Friday, August 29, 2014

The Role of Lobbyists and Paid Liars in Modern Britain

False information has a  high commercial value. We may think of tobacco lobbyists and their corrupt scientists who bamboozled the American Senate and Congress with false information upon the toxicity of tobacco for decades from 1950-2000. But the ‘false Information Industry’ (putting aside the advertising industry for now) is growing in power and influence.
I have watched the progress of two such lobbying groups within the Westminster Parliament of London, and also the Plenary Sessions of the European Parliament on its monthly sojourn in Strasbourg, France.  The first in the British Chemical Industries Association (unfortunately named the ‘CIA’) and the Anti Vivisection Group concerning minimising and curtailing experiments on animals. The CIA had access to sympathetic politicians with the intention of delaying and diluting new legislation upon such things as the tougher safety rules on the transporting and the use of harmful chemicals in domestic usage. The Anti-Vivisectionists took their love of animals and birds to the level that they were reluctant to believe in the efficacy of all experiments, and had good evidence that experiments upon animals, which usually resulted in the death of the animal, were unnecessarily widespread, and unregulated. A case in point was a Cambridge experiment of destroying the hearing of chaffinches in exploring the evolution of birdsong. To be fair to the CIA, the organisation is well aware of the dangers of manipulating public opinion, and have seen the discrediting of public performers in the Oil, Banking and Nuclear industries, who have suffered by means of a ‘Lie Too Far’. And so the CIA tries to blend its lobbying with practical improvements to its own industry.

Of great concern in the growth of lobbying in the British Parliament. It is an industry worth billions, and of such reach and influence that it now has a large influence on legislation, primarily against the public interest. Lobbying has enormously help develop the Tax-Fraud Industry, the Political Bribery Industry, the Property Speculation and Capital Gains Tax-Avoidance Industry,  and to the general impoverishment of the working British public, most of whom are poorer now than their parents forty years ago.
Occasionally, and when news of the excesses of lobbyists’ power come to light, the government of the day will announce a ‘crackdown’ upon lobbying, such as demanding a ‘Registry of Lobbyists’, but such hollow intentions usually results in the further empowerment of lobbyists, who are great contributors to Political Campaign Funds!

Paid Liars in Action

To be seen outside many and African or Asian courtroom was  of bench of paid liars, or ‘witnesses’. For a small fee and a little briefing, they will appear before the judge on your behalf, quite animated and articulate, to swear over their mother’s grave that they were with you the night of the murder/rape/robbery, and would swear that you took no part in it. They were alibi-providers. Because they had been doing it for years they had become quite plausible actors; moving the court from tears to laughter; full of surprising bits of circumstantial detail; endlessly persuasive, and well able to split a jury from the judge to land a ‘not-guilty’ verdict.
Today, a similar group of Information-Managers, or Paid Liars have emerged in the media to baffle the public and to dissuade them from their worthy observations.

Case History – Paid Liars in Action.


By Jake Wallis Simons. Daily Telegraph
10:00PM BST 15 Jul 2014
Immigration is an issue that affects every one of us. Right? There are now 7.9 million immigrants living in Britain, which amounts to roughly one person in seven outside of London, and as many as one in three in the capital. Which should have provided fertile material for a two-part programme in which five British-born people from Essex were introduced to five immigrants, and called upon to conclude whether they were a “drain or gain”.
Such was the premise of Nick and Margaret: Too Many Immigrants?(BBC One, Tuesday), presented by The Apprentice’s Nick Hewer and Margaret Mountford who spent more time talking to each other than talking to the camera. Which was odd.
Anyway, this was a lavishly un-scientific take on the immigration debate, highly watchable in its own way. But it suffered from a fatal flaw….




                                          Paid Liar Margaret Mountford



                                             Paid Liar Nick Hewer

How Paid Liars Distort the Facts

Background
Back in the nineteen eighties, and as a way of combatting Globalisation, the Conservative governments of the Western world conceived a plan of lowering the incomes of the lowest paid so that manufacturing could compete with the cheap labour becoming available in Bangla-Desh (clothing) China (Electronics and car-parts) and India (Call Centre Services) Part of the plan was to allow mass immigration from poor countries into the UK, who were attracted by a little-known system of disproportionate ‘Income to Buying-Power’.
Those who support mass immigration often express surprise why immigrants are so willing to work long hours for low incomes. They truly do not understand ‘Income to Buying-Power’.
Immigrants coming to realise that they can earn six to ten times more than their native income immediately find that they can buy houses back in their own country with a few months of work.
An Example…
In 1969, as a student, this author found that he and his girlfriend could work jointly in California for £5 and hour, while the average UK income was £15 a week. We worked during our long student vacation for three years and bought a house in the UK for cash, $2,750.  That is why immigrants are willing to work for minimum wage, £6.30 severely undercutting a Living Wage of £12 an hour demanded by British youngsters. 
………………………..

Although the criminal immigrants are certainly a minority, they are a sizeable and persistent minority causing disproportionate problems for the native population.
The television documentary presented by these two Paid Liars used many of the devices used by totalitarian governments through the media age to present a distorted reality to the public. In general, it is highly selective in the type of witness; it attacks false positions (often called ‘Straw-Dog’ arguments), it presents palpably false information and atypical witnesses. There are possibly as many as one hundred deliberate pieces of trickery contained in the two hours of documentary, and I shall highlight some of them.

The witnesses who had reservations about mass immigration were produced from a long and misleading selection processes that may have considered thousands of people, but selected only a handful who are entirely unrepresentative of their group. They had weak and unthought objections to mass immigration; few facts, and largely unreasonable arguments. For example an elderly couple from Ilford, London, objected to the strange vegetables now to be seen in ‘ethnic’ greengrocers; vegetables which are readily, and pleasingly,  absorbed into the British diet.

There were no witnesses who were victims of gang-crime, such a rape, credit-card scams, theft from cars, pick-pocketing, street-violence, shop-lifting, anti-social behaviour such as defecating in the street, night-time noise, piles of rubbish left in other people’s gardens, theft of goods and services, and so forth. Nor was there any mention of the large number of immigrants serving jail-time, nor of widespread criminal activity such as embezzlement, bribery of officials, or demanding bribes as officials,   benefit fraud, gang-sex with underage British girls by introducing them to drink and drugs, the trafficking of prostitutes, or threats and intimidation of fellow immigrants.
There was no mention that governments all over the world have been helping persistent criminals of their country to move to the UK. The jails of the world have been emptied into the UK.

A Popular Newspaper View of Mass Immigration into the UK.
This view is  consistent with  widespread public opinion.


Curb EU benefit tourism, Whitehall told: Report finds growing concern among Britons about access to the welfare state by migrants

·         Report, due for release earlier this year, was delayed by Liberal Democrats
·         It found evidence of growing public opposition to mass EU migration
·         Academics cited call for cap on numbers allowed in each year
·          
PUBLISHED: 23:08 GMT, 21 July 2014 | UPDATED: 23:14 GMT, 21 July 2014

A major overhaul is needed to curb  migrants’ access to British benefits, a Government review has concluded.
The report finds growing concern among Britons about access to the welfare state by the hundreds of thousands of arrivals from Europe taking advantage of EU free movement rules.  

  
If the system is not urgently reformed it could ‘significantly undermine’ public support for freedom of movement, it concludes.

Unemployed people at a Jobcentre Plus: A report says the public wants curbs on migrants' access to benefits
The report, published today, cites clear evidence that EU migration has put pressure on public services such as the NHS and schools.
And it concludes that EU court rulings have allowed an explosion in illegal activity such as fake passports and sham marriages by non-EU migrants trying to live and work in Britain.
The report, which is based on submissions from businesses, interest groups and members of the public, was due to be published earlier this year. But a Whitehall source said senior Lib Dems blocked its release because they feared it was too critical of the EU……….
…………………………………………………………….

Asian Men Sexually Abusing Vulnerable White Girls

Well over 1000 Asian men have been interviewed and about 100 so far convicted of sexually abusing underage girls. These predominately Asian (Pakistani) gangs are studiously excluded when Paid Liars consider questions of the impact of Asian communities upon native populations.

The Rochdale Gang.  

Asian grooming gang detectives hunt for FORTY more men who may have had sex with underage girls
·         Judge says gang preyed on five girls, aged between 13 and 15, partly because they were from different 'community and religion'
·         Nine men jailed for a total of 77 years as police prepare to arrest four more
·         Judge Gerald Clifton dismisses defendants' claims that prosecution was 'triggered by race' after ringleader brands him a 'racist b******'
·         But legal counsel for one of the convicted men says he will launch an appeal on the basis of a tweet by BNP leader Nick Griffin
·         Opportunity to catch the paedophiles missed after complaint four years ago
·         As many as 47 vulnerable girls were plied with alcohol, gifts and money
·         They were then passed around for sex with 'several men a day'
·         At least one victim forced to have sex with 20 men in one night, police say
·         Convicted men will be scattered in prisons across the UK and segregated from other prisoners over fears of revenge attacks
·         Former Labour MP Ann Cryer says gang were left to it because police feared being branded racist
·         Muslim leader warns that some British Pakistani men 'think that white teenage girls are worthless and can be abused without a second thought'




Why Do Paid Liars Try to Influence Public Opinion?

The mass immigration of seven and a half million people into the UK has seriously depressed incomes of the poorest half of British workers, while, at the same time, causing hyper-inflation of property prices. Those who benefit from such changes tend to distort the benefits of mass immigration while concealing their own hidden financial interests. 



Monday, August 25, 2014

How to Deal With The Islamic State 25/08/2014


·         Catherine Taylor on IS      (Oxford Professor of Neuroscience)
“….Once you think of the enemy as human, strategies for dealing with him open up. They involve a lot of effort, some of it painful and much of it counter-intuitive. But they have two great advantages over blitzing him, his neighbours and his kids. (Or demonising him, which makes the blitzing more probable – whatever the government says about "no boots on the ground".) These strategies are a lot less striking, from a media perspective, and they make our leaders look much less aggressively heroic; but they reduce the risk of British soldiers dying. And, unlike aggressive heroism, they might reduce the risk to civilians too……”  
Neurotaylor Blog
George Rumens Writes…
The essay is fresh, and a welcome opening-up of the discussion on how we should regard The Islamic State, and how to prepare a suitable response, and a strategy. The strategy is NOT to oppose IS but to neutralise it with sustained and intelligent diplomacy. It can be done, but only in full cognisance of the principles of ‘Conflict Resolution’ I have some experience of this since I spent years on the front line of recent wars, writing about it and gathering film and photos. Here’s how I am remembered from the First Gulf War of 1991…

“In Amman (Jordan)  large Press Conference had been arranged for us. I was to talk to the US Gulf Peace Team participants, but I felt at a loss for words. I asked George Rumens, a British Journalist and a member of our team. “Tell them…” he said, “…that when the war fever and hysteria subside,  we believe that the lasting and more appropriate responses to this war will be felt throughout the world; deepest remorse and regret for the suffering we have caused.””

(‘Iraq Under Siege; The Deadly Impact of Sanctions in War’  –Edited by Anthony Arnove)

I was right twenty three years ago, and I may be right with IS.

Neurotaylor makes a powerful point in suggesting that we forgo the anger and the desire for revenge, and try to understand the IS Group as people. They are new to their situation, and borne-aloft by a great passion stemming from a massive sense of injustice, and by the euphoria of seeming to capture, torture and kill supposed enemies.

All conflict resolution seems to start with the unlikely premise that we are faced, not with a cunning and scheming enemy, but with a ‘toddler-tantrum’. They, the group,  really do not know what they are doing, or what they should do next. Look at the weakly thought-out claims; that they will shortly conquer Rome, and that they will storm America, kill most of the 370 million population, and convert the rest to Islam. And that is the ideal point to step-in, and to begin to talk. While they are still so very triumphant. Before a group identity and group ideology has hardened.

Marshall Rosenburg’s ‘Non-Violent Communication Seminars’ lectured for years upon the importance of going and listening to your supposed enemy. When you go, not to argue, but to listen, then something unexpected happens. For the first time you begin to suspect that there is some strange logic to their behaviour. It doesn’t make mass-murder acceptable, but it does make it understandable. You hear their deep anguish, and the violent threats created by that anguish, perhaps for the first time. And see what happens to them? For the very first time, they begin to feel that they have been heard, and there are some people they would normally dismiss as enemies, who are prepared to listen, uncritically, to their hopes and dreams.

This kind of diplomacy is  hard road. It involves taking frequent insults and many threats. And so the secret is persistence. It is not a blind persistence but one aimed towards a goal. The goal of all that persistent listening is to draw the renegade movement back into the fold. They know, without us having to spell it out, that what they do by way of ditches full of corpses, and spectacular beheadings, is wrong. They know that it is against the Koran, and against the basic decency within their maturing minds. And one thing they would like to hear above all other, is a reasonable voice.


I once met a young Arab man in his thirties, in an Islamic Safe-House, in West Africa. He told me that he had been a killer in the Beirut wars of the eighties, and that he had killed many enemies. But that now he had come to realise that he was swept-along with the euphoria of those times, and by the seeming demands of Islam. But now he realised that he had done wrong, killed many people, and could never go back. And so we best look to the healing powers of association and not the dividing power of military aggression. 

Secrets of the Russian Aid Convoys to Ukraine 25/08/201



Secrets of the Russian Aid Convoys to Ukraine           25/08/2014

Russian Convoy


The Russian 'Aid' convoys of up to 300 near- empty trucks crossing from Russia in Ukraine have puzzled many. Why would Russia waste so much money carrying sleeping-bags and bottled water into Ukraine? It is best explained by an old story. 

The old story about the border between Vietnam and Laos goes as follows. The border crossing is guarded by Customs who raise taxes on almost anything crossing that border. A familiar and frequent crosser was an old man on a bicycle who had with him a bag of sandwiches in the front basket. Often the Customs officials searched him, but they could find nothing taxable. Day after day and year after year he would cross the border around midday. The officials gave-up on him. After his day of retirement, they confronted him and asked him why he made that journey everyday for years, but carrying nothing. And so they asked, "What were you smuggling?" 
"Bicycles!"

It would be an intelligent guess that the Russians are using convoys to bring separatist Ukrainian fighters back and forth, disguised as drivers. About three hundred would go to Russia to be trained in the latest arms and equipment, while 300 would come back into Ukraine ready to take-down the elected government so to make Ukraine a satellite of Russia. 

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Why Do Our Leaders Disappoint ?                   23/08/2014


Attorney general Dominic Grieve

The minimum we ask of our leaders is that they should be intelligent, and fee from odious beliefs that could harm us. Too much of a hope. Our top Law Officer is a Christian, and by asking for special treatment of all those sharing his crackpot beliefs, he is promulgating them. Compare his Christian beliefs with other, equally bizarre convictions such as astrology, flying saucers, the harmful effects of witches, the medical efficacy of dried toad, the importance of magic, and the awful warnings of comets. As much as we work to distance ourselves from the nasty past, so powerful people work to keep the whole fantasy train in operation.

There are supposedly eighteen unelected bishops in the House of Lords, - and that in a population wherein 1.7% attend a Christian church of a Sunday. I would suggested that it is an over-loaded bias against intellectuality and for super-natural fantasy. It cannot be a good thing that every piece of legislation to further the interests of our citizens should run the gauntlet of recognisable crackpots who have an historic power to shape the laws to further their head-banger convictions.

Grieve suggests that Christians are being side lined in society and cowed into silence by ‘aggressive secularism’. In other words the Christian mob who led us through painful centuries of misery are under criticism for their crimes, by their victims.
Religion; all religions, are evil. They serve to cow and belittle the population, telling children that they are full of inherent sin, and proposing a wholly false explanation for the universe, its origins, its processes and its contents. It is not as if religion has any redeeming features; it has none. It is surprisingly free of almost any possible good. But there is one; one uniquely useful quality. When our aged and religious grandmamma is upon her deathbed, and asks for reassurance that she will go to heaven to be reunited with all her kin, one is allowed to lie, and to promise her so. That’s it. Religion’s only redeeming feature.  All the rest serves to unite religious people together such that they can recognise and act against their supposed enemies; gays, women who have abortions, liberals, scientists, geologists, educated people everywhere, multi-culturalists, atheists, democrats, young people, and those of alternative religions. And religion conducts its evil machinations with a sweet smile and a false bonhomie.

" Religion doesn't have to be violent to be 'bad'. It can be, and often is, mysogynistic, homophobic, power-hungry, hypocritical, thought-suppressing, intollerant, illiberal, mean-spirited, puritanical, anti-science, obscuratist, patriachal, and misery-inducing, all the while remaining comitted to purely peaceful forms of expression"
 - Anonymous Letter in Giles Frazer’s Column in The Guardian 22/8/2014


And so those of us who love science, and light, and intellectuality, have to continue our efforts to reduce the impact of evil cults on our legislative system. 
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