Washington And London Decide Who The Enemies Are

Thatcher’s family hope to bank £500,000 by auctioning 200 of the Rusty Lady’s possessions.
Don’t hold your breath for a relief fund donation when Cameron finishes what his heroine started and Britain’s last deep mine, Kellingley in West Yorks, shuts before Christmas.
( Brian Reade, 07.12.2015 )

Here is your country.
Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children’s children.
Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.
( Theodore Roosevelt )

Margaret Thatcher’s Family Flog Her Treasured Possessions.

The auctioning of Margaret Thatcher’s treasured possessions at Christie’s left me bemused.
Didn’t the woman who paid £25,000 for her wedding dress realise there are much cheaper ways of getting a good Halloween frock than that?
Did the unusually high amount of interest in her muff prove the theory that all Tory men were attracted to her?

Does the fact that Jeffrey Archer wanted to buy five lots but left with nothing, prove that the cash he earns from those barely literate books is drying up?
And how wisely the main benefactor, Carol Thatcher, learned at her mother’s knee about the personal benefits of selling the family silver.

Yet how little she must have learned at her top private St Paul’s Girls’ School.
Because having to flog your mum’s dearest possessions to get the kind of pension that stops you needing to humiliate yourself on any more reality TV programmes shows those £22,000 annual fees were wasted.
And how her ice-cold mother might have been better off just giving her some love.
( Brian Reade, 19.12.2015 )

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara desert, in five years there would be a shortage of sand.
( Milton Friedman )

There have been smarter, stronger and better looking men than me who are no longer alive.
All that’s left for us to do is to keep on working as hard as we can and rebuild what is lost.
( Yisrael Kristal, Auschwitz survivor )

Washington And London Decide Who The Enemies Are.

Pakistan has been a major sponsor of various terrorist groups since General Zia ul-Haq seized power in a military coup in 1977, military support brought some groups into being, after which they were nurtured with arms and training.
The 7/7 bombers and many other would-be British terrorists are partly the product of subsequent decades of official Pakistani patronage of these groups.

And today it is the Pakistan-based networks which pose the largest threat to Britain and which are at the centre of global terrorism, having become perhaps even more important than al-Qaida, despite the Western media’s focus on Bin Laden.
Both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are partly British creations: Saudi Arabia was bloodily forged in the 1920s with British arms and diplomatic support, while Pakistan was hived off from India in 1947 with the help of British planners.

These countries, while being very different in many ways, share a fundamental lack of legitimacy other than as ‘Muslim states’.
The price paid by the world for their patronage of particularly extreme versions of Islam – and British support of them – has been very great indeed.

Given their alliance with Britain, it is no surprise that British leaders have not called for Islamabad and Riyadh to be bombed alongside Kabul and Baghdad, since the War on Terror is clearly no such war at all, but rather a conflict with enemies specially designated by Washington and London.
This has left much of the real global terrorist infrastructure intact, posing further dangers to the British and world public.
( Mark Curtis, 16.11.2015 )

Turkey’s modern sultan, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is fast becoming a tinpot dictator when a sacked doctor faces two years in the clink if found guilty of insulting the President by comparing him to Gollum.
One’s a dangerous, slimy, obsessive backstabber and the other a character in Lord of the Rings.
( Brian Reade, 07.12.2015 )

What Level Of Macho Self-Delusion Led Him To Tell Americans That If He’s Elected President He Will “Penetrate” The Internet To Close Down Islamic State.

Great news from the Supreme Court where Donald Trump has lost his appeal to stop offshore wind turbines being built within sight of his Aberdeenshire golf course.
What possessed someone with a head like that to build a golf course in the windiest part of Britain?

But then he is a man of many contradictions.
Why would he want to ban the burka when his face and hair suggest he would benefit from wearing one more than any other human being outside the Elephant Man’s remaining descendant?

And what level of macho self-delusion led him to tell Americans this week that if he’s elected President he will “penetrate” the internet to close down Islamic State.
How does that work?
Don’t be surprised if he follows up this wild pledge by offering to penetrate the hole in the ozone layer to close down this pinko global warming debate.
( Brian Reade, 19.12.2015 )

A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.
( Pope Francis attacks Donald Trump )

Cameron Accused Corbyn Of Not Wishing Him Happy Christmas.

Since being elected Labour leader in September, Jeremy Corbyn has been accused of committing every heinous act outside of bestial necrophilia.
Or David Cameron’s student party piece as it’s become known.
As if not bowing at the Cenotaph (when he did) wasn’t bad enough, Cameron accused him at PMQs of not wishing him Happy Christmas (when he did).
So here’s a little prediction. I reckon if this blood rain from the Sahara keeps up into next week, a right-wing newspaper will accuse Corbyn of carrying out pagan sorcery to invoke a Red Christmas and brainwash kids into rejecting Christ for communism.
( Brian Reade, 19.12.2015 )

You know what I wish?
I wish all the scum of the Earth had one throat and I had my hands about it.
( Alan Moore )

A Tory Regime Still Imposing Austerity On Britain Always Finds Money For Wars.

Bang goes an ambulance driver’s job with every £22,000 Paveway bomb Britain drops on Syria.
And the £35,000 bill for each hour a Tornado jet screeches through the sky on another air raid would fund the pay of three classroom teaching assistants for a year.
Fire a £100,000 Brimstone missile and that’s the wages of three extra nurses you see in the smouldering wreckage.
Launch a £790,000 Storm Shadow cruise weapon and wave goodbye to a full police station of 20 coppers.

It isn’t odd that a Tory regime still imposing austerity on Britain always finds money for wars because politics is about priorities.
And joining a brutal, enduring, unpredictable civil war in Syria was a priority of David Cameron’s since MPs stopped him attacking the other side two years ago.
No sooner had Tory MPs given him his majority for military action, and Labour rebels and Liberal Democrats a political insurance policy should it go badly wrong for Britain, than Cameron and Defence Secretary Michael Fallon changed their tune and started warning this conflict with the Islamic State fanatics will be long and hard.

The meter’s running and the price will only go up, perhaps matching in Syria the £200million a year cost of bombing the identical £5,000 battered pick-up trucks of Islamists in Iraq.
RAF bombing is a gesture, too many U.S. warplanes already chasing too few targets and Britain targeting oil fields in Syria already visited by American and French jets is a PR blitz.
As ex Republican Presidential contender John McCain so sweetly put it: “We will have some token aircraft over there from the British and they’ll drop a few bombs and we’ll say thank you very much”.

Back home the tab will be picked up by low-paid workers and families facing wage packet-emptying benefit cuts or parents worried about letting toddlers out of their pushchairs when hard-up councils are starved of money to sweep parks of broken glass.
Cameron could finance his war by scrapping Trident. Over the lifetime of the futile nukes we’re likely to enjoy little if any change out of £200billion.

But Cameron’s engrossed in a phallic symbol of power so prioritised that it is a radioactive folly over the sunken ships, scrapped aircraft and sacked soldiers of a previous defence review.
I don’t pretend to know an easy answer, ending oil sales to IS and hard graft for a political settlement to heal Syria’s civil war is a long rocky road with no guarantee of peace.
However, it’s a better bet than an expensive obliteration risking blowback.
( Brian Reade, 07.12.2015 )