Tony Blair names Henry Kissinger as his role model. Honestly, not kidding. It is of course literally true, as they were both responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands through neo-colonial war. What a pity he forgot to mention it when he stood for leadership of the Labour Party. On the other hand, it is the sort of thing Jim Murphy of the Henry Jackson Society is quite open about, and it doesn’t seem to hurt his career prospects either.
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Glen_UK & Craig
I agree that for Blair to mention Kissinger in that way without seemingly being aware that he is widely regarded as a monster shows ‘a very worrying mindset.’ And you can certainly infer from it (if you needed any confirmation) that Blair has now totally lost the plot. The fact remains, though, that people on the social media yesterday were tweeting and ‘liking’ his comment with gay abandon clearly understanding it to reflect Blair’s admiration for Kissinger’s appalling political record – Vietnam, Laos , Cambodia, Chile etc. – whereas he was talking about Kissinger’s golf playing.
Peacewisher
No idea where it is hosted at the moment. It is being moved around.
The site is being reconfigured in many ways to make it more proof about the massive denial of service attacks which are coming in, As I understand it, we need to get off a physical server which can be overwhelmed and in to a cloud which can’t.
Everything anyone has ever put on this site is firmly in the public domain and already monitored by the security services so there are no privacy issues connected to where it is hosted. There are multiple levels of protection now – legal action in any country cannot harm it.
KingofWelshNoir
I fear you are taking the Guardian’s “helpful” spin on what he said to heart. He did not say he admired Kissinger solely for his longevity and golf playing. He had widened it, as the introduction of Peres shows. The fact he chose them not Carter remains significant.
A UK Defence spokesman says Bahrain naval base is needed because UK has long term interests in the ( in- ) stability of the region.
BBC Today Program.
Jobless and reviled Blair had no idea whatsoever how to be a Middle East envoy. Who can I copy? Pretend you’re Kissinger. Pop up in the news from time to time and … everything will be fine.
A wasp stuck me in the eyebrow last week and it’s still hurting but you can’t blame a wasp for doing what wasps do or brainless celebrities doing what they do. He can’t even play football.
Thanks for that Mary, I heard it last night on the world service, its a sign that we are also on a war footing not just the US. The positioning of forward naval units close to Iran, a peaceful country that has not attacked anyone for 250 years[a repeat) makes it clear that we are an integral part of the attack dogs of war, the tail and the ears.
That we choose Bahrain, a largely Shia society that has been under the cosh for yonks, led by a pirate Sunni family that has form in history, is not surprising.
It is hoped that the suppression of Bahrain’s population will goad Iran, who once held that island, into action.
Iran has been surrounded by just about every nuclear power there is, including Israel and its Dolphin class subs they got presented with by Germany. These subs have ICBM capabilities, but nobody at the IAEA knows what they are carrying, similar to North Korea, its an unpredictable rogue submarine force.
And as the dough is rising, a predictable portion of Polish Angst, understandably, is thrown into the cake mix, it fits and accomplishes the Bahrain news.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/culture-leaders-in-poland-report-growing-fear-of-russia-a-1006372.html
Craig
I didn’t get sucked in by any Guardian spin, I just went back and read his original words, which were:
“One of the things people are going to have to get used to is: you are going to get leaders leaving office in their early 50s,” Blair says. “I have a lot of energy. I feel extremely fit. There’s no way I’m going to retire and play golf. You look at someone like Henry [Kissinger]. He’s 91 and he’s still going strong. I love that. Or Shimon Peres – these are my role models.”
The Guardian stripped out the context and reduced it to the soundbite that Blair regarded Kissinger as a role model. That strikes me as misleading to say the least.
Putin and Obama got talent…
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2014/03/20140117_putin2.png
Another test:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_external_debt
OK, Craig. I appreciate your dilemma. A cloud system provides multiple servers in multiple locations, so it should be more difficult to take a site down. However, a cloud provider that filters out references to URLs with factual content that is embarrassing to US and UK govts might not be the best medium for a website like your own. Of course if the filtering is due to the action of your moderator that is another matter.
@Peacewisher 7:38 am “I can confirm that you are no longer hosted in the Netherlands”
…except for me the server is still in NL, hosted by Vivid, but the nameservers point to Florida. I presume Infrastructure-as-a-service is involved, and I’m impressed by the backup Windows optimised site hosted by the Government of Tokelau and Teletok!
as distributed denial of service is basically cyber-war, (though in any phrase with the word “cyber” in it you can usually remove cyber and see the real situation) i.e. in this case simply “war” – arguably being pursued against Craig’s thoughts by the hegemon and his minions.
Some of the posters here insist that the water in the pond should always be clear so we can all point at double dealing, whereas others say its a murky pond and your day dreaming to think it will ever be clear. In truth sometimes the pond is clear and other times, some times the politician is a a pragmatist and sometimes an idealist sometimes a truthful pragmatist and sometimes a lying idealist.
Past time to stop hanging on Blair’s every word. The only interesting thing about him will be if he’s ever arrested for war crimes.
And the first to support Kissinger is our one and only Habbabkuk, who has also supported Pinochet.
Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)
5 Dec, 2014 – 3:45 pm
“Henry Kissinger was never a Nazi. He was born in 1923 and left Germany with his family, for the US, in, 1938.”
Resident Dissident
5 Dec, 2014 – 10:18 pm
“Couldn’t agree more – there are of course those who use anti-imperialism as a smoke screen for supporting despots and the abuse of human rights as well as replacememt [sic] imperialists.”
……………………………………………………………………………………………
Who would “those” be ResDis and which “despots” are you be on about? Names please.
Uzbek in the UK
6 Dec, 2014 – 12:14 am
“Vlad the Kremlinman’s Chechen henchmen well known gangmaster Ramzan Kadirov vowed to kick out families of 11 so called terrorists that have been killed in Grozniy yesterday. He also promised to destroy their houses. I bid you have not and will never hear this on RT? Will you?”
………………………………………………………………………………………………
And where did you hear that from Uzbek? Why no link or reference?
In the footsteps of Eric Joyce.
Peacewisher, sorry again; your comments had been sent to the spam folder and have now been displayed. Some spammers had worked out how to pass the ‘maths test’ so it was replaced, but our new automatic system suffers occasional false-positives. Sorry, it was you who was accidentally banned, too; not personal, just a coincidence.
Mr Scorgie
“And the first to support Kissinger is our one and only Habbabkuk, who has also supported Pinochet.
Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)
5 Dec, 2014 – 3:45 pm
“Henry Kissinger was never a Nazi. He was born in 1923 and left Germany with his family, for the US, in, 1938.””
____________________
Biography and a touch of the facts, Doug, not support.
Re. support for Pinochet – reference, please. Thanks.
It is interesting that travellers here on CM’s ship have not glanced through the window of the Henry Jackson Society, a named link in Craig’s latest post.
HJS at it’s roots lies an insidious percolate of neo-conservative American Core Knowledge calculated to worm into the minds of British primary school children with Gove’s approval.
https://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6092124
The binary pragmatism explodes into innocents minds from a payload of exceptionalism and intervention to covet existence into one all inclusive utilitarian frame.
Sumithran, my researcher will deliver the knowledge behind this so called ‘think-tank’ but meanwhile I offer a deadly morsel of interference from this praetorian enterprise.
http://henryjacksonsociety.org/2014/09/22/is-tony-blair-right-that-we-shouldnt-rule-out-deploying-ground-troops-against-islamic-state-2/
http://henryjacksonsociety.org/2014/08/12/go-big-or-go-home-iraq-needs-u-s-ground-troops-more-than-ever/
http://henryjacksonsociety.org/2014/08/08/us-intervention-in-iraq-is-necessary/
In relation to propaganda and education it is interesting that the three areas where China’s strictly prohibits any foreign investment are: elementary education; TV & radio; and the postal service. That must be some postal service.
Who would “those” be ResDis and which “despots” are you be on about? Names please.
Doug Scorgie and Castro are two that pop into my mind at present!
“The Henry Jackson Society:[6]
Believes that modern liberal democracies set an example to which the rest of the world should aspire.”
I don’t think the’d be much of a world left if everyone was so instant on domination, warfare ect. Good job they are not really.
Add this onto the list of you couldn’t make it up;
Party leaders’ Christmas cards revealed: is Nick Clegg past caring?
Often as a laarf the corporate media lampoons the north Koreans government, and its cult of personality. Needless to point out north Koreans have only one dear leader to cope with.
In our case, our dear leaders are many and the whole business about their Xmas cards, ablution habits, what will they be eating for Xmas dinner, and so on are somewhat more comical, but evidently the corporate media do not do irony.
What was that about dear past leader Tony? Lets face it, he is telling us; “I will be back”! Evidently the banksters need somemore smash and grab asset acquisition to compensate for the minuscule returns on their ill gotten gains, at these times of austerity.
Some more technical info on hosting.
The blog is, right this moment, hosted in Amsterdam but it can be moved without service interruption at any time. It was in Florida for a time until a few days ago and may soon be again but has never been hosted in Houston and there is no connection with “Websitewelcome.com”. The Amsterdam and Florida sites mirror each other and either one can be live.
The blog can be launched on anything up to a DDOS protected 32 core Amazon cloud server with 60 GB of RAM at a few minutes notice. It can also use Amazon CloudFront or Google PageSpeed Content Delivery Networks to take the load. A MariaDB Galera cluster of multiple active servers is also an option.
Of course normally the blog will simply be running on a mid-range VPS which can easily handle the normal load and will only be scaled up/down when/if needed.
Scottish based hosting options appear to be limited. One option looked at costs more per month than the Amsterdam VPS is for an entire year.
Expathos were excellent hosts for the blog but they are leaving the hosting business and Craig had to move. The server was also increasingly straining under the load and was offline for a few hours the day before the Scottish referendum from what appears to have been an intentional denial of service attack which we could do nothing about but wait until it stopped. The new “virtual” nature of the blog gives us more options should it re-occur.
Generally the blog gets “probing” attacks as opposed to full on attacks. IP addresses (often in Ukraine, Poland or China but anyone could have rented them) suddenly request the most cpu intensive WordPress pages and continue increasing the number of parallel requests until they have taken up all available resources – at which point they normally back off when they detect the server stops responding. Prior to the introduction of caching a very simple attack/probe could take the blog offline for minutes/hours while WordPress tied up all processors and database threads running up to thousands of queued request for a complex page that took multiple seconds to re-generate each time. The end result was real users saw a WordPress database connection error or a hung page and the frequency this was happening seemed to be increasing.
So the end goal is to keep the site online without having to rent a ludicrously expensive dedicated server with the capacity to handle the largest occasional load spikes which would sit mostly idle most of the time. Virtual servers in the cloud fit the bill. Amazon high end capacity can be rented by the hour if needed.
I hope the above helps explain the recent moves and please accept apologies for any glitches as we transition.
Many truths from John Pilger that counter the lies.
December 5-7, 2014
Secrecy, Surveillance and Censorship
War by Media and the Triumph of Propaganda
by JOHN PILGER
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/05/war-by-media-and-the-triumph-of-propaganda/
@craigmurray.org.uk
Thanks for all the hard work. ++
Thanks Phil – yes Pilger mentions the sanctions on Iraq and more as Mary makes known. It is possibly the most important message and epistle this year 2014 and I personally will absolutely share it any which way.
Let’s retake on the final paragraph and invigorate our intuition.
“It’s 100 years since the First World War. Reporters then were rewarded and knighted for their silence and collusion. At the height of the slaughter, British prime minister David Lloyd George confided in C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped tomorrow, but of course they don’t know and can’t know.”
Craig
“…because just this afternoon I was called to the SNP candidate assessment panel tomorrow in Stirling.”
Oh look. The last SNP candidate for the Stirling seat, Frances McGlinchey, quit the party because of it’s support for NATO.
Clearly no such qualms from pliable Murray.