I was trying to come up with a witty and apposite acronym for BBC to describe what I have just seen on TV, but all I could manage was Beyond Belief Cunts.
Watching BBC World News here in Accra, I have just seen forty minutes of intense and non-stop Israeli propaganda. A live press conference by Netanyahu and Ehud Barak followed by a long, long interview with Mark Regev in which the most searching BBC question could fairly be paraphrased as “How can you be certain that those dastardly Palestinians will not break the ceasefire and start firing rockets again?”
No attempt whatsoever to give a Palestinian a chance to put over their viewpoint. Now fifty minutes of solid coverage around the ceasefire without a single Palestinian view or pro-Palestinian or pro-peace view. And in that entire fifty minutes not one mention of Palestinian dead.
Beyond Belief Cunts. Actually, it’s not a bad effort.
@Vronsky – you don’t win by making a coarse insult. Especially when someone sent me a photo of you showing how you get your mind into the right state before posting about politics here.
You write stuff like this:
“George Kerevan is a former member of new Labour and although now SNP should still be treated with caution. However his piece here is a reasonably fair report on an interesting development”
(what is this, cliché time at the parish council?)
and this:
“just recently (the SNP) moved ahead of New Labour in Westminster voting intention. Yes, Westminster, not Holyrood. That means a majority of Scottish MPs will be Nationalists next time around”
(how many decades of such wishful thinking lie behind that, did you say?)
and you tell me to “pull it out”?
I usually only play sarcasm with professionals. But for you, my friend…
Habbabkuk
“I know I shouldn’t….but I simply can’t resist.
Compare and contrast :
Herbie at 4.46 pm : “The PA are no more likely to get on (ie, the BBC)than Hamas, or any other Palestinian voice”
Herbie at 5.56 pm : “Obviously PA people will have appeared on the BBC”.
What weed are you on, Herbie?”
And your point is…
@John Goss – OK I’ve read Mary’s post now, but I’m still not sure I understand what you were saying, or why my critical comment in the form of a question wasn’t apposite. I’m willing to learn though! I thought you were basically saying that whereas in Afghanistan rich elites who control banks line their pockets by means of, er, very ‘creative’ schemes involving ‘loans’ they know will never be paid back, etc., in the UK the analogous form of robbery involves the payment of bonuses. If I’m misinterpreting, I apologise, because that’s what I genuinely thought you meant, but I’d appreciate its being explained to me what you actually did mean. The point of my comment was just to underline that control over the banks allows masssive amounts of money to be grabbed by other means than bonuses. Bonuses are usually counted in paltry units called ‘millions’. That’s a very paltry unit for the Rothschilds whom you mention. Not that I’m saying they ever made any by giving any away! 🙂
I think concentration on ‘bonuses’ is a safety-valve, an allowed channel, set up when people who hadn’t thought much before about what a bunch of robbers the controllers of the City are, couldn’t be kept from being angry at banks.
A previous stock phrase was ‘fatcats’. People were supposed to concentrate on people like station managers getting million-quid payouts from privatisation, and never mind things like £400 million quid government payments for ‘advice’ that went to outfits such as Cazenove’s and Hambro’s.
This news really depressed me. Livni is coming back with a new ‘party’.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20510263
Do not forget that the ‘House’ has fixed it so she cannot be arrested and indicted for war crimes she committed under the Geneva Conventions Act 1957. If these psychopaths cannot be dealt with under the law, war will go on and on and on. Dear little children being burned for ever. This is key – and above all verbiage.
@ John Goss:
It is probably about time therefore Mr Craig Murray dug out the dirt on (ALEC) too before we all sink in the sludge of corporate defacation.
I was digging it up a year ago, and no-one took any notice ( Mary maybe did). Think it’s on an early Werritty thread. Since which time several large corporations have withdrawn their membership. Nothing to do with me…ALEC’s views were not likely to make good PR. AB was always linked to this grouping, and vermin like Hague and Gove probably still remain in contact.
Habbabcuk – I am sure our enquiries as to the frequency of Blair’s urgent visits to Gaza in order to hear (and see*, while dodging incoming) their POV will meet with a dignified silence. Silence, anyway. So let’s please keep asking. Thank you.
*and smell: Israeli import restrictions effectively blocked the upgrading of Gaza’s sewage infrastructure: nearly 90 million liters of untreated or partially treated sewage are discharged into the sea daily. Contaminated seawater poses a serious health hazard.
Not often reported, but here:
http://www.phmovement.org/sites/…/PHM_statement%20Gaza_16Nov2012.pdf
The Gaza sewage story that REALLY made the headlines was about a crocodile which has been living in the sewers since it escaped from the zoo a couple of years ago. Hilarious. All over the Israeli media. Those Arabs, eh? Don’t let any cement in. And shoot them if they collect rubble near the line.
Must be strong weed, Herbie!
The point being that at 4.46 pm you say that PA spokesmen have no chance of appearing on the BBC and an hour later you say that they have actually appeared there.
Keep going!
@ N_
If you can bring yourself to read the Guardian this week, they’re featuring the same sorts of creative schemes as the Afghan high heid yins are using. They involve keeping astonishing amounts of money away from the taxman, are often based on fraudulent loans (one young Nigerian UK resident managed to get more than £100M) and moving the cash through anonymous companies with directors who are kept in the dark (but know that they are being employed to know nothing). Shades, indeed, of Windrush Ventures and Firerush Ventures 1 thru 6, set up by dear Tony Blair. It’s not just bonuses. It’s the British Virgin Islands as well.
Komodo, Robin et al; I really think you’re wasting your breath. Some people are just not ready for independence. I know a contemporary from school who is still at home with his mother. I’m 56.
Whisper it lightly, but I know (a) some very bright and independent Scots and (b) some English utter morons. Don’t know where you’re going with that, not enough samples for a t-test anyway.
If you want to know what the ‘blue-nose bigots’ think of the SNP and Independence, head over to FollowFollow or RangersMedia. Or look for the banners at the club formerly known as Ragers (sic).
Exactly. Unionists to a man. Orange Lodge and all.
Komodo and others.
I have been reassured by an asbestos expert that if it’s sandwiched in paper/card it’s plasterboard whatever the colour of the material, and that it contains no asbestos.
Another course I have to go on, again! Thanks for all your concerns and comments. To the shop, apologies for doubting them!
Donald S? Sure it isn’t Donald (F)indlay? I did expect fearmongering and sectarianism from the Unionist camp, but I expected a bit a bit more subtlety, some sort of coherent argument, perhaps even an eccentricity or three to account for such clingy dependence. You are wildly off topic; Israeli/Zionist influence and other chronic failures of the BBC being in season. Your obsession with passports is verging on hysterical, Ireland is of no real relevance either. The utter criminality and unreconstructed evil that the British state as presently constituted exemplifies, its descent to near fascist control and domination of our lives and its frightening resurgence of naked neo-imperialist blood and treasure lust, aren’t good things and something which a majority of Scots and English, Welsh and others want no part of.
Everyone wants out from under Westminster rule (but you and your ilk). Nothing ever stays the same, you can cry and stamp your feet, or stamp your feet and cry, you’re an anachronism.
For regulars: It’s that time of year again, Next week (3rd to 9th December) is
National Hack an MPs Head Off With a Rusty Saw Blade Week. It was popular as ever last year and this time round interest has been over-whelming. It is a necessary cull, it will hurt us more than it hurts them, but it’s for the better and greater good of democracy.
Here’s to our new Republics.
@ N @ 8.58 PM – Your comment – “never mind things like £400 million quid government payments for ‘advice’ that went to outfits such as Cazenove’s and Hambros”.
.
An American friend of mine who worked for Cazenove some years back told me that when he started with them he had expected to find an oasis of ability. Instead he found only two really intelligent executives there, with the rest being either mediocrities or boneheads (albeit old etonian boneheads). And Hambros’ history just speaks for itself. But that’s the problem when one has crony capitalism rather than free market capitalism – it is who you know, rather than what you know that counts, so that key decisions that affect us all are often made by boneheads.
First I was told off for going on about bluenoses in the SNP; now all of a sudden I’m Donald Findlay? Is that because I alluded to Vatican power in Ireland? Sheesh! 🙂 And then I’m obsessed and hysterical, says the person who follows up with “The utter criminality and unreconstructed evil that the British state as presently constituted exemplifies, its descent to near fascist control and domination of our lives and its frightening resurgence of naked neo-imperialist blood and treasure lust.
Bloody ‘ell. Your prose is as purple as Craig’s sometimes gets!
The questions about passports, about what the position will be for Scottish citizens in EWNI, and for rUK citizens in Scotland, after ‘independence’, are very down-to-earth and practical and important for millions of people.
The ‘yes’-nuts can’t handle them.
All the ‘time for a change’ brigade can do against the ‘better the devil you know’ argument is say we’re all a bunch of Donald Findlays, scaremongerers.
Do you know what the publicists for the ‘time for a change’ ticket are supposed to do? You’re supposed to rebut the scaremongering!
The fact that nationalist types can’t do this shows you’re going to lose, unless something so drastic happens to get you some momentum.
The ‘discourse’ at the moment goes like this:
A: Vote for independence! Time for a change!
B: What will it mean?
A: Vote for it first. Then we can find out.
B: My son works in Newcastle. If he takes Scottish citizenship, lives in Scotland for a bit, and then goes back down south for a while and falls ill, will he get treated under the NHS?
A: Don’t worry! All will be well!
B: Great. So the answer’s ‘yes’ then? Have the SNP made that promise? I don’t like the British government any more than you do, so I’m all ears if you can offer me something better.
A: Well the FEBs, er, I mean ‘Westminster’ might make the answer into ‘no’. You know, after ‘independence’, we won’t be able to tell them what to do in their own country. But if you vote for ‘yes’ in the referendum, well, don’t you want to feel warm and fuzzy?
B: I was just asking a practical question. You’re the politician. Persuade me to vote the way you want.
A: Oh GTF, you obsessed hysterical one-tracked bastard! Scotland! Scotland! Bannockburn! If you were in a lodge, my friend, you’d know all about Bannockburn. I mean, er, if you watched ‘Braveheart’.
@Roderick Russell – I found Nick Leeson’s autobiography a great read. I think it was the chairman of Barings, a guy from the family, but in any case a very plummy chinless toff (unlike the traders) who when reporting to his pals on the ‘profit’ Leeson was bringing in from Singapore (by hiding how much money he was taking out of one office to play with in another office every day) indicated that it ‘wasn’t terribly difficult’ to make oodles of money in the derivatives market out there. The guy was an idiot.
Leeson also clearly thinks control over the exchange software was used to stuff his last few trades, which were of course getting more and more gigantic, causing the loss of hundreds of millions which was other people’s gain. I reckon he knows what he’s talking about.
I have just looked up Miss Rachel Reeves on wikipedia and so I have a question for the English contributors to this blog : is it true that it is the unwritten code that in order to become a high minister (or shadow minister) in England you must have a degree in PPE from Oxford University?
If so, I think it is formi..formi…formidable!
@Donald S.
It’s the unionists, that’s Labour, Liberal Democrats and Tories, indivisable in every aspect of policy who are promising unspecified jam tomorrow, the flavour is unknown, but the colour is brown and just one whiff confirms its substance. The SNP and Independence are continuity, that is a steady return of listening to and acting in accordance with the people’s will as expressed by effective and direct democracy in action something we’ve been fooled nito thinking we have now. The institution that is Westminster long turned into one.
There will always be an NHS in Scotland under the SNP and under any other party that could arise, they’ll respect the people’s will, and that favours it –or perish. It is the sort of thing governments ought to do and do well, there’s no place for the market or profit in healthcare. There will not be any recognisable NHS in the residual UK on its current far-right swashbuckling robber-baron trajectory, so your point is somewhat moot. I have great faith in Geordie hospitality and humanity and the medical professions mostly some higher principles than fussing with bureaucracy when their skills are needed.
These questions that you say are very down-to-earth and practical and important for millions of people in EWNI (you do like your jargon and labelling, to obscure your absence of substance) are from people with no say in the independence referendum, and thus irrelevant. The SNP speaks for and to and represents a majority of Scots living and voting here, most of them never having had any passport at all, or need for one, aren’t fussed who might hypothetically issue it when they and their country’s fortunes inevitably soar.
Your comment above suggests some conflict within, an internal debate in which you present all sides of a dialogue, if you could continue talking to yourself, but simply omit spilling it all out here, that would be for the best. Better to be thought a fool than open your gob and remove all doubt.
@ N – Your comment – As you say some of the bigwigs thought that ”it ‘wasn’t terribly difficult’ to make oodles of money in the derivatives market out there”.
.
Which just goes to show that these bigwigs didn’t understand the inherent risks in the derivatives market at all. And that’s what so much of the problem was – they didn’t know their own jobs. Too often these bigwigs in the City were bullshitters not real bankers.
@ Habbabkuk,
You’re totally absolutley welcome here.Free speech is always welcome herein.
But,at same time,behave yersel’-or beat it.
You seem to specialise in offending/harassing people.
Gie’s peace mate.
@ Ben Franklin.
Why do you always post cryptic comments here but,when asked,refuse to expatiate?
I woulda thought in the spirit of your Hunter S Thompson avatar you’d be all in favour of clarity,exegesis?
Why so coy Ben?
You riff out muchly yet seem loathe to eluciadate?
How come,pray tell?
Genuinely interested.
If your officer’s dead and the sergeants look white,
Remember it’s ruin to run from a fight:
So take open order, lie down, and sit tight,
And wait for supports like a soldier.
Wait, wait, wait like a soldier . . .
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier ~of~ the Queen!
Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936 / Bombay)
http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/4134349-rudyard-kipling-and-afghanistan-the-young-british-soldier
Running a country would be so, so easy.
Running a country without a huge defecit and then selling or the silve and re-mortgaging for the kids to pay, not so.
I am sure Scotland has a chance of finding itself represented and less compromised.
Oh, but the E.u. What the saying.
Damned if you do….
Arise Sir Jimmy! Arise Sir Cyril!
Who else that was tapped on the shoulders by her Maj got up to nasty and criminal behaviour?
I see Her Maj is entertaining another gruesome geriatric at Windsor and that her second son, the Duke of York, held a event at which the Kuwaiti Sheikh was ‘introduced to British business leaders’. That would be the arms manufacturers and the oil drillers then.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20521798
I spotted Agent Cameron at the banquet last night in the video. Just look at the diamonds and the table laden with gold at the beginning of the video. You would not think that ‘austerity’ was the watchword.
American dirty tricks being played out in broad daylight in Europe while the EC turns a blind eye:’
From the Telegraph:
” Speaking from inside the Ecuadorean embassy, the WikiLeaks founder accused “crazed” Independent Senator Joe Lieberman and Republican congressman Peter King of pressuring companies into blocking funds to his whistle-blowing website.
Visa and MasterCard were among several payment firms who instigated the crippling “banking blockade” shortly after WikLeaks published more than 250,000 confidential State Department cables in December 2010.
Today, the Australian pleaded with the European Union to help lift the two-year banking blockade, through DataCell, an Icelandic company, which had left the website fighting for its survival.
Mr Assange, 41, admitted the blockade had cost the website more than £30 million in lost donations, wiped out 95 per cent of its revenue and forced its staff to take pay cuts of up to 40 per cent.
It had also reduced the volume of leaked documents it publicly released through its website, he added.
…”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/9707051/Julian-Assange-extremist-politicians-handing-WikiLeaks-economic-death-penalty.html
Komodo 9.16 pm, yesterday. Sorry I got engrossed in something else last night. I well recall the excellent research work you did on Atlantic Bridge, I think we all made our contributions before revealing links became unavailable. That ALEC has lost some sponsors is true. These superbig companies are looking for a return on their money. Likewise Crossroads, Karl Rove’s creation, has taken heavy losses. So when the president-maker fails to make a president multinational companies start asking what the cash they invested was for.
http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/08/15007504-karl-roves-election-debacle-super-pacs-spending-was-nearly-for-naught?lite
Mr Al-Barrak would probably not agree that the Emir has contributed to the ‘promotion of a vibrant democracy’ as Her Maj said in her speech.
Shut down the parliament. Yeah. Right. And then bang up an opposition leader.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabah_Al-Ahmad_Al-Jaber_Al-Sabah
The fourth such death in this case.
Russian supergrass dies in ‘mysterious circumstances’
A Russian supergrass said to be assisting a Swiss probe into a multi-million pound money laundering scheme involving corrupt Russian officials has died mysteriously outside his home in Surrey, it was reported last night.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9707569/Russian-supergrass-dies-in-mysterious-circumstances.html
The Surrey police are being kept busy anyway.
Some hilarious inclusions in this list of names, including that of Liam Fox.
Leveson Inquiry letter signatories
Lord Justice Leveson is due to publish his report on media standards on
The following 87 MPs and peers have written to two newspapers urging Lord Justice Leveson not to recommend statutory regulation of the press in his report on media standards
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-20521305
Still not a cheep from any western Government on Morsi’s power grab. They’re clearly happy with the prospect of Mubarak Mk 2 and have no real interest in promoting democracy in Egypt. I wonder what he was promised by Hillary Clinton…
Habbabkuk
I’ll leave aside, for the moment, your misrepresentation.
Is it your position that Palestinian spokespeople have equal access to BBC studios in London as have the representatives of the Israeli terrorist state?
Looks like the Palestinian bid for further recognition at the UN is forcing some to change the music, somewhat.
I wonder why.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jakewallissimons/100191513/britain-is-right-to-support-palestine-at-the-un-and-so-should-israel/