大象传媒

Paul I wonder if all the 'enlightened' country's have done their maths as to how we are to accommodate all the 'huddled masses' and refugee status from the affected areas who land on doorsteps all over Europe seeking refuge....or have the doors already slammed shut?

looks like a good night!

One-Party State, two wings.

no wonder they are bringing over "American Political Advisers". The same bunch that brought us the farcical "Leaders Debates". Will Scotland and Wales join a 'North European Community', whilst England goes down the plug-hole with the US?

isn't it absolutely odd how we only keep hearing that "tax cuts stimulate consumer demand", when social benefit increases also have this effect? When is the last time you heard a TV 'economist' admit this simple fact?

"The IMF today advised the UK to increase both social benefits, and also minimum/Living wages, to increase public spending and boost the economy". In other news, it was discovered that pigs can not only fly, but have built a space-shuttle.

NN still pumping the word 'austerity' which is a political response to 'not spending beyond means'. Is a heroin junkie going cold turkey in 'austerity'? So debt junkies going cold turkey is not 'austerity' but reality.

Unions voting for ponzi pension schemes funded by the taxpayer. what's new. Everyone wants to 'go long' the taxpayer from banks to teachers.

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

PAST ACTIVITY IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE PERFORMANCE (#5)

Interesting times Bro - I intend to be dead.

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

future historians may make the same points about events elsewhere recently, as well.

#6: as often stated by various economic 'talking heads' on NN, the debt spigot is still turned full-on for the kkkorporate raiders. You can bet the "private health consortio" would be able to dig out some cash from the banksters!

"austerity" means cuts in benefits and services to the majority, no more, and no less. We will pay taxes, to fund the banks and the kkkorporates, the 'Lords in the Castles'.

ONCE MORE WITH NO FEELING (#8)


I WROTE TO MURRISON MD MP TO ADVISE HIM THIS PARLIAMENT IS ILLEGITIMATE

because he, and others, availed themselves the Conservative 'False Instrument' to gain votes. The good Doctor replied that it is more than his jobsworth to parley with the constituent of another MP (the dismissive Richard Benyon MP) and he has forwarded my letter.

One wonders what he would do if I wrote to him warning of a (redacted) plot . . .

It is high time the voters realised (Blogdog please insert) the Westminster MPs are.

SPOILPARTYGAMES - DISMANTLE WESTMINSTER

PLANKETY PLANK - IT'S MOTE AND BEAM TIME AGAIN, AGAIN. (#11 link)

Our own 'corrupt elite' are doing a splendid job of keeping the focus (and the bombs) on Johnnie Foreigner. I wonder if Archie Cant intends to say anything about that?

Billy the Spud is quite open about 'Improving The Arab' (shades of the White Man's Burden there) while Dave is back on song - 'bravest of brave, best of best' - regarding mercenaries 'doing the job they love' fighting an abstract noun.

Meanwhile corruption is rife in just about every area of British life; woven so tightly into the nation's functioning, as to be imperceptible. We no longer live WITHIN the lie, our national characteristic IS the lie. And who better to lead us than Dave - the man of two faces who actually spent half a mil ADVERTISING THE FACT. There's style.

I call for a UN resolution to bomb democracy into Britain. There should be no problem assembling a Coalition of the Willing! Arrogance makes no friends.

#14: i think Dave would definitely appreciate a tour at the front-lines - that's a tour of duty, not a highly protected nip around for the cameras and press.

make a man of him.


and he will not only sound more authoritative (less chipmunk like), but will most likely be less eager to send others off to die for "National Glory and Worship of the Great Leader".

being on the cutting edge of Reality tends to be more painful than living in luxurious Ivory Towers.


for that matter, lets send the Banksters out there as well.

[Bleep]ers.

What joy!


and
Lawmakers sue Obama over Libya raid


and the best(!)
Pakistan arrests CIA informants in Bin Laden Raid



:p Just gets better doesn't it?

Happy new haircut !

TURNING A PR EXERCISE INTO ANOTHER PR EXERCISE

Wasn't Dedicated Dave great in the hospital ward? As irate REAL BLOKE came roaring in, in one smooth movement, Dave morphed from bedside gusher to bed-end usher, urging the media throng out as if he had just spotted them, and was mildly peeved.

Puts me in mind of a Smith and Jones sketch: studio discussion with two opposing politicians. One is slagging off the other - who promptly drops dead. Mel Smith, seamlessly, segued from slagging to eulogy.

Brilliant comedy sketch, Jeremy and Billy the Spud doing an episode of Bird and Fortune ?????

@ Brossen #23 :o) Yes indeed! Gave me a good laugh anyway.
Also great to see Noreena Hertz on tonight. More please.
Interesting piece on the lunar eclipse too ;o)

"NOT JUST IN THE ARAB WORLD"

With those words, Billy the Spud ended his confident delivery, and took on a statesmanlike pose. Jaw firm - head tilted. (I wish he wouldn't tilt the head - IDS, Hilary and Frank Spencer tilt.)

Then we moved on to the guy who spoke of national 'NOISE' relieving national tension, and of FRAGILITY being dangerous. Indeed so.

While Dave and Billy uplift the Arab, the gunpowder mix, at home, is about ready. While parties squabble in Westminster, the lack of British 'noise' is deafening and THE STRIKES ARE COMING to this fragile land.

What do you do with a match to light gunpowder?

Nuff sed.

I was a bit surprised with William Hague; I always had him down as a smart fella albeit a bit weedy. His view on the Arab spring was very naive. I think history already tells most of us what follows revolution, clearly Hague ignores history. Take a look at Egypt now for example -after those facebook twitterwers demanding change - whats replaced the old Egyptian leaders?..go have a look, look see whats waiting in the wings, its gonna be a lot worse. Also Hague struggled with the double standards we and others display when dealing with tyrants, he was all over the place, and all Paxmans questions were fair I thought...and then Hague ended the interview as if he'd answered those questions in good fashion; deflected them well. God help us if Hague felt that interview went well, when clearly it didn't.

The black Swan discussion was fascinating..but I've forgotton most of it...that'll be because of those shoes Noreena was wearing...they were very nice shoes.

Astronomy is wonderful...and I have a big telescope, I'm not bragging, I really do have a big telescope.

A FEAST OF GEORGE PARR (#23)

The EU & IMF have done what years of political bickering could never do in Greece - unify its people across the political spectrum. But the Greek politicians are now irrelevant - clearly the Greek people won't allow their country to be carpetbagged in this way and I can't see how Euroland can avoid a default now as Round II cuts won't get through Parliament.

The Icelanders and Irish also rebelled in their ways - if the global financial system continues to creak there could be a brushfire effect as people after people refuse to allow their nations to be impoverished to feed the greed of the bankers, there is a wave of defaults and massive bank insolvencies that cannot be propped up.

IMHO growth in the EU is now impossible for the peripheral economies, so there is no alternative for them but to default - I can't see them being able to stay in the Euro on that basis, so it will shatter - will this be the high watermark for the EU? Will the tide turn and cause this mini-globalised market to decouple back into nations with their own agendas?

Those that advocate NeoCon policies need to realise where this will lead - protectionism, trade controls and international financial controls - and the ending of the Washington Concensus - all that they hold dear is going to be destroyed.

One way or another the mountains of debt will have to be written off because they can't be paid off - whether this through sovereign debt defaults or banking failures - squeezing the lifeblood out of whole countries is not an option anymore - we've reached the logical conclusion that Karl Marx wrote about - the "surplus value" taken out of economies is now so huge that these economies simply cannot afford to bear this burden anymore - for those who thought the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR spelt the end of communism, clearly it did not mean the end of Marxist economic theory which now looks to have been worryingly correct.

The Irish banks are now nationalised and if there is a meltdown, the UK banks will go the same way, as will most banks in the EU - at this point nations will owe each other these debts and we can all face the reality that they are worthless.

"Spending beyond one's means" As a society, does it (1) mean consuming beyond one's capacity to produce? (Bad - as it means eating the seedcorn.) Or, does it mean that money, the "entitlement to consume" is so manipulated by those who control its supply, that one can't afford to consume what one has the capacity to produce. (Also bad, because the ability of one section of society to extract rent, acts as an impediment to society as a whole providing for its needs.)

Re Asylum: The right to asylum these days is determined by one's access to an air ticket or some other mode of transport. If 5% of China (that is about 67million people) decided that they were oppressed and obtained tickets to the UK (population about 60 million), what would we do about it? The illusion of civilisation, one way or the other, would go out of the window.

If you advocate the right of asylum, should you not also make an effort to evacuate/rescue the oppressed? I do not have an answer to this. But there is lots of dishonesty about the right to asylum: it's like paper money when it pretended to be on the gold standard. Anybody could convert their paper into gold, so long as very few asked to do so.

Re photo shoots in hospitals: real hospitals are stressed and overworked. If photo opportunities for politicians are allowed at all, it should be on condition that they first forgo a days's salary and do an eight hour toilet cleaning shift instead!

Good night or good morning all! :-)

thank you for the down-to-Earth solid reasoning, richard bunning #28.





[...yes, i was freaked by that last segment, as well.] Synchronicity.
can be scary.

WOW!!!! to Sasha C#29!!!! :*

"austerity" means cuts in benefits and services to the majority,

when benefits are having a problem being limited to 26k, when money is being spent on overseas aid to space race nations, when pfi and political correctness soak up more billions and landowners get billions merely for owning an asset only to a mind in excess [who thinks the state should do everything] is it austerity.

what we have is a state of excess and a philosophy and mindset that excuses excess. If tax money is for the poor and needy then its never going to be for 'the majority'?

everyone wants to use taxpayers money for their pet hobbies and theories. People should use their own money for that.

28

lefties are so desperate to say capitalism has failed they misrepresent what has happened. The credit crunch wasn't a failure of economic laws but the reassertion of them after a giant fraud [creating debt equivalent to a third world war] by a few greedy demons and their political mates.

if there was no regulation in air traffic control planes would be falling out the sky. why would it be any different in any other industry.

the public pension scheme is also a giant fraud which is why it must also blow up as are the government pfi and other schemes. That is is not the failure of capitalism but its proof that you must not start smoking political fantasy utopianism and stay within mathematics or economic laws for things to add up.

anyone who manages their household without any debt has better right to be chancellor because they have demonstrated their grip on reality.

WAS IT EINSTEIN? (#28)

Someone warned that repeating a mistake gets the same bad outcome every time. As HomSap went from sustainable hunter-gatherer through agriculture and technology to global ambitions, he kept repeating the same mistakes - only magnified.

'Systems' imposed on (increasingly immature) HomSap, by the control-obsessed minority, has never, and will never bring sustainability.

My conclusion is that OPTIMISATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL, WORLDWIDE, such that HomSap ceases to act as a child, mindlessly elevating 'APPARENT PARENTS' (the psychopathic control-needy) to positions of power, would be an alternative approach.

There is a mass of neurophysiological/psychological data to support this, AND A MASS OF OPPRESSORS IN POSITIONS OF POWER WHO WILL PREVENT IT.

SPOILPARTYGAMES - DISMANTLE WESTMINSTER - PROMOTE AWARENESS

Greek Money for Nothing

Any State that goes to Goldman to hide its debt deserves what it gets? If you can't pay the bill don't buy. In what way is that unjust?

'We have the Maxim Gun And they do not'

JP sounds depressed the uk doesn't have an empire and a military interventionist foreign policy?


"Human Rights is Universal" [Hague]

So how does Cameron explain being a patron of the JNF? [As was Blair and Brown before him]

IT'S ALL DOWN TO THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE (#35)

In recent times, the PC good-doers purged a lot of 'givens' from children鈥檚 books: stereotypical nurses, doctors, police officers, house-persons etc, were 'disengendered'. BUT NO ONE TOOK THE JEWS OUT OF THE BIBLE.

Thus, CHILDREN get a false image of SPECIALNESS of the Jews - which they (The Chosen People?) do nothing to counter. As it is in the nature of the Westminster Ethos to elevate the immature to high rank, the opportunity to fulfil a wish be close to the Jews in the JNF (imprinted on their juvenile psyche) is taken up, with an indefinable feeling of 'extra somebodyness' - precisely what they crave.

Our world is BOTH physically AND psychologically wrecked at the hand of The Ape Confused by Language. Nothing will change in Britain until we

SPOILPARTYGAMES - DISMANTLE WESTMINSTER - PROMOTE AWARENESS

33

You really can't have it both ways - either the current economic system is infallible and warrants neo-religious faith in it so the "magic of the market" will work out the situation automatically and governments should sit on their hands and allow this to happen, or you take the view that the free market so deeply flawed that we'd be lemmings to simply let it run its course straight over the cliff, taking our banks, savings, pensions and jobs with it.

All the evidence is that if governments stood back and allowed things to take their course we'd all be back to bartering in a matter of weeks as banks, their business customers, consumers and whole nations would find their financial system had died under a tidal wave of insolvency, money would be worthless.

There is quite a board concensus (outside of the Tea Party & the GOP and the other loonytune libertarians) that it is essential that governents try to mediate and hold the system together, but on the Left there is the view based on the Marxist analysis of the capitalist system as explained by the concept of "surplus value", that there is such a deep contradiction at work that eventually it will become impossible to apply enough sticking plasters to hold the system together anymore.

There seems to me to be a case for saying when sufficient economies reach the Greek basketcase condition that governments will run out of options - and if the US debt situation continues to worsen, at some point their trading partners will refuse to go on accepting shedloads of freshly printed dollars - ditto Euros, Sterling, etc.

IMHO this is a legitimate debate which doesn't even begin to advocate or oppose any particualr course of action - merely seeks to indentify the scale and nature of the problem - and its causes.

I'd say that Paul's reports point towards a "no way out" scenario rapidly developing in Greece and other countries - once the population break with any notion of signing up to the "sticking plaster approach" of deep cuts and prrivatisation, you might well say that the next stage in Marx's analysis of the nature of economic change is being to happen - that those that work for a living become detached from the reformist view of the world and become politicised - Marx called it "Class conciousness": when people lose all faith in reform, stand together and actively resist the sort of economic repression the Greeks are facing.

There - now that wasn't so unreasonable, was it? I'd say the really dangerous people are those who advocate letting the marke

Mark

I noticed references to Russian , you might have also highlighted the EU's and that is before mentioning other things in which we seek Russian cooperation on.

So even though I have a natural empathy with peoples overthrowing their , now is not a good time for us to twang a hypersensitive bears nose.

Trouble on the Fringes of the Empire

Hasn't the ECB been buying up debt from Euro zone banks ?
If Greece defaults, wont the ECB be left holding the dodo ?

An alternative might be for Euro zone members to cough up some real cash for debt forgiveness, in the name of Euro zone solidarity.

Either way the timing would be politically problematic , as this action will have electoral repercussions in some of the larger Euro zone provinces.

Maybe a apt quote to repeat to our Euro Elite would be a Laurel and Hardy quote , 鈥淭hat's another fine mess you got me into.鈥�.

Discussion after discussion about the uprisings in the Arab world and NOBODY talks about the elephant in the room! In most of these countries the population has doubled - in some cases tripled in the last 30 years - and yet family planning is never mentioned...how can any country, dictatorship or democracy satisfy the needs of a burgeoning population...There is no forward thinking, no plans at all...bound to end in tears!

MY KIND OF FUNDAMENTALISM (#39)

Sparing and telling, valdalynen; how relevant to 'Vaccinations Sans Frontiere', Gates style.

As Long John Silver (another shrewd fundamentalist) said: "The dead will be the lucky ones."

Bloody elephants - they are everywhere.

what's with this elephant thing? Aren't they supposed to be the republican party?

37

the credit crunch was due to fraud in the mortgage market. to say it was due to the failure of free markets is to bear false witness. if someone sells you a fake rolex does that mean the failure of the economic system?

fraud means people suffer.

democracy demands responsibility to take an interest in what the politicians are doing in your name. most people are not bothered so they get what they deserve.

So when politicians like Blair say there should be light regulation in a functioning democracy they would have been challenged to demonstrate that was true when its not true in air traffic control or on the motorways etc. but they weren't and so here we are.

the credit crunch thus has it roots in a non functioning uk democracy that allowed the political class to suspend the laws of reason and mathematics and thus gain votes.

its trendy to think voting doesn't matter but its clear to vote wrong may mean economic collapse through massive fraud.

John Culshaw...out of his depth on NN...

42

I must have lost my mind! Thank you for pointing this out Jaunty! How did I ever not realise it was all Blair's fault!

Although Tony Blair must have spent a lot of time going round selling all those sub-prime mortgages in the southern US states, and he'd also have to have worked really hard on selling derivatives contracts for Bear Sterns, Leaman Bros, etc to have single handedly caused the failure of all those US banks/funds/traders, which then precipated the UK banking crisis as global wholesale lending completely dried up, causing the UK banking crisis.

Of course Blair allowed the light touch regulation started by Big Bang in the 80s to continue - indeed I seem to remember the IMF, OECD, ECB, etc plus the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrat Party all calling for and supporting light touch regulation - indeed, John Redwood argued for EVEN LESS REGULATION than Blair - ditto the Orange Book LibDems.

How foolish of me not to realise the entire credit crisis was the work of a single man who allowed himself to go along with the vast majority of experts, thinktanks, pundits, politicians and organisations arguing for rolling back the state and "light touch" regulation - you clearly feel he should have sided with the loony left who had been banging on about how it would all end in tears for many years and the need to rein in globalisation and the financial services industry.

Somehow I didn't quite see you as a Leftie, Jaunty.....