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What you want to say – 30th November 2016 November 30, 2016

Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.
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As always, following on Dr. X’s suggestion, it’s all yours, “announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose”, feel free.

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1. Joe - November 30, 2016

I see the Blades are playing the Academy, I think it’s 17th December.

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2. Gewerkschaftler - November 30, 2016

The unelected and therefore democratically illegitimate European Commission wants member states to spend more money on the military.

To that end they want to agree a collective ‘defence fund’ in December at an EU summit. But member states will decide how much money they want to contribute.

It won’t be in competition with NATO though. Oh no.

My bet is that further militarisation of Fortress Europe will result.

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3. Joe - November 30, 2016

EPA report encourages Minister Naughten to say that fracking is off the agenda here in Ireland for the foreseeable future…

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GW - December 5, 2016

Really? That’s it for fracking?

What about the north?

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4. Joe - November 30, 2016

Just came across this great piece about an English WW1 veteran and hero of the Irish working class. On the Bogman’s Cannon via Come Here to Me via Facebook. Who say’s the internet’s good for nothing!

https://bogmanscannon.com/2016/10/05/the-curious-case-of-the-corpo-employee–who-worked-himself-to-death/

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5. CL - November 30, 2016

Trump picks vulture for cabinet position; Wilbur Ross to be Commerce Secretary.

“Wilbur Ross, has an incredible track record as a “vulture capitalist”, meaning he buys businesses and investments that are in trouble, turns them around and makes millions each time he performs his magic.”
http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/393144-the-investment-contrarian/24511-forget-buffett-wilbur-ross-is-the-man-you-want-to-invest-with

‘U.S. billionaire Wilbur Ross sold his entire shareholding in Bank of Ireland for almost half a billion euros on Tuesday, to almost triple the value of a shrewd investment made at the height of the euro zone crisis.’
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-bank-of-ireland-ross-idUSKBN0EK1PH20140610

“a Manhattan billionaire who owned a West Virginia coal mine where 12 workers died in 2006….
In 2012, Ross, clad in purple velvet slippers, took the stage at a black-tie induction ceremony for the secretive Wall Street fraternity Kappa Beta Phi and sang show tunes mocking poor people,”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-wilbur-ross_us_582b4c04e4b01d8a014abacb

‘Ross said afterward that he knew about the safety violations’
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/trump-taps-billionaire-investor-ross-commerce-secretary-43755738

Michael Noonan now has a friend in the White House,-a predator who profits from the capitalized blood of murdered miners.

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Alibaba - November 30, 2016

As ever, more on predators. ‘Frightened by Donald Trump? You don’t know the half of it’. So says Monbiot:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/30/donald-trump-george-monbiot-misinformation

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6. dublinstreams - November 30, 2016

how do you get a politician to say what party he is in? Tommy Broughan keeps telling reporters he is Independent but he won’t tell me when he left the Independents 4 change party

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7. CL - December 1, 2016

“The movement, which now calls itself the Fight for 15, is demanding a minimum wage of at least $15 as well as the right to unionize. And Tuesday’s day of action proved just how massive it has now become. Strikes and protests weren’t limited to New York City — they reached 340 cities.”
https://thinkprogress.org/fight-for-15-four-years-e3f47b01ba71#.8klbf0d7g

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CMK - December 1, 2016

Sanders was fully behind this, if my memory is correct, and that probably accounted for much of his momentum. Trump’s cabinet of ghouls are determined, ideological, opponents of decent wages for workers and now they have the full repressive apparatus of the capitalist state at their disposal to stop the Fight for 15. The fate of this campaign will tell us much about the political lay of the land during Trump’s presidency.

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CL - December 1, 2016

The danger of Trump’s surreal spectacle:

‘The president-elect is speaking the language of dictators….
By attacking the very notion of shared reality, the president-elect is making normal democratic politics impossible…
For the next four years, Donald Trump will seek to shred any institution that threatens his ability to unilaterally determine what is real…
if he succeeds, then the … logic of democratic discourse will have been wholly replaced with the surreal anti-logic of nightmares.”
https://thinkprogress.org/when-everything-is-a-lie-power-is-the-only-truth-1e641751d150#.16x13yyfk

And how to resist:

http://qz.com/846940/a-yale-history-professors-20-point-guide-to-defending-democracy-under-a-trump-presidency/

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CL - December 1, 2016

“More than 2,000 U.S. military veterans plan to form a human shield to protect protesters of a pipeline project near a Native American reservation in North Dakota, organizers said, just ahead of a federal deadline for activists to leave the camp they have been occupying.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/north-dakota-backs-away-checking-cars-headed-pipeline-173642425–finance.html

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CL - December 4, 2016

“Protesters at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation have successfully beat back the Dakota Access Pipeline, which will no longer be built across the sacred land, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced Sunday….
The news came after thousands of veterans poured into the Standing Rock Sioux reservation this past weekend to stand in solidarity alongside the Dakota Access pipeline protesters.”
nypost.com/2016/12/04/army-corps-of-engineers-wont-grant-easement-for-dakota-access-pipeline/

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CL - December 4, 2016

‘Veterans Stand for Standing Rock’s GoFundMe.com page had raised more than $1 million of its $1.2 million goal by Sunday — money due to go toward food, transportation and supplies. Cars waiting to get into the camp Sunday afternoon were backed up for more than a half-mile.’
http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/national-international/Dakota-Access-Pipeline-Denied-near-sioux-reservation-404636436.html

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CL - December 5, 2016

“But the celebrations may be short-lived, as Trump seems likely to reverse the Army Corps and approve the easement for the lake crossing….

Trump has been an investor in Energy Transfer Partners, the project’s developer, and his May financial disclosure said he has investments with Phillips 66, which owns a quarter of the pipe.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/us-army-corps-blocks-dakota-access-pipeline-232172

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8. yourcousin - December 1, 2016
Gewerkschaftler - December 1, 2016

Thank for that YC.

Anton Neshek was killed with him by Sultan Erdogan’s warplanes – the fourth German volunteer to die fighting with the YPG in Rojava.

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Gewerkschaftler - December 1, 2016

The ambiguity of prepositions:

with = alongside

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9. Michael Carley - December 1, 2016

Found at random, but interesting:

Many years before he became the nearest thing to a British Mussolini in the 1930s, Oswald Mosley achieved political prominence as a parliamentary critic of Lloyd George’s campaign to use the Black and Tans to crush the IRA. Late in 1920, as a twenty-four-year-old Conservative MP, he was a believer in the League of Nations and condemned the Amritsar massacre in India as ‘Prussian frightfulness inspired by racism’. In his memoir, My Life, published in 1968, Mosley recalled that the war in Ireland had ‘evoked intense moral feeling’. With each atrocity committed by the Black and Tans he felt ‘that the name of Britain was being disgraced, every rule of good soldierly conduct disregarded, and every decent instinct of humanity outraged’. Mosley was one of a small handful of MPs who pursued Lloyd George and his blustering secretary for Ireland, Sir Hamar Greenwood, over the unacknowledged policy of reprisals.

Mosley’s speeches and questions, preserved in the columns of Hansard, are fluent, precise and lucid: reading them evokes the pleasure of observing a clever barrister at work in a trial. At the time he betrayed no sympathy for the IRA. In one of his early contributions he accepted that ‘in the present state of Ireland one certainly cannot deny the right to shoot a man who, when challenged, refuses to hold up his hands. Anything of that sort is perfectly legitimate.’ And after the Bloody Sunday massacres Mosley told the Commons that law-abiding people in Ireland were being intimidated by ‘a small gang of desperate men’, or, as he put it shortly afterwards, ‘the murder gang of Sinn Féin’. The root of Mosley’s case against the Black and Tans was that their behaviour undermined the superiority of British imperial rule. ‘No Empire, no Government, has been long sustained except by the power of moral force,’ he told the House of Commons after Bloody Sunday. ‘Our Empire stands alone, from the Imperial ruins of history, in its recognition of and obedience to this fundamental law. It is because I am a passionate believer in the destiny and in the yet unfulfilled mission of British Empire, that I am unwilling to sacrifice the inviolate tradition of the ages even to satisfy the transient purpose of this gambler’s expedient …’

https://thedublinreview.com/article/mosley-in-ireland/

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Ed - December 1, 2016

Enoch Powell made a similar case against the shoot-to-kill policy in Ireland a couple of generations later. There’s a BBC documentary from the late 80s (John Ware I think) where he’s one of the main interviewees criticizing the SAS and the Thatcher government, along with Seamus Mallon and Cathal Daly.

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Gewerkschaftler - December 2, 2016

People on the fascist spectrum can be surprisingly heterodox while adhering the lowest common denominators of the breed.

Umberto Eco’s piece on Ur-Fascism is well worth a read in this respect.

It was written in more postmodernist insouciance was still a thing, but this is remarkably prescient:

Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view—one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.

My italics.

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Gewerkschaftler - December 2, 2016

written in more -> written in a time when

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10. CL - December 2, 2016

Hollande announces he won’t run.

Sans dents rejoice, supporters of Say’s Law dismayed.

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botheredbarney - December 2, 2016

Looks like Francois Fillon will be elected to the Elysee next May.

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Alibaba - December 2, 2016

It looks like a choice between the French Thatcherite right (Fillon) and the far right (Le Pen). To be honest, I couldn’t call it myself. But here comes another presidential candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon, an experienced politician who is supposed to be to the left of the Socialist Party. This is the same person who recently damned EU workers for “stealing jobs from French workers”. Makes me cringe.

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11. Gewerkschaftler - December 2, 2016

🙂 As someone missing four with three more on their way out, I say good riddance.

The worst former social-democrat of the last four years in Europe. And that’s a very low bar.

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CL - December 2, 2016
12. Jim Monaghan - December 2, 2016

Print Room Dublin Castle, 12 Dec. Lectures all day. !916. Yeates on prisoners in 1916 etc. start 11-00 am. Don’t know how to upload further details.

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13. irishelectionliterature - December 2, 2016
Gerryboy - December 2, 2016

Have the chip vans arrived in the neighbourhood yet?

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Joe - December 2, 2016

Tawdy, where are you? We need the local CLR correspondent to give us the lowdown.

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Gewerkschaftler - December 5, 2016

I can appreciate why the Holy Mother has such a grá for Limerick.

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14. Tomboktu - December 3, 2016

<nerd_alert>
The European Committee of Social Rights is the quasi-judicial body that oversees compliance with the European Social Charter (which is the less famous counterpart to the European Convention on Human Rights). It consists of 15 independent individuals who are experts in economic, social, cultural human rights, and they are elected by the 43 member states of the Council of Europe that have ratified the Charter.

A rotation of membership occurs this year, and five outgoing members either retired (because they had served two terms) or needed to be re-elected. (The electors, in secret ballot, are the ambassadors to the Council of Europe from the member countries.)

This election (and the series of others that preceded it in recent years) has resulted in a committee with only one non-EU member on it (and she is Norwegian, so definitely western European).

There is no representative from the west Balkans (Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania, etc.), eastern Europe (Moldova, Ukraine, Russia), the ‘caucasus’ states (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia) or Turkey. A reasonable distribution across the 43 states would have seen four or five members elected from those countries.

This isn’t good for securing acceptance of economic, social and cultural rights as central to human rights across the Council of Europe.
</nerd_alert>

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15. RosencrantzisDead - December 5, 2016

Matteo Renzi has resigned and the Italian Constitutional looks set to return a ‘No’.

2016 has not been kind to centrists.

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RosencrantzisDead - December 5, 2016

Italian Constitutional Referendum*

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CL - December 5, 2016

‘The euro fell sharply against the dollar after Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi suffered a heavy defeat in Sunday’s referendum.’
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38203813

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GW - December 6, 2016

And then it bounced back again.

‘The market’ seems to have this ritual blip during which they insiders make money and the pension funds loose it.

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16. CL - December 5, 2016

Ben Carson nominated to be secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

““There are reasonable ways to use housing policy to enhance the opportunities available to lower-income citizens, but based on the history of failed socialist experiments in this country, entrusting the government to get it right can prove downright dangerous.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/28/ben-carson-trump-s-hud-pick-once-called-fair-housing-communism.html

“Later in the interview, Carson said he personally believed Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was encouraged by the devil.

As Charles Pierce wrote in Esquire: “What in the name of Edwin Hubble is this man talking about? Why is this man allowed out in public without a handler?”

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/ben-carsons-follies-7-most-stupefying-statements-gops-favorite-neurosurgeon

‘Carson told the graduates of Andrews University in Michigan that it is his “personal” belief that the pyramids were built as storehouses for grain and not, as archaeologists say, for the interment of dead pharaohs.’
http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/05/politics/ben-carson-pyramids-grain/

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WorldbyStorm - December 5, 2016

A government of all the talents.

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17. sonofstan - December 5, 2016

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/dec/05/amber-rudd-says-eu-nationals-in-post-brexit-uk-will-need-form-of-id

but it’s alright, it doesn’t include us. One thing I noticed this morning, though I think it’s always been thus; every other EU country has one EU passport queue and one non-EU queue. In Britain the first queue is ‘UK/EU’

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Michael Carley - December 5, 2016

There are UK passports which are not EU passports (Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, for example).

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sonofstan - December 6, 2016

Ah yes. Fair point.

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sonofstan - December 6, 2016

Although the IoM and the Channel Islands aren’t in the UK either but are protectorates or crown possessions. And their passports are ‘British’ rather than ‘UK’

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Michael Carley - December 6, 2016

You are indeed correct on the distinction. Other interesting thing from the wikipedia page:

British passports issued by the Jersey Government will have an endorsement included to the following effect:
“ holder is not entitled to benefit from European Community Provisions relating to employment or establishment ”

Although British citizens who have only a connection to Jersey are European Union citizens (an EU citizen being defined by the Treaty of Maastricht as a person holding the nationality of a Member State), they do not have EU Freedom of Movement Rights.

However, if British citizens connected to Jersey also have a connection to the United Kingdom (e.g. they have lived in the UK for five years, were born in the UK, or have parents or grandparents born in the UK), their passports will not include such an endorsement and they will be fully eligible to benefit from European Union Freedom of Movement rights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey_passport

so there is a means of giving people rights in the UK without giving them rights in the EU, and presumably v.v. Could that be one way of dealing with Ireland after Brexit: treat it like a very big Jersey?

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sonofstan - December 6, 2016

We could pull on the very big (Green) Jersey, you mean?

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Michael Carley - December 6, 2016

Or (Isle of) Man up?

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sonofstan - December 6, 2016

While pursuing this issue ad absurdam, I came upon this amusing exchange on Tripadvisor 🙂

https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowTopic-g186227-i488-k6379847-Need_passport_for_Channel_Islands-Channel_Islands.html

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Joe - December 6, 2016

Saw a thing on the BBC NI news a while back. Garda boarding a bus coming from the north and asking people for passports. A bunch of eastern European lads were on the bus and I think they were detained here (or at least delayed) in the RoI cos they had no identification. They were working in some factory in Armagh or Down and the factory owner was on the news complaining about it.
Then I recently met a woman from Fermanagh, living in Belfast, who came down to Dublin for a sort of arts workshop I was attending. Same thing happened to her. She told them she had no i.d. and they let her carry on. She reckoned it was her accent got her through. As a Fermanagh nationalist, let’s say she was not impressed.
So don’t worry about the homeland security or whatever it’s called in the UK, we’re well up there with the xenophobic border patrols in the good old RoI.

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sonofstan - December 6, 2016

Saw notices in Copenhagen airport yesterday alerting intending passengers to Malmö by train that the Swedes would be checking ID before you got on the train; I.e. In Denmark.

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Aonrud ⚘ - December 6, 2016

They used to stop the bus all the time, but it hasn’t happened to me in a year or so now. I never tended to have much to offer them ID-wise, but the accent and a picture-less card seemed enough. They’d often ask a couple of people to step off the bus – always depressing when someone didn’t get back on.

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GW - December 6, 2016

Related: when is Schengen not really Schengen?

When you go from Poland to Germany (both, like Italy, nation states less to two centuries old BTW) you are crossing a border inside the Schengen Area, at which, at least theoretically, no passport needs to be shown.

However recently the German police check identities (on trains at least) after one crosses that border. I pointed out the fact that I’d just travelled from one Schengen state to another to the policepersons checking my identity.

Apparently it’s not a border check, oh no, it’s a ‘routine identity check’. Which just happens to take place after you cross the border.

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GW - December 6, 2016

Before anyone starts on Poland being older – that was the ‘Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’. The Kingdom of Poland, as it was then is now 100 years old.

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Michael Carley - December 6, 2016

I saw one of those on a train between Lille and Bruges once. Oddly enough the darkest-skinned person in the carriage got the most attention.

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GW - December 6, 2016

To be fair they were completely neutral about it – regardless of skin colour or other detectable furriner-ness. And they let me off for not having my passport with me.

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18. Starkadder - December 6, 2016

It seems the Adult Swim network in the US have cancelled
the planned comedy “Million Dollar Extreme”. One of the show’s
creators, Sam Hyde, reported has strong ties to the alt-right movement:

http://www.avclub.com/article/adult-swim-cancels-alt-right-sketch-show-million-d-246917

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19. CMK - December 6, 2016

We have a good idea what will fill the Sindo this coming weekend. I’m sure ex-Senator Harass will have written a 2000 word column in 30 minutes in outrage at what has happened to his fellow employees of INM? Or maybe it is all the public sector’s fault?

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/pension-cut-at-independent-a-new-low-in-corporate-behaviour-1.2893832

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crocodileshoes - December 6, 2016

Any chance, you’d wonder, that journalists as a group would stop recycling, weekly, their article ‘why gold-plated public service pensions are unsustainable’ and start asking where the money actually ends up when defined benefit schemes are ended? Incidentally, Gene Kerrigan did an excellent analysis on the use of the word ‘unsustainable’ a week or two ago.

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20. irishelectionliterature - December 6, 2016

I see Renua Cllr Patrick McKee has left, leaving cllrs Ronan McMahon, Keith Redmond and John Leahy

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CMK - December 6, 2016

Where’ll he end up next? SocDems? FG? Back to FF? SWP? SF?

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21. sonofstan - December 6, 2016

Clarity at last:
“I’m interested in all these terms that have been identified – hard Brexit, soft Brexit, black Brexit, white Brexit, grey Brexit – and actually what we should be looking for is a red, white and blue Brexit,”

Theresa May, today.

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GW - December 6, 2016

Oh sweet Jay, did she actually say that?

I noted in passing that the Brit government’s basis for the current court case about parliamentary input into the triggering of Article 50 was “GB is a monarchy, all executive power emminates from the throne, and if she chooses to give the elected parliament a say, that’s up to her, parliament has no rights as such.”

What to say about a country where the armed forces are answerable to a Hannoverian aristo rather than to any kind of democratic structure.

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sonofstan - December 6, 2016

To be fair, the same is true in varying degrees in the three Nordic monarchies and in the Netherlands and Belgium.

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GW - December 7, 2016

From the article on the Norwegian monarchy in Wikipedia:

The King is treated by the armed forces as their highest commander, but there is, beyond legal fiction, no doubt that the complete control of the armed forces is actually held by the elected government of the day.

Are you confident you could say that of the British military? Say, if the Antichrist J. Corbyn bumbled his way to the post of Prime Minister?

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22. GW - December 6, 2016

Fascist-spectrum censorship and history-rewriting dept.

The PiSer turdballs have sacked the directory of a Polish cultural Institute in Berlin because her projects had ‘too much Jewish content’ and kept drawing attention to Polish complicity and pogroms, rather than celebrating pure ‘Polish’ culture.

Her specific crime against the Polish volk was to show a film about a woman who discovers she is Jewish and her family were murdered by their Polish Christian neighbours instead of some piece of propaganda about the current Polish Führer’s brother’s accidental death in a air-crash, which I won’t even dignify by naming.

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GW - December 6, 2016

They have purged Polish cultural institutes outside Poland as well.

The nasty wee man from Poland probably has a bet going with the nasty wee man from Turkey.

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23. Starkadder - December 6, 2016

Mommy, why does Donnie have a bomb? Three pieces about how
a bad-tempered sociopath is about to get the power to kill tens of millions of people:

https://www.ft.com/content/8715175e-b550-11e6-ba85-95d1533d9a62

http://thediplomat.com/2016/11/could-trump-actually-start-a-nuclear-war/

http://www.smh.com.au/world/donald-trump-will-soon-learn-the-nuclear-codes-what-will-he-do-with-them-20161126-gsyc1e.html

Will the world get to 2022 without a nuclear detonation? 😦

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CL - December 7, 2016

‘It’s extremely hazardous to have an “ignorant, thin-skinned megalomaniac“ who fires off angry 3am tweets in control of the nuclear codes,’-Chomsky.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/noam-chomsky-dismisses-megalomaniac-donald-trump-a7449151.html

But, said Chomsky ‘if young people and activists revived a strong labour movement, which could overcome racial conflict like it did in the 1930s, then the workers’ favour could be won back.’
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bernie-sanders-donald-trump-noam-chomsky-supporters-labour-movement-racism-unions-wages-a7459126.html

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24. Tomboktu - December 6, 2016

BeLonG To, Ireland, 2006:

PFLAG, Toronto, 2014:

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25. sonofstan - December 7, 2016
FergusD - December 7, 2016
Alibaba - December 7, 2016

News for Blair, Corbyn and May. Ukip leader, Paul Nuttall said: “We have this fantastic opportunity, which we’ve never had before to this extent, to move into Labour working-class communities and mop up votes. I think in some of these communities we can replace the Labour Party in the next five years and become the patriotic party of the working people.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/28/paul-nuttall-elected-new-ukip-leader-nigel-farage-finally-bows/

“There’s something going on in the continent of Europe. There’s an anti-establishment feel, which is growing, right across the rest of the world. And I want Ukip to be that vehicle here in the UK”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/nov/28/paul-nuttall-elected-as-ukip-leader
 

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FergusD - December 7, 2016

This guy sound slike he could develop in the direction of facism. Plebian, anti-establishment, patriotic. Just needs to ditch the neo-liberalism from UKIP and there are just about there.

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