The Silencing of Gaza: How Media and Politics Shape Narratives of War. In recent months,…
Dumb politicians are not the problem.
The problem is the dumb people that keep voting for them.
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
Two years ago the then Chancellor Tweeted these words with pride:
“We’ve finished process of returning Royal Mail to private sector.”
He was embarrassingly wrong.
Our mail service had never been in the private sector as it was set up for the nation by Henry Vlll and stayed in public hands before being hurriedly flogged by Osborne’s Government in 2013 to hedge fund sharks for £1.6billion below its market value.
His tweet continued… “Right thing to do for Royal Mail workforce, customers and the taxpayer.”
Again, completely wrong as the Mirror exclusively revealed this week.
Since privatisation the workforce has been cut by 11,000 and workers are so demoralised they want to strike over pensions and wages.
Customers are paying an extra 12% for stamps and the taxpayer watches impotently as Royal Mail shareholders take £500,000 every day in dividends from a national treasure we owned for 500 years until economic vandals came along.
It’s bad enough that these Tories are sharks.
It’s even worse that they’re sharks with the intelligence of plankton.
( Brian Reade, 21.10.2017 )
The American Way.
A Nation that has the death penalty, allows its citizens to carry guns, has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons on the planet, and threatens smaller Nations with violence and invasions in an attempt to make them behave how they don’t.
Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated.
( Albert Einstein )
Don’t fear weapons of mass destruction.
Fear weapons of mass distraction.
You Can See Why Many Tories Believe This Man’s Time Has Come.
Jacob Rees-Mogg came top in a poll of Conservative voters asked who they would like to see as their next leader.
Forcing some to ask how much of a no-mark do you have to be to come bottom of it?
But you can see why many Tories believe this man’s time has come.
Because he captures their version of the zeitgeist.
After all, he opposes gay marriage and abortion, even if a woman has been raped, and has never changed a nappy because he believes ownership of a penis bars you from that job.
He’s voted for cutting welfare and disability payments, the Bedroom Tax, restricting legal aid, anti-climate change measures and raising tuition fees.
He’s voted against moves to improve safety in tower blocks, regulate landlords, tax bankers’ bonuses, cut Corporation Tax, and virtually every move to bolster human rights and equality.
So as we withdraw into our post-Brexit 19th century splendid isolation shell and workers suffer the slowest wage growth since the 1800s, who better to lead us than a man who talks in Latin, calls his kids after 13th-century popes and wears a disdainful look that suggests he’s about to deduct a farthing from the pay of an eight-year-old chimney sweep for leaving soot on his drawing-room chaise longue.
All hail the Man of His Time.
( Brian Reade, 09.09.2017 )
Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.
( Lucy Parsons, 1853-1942 )
Common sense is not a gift.
It’s a punishment because you have to deal with all those who don’t have it.
Peers Planted In The House Of Commons Just To Vote Through Bills.
There’s been much outrage at 115 peers claiming £1.2million expenses without saying a word all year in the House of Lords.
I say give them a break.
Some probably couldn’t speak because their mouths were full of the heavily subsidised three-course lunch they’d spent two hours scoffing, or they’d drunk too much heavily subsidised wine and nodded off.
Some Lords may have wanted to speak but found they still had the leather gag on from spending their £300 daily allowance in Madam Suzie’s Soho Bondage Parlour.
Others may genuinely believe they’ve only been put there by a party leader to keep schtum and vote through any bill they’ve proposed.
Therefore they see themselves as voyeurs who are simply in the Lords to watch Acts pass.
In other words, it’s the country’s biggest dogging spot.
Time to put them all down?
( Brian Reade, 23.09.2017 )
My goal is simple.
It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.
( Stephen Hawking )
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
( Upton Sinclair, 1878-1968 )
Criminal Practises And Not One Senior Banker Brought To Justice.
Last week, a homeless, 30-year-old PTSD-sufferer with mental health issues was jailed for 28 days after sneaking into the Novotel swimming pool in Liverpool to get a wash and acting aggressively when made to leave.
Kyle Morgan hurt no-one and stole nothing, and the only inconvenience was that the pool had to be shut for a bit to be cleaned.
Yet the poor sod was thrown behind bars.
Meanwhile, 10 years after a financial crash caused by criminal practises – which led to British taxpayers losing tens of billions, the country almost falling off an economic cliff and a debt crisis that ushered in austerity policies which cost jobs, cut living standards, split families and drove thousands to depression and suicide – not one senior banker has lost a day’s liberty.
Ah yes, British justice.
The best in the world.
( Brian Reade, 23.09.2017 )
Those of us who are warm and dry and safe and well-fed must show up for those who are cold and wet and endangered and hungry.
That’s a rule of life.
Every ethical and religious and spiritual tradition in the world agrees on that rule.
( Elizabeth Gilbert )
Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one.
But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now.
( Eckhart Tolle )
He Begged The PM Not To Ban Fox Hunting Because It’s “Romantic”.
Ever since Prince Charles was asked on his engagement to Diana if he was in love and replied “whatever love is” we’ve believed his heart was made of ice.
If you can’t admit you’re in love with a beautiful woman on the day you tell the world she’s going to be your bride then what could possibly spark a man’s passion?
Well, we’ve just found out, as a 2002 lobbying letter to Tony Blair’s been made public in which he begged the then PM not to ban fox hunting because it’s “romantic”.
Yes, it turns out your next king thinks the spectacle of dragging a poor, defenceless animal out of a hole and ripping it apart until it’s dead is “what love is”.
I wonder if he crouched over a dead fox and blew his horn when he proposed to Camilla?
( Brian Reade, 14.10.2017 )
Governments don’t want an intelligent population, because people who can think critically can’t be ruled.
They want a public who are just smart enough to pay taxes and dumb enough to keep voting for them.
What progress we are making.
In the Middle Ages they would have burned me.
Now they are content with burning my books.
Freedom Of Speech.
You are not a racist for simply discussing your concern about the barbaric ideology of Islam, and how Muslim immigration can destroy your country’s quality of life, like it has in some European countries.
Don’t buy into political correctness bull-shit your government is trying to dump on you.
Freedom of speech is something you should never allow government to take from you, as your children will never get it back.
Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the State has become lawless or corrupt.
( Mahatma Gandhi )
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people things they do not want to hear.
( George Orwell )
A Public Sector Pay Freeze But Not For The Met Office.
I’ve got a few questions to ask the Met Office after they paid out more than £1million in bonuses for staff who got their weather predictions right last year.
You’ve got people still guessing if it will rain rather than computers calculating scientifically?
Wasn’t there a public sector pay freeze going on (or did you upgrade your own pay from frozen to mild with scattered sunshine)?
Isn’t getting money for guessing right called winning a bet?
So wouldn’t we be better off shutting you down, asking bookies to give us odds for the weather, spreading our bets and only paying when they guess right?
( Brian Reade, 23.09.2017 )
He said, “Don’t you feel lonely living in your own little world?”
She replied, “Don’t you feel powerless living in other peoples’ worlds?”
Men should be glad that women just want equality and not revenge.
Keeping Them In Control Was Not Difficult.
Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds.
To keep them in control was not difficult.
All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations.
And when they become discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontentment led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.
( George Orwell )
When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character.
This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor.
But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw.
Stigmatise those who let people die, not those who struggle to live.
( Sarah Kendzior )
Quitting As A Tory Peer But Keeping Hold Of The Biggest Perk, The Title.
Andrew Lloyd Webber quit as a Tory peer, saying he couldn’t be bothered to turn up again to vote in the Lords because he’s too busy making money on his cheesy musicals in America.
He jetted in from New York two years ago to vote for a tax credits bill that would have cut the incomes of three million people by an average of £1,300.
He rarely graces us with his presence, though.
Lloyd Webber has less than a 2% attendance record in the Lords, having voted between 30 and 40 times in the past 20 years, and he almost quit the Tory whip last year because he was “fed up that I keep being asked to go in and vote for things about which I don’t have knowledge”.
Which is why he only made one notable speech, about the arts being “strangled” due to the “cult of austerity”.
The implications being that cuts are only evil when they deprive his luvvy projects of grants, but not when they rob working families of a cushion against despair.
Lloyd Webber’s Westminster career once again makes us ponder of these 800 lords, who cost taxpayers £68million a year.
What other job allows you to stay in it for two decades, turn up for work 2% of the time then ditch it when it gets in the way of your money-making projects while keeping hold of the biggest perk – the title?
Reading his resignation letter it seems he can no longer be bothered to fulfil the parliamentary role he pledged to, but likes the idea of him and his wife still being called Baron and Baroness Lloyd Webber of Sydmonton.
Well, it works wonders when you need to impress people.
Especially in America.
I’d have had a lot more respect for Lloyd Webber if he’d simply handed back his title of Lord and written: “Don’t cry for me Upper Chamber, the truth is I never joined you.”
Although such peerless honesty would never catch on.
( Brian Reade, 21.10.2021 )
I don’t like lifestyles that become badges.
Badges of superiority.
Badges that declare others are wrong or stupid.
Only fools and idiots stay loyal to the politicians who are greedy, corrupt, liars and dishonest.
The Things That Separate Us.
That’s all the media and the politicians are ever talking about, the things that separate us.
Things that make us different from one another.
That’s the way the ruling class operates in any society.
They try to divide the rest of the people.
They keep the lower and the middle classes fighting with each other so that they, the rich, can run off with all the fucking money.
( George Carlin, 1937-2008 )
Governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments, and to organised religions as well.
That is why governments and religious organisations seek to control education.
( Jiddu Krishnamurti, 1895-1986 )
The British and American Intelligence along with the Israeli Mossad worked to create the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
A terrorist organisation that is able to attract all extremists of the world to one place, using a strategy called “The Hornet’s Nest”.
It is created to protect the Zionist Entity of Israel by creating it with religious and Islamic slogans.
The only solution to protect the Jewish State is to create ISIS near its borders.
( Edward Snowden )
The Last Bullingdon Boy Standing Is Ready To Claim His Birthright.
Aristotle believed it took a human 40 days after birth to break into its first laugh.
But even a foetus within burping distance of a TV this week would have struggled to contain stomach ructions at the noises coming out of the Tory conference.
The entire week was a metaphor for the confused, comical, shabby, deluded, divided, backward-looking, and ideologically bankrupt state Britain now finds itself in.
Due mostly to a party with an average membership age of 71 who wet themselves at the merest sight of Boris Johnson.
And what a sight.
The last Bullingdon Boy standing is ready to claim his birthright, mowing through his Government’s flimsy Brexit policy like a randy aristocrat through a cellar full of scullery maids.
He’s issuing ultimatums through right-wing newspapers, insulting the wage-capped masses by saying he’s struggling to live on £140,000 a year and cracking jokes about dead bodies in Libya when he’s supposed to be Foreign Secretary.
His new slogan is “Let the lion roar” which really means “Let the liar roam”.
The PM believes she’s clever by not sacking him on the John Major logic that enemies are best kept inside the tent peeing out, rather than outside peeing in.
But Johnson is so pathologically incontinent May is wading in a river of urine, right up to her chain necklace, minus a paddle or a boat.
( Brian Reade, 07.10.2017 )
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
Controlled poverty is what the Tory wants, not the abolition of poverty.
( Nye Bevan, 1897-1960 )
A German Soldier Shot Her Dead.
My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town.
A German soldier shot her dead in her bed.
My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.
The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt from gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians.
( Sir Gerald Kaufman, 1930-2017 )
Capitalism has outlawed its usefulness.
It takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.
( Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929-1968 )
It goes without saying that a civilisation which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.
Land Seized By Force.
Consider how the so-called owners of the land got hold of it.
They simply seized it by force, afterwards hiring lawyers to provide them with title-deeds.
In the case of the enclosure of the common lands, which was going on from about 1600 to 1850, the land-grabbers did not even have the excuse of being foreign conquerors.
They were quite frankly taking the heritage of their own countrymen, upon no sort of pretext except that they had the power to do so.
It is desirable that people should own their own dwelling houses, and it is probably desirable that a farmer should own as much land as he can actually farm.
But the ground-landlord in a town area has no function and no excuse for existence.
He is merely a person who has found out a way of milking the public while giving nothing in return.
He causes rents to be higher, he makes town planning more difficult, and he excludes children from green spaces.
That is literally all that he does, except to draw his income.
( George Orwell, 1903-1950 )
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
( John Maynard Keynes, 1883-1946 )
The war is not meant to be won.
It is meant to be continuous.
( George Orwell, 1903-1950 )
Investment Bankers Using Theresa May’s Taxpayer-Funded Help To Buy Scheme.
The Government’s Help to Buy scheme is subsidising households with six-figure incomes.
More than 5,000 people with earnings of more than £100,000 have reportedly used the taxpayer-funded loan scheme.
Four in ten recipients were on salaries of more than £50,000, while one in ten earned more than £80,000.
PM Theresa May this week pledged another £10billion with deposits of just 5%.
Sam Bowman, of the Adam Smith Institute, said: “This scheme is being used by investment bankers and doctors. It is astonishing that households earning over £100,000 a year are using it.”
( Graham Hiscott, 07.10.2017 )
I would like to see every single soldier on every single side, just take off your helmet, unbuckle your kit, lay down your rifle, and set down at the side of some shady lane, and say, nope, I aint a gonna kill nobody.
Plenty of rich folks want to fight.
Give them the guns.
( Woody Guthrie, 1912-1967 )
In politics, nothing happens by accident.
If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.
( Franklin D. Roosevelt )
She Left Us A £7million Debt When She Popped Off On Her Broomstick.
Dawn French says when she met The Queen Mother as a child she thought she was a witch because of her black teeth. Coincidentally, when I first saw pictures of her my Nana shouted out a word that began with “b” and rhymed with witch, due to her East End publicity stunts during the Blitz when she made out she was suffering with her people while living the life of Reilly.
But I reckon Dawn’s witch analogy is better.
Not only was the Queen Mother often seen with spirits, she cast a spell on the nation making it bestow saintly status on her, despite being a racist snob who left us a £7million debt when she popped off on her broomstick.
Gawd bless your cackle, ma’am.
( Brian Reade, 07.10.2017 )
Privilege is when you think something is not a problem because it’s not a problem to you personally.
Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.
The Highest Rate Of Civilian Gun Ownership In The World.
It beggars belief that after Stephen Paddock’s horrific mass shooting in Las Vegas, President Trump’s response was to say “now is not the time” to talk about gun control legislation.
Some 59 innocent victims are dead and almost 500 are wounded.
So I can’t think of a better time.
The figures couldn’t be clearer.
For every American killed by terrorism in the 10 years up to 2015, another 3,210 were killed by guns.
Some were victims of random crime or domestic violence, others suffered tragic accidents.
But the death toll is less surprising when you consider that the U.S. has the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world.
Yet Trump is much more comfortable whipping up anti-Muslim feeling than taking on his country’s powerful gun lobby.
Maybe someone needs to make the maths even simpler for him: idiots + guns does not equal ban Muslims.
It equals ban guns.
( Saira Khan, 08.10.2017 )
We won’t find a cure for life-threatening diseases until we find a cure for greed and selfishness.
A privileged, entitlement culture lurks at the heart of the Conservative Government.
The Real Cruelty Of These Tories.
The changes to Universal Credit that are causing so much pain and confusion were initiated by former Chancellor George Osborne to save £12billion.
He probably didn’t think that by late 2017 the 55p per-minute helpline would be a problem to poor people looking for advice.
He probably thought that by now everyone would be holding down seven jobs like him and able to afford the £295-a-month subscription to the London gym he shares with David Beckham.
The real cruelty of these Tories, virtually all of whom are raking in outside income, is they cannot comprehend what £5.50 for a 10-minute phone call means to people who have no money.
As in a couple of days food for the kids.
And the truth is they don’t really care.
( Brian Reade, 14.10.2017 )
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