With this country’s massive needs in housing and renewable energy, it is typical that the only public spending announcement the Tories wish to make is on more potential for death and destruction at Faslane. The politics of the ludicrous claims on employment creation are risibly transparent. Don’t vote SNP! Don’t Vote Corbyn! This is not an industrial or a services economy, its the WMD economy.
I was frustrated during the referendum campaign by the mealy-mouthed response to the unionists constant carping on about job losses at Faslane. Chucking out Trident will cause job losses. Good. Doing evil should not be sustained as a job creation scheme.
It is like arguing to keep the Spanish Inquisition going because of the workers it employs. Woodcutters gather the material for the burning alive of heretics. Skilled workers lay the faggots and construct the bonfires. Blacksmiths forge fetters and implements of torture. Then the torturers themselves have good steady jobs, and what of the clerks who write down the confessions? Ending the Spanish Inquisition would cause economic disruption.
I think that pushes the parallel far enough, but it is a sad comment on our moral relativism that anyone is allowed to talk of employment at Faslane as a bonus without being roundly ridiculed and socially shamed. As usual Osborne’s numbers are a trick of mostly totaling existing plans over a lengthy period. But even if this was genuine investment, he should be told where to stuff it. Scotland must not be a WMD based economy.
“Profit equals exploitation” – so final confirmation if it were needed that Mr Goss is an out and out Marxist – no qualification to only say excess/surplus profits represent exploitation. It should be remembered that not even Lenin went this far – he recognised the need for some element of the profit motive in the NEP. What Mr Goss is proposing is pure Stalinism, which is of course one of the reasons why he supported dekulakization and has to deny the Holodomor.
This year of 1915 is the centennial of Einstein’s making public his theory of general relativity. One of the greatest accomplishments in the history of the human mind. As the theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler made clear to me when I took one of his courses at Princeton.
RobG
31/08/2015 11:13pm
My answer is no. A revenge attack would not be morally acceptable. Bit of a no-brainer, to my mind.
I think that is a different question, however, to whether the threat of mutually assured destruction as a deterrent to nuclear war is morally acceptable. It might be the same answer, or it might not; it is certainly more morally ambiguous than the question you have posed. But it’s a different question.
Kind regards,
John
Thanks Rob for letting me know about the link not working, this is getting spooky for some reason the hypelinks are pointing back to this blog, and going to “404” page not found?Here is the link again Gamma-ray burst
======
He was a huckster who hawked his knowledge as a physicist to earn millions by feeding the paranoia of the generals who had fought the last war, and verily believed the bigger the bomb the better the bomb. Teller was the same character who set up a symposium for use of his hydrogen bombs for mining, and he went so far as fracking for gas! Trouble was his extracted gas was radio active!
In all probability Teller inspired the author of character of Dr. Strange Love
Lysias
31/08/2015 11:29pm
How interesting. Did you know Richard Feynman?
Kind regards,
John
The Atomic Weapons Establishment(AWE) at Aldermaston is run by a company owned by the British giant Serco whose boss is Rupert Soames that 3rd class former DJ from a dodgy club running a firm of cheats that will one day run workplace health care, a mandatory requirement for employers.
Yes thanks to ya Iraq war voting Aegis kin, Trident is in the bag – we have already ordered the Stateside Submarine launch tubes!
Oh and thanks Rupert not for nicking all the drinks out of the cooler on Arni Weinstock’s HS125 – I had a ‘dry’ flight up to Inverness twice – Bastard!
BrianFujisan thanks for the feedback, but as you are already aware out there (ie only 200 miles in the skies direction), we have enough threats to end humanity and wipe the bally lot out of the universe, and as yet this seems to not have registered with any of the so called dear leaders and their sponsors.
I have re posted the link, and checked it, and found it to be working.
Cheers Fedup..yes it works now.
And aye, they sure do have Things up there. i often wonder just how far ahead are the Fkers, compared to what we Joe Public have…10/ 20/30 years… And the £$£$£$£ it all costs.
P.S… NO Amount of $£$£$ can protect us ( at least Not Yet ) From the inevitable Impact. But it would still be £$£$ better spent in the Attempt…
PPs Ahem we are going all Squonk.. 🙂
Mary
Yes the Place is Vast.. The Fkers Love to harass. intimidate Small Boats that stray… i was once one such a wee boat.. Power happy assholes…. – So we wanta plant Bomb or What ever.. I Great Plan just sail right up there.. Better to use the Trained Dolphins methinks…Poor Intelligent Things.. Or Ahem, some other underwater Specialists.
Techno:
The filthy Tories certainly do subsidise loss-making industries – farming, for a glaring example. Still do. They also refused to abide by their own promises (remember the “Plan for coal”? Of course not!).
The demand for coal had – of course – gone down with the switch to gas for central heating, just as steam-trains gave way to diesel engines. Zero weight added to your argument with that, likewise as the “behaviour” of miners.
But your central point is that British coal miners could not compete with Colombian child labour, and that’s a fair concern. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been buying the products of abusive labour practices? But the likes of you would then refer us to the wonders of the Free Market, and wearily patronise us on how the results are simply inevitable and clearly for the best – except for virtually everyone concerned.
JSD: “Glenn
Usually, I am addressing someone directly, so I personalise my response.”
It’s not _that_ personal on a public blog, actually.
“Sorry if it irritates you, but that really does not seem to me to be a good enough reason to change the way I am.
I imagine it slides right past most people and they don’t care much, but it matters to me.”
Alcyone is right – it’s not so much an irritation, as questioning the need for your gimmick. If everyone behaved the same as yourself (often a useful moral yardstick), imagine how annoying it would be should everyone decide to have their little .sig !
But why does it matter to you – is it so important to have your mark of distinction there? Do you think the rest of us are lacking, maybe a little rude, in not giving a personalised sign-off?
Since it apparently matters to you so much, perhaps you’d be good enough to explain. Good netiquette dictates following established practices, it seems rather uncouth to buck it. But you are at pains to do so anyway – is it simply to give you the option to sign off with or without the “Kind regards”, thus indicating how favoured your correspondent should consider himself?
Brilliant Glen.. And Em No Mention of WMD’s… Here or There… or Over there.. We know what their up to..Tactical nukes..Lets see how that Pans Oot
I make it a rule not to reply to trolls such as Resident Dissident and Anon1 but this Holodomor nonsense
Denying “The Holodomor“ is not something restricted to Marxists.
Historians generally do not recognise this non event because it did not actually take place.
It is in fact a fascist meme, one of the characteristic means of denying the genocides which have become known as the Holocaust. Genocides which could not have been carried out without the enthusiastic assistance of east european fascists, particularly in the Baltic states and, in Ukraine, the militias led by Stepan Bandera and the two Waffen SS divisions recruited from his sympathisers.
The idea is very simple, as were most of Goebbels`s ideas: by inventing a genocide perpetrated by the Soviet Union the unique nature of the Nazi Holocaust is trivialised, reduced to being one among many such events. At the same time the reputation of the Nazis, and their auxillaries, is rehabilitated by suggesting, that as a regime, it was merely a reaction to Bolshevism and thus no worse, in fact very likely morally superior to the Soviet Union.
By such intellectual chicanery do we end up with popular support for a Ukrainian regime which is openly Nazi in sympathy and fascistic in its daily practises- using, as did the Nazis, gangs of thugs to kill and beat any who it suspects of opposing it, banning and imprisoning opposition political parties, characterising its opponents as racially inferior and looting the masses who dare not protest or protect themselves.
Corbyn has presented a plan to allow workers currently employed on Trident to move to other areas and allow their skills to be productively employed: http://www.jeremyforlabour.com/defence_diversification
John Spencer Davis says
“Chucking out Trident will cause job losses. Good.”
Not good at all. Imagine being one of the people put out of work.
Are you serious?
the obscene amount of money spent on Trident spent on engineering works house building and so on could provide high paid high skilled jobs all over Scotland and still leave enough change to compensate every single person in Helensburgh with a million quid each, never mid the fact that Faslane would then become the Scottish navy’s headquarters creating substantially MORE jobs than are at Faslane at the moment!
http://www.nuclearinfo.org/article/uk-trident-operational-berths/ministry-defence-reveals-just-520-faslane-jobs-depend-trident
Techno says
“The nasty Tories did not shut down anything directly, they refused to subsidise loss-making industries with tax money. The coal mining industry started shutting down under Labour in the 1960s, and the behaviour of striking miners in the 1970s and 1980s did not help at all. Manufacturing and textiles were all moving to the far east where labour per hour is cheaper. British workers were simply too expensive.”
Im guessing from you psuedonym your maybe thirty years old?
I would steer clear of stating WHY you feel the tories did what the did in the eighties if I were you!
Unless you want to start explaining why (for example) the tories (and they did) closed Ravenscraig steel mill which at the time was a largest strip mill in Britain and the most profitable part of British Steel and then made absolutely sure it couldn’t be reopened by selling of (with indecent haste) the equipment from the mill to China Brazil et el at “not to be repeated knock down prices”
and then demolished it just for good measure,
Maybe you would like to tEll us just how uneconomic the case for Rosyth was to the MOD when John Major in spite of the howls of protest from among others the MOD itself when he contrarily decided to award a refit contract to Devonport in spite of the fact Rosyth already had the infrastructure in place (eg dry dock ) which Devonport had to build at an extra cost to the taxpayer of 100 million pounds,
Or possibly explain WHY British miners were SO overpaid and under producing that the only decent thing to do was to close all the pits and destroy communities all over the UK many of which to this day have not recovered from the destructive vandalism of the Thatcher regime, she on the other hand stated reasonably it was against EC rules to subsidise failing companies so she was only following orders, yea right, she CHOSE to adhere to that EC rule while France and Germany totally ignored it and modernised their mining industries, Thatcher was always going to close the pits no matter how terrible the consequences for the communities and the UK as a whole after they humiliated Ted Heaths government in the early 70’s it was payback on the same level as George Bush taking down Saddam Hussein after his father hadn’t the cojones to finish the job when he had the chance,
btw as a miners son, my father all his life toiled away down the pits and our family holidays consisted of a week in Port Seaton, so much for overpaid miners eh?
Let me remind you “the behaviour of the striking miners” pal was caused by a government who in the 70’s completely ignored the perfectly reasonable demands of the miners who were indeed underpaid compared to comparative industries and then in the 80’s were placed under such draconian conditions as to be comparable to Amazon demanding impossible targets and closing pits who couldn’t meet them,
So beware coming to Fife (if you dare) and coming out with SHIT like that,
My wife was standing in a doorway in a heavy shower of rain prior to the Murphy egging incident in Kirkcaldy and was standing next to one of Murphys hangers on who was about 30 and English and he stood there in a street in Kirkcaldy and proclaimed loudly that the “miners brought it on themselves ” remember this was supposedly a labour supporter stating loudly that Thatcher had the right of it, She (my wife) ripped him a new one and got a round of applause from the people who were starting to emerge from the surronding doorways who heard what that idiot said, he indecently kept a safe distance from us while Murphy stood on his juice crate and shouted at us from three feet away through a megaphone.
Glenn
01/09/2015 2:08am
Is it really that important? Do you not have better things to do than concern yourself with how I choose to sign myself off?
John
Bevin
You are talking errant nonsense – it is quite possible to believe that both the Holocaust and the Holodomor occurred, because they did. Most historians of all political complexions believe that they both happened.
As for the Ukrainian regime being openly Nazi in sympathy and fascistic in its daily practices – perhaps you could explain how said regime yesterday voted for decentralisation of power against the voices of the extreme right wing elements in Ukraine. When did you last see fascists, or Mr Putin for that matter, take steps leading to a decentralisation of power. Putin has consistently taken away power from the regions and republics of the Russian Federation in order to strengthen what he calls the vertical of power.
I think you will find that Mr Goss’s friends on the Rothschild’s web sites to which he has linked many times also engage in not a little Holocaust denial.
For his next trick Bevin will make the Great Terror and the Gulag disappear – expect a recipe for omelette or similar.
“I make it a rule not to reply to trolls such as Resident Dissident”
That will be the Soviet style rule that everyone is meant to obey apart from the “nomemklatura” such as yourself who can do so when ever you feel like!
When Mr Putin announced 50 new ICBM recently ( or a renewal as Mr Lawton insists on calling it) did we hear a word of criticism from those condemning Osborne’s current actions? If so could someone please tell me where. I can see the arguments for not renewing Trident or at least replacing it with something a lot less expensive than the current proposals – but if you believe in nuclear disarmament in the real world then you cannot remain silent while others rearm or try to get nuclear arms in the first place (yes I can also remember how some saw little problem in Iran getting the bomb).
Projects like Faslane also destroy jobs. There was once a large shipbreaking facility and indeed much more in Faslane that were replaced by the Trident (then Polaris) base with the loss of thousands of jobs.
But is more than that. Britain was – in the early days of Faslane – short of money. A small portion of the funds allocated to Faslane could have provided the investment that saved hundreds of thousands of jobs in Scotland’s once great shipbuilding and engineering industries which were dying (through lack of investment in them)at the same time as Faslane (then with Polaris) was being created. These great industries died because there was no investment money available at the time (with sky high taxes the wealthy were not investing in the UK but funneling their money abroad through the City)
The plain fact is that the cost to the taxpayer of funding faslane probably destroyed more jobs than it created. The irony is that it is not even an independent deterrent since it can’t be fired without American permission.
Mr Goss
“Noddy, Noddy – apart from Miss Prim and Miss Rap – Blyton does not really do women.”
_______________
Which one did you get caught behind the bike shed with?
////////////////
And what makes you think I’m not telling the truth when I explained to Doris why I hadn’t posted during the day? Give me your address and a few shekels and I’ll send you a postcard.
glenn
1 Sep, 2015 – 2:08 am
“If everyone behaved the same as yourself (often a useful moral yardstick), imagine how annoying it would be should everyone decide to have their little .sig !”
then…
“Good netiquette dictates following established practices, it seems rather uncouth to buck it.”
If everyone decided to “have their little .sig” then wouldn’t that be a de facto “established practice” which, according to you, equates to “good netiquette”.
So mob mentality rules, does it?
Why anyone would get so worked up about something so utterly trivial as whether or not someone signs their name at the end of a comment is completely beyond me.
Lockheed Martin’s alleged frauds
‘Last week, Lockheed Martin paid the Justice Department $4.7 million to settle charges it fraudulently paid a lobbyist with illegally-used taxpayer funds. It paid the lobbyist, a revolving door former U.S. Representative, to help it get it a giant, no-bid, $2.4 billion-a-year contract to run giant national labs for many years to come. Lockheed’s astonishingly corrupt influence peddling, with illegal taxpayer funds, has so many sleazy aspects that only the ten worst can be briefly covered.’
Aug 31, 2015
The 10 Worst Things About Lockheed Martin’s Alleged Lobbying Fraud
http://www.forbes.com/sites/charlestiefer/2015/08/31/lockheed-fined-4-7-million-for-fraudulent-taxpayer-paid-lobbying-with-most-corrupt-ex-rep-wilson/
“Blyton does not really do women.”
I suspect that the poor dear was getting confused with the Politburo in his back editions of Pravda – women are all over the pace in the collected works of his favourite author.
I see the name of Rothschild emerges above.
Remember Gideon, Deripaska, Nat Rothschild and Mandelslime on the yacht?
After that all came out, Gideon and Nat, although they were best mates at a posh London prep school, fell out. Gideon was narked at an accusation he was soliciting a bung.
‘But in 2008, after 30 years of friendship, they had a spectacular falling-out after an evening aboard the yacht of Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch, in Corfu. Osborne gossiped to journalists that Peter Mandelson had been there too, and had allegedly “poured poison” into his ear about Gordon Brown (then Prime Minister). Rothschild was furious at this “breach of privacy” and wrote to The Times accusing Osborne of trying to solicit from Deripaska a £50,000 donation for the Conservatives (something Osborne denies).’
A repellent bunch.
Well now Gideon and Nat are friends again as Nat reveals from his eyrie in Switzerland where he relocated from London.
‘My winners are ahead of my losers and that’s what business is about’: Nat Rothschild on money, modesty and feeling a bit Swiss
After a disastrous foray into mining Nat is back with an app to save the black cab industry. Here he talks money, modesty and feeling a bit Swiss
http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/my-winners-are-ahead-of-my-losers-and-that-s-what-business-is-about-nat-rothschild-on-money-modesty-9815749.html
Even though he came a cropper on his Asia minerals ploy, he is still richer @ £523m than his father Jacob, and his relative Evelyn. So it says!
Mary
1 Sep, 2015 – 9:01 am
“Mandelslime”
“soliciting a bung”
“as Nat reveals from his eyrie in Switzerland”
LOL. You have a nice turn of phrase, Mary!
It is telling that Nat’s collaborator on the black taxi app is an ‘Israeli former cyber security office’.
‘We’re here to talk about Maaxi, the app that he’s launching with Gabi Campo, an Israeli former cyber intelligence officer. It’s a brilliant idea, allowing Londoners to share black taxis with up to five strangers on the same route, a computer calculating the cost between them. Rothschild believes it will “save the taxi industry”.’
Googling ‘Gabi Campo Israel’ produces this as the first result???
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabi_Ashkenazi
Britain, as a member of NATO, has committed to spending 2% of GDP on defence, an independent Scotland which was a member of NATO would be too.
Trident comes out of that 2%. The money couldn’t be spent on schools, hospitals, houses it has to be spent on providing Britain’s contribution to the security of the west and that means either a nuclear deterrent or a large well equipped with conventional methods of killing people standing army ready to go to war.
@fedup 31 Aug, 2015 – 4:12 pm
Won’t the multitude of new of Saudi/Qatari ‘anti-ISIS’ Eurofighters soon be engaging the latest deployment of another ‘anti-ISIS’ Микоян МиГ-29 force as they are all struggling to out-Daesh Daesh?
Maybe we will actually still need some rented locked-out Faslane nukes in the next decades. . . http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4696268,00.html
either nukes or large tubs of pop-corn to watch the developments