A Place to Stand

  A couple of examples of  overgovernment.

  Tim Worstall writes an essay around this example of government engaging in preventing the market work and then being astoished to find it not working.

London's Metropolitan Police said they had arrested 16 people since Friday for illegal reselling of Olympics tickets, as Games organisers said they were investigating why scores of seats were empty at some events yesterday.

 Meanwhile the Scottish government are taking money from ordinary taxpayers to fund a campaign to put up prices for ordinary taxpayers, while claiming to be doing their best to get us out of recession.

Dairy farmers' campaign for fair pricing gets £100,000 of Government cash

Tim again on a point I have long been making - that much of the cost of housing is government parasitism & ending it would get us out of recession.

Britain Unleashed: Just relax the planning system

Douglas Carswell on how government printing more money isn't the solution to the printing more money financial bubble they caused.

Tim's 3rd outing saying government, using the excuse that Keynes had given them permission to print money during a recession to balance with a surplus during booms, hadn't actually followed their rules. Thus they caused the recession. .

So, let us look around the world and see whether, in the tail end years of the longest boom of modern times (roughly, 2000 to 2007) governments were running budget surpluses. Spain was, yes, and Ireland too. The UK certainly wasn't, as Brown decided to borrow more to "invest" and the idea that the younger Bush ran a surplus will be greeted with hollow laughter. But even Spain wasn't running a large enough surplus. The deficit/surplus should be symmetrical to some extent. If the slump is going to bring forth 5pc or 10pc of GDP deficits then at the peak of the boom we should be having 5pc or 10pc surpluses.

SNP explain their promotion of the most expensive form of power (windmills) and opposition to the cheapest, nuclear, is helping keep bills down

“Nuclear energy is expensive, dangerous and impossible to deliver without massive public subsidy...

“The Scottish Government has set ambitious targets to generate the equivalent of 100% of our electricity needs from renewables by 2020. That is already delivering jobs and investment to communities across Scotland demonstrating the kind of leadership that the UK Government would do well to follow

  And an example of the complete opposite in another field.
  Withoput any "help" from mankind nature is absorbing twice as much carbon as it used to.

Amount of CO2 being sucked away by Earth 'has doubled in 50 years'

  From the estimable Register, but unaccountably, this proof that the CAGW scare is nonsense and there is strong negative natural feedback is missing from the state controlled media.

It is not easy for a modern Englishman, who can pass in a day from his club in St. James's Street to his shooting box among the Grampians, and who finds in his shooting box all the comforts and luxuries of his club, to believe that, in the time of his greatgrandfathers, St. James's Street had as little connection with the Grampians as with the Andes. Yet so it was. In the south of our island scarcely any thing was known about the Celtic part of Scotland; and what was known excited no feeling but contempt and loathing. The crags and the glens, the woods and the waters, were indeed the same that now swarm every autumn with admiring gazers and stretchers. ... Yet none of these sights had power, till a recent period, to attract a single poet or painter from more opulent and more tranquil regions. Indeed, law and police, trade and industry, have done far more than people of romantic dispositions will readily admit, to develope in our minds a sense of the wilder beauties of nature. A traveller must be freed from all apprehension of being murdered or starved before he can be charmed by the bold outlines and rich tints of the hills. He is not likely to be thrown into ecstasies by the abruptness of a precipice from which he is in imminent danger of falling two thousand feet perpendicular; by the boiling waves of a torrent which suddenly whirls away his baggage and forces him to run for his life; by the gloomy grandeur of a pass where he finds a corpse which marauders have just stripped and mangled; or by the screams of those eagles whose next meal may probably be on his own eyes. ...


[The poet Oliver] Goldsmith was one of the very few Saxons who, more than a century ago, ventured to explore the Highlands. He was disgusted by the hideous wilderness, and declared that he greatly preferred the charming country round Leyden, the vast expanse of verdant meadow, and the villas with their statues and grottoes, trim flower beds, and rectilinear avenues. Yet it is difficult to believe that the author of the Traveller and of the Deserted Village was naturally inferior in taste and sensibility to the thousands of clerks and milliners who are now thrown into raptures by the sight of Loch Katrine and Loch Lomond.

His feelings may easily be explained. It was not till roads had been cut out of the rocks, till bridges had been flung over the courses of the rivulets, till inns had succeeded to dens of robbers, till there was as little danger of being slain or plundered in the wildest defile of Badenoch or Lochaber as in Cornhill, that strangers could be enchanted by the blue dimples of the lakes and by the rainbows which overhung the waterfalls, and could derive a solemn pleasure even from the clouds and tempests which lowered on the mountain tops.

The change in the feeling with which the Lowlanders regarded the highland scenery was closely connected with a change not less remarkable in the feeling with which they regarded the Highland race. It is not strange that the Wild Scotch, as they were sometimes called, should, in the seventeenth century, have been considered by the Saxons as mere savages. But it is surely strange that, considered as savages, they should not have been objects of interest and curiosity. The English were then abundantly inquisitive about the manners of rude nations separated from our island by great continents and oceans. Numerous books were printed describing the laws, the superstitions, the cabins, the repasts, the dresses, the marriages, the funerals of Laplanders and Hottentots, Mohawks and Malays. The plays and poems of that age are full of allusions to the usages of the black men of Africa and of the red men of America. The only barbarian about whom there was no wish to have any information was the Highlander. ...

In the reign of George the First, a work was published which professed to give a most exact account of Scotland; and in this work, consisting of more than three hundred pages, two contemptuous paragraphs were thought sufficient for the Highlands and the Highlanders. We may well doubt whether, in 1689, one in twenty of the well read gentlemen who assembled at Will's coffeehouse knew that, within the four seas, and at the distance of less than five hundred miles from London, were many miniature courts, in each of which a petty prince, attended by guards, by armour bearers, by musicians, by a hereditary orator, by a hereditary poet laureate, kept a rude state, dispensed a rude justice, waged wars, and concluded treaties. While the old Gaelic institutions were in full vigour, no account of them was given by any observer, qualified to judge of them fairly.

Had such an observer studied the character of the Highlanders, he would doubtless have found in it closely intermingled the good and the bad qualities of an uncivilised nation. He would have found that the people had no love for their country or for their king; that they had no attachment to any commonwealth larger than the clan, or to any magistrate superior to the chief. He would have found that life was governed by a code of morality and honour widely different from that which is established in peaceful and prosperous societies. He would have learned that a stab in the back, or a shot from behind a fragment of rock, were approved modes of taking satisfaction for insults. He would have heard men relate boastfully how they or their fathers had wreaked on hereditary enemies in a neighbouring valley such vengeance as would have made old soldiers of the Thirty Years' War shudder. He would have found that robbery was held to be a calling, not merely innocent, but honourable. He would have seen, wherever he turned, that dislike of steady industry, and that disposition to throw on the weaker sex the heaviest part of manual labour, which are characteristic of savages. He would have been struck by the spectacle of athletic men basking in the sun, angling for salmon, or taking aim at grouse, while their aged mothers, their pregnant wives, their tender daughters, were reaping the scanty harvest of oats. Nor did the women repine at their hard lot. In their view it was quite fit that a man, especially if he assumed the aristocratic title of Duinhe Wassel and adorned his bonnet with the eagle's feather, should take his ease, except when he was fighting, hunting, or marauding. To mention the name of such a man in connection with commerce or with any mechanical art was an insult. Agriculture was indeed less despised. Yet a highborn warrior was much more becomingly employed in plundering the land of others than in tilling his own.

The religion of the greater part of the Highlands was a rude mixture of Popery and Paganism. The symbol of redemption was associated with heathen sacrifices and incantations. Baptized men poured libations of ale to one Daemon, and set out drink offerings of milk for another. Seers wrapped themselves up in bulls' hides, and awaited, in that vesture, the inspiration which was to reveal the future. Even among those minstrels and genealogists whose hereditary vocation was to preserve the memory of past events, an enquirer would have found very few who could read. In truth, he might easily have journeyed from sea to sea without discovering a page of Gaelic printed or written. The price which he would have had to pay for his knowledge of the country would have been heavy. He would have had to endure hardships as great as if he had sojourned among the Esquimaux or the Samoyeds. Here and there, indeed, at the castle of some great lord who had a seat in the Parliament and Privy Council, and who was accustomed to pass a large part of his life in the cities of the South, might have been found wigs and embroidered coats, plate and fine linen, lace and jewels, French dishes and French wines. But, in general, the traveller would have been forced to content himself with very different quarters. In many dwellings the furniture, the food, the clothing, nay the very hair and skin of his hosts, would have put his philosophy to the proof. His lodging would sometimes have been in a hut of which every nook would have swarmed with vermin. He would have inhaled an atmosphere thick with peat smoke, and foul with a hundred noisome exhalations. At supper grain fit only for horses would have been set before him, accompanied by a cake of blood drawn from living cows. Some of the company with which he would have feasted would have been covered with cutaneous eruptions, and others would have been smeared with tar like sheep. His couch would have been the bare earth, dry or wet as the weather might be; and from that couch he would have risen half poisoned with stench, half blind with the reek of turf, and half mad with the itch.

This is not an attractive picture. And yet an enlightened and dispassionate observer would have found in the character and manners of this rude people something which might well excite admiration and a good hope. Their courage was what great exploits achieved in all the four quarters of the globe have since proved it to be. Their intense attachment to their own tribe and to their own patriarch, though politically a great evil, partook of the nature of virtue. The sentiment was misdirected and ill regulated; but still it was heroic. There must be some elevation of soul in a man who loves the society of which he is a member and the leader whom he follows with a love stronger than the love of life. It was true that the Highlander had few scruples about shedding the blood of an enemy: but it was not less true that he had high notions of the duty of observing faith to allies and hospitality to guests. It was true that his predatory habits were most pernicious to the commonwealth. Yet those erred greatly who imagined that he bore any resemblance to villains who, in rich and well governed communities, live by stealing. When he drove before him the herds of Lowland farmers up the pass which led to his native glen, he no more considered himself as a thief than the Raleighs and Drakes considered themselves as thieves when they divided the cargoes of Spanish galleons. He was a warrior seizing lawful prize of war, of war never once intermitted during the thirty-five generations which had passed away since the Teutonic invaders had driven the children of the soil to the mountains. That, if he was caught robbing on such principles, he should, for the protection of peaceful industry, be punished with the utmost rigour of the law was perfectly just. But it was not just to class him morally with the pickpockets who infested Drury Lane Theatre, or the highwaymen who stopped coaches on Blackheath. His inordinate pride of birth and his contempt for labour and trade were indeed great weaknesses, and had done far more than the inclemency of the air and the sterility of the soil to keep his country poor and rude. Yet even here there was some compensation. It must in fairness be acknowledged that the patrician virtues were not less widely diffused among the population of the Highlands than the patrician vices. As there was no other part of the island where men, sordidly clothed, lodged, and fed, indulged themselves to such a degree in the idle sauntering habits of an aristocracy, so there was no other part of the island where such men had in such a degree the better qualities of an aristocracy, grace and dignity of manner, self respect, and that noble sensibility which makes dishonour more terrible than death. A gentleman of this sort, whose clothes were begrimed with the accumulated filth of years, and whose hovel smelt worse than an English hogstye, would often do the honours of that hovel with a lofty courtesy worthy of the splendid circle of Versailles.

Though he had as little booklearning as the most stupid ploughboys of England, it would have been a great error to put him in the same intellectual rank with such ploughboys. It is indeed only by reading that men can become profoundly acquainted with any science. But the arts of poetry and rhetoric may be carried near to absolute perfection, and may exercise a mighty influence on the public mind, in an age in which books are wholly or almost wholly unknown. ...

There was therefore even then evidence sufficient to justify the belief that no natural inferiority had kept the Celt far behind the Saxon. It might safely have been predicted that, if ever an efficient police should make it impossible for the Highlander to avenge his wrongs by violence and to supply his wants by rapine, if ever his faculties should be developed by the civilising influence of the Protestant religion and of the English language, if ever he should transfer to his country and to her lawful magistrates the affection and respect with which he had been taught to regard his own petty community and his own petty prince, the kingdom would obtain an immense accession of strength for all the purposes both of peace and of war.

Such would doubtless have been the decision of a well informed and impartial judge. But no such judge was then to be found. The Saxons who dwelt far from the Gaelic provinces could not be well informed. The Saxons who dwelt near those provinces could not be impartial. National enmities have always been fiercest among borderers; and the enmity between the Highland borderer and the Lowland borderer along the whole frontier was the growth of ages, and was kept fresh by constant injuries. One day many square miles of pasture land were swept bare by armed plunderers from the hills. Another day a score of plaids dangled in a row on the gallows of Crieff or Stirling. Fairs were indeed held on the debatable land for the necessary interchange of commodities. But to those fairs both parties came prepared for battle; and the day often ended in bloodshed. Thus the Highlander was an object of hatred to his Saxon neighbours; and from his Saxon neighbours those Saxons who dwelt far from him learned the very little that they cared to know about his habits. When the English condescended to think of him at all,—and it was seldom that they did so,—they considered him as a filthy abject savage, a slave, a Papist, a cutthroat, and a thief.

This contemptuous loathing lasted till the year 1745 [when Bonnie Prince Charlie, Pretender to the throne lost by the Stuarts in 1688, led an invading Highland army to within 100 miles of London], and was then for a moment succeeded by intense fear and rage. England, thoroughly alarmed, put forth her whole strength. The Highlands were subjugated rapidly, completely, and for ever. During a short time the English nation, still heated by the recent conflict, breathed nothing but vengeance. The slaughter on the field of battle and on the scaffold was not sufficient to slake the public thirst for blood. The sight of the tartan inflamed the populace of London with hatred, which showed itself by unmanly outrages to defenceless captives. A political and social revolution took place through the whole Celtic region. The power of the chiefs was destroyed: the people were disarmed: the use of the old national garb was interdicted: the old predatory habits were effectually broken; and scarcely had this change been accomplished when a strange reflux of public feeling began.

Pity succeeded to aversion. The nation execrated the cruelties which had been committed on the Highlanders, and forgot that for those cruelties it was itself answerable. Those very Londoners, who, while the memory of the march to Derby was still fresh, had thronged to hoot and pelt the rebel prisoners, now fastened on the prince who had put down the rebellion the nickname of Butcher. Those barbarous institutions and usages, which, while they were in full force, no Saxon had thought worthy of serious examination, or had mentioned except with contempt, had no sooner ceased to exist than they became objects of curiosity, of interest, even of admiration. Scarcely had the chiefs been turned into mere landlords, when it became the fashion to draw invidious comparisons between the rapacity of the landlord and the indulgence of the chief. Men seemed to have forgotten that the ancient Gaelic polity had been found to be incompatible with the authority of law, had obstructed the progress of civilisation, had more than once brought on the empire the curse of civil war. As they had formerly seen only the odious side of that polity, they could now see only the pleasing side. The old tie, they said, had been parental: the new tie was purely commercial. What could be more lamentable than that the head of a tribe should eject, for a paltry arrear of rent, tenants who were his own flesh and blood, tenants whose forefathers had often with their bodies covered his forefathers on the field of battle?

As long as there were Gaelic marauders, they had been regarded by the Saxon population as hateful vermin who ought to be exterminated without mercy. As soon as the extermination had been accomplished, as soon as cattle were as safe in the Perthshire passes as in Smithfield market, the freebooter was exalted into a hero of romance. As long as the Gaelic dress was worn, the Saxons had pronounced it hideous, ridiculous, nay, grossly indecent. Soon after it had been prohibited, they discovered that it was the most graceful drapery in Europe. The Gaelic monuments, the Gaelic usages, the Gaelic superstitions, the Gaelic verses, disdainfully neglected during many ages, began to attract the attention of the learned from the moment at which the peculiarities of the Gaelic race began to disappear.

So strong was this impulse that, where the Highlands were concerned, men of sense gave ready credence to stories without evidence, and men of taste gave rapturous applause to compositions without merit. Epic poems, which any skilful and dispassionate critic would at a glance have perceived to be almost entirely modern, and which, if they had been published as modern, would have instantly found their proper place in company with Blackmore's Alfred and Wilkie's Epigoniad, were pronounced to be fifteen hundred years old, and were gravely classed with the Iliad [e.g., James MacPherson's hoax epic Ossian, published around 1760]. Writers of a very different order from the impostor who fabricated these forgeries saw how striking an effect might be produced by skilful pictures of the old Highland life [e.g., Sir Walter Scott]. Whatever was repulsive was softened down: whatever was graceful and noble was brought prominently forward. Some of these works were executed with such admirable art that, like the historical plays of Shakspeare, they superseded history. The visions of the poet were realities to his readers. The places which he described became holy ground, and were visited by thousands of pilgrims.

Soon the vulgar imagination was so completely occupied by plaids, targets, and claymores, that, by most Englishmen, Scotchman and Highlander were regarded as synonymous words. Few people seemed to be aware that, at no remote period, a Macdonald or a Macgregor in his tartan was to a citizen of Edinburgh or Glasgow what an Indian hunter in his war paint is to an inhabitant of Philadelphia or Boston. Artists and actors represented Bruce and Douglas in striped petticoats. They might as well have represented Washington brandishing a tomahawk, and girt with a string of scalps. At length this fashion reached a point beyond which it was not easy to proceed. The last British King who held a court in Holyrood thought that he could not give a more striking proof of his respect for the usages which had prevailed in Scotland before the Union, than by disguising himself in what, before the Union, was considered by nine Scotchmen out of ten as the dress of a thief.

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   Via the estimable Steve Sailer who has a talent for finding interesting things across the board and having unusual things to say about them. 

Letter sent to over 50 newspapers and TV "news services". Technicaly I shouldn't list it as unpublished yet and will publicly apologise to any newspaper/broadcaster which  does not live down to my expectations of them being totally committed to censorship.

Sir,
     There was once a time when newspapers and indeed broadcasters used to be proud to obtain a "scoop" as an important news story not yet reported by competitors was called. Nowadays most of the mainstream media seem to do do everything possible to avoid printing any "news" ahead of their "competitors" or indeed  much, even in reader's letters sections which are supposed to be reserved for reader's opinions not covered elsewhere, which is not simply rehashing press releases from the state, state funded sock puppets and the friends of the state.

      Instead breaking news is left entirely to to the blogsphere.

      However, in the spirit of assuming you, almost alone, would like to scoop your "rivals" here are 2 pieces of news unpublished by them, though common on the net, which might give you an edge.

 1 - The MSM have very widely reported the alleged conversion of Richard Muller from warming sceptic to alarmist. The scoop unpublished is that Muller's claim to ever have been a sceptic is deliberately fraudulent as shown by a number of public remarks. Most tellingly

“If Al Gore reaches more people and convinces the world that global warming is real, even if he does it through exaggeration and distortion – which he does, but he’s very effective at it – then let him fly any plane he wants.” – Richard Muller, 2008

That Muller has expressed support for Mr Gore's deliberate lying to promote this scare story shows he has no close connection to honesty, and certainly none to scientific integrity.

While the original claim has 15.800 news reports according to Google News the genuine news (& main human interest angle) that Muller is lying about being a sceptic in what in secret service parlance is called a black flag operation, a perusal shows that of the only 41 mentions worldwide all, at least in the top dozen, come from online sites or are comments added online by members of the public rather than the original journalist.

Of course the BBC prominently pushed the original lie even though, at the time they did so, the truth was known by them. On the other hand I don't think any informed and honest person now suggests that anybody in the BBC is other than a wholly corrupt totalitarian fascist propagandist merely masquerading as a journalist.

2 - The second scoop is that the Syrian "revolution" is not an internal revolution at all but, as Asia Times, an online publication, reports "swarm of mercenaries - infiltrated via Jordan - who were supposed to take over the capital had to retreat up north. Now the news cycle is fixated on another faux game-changer - the "Battle of Aleppo"" (something unnoticed by all the western journalists on site & that the Damascus bomb, far from being a set by "rebels" was a carefully crafted Saudi & US state assassination to which the Syrians have remarkably quickly reacted by in turn assassinating Prince Bandar bin Sultan (now up to 2,900 mentions worldwide) who was appointed Saudi intelligence chief for masterminding it. It is difficult to see how any part of the Syrian conflict can be understood without knowing this but because your "rivals" have managed to miss it, here again you have the opportunity of a major scoop.

  You don't have to thank me. Seeing publication of this letter or indeed of the news I have given you will be satisfying enough. I think you will agree that if the MSM is to stop the hemorrhage of readers printing the news in newspapers might help. 

      I saw this reported on the BBC Ceefax this morning & assume it has been on the traditional BBC News as well..

A formerly sceptical climate scientist says human activity is causing the Earth to warm, as a new study confirms earlier results on rising temperatures

In a US newspaper opinion piece, Prof Richard Muller says: "Call me a converted sceptic."
Muller leads the Berkeley Earth Project, which is using new methods and some new data to investigate the claims made by other climate researchers..

In a piece authored for the New York Times, Prof Muller, from the University of California, Berkeley, said: "Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming.

"Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause."

   Now there is no end of "scientists" claiming to see catastrophic warming. The difference here is the claim to be a converted sceptic - this is why the BBC highlighted it.

  Except that it is a lie and that it had been proven to be a lie long before the BBC chose to push it. This comes via Pournelle's but it has gone viral all over the net and it is not credible the BBC didn't know of it when they put it up.

The Truth about Richard Muller


“I was never a skeptic” – Richard Muller, 2011

“If Al Gore reaches more people and convinces the world that global warming is real, even if he does it through exaggeration and distortion – which he does, but he’s very effective at it – then let him fly any plane he wants.” – Richard Muller, 2008

“There is a consensus that global warming is real. …it’s going to get much, much worse.” – Richard Muller, 2006

“Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate.” – Richard Muller, 2003″


Clearly somebody who praised Al Gore for lying is not any sort of sceptic, or indeed scientist. Such fraud has no place in science. That is why I emboldened that particular part.

Jerry's description was that Muller was clearly a "black flag" operative, who had always been working for the other side, simply trying to discredit the group he was pretending to be part of. The term is from the more violent end of secret service work and not unknown in the dirtiest bits of conventional politics but obviously contrary to all the principles of science.

And the BBC, knowing at the time that they were deliberately promoting a lie, decided to push it.

Once again proof that the BBC is wholly corrupt and willing to tell absolutely any lie and censor absolutely any fact in the totalitarian fascist cause.
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    And on a completely different subject - our support of the "democratic fighters" in Syria or "the swarm of mercenaries - infiltrated via Jordan - who were supposed to take over the capital had to retreat up north. Now the news cycle is fixated on another faux game-changer - the "Battle of Aleppo"" as Asia Times, not being restricted by the organlegging Nazis who run Britain and its media, is able to say. 

   The unmentioned news here is the apparent assassination by Syrian operatives of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, newly appointed Saudi intelligence chief, who, with American assistance (& British if GCHQ information gathering was used) set up the Damascus bomb. As retaliation for that act the Syrian's reply is slightly less than proportionate but the remarkable thing is that they were able to do so within a few days of the attack on them.

   Clearly we are not dealing with anything that has any of the characteristics of an internal struggle for democracy. Equally clearly we can expect the BBC & British media generally to totally censor it and continue to lie to us to keep us in the dark.

   A lot of the important stuff in the world is censored by our MSM and almost all of what is reported is slanted or outright fabricated by the Ministry of Truth.

I see that there is a proposal for a new Tay bridge to ease congestion.

Your readers may be interested in the fact that the Norwegians have built over 700 km of road tunnels in recent years at a cost of under about £4m million per km. For example a Forth tunnel was costed at around £30 million whereas the bridge chosen is promised at £2,600 million.

Indeed a Tay Tunnel was part of the Scottish Tunnel Project - a series of Norwegian style tunnels across the country giving road access to most of the major islands & Kintyre as well as tunnels at North Berwick and the Tay estuary.

This has been published in a major Scottish newspaper and while no decision has been made by the Holyrood parties has been adopted as the policy of UKIP in Scotland.

Tunnelling technology has progressed by leaps and bounds in recent decades and nobody, either in Holyrood or elsewhere has suggested any show stoppers or disputes that the transport gains it would give the whole country would not be likely to produce substantial economic growth.

Hopefully this will persuade the main parties after they have given it sufficient consideration.

Ref http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/holyrood-must-see-light-on-tunnels.html

This letter is in today's Courier. It was in response to reporting of a Perth local business calling for a new Tay bridge at Perth to reduce congestion. I actually heard about that thru a BBC Radio Scotland interview with the businessman who gave a good impression of how you don't have to have a coherent idea to get BBC coverage. BBC have never mentioned the tunnel project.

 The censorship of the highlighted passage is blatant. I don't think it is because of the mention of a competing newspaper (Scotsman) since I had not named it. So it must be UKIP having a positive Scotland specific policy that is being censored.

   President Assad's father was a nasty piece of work. He was responsible for the Hama Massacre where 10-20,000 people were killed but which wasn't newsworthy at the time.

   Since the current President started out as London doctor, married to a British wife it is clear that this is not the job he wanted. He inherited it.

   Shakespeare who uses the theme of the inheritance of power, legitimatley and otherwise, in almost every play, would have understood this  We live in a nominally more democtratic age, where democracy is defined as the people being allowed to choose whatever rulers the western powers support at this moment.
========================

The Houla Massacre - This was the killing of about 100 people. The BBC, which entirely censored any mention of the Dragodan Massacre, where British police murdered 210 people in cold blood iin Kosovo (a matter many times more important to Britain)  gave massive initial coverage to this event saying, repeatedly, how dreadful it was. However

Houla massacre was in fact committed by anti-Assad Sunni militants, and the bulk of the victims were member of the Alawi and Shia minorities, which have been largely supportive of Assad

  A fact which remains entirely censored by the BBC state broadcasters. Obviously if the victims are Assad's allies it is im[possible for them to have ben the perptrators.

   Of course nobody denues that their censoprship of the Dragodan Massacre is inconsistent with the BBC beingt anything other than a wholly corrupt, racist, fascist propaganda organisation for which no human who was not themselves more racist and Nazi than the guards at Auschwitz could ever work. Still confirmation is worthwhile.

   Another point airbrushed out the by our Nazi broadcaster is the role of al Quaeda as, at least, the dominant military part of this genocidal war.

neil craig said...

Current reporting seems to fit with it not being a suicide bomb but a preplaced one as Brian says. Closer to the IRA Brighton bomb than a typical arabic terrorist.
I have seen it said that the Gulf emirates are "buying" Syrian officials. If so for a bit more they could buy one willing to leave a bomb before departing.
This, however, would require good intel on where and when such "high value targets" would be present. This might come from the turncoat but I think a more certain source would be the sort of electronic intel GCHQ & Langley are undeniably good at.
Overall this seems more consistent with a well planned western operation, based on western intel, using an arab recruited with Gulf oil money and contacts than the sort of bloody but incoherent terrorism our al Quaeda allies in Syria, Libya and elsewhere, have recently achieved.

  And others from Neil Clark's site.
The FSA: NOT Free NOT Syrian and NOT an Army:

'We arrived to Midan, to the Police center; they sent us in a tanked vehicle with some soldiers to accompany us. We got down in the heart of a popular area where streets are narrow and houses are traditional (irregular houses). The quarter was empty of inhabitants. Soldiers told us that Syrian army helped them to evacuate the quarter before starting its operation. We saw traces of fights everywhere. Bullets’ caps everywhere. We wanted to see bodies of fighters of the so-called FSA (I said “the SO-CALLED” because the bodies belonged to NON-Syrian nationalities!) Answering a question of the journalist, soldiers said that most of the foreign fighters are Libyan, Afghan, Pakistani and other Arabic nationalities.'

http://nsnbc.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/syriaonline%C2%B4s-iyad-khuder-reports-from-damascus/
..............
on the turkish jet:
http://newsaboutsyria.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/us-tricked-erdogan-fact-behind-downing.html

and
Syrian refugees are fearing rebels, not Assad!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH7ilDsHQQ8&feature=youtube_gdata_player
......
'Two foreign journalists captured by Islamic extremists in Syria and held for a week were rescued by Syrian opposition fighters, one of them said on Friday...Mr. Oerlemans said their captors apparently included no Syrian fighters, but instead jihadists from Bangladesh, Britain, Chechnya and Pakistan...“They were only foreign jihadis; I don’t think there was one Syrian among them,” Mr. Oerlemans said...“They were definitely quite extreme in their religious beliefs,” he said. “All day we were spoken to about the Koran and how they would bring Shariah law to Syria. I don’t think they were Al Qaeda; they seemed too amateurish for that. They said, ‘We’re not Al Qaeda, but Al Qaeda is down the road.’”...'
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/28/world/middleeast/jeroen-oerlemans-john-cantile-two-journalists-freed-by-islamic-fighters-in-syria-after-weeklong-ordeal.html?_r=1
so UK is now harboring islamic terrorists...some are also Chechnya.
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  Stuff we will not be seeing on the BBC. Of course i can't guaratee that all of these are entirely accurate but I can guarantee that they average far more trustworthy than what we do see.

Neil Clark's blog is recommended for getting the censored news about Syria.

 And from the other end of the political spectrum comes this perceptive and not entirely critical assessment of the conspiratorial relationship between Saudi and America (& by extension Britain) which may have a lot of bearing on the NATO role in helping Islamic terrorists inYugoslavia and certainly has some in the inability, after over a decade of "war on terror" to stop the flow of Saudi and Gulf money to our al Quaeda allies.

The Fourth Rail of Washington imperial politics is the Saudi Lobby (the Third Rail is the Israeli Lobby).

The Saudis have more money than God, but, like the Kuwaitis in 1990, they are too lazy and cowardly too defend their unearned oil wealth. But, unlike the Kuwaitis, who were too arrogant to even pretend to like America before Saddam's invasion, the Saudis have long been using their oil money prudently to buy themselves friends in Washington.

One way they do it is by doing actual favors for the United States of America. Most notably, at the Reagan Administration's request, the Saudis pumped so much oil in 1986 that it drove oil prices low enough to pound the last nail in the Soviet Union's economic coffin. That was a big one, and I am grateful.

Currently, the Saudis appear to be funding the Sunni uprising in Syria. Is that at the request of the Obama Administration? (I haven't been following the news out of Syria.) Obviously, this is wildly hypocritical after the Saudis sent tanks in to Bahrain to crush democracy protests there last year, but such is the way of the world.

Unfortunately, the Saudi rulers aso have interests not at all aligned with America's. Most notably, the Royal Family buys off local hotheads by subsidizing them to stir up Muslim hotheads abroad.

On the other hand, while occasionally the Saudis will do a genuine expensive favor for the U.S. like cutting the price of oil to hurt a mutual foe, most of the time they find it more cost effective just to do favors for members of the American ruling class.

  So are the Suadi's funding terrorism against Iran's enemy Syria as a favour to us or are we supporting their terrorist war as a favour to them. Whe knows, possibly not even all of the American and Saudi government.

  2 things we can be sure of - that if Saudi us unviolved it is nothing to do with promoting democracy & - the people getting killed are mainly harmless local civilians not our al Quaeda/"free Army" let alone their paymasters or organisers.