I had excellent news from my cardiologist yesterday. Ready to think about other things now. I am horrified by the continuing stream of ” royal” baby hype on television. Truly pathetic – is this 1313 or 2013? Who buys into this nonsense?
I thought the Lib Dem take on Trident missiles was hilarious. This small group of islands does apparently need to retain the ability to wipe out one third of the urban population of humankind, as a defence against something undefined – possibly people we invade getting too annoyed about it – and in order to increase our “influence” in the World. As we plainly have less influence than the Germans, who don’t feel this need for the power of obliteration, I do not quite see how this works. Nor do I see Pakistan, which does have nuclear weapons, as very influential. Nor do I quite understand how our influence can be increased by possessing something under effective American control. But there you are.
Anyway, the Lib Dems have come to the intellectually scintillating conclusion that we do need this world shattering power, but we don’t need it on Wednesday or Thursday afternoons or on Saturday mornings, which will be cheaper. Brilliant, and plainly does not dodge any big ethical or practical questions at all.
Thanks Anon for clarifying, Jeffrey Dahmer was a bit harsh I admit, but I did take affront to your suggestion because somebody else had the same idea.
Water is a real issue which should not be in the political, but the human roam, its political use reviles most and more than any esoteric talk of faith or believe, it is what makes us alive, we are water and we need it, a lifelong need for all of us. So there should be equal water for all.
I’m glad you are a charitable soul, it is very commendable and apparently cleanses the soul, some say, suppose that’s why you have mentioned the Dresden Fire storm and recycling in Norfolk, a purely charitable comment. I still say that FJ’s comparison was apt and what do you know of recycling in Norfolk?
If we think that oil is what gets us all going, wait until the aquifers are starting to dry up from overuse, whatever politics, money or religion, masses will be on the move without water, until they find some.
Those Scotsmen who claim to have lived of whiskey alone are telling tales…;)
Well every other message board seems to be having a guess the sex/name/weight of the royal baby poll, I thought it would be more appropriate here if we had a poll on which will be the first royal baby conspiracy theory out of the traps:-
1. It’s a lizard
2. It’s an alien
3. There is no baby. Kate’s been walking around with a cushion under her coat waiting for a suitable baby to be kidnapped from an NHS maternity ward. This is necessary to cover up William’s impotence/the fact that he’s a lizard and continue the royal blood line.
4. It’s black
5. It bears a suspicious resemblance to Boris Johnson
6. All of the above
What a shallow blog, red tops eat your heart out, we can also bore the pants of ourselves…..
All about waters breaking at St. Mary’s, hardly any water for Gaza, not enough water for Wales hill dwellers, due to plumbing, what a sunny dry watery day we’re all having.
such fun
Dear all,observe the sync of the sayanim singalong above aka “The Israeli narrative”, would put the miss-stepping five dancing israelis in the NY car park to shame!! Only the bass from Villager is missing otherwise the esayanim ensemble is in fine fettle, almost wish I could add to their annual $2,000 stipend!!
Thalif Deen makes the point for Gaza in 2012, apologise for not being up to date.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/90-gaza-water-unsafe-drinking-says-un/11544
Kempe, it’s a zionist false-flag op to distract the world’s attention from Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, obviously!
Bah, Jon if you are unable to mod the tag team, let me say it to these DIYers, yer yarmulkers are all see through, you are fooling no one, please take your narrative to Debka or HuffPo !
Kofi Anan
Only a ziofuckwit can engage in “What about”, “So, the others do too”, to deny the facts and realities
Passer
Some people are above the law. Some people are beneath it.
Muslims are not protected by laws. As is often said, “the law isn’t there to protect terrorists”.
Zionists are above the law.
Laws may apply to everyone else, but not to them.
Remember what happened this very day, many years ago? 22nd July 1946?
1946-Jewish terrorists bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem which was the headquarters of the British civil and military administration, killing
91. No warning was ever given! Jews serving in the British army played a major role in the bombing and boasted about their role in this insidious act years later!
Why are the Jews in the British army able to boast about what they did without being arrested for it?
They are able to kill Palestinians because Palestinians are beneath the law.
The reason why serving jewish British soldiers were able to kill other British soldiers and civilians, and be so confident in being above the law they are able to freely boast about what they did, is they are above the law.
The Conservative Friends of Israel, The Labour Friends of Israel and the Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel would never allow, them to be investigated, let alone prosecuted. Israel has bought enouth Friends of Israel in all three parties to have all the control they need.
Nobody is denying the facts and the reality, Passerby, though “concentration camp” is probably pushing it a little. I would like to know, why do you never post on, say, India’s theft of water alloted to Pakistan on its way from the Indian Himalaya to the Indus basin, on which millions of Pakistani farmers are reliant?
Arsalan, some people will have to die out before the pasts crimes and violations of principles that allowed this UN protectorate Israel to be established, by means of a series of violent land grabs and without consideration given to the existing majority population, then Arab.
I’m a realist and rather see the equation in Palestine change first, because the food situation is getting worse everywhere, especially in Gaza, but poverty exists everywhere, including in prosperous Shanghai, poverty is the trademark of our current politi of greed, so this issue came up and rightly so.
And as it so happens, today Tesco’s CEO announced that the age of cheap food is well behind us, that prices will rise, as commodities do.
But today is not about that is it? its about water….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7GQ3XygHI8
More on Dr Kelly’s death by Andrew Gilligan in yesterday’s Telegraph in which room is given to Blair. It is a description of layers of bullshit sandwiched between evil. Part of the problem is that Gilligan is a member of the corporate media, commonly known as the MSM. (A friend of mine did not know what that acronym meant). It does not mention the dozens of facts/lies/omissions which make suicide unlikely.
The betrayal of Dr David Kelly, 10 years on
Andrew Gilligan, the journalist at the centre of the ‘dodgy dossier’ row, reflects on the shocking facts that have emerged since Dr David Kelly’s death http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10192271/The-betrayal-of-Dr-David-Kelly-10-years-on.html
What cheap food Mr Clarke @ Tesco? A few years back, if you bought 20 items in a supermarket, you could estimate that the cost would be about £20. Now 20 items cost + £30.
The Tesco Seventeen http://www.tescoplc.com/index.asp?pageid=172
Mr Clarke did not take his bonus but he still took £1.6m in salary.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/markets/article-2166031/Shareholder-spring-Tesco-firing-line-exec-pay-faces-investors.html
Two retiring directors went with £3m between them.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/10077174/Tesco-pays-3m-to-outgoing-directors-but-chief-executive-misses-out-on-bonus.html
BIG SUPERMARKETS. BIG MONEY.
The war crime that keeps on giving …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzCwSEsgM4Y
@Kempe: Ha ha, yes! I’ll go for theories 1 and 5 please.
@Hasbarista: I don’t think dancing Israelis offers, um, an explanation for everything – not least because the Palestinian situation was also very difficult prior to 9/11. As has been mentioned quite a bit here, yes the situation in Palestine/Gaza is dreadful, but what to do about the deadlock given the political realities on the ground is complex. Views on what to do, of course, are always welcome. My acid test is: if you were leading an international conference on the subject, what would your speech contain?
By the way, I wrote a lengthy reply to you yesterday (21 July 12:05pm) – I should be interested to hear what you think.
Anon
I agree with passer that gaza, not just gaza but also the strips of isolated land in the westbank that the palestinians are cramed in to are concentration camps.
if we look at how wiki defines concentration camp, and we look at gaza and the isolated strips in the west bank wehere palestinians are cramed in.
They match.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camp
When we use the term, Zionists like to scream, “it’s our word, how dare anyone but us use it!”
But that is just a tactic, they have been using for so long, it is wearing out.
Instead of using the word concentration camp, Zionists would like us to use the word, “5 star hotel” for Gaza. When there was starvation there, and the Zionists togeather with their Egyption slaves blokaded all the people in, and they bombarded it with white phosperous, burniing people alive from the inside out, while starving them.
5 Star hotel was exactly the words Zionists used, when asked about the people starving there. They even gave an example of a menu from a hotel there, which had beef of the printed on the menu. Whether the hotel or anywhere else in gaza had food or not is another matter. But the fact that food was printed on the menu, means the people in gaza ate high up on the food chain.
Hi Clark; You’re not on the baby watch?
Nevermind; When people ask for advice, they don’t want you to talk. They want to do the talking.
But Gibran is right. It seems the human brain primarily functions as a platform for justifying what we’ve already decided to do.
re Gaza water/”concentration camp”, etc, etc…:
Well, as I rather suspected, an embarrassed silence from the Eminences in the face of my thought, posted at 13h52, on whether (as an example) millions of people living in the Brazilian favelas and the huge cities of India and some African countries aren’t rather worse off than the inhabitants of Gaza.
The only substantive response came from Kempe (who is, of course, not one of the Eminences), who told us that annual per capita water consumption in the UK is between 45-100 cubic metres – which puts the idea of the Gazans being starved of water into proper perspective. Kempe is also right to speculate that the higher per capita Israeli water consumption is probably due to the well-developed Israeli agricultural industry (most of their production is of high-water-use products, eg fruit and vegetables.
Would someone like to furnish comparative figures (say from various UN agencies) on indicators such as schooling/literacy, infant mortality, per capita GNP, govt spending on health care, etc, etc,..as between Gaza and, say, Brazil, India, Pakistan, Kenya, South Africa, and any other African state you might like to throw in? Come on now, don’t be shy!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Now I’m posting, I might as well pick up on two other comments made on or around this theme.
1/.@ Arsalan : could we please have sources for your claim that “Zionists” have called Gaza a “5 star hotel”? By sources I mean of course people of organisations habilitated to speak for the Israeli govt, and not either anti-Israel websites or individual “Zionists” speaking in a personal capacity. Thank you in advance!
2/. Passerby should not speak about the duties and obligations of “occupying powers” in relation to Israel and Gaza, as it may have escaped his attention that the Israeli occupation of Gaza ended several years ago.
James Corbett, in an episode that plays with some of those Islamist/Secularist/Statist discussions we’ve had here recently:
http://www.corbettreport.com/episode-276-the-state-is-not-great/
Patrick Foy looks at the revived Palestinian peace talks, and why that September UN meeting matters:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/22/fun-and-games-with-the-peace-talks/
@ Flaming June (16h31)
“What cheap food Mr Clarke @ Tesco? A few years back, if you bought 20 items in a supermarket, you could estimate that the cost would be about £20. Now 20 items cost + £30.”
______________
Meaningless without more information : which items? A basket of goods? If so, could you please let us have the contents of the basket or provide a source?
You do provide a couple of sources, but they seem to refer to the Tesco board and the salaries paid to them. Perhaps you have adduced directors’ salaries as an explanation for your clailm that £20 has become £30. To put those salaries into perspective, could you please give us the figure for Tesco’s annual turnover in the UK?
Many thanks and I look forward with pleasure to continuing the discussion on this important matter you’ve seen fit to raise.
See? More scatatological inquiries into the number of flea turds in rat scat. So helpful and playful !
What would we do without meaningful forays into the realm of verbose minutiae ?
Habby above @7.22pm states that:
“the Israeli occupation of Gaza ended several years ago.”
Given the breathtaking dishonesty of that statement is it even worth asking the poster to substantiate it.
An extract from “Knowledge and the Transformation of Man
San Diego 1974 Conversation with Dr. Allan W. Anderson”
“K: I can’t tell you what I feel when I go round the world. The pettiness, the shallowness, the emptiness of all this, of the so-called western civilisation, if I may use that word; into which the eastern civilisation is being dragged. And we are just scratching on the surface all the time. And we think the mere change on the surface – change in the structure is going to do something enormous to human beings. On the contrary it has done nothing. It polishes a little bit here and there but deeply fundamentally it does not change man. So, when we are discussing change we must be, I think, fairly clear that we mean the change in the psyche, in the very being of human beings. That is, in the very structure and nature of his thought.
A: The change at the root.
K: At the root – yes.
A: At the root itself.
K: At the root. And therefore when there is that change he will naturally bring about a change in society. It isn’t society first, or individual first, it is the human change which will transform the society. They are not two separate things.
……
K: That’s right. After all human beings have created this society. By their greed, by their anger, by their violence, by their brutality, by their pettiness, they have created this society.
A: Precisely.
K: And they think by changing the structure you are going to change the human being. This has been the communist problem, this has been the eternal problem: that is change the environment then you change man. They have tried that in ten different ways and they haven’t done it, succeeded in changing man. On the contrary man conquers the environment as such.
So, if we are clear that the outer is the inner – the inner is the outer, that there is not the division, the society and the individual, the collective and the separate human being, but the human being is the whole, he is the society, he is the separate human individual, he is the factor which brings about this chaos.”
http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-video/knowledge-and-the-transformation-of-man-part-1-of-18.php
“The internal document shows Pakistani officials too found that CIA drone strikes were killing a significant number of civilians – and have been aware of those deaths for many years.
Of 746 people listed as killed in the drone strikes outlined in the document, at least 147 of the dead are clearly stated to be civilian victims, 94 of those are said to be children.”
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/07/22-0
@Jon – I don’t know why you are trying to engage with someone who talks of awarding “row-advances to the front of the cattle car”.
@Arsalan – I suppose one has to actually visit Gaza in order to know whether or not it resembles a concentration camp. From pro-Israel sites we see pictures of thriving markets crammed with produce, luxury apartments and fast cars. From pro-Palestinian sites we see pictures of children huddled up against iron bars topped with razor wire, arms outstretched. Even from those who have visited Gaza, we have conflicting accounts of what life is like there. Both sides have interest in making the situation look as good/bad as possible.
“Instead of using the word concentration camp, Zionists would like us to use the word, “5 star hotel” for Gaza.”
It is neither.
Certainly, as you observe, when Gaza was bombarded during Cast Lead, then life there must have been grim. Daily life I should imagine is mostly routine. I haven’t seen any evidence that Gaza resembles a concentration camp, although the term ‘concentration camp’ is open to various definitions.
What you are doing here by claiming Gaza as a ‘concentration camp’ is using a term widely associated with and invoking the memory of Jewish suffering under the Nazis to accuse Jews of meting out the same kind of treatment that was inflicted on them during WW2. Ditto “ghettos”. It’s deliberately provocative wordplay. However bad the situation is in Gaza, it is not the same as the situation of the Jews in Nazi-occupied territories.
Interestingly, you don’t want Jews to possess ownership of the term, but at the same time you want to make full capital out of its association with Jews. I have to say, Arsalan, there’s really no difference between you and a rabid Zionist.
Oh my, I see Habbabkuk is wearing Anon’s shades at
22 Jul, 2013 – 7:31 pm AND 7:22 pm
Fancied a change of email address, Habbabkuk? Why?
Think GPS tracks us well, wait until you see IPS.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/126843-think-gps-is-cool-ips-will-blow-your-mind
Per Capita Consumption of water 2006/7 England and Wales. First figure is for unmetered households and second is for metered households.
Table 2: PCC (l/h/d) for unmetered and metered households as submitted by the various water companies in England and Wales for 2006-07 (from Ofwat, 2007b)
[Mod: Removed large chunk of copy and paste stats, see link]
http://a0768b4a8a31e106d8b0-50dc802554eb38a24458b98ff72d550b.r19.cf3.rackcdn.com/geho0809bqtd-e-e.pdf
~~~
Evan Davis on Bottom Line.
‘Water is the world’s most precious resource. It’s also big business. As climate changes and populations shift, getting water where it needs to be is a huge global challenge, and that’s without the added problem of leakage. Just how much should consumers pay for something that none of us can live without? Evan Davis and guests discuss an industry which has changed almost beyond recognition in just a few decades – from state-owned water providers to international business players.’
Little depth. No explanation was given for the huge rise in our water bills. The contributors were:
Peter Simpson, CEO Anglian Water
Bryan Harvey, Vice President CH2M HILL
Olivier Bret, CEO Veolia Water UK
The consumer was not represented.
The Anglian Water customers’ water consumption was given as 100-150 litres per day per person
Czech water consumption was given as 100 litres per day per person.
The water companies’ leakage figures in this country were staggering. 23% – 25%.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b037lsp5/The_Bottom_Line_Series_14_Water/ 24 minutes.
Ben, with respect, i think what Habby is highlighting is the pettiness, and inherent laziness, and ultimately the meaningless of the original comment. And therefore the quality of posts counts and is the responsibility of each one of us.
Here’s one from the hippy-villager!
George Harrison & Paul Simon – Here Comes The Sun
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiOr5WoAJgg
Though what we need now is the rainbow…..and to share LOVE. One of the most touching songs ever
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xLgepKv9oI