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847 thoughts on “Blog Down

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  • A Node

    FOR THE ATTENTION OF NON-EMINENCES AND NON-MURRAYISTAS

    New studies: ‘Conspiracy theorists’ sane; government dupes crazy, hostile

    Recent studies by psychologists and social scientists in the US and UK suggest that contrary to mainstream media stereotypes, those labeled “conspiracy theorists” appear to be saner than those who accept the official versions of contested events.

    The authors were surprised to discover that it is now more conventional to leave so-called conspiracist comments than conventionalist ones: “Of the 2174 comments collected, 1459 were coded as conspiracist and 715 as conventionalist.” In other words, among people who comment on news articles, those who disbelieve government accounts of such events as 9/11 and the JFK assassination outnumber believers by more than two to one. That means it is the pro-conspiracy commenters who are expressing what is now the conventional wisdom, while the anti-conspiracy commenters are becoming a small, beleaguered minority.

    Perhaps because their supposedly mainstream views no longer represent the majority, the anti-conspiracy commenters often displayed anger and hostility: “The research… showed that people who favoured the official account of 9/11 were generally more hostile when trying to persuade their rivals.”

    Professor deHaven-Smith explains why people don’t like being called “conspiracy theorists”: The term was invented and put into wide circulation by the CIA to smear and defame people questioning the JFK assassination! “The CIA’s campaign to popularize the term ‘conspiracy theory’ and make conspiracy belief a target of ridicule and hostility must be credited, unfortunately, with being one of the most successful propaganda initiatives of all time.”
    In other words, people who use the terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” as an insult are doing so as the result of a well-documented, undisputed, historically-real conspiracy by the CIA to cover up the JFK assassination.”

    http://therebel.org/resistance/666083-new-studies-conspiracy-theorists-sane-government-dupes-crazy-hostile

  • Flaming June

    Here and in America, the number of suicides of military personnel have exceeded the number of those killed in action.

    UK soldier and veteran suicides ‘outstrip Afghan deaths’
    More British soldiers and veterans took their own lives in 2012 than died fighting in Afghanistan, the BBC’s Panorama learns.
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23259865

    U.S. military suicides exceed combat deaths – CBS News
    http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57563857/u.s-military-suicides-exceed-combat-deaths/
    Suicides in the U.S. military surged to a record 349 last year, far exceeding American combat deaths in Afghanistan, and some …

  • Kempe

    “Perhaps because their supposedly mainstream views no longer represent the majority, the anti-conspiracy commenters often displayed anger and hostility ”

    A vast leap from an analysis of 2,000 comments. It is actually a tiny minority that bother to leave comments on a newspaper website anyway, the Daily Wail has over 100 million unique visitors to it’s website every month but barely a few hundred ever leave comments and the views expressed say nothing about the commentators sanity.

    In short a badly researched piece from a website full of similar material. Can we assume that you don’t subscribe to their views on the Holocaust?

    If anti-conspiracy contributors display anger and hostility it’s out of frustration at the stupidity of conspiracy theorists.

  • Flaming June

    Advice to the young aspiring to be journalists.

    The Business of Manufacturing Opinion
    by Jason Hirthler / July 13th, 2013

    ‘[..]It won’t be all sunshine and light, though. You’ll have to defend wars that turn sideways, policies that imperil the peace, and economic models that defy arithmetic. But this is the burden of the public intellectual—laboring to advance unpopular causes in the face of the ‘bewildered herd’, as PR godfather Walter Lippmann liked to call it.

    But the educated classes will embrace you. For those of us with a degree, your paper is the gate-key to our ruling class pretensions. How we love to settle down in our sunlit living room on a Sunday morning to sip coffee and leaf through The Times, feeling the frisson of liberal respectability. We’ll swallow your politics along with the masterly literary and cultural reportage, and not think twice.

    But be warned, this state of affairs may not endure. It has become difficult for average Americans to sustain the threadbare illusion that they are Middle Class. According to Paul Craig Roberts in his scrupulously researched The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, about 16 million smart, naïve and mostly entitled college graduates have fired forth from our universities between 2007 and 2014. They will find just over a million jobs waiting for them that require a degree. Either they will launch a Facebook campaign to force fast casual restaurants to require PhDs to ‘build’ a naked burrito, or they will burn their papers of record, if not their degrees, in the nearest bonfire. There should be plenty to choose from.’

    http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/07/the-business-of-manufacturing-opinion/

  • Fred

    “In short a badly researched piece from a website full of similar material. Can we assume that you don’t subscribe to their views on the Holocaust?”

    That it was a conspiracy by the German government to commit ethnic cleansing?

    The question is what was the mainstream view on the holocaust in 1940s Germany? Would you subscribe to that? If you had been in 1940s Germany and someone had told you about the death camps would you have believed them? Or would you have said they were mad because your government wouldn’t do a thing like that?

  • Kempe

    Your point being what? That because a dictatorship managed an effective cover-up (or didn’t, opinions vary) under wartime conditions the same thing is happening today with every other conspiracy?

  • John Goss

    A Node at 11.31 pm last night. Good link.

    ‘In any event, Putin has made clear that Russia would never extradite Snowden. As he put it, “Russia has never extradited anyone and is not going to do so. Same as no one has ever been extradited to Russia.” Besides, the cat’s already out of the bag, in terms of the big revelations Snowden made public.’

    Perhaps Theresa May and Jack Straw could have taken a leaf out of that book on how decent civilised countries behave.

    On Topic. New Facebook photo of Craig Murray. He looks good.

  • Fred

    “Your point being what? That because a dictatorship managed an effective cover-up (or didn’t, opinions vary) under wartime conditions the same thing is happening today with every other conspiracy?”

    My point is that people shouldn’t blindly follow either cause, it’s blindly following causes that lead to events such as the Holocaust.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    “Fact that the flat income distribution system ie communist system itself was the subject of sabotage by the plutocrats, and oligarchs of the grossly unequal income distribution systems ie capitalist system, is discounted! Further, the self-preservation attempt by the communists in the face of the onslaught of the capitalists is misconstrued as the deep state bent on coercion of the standard issue worker in the communist systems.” FedUp.

    Yes, yes, I know all this, as do billions of others. But Jon’s argument that flatter income distribution is related always, or usually, to a less intrusive deep state – for whatever reasons – is flawed (for whatever complex historical reasons).

    You’re an old Commie, Fedup, aren’t you? Ah, Comrade Fedupki, welcome! Would you like a glass of vodka, or do you prefer moutai? Was the The Revolutionary Communist Group, or the Worker’s Hammer? Or were you a Trot? SWP? Well, it makes a welcome change from blazered, straw-hatted self-consciously mature Englishmen who stroll determinedly through ancient churches, hands clasped tightly behind their backs, muttering, “Hmn…” as they peer up at the gargoyle’d world. There appears to be an entire Oxbridge boat-race team of straw hats here, you know.

    🙂

  • Suhayl Saadi

    The Al Hilli thread is still going, btw. 16,000 comments, plus (there was an older thread on the subject which was capped at 7,500 or so comments). The regular posters there (eg. James, Bluebird, Tim and now more recently, someone who calls themselves, ‘Fat Bastard’) should get an award for sheer doggedness.

    Wouldn’t it be deeply freaky if the murderer(s), too, was (were) posting? Nah, silly thought. One wonders if the murderers wear blazers and straw hats and walk determinedly up the aisles of ancient churches… there’s a (fictional) story in there, somewhere.

  • Kempe

    ““Russia has never extradited anyone and is not going to do so. Same as no one has ever been extradited to Russia.” Besides, the cat’s already out of the bag, in terms of the big revelations Snowden made public.’

    Perhaps Theresa May and Jack Straw could have taken a leaf out of that book on how decent civilised countries behave. ”

    So you agree with Straw’s decision not to extradite Pinochet? How about Andrey Lugovoy? Is it decent and civilised to shelter suspected murderers?

  • Flaming June

    Revealed: How a Blair fixer picked the judge for the David Kelly Inquiry just three hours after the weapons inspector’s suicide

    Letter from Lord Hutton shows he was asked three hours after the death
    He had not been identified and no cause of death had been established
    Hutton was contacted by Blair’s friend and former flatmate Lord falconer
    Is evidence of the extraordinary haste with which the Blair Government set up an inquiry to replace the usual coroner’s inquest

    By Miles Goslett
    13 July 2013

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2362659/Revealed-How-Blair-fixer-picked-judge-David-Kelly-Inquiry-just-hours-weapons-inspectors-suicide.html

  • Dreoilin

    “Dre
    It’s easy to fake IP.”

    You talking about using proxies, Herbie?
    I thought the use of a proxy would be visible to Jon. Maybe not.

  • Flaming June

    Thanks for that John.

    Greenwald: Snowden has enough information to cause US govt worst damage in history
    Discussion on Medialens.

    http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/thread/1373787571.html

    ~~~

    PS Miliband D is on Marr BBC 1 speaking to Marr who is making a special appearance. He seems to have made a good recovery from his stroke apart from a slight speech impediment and some facial paralysis.

    Miliband is attempting to fill the role of a reserve for world affairs commentator B.Liar. Full of it.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    “decent civilised countries…” John Goss.

    I agree about not deporting Snowden. He’s a whistleblower and political asylum-seeker. However, it’s a stretch to describe Russia as a “decent civilised country”. It’s a gangster state run by a combination of often interchangeable KGB and Mafia. Think too about the massacres in Chechnya and the Russian state’s use of Jihadists and false flag ops in that context. Snowden has been forced to seek refuge there and having a multipolar world is better than having a unipolar world. But that fact should not lull us into imagining that somehow the Russian state is beneficent, any more so, internationally, than is the US/UK state. And domestically, the Russian state is far worse.

  • Anon

    “Snowden has been forced to seek refuge there and having a multipolar world is better than having a unipolar world.”

    Good points, Suhayl. Had Snowden found refuge in Iran, the Murrayistas would be saying what a thoroughly decent humanitarian government Iran has. Of course, Russia will make full use of Snowden for its own nefarious activities.

    One very weak argument made by pro-spying msm is that Snowden has undermined his cause by seeking asylum in countries with poor democratic / human rights records. Very weak though this argument is for reasons that should be obvious, it takes a Murrayista to and then go and feed right into it. They need to concentrate on their support for Snowden.

    By the way, Suhayl, you’ve got me all figured out about the blazered aisle-striding and gargoyle-gazing. Since when did this place turn into the bloody NSA? Is there no sanctuary?

    However, you have competition in the form of Dreoilin and Someone – they really are good and would make a great team to replace Snowden should they fancy partnering up and moving to Hawaii.

  • Anon

    Suhayl, not having the inclination to trawl through 16k comments, would you be able to provide a summary and, if one has been reached, a conclusion? Mossad, CIA, or MI6?

  • Flaming June

    The Friends of Israel are out in strength this morning. Following Miliband D on Marr BBC1, we have just had Lord Levy on Murnaghan Sky News. Levy uses the same hand gestures as his best mate Tony. They must have had the same teacher.

  • Anon

    Also, where are we on the Boston false-flag and has Trowbridge made any breakthroughs on the Flight 214 sabotage?

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Anon, ha, good ones! Gargoyle-gazing is good for the (eternal) soul, they say. Re. Al Hilli, I don’t think they’ve come to a conclusion. Various ideas seem to have been floated over the course of time. Posters have come and gone, though some have remained. Some have fought with others, then there also have been group hugs (well, not really). And yes, the Comrades from UKIP do seem to have a presence here.

    “Levy uses the same hand gestures as his best mate Tony. They must have had the same teacher.” Flamin’ June (as Terry never intoned)

    The Manson Family, perhaps…? Or Mr Spock (one of my fictional heroes!)?

    I do know what you mean, though, Flaming June. Do they both drop their tees, as in ‘Bri’ain’ to appear more man-next-door-ish? God, if Tony Blair lived next door, one would want lots of garlic, everywhere. Mirrors, too. Stakes, Peter Cushing, the lot. There is, too, a certain body language – including facile hand movements – which most TV reporters seem to be taught these days, which really annoys me and makes me want to prick the TV screen with a pin.

  • Flaming June

    Military and royal propaganda contd.

    Location Buckingham Palace Gardens 12 July 2013
    Event Queen’s Coronation Gala Evening

    Royal hangers-on, holders of the royal warrant, Fascisti and rich tourists seated in rows in front of the stage. Seats a snip @ £90 – £120

    On the iPlayer

    Interval – Mr Gareth Malone, now bearded and creator of the Military Wives Choir speaks to Ms Katherine Jenkins, songstress.

    GM Katherine Hello…..You’ve performed for the Queen many times and for Pope John Paul II and you have been to Iraq and Afghanistan. What has been the highlight for you?

    KJ Well I would say going out to somewhere like Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s always a proud moment. I love all of it.

    Malone and Jenkins should get their brains into gear and read this.

    http://beforeitsnews.com/war-and-conflict/2013/04/effects-of-depleted-uranium-found-in-dead-babies-in-iraq-and-afghanistan-2446480.html

    ~~~

    Ms Katie Melua sang an excruciating melody entitled I’ll be There. She was singing about the Queen. Look at these lyrics!! Sick bag time.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IRIP-hSfJ0&feature=youtu.be

    She is like the lady down the road
    Or just the woman up the street,
    Like any mother you may know.
    To me, she is the one who had it planned
    To lead us all to Wonderland,
    She always wanted us to go,
    And she said:
    Don’t ever be lonely,
    Remember, I’ll always care.
    Wherever you may be
    Remember I will be there.
    And like another lady that we know
    She has a smile so bright and sweet,
    And hair as white as driven snow;
    Though life is never easy day to day,
    She has a very special way
    To make us smile when we are low.
    And she says:
    Don’t ever be lonely
    Remember, I’ll always care.

    Glaxo Smith Kline were one of the main sponsors along with Jaguar. GSK have just been accused of bribing medics and hospitals in China. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23265958
    Must keep the exports flowing! and it makes a change from arms.

  • Anon

    The hand gestures are deeply irritating and it is sad to see alternative outlets such as RT adopting them too, but the greatest annoyance for me is the referring to Krishnan Guru-Murthy as “Krish” by his colleagues on the Channel 4 news. Those 5-minute slots after the broadcast during which we hear the thoughts of “As a paraplegic Zoroastrian lesbian…” and such like are painful, too

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Flaming June at 11:15am: Reminds me of Norman St John Stevas who, it seemed to me, used to exude unctuousness as a tannery exudes fat.

    Sorry, just in time for Sunday lunch.

  • A Node

    Anon 14 Jul, 2013 – 10:50 am

    “Also, where are we on the Boston false-flag ….?”

    I’m glad you asked, anon.

    The chief witness to Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s involvement with the FBI died in police custody, shot six times including what his father believes was a ‘kill shot’ through the crown of the head.
    http://rt.com/news/todashev-head-shot-father-009/

    Meanwhile an Aunt of Tamerlan Tsarnaev has positively identified the man who was filmed being led naked into the back of as police car as her nephew. This film was taken after her nephew was supposedly shot dead in a gun battle with police.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sDTq67zc3sAnon 14 Jul, 2013 – 10:50 am

    Then there was the unfortunate loss of two FBI agents who were involved in the capture of the other brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. They fell to their deaths from a helicopter shortly after.
    http://intellihub.com/2013/05/23/fbi-agents-killed-in-virginia-were-investigating-the-boston-bombing/

    And of course the uncle who was so quick to appear on TV condemning his nephews turned out not to be quite what he seemed. Amongst other dodgy dealings, he formed a company sending ‘aid’ to Chechens which listed it’s address as the home of former top CIA official Graham Fuller.
    http://darkernet.in/boston-bombings-when-hue-and-cry-goes-awry-lessons-for-social-media/

  • A Node

    Final reminder ………………..

    Today, Sunday 14th July, Radio 4 Extra at 13.30:
    Craig Murray – Murder in Samarkand

    David Hare’s witty portrait of an unlikely hero, based on the memoir by Craig Murray.

    Craig is proud to be sent as Ambassador to Uzbekistan, eager to work hard and also eager for fun. The combination takes him on a dangerous course both professionally and personally, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

    Craig Murray played by David Tennant

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