After such an extended break from blogging, you will be deeply disappointed that I restart with something as mundane and trivial as Jeremy Clarkson. I have defended the man in the past, because I much enjoy Top Gear and consider that much of what he has been criticised for in the past had been an amusing winding-up of the po-faced of the kind I employ myself. But nasty, indeed vicious bullying of a subordinate should always be a sacking offence.
That did not ought to be the question, though. He hit someone and they had to go to hospital. Where are the police? They are incredibly fond of sweeping up scores of teenagers for thought crime, but here we have an actual violent assault that spills blood, and it seems completely out of the question the perpetrator is brought to account. Why is that? I had a personal experience a couple of years ago when I was very mildly hurt – less than young Oisin – in an assault, and the police insisted on arresting the perpetrator despite my repeated requests to them not to do so. They told me rather firmly that the idea that it is the victim who has a say in pressing charges, is a myth. Why was Clarkson not arrested?
I cannot in my mind dissociate this from the non-arrest of Jimmy Savile for his crimes, despite their being well-known and reported at the time. That seems to link in to the wider paedophilia scandal, and the question of why no action was taken even in the most blatant of cases when there was compelling evidence, such as that of the extremely nasty Greville Janner MP.
But then I think still more widely as to why, for example, Jack Straw has not been charged with the crime of misfeasance in public office after boasting of using his position to obtain “under the radar” changes in regulations to benefit commercial clients, in exchange for cash. I wonder why a large number of people did not go to jail for the HSBC tax avoidance schemes or the LIBOR rigging scandal, which involved long term dishonest manipulation by hundreds of very highly paid bankers.
At the top of the tree is of course the question of why Blair has not been charged for the crime of waging illegal war. The Chilcot Inquiry heard evidence that every single one of the FCO’s elite team of Legal Advisers believed that the invasion of Iraq was an illegal war of aggression. Yet now the media disparage as nutters those who say Blair should be charged.
Then I think of all the poor and desperate people who get jailed for stealing comparatively miniscule amounts in benefit fraud, or the boy who was jailed for stealing a bottle of water in the London riots.
The conclusion is that we do not have a system of justice in this country at all. We have a system where the wealthy and governing classes and those associated with them enjoy almost absolute impunity, broken in only the rarest of cases. At the same time those at the bottom of the pile are kicked hard to keep them there. There is no more chance of justice against those in power in the UK than there is of the killers of Nemtsov being brought to book in Russia.
But what has really scared me is this thought. This situation has been like this my entire life: and I have reached the age of 56 before I realised it. A very great many people have still not realised it at all.
What does not scare me is this. I realise that if the system of justice is completely corrupted, then there is no obligation on me to follow the laws of the state. In fact it would be wrong of me to do so. I must seek my ethical compass elsewhere than in the corrupt power structure which weighs so hard upon the people.
Clark, in a quite blatant effort to try and stop this thread becoming another Ukraine-fest, and because I believe you are a star gazer…
http://news.sky.com/story/1447296/solar-storm-causes-stunning-light-display
No doubt you’ve been following all this cosmic stuff, but is there a connection to the two recent most violent cyclones in recorded history..?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Pam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Haiyan
Both Haiyan and Pam were level 5, which is off the scale. If either of them had hit a metropolitan area it would have caused the same level of death and destruction as a nuclear bomb going of.
Repeat, there have never been cyclones like this in recorded history.
“Herbie, I think the EU could have started integrating Ukraine”
Please, don’t be silly.
They could not, nor had they ever any intention of integrating the Ukraine into the EU.
No more than they desired Turkey, for example.
It’s no more than a political theatre.
And very specifically designed to US geostrategic interest.
All the US was looking for was Yanukovych’s rejection of the EU’s faux offer, which they then sold as negative for the hopes and dreams of golden youth, thereby bringing more and more of them onto the streets, having been coached to these ends by propagandistic and controlled media.
Clark; “Pilger merely described the similarities to the pattern he’d seen before.”
He did a bit more than that;
“This reached its apogee in 2014 when the Obama administration splashed out $5 billion on a coup against the elected government. The shock troops were neo-Nazis known as the Right Sector and Svoboda. Their leaders include Oleh Tyahnybok, who has called for a purge of the “Moscow-Jewish mafia” and “other scum”, including gays, feminists and those on the political left.
These fascists are now integrated into the Kiev coup government. The first deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, a leader of the governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On February 14, Parubiy announced he was flying to Washington get “the USA to give us highly precise modern weaponry”. If he succeeds, it will be seen as an act of war by Russia.
No western leader has spoken up about the revival of fascism in the heart of Europe – with the exception of Vladimir Putin, whose people lost 22 million to a Nazi invasion that came through the borderland of Ukraine. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, ranted abuse about European leaders for opposing the US arming of the Kiev regime. She referred to the German Defence Minister as “the minister for defeatism”. It was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev. The wife of Robert D. Kagan, a leading “neo-con” luminary and co-founder of the extreme right wing Project for a New American Century, she was foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney.
Nuland’s coup did not go to plan. Nato was prevented from seizing Russia’s historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in Crimea. The mostly Russian population of Crimea – illegally annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954 – voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as they had done in the 1990s. The referendum was voluntary, popular and internationally observed. There was no invasion.
At the same time, the Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian population in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleansing. Deploying neo-Nazi militias in the manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid to siege cities and towns. They used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and pensions. More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia. In the western media, they became unpeople escaping “the violence” caused by the “Russian invasion”. The Nato commander, General Breedlove – whose name and actions might have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove – announced that 40,000 Russian troops were “massing”. In the age of forensic satellite evidence, he offered none.
These Russian-speaking and bilingual people of Ukraine – a third of the population – have long sought a federation that reflects the country’s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are not “separatists” but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland and oppose the power grab in Kiev. Their revolt and establishment of autonomous “states” are a reaction to Kiev’s attacks on them. Little of this has been explained to western audiences.
On May 2, 2014, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. The Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as “another bright day in our national history”. In the American and British media, this was reported as a “murky tragedy” resulting from “clashes” between “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) and “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine).
The New York Times buried the story, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington’s new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims – “Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says”. Obama congratulated the junta for its “restraint”.
If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained “pariah” role in the West will justify the lie that Russia is invading Ukraine. On January 29, Ukraine’s top military commander, General Viktor Muzhemko, almost inadvertently dismissed the very basis for US and EU sanctions on Russia when he told a news conference emphatically: “The Ukrainian army is not fighting with the regular units of the Russian Army”. There were “individual citizens” who were members of “illegal armed groups”, but there was no Russian invasion. This was not news. Vadym Prystaiko, Kiev’s Deputy Foreign Minister, has called for “full scale war” with nuclear-armed Russia.
On February 21, US Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, introduced a bill that would authorise American arms for the Kiev regime. In his Senate presentation, Inhofe used photographs he claimed were of Russian troops crossing into Ukraine, which have long been exposed as fakes. It was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s fake pictures of a Soviet installation in Nicaragua, and Colin Powell’s fake evidence to the UN of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The intensity of the smear campaign against Russia and the portrayal of its president as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I have known as a reporter. Robert Parry, one of America’s most distinguished investigative journalists, who revealed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote recently, “No European government, since Adolf Hitler’s Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet across the West’s media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established… If you wonder how the world could stumble into world war three – much as it did into world war one a century ago – all you need to do is look at the madness over Ukraine that has proved impervious to facts or reason.”
http://johnpilger.com/articles/why-the-rise-of-fascism-is-again-the-issue
Re the EU negotiations, here’s quite a detailed account, but even this is marred by a complete absence of any mention the hidden hand of the US in the background;
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/war-in-ukraine-a-result-of-misunderstandings-between-europe-and-russia-a-1004706.html#js-article-comments-box-pager
Another Robert Parry article;
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/01/24/nyt-is-lost-in-its-ukraine-propaganda/
Fedup, yes, I’m scared. Very. But I’ve argued with RD before, and we’ve both hanged each other’s minds somewhat. And no I fully accept the propaganda roles of the “Western” media you name. RT is propaganda too, but it points the other way. Informational artillery is like physical artillery in that respect. You’ll find my comments about various propagandas earlier in this thread.
Peacewisher, I’m not as trusting as you are of the Russian powers. They had a reason for controlling their media so closely and swaying their population to nationalism. Russia is very militarised, and a major arms manufacturer. And the Russian powers will be losing some control over all Ukraine, but gaining tighter control over large pieces of it. This isn’t all loss for Russia, no matter that RT claims it is.
RobG, more violent storms have been predicted for decades as one results of global warming. You need the following link for discussions of the aurora:
https://squonk.tk/blog/2015/03/15/the-general-discussion-thread/comment-page-40/
Herbie, no I don’t accept that. Europe didn’t want this conflict on its doorstep and is busy trying to broker peace. The US is internally divided. The UK government would like to go with the US hawk Neocon faction, but they lost the vote for war on Syria, thank the people. We should be lobbying our MPs to align with Europe rather then the US.
Macky, great piece by Pilger.
The only thing I would add is, that it was published last month.
This month, March 2015, there has been much speculation about the ‘disapearence’ of Putin for ten days or so.
Putin has now reappeared again. I would lay even money that his disapearence is all to do with another nuclear war alert prompted by the West, very murky stuff that the public won’t probably be told about for decades to come.
Macky, please be an angel and start doing summaries!
RobG, same link as above, previous page on that thread (39). There was a big fire in Moscow amid all the speculation about Putin… I don’t know, it’s hard to keep up.
Grief. Myself, 12:42 am:
Clark; “Macky, please be an angel and start doing summaries!”
First you wanted details for the writers of linked articles, and now you want summaries !
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, you need to go through the fine details & convincing argumentation for yourself to see if it you find it persuasive, so sorry there’s no short cut; if you have time for the debate but not for informing yourself of the issues of the debate, your contributions are going to be shallow, & rather a time-wasting disregard for the others in the debate.
Macky, I’ve really only scanned the Pilger article, but it is short on references for his sources – unlike Parry who is very specific and close to those he quotes. Of course if we don’t know where stuff is sourced it could be through RT – which, even if accurate, will be of no use in convincing RD.
And it misrepresents a bit. That five billion dollars was spent over the course of some time, wasn’t it? From the mid ’90s until late 2013 when that boast was made, if I remember rightly. It doesn’t look so much considered like that.
Clark, what I find hard to keep up with is how anyone can possibly see Putin and Russia as a threat?
Anyone who understands the GDP of Russia knows that this is patent nonsense.
It’s sort of the same total nonsense as calling ISIS a threat.
I can’t remember the quote about fools and donkeys.
Macky, yes I know I can be very demanding. But not as demanding as mistakes in geopolitics or with nuclear weapons.
That’s how you convince people. Summaries to save them time, references and credentials so they know their time will be well spent.
“No doubt you’ve been following all this cosmic stuff, but is there a connection to the two recent most violent cyclones in recorded history..?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Pam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Haiyan
Both Haiyan and Pam were level 5, which is off the scale. If either of them had hit a metropolitan area it would have caused the same level of death and destruction as a nuclear bomb going of.
Repeat, there have never been cyclones like this in recorded history.”
Do you have an answer yourself RobG? I can only speculate. The United States has been doing lots of experiments with weather as a weapon. There are HAARP stations all over the world (about 16 I think controlled by the US) whose intent, together with chem-trails, is to control, manipulate and deliver weather systems worldwide.
Of course there could be other reasons, removal of Amazonian forests for grazing, and other man-made geocentric events may have contributed, particularly the upper-atmospheric nuclear tests the Yanks did in the sixties under the control of Billy McCormac.
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/2000BAAS…32.1678W/0001678.000.html
What do others think? Because nobody will ever change the opinion of Resident Dissident on Ukraine, Russia and Putin. He’s for one and against the other two. Full stop.
RobG, you can take too much notice of money. So long as everyone keeps doing their jobs, money doesn’t matter that much. The Mir space station was up when the Soviet Union collapsed. The Russian space programme continued, the staff unpaid.
Russia is not to be underestimated. They have lots of weapons, lots of resources. The EU gets a third of its gas from Russia. Russia built nearly half of the International Space Station (ISS). It’s the only nation currently building a launch system that can escape Earth’s gravity. Since the Shuttle was taken out of service, the only way to and from the ISS has been by Soyuz. Russia keeps the polar ice broken with nuclear icebreakers. One hell of a nation, Russia.
Clark; “Macky, I’ve really only scanned the Pilger article, but it is short on references for his sources”
If you are not wlling to spend the time to read what you want to debate about, then at least try to improve your scanning skills, as throughout the article Pilger does name & describle the people are he is quoting, one being Robert Parry.
John Goss, you need to do your sums. One (1) large cumulus cloud has about the same energy as the Hiroshima bomb. Compared with natural phenomena, our technology is utterly puny. Global warming is what is causing super-cyclones; releasing stored carbon at a million times the rate it was originally accumulated from sunlight.
I’ve looked hard for good evidence for chemtrails and it is lacking. There are plans and some tests for geoengineering, but the claims that all the vapour trails you see are barium whatnot – sorry, it’s just not true. And bloody great skyscrapers can fall down if huge passenger aircraft are flown into them. No WTC nukes. That does NOT mean we’ve been told the truth about 9/11. We’ve been given forced confessions, a commission that resigned, and a report with the real findings redacted.
No you need to stay focussed and find the right sources to influence RD. You mustn’t be too gullible. You need to be able to tell a tank from a combine harvester. Sorry.
Macky, I’ll try to do better next time xx
As Ukraine seems to be the only topic here are a couple of links that are trending. Probably the most important is that Putin, under the Russian constitution, is to nationalise the Rothschild National Bank.
http://yournewswire.com/putin-to-nationalise-rothschild-central-bank/
The second is the fascist weasel-faced US pet Yatsenyuk intends to continue the war on Donbass after a temporary lull. Can’t see that happening when the bank-nationalisation happens.
http://rinf.com/alt-news/featured/ukraine-declares-resumption-of-war-against-donbass/
OK, scrap Nationalisation of the Bank. It was trending on the site I got it from but the article it got its information from is December 2014. I had not seen it before.
“Up to 50000 people blocked the centre of Cardiff again today, with no sign of the English-speaking President who it seems was forced to flee for his life. ”
Peacewisher:
CM (11/8/2011, 11:40am): “Why would anyone care what happens in Cardiff?”
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2011/08/these-are-english-riots/
PS: Macky – the quote you were looking for is around about that time, but it doesn’t quite say what you appear to have remembered. I’ll give it tomorrow if you haven’t found it by then.
@Glenn_UK. LOL…. it was meant as an analogy, but people decided to get wrapped up in stupid detail.
@Clark:
1. Crimea was strategically essential to the defence of Russia
2. Despite what RD says, the people of Crimea voted against joining Ukraine, and that’s why they became an autonomous region
3. The people of Crimea was calling out for Russia to save them from what they saw as a coup in Kiev.
How much more do you need? (there is more…)
PS. I’ve heard Pilger speak. He has spend his professional life in journalism and he knows exactly what’s ben going on in the Western media PS it ain’t democracy.
My best wishes to your daughter during her Odysee of hospitals, Brian, I very much hope that all are well.
my best to nearly all.
Some commenter’s here still seem to think that following NATO blindly is the only option available to us here in Europe, they also seem to have forgotten what reasons NATO was established for.
That there is no more Warsaw pact is indisputable, and I don’t expect Jeremy Clarkson to widen his interest sphere into tit for tat escalations, militaria or whether a bicycle has two wheels, one would not want his big head, full of useful, life changing information about cars, expand any further, unless there is a remake of elephant man in the offing.
There is always somebody else to do his job, as much as we support and lift our celebrities on to useless rotten pedestals. Lest put it down to his upbringing, his difficult time as a bully in school and his lack of playing cricket against multicultural teams of more apt cricketers. Or was he abused and slapped with a wet towel? was it the wayward aunt, painted face, offering life’s sustenance at a very young age, we will never know. And what a relief that is, who in their right mind want to find out, after we have seen what the BBC model is like for building up celebrity’s such as Jimmy Saville.
“RD, thanks. Now I’ve been very annoyed with John Goss for looking at the Ukraine conflict only from the RT angle, but I’ve been following some of Macky’s links, and reading some articles by Robert Parry, the journalist who broke the Iran-Contras affair.”
As you brought my name into a discussion I deliberately tried to avoid it is fair that I have the right to respond. Your personal “road to Damascus” conversion at the pulpit of Robert Parry, while welcome because you have at last seen the light, does not give you the right to denigrate me by suggesting that the same arguments Parry advocates are wrong because my sources which make similar arguments, occasionally from Russia Today, are in your mind pro-Kremlin and therefore invalid. I am afraid Clark you are the bigot.
We see it again when I was trying to learn what had caused the the biggest cyclones known to mankind by RobG. “I can only speculate.” I said. You came back at me with “John Goss, you need to do your sums.” As I never did any sums in the first place I never got anything wrong. I was trying to find out what others thought on another topic, of which I only know what I have read, and you are there again, in with the knife. This was the article that got me thinking. It’s not Russia Today.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10835274
As to being ‘gullible’ as you put it you should start examining your relationship with Resident Dissident, and examining his past. Whether he is paid to make contributions to this blog I don’t know. But the very name he has taken for himself shows that he is not going to agree with any main line argument which goes against his masters’ wishes – he has never condemned Guantanamo Bay as being as evil as any Gulag, he adopts the western governments’ arguments on everything, his purpose is to disrupt. Anybody who thinks otherwise needs lessons in what gullibility means.
Resident Dissident 8:55 pm
It is possible these media outlets were funded by the US.
But I’m sure journalists know their limits in Russia as they do in the UK and the west.
There is a fascinating story here
‘A Conspiracy Of Silence’ – HSBC, The Guardian And The Defrauded British Public
http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/2015/788-a-conspiracy-of-silence-hsbc-the-guardian-and-the-defrauded-british-public.html
Also I might add on topic.
@Nevernind: both Clarkson and Saville are Narcissists. No-one has really got to the bottom of what happened with Saville, but it seems that both the BBC version of “fame” and the Saville ego were feeding off each other. Saville was being egged on, and so was Clarkson. It is to Jeremy Clarkson’s credit that he can laugh at himself, which means that after a few month out of the limelight, he should be fine. As for Auntie Beeb… well we’ve discussed this matter many times.
For those who want to help Clarkson, here’s the petition to separate him from “BBC fame”:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/140/563/543/jeremyclarkson/
http://www.cfr.org/environmental-policy/conversation-us-environmental-protection-agency-administrator-gina-mccarthy/p36257
The effects of environment are primary for society’s well being. Who are we working for If not for ourselves.
The government borrows money to keep society going it’s called balancing the books. If your not working for yourselves you are payed by government to keep you, therefore you are working for the government. Ie state. The capitalist society allows you to work for yourselves laissez faire but limits how you work for the government.
By working profitably for the government you could reduce public borrowing.
So wherever we work how does it benefit and effect our environment and ourselves withi in it.
The Council of foreign relations has the Ukranian economic minister Frisay interviewed.
No point!
“@Nevernind: both Clarkson and Saville are Narcissists.”
I can understand why people don’t like Jeremy Clarkson, he’s an easy man to not like but repeatedly comparing him to Jimmy Savile? Get real.
I know people don’t like his class or his politics which is fine but repeatedly comparing him to a paedophile monster is just obscene.