A particularly mendacious lie by Danny Alexander puts the institutional start-up costs of Scottish Independence at £1.5 billion. That is a cool half billion pounds cheaper than Scotland’s share of the costs of the Iraq and Afghan wars, even on the Westminster government’s blatant under-estimate of the war costs.
So Scotland can afford criminal invasions killing hundreds of thousands to ‘bring freedom’, but cannot afford the smaller cost of its own freedom!!!
The £1.5 billion estimate is mendacious in two ways. Firstly, it is a simple recycling of a Canadian lie at the time of the Quebec independence referendum, apportioning with no argument 1% of GDP to startup costs.
Secondly, as nearly all the money will be spent in Scotland it is not a loss at all, but actually an increase to GDP, as any but the most nutty neo-con would be forced to acknowledge. And it would be the precursor of government money spent annually in Scotland rather than England for ever thereafter.
Thankfully Alexander won’t have a job much longer – and if he thinks a penny of Scottish public spending is going in future to support his huge arse and deceitful mouth, he is very wrong.
These villagers appear to be amazingly patient. How about the local authority only recording a crash if there is injury, ie one out of the 24 that have occurred so far this year.
Nether Haugh: Death fears over B6089 crash road
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-27620640
Their MP, Sarah Champion Lab Rotherham, is on the HoC Transport Committee!!
Andy
“Thanks a lot habbabkuk, what would we do without your enlightened contributions?”
________________
And my thanks to you as well, Andy. But I’m not entirely sure that I should take your thanks seriously (any more than you should take mine seriously) since I believe I recognise your moniker and seem to remember that I’ve had occasion to set you right on a couple of matters in the past. I can’t remember the exact comments of yours which I had to correct but I do hope I didn’t have to be too brutal when demolishing you?
*********************
Habbabkuk cleans up the vilest sewers. Use liberally.
More about the hypocrisy at the Mansion House.
Try to Contain Your Laughter: Prince Charles and Lady de Rothschild Team Up to Talk About ‘Inclusive Capitalism’
Lady de Rothschild Speaks on Bloomberg News About the Inclusive Capitalism Conference
Now that the worldwide Occupy Wall Street protest movement has been beaten, pepper-sprayed, mass-arrested and hog-tied into submission; now that assorted financial luminaries have exhorted corporate media to stop giving air time to people calling bankers evil; it’s now safe for the 1 percent to take over the debate – or so the thinking goes in London.
Prince Charles, who lives in four mansions in England, Scotland and Wales, delivered the opening speech yesterday for a conference on “Inclusive Capitalism” hosted by Lady de Rothschild, wife of multi-billionaire Sir Evelyn Robert de Rothschild, in the heart of financial skulduggery, the City of London, Wall Street’s alter ego.
Rounding out the day’s speakers were former President Bill Clinton, who repealed the depression era investor protection legislation known as the Glass-Steagall Act which deregulated Wall Street and is widely blamed for the 2008 financial collapse and for ushering in the greatest wealth inequality in America since the Gilded Age; and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers who helped Clinton muscle through the deregulatory legislation. (You can see the full-day agenda here.)
The lurking undertone of the conference was not so much a noblesse oblige gesture to spread the wealth as it was an effort to address the growing anxiety among the well-heeled that if they don’t step up their PR game, government and/or a populist revolution is going to take the reins – and possibly their heads.
Lady de Rothschild (Lynn Forester) summed up the anxiety the day before in an interview with Bloomberg News, saying it’s “really dangerous when business is viewed as one of society’s problems.” She noted further that 61 percent of Britons say they will elect the party “that is toughest on big business.”
The web site of the Inclusive Capitalism Initiative which sponsored the conference adds this note to explain its motivations: “To avoid heavy-handed government interference in the banking sector, a revolution in management, supervision and ethics is required.”
/..
http://www.blacklistednews.com/Try_to_Contain_Your_Laughter%3A_Prince_Charles_and_Lady_de_Rothschild_Team_Up_to_Talk_About_%E2%80%98Inclusive_Capitalism%E2%80%99/35566/0/0/0/Y/M.html
The sick making agenda. Look at the participants in the panels.
http://www.inclusivecapitalism.org/conference-2014/agenda/
They followed with some nice cocktails and then dinner. We are not told about the menu.
Q Do they have another conference later on in the year entitled ‘Exclusive Capitalism’?
Yes, let’s put all the cards on the table…
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38630.htm
“Small wonder that Putin and his associates were prospecting for powerful new friends ten years ago – first and foremost, China. And, the West kept providing the Kremlin with new incentives as NATO recruiters remained aggressive. NATO heads of state, meeting in Bucharest in April 2008, declared: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.”
That led to some very foolish adventurism on the part of former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who had been listening to the wrong people in Washington and thought he could play tough with the rebellious regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, including attacks on Russian peacekeeping troops. Russian forces gave the Georgians what Moscow normally calls a “resolute rebuff.”
The 2008 declaration of NATO’s intent is still on the books, however. And recent events in Ukraine, as a violent putsch overthrew elected President Yanukovych and installed a pro-Western regime in Kiev, became the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
During an interview with CNBC on May 23, 2014, President Putin bemoaned the still-pending NATO expansion in the context of Ukraine: “Coup d’état takes place, they refuse to talk to us. So we think the next step Ukraine is going to take, it’s going to become a NATO member. They’ve refused to engage in any dialogue. We’re saying military, NATO military infrastructure is approaching our borders; they say not to worry, it has nothing to do with you. But tomorrow Ukraine might become a NATO member, and the day after tomorrow missile defense units of NATO could be deployed in this country.”
Putin raised the issue again on May 24, accusing the West of ignoring Russia’s interests – in particular, by leaving open the possibility that Ukraine could one day join NATO. “Where is the guarantee that, after the forceful change of power, Ukraine will not tomorrow end up in NATO?” Putin wanted to know.”
More rot from the LDs.
Lord Rennard Says Sorry To ‘Harassment’ Women
The ex-Lib Dem peer goes against his earlier refusal to apologise by saying he regrets “harm and embarrassment” to four women.
http://news.sky.com/story/1271625/lord-rennard-says-sorry-to-harassment-women
A third hand apology which does not sound sincere gives no satisfaction under the law to the four women. They should sue him or the partei for damages.
The Reluctant POTUS; at least we have that going for us.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/28/obama-s-flawed-vision-of-the-world.html
“The same goes for venturing anew into the Syrian swamp. Obama is now moving to provide moderate rebels in Syria with overt training from U.S. special operation forces in addition to the covert aid presently fed by the CIA. That move will make sense only if the White House formulates a viable strategy for Syria. Right now, its strategy of upending President Bashar Assad makes no sense. If he’s not winning, he’s certainly not losing. And no amount of projected aid to the moderate rebels will change that unfortunate but unarguable fact.
Thus, Obama either will have to change his means and provide massive aid to these rebels, which he will not do, or he will have to change his goal of eliminating Assad. This may well surprise experts, but senior administration officials tell me that Obama has been modifying his objective and is now prepared to work with Assad, to some degree, along with the moderate rebels, against what the White House finally has come to see as the real and major threat—the jihadists. These senior officials further say that they expect support in this new policy from previous opponents, i.e. from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Let us hope that this is true.
“Remarkably, Snowden had made claims about going through channels prior to this exclusive interview. The NSA had denied that any paper trail showing communications existed.”
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2014/05/29/email-released-by-us-intelligence-to-undermine-snowdens-claims-about-going-through-channels-but-does-it/
I’m surprised there have been no responses to Ben/anyone regarding Obama’s “We’ve won, world, get over it… now just do as you are told and we won’t get angry” speech?
1251 responses have been logged to this Guardian article:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/28/obama-foreign-policy-shift-speech-west-point
Habbabkuk
You know those tasty bits of skin on take-away chicken wings you don’t really want to eat? You are the feathers from them.
Gist of the thing.
Blair to Bush: ” You know those bits of hair in my stools, don’t worry about them. I only chew my tail because I’m bored filling in for the, you know, UK Conservatives, until another of your poodles can get them back in.”
Bush to Blair: ” Listen Benn, oil is in Iraq. It’s our oil. Get up on your pulpit in the mother of parliaments and explain it to them. Understand? “
Chilcott caved. I’m sad, but not surprised. Clearly the pressure from the US was serious indeed, one wonders quite how serious. It’s all rather depressing really. And the fact that the Tories put a spanner in the works is weird indeed, and makes me go all conspiratorial; those letters must have been damning indeed. We’ll find out in 100 years, after we are all dead, of course.
The Bear and the Bees
Once upon a time, a bear was stung by a bee. This made him so angry, he ran into the bee-garden and, without stopping to think, kicked over all the beehives in furious revenge. This made all the bees very angry as well, and they flew at him, and stung him in a thousand places and he wished he had never gone near them.
Moral:
It is silly to pay back someone for one injury, if by doing so you make hundreds of enemies.
It was a paid speaking engagement, but why the secrecy? Bush/Cheney would follow the same MO, amirite?
More beer please.
I am not going to feed your beer habit, Ben, until you give up Bud and declare a preference for Greene King IPA. I am trying to support British industry.
But seriously, the secrecy question highlights the deeply contradictory nature of the man. When he’s on the self-promotion trail, he’s all over the media. Where money is concerned, he hides his activities very successfully. And where his mission to the Israelis/proposed exploitation of the Palestinians is concerned, he’s pretty well invisible unless Ha’aretz catches him schmoozing Netanyahu. Aside, I’d be interested to know what the Quartet ‘representative’ was doing solving the Middle East with a bunch of Swedes at a formal dinner in the US Embassy in Stockholm. The US may be a member of the Quartet, but Sweden only qualifies as a very non-representative part of Europe. Neutral country? Maybe, but the US embassy isn’t neutral ground at all.
Mary (re the Conference on inclusive capitalism):
“The sick making agenda. Look at the participants in the panels.
http://www.inclusivecapitalism.org/conference-2014/agenda/”
_________________________
I’ve looked at the agenda and the items seem to be eminently pertinent and sensible ones, so why is it making you “sick”?
As for the participants, they seem to be high-level company executives in the main (people who run the capitalist model on a daily basis) Is there anything surprising or reprehensible about that?
PS – you also complain that they haven’t revealed what was for lunch. Is what they had for lunch remevant to anything in particular?
Another pointless post, I’m afraid, Mary.
Anyway, he got back yesterday morning, so presumably he’ll be getting instructions from Cherie before being bland on all media re. Chilcot. Q. Why do the media even bother to publish his denial of blocking the Bush-Blair correspondence? He’s a proven liar, and his openness schtick must have worn thin by now,ffs.
Of course he didn’t block it. Cameron blocked it, after a casually dropped hint during one of his many friendly discussions with Blair. Blair knows where the bodies are buried,Cameron knows what’s good for him, and that’s how things get done round here.
Major, ref Chilcot, said this morning that Cameron’s government could not intervene with Heywood and that it will now fester. Dear Grey Man. Heywood was there in Blair’s time at the critical point as he is there for Cameron today. And as for ‘festering’ it has already festered and the laudable pus will shower over all of them.
Heywood. now 53, has been around since Lamont’s time. PPS to Blair, then Chief of Staff to Brown, then Permanent Secretary and afterwards Cabinet Secretary to Cameron. Cameron was also around in Lamont’s time. All the gangsters are known to each other and Heywood knows all their secrets apart from those during the period 2003-8 when he went off to make money.
.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Heywood
It is most pertinent that he resigned in 2003.
‘Heywood joined HM Treasury in 1992 and became the Principal Private Secretary to Chancellor Norman Lamont at the age of 30, having to help mitigate the fallout from Black Wednesday after less than a month in the job.[5] Heywood remained in this role throughout the 1990s under Chancellors Kenneth Clarke and Gordon Brown before being promoted to be the Principal Private Secretary to Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1999. He stayed in this position until 2003, when he left the civil service in the wake of the Hutton Inquiry where it emerged that Heywood claimed to have never minuted meetings in the Prime Ministerial offices about Dr David Kelly, a job he was required to do. He emerged to become the Managing Director of the UK Investment Banking Division at Morgan Stanley where he became embroiled in the Southern Cross Healthcare scandal that almost saw 30,000 elderly people being made homeless.[6] Upon Gordon Brown becoming Prime Minister in 2007, Heywood returned to government as Head of Domestic Policy and Strategy at the Cabinet Office. Political commentator Peter Oborne, in the wake of this appointment described Heywood as
“a perfect manifestation of everything that has gone so very wrong with the British civil service over the past 15 years.”[7]
He would later go on to resume his old job of Principal Private Secretary, as well as being appointed the Downing Street Chief of Staff after the resignation of Stephen Carter.[8] In 2010, after David Cameron became Prime Minister, Heywood was replaced as Chief of Staff by Edward Llewellyn and as Principal Private Secretary by James Bowler. Heywood returned to the civil service and was subsequently appointed the first Downing Street Permanent Secretary, a role created with the purpose of liaising between the Cabinet Secretary and the Chief of Staff within the Cabinet Office.’
What a stench!
PS Cameron was Lamont’s bag carrier at the time of Black Wednesday.
http://www.addictinginfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/david-cameron-and-norman-lamont.jpg
‘And who was working with Norman Lamont on Black Wednesday. Young David Cameron!
You can be sure that this photo will be reproduced a few times as we get closer to the next General Election. Although Cameron was really just a bag carrier rather than a player, he is indelibly associated with Lamont’s failure.’
The troll above displays further lack of comprehension and even inability to read. It was their DINNER I was talking about, not lunch.
~~~
‘Central to the proceedings was an undercurrent of elite fear that the increasing disenfranchisement of the vast majority of the planetary population under decades of capitalist business-as-usual could well be its own undoing.
The Conference on Inclusive Capitalism is the brainchild of the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), a little-known but influential British think tank with distinctly neoconservative and xenophobic leanings. In May 2012, HJS executive director Alan Mendoza explained the thinking behind the project:
“… we felt that such was public disgust with the system, there was a very real danger that politicians could seek to remedy the situation by legislating capitalism out of business.”
He claimed that HJS research showed that “the only real solutions that can be put forward to restore trust in the system, and which actually stand a chance of bringing economic prosperity, are being led by the private, rather than the public, sector.”’
(Nafeez Ahmed: The Guardian)
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/may/28/inclusive-capitalism-trojan-horse-global-revolt-henry-jackson-society-pr-growth
Henry Jackson Society. Enough said.
Meanwhile, from the nethermost pit, emerges…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2638470/Former-spin-doctor-Alastair-Campbell-meets-Egyptian-regime-blamed-1-000-deaths-weeks-Blair-gives-staunch-backing-coup-leader-ahead-election.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490
As the article makes slightly less obscure, Campbell/Blair remain an item.
And –
Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, said at the time of Mr Blair’s remarks: ‘Dangerously, Blair and others are turning a blind eye to the suppression of human rights, the widespread arrests, the crackdown on freedom of media and the absence of rule of law.’
Well, yes, that’s what you’ve gotta do, y’know, and you have to have, y’know, some instability and stuff so your lovely big hedge funds can move in and buy the place up. Cherie says you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs (I really wouldn’t know, I let the help do all that) but it works for Kazakhstan, doesn’t it? Used notes, please. Thank you.
Ot I am told
Our local land fill recycles the plastic bottles carefully collected in wheels bins.
The bottles are collected, weighed, then put in sheds and steamed with megawatts partially decomposed then put into the landfill.
Of which leaches into the ground.
All waste decomposes and produces methane/ co2 and toxic chemicals.
Incinerated at high temp, no toxic chemicals just co2.
The Swedish are the most advanced in this technology! Hopefully the suits at Bilderberg can discuss the intricacies of toxifying the planet.
Growth. “Nevermind”
Jay:
As you correctly mention, landfill produces methane. If your local landfill were run as a sealed gas recovery unit, the methane could be used to run a small power station – and at many UK sites has done successfully for over a decade. And there would be no leachate, as geopolymer and clay barriers contain the toxic runoff. As much household waste consists of waste food and paper, at least some of the methane production is sustainable. As indeed is much of the CO2, which is probably not the case with the extra energy required to ensure that incinerator waste not only burns, but burns at a sufficiently high temperature.
Also, incineration isn’t quite as straightforward as setting fire to the rubbish. This Chinese paper outlines why: take-home message, incinerators must be strongly monitored to ensure that the complex (and energy-requiring) cleanup of the exhaust gas stream remains effective. And that does not mean ‘monitored by the operator alone’. Dioxins are nasty.
Personally, I’m not sure why plastics aren’t routinely separated from the waste stream at the outset, and pyrolised to give a mixed-hydrocarbon oil which can then be fractionated for chemical feedstocks. Wouldn’t need much, if any, more energy than steaming them.
Sorry – link for above:
http://www.pvc.org/upload/documents/PVC_and_waste_incineration_-_modern_technologies_solve_old_problems.pdf
John Major exhibits some understanding:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/chilcot-inquiry-john-major-urges-blair-to-get-bush-conversations-published-9459173.html
Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, Sir John said it was a “pity” for papers to be withheld.
He added: “Firstly, they will leave suspicions unresolved and those suspicions will fester and maybe worsen.
“Secondly, in many ways I think withholding them is going to be very embarrassing for Tony Blair, not least of course because he brought the Freedom of Information Act into law when he was in government*.”
Sir John said there were “strict rules” that prevented the current Government from intervening and insisted it was down to Labour or Mr Blair to approach the Cabinet Office, which handled the negotiations.
“Mr Blair could, the previous Labour government could, and maybe in their own interests they should think about that because otherwise, as I say, this will fester and I don’t think anybody wishes to see that,” he added.
And Tony agrees…errrmmm…theoretically:
“It is certainly not me who is holding it up,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “The sooner it is published the better, from my perspective, as it allows me to make the arguments.” , he lied.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-27585261
* Blair has since expressed the wish that he hadn’t, lol.
Andrew Gilligan also has a score to settle with Blair, after he (Gilligan) was fired from the BBC for his 2003 broadcast correctly alleging that the Iraq WMD claim had been ‘sexed-up’.
Here’s Gilligan (lately Boris’s cycle commissioner, but we can forgive him for that) reporting a Chilcot development which the MSM largely missed:
On January 13, 2010, the day after one star witness, Mr Blair’s spin man, Alastair Campbell, appeared before Chilcot, the inquiry heard from the Cabinet Secretary at the time of the invasion, Andrew Turnbull. Lord Turnbull gave evidence again, as did his predecessor, Lord Wilson, on January 25 2011, a few days after Mr Blair had made his second appearance.
Both times, the TV circus for Mr Campbell and Mr Blair had folded its tents and the ex-mandarins’ sessions were barely covered in the Press.
But they were devastating. Lord Turnbull said that he and the Cabinet had essentially been deceived, “brought into the story … a long way behind” what had already been agreed by what he described as Mr Blair’s “entourage”. The Cabinet never saw any papers at all, he said. Lord Wilson, who left six months before the war, testified that at his final meeting with the Prime Minister he had told Mr Blair that he had a worrying “gleam in his eye” over military action.
Lord Turnbull added that had Lord Wilson known the full picture – that a note had already been sent to President George W Bush promising, in his words, that “you can count on us whatever”, Lord Wilson “would not have described it [just] as a gleam”.
And that’s the then Cabinet Secretary; by the look of it he would have no objection to full publication. It would support the evidence he gave.. Strange that the current CS is so pusillanimous on the subject, no?
Mary
“The troll above displays further lack of comprehension and even inability to read. It was their DINNER I was talking about, not lunch.”
________________
I accept the bitch’s* correction and therefore rephrase my question as follows:
“you also complain that they haven’t revealed what was for dinner. Is what they had for dinner relevant to anything in particular?”.
Answer now awaited, thanks
___________________
* as you see fit to refer to me as the “troll”, I’m sure you won’t mind if I refer to you as the “bitch”? That’s fair enough, isn’t it : to you I present the characteristics of a troll, whilst to me you present the characteristics of a bitch.
Ray McGovern, with a useful cautionary backgrounder on the current geo-political tectonic shift:
“The post-coup election of a pro-Western politician as president of Ukraine – and the escalating slaughter of lightly armed anti-coup rebels in the east – have created a celebratory mood in Official Washington, but the victory dance may be premature, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38630.htm
All this talk of Soylent Green. Did they ever find Saddam Hussein’s Sausage-Making Machine?
Was Tubby Isaacs the noob troll that muscled in on habbaduk’s (remember him) patch and got told off in no uncertain terms that this place was already well-covered, OnYerBike!
Nice types. If it’s not the IDF with tear gas, it’s Orthodox Israelis with stinkbombs. Krazies and nasty with it.
Orthodox men hurl stinkbombs at women praying at Jerusalem’s Western Wall
Religious tensions in Israeli society turned Judaism’s holiest site into “a battlefield” on Friday, police said, as ultra-orthodox men hurled missiles and insults at women worshippers exercising their right to pray in a manner previously restricted to men.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/10049274/Orthodox-men-hurl-stinkbombs-at-women-praying-at-Jerusalems-Western-Wall.html
Ms Power aka Mrs Sunstein is so greedy for sanctions. Targeted ones this time for South Sudan. Now where’s that oil Ms Power?
‘U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power has urged the Security Council to consider imposing targeted sanctions on South Sudan.’
U.N. peacekeepers to focus on protecting South Sudan civilians
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/05/27/uk-southsudan-unrest-un-idUKKBN0E72FZ20140527
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudan_%E2%80%93_South_Sudan_Border_War