I am delighted that a new canpaign has started today against the state enforced child slavery in the uzbek cotton industry, especially as this campaign originates in Germany, where a significant portion of society appears to have finally woken up to the reality of the German government’s appalling complicity in the Nazi style regime and atrocities of Karimov.
However in the UK it remains the case that since the coalition government came to power, there has not been one single government statement on the human rights atrocities in Uzbekistan or – even more damning of our sham democracy – one single statement or question from New Labour.
Thanks for showing up Rupert Murdoch for what he is, a monger of the worst kind who should pay his full taxes here, maybe the real reason behind the meeting with Osborne and Boris, nothing to do with elections and all that.
A whole programme on torture and we missed it here? we must do better
the big Question, from Salford. Torture being destroyed by arguments. Craig is mentioned some 29 minutes in.
They also have their Habbabkuk on the programme, one Irish torture fan, named David Vance, who wrote Unionism decayed, he just does not get it.
But he’s all over the argument and fails to make a case for torture.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01qgn3x/The_Big_Questions_Series_6_Episode_4/
Habbabkuk
7 Dec, 2012 – 8:19 am
Mary, you probably won’t thank me for this, but I want to support your comments in your blog of 7.39 am 150%.
Re your 1st para : ALL of “Oniel”‘s writings have displayed clear evidence of hasbara direction. If I were Jon, I’d be less worried about “sock puppets” and more concerned with propagandists like “Oneil”; it must surely be clear to everyone that this guy/guyess is not just an ordinary citizen who somehow came across this thread and decided to debate. His purpose was to disturb.
Re your 2nd para : following on from the above, our mistake was to waste time “debating” with a man who wasn’t there to be debated with; worse, some commenters got mad with him (that must have pleased him – destabilisation!). And, more generally, nattering HERE won’t change anything on the ground. No, what needs to be done HERE is a referencing and sharing of info and sources (our opinions are just self-indulgence in the last analysis, since we’re preaching to the converted) and what needs to be done THERE (ie, in the real world) is a series of small actions: lose no opportunity, should the subject arise, to persuade people of the justice of the Palestinian cause; keep up steady pressure on the BBC, your MP and ministers as appropriate, support the BDS and apply it in your evereyday life, etc……
——
A moment of harmony or a morphing of Oneil Samuel into someone else?
A neat little handover after Mary blew Oneil’s cover?
On the record. Unusual style…
Habbabkuk
6 Dec, 2012 – 9:36 pm
Where is my namesake ONIEL this evening?
How strange not to hear his dulcet tones and read his sweet reasonableness.
Is he by any chance treating his lady wife to a “sausage” supper (not pork, of course) ?
[Jon/Mod: Posted as O’Neil, in fact this is Habbabkuk – sock-puppetting is discouraged here]
Dijon selling prized wines to fund social programs.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-29/dijon-sells-wine-stock-as-french-economic-slump-hits-budget.html
China is rumored to be developing a gold-backed currency, and if oil can be pried loose from the Petrodollar, y’all might want to stock up on Glenfiddich whilst your currency of choice is still in vogue.
Mary, I’d just like to add my support for you to that expressed by A Node, thatcrab, Summerhead, David, and others.
Habbabkuk, please stop abusing other contributors. Do you not understand? Craig Murray, the regular contributors and this blog itself are parts of a counterforce. You occasionally write phrases such as “Israel’s deplorable treatment of the Palestinians”, so you seem aware that a counterforce is called for. But by continually directing personal insults at the individuals who contribute to it, you degrade this environment for this entire community.
Some of your points are quite important and it is right of you to make them. For instance, I have a friend who was born in Israel; she is Left-leaning and a peace activist, so I partly agree with your phrase:
though I think that “pro-Likud” is too narrow. But you could make such points in a friendly, helpful manner if you so wished. Instead, you are acting as if you wish to disrupt the community spirit and drive away, silence or attempt to discredit people who make good contributions.
Show us that you care, Habbabkuk. That, or do the honest thing and plainly state which political forces in this world you support. At present, your intentions seem ambiguous at best, and probably rather unpleasant.
@ Fred – mortality rates for Palestinian children.
1/. The internationally accepted definition of “Infant Mortality Rate”, the expression which you used in your original post, is the number of deaths of children aged under 1 year per 1000 live births.
I responded to your observation about this figure and added some others which you omitted or were not aware of.
2/. I realise that you then gave a second statistic, ie, the percentage of children dying before they reach the age of 5.
However, had you BOTHERED to READ your source (=the link you gave) MORE CAREFULLY, you might have noticed that the figure for Palestinian children is 30 per MILLE ( 30o/oo )and not 30 per CENT ( 30% ). You are out by a factor of 10.
(BTW, the figures for Syria, Egypt and Jordan are 16 per mille, 21 per molle and 25 per mille, respectively. You can check out the figures for Israel and various other countries yourself).
“mortality rates for Palestinian children.”
So which part of “End of story” didn’t you understand then?
I suspect many here have read William Blum’s excellent book Killing Hope, or read his blog. Here’s his latest interview:
‘There is a Drone with Assange’s name on it’ – William Blum
http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_01_28/There-is-a-drone-with-Assange-s-name-on-William-Blum/
Arbed; Thanks for that. Blum was part of the underground press in the late 60’s and I thought he might have been with Ramparts magazine, but found no hits.
“And Ecuador and its president, Rafael Correa, will pay a price. You think with the whole world watching, the United States would not intervene in Ecuador? In Latin America, it comes very naturally for Washington. During the Cold War it was said that the United States could cause the downfall of a government south of the border … with a frown. The dissolution of the Soviet Union didn’t bring any change in that because it was never the Soviet Union per se that the United States was fighting. It was the threat of a good example of an alternative to the capitalist model.
For example, on January 21, 2000 in Ecuador, where almost two-thirds live in poverty, a very large number of indigenous peasants rose up in desperation and marched to the capital city of Quito, where they were joined by labor unions and some junior military officers (most members of the army being of indigenous stock). This coalition presented a list of economic demands, seized the Congress and Supreme Court buildings, and forced the president to resign. He was replaced by a junta from the ranks of the new coalition. The Clinton administration was alarmed. Besides North American knee-reflex hostility to anything that looks or smells like a leftist revolution, Washington had big plans for a large military base in Manta (later closed by Correa). And Colombia — already plagued by leftist movements — was next door.
The US quickly stepped in to educate the Ecuadorean coalition leaders as to the facts of Western Hemispheric imperial life. The American embassy in Quito … Peter Romero, Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America and Western Hemispheric Affairs … Sandy Berger, National Security Adviser to President Clinton … Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering … all made phone calls to Ecuadorian officials to threaten a cutoff in aid and other support, warning that “Ecuador will find itself isolated”, informing them that the United States would never recognize any new government the coalition might set up, there would be no peace in Ecuador unless the military backed the vice president as the new leader, and the vice president must continue to pursue neoliberal “reforms”, the kind of IMF structural adjustment policies which had played a major role in inciting the uprising in the first place.”
http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer106.html
Clark, I think we might (unfortunately) be on very different wavelengths.
You think that I “continually direct personal insults at the individuals who contribute to this blog”.
This is incorrect. Where my posts are sustained, as they are on occasion, they are mostly replying to people who have either tried to trip me up or who insult me in one way or another (instead of answering the point I was making). And I go for WHAT some people write on occasion, I don’t go for THEM. As I have no idea who these people are, they can hardly offend me through their person, but only through what they write.
I, on the other hand, think that I am pulling up people when they write an especially blatant or tendentious piece of nonsense. Or when they include gratuitous, irrelevant and nasty and sour little nuggets in their posts (recent example: in the middle of a post about Mali – to which I do not take exception – Mary suggests that Kim Darroch is a member of MI5 or MI6. Relevance?????).
Why do you have a problem with that?
I shan’t go into the various exagerations in your post (and in other people’s). Glenn’s statistics do a good job in exposing one of them at least.
Pot/kettle? Chicken/egg.
Fred, have you understood the difference between 30 per mille and 30 per cent yet?
“Habbabkuk, please stop abusing other contributors. Do you not understand? ”
The Scorpion and the Frog
A scorpion and a frog meet on the bank of a stream and the
scorpion asks the frog to carry him across on its back. The
frog asks, “How do I know you won’t sting me?” The scorpion
says, “Because if I do, I will die too.”
The frog is satisfied, and they set out, but in midstream,
the scorpion stings the frog. The frog feels the onset of
paralysis and starts to sink, knowing they both will drown,
but has just enough time to gasp “Why?”
Replies the scorpion: “Its my nature…”
Fair dues: 30 -> ‰ <- 'per mille' in the article was misleading, and accompanied later by a 'typo' conversion to '%'. A very poor show.
The 7 times higher than Israeli rate stands though, and the first rebuttal (and typical telling off) using the under 1 rate was poor too.
The raw post counts do not display the very high rate of patronism and sarcasm and challenges from Habbakuks input. It is nonsense to talk over the record with claims of ‘exaggeration’.
Habbabkuk, 29 Jan, 4:19 pm:
I don’t regard it as “fortune”; I have deliberately developed my style of communication, and I’d like you to do the same. If you’d like some help, follow the link on my name and use the shorter e-mail address. But please be patient as I am often busy.
Many other people have pointed this out to you, and you have posted many insulting and/or sarcastic comments on this thread alone. Again, if you’d like help in comparing your self image with the way it comes across with a view to improving matters, e-mail me and we can work on it together.
This little interview makes it obvious that president of the Ivory Coast, Mr. Quattarra does not see the threat, as the MSM has been told to make us believe. But he does his best for the backers who pushed him into power.
He clearly states the point of ‘negotiations’ with ethnic tribal leaders in the North of Mali, he acknowledges the decades long strife for a Tuareg autonomous area in Azawad and recognises that this will not be a short campaign.
So we give 21 million in support for the Syrian rebel’s and feel compelled to support France and send our own troops to Mali, with 700 soldiers coming from Chad and Ecowas looking at more support from African countries.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/ivory-coast-president-urges-germany-to-deploy-military-to-mali-a-878791.html
Having come out here as German some time ago I feel that my Government should keep out of it and concentrate on the issues here in Europe and their own countries finances. Germany should speed up its gold repatriation from London and Paris, so they can play a part in a future new world currency.
More young men have died in Afghanistan than we are sending there, some 440, so when will we see the first Mali casualties be brought home.
Habbabkuk
From your posts I have formed the opinion that you are a Zionist troll, a homophobe and a misogynist but that is only an opinion.
You have yet to elucidate your views on the Palestine/Israel problem why are you so reticent on this issue?
So now we know that Julian Assange is very likely on a CIA hit list, what happens to embassy’s with regards to immunity to its inhabitants, if there is a deposed president or an assassinated president?
Is the police/Government allowed to re allocate diplomatic space?
Thanks for that Blum snippet, Arbed and welcome back Dreolin, good to see your sensible posts again.
This one is for all the computer/cyber geeks in the world, i.e who has send the red October virus to eastern Europe and why?
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/how-russian-virus-hunters-tracked-down-a-global-espionage-network-a-879467.html
Nevermind; The presence of russian slang makes me wonder if it is Anonymous copy-cats writing Red October.
30 per mille is still pretty bad. I’d reckon a whole lot more infant or pre-5 deaths and many others go unrecorded, especially with the rapid burial religious dictates and constant population migration; record keeping suffers when the bullets, clubs, white phosphorous, settler criminals and bulldozers are in action. Bodies reduced to dust or ploughed over. There is the other end of the age spectrum too, where mortality rates are also no doubt, shocking and artificially accelerated. The weak and defenceless easy targets for these cowards but killing the young children of Palestine, preventable deaths due to disease, malnutrition, terror, murder, the most despicable acts of the malignant Israeli regime. It’s not even a case of a plan going awry, going rogue, it has all been pre-meditated.
Bricking up bodies (children/babies, dead and alive) in walls (for luck!), seems to have some history in Spain, with the jesuits, who were converts to christianity and were most active in the inquisition. A case of the over-zealousness of the convert. Mass graves under the foundations of swimming pools might be a grotesque modern day equivalent for future archaeologists to ponder over how they might have come to be there.
Earlier discussion was on the barbarity of Islamic punishment for real offences as well as religious ‘crimes’. I’m surprised reviewing this thread that no further mention was made of the conference in Iraq CM attended attempting to address the matter of the many Palestinians held in Israeli dungeons on specious charges. Large numbers of young children also being incarcerated and maltreated. Has there been any movement on that resultant from the talks?
I’ve only read, some time ago the online portions of Blum’s book over at http://killinghope.org/ Down with Apple-pie.
@Nevermind “Germany should speed up its gold repatriation from London and Paris.”
Why so? When the majority of Germany’s overseas gold holdings is/was in New York and the US is stalling and offering it only in instalments.
Quite apart from the fact it is indeed a worthless relic. It is inedible and its only real use, excepting misguided drooling over it, is for trace amounts in electronics/chip production.
@ ThatCrab :
The Israeli/Palestinian ratio for the mortality rate at 5 years may well be 1 to 7 according to Fred’s source (someone can check if necessary).
I allowed myself to comment on the 1 year figures because Fred used the expression “Infant Mortality Rate” and that expression – must I really have to repeat everything? – customarily means the 1 year rate. So why is that rebuttal “poor”? I thought the figures were quite revealing, actually.
I find it interesting that although it’s Fred who gives an incorrect figure (by a factor of ten), it’s someone else who rsuhes to his defence. Like a relay team, really. No admission of error from the guy who dropped the baton, of course.
@ Cryptonym : “even 30 per mille is quite bad”. Yes, I agree, it’s nothing to be proud of. For context, I’ve already given you the age 5 figures for a couple of the Palestinian’s neighbours, and if I suspect that if you plough through the figures in Fred’s source you’ll find the relative positions of Israel, Palestine and the other countries I threw in for comparison are more or less the same for the age 5 statistic and for the IMR (ie, 1 year) statistic.
Just as a matter of interest : who shares Fred’s opinion that what has happened/is happening to the Palestinians can be equated with what happened to the European Jews? In other words, that we are in the presence of a new holocaust?
you talking to me?
@ Cryptonym. If its really that worthless junk, why does it need returning in instalments, is it not were it should be?
Is there another Tungsten shimmy coming up or are they too busy with other countries demanding their gold reserves back? bit of a rush on.
Or is it just time saving, trying to restore some trust in holding banks, the precursor to a new order?
Soon it will be tulip bulbs again.
Child care costs in the UK are the highest in Europe bar Switzerland.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/48eef10e-6719-11e2-8b67-00144feab49a.html#axzz2JOAnngLa
Child care workers in the UK receive the lowest pay in Europe. Average here £11,000 pa In Holland £22,000 pa.
This Government now relaxes the rules on staff to child ratios, now 1 to 4, will be 1 to 6, thus placing greater burdens on the poorly paid nursery staff and possibly affecting the children’s development and progress. I expect SamCam has nannies and doesn’t bother with nurseries. My niece who is a secondary school teacher and is married to another teacher pays £1,500 per month for day care for their 2 year old.
Things have value because people think it does. Beanie babies and Pokemon cards used to have value; now they don’t.
The world’s shadow economy began when gold was no longer required as collateral, substituting paper or dross metal currency. The IMF and Fed have been printing money like the Sorcerer’s apprentice made brooms. Out of control and mindless cloning of cash seems like a good idea, until confidence, then buying power, crashes.
@Habbabkuk: You wrote asking for my advice. I rather doubt that you need any wisdom from the likes of me, but I can pass on some advice from a wise friend, who sadly departed some years ago, together with a couple of points picked up through participating in these forums over the years.
“ThatCrab’s post (13h55) presumably refers to me. In your opinion
– should I turn the other cheek and not respond to what is patent nonsense, or […] ”
Why do you want to reply at all – what are you hoping to achieve? If the aim is to persuade someone to a different point of view, the approach might be reconsidered a bit.
Persuasion is an incremental process. It takes time and finesse, it needs to be gentle and requires patience and also rewards.
If you would rather correct the record, not so much for the benefit of your correspondent but for other readers, and on general principles of accuracy, I would suggest not making it personal. Some of my biggest rethinks have come from someone arguing the facts, maybe with more than one line of approach, but the task is made harder when wading through personal insults in the process.
“- should I ask him to repost a clarified version which we can understand
without recourse to a stiff whisky and an ice-pack around one’s temples, or […]”
It’s always worth asking for clarification of items you don’t agree with – in fact that might be a good starting point for introducing an alternative perspective. But please consider the point about persuasion above, if you would like your perspective to have a fighting chance.
” – should I ask him to refer us to just a couple of posts of
his which he feels were valuable contributions to this blog?”
This would seem unnecessarily combative. It’s unlikely to arrive in any sort of agreement, and gives others the impression that your correspondent is being picked upon. If this is the approach taken with a number of one’s correspondents, the overall impression will be that of a disruptor, maybe worse.
*
Now it’s not as if I personally live up to much of the above. Clark is one of the best as far as that sort of thing is concerned, his advice is always extremely well meaning.
Swedish Svea Appeal Court rules compensation must be paid for violations of the presumption of innocence, even when there is no formal acquital (Svea Court of Appeal T 692-12 – Compensation Act (1998:714)):
https://www.flashback.org/sp41743430
You’ll have to use Google translate, I’m afraid. But keep a note of that thar case number – I think it might come in handy later for Julian Assange… 😉
Gerald Scarfe, a very witty cartoonist. Portraying the truth should not be a crime for journalists or cartoonists though it appears to be these days. I recall Scarfe’s middle page spread when Nixon was impeached. He had managed to capture Nixon’s face turning his nose into a penis and chin into testicles. It came with short verse which ran something like:
His manners were so slick
I’ll miss his every trick,
His used-car style and sweaty smile
Made him a perfect [expletive deleted].
I don’t recall anybody criticising Scarfe for attacking Quakers. Zionists are so touchy about their crimes.
Here is a petition everybody should consider signing. It is asking for the Chilcot Inquiry to release papers and name names forthwith. It is worth a minut of everybody’s time>
http://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/chilcot-inquiry