It is lead news in every outlet of the mainstream media today that there is a massive increase in terrorism – as everyone can plainly see from all the bodies littering our streets.
I can also tell you that there is a massive increase in the threat of deadly asteroids about to hit Britain and destroy us all. My unimpeachable evidence for the existence of this massive asteroid threat is my own anti-asteroid activity. I and my dedicated team have visited 268 sites this year where we thought an asteroid was about to strike. That represents a 40% increase on our activity last year and therefore the media can say a 40% increase in the asteroid threat.
Thankfully due to the brilliance and never-ceasing vigilance of my anti-asteroid team the world has been saved. We can continue to do this if given a further 15% budget increase to 32 billion pounds and the right to arrest anyone anytime who looks a bit dusky, and take Theresa May to pose in their home.
There will also be a new crime of denying that asteroids are dangerous or looking at videos and pictures of asteroids. Anybody found guilty of looking at asteroids in other countries will be found guilty of treason and hung drawn and quartered.
This lead-in post was funny, but the underlying point (as I see it) seems flawed because it implies that there are in reality no terrorist activities being planned or at least that their extent is being exaggerated.
Now, you are as little able to back that up as other people are to prove that it’s true. Except for the small detail that there have been terrorist attacks in the UK and that there is a lack of convincing evidence that these will not be replicated.
I am particularly concerned about radicalised ones from the asteroid belt beyond Mars. I read in the Daily Mail that there are several hundred of them intending to infiltrate the inner solar system. It’s about time the government placed restrictions on people looking at the sky.
“This lead-in post was funny, but the underlying point (as I see it) seems flawed because it implies that there are in reality no astral activities being planned or at least that their extent is being exaggerated.
Now, you are as little able to back that up as other people are to prove that it’s true. Except for the small detail that there have been meteorite strikes in the UK and that there is a lack of convincing evidence that these will not be replicated.”
– There, fixed that for you.
Craig: What a fine Swiftian squib you have lit to mark your birthday. At the level of the logic of cause and effect your asteroids are cousins to the herds of elephants that are kept at bay from uprooting our farmlands and homelands by May’s Special Anti-Elephant Ointment.
However, some of your readers may be so deaf to irony that they will insist: “Much as you make fun of tribes of astronomers scanning the skies for dangerous asteroids, these asteroids do exist and it would be irresponsible not to seek them out, however difficult and expensive the task.” For those who prefer unironic modes of argument three points can be made.
First, some of these asteroids – and amongst them those closest to earth – have in fact been created and launched by military forces making extensive use of astronomical skills. Second, when asteroids do hit Earth, the extent of the damage they cause will be largely man-made if the response is to bomb the areas where they land, thus wiping out large numbers of the survivors. Third, intelligent risk analysis shows there are other threats far more devastating in their effects than asteroids, such as poverty and injustice. We do need specialist asteroid-hunters; but we need far more people employed to hunt down poverty and injustice..
Habbabkuk
There have always been terrorist attacks in the UK, throughout history. 200 years ago the Prime Minister was assassinated (Spencer Perceval). The number of deaths from terrorism in the last five years has been 2. We are in fact at a historical low. The instance in the 1970s and 80s was perhaps thirty times more than it has been in any decade since. Your appeal to experience most usefully proves my point.
We are of course doing our very best to provoke more terrorism by bombing Syria. But that is more like hitting yourself on the head with a rock and claiming it was an asteroid.
In the twerp Abbott’s Australia too.
The real threat of terrorism to Australians, by the numbers
Bernard Keane | Sep 04, 2014
Terrorism kills fewer Australians than even the most exotic causes of death, yet we’re obsessed with it. The numbers show why we’d be better off focusing on less glamorous subjects.
http://www.crikey.com.au/2014/09/04/the-real-threat-of-terrorism-to-australians-by-the-numbers/
Habbabkuk
You also ignore the fact that I have seen the intelligence services at work from the inside. I have seen intelligence which I as Ambassador knew to an absolute certainty to be false, accepted as it “helpfully” built up an exaggerated picture of the strength of Al-Qaida. I have seen, famously, a Jehovah’s Witness included by the CIA in an extraordinarily improbable list of al-Qaida members in Tashkent. I know that much of the “intelligence” on terrorist threat comes from torture cells abroad or from “friendly” dictatorships seeking to demonise opponents. I am an eye witness to these things.
13 entries from a search for ‘terrorism’ on the BBC News website.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=terrorism&sa_f=search-serp
Lest we forget. Human Rights Watch on the “terrorist threat. Killer line from their deputy Washington director: “But take a closer look and you realize that many of these people would never have committed a crime if not for law enforcement encouraging, pressuring, and sometimes paying them to commit terrorist acts.”
WIll it be so very different over here?
Happy Birthday Craig.
http://www.hrw.org/node/127456
PS From now on we may never know the full truth, as our growing penchant for secret trials will exclude any awkward information from public scrutiny, while allowing the spooks to cook up whatever “evidence” they like with complete impunity.
It’s money for old rope. Our guardians can now engineer whatever threat level they like and their methods will remain forever off the radar.
Made me laugh. Haven’t heard the word “dusky” for decades.
Happy birthday Craig.
The correct response to a massive increase in the threat of terrorism is always to have a proportional massive increase in the numbers of normal police.
Standard Policing is the best method to combat terrorism, arresting the people that are planning terrorism. It would be helpful to those who remain sceptical about the existence of the actual terror-plots that following these arrests that there should be open camera trials, and justice should be seen to be done. Yes, the UK has some communities where estimates have been made that about half of the community might have been slightly radicalised (by Blair policy) and remain slightly sympathetic with ‘the wrong side’, but even this can be dealt with by genuinely involved community policing.
It is very expensive to recruit good police & get them back on the beat, but that’s one inevitable component of the price of warfare against a noun(*)
In this Guardian article of 2009, where the police correctly arrested (in a military manner) 11 northerners – then subsequently released them due to lack of evidence, this was obviously the correct thing to do. The men would then have become legitimate persons of interest for profiling by the UK agencies. Rather than having headline ‘arrests’ – can we consider headline ‘convictions’
What would further seem to be wrong, by my account, is to have the estimated 1200 metropolitan police ‘special demonstration squad’ style undercover officers wandering around actively “provoking terrorism” inside sensitive groups in the UK, as they have tried to do in the past.
In the Guardian article above, the valid policing criticism was amazingly made by Lord Carlile whom GCHQ has lined-up as ‘on-message’ for the prevention of public discussion, to counter the fear that even passing references to its wide-reaching surveillance powers could start a “damaging” public debate. You couldn’t make it up!
(*)the noun that Blair attacked, was of course “Terror,” which is from the French “terreur,” a noun derived from the Latin verb “terrere” meaning “to frighten”, and invoking it is a policy of political repression and violence intended to subdue political opposition.
The have been hundreds of British deaths and thousands of casualties due to “terrorism” over recent years. Soldiers. The people in Afghanistan and Iraq who’ve had their families blown to pieces, lost their children etc in collateral damage might think they’re the terrorists though.
Helmand province was pretty peaceful before the anti-terrorists arrived. There to deal with the “terrorists” who had nothing to do with 9/11. The Taliban foreign minister even warned the US about a possible attack.
And Iraq had about zero Islamist terrorists before the anti-terrorists arrived in 2003. They now control a third of the country.
The other day Boris was letting us know there were thousands of potential terrorists being spied upon in London alone to keep the Fatherland safe.
The IRA were a real threat and used real bombs.7/7 has been officially consigned to history without so much as any hard facts getting in the way of the narrative.
The same is true in Israel where more Israeli’S die each year choking on olives than do at the hands of Palestinian(Hamas,Hizbollah,fatah,PLA,PLO)terrorists,but the illusion of a threat is enough to justify massive amounts being spent on security which dissolves the freedom and justice which we’re supposed to be enjoying.
Hope your asteroids get better.
From the BBC article Craig linked to:
Hang on – I thought the UK to be allied with the US, and that the US had spent some 4 to 6 billion dollars through one of the Gulf monarchies to fund ‘rebel’ fighters in Syria. I thought US and UK special military services were operating in Turkey to support the fight against the Syrian government…
If people are leaving the UK to fight, they cannot be a ‘terrorist threat’ to the UK because they won’t be in the UK.
This entire government policy seems to fail tests of very simple logic.
Death by asteroid needs putting into context.
A quick seach on google led me to :http://www.wired.com/2013/02/asteroid-odds/ the article says “Your odds of getting killed by a meteorite are roughly 1 in 250,000. You are far more likely to die in an earthquake, tornado, flood, airplane crash, or car crash”
Compare this to deaths by lightening, according to this Guardian article
:http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/28/venice-beach-lightning-death-15th-this-year, it says UK death by lightening average “less than five.”
Compare also, just for academic purposes, deaths in police custody:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_deaths_in_custody, 2012 was a good year, aparently, just 9, whereas in 2011 is was 23.
I can find no record of any UK deaths by meteor strike for this century, it may have happened but was just poorly recorded by google, but would appear to be less than claimed by Wired.
What does this mean? Well, aside from the obvious, life is uncertain, your chances of death by meteorite are very slim. Your chances of dying in police custody are higher than being killed by lightening. As far as being killed by Islamic terrorists – you say 2 UK deaths in the last five years, is would appear that being in police custody is a far more dangerous threat to human life.
Oh, and happy birthday.
“The number of deaths from terrorism in the last five years has been 2.”
Anybody with half a brain (are you there Noddy?) is aware that through the multiple Anti-terrorism Acts enacted since 2000 that large numbers of people (nearly all Muslims) have been imprisoned, often without trial, arrested usually without evidence, extradited on the whim of a xenophobic Home Secretary to the country with the biggest prison population and one of the worst human rights records. This is what it is all about. The only threat of terror in this country, and practically anywhere, comes from the Zionist/neocons who own the media and banks. The media pumps out news which is not news and sticks some Mr Plod of a police inspector calling for an even greater number of laws to “do our job”.
There is no threat from the British Muslim population. Wake up. It’s our government, all parties, that we ought to be tackling and outdated institutions like the monarchy and the House of Lords. At Wednesday’s Left Unity meeting the biggest cheer perhaps came when Kate Hudson (national secretary, Left Unity) called for the abolition of the monarchy. Now where have I recently read that?
” more like hitting yourself on the head with a rock and claiming it was an asteroid.” That reminds me of the scene from the cartoon “Carrotblanca” (included on some DVDs of “Casablanca”, and maybe other places as well) where Daffy Duck sings ‘knock on wood’ and bops himself on the head 🙂
A recent BBC report warns that there could be a backlash by civilians harmed by American bombs as well as concerns about the sufficiency of the American effort. Putting troops on the ground would require planning for the long term. A very difficult situation. Better Obama and allies like Cameron than me to decide what to do. Of course you (Craig) could apply to be a Special Advisor to No. 10, on the grounds of your great experience as well being a scholar of Hiatory. 🙂
Anyone remember this: Osama bin Asteroid’s Tora Bora mountain fortress?
http://infographicality.com/bin-ladens-mountain-fortress-infographic/
‘Tora Bora was variously described by the western media to be an “impregnable cave fortress” housing 2,000 men complete with a hospital, a hydroelectric power plant, offices, a hotel, arms and ammunition stores, roads large enough to drive a tank into, and sophisticated tunnel, and ventilation systems….When presented with such plans in an NBC interview, the United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said “This is serious business, there’s not one of those, there are many of those.”’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tora_Bora
I wonder why they never found it.
Remember, those asteroids hate us for our freedoms.
“bodies littering our streets”.
Not quite: more ‘clogging up the rubbish’:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-29649136
What sort of society are we living in for this to happen? Profit driven, stomach turning, corporate greed and corruption on a scale never seen before: bleeding the people dry. Literally. To be put out with the rubbish. All a human life is worth. But that’s ok, because we ‘re ‘all in it together’. Aren’t we just.
Craig.
I told you not to get too pissed last night. Keep it for to-night.
There was no “Terrorist attacks” in Scotland until Gordon Brown became P.M. Then two muslim doctors working in a Scottish hospital tried to bomb Glasgow airport.
“We set about them”.
So you see they are there waiting for the trigger to set them off, (sleepers).
When the SNP started to get underway in Scotland the Police set up some youngsters with “fake” bombs, which they planted, and were later convicted.
To-day I am confronted with a “sea of poppies” to mark all those killed in the first world war, which my grandpa fought in and survived, to tell the horrific tales. His son also fought the second world war, and survived, and never spoke about it, except to say “a bad thing”.
Then I turn the page to be told Scotsmen die 12 years younger because of poverty, the well off live longer apparently.
Nobody says anything about the pollution from “industry in England and Ireland” blowing over Scotland and turning the air, land and water acidic.
Then there is sugar, salt and fat in processed foods that are advertised to the extent people buy them and addict themselves to this unhealthy concoction with the result they die prematurely. The people of Scotland used to live to 120. The Industrial Revolution put paid to that with inferior housing and poor sanitation and of course sugar to keep them working.
I wonder if the Archduke Ferdinand is pleased with the sea of poppies?.
Don’t let asteroids or anything else spoil your birthday. All the very best.
you’re a dinosaur Habbabkuk, and you really ought to treat the asteroid threat more seriously.
Clearly, you don’t understand the threat: there are almost 300,000 Icelanders threatening our elites by demonstrating democracy trouncing financial interests. It’s terrifying!
Icelanders eh? Radicalised democrats the lot of them. They’ve got previous for this kind of thing and we had to mark their card as terrorists once before. There was a time when we had a Navy …
Happy Birthday Craig, you share the same birthday as my son, Findlay, who is ten today and also a relation, Andrew Murray, who is 60 something
Sorry, it’s not quite the usual shape for a Birthday Card UK infographic from “Finland’s best place to work”
Anabolic asteroid threat?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2594949/Fitness-obsessed-bodybuilder-said-invincible-died-massive-steroid-use-started-working-despite-TWO-heart-attacks-THREE-strokes.html
(relax, it’s the Mail. Next week they’ll be good for you)
Talking about crimes – how about the on-going crime in the Middle East.
Two American authors and anti-war activist, Max Blumenthal (Jewish) and Rania Khalek has recently called “Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL)” as “Jewish State of Israel in the Levant (JISL)” – and for damn good reasons. The basic doctrine of both entities are based on terrorism, hatred and racism toward others who don’t agree with their doctrine.
And let’s not forget, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has admitted in June 2004 that ISIL is good for Israel.
http://rehmat1.com/2014/10/17/max-blumenthal-islamic-state-jewish-state/
@Robert Crawford: “There was no “Terrorist attacks” in Scotland until Gordon Brown became P.M. Then two muslim doctors working in a Scottish hospital tried to bomb Glasgow airport.
“We set about them”. So you see they are there waiting for the trigger to set them off, (sleepers).”
Oh come on. They “tried to bomb the airport” – seriously? Doctors should be able to think up a better attempt than that – the action they took was more like some sort of minor protest than any serious attempt.
You should have seen how the Welsh nationalists carried on a few years back. Nobody started quaking in their boots about “terrorists” coming to get them. OK, apart from a few cowardly English with their holiday homes ruining small villages here, granted.
like hitting yourself on the head with a rock and claiming it was an asteroid.
A succinct oxymoron that alludes to our British intelligence services subverting a brown skin, pressing a pigs blood daubed knife into a vacillating hand and shipping to a prepared theatre of UK operations.
The ‘complex’ backend story the Beeb refuses to bring to light and as a normal intelligent being perceives, discloses a nervous acknowledgement that the same normal intelligent being staking out in Syria will unearth a ‘conspiracy of truth’ that ‘special forces’ are provoking and instigating terror in a myriad of violent contrivances.