The nauseating smugness of the Davos gathering is sickening enough at the best of times. In these very bad times, it is unbearable. The idea that we just need to recover confidence and get credit moving again, was precisely what the promoters of the South Seas and Darien schemes said when those schemes collapsed. The Church of England were quite right to characterise New Labour’s proposed remedies as “An addict returning to his drug”.
Brown’s extraordinary reliance on paid advisers from the merchant banks themselves to devise the way forward is laughable – not to mention the hideously unpleasant Baroness Vedera, one of the endless stream of democratically unaccountable Brown cronies parachuted into the Lords as ministers. And if one more penny of public money gets put into the banks without all bank bosses and staff being put on civil service pay rates, I am organising a tax strike.
Am in the middle of moving house, so no more from me until the end of the week.
What is arguably the biggest conspiracy theory of them all?
Answer. That there are no conspiracies!
On the other hand people who deny certain conspiracies are perfectly willing to accept the ones they believe in, like the one about a Muslim conspiracy to attacks and destroy our way of life, and there’s a worldwide network controlled by a guy living in a cave who pulls all the strings.
Then there’s the great anti-Israel conspiracy, which then becomes the great anti-Semetic conspiracy.
Conspiracy is apparently in the eye of the beholder, like beauty.
What characterises American politics, on one level, is that it’s a conspiracy and always has been. The Founders were a group of conspirators, traitors to the Crown, who conspired to wrench the American colonies, using force, away from the British Empire.
What’s interesting is that the people who started the revolt against Britain were probably a distinct minority with little actual support in the North American colonies at the time. Even when open warfare broke out between the Crown and the rebels, it’s highly debatable that they had a majority of the population behind them in their attempt to break away from Britain.
I wonder if I will be accused of anti-American bias for these ideas.
Politics and conspiracy go together like a horse and carriage.
The American historian Theodore Draper has described this in depth in his book “A Struggle for Power” [1996] – a gripping account of the events leading up to the American Revolution.
It was indeed carried through by a minority who didn’t want to pay the taxes which the British considered necessary for the defence of the colonies against the French and the Indians.
And the Revolution would not have succeeded but for the ineptitude of the British commanders – notably Lord Howe. Kenneth Roberts’ novel “Oliver Wiswell” is a moving evocation of the emotional agony endured by Loyalists during the Revolution.
I had an American friend who once said she thought I would write a book called “I’m Glad They Had a Revolution”. But in fact I’m not, as I think that if they had evolved to independence as members of the British Commonwealth they would have been a more constructive influence in today’s world.
4 February 2009
“British winter death rate predicted to rise”
“A higher death rate amongst older people and an increase in cold related illnesses is expected, after the recent extended period of cold weather in Britain.
An increased death rate associated with the winter months is a widespread international phenomenon, but Britain has one of the worst records in Europe. A World Health Organisation (WHO) report published by its European Regional Office last year stated, “The magnitude of the excess in the United Kingdom, at over 40,000 deaths every winter is the highest in the European Union”…
http://tinyurl.com/dxtyqv
Fiddling While Rome freezes.
MJ
What planet are you on?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_Commission
Cell phones – at least 30 calls were made from the planes. All credible experts agree that such calls were possible at the altitudes involved. The black box from UA93 has been recovered and relatives have listened to the tanscript. A feature film was made based on this and the phone calls (it’s a very good film). The remains of 13 of the 19 hijackers have been identified from DNA testing. Bin Laden – you think he is a CIA stooge or is that joke? I’d be interested to know who did the deed if not Islamists? Jews? The CIA? Little green men? Do you also believe in the no plane theory or the controlled demolition theory? Perhaps you believe in santa claus as well? As John McEnroe used to say, You Cannot Be Serious.
“The remains of 13 of the 19 hijackers have been identified from DNA testing.”
Now this DOES surprise me. Source, please.
“This was then confirmed by the full investigation and by the man in the cave himself.”
The “man in the cave”, as you called him, in the last authentic recorded statement from him issued on Sep 12 2001 denied having anything to do with Sep 11.
And your full investigation was remarkably light in content and on subpoenaed testimonies.
“All credible experts agree that such calls were possible at the altitudes involved”
Incorrect. That’s why the 911 Commission Report quietly dropped the cell-phone story in all but 2 instances.
“The black box from UA93 has been recovered and relatives have listened to the tanscript”
Incorrect again. It was the cabin voice recorder they recovered, not the flight data recorder. That’s what the relatives were able to listen to. You read transcripts, not listen to them by the way.
“A feature film was made based on this”
Golly. Must be true then.
“Bin Laden – you think he is a CIA stooge or is that joke?”
Hardly a joke. Are you unaware of his long association with the CIA?
“The remains of 13 of the 19 hijackers have been identified from DNA testing”
Nonsense.
“I’d be interested to know who did the deed if not Islamists?”
In the absence of a proper inquiry I think it ia not possible for anyone to come to any certain conclusion as to the identity of the perpetrators.
It is you who are lacking seriousness here.
Oh Eddie, you said you were never coming back and I took you at your word. More fool I. From here on in I promise never to do that again.
As for your dismissal of conspiracy theories, um, I can’t figure out if you’re for ’em or against ’em. You’re for them if they’re told to us by the US government and the media it seems. And agin ’em if they ain’t. Is that right?
And all that evidence! The evidence was so good and so unimpeachable that Colin Powell stood in front of the UN and swore on a bible (Well the OT anyway, and as everyone knows that’s the best bit). Oh wait, that wasn’t 911, that was the WMD’s in Iraq. Anyway, a trifling matter with barely a million dead and four million displaced. And besides, wars are necessary things and what’s a few fibs when it’s all in a good cause? So they lied about some WMD’s. They certainly wouldn’t have lied about 911. The fact that the war that we had to have could never have taken place without it, is to be dismissed by a wave of the hand. Like so! Did you see my hand? It never left my sleeve!
And all those neocons who signed their name to the PNAC declaration demanding that the West destroy Israel’s neighbours (google ‘oded yinon strategy for israel) and their prophetic daydreaming about a ‘New Pearl Harbour’ was nothing more than a spooky coincidence. I’m sure each of them slapped their foreheads and said to each other, ‘Wow, who knew? We called for a New Pearl Harbour and we got one. We are the luckiest girls in the world! And now America can smash Israel’s enemies. Er sorry, America’s enemies! Huzzah Huzzah.’
As for who did 911 you should get in touch with the FBI. Their official wanted poster for Bin Laden does not include 911. Apparently this was due to a lack of ‘evidence’ or something. Give them a call and tell them that there is too evidence, so there.
And you should also get in touch with those seven of the nineteen hijackers who stuck their hands up and said that, ‘Yes that’s my name and photo on the poster but as you can see I didn’t die on 911’. Idiots! How could they be sure? Didn’t they watch that movie?! It was a Feature Film and ‘very good one’ apparently. It was proof enough for you Eddie, so it should easily be proof enough for them. And if they want to bleat some question about whose face was that they just cut while shaving that morning, tell them you have EVIDENCE dammit. Be firm. Don’t take no for an answer. Evidence is evidence. And whether it’s cross examined or mere assertion, it’s still EVIDENCE.
Seems like 9-11 has replaced Hitler as the inevitable feature of any internet based discussion.
Yes John, but only because there’s so much evidence.
Jahn.
The ripples of 911 are in themselves tsunami’s. Or haven’t you noticed???
Hmm… it seems we’re all dancing to Eddie’s ‘I’m-not-a-zionist’ polka again. Even me, ha ha. Well, a toe-tapping beat is hard to resist.
Has anyone ever noticed a certain consistency to the Eddies of the world? I’ve met lots of Eddies and I seem to keep seeing the same things over and over. At a base level they seem to combine the twin strands of: the rightness of the War On Terror and the Government’s fascistic response to it; and the rightness of all things Israeli. On most everything else they seem to have very little opinion. They will profess to being vaguely Labour or vaguely Conservative, depending on who’s in power and whether or not that particular party is supporting the previous two memes.
Invariably there are two weapons in an Eddie’s arsenal. They are the ever reliable ‘anti-Semite’ tag and the also ever reliable ‘conspiracy theory’ tag. Both of them are meant to trump all other arguments. I wasn’t paying particular attention, but has anyone used the phrase ‘tinfoil hat’ yet? Or perhaps that’s an American wrinkle.
But the main thing is that discussions of banking must be avoided at all cost. And the media is no different. There is not a lick of doubt that the US Fed is privately owned. The history, once you search it out, is cast iron. People love quotes. How about this one –
“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is now controlled by its system of credit. We are no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”
?”Woodrow Wilson, 1919 (Referring to the Federal Reserve and the transition to a debt-based economy)
But Wilson ain’t nothing. Try putting ‘Andrew Jackson banking quotes’ into google. Wild, huh? How come we’ve never heard of this before? Why has this subject been disappeared? Isn’t the media – I don’t know – corporately owned or something? The reason the media doesn’t touch certain subjects (like the absence of WMD’s) is because their corporate masters collectively, somehow, wanted a war, and that suits them, or something. That’s how it works isn’t it? Some vague thing like that? Corporations want war, the media is corporate, something something.
But curiously the media bags out corporations all the time. The war got bagged out. Cheney got bagged out. The idiot son got bagged out. Everyone gets bagged out. Only one topic is utterly verboten and that’s the nature of reserve banking. In the media house of many voices you turn a corner and find youself in a room so quiet you could hear a pin drop. That conversation can never be had, not because it’s bullshit – if it was bullshit they’d be all over it – but because it can’t be touched with a 305cm pole (which is, er… 17.4 cubits in the old measure). And it can’t be touched because it’s cast iron. Were people to have their curiosity whetted to even the slightest degree, there’s only one conclusion they’re going to arrive at. Don’t believe me (I wear a sarong, a sure guarantee of not being taken seriously), just go look it up on google – ‘privately owned us fed’. Or watch ‘The Money Masters’. It’s free, nothing in it for me (except some poetry)(ahem).
Anyway Eddie, what were you saying mate? Conspiracy theory something or other. Lots of evidence, I recall. Carry on. And don’t mind the topic mate. Since you’ve only a handful of weapons in your arsenal, best to alter the topic to suit you, rather than the other way around. And to paraphrase Basil Fawlty – Mention the war! Mention 911! Mention any other goddamn thing!
Oh look! Is that a low flying wildebeest?! And so early in the year!
Phone calls. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, 13 passengers from Flight 93 made a total of over 30 calls to both family and emergency personnel (twenty-two confirmed air phone calls, two confirmed cell phone and eight not specified in the report). The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force testified that all but two calls from Flight 93 were made on air phones. There were reportedly three phone calls from Flight 11, five from Flight 175, and three calls from Flight 77 which American Airlines later confirmed did not have airphones fitted, two calls from these flights were recorded, placed by flight attendants Madeleine Sweeney and Betty Ong on Flight 11.
According to the 9/11 Commission Report, both black boxes from Flight 77 and both black boxes from Flight 93 were recovered. On April 18, 2002, the FBI allowed the families of victims from Flight 93 to listen to the voice recordings.
Bin Laden has admitted responsibility for 9/11, but of course if he is a CIA stooge…?
These big events always attract conspiracy nuts. There are none so blind as will not see.
On another topic, I hope you lot are following the results of the Iraqi election. A resounding victory for secular parties against religious zealots.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hwK_CSpBxsNuVUEaDuOwmSSCiqGwD964CM800
and against people like this – the personification of evil, a woman who was part of an organisation that arranged for women to be raped in order that they could then be turned into suicide bombers. But you lot probably don’t have the balls to condemn her, you probably think she is a victim, just like the women she sent to die.
When Ruth called him out as a paid shill, he wrote he would quit posting here.
When i asked under what new alias he would come back, he thought it easiest to come back under the old one.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/01/new_labours_bri.html
His assignment is transparent, his income depends on the distracting disinfo he spreads here.
He has his supporting crew amidst commenters here, but his training and dedication is not enough to cover the rotting body of lies he has to defend.
“Eddie” is a Zionist shill and a notorious liar.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/01/boring_boring_b.html
Thanks, nobody, for reminding us about the taboo subject.
What do you people think about a tax strike as proposed by Craig ?
Researcher. What’s your line of research? Mental impairment?
Sorry Researcher, no time for that. I’m too busy shaking my fist at Eddie’s ‘personification of evil’. She was on the telly so I’m perfectly certain that everything we’re told about her is true. Is there no end to these wicked Muslims? Certainly not on the telly and nor from Eddie neither. Quite right that they should be shot whilst waving white flags and trying to surrender. Doubtless some trick.
Um, protest against tax eh? Yeah, why not? I don’t know about the UK (nor here actually) but the IRS in the States is another privately owned corporation registered in the Bahamas. Did you know income tax wasn’t introduced in the US until the year after the Fed was founded? They didn’t need it prior to that since tax on business profits was sufficient to pay for all that fiscal policy stuff like roads and bridges etc. But after the Fed was founded and all US money then had to be borrowed from the Fed (who merely printed it for the costs of the paper and ink), interest had to be paid. Lots of it. And that’s what income tax is for! Every penny of it is paid to the Fed. Wild stuff huh? Who knew?
Is it the same in the UK and here in Oz? Well when the government releases a stimulus package is all the money borrowed or not? From whom? Who has all that money? Did they amass it all because they’re good at saving? Or did they just print it for the cost of the paper and ink? We could ask Eddie but he’s too busy jabbering about Muslims.
Muslims funnily enough don’t have reserve banks. Imagine owning a reserve bank and being able to print your own money. Imagine being able to say, “Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.” Imagine that power. That’s the power to scoff at a nation’s laws. If you had that power and there were people out there who weren’t under your thumb, who offered an interest-free alternative model to your own money-as-debt usury, would it serve your interests to show them what happens to smart guys? Blow their shit up kind of thing?
What if we were to roll around in our heads the idea that our campaign against Muslims is actually a sanctity-of-banking campaign? Does that make sense? Or rather, does it make as much sense as all the other idiotic and ever-changing reasons why we smashed Iraq, are right now smashing Afghanistand and Pakistan, and are (any day now) about to smash Iran? Works for me.
Did anyone google ‘oded yinon strategy for israel’? Was there a single Muslim country to escape destruction in there? Indonesia perhaps. Mind you, Indonesia owes more money to the IMF than the whole country is worth, so no biggie.
Anyway, Eddie insists we not talk about this. Which is predictable of him of course, but sort of comforting in a perverse fashion. ‘Ooh, Eddie, you are awful but we like you.’ Well I like you since you’re so perversely predictable. Or is it predictably perverse? Either will do I expect.
Everybody shake your fist at Eddie’s straw man! Er, woman! Throw another faggot on the fire. Yay! Burn Muslims Burn!
Crikey. Keep taking the tablets. Just had a look at your site. Anyone who thinks that old fraudster Pilger is god get my vote for the loony bin.
Nobody is on particularly good form today and he has done us a service by wrenching the discussion back to the original topic of this thread.
He is quite right to point out the basic difference between Western and Muslim banking models. Muslim banks are largely unaffected by the current crisis and this is because of – cover your ears Eddie – Shari’ah law. It prohibits the acquisition wealth via gambling (or alcohol, tobacco, pornography or stocks in armament companies) and forbids the buying and selling of debt as well as usury. Additionally Shari’ah banking laws forbid investing in any company with debts exceeding 30%. I guess Western bankers would just find this too dull.
Nobody is correct also to raise the subject of IMF debt. Very few nations are without debt, but if you get a list of those who are in this enviable position, compare it with the list of those nations comprising Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’: what an amazing coincidence!
Yes but many muslim countries are also some of the most corrupt and poverty stricken on earth, with disparities in wealth between the richest and the poorest that put the West to shame. Perhaps there is a link? Arab sheikhs buying up Premiership football clubs when their people are dying is disgraceful.
Did anyone see that just now on Sky News? Some ‘prayer breakfast’ in Washington. The guy introduced Tony Blair as “one of the great moral leaders of the world” (or on the planet, whatever his precise phrase was.) I nearly threw up.
Always pays to check on a statement
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0908770.html
inequality top 10 as of 2002
Sierra Leone
Central African Republic
Swaziland
Brazil
Nicaragua
South Africa
Paraguay
Colombia
Chile
Honduras
So the number one slot is held by an Islamic country, but not an arabic one, number two is mostly Christian, number 3 is mostly Zionist. South American countries feature heavily in the top ten.
As for poor countries, you’ll see Muslim, Christian and Buddhist competing for the top slot in misery.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0908763.html
always check
Eddie says, “Bin Laden has admitted responsibility for 9/11, but of course if he is a CIA stooge…?”
Have a look at that tape again and compare it to others of bin Laden. It bears little or no resemblance to the man. And Eddie, calling people “conspiracy theorists” is about the same as throwing “anti-Semitic” at them. It’s an attempt to short-cut your way to writing off everything they say. It doesn’t work. Sorry mate!
“he wrote he would quit posting here”
Yep, I distinctly remember “this is my last post”. Poor Eddie just can’t stay away.
I have this (personal) mental picture of Eddie: an only child, taught to respect and obey “authority”, a bachelor, lives alone and doesn’t have many friends. Even those he does have get bored with him pretty often. He’s obsessive about keeping his fingernails clean. He used to collect colourful foreign stamps until he found the internet, and now he finds “company” there by being provocative, and dragging threads off topic when he can, forcing people to use up energy rebutting him. He likes his worldview simple and uncomplicated. And he, and he alone, has a handle on good and evil.
Ta-rah! That’s my potted ‘Eddie’.
Touch of Islamophobia too, Eddie?
Eddie,
sorry I’m late – Proven ‘conspiracy theory’ – The Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Complete lie, completely admitted (after years and years of total denial), 58,000 dead Americans, 3,000,000 dead Asians. They’ve got form, my friend. And if recent conflicts have not been engineered then they will be historical oddities.
By the way, do you, by any chance, remember that crying lttle girl that told us all about those evil Iraqis throwing babies out of incubators prior to Gulf War 1? She was wheeled out when US public support for the war was fading really fast. Turned out to be the Kuwaiti ambassadors daughter with some helpful coaching from PR firm Hill and Knowlton and the Bush 1 regime. All lies of course, but once again it had the desired effect of stirring US blood and getting a war back on track.
Eddie,
It’s good to have you back. I don’t have to agree with you but you’re as entitled to your opinion as anyone else.
To quote Mr Chomsky: “If you don’t believe in freedom of speech for those you despise, you don’t believe in it at all.”
Not that I despise Eddie or anyone else, but you surely get the point?
I agree with Chris. I like Eddie being around. He disagrees with, and indulges in ad hominem attacks on, everybody else. We’d all agree with each other and be too polite if Eddie wasn’t here.
“I like Eddie being around”
Me too. Otherwise who would we cynics beat around the head? We’d be chewing the furniture instead.