This is my last comment for the year as we are off to spend Hogmanay as the guests of an Ambassador in Paris. Out of deference to my family, who have had the brunt of it these last few days, I am definitely not taking the laptop, so I will no longer be able to take part in the popular new bloodsport of proving your loyalty to the SNP by being nasty to Craig Murray.
My parting thought is that, as every year of my entire life, it has been a disastrous one for the Palestinians. Yet more land occupied, settlements built, homes destroyed, olive trees uprooted, shipping vessels sunk and yet another murderous onslaught on Gaza.
I warmly recommend this rare public appearance by Col. Larry Wilkerson, ex-Chief of Staff to Colin Powell and a fellow recipient of the Sam Adams Award for Integrity. His brief musings here on Israel and Syria come from a deep store of knowledge and a razor-sharp intellect.
Do have a wonderful celebration. The future will be good. We are closer to a transformational change in society than you may realise.
Trust is a wonderful even admirable quality in our world of mistrust and uncertainty:
Iran allegedly “tentatively agreed” to transport a large portion of its uranium stockpile to Russia for conversion into reactor fuel. The P5+1 group, namely United States, Russia, China, United Kingdom, and France, plus Germany, is scheduled to meet the Iranian delegation in Geneva on January 15.
http://rt.com/news/219507-iran-us-uranium-agreement/
Here is the AP report source:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAN_NUCLEAR?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
I wait for the US to drive a knife through the agreement with the upset apple cart of sanctions.
No, Clark
I and TonyM agree with the cited Hitchens quote.
Tech agrees with everything else Hitchens writes except that specific quote.
She won’t even acknowledge its existence.
Could be a woman from Venus thing. Dunno.
That £2 million Mary would certainly improve the number and quality of food banks thousands of struggling families rely on:
http://www.scotsman.com/news/health/over-73-000-scots-reliant-on-food-banks-1-3648314
Mark, I wish Iran would develop their research reactors more and drop the Bushehr PWR power reactor project. They’ll just end up with an awful radioactive mess like other countries have, and that’s if it doesn’t blow up. Iran has plenty of sunshine for solar concentration. Exotic isotopes for export from research reactors is where the money and advancement are to be found.
Thank you Clark – yes I have researched the 1953 Iranian coup d’état although right now that is far too many words for my eyes. It was CIA orchestrated and we should have learned their present day modus from that corrupt, deceitful and shameless event.
I don’t begrudge Westminster some booze, especially if it loosens their tongues when they’re within ear-shot of any active audio recorders. 1.25 million over five years is peanuts, though if the two million is for just a year and just for the Commons it does seem excessive.
I DO begrudge the hugely greater amount of money they’ve put into nukes, war and banks. And I begrudge the stupid, self-defeating “austerity measures”.
Well you are right Clark – plenty of sunshine and we still have Fukushima polluting our oceans to the point I hesitate to eat a sardine, a great source of omega3.
No I empower the positive which is trust between Iran and Russia; a crucial and fundamental condition and prerequisite to the economic agreements viz BRICS and financial systems that negate the US/UK/IS monopoly; an imperative component IMO to the peace of mind and well-being of future generations.
Why should any government be given booze? when most, as we learn, fiddle expenses and maintain moats/castles etc with our dosh? Why should anyone be entitled to relief on a second property when most are rented out at exorbitant rates?- We remember old school Londoners like my ancestors booted out to the provinces as a result of commercial redevelopment.
Mark, it’s such a sordid history, the “Western interventions” in the Middle East. The voters don’t learn because the mass media don’t report it properly.
Look at this latest débâcle. The US pouring in money and arms through Bahrain to strengthen the “Syrian Opposition” – who then turn out to be ISIS, those great beheaders and killers of – well, just about anyone and everyone who isn’t ISIS.
“Intervene, intervene, intervene”; the constant call for more war. And the results just go from bad to worse to appalling to ISIS. It’s like watching some incompetent quack who calls himself a doctor killing the patient by trying drug after drug after drug, never admitting that the symptoms are cased by the treatments. And on the sidelines there’s the drug merchant, promising that the latest treatment really will work, and constantly goading; “the situation is critical; you have to do something!“
Sorry; should be “symptoms are caused by the treatments…”
Oh, let’m have their booze or any other recreational drugs; it all oils the wheels – but not two million’s worth a year, mind. And yes, audit their expenses with rigour. But recreational drugs will help the truth leak out 🙂
It’s a bit like the way 90% of US broadcast media is controlled by just six corporations.
At worst that’s just six guys phone eachother and agree a media agenda. Don’t need to happen of course. They’re all on the same page anyways.
But look at this. These three oul fuckers divided up the whole world:
This is their serious pic:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gnT8h3wFpmI/T6VetwpI8CI/AAAAAAAAEeE/iH5WXlybk_8/s1600/yalta.jpg
And here’s them laughing:
http://content.answcdn.com/main/content/img/getty/6/5/2642765.jpg
Reminds me of that final scene from Animal Farm.
As a result of their agreement at Yalta, untold millions were imprisonned in Communism, whilst the West went on a productive spree.
No competition. Geddit. Great wealth for westerners, even the peeps, all up to the 1980s, until the prisonards were released from the communist cage.
Then what happens.
They flood the western market with recently released cheap labour and products, western standard of living goes down, eastern goes up.
It’s all just a game, guys.
And if you ain’t a player, you’re a loser.
For most peeps the best advice is just to ensure you’re born into the upwave in your particular birth location.
That’s probably eastwards for the forseeable future.
Nothing personal. Just business.
lol Herbie – although a deadly ‘game’ – in 2001 the West threw it’s toys out of the pram –
gassed‘put to sleep’ it’s own people, and turned bodies and buildings to dust in a trick to turn on terror and invade Iraq displacing 4 million families and murdering thousandsof women and children.Atonement is just round the next bend!
Herbie – selectively quoting Christopher Hitchens:
“It necessarily changes our attitude toward the everyday complicity of average Germans.”
Of course Herbie never says how Hitchens believed the attitudes should change i.e. from what to what. I am pretty certain given the rest of the article that Hitch was taking up the “reformist” views of David Irving or endorsing those of Herbie. The technique of taking any ambiguity in anyone’s writing and then quoting out of context as a means of supporting one’s own narrow point of view (remember they all say the same quote) has very little to commend it.
Clark since Islam (or more precisely some of its adherents) cannot be blamed for anything could you now relieve Christians of blame for the Inquisition?
On the other hand perhaps we might wish to blame all the ideologues, where their ideology is religious or politicial, who stick rigidly to their ideology regardless of the human consequences and who go to such ridiculous ends to distort and select evidence that supports their ideology.
Glenn_UK
““Of course you should feel free to continue to mispell Hannah Arendt’s name – perhaps you could add “Annah” or “Hanna” to the “Arrendt” next time?”
“mispell” – ? Hmm, perhaps we shouldn’t be overly petty in criticisms about typos, and let minor points slide once in a while.”
____________________
Come on now, Glenn, be fair.
You should know that I don’t usually comment on typos (if I did, I’d soon be doing nothing else). But there are exceptions which occasionally stir me into action; two such categories are
1/. when the typo is (inadvertently) funny
2/. when people like Professor Herbie throw heavyweight names into the discussion in an attempt to add weight or gravitas; in such cases, the least the poster can do is to get the names of his/her heavyweight “witnesses” right. If that means taking extra care while typing, then so be it.
Does that clarify?
PS to Iain Orr : I enjoyed yours and shall return to it later today (I hope). For now, thank you.
More evidence that Hitch was not supporting the Herbie world view
“Well, as Hannah Arendt famously said, there can be a banal aspect to evil. In other words, it doesn’t present always. I mean, often what you’re meeting is a very mediocre person. But nonetheless, you can get a sort of frisson of wickedness from them. And the best combination of those, I think, I describe him in the book, is/was General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina, who I met in the late 1970s when the death squad war was at its height, and his fellow citizens were disappearing off the street all the time. And he was, in some ways, extremely banal. I describe him as looking like a human toothbrush. He was a sort of starch, lean officer with a silly mustache, and a very stupid look to him, but a very fanatical glint as well. And, if I’d tell you why he’s now under house arrest in Argentina, you might get a sense of the horror I felt as I was asking him questions about all this. He’s in prison in Argentina for selling the children of the rape victims among the private prisoners, who he kept in a personal jail. And I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone who’s done anything as sort of condensedly horrible as that.”
and
“She made it clear that she was in no way blaming the Jews or excusing the Germans, but was simply insisting that we confront the specificity of 20th century anti-Semitism”
http://www.hannaharendtcenter.org/?p=3428
Sorry no Technicolour on this subject (Hitchens and the Hoess confession) it is you who is fabricating wildly and dragging in completely extraneous irrelevant material to confuse the matter, with each reply you’ve given. You repeated information authoritatively though to be competely untrustworthy, I pointed out, in case you weren’t aware, that everyone has moved on (like 25 years ago) from that position, that it was no longer (never was) credible. I said I’d leave the matter there, but as this has rumbled on in my absence, I’ll leave it here instead.
“it is you who is fabricating wildly and dragging in completely extraneous irrelevant material to confuse the matter, with each reply you’ve given.”
Oh you mean like the rest of Hitch’s essay from which your original quote was taken out of context – you really are a piece of work.
Can somebody please make sense of 911, all that ENERGY that turned 100s of stories to pyroclastic dust surely did not come from a couple of wing-fulls of kerosene. And the devils will be laid bare, its either the muzzies or their accusers, we will know whether macky is the devil or gayboy jemand.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, eye-witnesses do not always tell the truth and especially not when directly implicated in the events they are describing. It is not always because they are natural liars, but the mind has tricks to rationalise events after the fact. Anyone who has found an old diary many years later will find that what we think we remember is not always what a contemporaneous written record confirms happened.
For a fascinating insight on how people cope within the context they are given you could follow Scouse Billy’s recommendation and look up Konrad Morgan, the SS investigator who had the commander of the Buchenwald Camp executed for corruption. The description in the German account of his attitude at the German Auschwitz trials of the 1960s is quite revealing ” Seine Empörung galt aber den Tätern nicht wegen des Massenmordes, sondern ihrer persönlichen Bereicherung daran”
It hasn’t taken long for a new version of the Tory election poster to emerge.
http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/thread/1420277829.html
It’s irrelevant material Res Diss, because the pertinient subject was only the reliability or not of information derived from the Hoess confession. The consensus is it’s not reliable. That was my sole point, I don’t know why Technicolour is making such a grand theatrical production about it.
I merely stated to Technicolour, who used something presumably derived from the forced confession: ” […] who admitted to being responsible for the deaths of more than two and a half million Jews […]”, that it maybe wasn’t such a great example to use, the context was of a psychologist having interviewed Hoess and having wrote “one gets the general impression of a man who is intellectually normal but with a schizoid apathy, insensitivity, and lack of empathy that could hardly be more extreme in a frank psychotic”. As he’d been through torture and several times been beaten nearly to death, and confessed to all sorts of impossible and ridiculous things, as well as having been taken to Belsen to view piles of corpses, I felt the psychologists assessment likely to have been affected by those preceding events and rather like the confession itself the psychologists assessment might not have great empirical or evidential value.
Hi Clark recreational drugs will help the truth leak out –
We could unquestionably open a new page on these so called ‘recreational’ drugs which are neither competitive or exercise related; admitted ‘getting stoned’ or drunk is much nicer with a team of buddies; however legislators are ignorant of that fact and get their ‘chancellors buzz’ out of Aunt Nora or the big rush, the bane of truth! – Lady Snow = Lies! and like the scorpion’s sting, lies kill the senses, stifle awareness and precipitate ‘Puzzled’ here and perplexed elsewhere.
Unsupported confessions, especially under torture, are indeed notoriously unreliable which is why supporting evidence is so important. Höß was running a camp for which SS architects designed crematorium capacity sufficient to handle 2 Milllion bodies per annum, just as well they wasted resources on that rather than build more bunkers.
I’ll correct the above he wasn’t taken to Belsen, not having been captured till 1946, that was a mistake/confusion with another or others who were taken to Belsen when in Allied custody, but did not include Hoess.
It’# quite simple. Tony M and Herbie (there’s an unexpected connection) are both attempting to say that the confession of Rudulph Hoess, the Auschwitz commander, that he was responsible for the deaths of two and half millions Jews, was a forced one. They use this assumption as a basis for questioning the the number of Jewish people killed by the Nazis.
Why they would want to do this I do not know. They are Holocausts Deniers/Revisionists, and if neither of them is David Irvine, and I would imagine his prose style was rather more practiced, then they are, in the words of Christopher Hitchens “Nazi revivalists, crackpots or conspiracy theorists”
They are trying to pretend that Hitchens supports their point of view. He does not. I would be glad to see them sued by his estate for slander.
(libel)
@Puzzled: I can’t believe that people are still arguing about the collapse of the towers. There was clearly a controlled explosion at the base, and otherwise they wouldn’t have gone vertically down like that. The reports of very high temperatures suggest a chemical mix that would initiate a “thermit” reaction.
You may be puzzled as to why the US government didn’t come clean about this eminently sensible, but perhaps controversial way of proceeding (maybe triggering of explosives was “automatic”). I suspect “commercial interests” would have to be protected. Safety and security tend to be glossed over in our consumerist driven Western, and increasingly Global, society. Not good for business to talk too much about things that could go wrong, because there may be a credibility gap… as the recent air crash has again demonstrated.
Over to you…