You can see me speaking 24 minutes in here. Can’t work out how to embed this one. It was literally freezing and the very small crowd was understandable. I think four hour rallies outdoors in Scotland in midwinter are somewhat optimistic. I think we also need to face that the high excitement of the referendum campaign, where you could just put something out on Facebook and 10,000 people would show up, is behind us. What we have now is a period of hard graft towards the general election.
I think what I say in this short speech will give comfort to those in the SNP who blocked me as a candidate, because as usual I am joyfully off message. Shortly after me there is an amazing speech from Tommy Sheridan; his physical voice projection alone is astonishing! It was bouncing back off Salisbury Crags and Holyrood Palace.
This really is under 100 yards from where we live. That view of Salisbury Crags is what I see every time I look out the window. The balcony will be great once it gets a bit warmer.
I think the troll means 17.41 and 17.42.
I was following on from RoS’s comment on the Army’s new brigade and was quoting the words of a recent chief of the general staff of HM forces.
His Register of Interests makes interesting reading.
2: Remunerated employment, office, profession etc.
Speaker, Celebrity Speakers Agency (speaker bureau)
Senior Adviser, Joule Africa
Executive Chairman, Typhon (web and open source hosting services)
Adviser, Capita Symonds (project management)
Advisory Board Member, Targetfollow Ltd (property)
Adviser, Board of Imeon Logistics
10: Non-financial interests (b)
Chairman, Strategic Development Board, Durham Global Security Institute
http://www.parliament.uk/biographies/lords/lord-dannatt/4220
Joule Africa are involved in solar and hydro electric power in African countries.
http://www.jouleafrica.com/about-us/advisory-board.html
Something is swallowing my comments …
Habbabkuk
Not sure if this is the info you are looking for but council houses were not subsidised. Rents covered costs. Rents were fairer due to things like macro planning, state buying power and the absence of shareholders.
Maybe if I don’t post a link …
MOSCOW, February 1 (Sputnik) – The United States took an active part in the February 2014 coup in Ukraine, which installed pro-Western authorities, US President Obama told CNN Sunday.
“And since Mr. Putin made this decision around Crimea and Ukraine — not because of some grand strategy, but essentially because he was caught off-balance by the protests in the Maidan and [Ukraine’s then-President Viktor] Yanukovych then fleeing after we had brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine,” Obama said in an interview
Apologies for the duplication. My posts weren’t showing (to me).
[craigmurray.org.uk – spam filter false positives. Duplication isn’t Dreoilin’s fault. Clean-up in progress delayed by having to write to Habbabkuk]
Thanks Mods!
Jemand, 6:42 pm: so basically you’re saying it’s morally OK to foist death and destruction upon ordinary Middle Eastern people and populations so long as the “West” gets cheap oil, right?
You presumably regard the worth of the lives of brown people as less than that of white people. Indeed, you must rate brown lives as of less worth than your luxuries. I call that despicable racism.
Jemand, all can see that you hate Muslims and those you identify as such, though you’ve produced no coherent argument as to why.
So why not just round up “Muslims” and burn them for fuel? Shackle them to your car and whip them to drag it along; better than killing them, yes?
This is the racism that drives “Muslim terrorism”. YOU and your ilk are to blame, Jemand.
Phil, I don’t wish to be the bore at the party, who tells everyone to sober-up and look out the window, at the meteorite that’s heading for the house.
Are you aware that the largest eco-system on the planet Earth, the Pacific Ocean, is not just dying, it’s now almost dead. This has happened over the last three years or so and is well documented in the mainstream media.
Oppenheimer had a great quote about it all, which I can’t now remember. Something about slaying worlds.
So, so long, and thanks for all the fish…
(and I should add that I don’t mean to be derogatory. The world of Scottish politics is just as Alice In Wonderland as the other worlds of politics)
“So why not just round up “Muslims” and burn them for fuel?”
You’ve got to admit, though, it’s not a wholly bad idea. There being a shortage of energy and a general excess of Muslims…
“Shackle them to your car and whip them to drag it along; better than killing them, yes?”
Now that you suggest it. Personally I had not thought of that.
RobG
Well I did couch my response with maybe and optimism. Actually, I do not know anything about your report of the pacific. What do you mean by dead? Got any resources?
“Indeed, you must rate brown lives as of less worth than your luxuries. I call that despicable racism.”
Despicable indeed. I’m white, middle-class and guilty and when I put the word “brown” in front of “lives” or “people”, preferably with the word “little” attached before it, I get a little glow of satisfaction.
“So, so long, and thanks for all the fish”
Sounds like a Kurt Vonnegut story title.
“This is the racism that drives “Muslim terrorism”. YOU and your ilk are to blame, Jemand.”
Got that, Jemand? YOU are to blame for Muslim terrorism. You and your car-dragging of brown people.
@Anon: For Christ’s sake, I start to agree with you, complementing your points, and then you shovel that horseshit at 21:30 at us.
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@RobG: (21:28) That is the elephant in the room, is it not? We’re just scrambling around, fighting for the higher ground while it’s rather inevitable that we’re all going to drown sooner rather than later. Nobody wants to talk about it. Fools actually argue that it’s all a hoax. We concern ourselves with supposed terrorists coming to kill us all, and Internal Security, and personal enrichment, as if the clear fact of our near-term demise was somehow a distant abstraction.
And no, there’s no reason for you to feel guilty at all. I’d like to pull up a deck chair next to you, and shoot the breeze. Unfortunately my retirement is still some decades away. Somehow, I doubt that we are all going to be in a position where I get to enjoy very much of it.
“Indeed, you MUST rate brown lives as of less worth than your luxuries.”
Indeed you MUST! I have decided you are a despicable, brown-dragging racist who uses Muslims for lighter fuel. All so you can enjoy your little luxuries. SHAME!
“@Anon: For Christ’s sake, I start to agree with you, complementing your points, and then you shovel that horseshit at 21:30 at us.”
Have a go at Clark’s horseshit for a change.
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Gawd. Searching “dead pacific” immediately drags you into the world of gw propaganda. Capitalised “debunked” abound. I can’t be arsed to trawl through it, it won’t change my behaviour. Am interested to read any good quality (i.e. science based) links provided though.
So Mr Goss do you believe that the Militant Tendency of which Tommy Sheridan a “supporter” (or member as Mr Kinnock would like us to call them) was or wasn’t trying to infiltrate the Labour Party? Did you ever support the Militant Tendency?
What were your views regarding Polish Solidarity – and organisation like Syriza and Podemos that stood against the establishment in its own country?
I wouldn’t like to impute your motives – but a few facts would be nice? You are not usually one to hold back on your opinions.
Phil, perhaps search for ‘animals dying in the Pacific’, or something like that.
I could give you zillions of links, but I get bored with it all, because the human race remains in complete denial of all things nuclear, despite the fact that huge numbers of people are dropping dead from cancer. Naw, nothing to do with manmade radionuclides (of which there are thousands, none of which existed in nature before). It’s cause we live longer, innit, and ain’t got nothing to do with programmes for weapons of mass destruction. Our leaders are nice chaps who wouldn’t commit genocide on their own people, like the Nazis did.
The three most polluted places on the planet Earth, that continue to kill huge numbers of people, are Hanford in Washingtom state, Sellafield in the north of England and Mayak in the southern Urals. They’re all nuclear bomb factories, and they are all a testament to how totally sick the human race is.
My point to Craig, of course, is how anyone standing on a reforming political platform cannot mention any of this stuff?
Are we all children?
@Clark. A lot of people also do banking online. Should we allow agents of the government to access our bank accounts? Where does this “you have no absolute privacy” stop?
Even at this late stage, if the libdems made a principled defence of online privacy rights and proved somehow that they wouldn’t betray us on delivering this time, they’d get my vote. Should be an election issue, anyway…
@Dreolin: yes, what an admission that was! And what a mess Ukraine has become as a result of the (illegal, obviously!) coup.
Yet the Guardian (through “comment is free”), seems to want us to declare war on Russia… Positively Orwellian!
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/01/putin-stopped-ukraine-military-support-russian-propaganda
No wonder the powers that be protected Leon Brittan so intently:
Brittan’s neoliberal legacy:
I guess that kind of record can excuse a multitude of sins, in the eyes of the powers that be. And I guess that shows how the UK has fulfilled the role of Washington’s Trojan Horse inside the EU.
RobG and Glenn, take heart. Life on this planet is more robust than you’re giving it credit for. It’s been through several mass-extinctions and numerous lesser ones. Early life was poisoned by oxygen when photosynthesis evolved. Earth periodically goes through ice ages. It’s been struck by asteroids. Life came through all these events.
The nuclear pollution is deplorable, but it “isn’t the end of the world”. Yes, it gives organisms cancer, but look around Sellafield and Chernobyl – these places are not wastelands scoured of life. The radioactivity causes mutations many of which are fatal, but the life that survives replaces them faster then the death rate, and by driving humans away nature actually flourishes.
Humans are fucking up big time, but treat it like a skid on a bike or a tail-spin in an aircraft – it happens too fast to analyse, you don’t know the outcome until after it’s over, and you just have to do your best to pull through it. Morally, giving up while there’s still a chance is not an option; there are kids in the back. And we don’t know all the dynamics so we don’t know what the chances are. So bear up, OK?
lysias, 11:06 pm, I suspect it was rather the other way around. Because the great powers knew what these politicians were doing to children, they had perfect blackmail material to make them agree to any policy they were told to follow…
@Clark: Appreciate your optimism, but you’ve forgotten the depleted uranium that has been used in the Middle East since the Israeli-Arab six days war back in 1973. Thankfully not (yet…) in Ukraine. As Brian Haw used to say… “Stop killing our kids”.
Phil, “so long, and thanks for all the fish” is a Douglas Adams book title.
What’s “gw propaganda”?
@Lysias: I often wondered what the US wanted in return for supplying “intelligence” on Argentine positions during the Falklands Conflict/War. Wasn’t Leon part of the govt in 1982?
Peacewisher, depleted uranium is less radioactive than natural uranium; that’s what’s depleted about it. It’s still a nasty poison chemically, so it’s best not to make munitions from it and fire it into things, because that liberates it as dust.
Peacewisher, uranium is really not a problem. You can hold either natural or enriched uranium in your hand with no ill effects. Plutonium too – I mean, I wouldn’t sleep on a bed of it every night, but you can handle it no problem; very nasty chemically, though. But neither are really bad as regards radiation. The fission products made in nuclear reactors are far worse.