In the wake of the news that two of the nine men arrested during anti-terrorism raids in Birmingham last week have been released, I have secured an exclusive audio clip from the crack MI5 surveillance team that had been intensively monitoring their behaviour for the preceding six months...
edit - well, it looks like the police are actually going to charge some of them with something or other. Hopefully the charges will be more salacious than the usual 'possession of a dodgy video' charge. Maybe the police will be able to come up with one of those star witnesses who's had his bollocks in a vice in Pakistan or Algeria for the last ten months - they're a winner.
Ah well, let's see what the morning will bring. In the meantime, this chap has put together a running list of all our domestic terror plot fit-ups and their outcomes up until August last year, so I really should link to this one as well for completeness.
And no, I am not blithely discounting the possibility of genuinely dangerous domestic Islamic terrorism and, yes, the police do have a very difficult job. However, if there is one thing I'm damned sure of it's that reacting and behaving in exactly the way the terrorists (whoever they may be) want us to serves their purposes not ours.
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11 comments:
good picture
Good movie
www.imdb.com/title/tt0059319/
This stuff is really frightening, one could think the UK is a policestate...
Not yet but we are practicing.
The 'interesting' time will come when the laws and systems that have been introduced to deal with the threat of Islamic terror are applied to other groups of people.
Until that starts to happen the majority of people do not feel personally threatened and consequently they don't care a fuck
I am still undecided whether
- the people in charge of those policestate measures just think they do the right thing (TM) and have been bamboozled by the security industry's and the law enforcement agencies' hunger for funds
= OR =
- the people in charge get a piece of the pie and just don't care what happens to the rest of the people
But I guess one can find both kind of people in top positions. Is there a litmus-test to distinguish between reckless/corrupt and honest/not-so-bright leaders? And what category is your primeminister? I have a feeling about some former/current members of the US or German government, but Tony Blair, I haven't figured him out.
There is, of course, no way to be sure
But does it matter if a leader is wicked or stupid? The results are usually the same
For what it's worth the leaders of our administration in the UK are a mixture of both. Their deceit and corruption has been exposed on numerous occasions but they have also demonstrated their stupidity as well.
My own question is - 'is there a leadership behind the one we see?'
I fear the answer may be yes
Yes, it is an academic question.
I think that the man behind the curtain (the "real one" from that movie) can control the stupid and does not depend having wicked people, but a leadership behind the one we see? I'd imagine this would be difficult without wicked people, people who have some "needs", needs a "secret government" could control.
I ask myself, what makes a person like our former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder tick? He is quite clearly not stupid and has quite clearly moved to the wicked camp. But why, what where his motives, how did this happen? I think when he started his career in politics, he wasn't wicked (but I don't have enough information on this). But what changed him, did he got sucked into it or was it a conscious descision to "cash in"? From what I know, he was already firmly in the wicked camp once he was in charge in Lower-Saxony, which owns a large stake in Volkswagen. Volkswagen seems to be one major contributor to corruption in German politics. Schröder seems to have used services by Volkswagen without having them accounted and it was the German Social-Democrats with Schröder that let Peter Hartz, a HR executive from Volkswagen, change the unemployment benefit system in a way that made labour much cheaper (as in "sold out the people").
So did Schröder "join the club" or did he got sucked in because he wasn't careful? I don't know, but I think it is important if one wants to try to understand it and maybe, just maybe, do something against it.
One more thing I have to think about is the former Communist party of east Germany, which is in power in the German state of Berlin (together with the Social-Democrats) and is doing politics that can be described as slightly neo-liberal, selling off state property. Well, the state of Berlin has a debt problem, but still, why are they selling out so easily? What has happend here? How can this be avoided?
I have started to venture off into politics and I want to make sure that does not happen, not to me and not to the people I want to support. I feel like fighting windmills...
"The 'interesting' time will come when the laws and systems that have been introduced to deal with the threat of Islamic terror are applied to other groups of people."
First they came for the Muslims...
Re Tony and the tanned, face lifted Green Mr S - no doubt by accepting the Chairmannship of the new Russia / German Baltic pipeline and the benefits that might go therewith, he was just undertaking his patriotic duty - leaving Mr Putin and his silovaki with their hand athwart the jugular energey vein of Europe is something for the children to concern themsleves with.
@Tony
It would be easy enough to maintain a system that only promoted people in proportion to their level of personal corruption. Once you've taken your first payment you are trapped and as your influence increases so do the 'benefits'.
Alternatively, maybe you are only allowed to progress once someone has 'something' on you - which might go some way to explaining why such a high proportion of our elected leaders appear to have sexual tastes that leave them vulnerable to blackmail
eg
www.dailykos.com/story/2006/4/4/222122/9072
In the German language there is word called "Seilschaft". In the literal sense, it is a roped party (rope=Seil) climbing together a mountain. But it is used in the political sense as a small group of politicians working together to reach power. Is there anything like this in the English language?
I think this concept plays were well into the "I know what you did" concept.
A good word. I'll try and remember that
I can't think of the British word for that technique. To be honest most of the climbers I knew thought that was a very Italian way to climb and a guaranteed way to lose an entire group in the event of a serious fall
And as for its use in politics, hmmm, again I can't think of a equivalent term...
Freemason?
Only kidding...
Or am I?
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