thrive link. I think you should steer clear of such stuff. It’s Free Market Fundamentalism, and the introductory film has been denounced by most of the people they interviewed for it; they say they were misled.
http://thrivedebunked.wordpress.com/tag/adam-trombly/
Oh and Scouse Billy, thanks for the video link, but my friend is vegan and has been for decades.
Clark: You didn’t misrepresent anything, no worries there. This new video (by PBS, surprisingly enough) goes into some more detail about WTC7:
http://video.cpt12.org/video/2270078138
*
As an aside, I’ve been virtually vegan for decades too. I don’t see the real problem with properly sourced, free-range eggs. But I suppose that downgrades me to a strict vegetarian only – fair enough. There’s no reason a veg*an of any description has to buy into an “alternative” to hard fact, truth and science.
Are you veg*an by any chance, Billy? Perhaps you do have some principles after all.
Hitler was a tea-total vegetarian, wasn’t he? Billy, you’ll know the answer to that. I’m still wondering who that man with the fist is on your avatar. Your previous one was Hitler as a child, wasn’t it?
My friend and I have both read Jane Plant’s book about dairy products, IGFs (insulin-like growth factors), The China Study and cancer. She makes a rather convincing argument that dairy products increase cancer risk, and the second edition documents the pressure she was put under by representatives of the dairy industry to retract her claims.
OK well I’ve scanned down the 9/11 thread. Seems to me the Glenn on that thread is the alter-ego of the one on this thread.
I have avoided the phrase “Good German” on this thread but I see you used it to good effect against those defending the government conspiracy theory. I recognise the “9/11 truth denier” epithet.
Why do you persist with the “if you’re sincere” attitude?
I have sincerely read your contributions. And those of others.
You hadn’t read the graph one and you’re pissed off because you got caught out?
You are exempt from providing any evidence of anything.
You haven’t challenged the factual content of my posts but you won’t read / watch anything that doesn’t fit your world view. But you are a “rational” judge and not a “crazy”. You are uniquely equipped to decide which “conspiracy” is valid. The government would “blow up buildings” for war, but it wouldn’t exaggerate the effects of CO2 for control because that would be “crazy”.
The 0.01 % are the problem but there are no “elites”.
So you come here to heckle, but never contribute.
I’m pretty tired of the insults. Especially now I see the hypocracy.
“these paranoid freaks”
Which ones?
“the bobble-heads are running around freaked out about a depopulation myth”
Are they? Again, another straw man.
“..just by chance! – are favouring a corporate line. ”
Nope. Not me.
It’s quite hard to find the original quote but here is how it originally appeared…its true that its been coloured by time but the message is the same:
“Food is power. We use it to change behavior, some may call it bribery. We do not apologize.”-Catherine Bertini, executive director of the U.N. World Food Program (speaking in 1997) http://www.markswatson.com/popcontrol.htm (its a tatty looking site but the quote is the right one)
I have no idea why Clark and Glenn seem to get upset about such a quote- Henry Kissinger put accross the same message in the 1970’s, as did Hitler and countless other dearranged people through the ages, as can be seen on many many places on the interweb including infowars – with the mere mention of the name seeming to cause some to recoil in horror at the thought that they may be …..cue dramatic horror music….a bit..too…PATRIOTIC!!!! THe horror of it!
Anyway,this article demonstrates how numerous members of the have called for and are calling for population reductions of 80% and more through various methods of control,including food:
http://www.infowars.com/the-move-to-depopulate-the-planet/
Clark -regarding corporations etc – you seem a bit confused and i’ve no idea why you seem to think i’m pro corporations. You say you want better control over corporations and stronger government (which i agree with) but then you say you want more international government and better global power to control corporatism. However what you miss out on is that most governments have now been taken over by cooperations so a global government would be a danger because you would be controlled by the cooperations that we both dislike so much..
There’s quite a bit about birth rate reduction being pushed by the World Bank and Billy Gates’ Foundation on the link below. Nothing about killing billions of people though. It’s not really surprising, but it is shocking that such organisations are really going ahead with such stuff. I don’t know how you’d go about stopping it without some form of global democracy, either.
The article has lots of links, but unfortunately also has overtones of the World Government / GCC-is-a-scam conspiracy or whatever you want to call it.
http://williambowles.info/2012/10/05/leading-world-bank-demographer-vaccination-campaigns-part-of-population-reduction-policy-by-jurriaan-maessen/
My link is to William Bowles’ site. I used to subscribe to the e-mail list for his essays, but he stopped sending them out. I thought they were pretty good; decent analysis from a socialist perspective. If you want to read his essays, the index for them is linked on the right of that page.