Wild mushroom risotto, apple cobbler. Autumn!
Luckily, on the basis of one middle-class “horror” story in the Daily Hate-Mail, and a 2-year old recycled story from their own paper at that, there seem to be fewer people willing to pick… and so more wild mushrooms for those of us with a little common sense.
If I were a viking… Beserker!!!
I am not a viking. I am hungri for fungi.
Fuck the rules. Fuck playing the game the banksters want you to play. Fuck being the good citizen. Fuck filling out every form, fuck paying every tax. Fuck the government, fuck the banks who own them. Fuck the free-loaders, living rent-free while we pay. Fuck the legal process, a game which only works if you’ve got the money to pay for the parasite lawyers. Fuck being a chump. Fuck being a stooge. Fuck trying to do the right thing – what good does that get you? What good is coming your way?
[…]
Can you smell that?
Its the smell of someone waking up. Its the smell of fresh air after years of living in the city.
Its the feeling you get when you realise that there is no noise, after living in a large city for years. You are actually ALIVE.
If you have ever had a ‘eureka moment‘, where something that made no sense, or was clouded over in complexity, suddenly becomes crystal clear, and you feel a tingling on your neck, and you say…. YES!
The eureka moment here, the smell in this case, the feeling here is the understanding that all along, the ‘crooks’ and ‘criminals’ were in fact right in almost every way.
And by ‘crooks’ I mean the people who didn’t hurt anyone or steal from anyone and who disobeyed every rule out there, and got away with it.
The people in the story linked above are the form fillers, the dutiful, brainwashed good people who believe all the big lies and who paid through the nose in every way.
My sincere hope is that all of these people finally wake up and stop being so insufferably STUPID, all at the same time.
We will then, finally, see the end of the police state, just like the East Germans saw the end of theirs; only this time, there will be no wall to cross anywhere but in the minds of the people who have been shaken from their hypnotic trance.
You know who I am talking about, the robotic, brainwashed, simpletons who think that restaurants must be licensed, that the state should be negotiated with when it comes to the ‘rights’ that they ‘give’ you – the irrational people whose thoughts are wildly incoherent, who get from A to E, again avoiding C, D, and B… you know who I mean… THE PROBLEM!
When these people, these intransigent folk who have based their lives on lies for decades and who simply refuse to accept the truth because it hurts too much, right up until the moment that they are being hauled away to the camps, as they wake up and get really really angry there will be no turning back.
You think its bad now, wait until the dollar collapse happens. The people who were manning the controls of the machine will live in fear of their lives.
And that is an entirely good thing.
If its gone for good, that’s bad.
UPDATE!
It’s back up, he backed down?!
A recent editorial entitled ‘The Swine Flu Scam’ in the Journal of Public Health begins;
There is a conspiracy theory about nearly everything. So claims that swine flu was a scam come as no surprise. ‘This was a pandemic that never really was’ according to Paul Flynn, MP who prepared a recent report on the flu pandemic for the Council of Europe.1 The report expresses alarm about the way the pandemic was handled. It criticizes the proportionality of the response and argues that over reaction led to waste of public money, distortion of public health priorities and unjustified fears about health risks. It identifies ‘grave shortcomings’ in the transparency of decision-making processes and concerns about the influence of the pharmaceutical industry. The World Health Organization (WHO) comes in for particular criticism for failing to publish the declarations of interest of members of its Emergency Committee, the group advising director general Dr Margaret Chan on the pandemic response.These themes are taken up by Cohen and Carter2 in the British Medical Journal. They found that key scientists had done paid work for pharmaceutical firms that stood to gain from advice they gave to WHO. However, declarations made by members of the Emergency Committee, and of other WHO committees that helped produce influenza preparedness plans, have never been disclosed by WHO. Even the identities of the 16 member Emergency Committee remain a closely guarded secret.
- Flynn P. Social, Health and Family Affairs Committee. Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. The Handling of the H1N1 Pandemic: More Transparency Needed 2010.http://assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2010/20100329_MemorandumPandemie_E.pdf.
- Cohen D, Carter P. WHO and the pandemic flu ‘conspiracies. Br Med J 2010;340:c2912.
This article goes on to conclude that conflict of interest is not necessarily a problem, so long as it is accompanied by transparency.
It is then followed by a declaration of interest by the author;
Conflict of interest: M.R.E. is a member of the UK Scientific Pandemic Influenza Advisory Committee and the UK Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies.
In light of this transparency the article may now be re-read as simply ‘DON’T BLAME US – IT WAS THEM THAT DID IT!’.
The author discounts the conspiracies as merely a ‘cock-up’, yet notes above that “the identities of the 16 member Emergency Committee remain a closely guarded secret”. So how can a conspiracy be so easily discounted? It is certainly no simple ‘cock-up’ for GSK, Merck et al., whose coffers now bulge with extra billions of taxpayer’s hard-earned. For their part, it was carefully managed business run at state and global levels to ensure maximum profitability, as it always is. Please ensure you read this article on marketing HPV vaccine if you think otherwise.
So we are left with public health and public money being manipulated for the benefit of shareholders in Big Pharma as a result of actions (or inactions) and recommendations of unknown persons within an unaccountable advisory body known to have close links to… Big Pharma. Sound like a conspiracy yet?
And today…
Pregnant women added to flu jab list
Government urges mothers-to-be to take up offer in case of a resurgence of swine flu this winter
You couldn’t make it up!
Luckily, you don’t have to, as some unnamed people working at your expense have already done so.
August 28th, 2010 by Militant Libertarian, Originally published on March 9, 2004.
by Russell Madden
Fascism: a political-economic system in which citizens retain title to their property but in which the government determines how that property may or may not be used.
You might be a fascist if you …
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Originally seen here.
Old Holborn has an interesting post about rubbish collection:
When I purchase something with money I have earned, I was under the impression that it belonged to me, to do with as I wished. It is my “property”.
Apparently Brent Council do not agree. With recycling now being big business, the London Council has decided if you don’t want it anymore, it belongs to them and failure to hand over valuable aluminium, glass and paper will see you the recipient of a £1000 fine. No, really.
http://www.oldholborn.net/2010/08/rubbish-police.html#idc-cover
Old Holborn then goes on to repeat the sanctions the council will use for those who refuse to recycle their garbage, which include surveillance, hand delivered letters, visits from ‘officials’ and ultimately a fine of £1000.
The answer to all of this is simple, and Old Holborn’s impression is completely correct.
The things you buy really do belong to you; that means the packaging that they were delivered in and all the goods you do not consume that become your waste.
When you throw your waste away, you should contract with a private garbage collector to remove it.
You then do not have to deal with eco loon control freak socialist councils and their absolute nonsense. I say its absolute nonsense because it is:
RUBBISH: In Palo Alto, California, citizens are ordered to separate their trash into seven neatly packaged piles: newspapers, tin cans (flattened with labels removed), aluminum cans (flattened), glass bottles (with labels removed), plastic soda pop bottles, lawn sweepings, and regular rubbish. And to pay high taxes to have it all taken away.
In Mountain Park, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, the government has just ordered the same recycling program, increased taxes 53% to pay for it, and enacted fines of up to $1,000, and jail terms of up to six months, for scofftrashes.
Because of my aversion to government orders, my distrust of government justifications, and my dislike of ecomania, I have always mixed all my trash together. If recycling made sense – economically and not as a sacrament of Gaia worship – we would be paid to do it.
For the same reason, I love to use plastic fast- food containers and non-returnable bottles. The whole recycling commotion, like the broader environmental movement, has always impressed me as malarkey. But I was glad to get some scientific support for my position.
Professor William L. Rathje, an urban archaeologist at the University of Arizona and head of its Garbage Project, has been studying rubbish for almost 20 years, and what he’s discovered contradicts almost everything we’re told.
When seen in perspective, our garbage problems are no worse than they have always been. The only difference is that today we have safe methods to deal with them, if the environmentalists will let us.
The environmentalists warn of a country covered by garbage because the average American generates 8 lbs. a day. In fact, we create less than 3 lbs. each, which is a good deal less than people in Mexico City today or American 100 years ago. Gone, for example, are the 1,200 lbs. of coal ash each American home used to generate, and our modern packaged foods mean less rubbish, not more.
But most landfills will be full in ten years or less, we’re told, and that’s true. But most landfills are designed to last ten years. The problem is not that they are filling up, but that we’re not allowed to create new ones, thanks to the environmental movement. Texas, for example, handed out 250 landfill permits a year in the mid-1970s, but fewer than 50 in 1988.
The environmentalists claim that disposable diapers and fast-food containers are the worst problems. To me, this has always revealed the anti-family and pro-elite biases common to all left-wing movements. But the left, as usual, has the facts wrong as well.
In two years of digging in seven landfills all across America, in which they sorted and weighed every item in 16,000 lbs. of garbage, Rathje discovered that fast-food containers take up less than 1/10th of one percent of the space; less than 1 % was disposable diapers. All plastics totalled less than 5%. The real culprit is paper – especially telephone books and newspapers. And there is little biodegradation. He found 1952 newspapers still fresh and readable.
Rather than biodegrade, most garbage mummifies. And this may be a blessing. If newspapers, for example, degraded rapidly, tons of ink would leach into the groundwater. And we should be glad that plastic doesn’t biodegrade. Being inert, it doesn’t introduce toxic chemicals into the environment.
We’re told we have a moral obligation to recycle, and most of us say we do so, but empirical studies show it isn’t so. In surveys, 78% of the respondents say they separate their garbage, but only 26% said they thought their neighbors separate theirs. To test that, for seven years the Garbage Project examined 9,000 loads of refuse in Tucson, Arizona, from a variety of neighborhoods. The results: most people do what they say their neighbors do – they don’t separate. No matter how high or low the income, or how liberal the neighborhood, or how much the respondents said they cared about the environment, only 26% actually separated their trash. The only reliable predictor of when people separate and when they don’t is exactly the one an economist would predict: the price paid for the trash. When the prices of old newspaper rose, people carefully separated their newspapers. When the price of newspapers fell, people threw them out with the other garbage.
We’re all told to save our newspapers for recycling, and the idea seems to make sense. Old newspapers can be made into boxes, wallboard, and insulation, but the market is flooded with newsprint thanks to government programs. In New Jersey, for example, the price of used newspapers has plummeted from $40 a ton to minus $25 a ton. Trash entrepreneurs used to buy old newspaper. Now you have to pay someone to take it away.
If it is economically efficient to recycle – and we can’t know that so long as government is involved – trash will have a market price. It is only through a free price system, as Ludwig von Mises demonstrated 70 years ago, that we can know the value of goods and services.
[…]
From the priceless ‘Rockwell’s Anti-Environmentalist Manifesto’. And of course, once you have your own garbage collected privately, you can deduct the amount that that council is charging you for their ‘service’ since you do not avail yourself of it. Old Holborn already does this for the services he does not require from his council.
Once again Libertarian principles, specifically the property right you have in things you have voluntarily exchanged for, offer the best solution to a problem as opposed to the inherently immoral solutions put forward by collectivists, coercion the state and its insanity.
But what about the economics of it all? If garbage has a value after it has been collected, then someone will sort it and extract what is valuable. This is what it looks like:
The problem with this system is that it is entirely efficient. If private enterprise sorted garbage like this, the loony left salary addicted control freaks at Brent would not be able to justify going out to people’s homes and threatening them.
Furthermore, have you ever seen a garbage compactor in the kitchen of a UK household:
One of the consequences of people having to pay private contractors to remove their waste is that normally you are charged by volume for what you have removed from your household. If you have less volume of garbage to remove, the cost of removing it is less, so there is a great incentive to squeeze as much trash as you can into the smallest possible space.
That is why in many American kitchens, you find garbage compactors; an under the counter machine that you throw your waste into day after day, that compacts it all into a very small shape that is easy to handle and which dramatically reduces your waste disposal costs and storage hassles.
These compact cubes of refuse greatly increase the efficiency of garbage disposal; trucks can carry more garbage, make fewer rounds, you use less bin liners, put garbage into external bins less often and into fewer bins etc etc.
All of this efficiency is lost thanks to the crazy as a coot collectivist crap of councils like Brent.
Even fast food restaurants use them:
The side effects of the free market in terms of efficiency are always beneficial. Other desirable side effects are that the need for nosey parkers sniffing around in your trash is completely eliminated.
That is why the statists hate private enterprise. Sadly in the UK, people are so inured to the idea that ‘the council’ is in charge of everything, from leisure to garbage collection, that it appears that they cannot imagine even the most simple solution to everyday problems without invoking the state in some way as facilitator.
‘The Andromeda Strain’, a must see film had its soundtrack released in this packaging:
Not only did you get the original sound with the vinyl, but the package is absolutely wonderful; a perfect match for the biology of the bioweapon ‘Andromeda’:
All the iTunes, FLACs and MP3s in the world will never replace the intimacy of this; a physical object, designed by man, in your hands, with its smell, its feel and its reality.
601!
A very insightful Home Educator takes the evil and violent Richard Dawkins to task on his faulty logic and flawed thinking and application of the scientific method.
Did anyone catch that documentary last night called ‘Faith Schools Menace’ in which Richard Dawkins put the boot into faith schools? At the climax of the program Dawkins authoritatively states his main point in an extremely self-assured and almost God like tone which is that “our greatest responsibility in education is to unleash children’s curiosity and never limit their questions.” No one would disagree with that as an honourable aspiration but the means by which he proposes to achieve it falls way short of its aim. For someone who claims to be an EVIDENCE-based rational thinker how come he hasn’t looked at the EVIDENCE, which, if he had bothered to do so, would have enabled him to delete the first word of the documentary’s title. All the irrefutable and reproducible research findings, arrived at through the logical, reasoned and scientific methods that Dawkins is so fond of (as am I), strongly indicate that there is practically no place on earth that suppresses children’s curiosity and limits their questions more than school. If anyone can show me convincing evidence to the contrary my kids will be sent to school forthwith (assuming they would want to go after critically evaluating the new EVIDENCE). Earlier on in the documentary he expresses his disgust for the way children are labelled as Catholic, Protestant, Muslim etc but completely misses the most common label attached to children which is ‘schoolchildren’; which by his reasoning is surely equally repugnant since it labels children as belonging to the state (in most cases) before they have the cognitive ability to understand and critically evaluate the EVIDENCE offered by the likes of Gatto, Meighan, Holt, and their many international associates, showing that school-based learning produces significantly lower levels of academic attainment, social skills and, most importantly, emotional and psychological well being than learning by other means. The EVIDENCE also explains how schooling came about, what its real purpose is and how it impedes natural learning processes (I liked the history of British schooling put forward in ‘Overschooled but Undereducated’ which parallels Gatto’s in many ways). It has been said that schooling is the only true world religion and many of the arguments Dawkins applies to religion have exact equivalents that can be applied to schooling, some of which are probably best illustrated in Illich’s ‘Deschooling Society’. How can someone as astute, observant and insightful as Dawkins completely miss the elephant in the room?
An EVIDENCE-based solution that follows Dawkins’ logic would not just be to abolish faith schools, it would be to abolish schooling altogether and replace it with a learning framework fit for a democracy, a large part of which, of course, would be home education.[…]
Mostly makes sense doesn’t it?
We already know about Richard Dawkins and his irrational attitudes to people’s liberties. No one should have their money stolen from them to pay for the education of children. This would eliminate the ‘problem’ of ‘Faith Schools’; if you want to send your children to a Koran chain school or a Catholic school or any other type of school, that is entirely your affair, your right, and no one has the right to tell you how to educate your children (and I literally mean your children).
People like Richard Dawkins, who believe that religious teaching is indoctrination and child abuse, are in fact, violent statists who want to own your children and force them to be taught what they believe is the truth. This is immoral, unacceptable and totally evil, and it can be deduced as immoral without invoking any religious argument.
His collectivist ideology is clearly expressed in this line:
“our greatest responsibility in education is to unleash children’s curiosity and never limit their questions.”
Who is this ‘our’ that he is talking about? He surely cannot be talking about your children, for whom you have absolute authority and responsibility? I fear that this is exactly what he is talking about, and it is in fact, a completely dishonourable aspiration; using violence to make people into slaves and property is dishonourable full stop.
He labels children as ‘schoolchildren’ because his ilk refer to people as property in the same way that water is wet; it is in the statist’s nature to refer to people as property, and all of the arguments between the various statist factions are in fact battles over who gets the power to control property, meaning you and your children. The fact that Home Education is better in every way than schooling is actually anathema to Dawkins, because it is only through regimented brainwashing that he and his violent atheists can ever hope to rid the population of ‘the scourge of religion’.
The writer asks how can someone as astute, observant and insightful as Dawkins completely miss the elephant in the room. The fact of the matter is that he is not astute, observant and insightful; if he were, he could not be a violent atheist. Insightful people refrain from violence of the kind he is calling for. Observant people base their thinking only on observations instead of using what they viscerally hate, are repulsed by, and refuse to believe as the basis of their philosophy.
Richard Dawkins is not a scientist; he is a man fully consumed by atheism and Darwinism. His mind is completely closed to anything outside of his world view – and for the record, I have no problem with people like that. What I do have a problem with is people who think like Dawkins, and who then want to control me and my property. They are no different to the people who want Sharia to engulf the entire world, or Catholics in the Cabinet. They are diametrically opposed to Liberty and the truth, and are your mortal enemies.
An evidence based solution to the problems of education in any country would result in the state removing itself completely from education, since education, like healthcare, is a good and not a right. There should be no state ‘framework’ replacing state schools, as any such thing would be financed by immoral theft, and certainly any evidence based solution could only conclude that democracy is bad for education, bad for your rights and should be rejected, based once again, purely on the evidence.
People who live and think like scientists do not pick and choose when to apply evidence. You cannot on the one hand call for evidence based living and then say that democracy is legitimate way of organising a country or supplying services. It is therefore irrational to ask for anything that would be ‘fit for a democracy’. Democracy is what almost got Home Education banned in the UK. It is what has caused it to be banned in Sweden.
Libertarianism is the best solution to the problem of organising groups of people, because it is based only on the evidence, is free from contradictions, free from violence, free from coercion, embraces everyone and their peculiar beliefs, absolutely guarantees your rights and does not allow anyone to lord it over anyone else.
In a Libertarian society there would be no one to create false rights (right to education, right to internet access etc. etc.) and no one to take away the very real natural rights that you are born with.
If you refuse to accept the truth of it, that is not derived from anything other than pure logic, then you are irrational, not thinking based on evidence alone, and if you claim to be a scientist, are not one.
While we are at it, take a look at this:
That man, eating noodles bought from a street seller in Malaysia (note how there are no regulations stopping people from cooking food and selling it to anyone who wants it. We have been over that before) is basing his financial choices on the evidence. He is smarter than most people in the UK and the USA when it comes to this. After watching it, will you go out and convert at least some of your worthless paper money to gold coins? Perhaps you need a different face put on the facts to help push you along.
That is what it looks like when people are living by evidence; they change their behaviour when something is not working correctly. Home Educators remove their children from school because school does not work. That is rational, logical behaviour where people are thinking and living by the evidence.
Sadly, there are many people who only apply evidence based thinking to some parts of their thoughts and behavior. For example, you can have people who, whilst behaving rationally in one area, will cling to socialist ideas like wealth redistribution and taxation. These same people call for the licensing of restaurants ‘because someone might get poisoned’. These same people think that it is totally proper for drivers of cars to be licensed, and of course, cars and the fuel that goes in them to be taxed. They believe that it is perfectly moral and acceptable for them to apply for ‘grant money’ (stealing) so that they can carry on their particular way of life or activities. They think its a ‘good idea’ that there should be a minimum price set on alcohol by the state. They believe in the state. They believe in democracy, ‘fairness’ and all of that other demonstrably irrational, dangerous and illogical nonsense, despite it being demonstrated to them again and again that these things are immoral, wrong and harmful to them directly.
This is ‘the big problem’ that free people face. The legions of sheep who are wilfully ignorant, who cling on to their violent beliefs and who continue to finance them despite having been shown that what they are thinking and doing is wrong.
If it were as easy as saying, “they will get what they deserve in the end” it could be said and left at that, but sadly, the free people get what the stupid people deserve because the stupid drag everyone down with them.
And that really is a big problem.
John Pilger has an article at Lew Rockwell, saying that Tony Blair “must be prosecuted”. Anyone that has an interest in permanently stopping the war machine and ending the state knows that prosecuting Blair, as satisfying as that event might be, will do nothing to stop the war machine and its murderous intentions towards Iran.
Lets do it.
Tony Blair must be prosecuted, not indulged like his mentor Peter Mandelson.
I for one, am sick and tired of the soap opera of political personalities and the writers who promote it by talking about it. It hasn’t done anything to stop the war machine in the past, and it will not going forward. This sort of thinking distracts from getting to the solution, as people vent all their energy on hating a single individual instead of the war machine itself.
There are an unlimited supply of Blairs waiting to fill his shoes. Anything other than an idea to stop the next Blair from taking the levers of the war machine in his hands is a waste of time.
Both have produced self-serving memoirs for which they have been paid fortunes. Blair’s will appear next month and earn him £4.6 million. Now consider Britain’s Proceeds of Crime Act. Blair conspired in and executed an unprovoked war of aggression against a defenseless country, which the Nuremberg judges in 1946 described as the “paramount war crime.” This has caused, according to scholarly studies, the deaths of more than a million people, a figure that exceeds the Fordham University estimate of deaths in the Rwandan genocide.
I could not care less about how much money Blair makes from his memoirs. If the price of stopping the war machine for all time is that Blair becomes a multi billionaire, so be it.
This is nothing more than jealousy politics wrapped in a cloak of moral outrage over the genocide committed by Blair. Once again, this is a complete distraction from what sensible people should be thinking about; the next ‘Blair’ and Iran.
People like Pilger, by failing to get to the solution and distracting everyone with his brilliantly crafted exposés is actually a part of the problem. Like Tony Benn and StopWar, these people are not spreading the solution; they are diffusing the anger of the vast majority who are sick of war and want a stop put to it.
In addition, four million Iraqis have been forced to flee their homes and a majority of children have descended into malnutrition and trauma. Cancer rates near the cities of Fallujah, Najaf and Basra (the latter “liberated” by the British) are now revealed as higher than those at Hiroshima. “UK forces used about 1.9 metric tons of depleted uranium ammunition in the Iraq war in 2003,” the Defense Secretary Liam Fox told parliament on 22 July. A range of toxic “antipersonnel” weapons, such as cluster bombs, was employed by British and American forces.
We know all of this, and all of it is now irrelevant.
The only thing that matters is the next war and how it is to be stopped. Nothing can be done to de-poison Iraq, and an eloquent recital of the crimes committed there will do nothing to stop the attack on Iran. We know this, because similar writing was done before the Iraq colonisation for decades; from Agent Orange on the crimes of the war machine have been carefully documented and exposed. More exposure will not stop the next outrage. John Pilger, who is deeply experienced in all of this, knows this perfectly.
Such carnage was justified with lies that have been repeatedly exposed. On 29 January 2003, Blair told parliament, “We do know of links between al-Qaida and Iraq ….” Last month, the former head of the intelligence service, MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, told the Chilcot inquiry, “There is no credible intelligence to suggest that connection … [it was the invasion] that gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad.” Asked to what extent the invasion exacerbated the threat to Britain from terrorism, she replied, “Substantially.”
Once again, BLAH BLAH BLAH.
The bombings in London on 7 July 2005 were a direct consequence of Blair’s actions.
Only in the sense that he personally ordered it to happen. Are you shocked by that accusation? You need to watch this documentary.
Documents released by the High Court show that Blair allowed British citizens to be abducted and tortured. The then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, decided in January 2002 that Guantanamo was the “best way” to ensure UK nationals were “securely held.”
So what? Blair is out of office and Labour are not in government. What do you have to say about what is happening NOW and what is being planned NOW? And is what you say going to make any difference? These are the questions that need to be asked; these are the points that need to be made, not all of this emotion stoking garbage.
Instead of remorse, Blair has demonstrated a voracious and secretive greed.
Once again, who cares if Blair shows remorse? Will that bring back the dead, or clean up the mess he left behind? Will it stop Iran from suffering the same fate? Of course it will not; Pilger (an author himeself) only cares about how much money Blair is making through his lucrative publishing deals, “I do not murder anyone and I cannot sell the number of books Blair does. I am telling the truth, history is on my side, I have the moral high ground, why can I not sell as many books as a mass murderer? ITS NOT FAIR!”.
Since stepping down as prime minister in 2007, he has accumulated an estimated £20 million, much of it as a result of his ties with the Bush administration. The House of Commons Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, which vets jobs taken by former ministers, was pressured not to make public Blair’s “consultancy” deals with the Kuwaiti royal family and the South Korean oil giant UI Energy Corporation. He gets £2 million a year “advising” the American investment bank J P Morgan and undisclosed sums from financial services companies. He makes millions from speeches, including reportedly £200,000 for one speech in China.
More jealousy, more nonsense, all of it irrelevant to the next act of mass murder and none of it able to bring back a single life.
In his unpaid but expenses-rich role as the West’s “peace envoy” in the Middle East, Blair is, in effect, a voice of Israel, which awarded him a $1 million “peace prize.” In other words, his wealth has grown rapidly since he launched, with George W. Bush, the bloodbath in Iraq.
No mention of BDS which is the best way of making people change their ways. Why not? This article is a complete waste of time!
His collaborators are numerous. The Cabinet in March 2003 knew a great deal about the conspiracy to attack Iraq. Jack Straw, later appointed “justice secretary,” suppressed the relevant Cabinet minutes in defiance of an order by the Information Commissioner to release them. Most of those now running for the Labour Party leadership supported Blair’s epic crime, rising as one to salute his final appearance in the Commons. As foreign secretary, David Miliband, sought to cover Britain’s complicity in torture, and promoted Iran as the next “threat.”
So, what should be DONE about the personalities who are about to step into the cockpit of the war machine? We know they are all for mass murder, no matter what their names are. Stop wasting everyone’s time with the soap opera!
Journalists who once fawned on Blair as “mystical” and amplified his vainglorious bids now pretend they were his critics all along.
And if they were critics all along, what difference would that have made? None whatsoever.
As for the media’s gulling of the public, only the Observer’s David Rose, to his great credit, has apologized. The WikiLeaks’ exposés, released with a moral objective of truth with justice, have been bracing for a public force-fed on complicit, lobby journalism. Verbose celebrity historians like Niall Ferguson, who rejoiced in Blair’s rejuvenation of “enlightened” imperialism, remain silent on the “moral truancy,” as Pankaj Mishra wrote, “of [those] paid to intelligently interpret the contemporary world.”
All of this, except the Wikileaks exposé is irrelevant.
Apologies are irrelevant.
Journalists are irrelevant.
Historians are irrelevant.
The only thing that matters is what is going to happen next, and how it can be stopped. If it is true that the majority do not want more war, then war can be stopped. The massive march against the Iraq invasion showed that there are literally tens of millions of people in the UK alone who do not want any more war. The question is, what can they do (or more likely refrain from doing) to stop it.
We know that marching again would be totally pointless, and that for every one of the two million people who marched on that day, there were probably five people who would have gone but who did not make it. We wrote about this before.
Something oblique, unexpected, unstoppable, simple and effective needs to be unleashed. That is the only way an attack on Iran will be stopped. What is for sure is that this strategy will never come from a journalist or a historian.
Wikileaks has demonstrated that it is possible to damage the war machine. So effective is its operation, run by a handful of people with almost no money at all, that there have been open calls for its public face to be assassinated.
That is what we need; a harnessing of all the tools we have to hand to make it impossible for the war machine to operate. Wikileaks does what it does without marching, demonstrating, picketing or any of the other now discredited 20th Century methods of changing the world.
Even in the face of this revolution, the Pilgers of this world keep harping on like its 1999.
Is it wishful thinking that Blair will be collared? Just as the Cameron government understands the “threat” of a law that makes Britain a risky stopover for Israeli war criminals, a similar risk awaits Blair in a number of countries and jurisdictions, at least of being apprehended and questioned. He is now Britain’s Kissinger, who has long planned his travel outside the United States with the care of a fugitive.
If Blair is collared, then what? All of the above still applies, and if Kissinger is a war criminal, and you compare Blair to Kissinger, then Blair has a long life of influence and wealth ahead of him, no matter what you say or write.
Two recent events add weight to this. On 15 June, the International Criminal Court made the landmark decision of adding aggression to its list of war crimes to be prosecuted. This is defined as a “crime committed by a political or military leader which by its character, gravity and scale constituted a manifest violation of the [United Nations] Charter.” International lawyers described this as a “giant leap.” Britain is a signatory to the Rome statute that created the court and is bound by its decisions.
But not retroactively, and its over broad, as what is or is not a ‘crime’ is open to debate (dumping the dollar might be construed as an act that in its character, gravity and scale could be construed as a ‘crime’ by some). Statists want more state power knowing (or not) that this leads to more war, more aggression as people are forced to conform to artificial ‘norms of society’.
On 21 July, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, standing at the Commons despatch box, declared the invasion of Iraq illegal. For all the later “clarification” that he was speaking personally, he had made “a statement that the international court would be interested in,” said Philippe Sands, professor of international law at University College London.
I have a new phrase to describe Pilger, StopWar and all the other well meaning statists who incessantly whine about the war machine without offering any solutions ‘The Cathartics‘. I like it!
The Cathartics grasp onto any word or slip of the tongue and then scream and shout about it like it means something when it means precisely nothing. The House of Commons is the one of the centre stages of the soap opera, and Pilger quoting lines from its script is no better than a scarf wearing washer woman recounting what happened on Coronation street last night as if it were real.
Tony Blair came from Britain’s upper middle classes who, having rejoiced in his unctuous ascendancy, might now reflect on the principles of right and wrong they require of their own children. The suffering of the children of Iraq will remain a specter haunting Britain while Blair remains free to profit.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/pilger/pilger86.1.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
Blair, reflecting on what he did means nothing. What Pilger actually means is he should feel ashamed of making so much money out of his publishing deal and post PM contracts. Get over it Pilger; Blair lining his pockets is not the problem.
As for the principles of right and wrong he requires of his own children, that is an entirely personal matter that is also, not the problem, and I guarantee you that Blair is not haunted in any way by what he did. He believes that what he did was of benefit in the long run, and nothing you can say will change that. Finally, venting jealousy is a poor substitute for a solution to the end of the war machine.
What a total waste of time; Lew Rockwell, one of the biggest websites in the world, where articles are not only read but copied, re-posted and emailed by the millions; a platform of extraordinary reach, has been used by this man to spew a completely pointless jealous rage piece, repeating what everyone already knows about Iraq, singularly failing to mention even a single possible solution to the next war crime. Even offering a bad solution would be better than nothing. Not a single hyperlink to any resource that could help stop the possible attack on Iran… but there is a link to Amazon so you can buy his book.
If the attack on Iran is to be stopped, do not look to John Pilger for an answer. It will emerge from the internets via social networks, and then, all of a sudden, the war machine will be shut down.
What we are waiting for is a text; a small piece of writing containing the very simple instructions that everyone needs to follow to bring down the machine. The idea is coalescing in the mind of someone somewhere, and soon, it will arrive in your inbox, or in your timeline and it will hit you with its simplicity and its beauty. You will commit to doing it and you will forward it to all your friends and re-tweet it, and the machine will die on that day.
Tony Benn, war enabler and thief has a piece over in the Grauniad that simply cannot be allowed to stand:
The time to organise resistance is now
We reject these cuts as simply malicious ideological vandalism, hitting the most vulnerable the hardest. Join us in the fight
Gravity is not an ideology, it is a fact. In this matter, the fact is that the state is STEALING money from the productive to disburse as it sees fit. This is theft, pure and simple. It is immoral and unacceptable to decent people.
It is time to organise a broad movement of active resistance to the Con-Dem government’s budget intentions. They plan the most savage spending cuts since the 1930s, which will wreck the lives of millions by devastating our jobs, pay, pensions, NHS, education, transport, postal and other services.
What has wrecked the lives of millions is SOCIALISM. The STATE is responsible for all the ills that have been suffered in the twentieth century, and thanks to the internet, everyone can now see that this is the case.
There is no such thing as ‘our jobs’ jobs are created by entrepreneurs, not the state. They are not collective property; they are the property of the people who create them. Pay is what is due to people who do work. The rate of pay is a private matter between employer and the employed. The state should have no say in that private contract whatsoever. Education is not the business of the state; it is not a right, but is in reality, a good like Health Care. Transport is also no business of the state, and niether is the delivery of anything, including the post, and any other service, like the internet, which some deluded people want to claim is a right.
The government claims the cuts are unavoidable because the welfare state has been too generous. This is nonsense. Ordinary people are being forced to pay for the bankers’ profligacy.
This is a straw man argument. It is completely wrong that anyone other than the shareholders and depositors in banks were made to bail out the banks. In a properly functioning country, no one would be forced to pay for a bailout, or other people’s food or anything else, and the fact that this has happened is no excuse for more organized theft by the state.
The £11bn welfare cuts, rise in VAT to 20%, and 25% reductions across government departments target the most vulnerable – disabled people, single parents, those on housing benefit, black and other ethnic minority communities, students, migrant workers, LGBT people and pensioners.
It is absolutely wrong that the state should levy a ‘value added tax’. This is an unjustifiable interposition in the private transactions of individuals. As for that shopping list of people who are going to suffer because of these cuts, they would not be suffering at all if everyone were free to interact economically with 100% of their money, and those that were left out would be take care of by charity.
One thing is for sure, Labour and socialism has utterly failed to produce the prosperity that they promise again and again, and they will never be able to produce it. All they can do is destroy capital, technology and redistribute wealth by force.
If their ideas were great, people would voluntarily finance them. The fact is that people who are creative and productive see their sham for what it is, and run from it like horses run from fire.
Women are expected to bear 75% of the burden. The poorest will be hit six times harder than the richest. Internal Treasury documents estimate 1.3 million job losses in public and private sectors.
The ‘public sector’ is entirely parasitic. Those jobs are not real jobs; they are invented by government and financed by people who are productive in the real economy.
What happens in the ‘private sector’ or the real economy, is not the affair of the state, and if the state had no power to interfere in the real economy, it would be many times more prosperous, with greater opportunities for both job seekers and entrepreneurs.
We reject this malicious vandalism and resolve to campaign for a radical alternative, with the level of determination shown by trade unionists and social movements in Greece and other European countries.
You cant make stuff like this up.
This man is a representative of the most malicious, vindictive, destructive and anti-human philosophy ever known to man. They are violent thieves who steal money from the productive to give away to their friends and to finance their hair brained schemes.
What do they mean by ‘radical alternative’? What can it possibly mean other than more theft, more wealth redistribution, a return to Orwellian bureaucracy and everything evil that all the British are fed up to the teeth with?
These people understand NOTHING about economics and money. Even a child can be made to understand it if they read the right books.
And as for other European countries, Britain is not a European country. Everyone has had ENOUGH of Europe and its insane policies, and rioting like the Greek parasites will only destroy the infrastructure that you need to steal the billions you are craving for like the vampires you are.
I have a feeling that Tony Benn and his band of modern day Robin Hood criminals are going to find that everyone hates them, will not tolerate being stolen from by them, and will push back against them with such ferocity that they will be knocked over.
This government of millionaires says “we’re all in it together” and “there is no alternative”. But, for the wealthy, corporation tax is being cut, the bank levy is a pittance, and top salaries and bonuses have already been restored to pre-crash levels.
Like it or not, it is the millionares and everyone beneath them that owns and runs a business that creates all the wealth in any country. They should be cherished, free to operate their businesses as they see fit, without any interference from the state of any kind. If you want to start a union, that is entirely your absolute right; but the owners of businesses also have rights, and yours do not trump theirs.
This is the principle, that everyone has the same rights, that Tony Benn cannot accept. His position, in his mind, is one of superiority. His rights trump all others. The rights of his friends and followers trump the rights of all others.
He is DEAD WRONG.
An alternative budget would place the banks under democratic control, and raise revenue by increasing tax for the rich, plugging tax loopholes, withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, abolishing the nuclear “deterrent” by cancelling the Trident replacement.
Banks are private property. What Benn is advocating is that the banks be nationalised, STOLEN from their owners if you will. Once again, the word ‘democratic’ is being used as a synonym for ‘fair’, ‘just’, ‘honest’, and ‘good’ when it is none of those things. Democratic control means control of the mob, against the wishes of the owners of property. That is THEFT, IMMORAL and EVIL.
Raising revenue by increasing tax for the rich is just theft. There should be no taxation by the state, full stop. The state should not be engaged in wars of aggression, no matter where they are being fought. And without a state, there would be no money for a nuclear deterrent unless everyone voluntarily wanted to pay for one, which I doubt would ever happen.
All of our problems come from the state, and people like Tony Benn, who control it.
An alternative strategy could use these resources to: support welfare; develop homes, schools, and hospitals; and foster a green approach to public spending – investing in renewable energy and public transport, thereby creating a million jobs.
Welfare is a soul destroying disease, and even those who deal with poverty have come to understand this.
We commit ourselves to:
- Oppose cuts and privatisation in our workplaces, community and welfare services.
Those workplaces do not belong to you, they belong to the people who created them you THIEF! The welfare services you claim are yours are financed by money you STEAL.
- Fight rising unemployment and support organisations of unemployed people.
Fighting rising unemployment can only be done correctly by freeing business to do what it does best, creating jobs, capital and progress. We do not need you, or the state to make this magic happen.
- Develop and support an alternative programme for economic and social recovery.
There is no alternative to reality. Money and human nature are fixed. Go and read about it.
- Oppose all proposals to “solve” the crisis through racism and other forms of scapegoating.
And no scapegoating of the people who create the jobs you want so badly, the ‘rich’!
- Liaise closely with similar opposition movements in other countries.
No matter how many people you gather together in your bogus and immoral cause, you will still be bogus and immoral.
- Organise information, meetings, conferences, marches and demonstrations.
YES! please do that, after all its so very effective!
- Support the development of a national co-ordinating coalition of resistance.
That sounds to me like a call to arms to all thieves. Absolutely appalling. They want more theft, more immoral redistribution of wealth, more tyranny, more bureaucracy, a bigger hungrier state, more control over business. Just how stupid can people be?
It seems that there is no limit.
We urge those who support this statement to attend the Organising Conference on 27 November 2010 (10am-5pm), at Camden Centre, Town Hall, London, WC1H 9JE.
Signed:
Tony Benn
Caroline Lucas MP
[…]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/04/time-to-organise-resistance-now
And then there is a list of the usual, delusional suspects.
Thieves to a man, all rotten to the core, leeches, unproductive, insane, destructive, anti-human and all bad!
