I started off by putting samples of all of the construction material that I had been using in the attic. And I’ll tell you – the effect is frightening. The plasterboard took the longest to burn but eventually it did. Everything else was gone in minutes.
No wonder there are so many conflagrations in domestic property. There won’t be much left of my place if it sets alight.
But the tidying up is progressing, and it’s looking quite impressive downstairs. Another day or so and it’ll be done. The pallets that formed the old floor in the attic, they will have to be chucked out of the window but I can’t move the broken slates yet. They are destined to be used for the footpaths between the raised beds in the new vegetable garden once make a start on that later this winter.
And once the tidying up is completed it will immediately become untidy again as I demolish the wall between the bedroom and the stairway. All the rubble will be used for making the steps outside up into the house.
Claude came round today for a chat and bought me some news. Someone has had a really good stroke of luck – an exceptional one in fact. It’s bad news for me as it happens but I suppose that if I stopped being selfish and looked at it from other people’s points of view I should really be pleased at their exceptional fortune.
I can’t say any more about it right now as there needs to be something of a proper announcement at the right time by the right people in the right places.
In other news, the public enquiry into the War to Steal Iraq’s Oil has got under way. Many people wonder why I call it that, but don’t take my word for it – take that of Australia’s Defence Minister Brendan Nelson.
But back to the plot. I was particularly impressed with the phrase “that Saddam had a “continuing intention” to acquire weapons of mass destruction, having used them in the past”. We all know by now that Saddam Hussein had Bacillus Anthracis, Clostridium Botulinum, Clostridium Perfringens, E coli, Histoplasma Capsulatum and Brucella Melitensis, and that he used them on Iranian soldiers during the Iran-Iraq war. And how do we know this? Because the USA sold them to him and then gave him the satellite photos of Iranian troop movements so that he knew where to aim the chemical weapons.
The other bit that drew my specific attention was that “the sanctions policy in place against Iraq since 1991 …was steadily breaking down”. Here’s one reason why it was breaking down. And here’s another one. And there are plenty more where those came from. No wonder the wheels fell off the sanctions policy when Western companies put greed before ethics and legality.
Another Western company implicated in the breach of sanctions was Matrix-Churchill. They were one of the companies, by the way, that were named and shamed by Michael Moore as having supplied chemical weapons to Iraq. And would their “breach of sanctions” have anything to do with Saddam’s “continuing intention to acquire weapons of mass destruction”? During the company’s trial in a British court for its alleged breach of sanctions, the directors of the company claimed that their breaches of sanctions had been guided by the British Intelligence (there’s an oxymoron) Services and the British Ministry of Defence.
This startling revelation so clearly shocked the Court that the British Minister for Trade, Alan Clark was summoned to give evidence and under oath he was obliged to admit that he had been “economical with the truth” in an earlier statement denying all knowledge of the affair. Of course, the trial collapsed and the directors were awarded compensation.
This entire Iraq affair stinks to high heaven.
Western foreign policy and the arms trade, the uses to which third world aid is put and the lack of checks and controls on it stink to high heaven. The CIA and the games it plays with supporting, arming and training terrorist organisations within other nations one minute and then the governments another also stinks! If they shut up shop at least half the long running conflicts in the world would end within a few years due to lack of funding. We talk about terrorist states but the USA, especially under GWB, is the worst of the lot. (Some of the countries of the EU aren’t far behind either!).
Yes, but you need to have an enemy in order to frighten your population into submission. And when you don’t have one, you have no recourse other than to invent one.
Iraq anyone? Even more than their oil, it was GWBs way to keep control of a population scared stiff by 9/11. Afghanistan didn’t work to calm to Americans because there was no conclusion to it. Al Quaeda didn’t go away. So he picked another target, and Iraq was at the top of the list because it was unfinished business from his father’s day. He had opposed them backing away from regime change then. Then when they didn’t find WMD and his idea of planting some was vetoed, he’d have picked another country to attack if his general staff hadn’t told him the military was overextended fighting two wars and that it would be madness to open a third front.
How about hiking up the tension on Iran ready for the next scenario?
…and then there’s North Korea, China, Syria and Russia too if nobody fancies Iran. Create a beleaguered bunker mentality and the populace will let you steal rights and freedoms if it means ‘greater security’.
Who said “Of course the ordinary people don’t want war. But all you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country”.
Answer is “Herman Goering”. Yes, much as the west denounced the Nazis, they didn’t denounce them so much that they refuse to steal Nazi ideology.
They just rebrand it as patriotism.