I have a guilty political secret. I do not detest Gordon Brown. That is such an unfashionable opinion that I don’t really expect any comments at all to agree with it. And yes, I do realise that he went along with the Iraq War and all the other horrors of the Blair era. Interestingly, I don’t remember the question of what Gordon Brown really thought about Iraq ever being discussed; he deserves condemnation for having not tried to stop it, and perhaps he was indeed an enthusiast. And I am well aware that the Private Finance Initiative is a terrible disaster, and that he oversaw creeping privatisation in the health services, and – worst of all – the introduction of tuition fees.
And yet I cannot dislike him. Probably because I just know too many people who have known him through decades, who are themselves good people, and who like him. Around Edinburgh and Fife you will find it hard to find people who actually know him who share the hatred and contempt he seems to arouse among the political and media classes of London.
As a general rule I do not like or dislike people according to their politics, but rather according to the sincerity of their political beliefs and the goodwill with which they hold them. I am sure Anders Breivik is sincere in his political beliefs, but those are lacking in goodwill. Sincerity is not enough – humanity and inclusiveness are also important.
There are one nation Tories who seem to me perfectly decent people, genuinely trying to do good. I don’t hate them because their political conclusions on the best way to do good are different to mine. Gordon Brown I put rather in the same category – I feel he was trying to do good for ordinary people, he just got it wrong.
Blair is in a whole different category again – insincere, absolutely focused on attaining personal power, and with a Messianic belief that what is good for him must be good for the World. The Guardian is publishing some emails around the Blair Brown rivalry this week. I don’t care and won’t read them. But while I see Blair as quite properly damned for eternity to the seventh pit of hell, I don’t think Brown deserves anything worse than North Queensferry.
I have been in Ghana the last 20 days living in a house with no internet connection and working (extremely hard) in an office with virtually no internet connection – not enough to load WordPress. I hope to get more chance to blog shortly.
Gordon Brown was a financial disaster.He started off ok keeping spending under control.Then he just poured petrol on the fire of the British economy. When the Bank of England tried to slow the economy by raisng interest rates,he increased Government spending to keep the boom booming,and thwart the Bank’s attempts to slow the economy.
He knew the banks were acting dangerously and encouraged/allowed them to continue with his “lighttouch” regulation.
He knew what he was doing, house prices trebled,the boom was further fuelled by equity withdrawal,the government was awash with dosh.Labour won elections.
When the inevitable crash followed,he bailed out the banks’ whose crazy activities he had encouraged,in the process doubling the National Debt.
Perhaps Craig likes him because the two biggest bailout were to Royal Bank of Scotland,and Lloyds who Brown persuaded to buy Halifax Bank of Scotland,which purchase sunk them.
What an absolute total disaster.
Brown shot off at speed from a meeting at the UN when a reporter asked him about McBride. Video.
Gordon Brown refuses to condemn McBride
Gordon Brown declined to condemn the actions of Damian McBride, his former aide who has confessed to smearing Labour colleagues to advance his boss’s career. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/gordon-brown/10329510/Gordon-Brown-refuses-to-condemn-McBride.html
McPoison is at the Brighton conference and will be giving interviews tomorrow, incl Sky News in the morning. He has a book to sell. No shame.
Fedup, sorry, I’d missed your earlier question. Actually, I don’t know enough detail on these various ‘Jundallahs’ – perhaps they simply don’t have the imagination to think up new brand names anymore – to know what, if any, relationship they bear with each other. I’ll ask the journalist I wrote about earlier, who lost relatives in the Peshawar church bombing. This lot seem linked in some way to the Lashkar-e-toiba lot. But I guess they’re all linked with the ISI (some – the ones who attack specifically/mainly Iranian interests but also kill Pakistani Shias – with the CIA too). Then again…
Prince Bandar might know!
Where is Prince Bandar?
Has anyone got his number!
I am Ben – reposted with succinct reference to Chernobyl.
Wow! Suhayl if it is Lashkar-e-toiba, are these the same bunch associated with the Red Mosque?
If so there is a direct land line to Washington, that can explain the little tosser Bu$hBandar throwing money at these bunch of halfwits and fuckwits, and around like it is going out of fashion.
This beast is a nasty piece of work that now has been activated to kill more Pakistanis (Shia add Christian). That is in addition to the Iranian blood that has been spilt. These animals were using blunt knives to decapitate their victims, as they posed for video cameras whilst hacking away at the necks of their victims. These gruesome clips were to be made available for distribution later.
Don’t know if they have no imagination wrt Jundullah, or is there a new fight brewing among their own ranks?
Thanks for the effort to find out, this is a new development, that needs to be kept and eye on.
BTW thanks for the SOAS link, and more important Corinne De Suza.
Test.
Do you believe your eyes?
Do you believe what you see on TV?
So you believe Photoshop is harmless?
Do you believe a magician’s trick is real?
Secret Picture of Alien Toad
I thought so.
http://cdn.grindtv.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/cane-toad.jpg
@ NR,
I’m a bit of a pluperfect digital invariant fan myself, as are some others here, no doubt…
al-Qaeda commander-in-chief Prince Bandar was recently attending the King Faisal Specialist Hospital Suhayl.
The hard pull of engineering the sarin intelligence around the policy and flying to Britain a Syrian he had exposed to sarin was demanding. Bandar had to push the British secret service to accept his extremely dubious claims that Assad was using sarin gas.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323423804579024452583045962.html
According to a source Prince Bandar was seen entering Syria from Jordon wearing an abaya and shayla secured with jewelry.
Maybe he cut himself shaving?
Fail safe, animal friendly and bio-degradable test to see who’s up to speed.
GTAV, 1B, 3D, bye, bye COD.
“In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the “master illusions” which have formed the basis of black propaganda and provided “false flags” for political chicanery and for wars and atrocities, such as Iraq and the Israeli assault on the Gaza peace flotilla.
How do wars begin? With a “master illusion”, according to Ralph McGehee, one of the CIA’s pioneers in “black propaganda”, known today as “news management”. In 1983, he described to me how the CIA had faked an “incident” that became the “conclusive proof of North Vietnam’s aggression”. This followed a claim, also fake, that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked an American warship in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964.
“The CIA,” he said, “loaded up a junk, a North Vietnamese junk, with communist weapons – the Agency maintains communist arsenals in the United States and around the world. They floated this junk off the coast of central Vietnam. Then they shot it up and made it look like a fire fight had taken place, and they brought in the American press. Based on this evidence, two Marine landing teams went into Danang and a week after that the American air force began regular bombing of North Vietnam.” An invasion that took three million lives was under way.”
http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-black-art-of-news-management
@ John,
I’m not referring to earthquakes. I’m talking about MSM not giving details about a man carrying 5 different passports. Any idea what that copper around the corner would do if he caught you with those things?
Do you want to be a victim of ID theft?
Ia Al-Shebaab (youth; that tells you something) the Muslim Brotherhood’s mirror-image? I suggest that, like the Tea-Party radicals, these fringe groups cannot continue to be the tail that wags the dog. It’s difficult for Muslims to get air-time or print unless they seek negative attention. Perspicacious members of that community must organize a significant public conference and invest themselves in a quest for control of the narrative wrt Islam.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/09/23/225419432/somalias-al-shabab-four-things-to-know
Suhayl @22/9, 11:05: Very sorry to hear of your friend’s losses. It’s occasions like this which brings the whole hideous pointlessness of it into personal focus, even if one is a couple of steps removed from the deceased themselves. The additional knowledge that this was – in the end – for nothing, served no purpose at all (apart from increasing the grief and hatred all round) makes it harder to bear again.
When someone dies in an accident, or of some ailment, one can be consoled by the idea sometimes that at least all was done that could be done for them, or they died doing something they appreciated. The aforementioned losses are because some indifferent, hate-filled bastard thought death and misery might further their cause, in some vague manner. So someone else had to pay that price.
To make the world an even sadder place, people in governments do this on an industrial scale to further a political or financial aim. It’s hard to say which is the worst – a merciless fanatic, or the spineless, corrupt politician who doesn’t even have the nerve to get their suit rumpled.
Anon: “I hope this helps”
Yes it does ; it confirms that you are being deliberately misleading by trying to conflate the Foreign Aid Development, ostensible given for humanitarian reasons, but in reality probably to secure unrestricted access to land locked Afghanistan + support for the WOT, to the blood money compensation given to grieving relatives of people murdered by “Ours Boys”; and then you assert that these grieving relatives are just like any other thankful recipient of charity !
Not only deliberately misleading via bogus linkage, but rather revealing of your callous attitude to sanctity of life.
You even see fit to throw in that line about the tiny percentage who pay income tax, which is hardly surprising as one in three people in Pakistan live on less than 30p a day, but the fact that you saw fit to even mention this & then to hold it as some sort of contrast it to the Western Aid, really does sum-up your morally bankrupt mindset.
Mary: “Anon is sounding more and more like Habbabkuk. Are they one and the same.”
I agree, either it’s the same person, or it’s that those types of that particular stripe of viewpoints, also share to an uncanny degree, a distinctively irrational & callous mentality, which I suppose goes with the “contarian” territory.
Drolin: “Anon, Villager and HabbabK don’t sound remotely alike”
Agreed that Villager has a “style” that stands out uniquely, but Anon & the Habbu-Troll are indistinguishable, as they seem to be clones of each other.
Anyhow this caught my eye today;
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/belgian-prime-minister-angry-at-claims-of-british-spying-a-923583.html#js-article-comments-box-pager
@ Glenn_uk
Q: … because some indifferent, hate-filled bastard thought death and misery might further their cause, in some vague manner.
R: I am, like you, convinced that the wo/man who detonates his/her ‘payload’ voluntarily will do this because of whatever reason they have, thus causing mayhem and unfathomably bouts of grief, anger and despair.
For argument’s sake: what are/might be the mindsets of their handlers [the ones orchestrating this carnage, the ones that will live onward to see another day]?
Perhaps there are vast conspiracies abound on message-boards, and always have been. But ever since the days of Usenet, suspicions have been raised about this or that poster, their secret relation with another poster, whether one or more are in fact the same person… what their agenda might be… who they might be getting onside with, and so on ad infinitum.
Of course sock-puppeteering does take place, but it’s usually very easy to spot. While one’s chosen message board might be very interesting, and host a number of colourful characters, it’s probably rather fanciful (not to say unduly self-important) to imagine a concerted effort involving many people, organisation and conspiracy, just to tick off this or that poster.
My advice, fwiw, is to stop wasting time with speculation, and deal with posts and posters (or ignore them) on their individual merits.
Daniel Rich: “For argument’s sake: what are/might be the mindsets of their handlers [the ones orchestrating this carnage, the ones that will live onward to see another day]? ”
Good question – but one our politicians should be able to answer as well as these handlers. They’ll come up with their reasons – a tyrant knows that any excuse will do. Maybe the sheer power of life and death is what gives the greatest appeal.
These terrorist handlers know they will go to jail at best, and probably have a pretty hard time there. Our terrorist politicians will get fat rewards – directorships, book contracts, lecture circuit tours and protection for life at the taxpayers expense. Again, it’s tough to see which class is the worst.
Dreolin et al, I see you are distraught with compassion for the world. You weep for the accidental nuclear extinction of mankind. Yet you show no compassion at all for the lusty young Levantine bucks who are shooting blanks because of the meteorological holocaust of adverse wind that blew depleted uranium meant for Palestinian miscreants back into their land of milk and honey and nuked the manly virility of their balls. Is their looming extinction of no concern to you? To avoid the fate of the Dodo and the Irish Elk and the Short-Faced Bear and the mighty Triceratops (all of which were cruelly abandoned to their fate, but we never hear a peep out about that from you anti-Western zealots,) this proud nation might have to stop sterlizing Ethiopeans immigrants. Can you imagine the anguish? And all because you remained silent.
You could have labeled the munitions DO NOT USE THESE WHERE YOU LIVE. Is that too much to ask? You think we can remember every little thing in the midst of a fight for our lives against hordes of rickety toddlers throwing pebbles in the general direction of our tanks?
Glenn,
Although back in Usenet days, unlike most forums, your IP address was (and still is) attached to every post for all to see.
@ Glenn,
Many moons ago I spent many a day in court trying to ‘learn the ropes’ so to speak. It was there, and over time, that I realized that this dotted line between illegal and legal was mostly man made and artificial at best. I have since dropped judging events on laws penned down on parchment and follow my ‘gut feeling’ and ‘instincts’ which, occasionally, send me nowhere. Fortunately, in most cases, I end up at the side of true justice [or at least the way I see it]. The fact that Pfc. Manning is in jail and ‘Teflon Tony’ and ‘W’ are not, speaks volumes about how mind-numbingly twisted our current ‘laws’ really are.
Let the world help at Fukushima No. 1
@Ben Franklin – Your source NPR is as much Zionist and Jewish as Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been habitual liar all his life. As an American citizen, Netanyahu used fourdifferent ID to cheat US government.
As far Islam is concerned – let me quote your brother-in-faith, Norman Gershman, founder of “BESA, a code of honor” project, who said: “To me Islam is poetry. is science, is to be with the Divine. Islam is beauty”.
http://rehmat1.com/2010/01/20/gods-house-muslims-saved-jews-from-nazis/
Welcome to my home
“Although back in Usenet days, unlike most forums, your IP address was (and still is) attached to every post for all to see.”
Not if you used the Altopia server.
StandardKenya: Tenants on spot as investigation takes new turn
Detectives want to talk to all tenants of the Westgate Shopping Mall as part of efforts to trace terrorists who attacked it.
This comes amid speculation some of the attackers could have been tenants at the mall.
They had hired shops at the mall to help them map it and plan well in readiness for the assault…
Westgate Shopping Mall is one of several Israeli-owned businesses in Kenya…
http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/mobile/?articleID=2000094160&story_title=detectives-put-westgate-mall-tenants-on-spot-as-investigation-takes-new-turn
altho the Standard also claims Westgate is Israeli-owned, note:
Kenya Talks Forum: Westgate is owned by Mwau not Isreal
1. The isreal just owns the Art Cafe but the building is owned by Mwau. I used to work alot in Peponi Plaza when the building was coming.
2. People like Mwau tend to own such huge properties jointly with others
3. Of course but there is always the major shareholder..and that is John Harun Mwau.
4. Understand Nakumatt leased the whole building and did subletting of all the others. Atul was devastated yesterday
http://nipate.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=32038&p=253539
2012: NairobiWire: The Story of John Harun Mwau
Considered one of Kenya’s wealthiest men, John Harun Mwau is a former police sharpshooter whose name has been associated with drug trafficking…
Mwau, who is the founding director of Kenya Anti Corruption Commission, recently claimed US President Barack Obama wanted him dead over his $750m (Sh6b) empire, after Obama named him one of the drug lords in the world…
http://www.nairobiwire.com/2012/12/the-story-of-john-harun-mwau.html
also heard aljazeera saying al-shabaab had its funding cut off recently. most likely this:
13 Sept: Financial Times: UN pushes Gulf to cut off al-Shabaab economic lifeline in Somalia
The UN estimates that al-Shabaab pocketed more than $25m from charcoal in 2011, fuelling its operations and undermining efforts to promote stability in a fragile country suffering from terrorism, piracy and more than 20 years of clan warfare…
Mr Chopra said, in a separate letter, that Dubai-based charcoal traders were treating the fate of the MV Energy 3 vessel as “a test case for the effectiveness of the charcoal ban” in the Middle East. He also named six more vessels plying the illegal charcoal route…
A UN sanctions report published in July stated Somalia’s illegal charcoal exports are worth more than $360m on the international market, and that two al-Shabaab traders control a third of exports…
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/09fd06f4-1c61-11e3-a8a3-00144feab7de.html
@Fred.
I never mentioned the BNP, you did.
I said Lamont was the Leader of the British National Socialists, ie Labour.
She used the word ‘virus’ to describe her political opponents. A National Socialist party of the past liked to use such words. It really is scary, watching what Labour, and their BBC colleagues, are doing in Scotland.
Would you agree with her choice of words, and her demonizing of the poor?
Hague used the word ‘work’ to describe the AMISOM activities going on in Somalia which the UK supports along with the EU and the UN. It’s called peacekeeping but is mainly more killing.
‘In response to al-Shabaab’s statements, he said work to “bring stability to Somalia, to defeat terrorism there, will continue”.’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24192168
His words were repeated on Radio 4 this morning.
‘Kenyan forces in the African Union’s AMISOM peacekeeping mission, which has a U.N. Security Council mandate and receives funding from the European Union and United States, helped the Somali government retake control of Kismayu when the al Qaeda-aligned militants fled in September 2012.’
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/14/us-somalia-charcoal-un-idUSBRE96D01A20130714
Interesting that an armed off duty SAS officer was on hand in the mall.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2430201/Kenyan-Mall-Massacre-Off-duty-SAS-soldier-handgun-saved-100-lives.html
‘Sources said the soldier was with the Special Air Service, or SAS. He cannot be named for security reasons. The British Special Forces regularly train and operate out of Kenya, and have been involved in tracking UK citizens involved with hardline Islamists in Somalia and Yemen. Former members work with both the UK and Kenyan governments and security firms across East Africa.’
The tentacles of the UK obviously still extend across the old empire.
Read the mealy mouthed words of Ms Buckle of the ZBC attempting to justify their continuing censorship by refusing to broadcast Ziv’s film Exile – A Myth Unearthed.
The gatekeeper-in-chief strikes again…
23Sep
In an earlier post, I asked whether the BBC Trust would investigate the axing of Ilan Ziv’s “Jerusalem – An Archaeological Mystery Story”.
The answer, but of course, is no..
http://theblogobot.wordpress.com/2013/09/23/the-gatekeeper-in-chief-strikes-again/
Mr Ziv wrote this in May.
http://ilanziv.wordpress.com/2013/04/27/the-exiling-of-my-film-exile-a-myth-unearthed-in-the-bbc-2/