The Silent Spring

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The Silent Spring

Postby Harvey » Fri Apr 24, 2020 5:35 pm

Alternatively a thread called: Upon noticing how many interesting voices have become silent.

Craig Murray Defence Fund Launched by Craig Murray

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives ... -launched/

I know of four pro-Independence folk who were last week phoned or visited by Police Scotland and threatened with contempt of court proceedings over social media postings they had made weeks back on the Alex Salmond case. Then on Monday, a Scottish journalist I know had his home raided by five policemen, who confiscated (and still have) all his computers and phones. They said they were from the “Alex Salmond team” and investigating his postings on the Alex Salmond case. He has not to date been charged, and his lawyer is advising him at present to say nothing, so I am not revealing his name.

Then on Tuesday morning, a large Police van full of police pulled up onto the pavement right outside my front gate, actually while I was talking on the phone to a senior political figure about the raid on my friend. The police just sat in the van staring at my house. I contacted my lawyers who contacted the Crown Office. The police van pulled away and my lawyers contacted me back to say that the Crown Office had told them I would be charged, or officially “cited”, with Contempt of Court, but they agreed there was no need for a search of my home or to remove my devices, or for vans full of police.

On Thursday two plain clothes police arrived and handed me the indictment. Shortly thereafter, an email arrived from The Times newspaper, saying that the Crown Office had “confirmed” that I had been charged with contempt of court. In the case of my friend whose house was raided, he was contacted by the Daily Record just before the raid even happened!

I am charged with contempt of court and the hearing is on 7 July at the High Court in Edinburgh. The contempt charge falls in two categories:

i) Material published before the trial liable to prejudice a jury
ii) Material published which could assist “jigsaw identification” of the failed accusers.

Plainly neither of these is the true motive of the Crown Office. If they believed that material I published was likely to have prejudiced the jury, then they had an obvious public duty to take action BEFORE the trial – and the indictment shows conclusively they were monitoring my material long before the trial. To leave this action until after the trial which they claim the material was prejudicing, would be a serious act of negligence on their part. It is quite extraordinary to prosecute for it now and not before the trial.

As for identifying the failed conspirators, I have done less than the mainstream media. But plainly the Crown Office, or whoever is pushing them to this persecution, had no genuine interest in protecting the identities, otherwise why did they tip off the media that I was being charged, and thus guarantee further publicity? If protecting the identities was their motive, to tip off the media would obviously be counterproductive.

But what proves that the Crown Office is acting from base motives and not those stated is the one-sided nature of this. Only supporters of Alex Salmond – the Alex Salmond found innocent by the jury – are being pursued by this continuing Police Scotland operation.

There are literally thousands who put out “Salmond is guilty” “Salmond is a rapist” “Salmond is a pervert” posts on social media before and during the trial. Not one has had the police knock on the door. The Herald published absolutely deliberately, the day before the trial, a montage of Alex Salmond amongst photos of mass murderers. They have not been charged. Every newspaper published “jigsaw identification” information which I withheld. They have not been charged or investigated, despite the evidence brilliantly compiled and presented to the Police.

No, this is a blatant, one-sided political persecution. That much is entirely plain. I have therefore decided, in the interests of open justice, to publish the entire indictment against me (with a single sentence redacted where I think the prosecution were excessively indiscreet). Neither the indictment nor the covering letter is marked confidential or not for publication. It is, so far as I know, a public document.

The Crown have very deliberately not included the names of any of the failed conspirators in the indictment and instead refer to the women by their court allocated letters. That is a plain indication to me that this is a public document drafted specifically with publication in mind. Otherwise the document would have more naturally used the names and not the alphabet letters.

More fundamentally this indictment is the basis on which they are attempting to put me in prison – in fact the indictment specifies up to two years in jail and an unlimited fine as the punishment sought from the court. I think the public interest, and my own interest, in it being public is very substantial.

The state believes it has finally discovered a way to put me in prison without the inconvenient hurdle of a jury of my peers. Contempt of Court is just decided by a judge. It is extraordinary that you can go to jail for a substantial two years with no jury protection and no test of “beyond reasonable doubt”; and on the whim of a judge defending what he may view as the dignity of his own office. This really is the epitome of bad law. To use it against freedom of speech is disgusting.

So here is the full indictment against me:

caseagainstcraigmurray

If the indictment contains anything they did not wish to be public, well, I didn’t force them to serve it on me. From my side, the proceedings against me will be entirely open. I will remind you that you may find all or part of the indictment initially convincing; but you are yet to see my point by point reply, which naturally I shall also publish in due course.

The purpose of this operation against free speech is a desperate attempt to keep the lid on the nature of the state conspiracy to fit up Alex Salmond. Once the parliamentary inquiry starts, a huge amount of evidence of conspiracy which the court did not allow the defence to introduce in evidence during the criminal trial, will be released. The persecution of myself is an attempt to intimidate independent figures into not publishing anything about it. The lickspittle media of course do not have to be intimidated. To this end, I am charged specifically with saying that the Alex Salmond case was a fit-up and a conspiracy in which the Crown Office was implicated. So I thought I would say it again now:

The Alex Salmond case was a fit-up and a conspiracy in which the Crown Office was implicated, foiled by the jury. If Scotland is the kind of country where you go to jail for saying that, let me get my toothbrush.

Before then, I am afraid we have to fund my defence and I shall be very grateful for donations to my defence fund. My initial target is £60,000. I shall post daily updates on total reached, but I shall be using my established funding channels and not involving a crowdfunding website.I do not intend to fight this battle entirely on the defensive, and some of the funding may be put to launching actions against the Crown or others.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: The Silent Spring

Postby alloneword » Sat Apr 25, 2020 9:36 am

Update:
Legal Defence Fund over half way to the target in just 16 hours! £34,212 raised from 1,507 individuals. 54% of donors in Scotland, 22% in England, 14% in USA. I am choked with gratitude at the support. Will post further updates.

(link as above)

Don't let that put anyone off donating, though.

His coverage of the Assange 'trial', Salmond 'trial' and Phillip Cross affair firmly establish him as one of the better journalists we have (which isn't saying much, TBH). If they manage to silence him over this bollocks, it will likely bring more attention to his work.
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Re: The Silent Spring

Postby Harvey » Sun May 03, 2020 11:55 am

liminalOyster » Sun May 03, 2020 9:02 am wrote:
YouTube deletes conspiracy theorist David Icke's channel
Icke’s account was terminated for violating policy on spreading coronavirus disinformation



Sat 2 May 2020 18.51 EDTLast modified on Sat 2 May 2020 19.48 EDT

YouTube has deleted conspiracy theorist David Icke’s account.

The video-sharing site said the 68-year-old violated its policies on sharing information about coronavirus.

The former footballer has made controversial unproven claims about the virus on several internet platforms, including one that it is linked to the 5G mobile network.

The video service, which is owned by Google, told the BBC: “YouTube has clear policies prohibiting any content that disputes the existence and transmission of Covid-19 as described by the WHO and the NHS.

“Due to continued violation of these policies we have terminated David Icke’s YouTube channel.”

The ban follows a similar move by Facebook, which removed Icke’s page on Friday.

Well-known medics and broadcasters including Dr Christian Jessen and former junior doctor Adam Kay have called on social networks to remove Icke from their platforms.

They are backed by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which claims Icke’s conspiracies over Covid-19 have been viewed more than 30m times.

“We commend YouTube on bowing to pressure and taking action on David Icke’s channel,” said CCDH’s chief executive Imran Ahmed. “However, there remains a network of channels and shadowy amplifiers, who promote Mr Icke’s content [and] need to be removed.”

The CCDH asked for other networks to follow the lead, and added: “It is time for Instagram and Twitter to follow Facebook and YouTube by acting to remove Icke and his content from their platforms.

“Lies cost lives in a global pandemic, and their failure to act promptly puts us all at risk.”

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/ ... es-channel
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: The Silent Spring

Postby §ê¢rꆧ » Fri May 08, 2020 6:30 am

Yes, I have been feeling eerie feelies about this Silent Spring... thinking about the filter bubble effect that elected 45. Those Youtube videos going down are just popping up somewherez else, and the people that seek them out will always find them, using forum chitchat and, you know, talking in person (they won't be wearing evil facemasks, so it will be easy to hear them!), or some obscure protocol or workaround (the Internet, hobbled even as it is, was designed to route around censorship), and the only thing this is likely to accomplish is to further polarize political opinion in a way that will make it easy for 45 to squat in the White House longer.

Also, I'd rather make up my own mind. It's bad enough to waste my time on reading & watching (often) sloppy thinking unfold, but to have to actually hunt it down first is double insult to my aged brain!!

Sarcasm aside, Youtube's takedowns are obvious, it makes one wonder what is the big G up to behind the scenes with it's Pagerankery? What do /you/ use to search? DDGG, Startpage and Qwant are usually me next stops.
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Re: The Silent Spring

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri May 08, 2020 12:10 pm

They're tooling up at YT & FB to get ready for the onslaught sure to come with the election. Can you imagine the anger? Or from the jackass defense of supporters who believe his shared wisdom. We'll be lucky to have access to the internet by then, and that's only a few months from now.

Time to update my copy of "foraging for food."
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Re: The Silent Spring

Postby Harvey » Sat May 30, 2020 8:34 pm

Professor David Miller and professor Piers Robinson of The Working Group on Syria, without whom we may not have heard from the OPCW whistleblowers, have been under sustained attack in the Murdoch press and elsewhere. Piers lost his job late last year as Chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism at the University of Sheffield and David Miller has been banned from Twitter for a month now, over alleged anti-Semitism, a claim which is total bollocks. He merely spoke directly about the Israel lobby.

Which prompted me to post an excerpt from his book, co-authored by William Dinan, A Century of Spin. It centres on the history and development of PR in Britain, necessitating a brief description of anti-union propaganda in the states:

THE INTELLECTUALS AND DEMOCRACY

The threat of democracy troubled some leading intellectuals as well as politicians and business lobbyists. In the US this manifested in a concern about how society’s elites might cope with the potential consequences of the extended franchise. ‘The crowd is enthroned’, as PR pioneer Ivy Lee put it in 1914. Lee believed in the necessity of ‘courtiers’ to ‘flatter and caress’ the crowd. The courtiers were the professional propagandists. It was essential, wrote Walter Lippmann, the most important US theorist of the trend, that ‘the public be put in its place’ so that ‘each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd’. The fear of the irrational crowd ‘became an insistent note among leading intellectuals’. At the end of the nineteenth century Gustav Le Bon had sounded the alarm in his influential book The Crowd. Le Bon argued that ‘a crowd thinks in images’ and ‘an orator in intimate communication with the crowd can evoke images by which it will be seduced... The powerlessness of crowds to reason prevents them displaying any trace of the critical spirit of discerning truth from Le Bon’s work was developed by Gabriel Tarde, who distinguished between the ‘crowd’ and the ‘public’. For Tarde, the ‘crowd’ was the power of the past. Now, with new means of mass communication such as the telegraph, printing press and railway, a collective ‘public’ was created even though people were not physically present in the same place and time – ‘a dispersion of individuals who are physically separated and whose cohesion is entirely mental’. ‘The crowd is the social group of the past’, Tarde wrote. ‘Whatever its forms, standing or seated, immobile or on the march, it is incapable of extension beyond a limited area; when its leaders cease to keep it in hand, when the crowd no longer hears their voices, it breaks loose... But the public can be extended indefinitely.’ In his view the public was both more affected and less of a threat than the crowd. More affected in the sense that newspapers distribute through time and space information and ideas which impinge on, implicate and influence countless thousands – ‘even those who don’t read papers, but who talking to those who do, are forced to follow the groove of their borrowed thoughts. One pen suffices to set off a million tongues.’ This power is a potential threat to society – the socialist or anarchist state of mind did not ‘amount to anything’ before ‘a few famous publicists, Karl Marx, Kropotkin and others, expressed them and put them into circulation’. But the political dangers posed by the public are less pressing than those of the crowd.

Tarde gave the example of ‘feminine publics’, made up of ‘readers of popular novels or fashionable poetry, fashion magazines, feminist journals and the like’. These he says ‘scarcely resemble’ feminine crowds and have a ‘more inoffensive nature’. Women assembled together on the street though, ‘are always appalling in their extraordinary excitability and ferocity’ The geographical and social distribution of the public meant new strategies for communicating with the masses were required. The management of public communication was becoming a practical and political imperative for elites and intellectuals. Tarde concluded his essay on the public and the crowd with a ringing challenge to intellectuals to win the battle of ideas with the public in order to maintain elite power in the face of the rise of the public:

What will preserve the intellectual and artistic summits of humanity from democratic levelling will not, I fear, be recognition of the good that the world owes them, the just esteem for their discoveries. What then? I should like to think that it will be the force of their resistance. Let them beware if they should separate.


In both the US and Britain a number of writers and thinkers responded to these new circumstances by working together to resist democracy. Many of this group shared a fascination with the possibilities of social control and the management of consent. Walter Lippmann was the most influential of all the theorists of propaganda-managed democracy. Lippmann’s view was that the ‘manufacture of consent’ was both necessary and possible. ‘Within the life of the generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self conscious art and a regular organ of popular government.’ Edward Bernays, as one of the most influential early PR practitioners, tried putting Lippmann’s ideas into practice. Both his first two books (Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928)) were published a year after Lippmann’s interventions (Public Opinion(1922) and The Phantom Public (1927)). Bernays argued that:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.


The manipulation could only take place because the mass public was conceived as irrational and responded not to facts but to feelings or prejudices. Bernays’ thinking was influenced by some of the early social psychologists such as Le Bon and Tarde, but also by his uncle Sigmund Freud. Bernays later had Freud’s works translated and published in the US and personally promoted them. But it was not only nephew Edward that Freud influenced in the 1920s. Both Ivy Lee and Walter Lippmann had become interested in his work. ‘I have found’, Lee told an interviewer in 1921, ‘the Freudian theories concerning the psychology of the subconscious mind of great interest... Publicity is essentially a matter of mass psychology. We must remember that people are guided more by sentiment than by mind. Lippmann too had come across Freud, but much earlier. In one of those curious twists of fate Lippmann wrote his fi rst book in a cabin in the backwoods of Maine in the company of his friend from Harvard, Alfred Kuttner, who was at that moment translating Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams into English under the direction of one of the early US psychoanalysts, A.A. Brill. As a result Lippmann studied Freud with, as he wrote to Graham Wallas, ‘a great deal of enthusiasm’. The result was that Lippmann’s book, A Preface to Politics(1913), was replete with Freudian terms.

In the United States the threat of democracy was created by the extension of the franchise from 15 to 50 per cent of adults between 1880 and 1920. This was accompanied by rising antagonism to the power of business, expressed succinctly in the label ‘robber barons’, which was given to corporate leaders and the super-rich at the time, including Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie and perhaps most famously, John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller and his Standard Oil company had provided an object lesson in how big business might accumulate and retain power. By 1885 the company ‘had its own network of agents throughout the world, and its own espionage service, to forestall the initiatives of rival companies or governments’. Despite this, the rise of organised labour and the attacks on business from investigative and campaigning journalism led to a backlash against corporate power and the rich. As a result anti-trust legislation was introduced to prohibit cartels and anti-competitive business practices. This meant that some of the biggest corporations in America were broken up. Standard Oil was divided into numerous smaller corporations, creating in the process some of the most important oil companies of the twentieth century such as Exxon, Amoco, Mobil and Chevron.

The corporations – individually and collectively – increasingly adopted public relations, propaganda and lobbying techniques to resist the encroachment of popular government or to counter attack to win new sectional concessions. The defence of their interests was accomplished by hiring their own public relations personnel, by banding together in class-wide lobby groups and by creating policy planning groups to try to exert influence on public policy questions.

In 1906 J.P. Morgan and Company hired Ivy Lee to defend them against anti-trust moves by the government. In 1907 Lee was asked to do a similar job for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Vice-president M.J.B. Thayer noted this was because they had ‘come to the conclusion... that the time had come when we must take “offensive” measures as it were, to place our “case” before the public’.19 Corporations also tried to go on the offensive by using the new techniques to re-engineer perceptions. Leaders in this area were AT&T, Eastman Kodak, General Electric, General Motors, Ford, Goodyear Rubber, National Cash Register and Standard Oil. These were the first few steps along the road to the branding and corporate governance practices of today. They attempted to humanise the corporation. ‘The word corporation is cold, impersonal and subject to misunderstanding and distrust’, wrote Alfred Swayne of the Institutional Advertising Committee in advice to General Motors. Over at AT&T, advertising executive Bruce Barton wanted more than a vague positive feeling. People no longer feared the big corporations – at most they would ‘only tolerate them’. But even though the public did not ‘fully understand’, ‘fully trust’ or even ‘love’ the corporations, it was felt corporate propagandists should try to create such sentiment.

The National Association of Manufacturers was created in 1895. In 1903 an internal leadership ‘coup’ transformed NAM from ‘an international trade organization into a virulent anti-union one’. Its activities included hiring an employee of the House of Representatives as a spy; making campaign contributions to sympathetic Congressional candidates; creating a front group called the Workingmen’s Protective Association to campaign for Republican candidates; paying operatives to waylay Congressmen on the way to the chamber so they would miss important votes; marshalling a disguised propaganda campaign through newspaper syndicates; distributing significant amounts of propaganda to schools, colleges and civil society organisations. This was all revealed at the first Congressional inquiry into lobbying in 1913. The inquiry concluded that:

The correspondence between officials and employees of the association laid before your committee and placed in evidence shows it to have been an organization having purposes and aspirations along industrial, commercial, legislative, and other lines so vast and far-reaching as to excite at once admiration and fear – admiration for the genius which conceived them, and fear for the ultimate effects which the successful accomplishments of all these ambitions might have on a government such as ours.


Corporate leaders also formed a new policy planning group called the National Industrial Conference Board. According to its own account it was ‘born out of a crisis in industry in 1916. Declining public confidence in business and rising labor unrest had become severe threats to economic growth and stability.’ It was ‘an entirely new type of organization. Not another trade association. Not a propaganda machine. But a respected, not-for-profit, non-partisan organization that would bring leaders together to find solutions to common problems and objectively examine major issues having an impact on business and society.’ The concern to find solutions was tested in 1919 when the NICB was one of three representatives of business summoned by President Woodrow Wilson, partially in the hope of averting the then looming steel strike, to a ‘National Industrial Conference’ to discuss methods of bringing capital and labour into close co-operation, and to canvass every relevant feature of the present industrial situation, for the purpose of enabling us to work out, if possible, in [a] genuine spirit of co-operation a practicable method of association based upon a real community of interest which will redound to the welfare of all our people.

The ‘management participants refused to accept any type of collective bargaining’, thus making progress impossible and showing the real role of the Conference Board as a corporate policy planning and lobby group. The NICB was set up by four corporate bosses, three of whom have been described as ‘professional militants’ who had made careers out of promoting corporate interests. All four ‘enjoyed some notoriety during their active careers only to pass largely unnoticed into the silence of history’. The Conference Board (as it later became) was in other words formed out of a desire by corporate leaders to ‘unite American employers’ into a class-wide organisation.

According to some accounts ‘The “dollar decade” of the 1920s temporarily put to rest the nation’s fears of the power of business.’ But clearly this was accomplished in part by the use of techniques to manufacture consent. These activities – the ‘deliberate use of propaganda’ as Bernays put it – transformed the political fortunes of big business from ‘ogres’ to ‘friendly giants’ by the mid 1920s.

Shortly before the war... the newspapers of New York took a census of the press agents who were regularly employed and regularly accredited and found that there were about twelve hundred of them. How many there are now [1919] I do not pretend to know. But what I do know is that many of the direct channels of news have been closed and the information for the public is first filtered through publicity agents. The great corporations have them, the banks have them, the railroads have them, all the organisations of business and social and political activity have them.

But even this growth in publicity does not account for the full range of techniques used. The key moment which saved the day for the corporations in the 1920s was the pioneering of techniques for strike-breaking which welded the new propaganda techniques together with intimidation, harassment and violence. The decisive period was 1919–21. In 1919 more than 4 million workers were involved in industrial disputes, four times the number in the previous year. Beginning in 1919 almost 400,000 miners went on strike, sparking one of the longest-running industrial disputes in the US which resulted in the destruction of the miners’ unions. Ivy Lee was retained to defend the strike-breaking activities of the Logan County Coal Operators Association in October 1921. They hired armed Pinkerton and Baldwin-Felts ‘detectives’ and were authorised to sign up their own ‘deputy-Sheriffs’ to crush a miners’ march in Logan and Mingo Counties, assembled to protest police brutality against union organisers: ‘In pitched battles over 6 days that became known as the battle of Blair Mountain, some 70 miners were killed.’ In the face of an influx of state police, national guards and federal troops ordered in by the President, the defeat of the miners was inevitable. Lee’s job was to justify the strike-breaking tactics. He quickly issued a series of Miner’s Lamp and Coal Facts bulletins and a number of pamphlets full of ‘false and exaggerated information’ about the dispute. This information came from the mine operators and was ‘published as truth’ by Lee. The pamphlets were purportedly published by the ‘Logan District Mines Information Bureau’, a fake front group set up by Lee for his client. In the Great Steel Strike of 1919 the same new propaganda tactics were used in alliance with the traditional harassment and intimidation (20 people lost their lives in the strike).

Five days after the strike began the steel corporations launched a campaign of full-page advertisements which urged the strikers to return to work, denounced their leaders as ‘trying to establish the red rule of anarchy and bolshevism’ and the strike as ‘Un-American’ and even suggested that ‘the Huns had a hand in fomenting the strike’.

Louis Post, the Secretary of Labour at the time, complained that intense corporate propaganda ‘produced an anti-red hysteria about an invented plan by workers and their leaders to overthrow the government’. The Interchurch World Movement concluded that the strike was defeated by ‘the strike breaking methods of the steel companies and their effective mobilisation of public opinion against the strikers through charges of radicalism, bolshevism and the closed shop. None of which was justified by the facts.’ As a result, trade union power was decisively defeated during the 1920s. ‘Civil liberties were left prostrate, the labour movement was badly mauled, the position of capital was greatly enhanced and complete antipathy towards reform was enthroned’, wrote historian Robert Murray. In addition, ‘the Communist Party had been shattered and gone underground... institutions of police repression had been installed and the United States had been made safe for business’, as historian and activist Joel Kovel has put it. The role of the early propaganda experts in this transformation was central. As Editor and Publisher summed up the transformation of the reputation of Rockefeller on his death in 1937:

It must be admitted without a grudge, that Ivy Ledbetter Lee did a swell job of press-agentry in not only removing the stigma of commercial pirate that the old gentleman wore for so many years, but actually substituting it for a saintly halo... He [Rockefeller] paid little attention to newspaper comment until the Colorado mine massacre turned the big Eastern papers loose at him and invested 26 Broadway with a howling mob of protesting pickets. Then the suave Lee entered the picture, gave the Rockefeller press relationships the guise of candour, played no favourites and succeeded, it must be admitted, in more than once turning merited public anger toward approval.


‘Among the nations of the earth today’, wrote one observer in 1921, ‘America stands for one idea: Business.’ The ‘robber barons’ were not transformed simply by the manipulation of words and ideas, but by the use of new techniques of press management in alliance with older coercive practices.


Image
...from ogres to friendly giants
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: The Silent Spring

Postby Harvey » Sat May 30, 2020 9:09 pm

§ê¢rꆧ » Fri May 08, 2020 11:30 am wrote:What do /you/ use to search? DDGG, Startpage and Qwant are usually me next stops.


Don't know what DDGG is, the other two I have in my bookmarks but haven't given them a test drive. I mainly use a combination of the big search engines from Russia to the US and one or two of the more specialised smaller outfits, none are satisfactory. I remember when the search engines first started, falling all over themselves to offer shiny new tools. All that soon went out of the window.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: The Silent Spring

Postby alloneword » Sun May 31, 2020 7:24 am

Thanks for that Dinan excerpt, H. A good reminder of just how long they've been playing this game.

(DDG = DuckDuckGo?)
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Re: The Silent Spring

Postby JackRiddler » Sun May 31, 2020 6:26 pm

Harvey thanks for the Murray case updates and thanks very much for the Dinan history, which I think is nicely compact, I will probably use it in my fall classes.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: The Silent Spring

Postby Harvey » Sun May 31, 2020 7:47 pm

JackRiddler » Sun May 31, 2020 11:26 pm wrote:Harvey thanks for the Murray case updates and thanks very much for the Dinan history, which I think is nicely compact, I will probably use it in my fall classes.


You can find the book in electronic form if you have a look around. It's full of well researched nuggets. And it's written by David Miller and William Dinan, the confusion is my own poor writing skills.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: The Silent Spring

Postby Harvey » Sun May 31, 2020 8:06 pm

alloneword » Sun May 31, 2020 12:24 pm wrote:Thanks for that Dinan excerpt, H. A good reminder of just how long they've been playing this game.

(DDG = DuckDuckGo?)


I reccomend you find a copy and read it through. I thought I was reasonably informed, not least through years of exposure to information on RI among other places, but this book was a total shock. The whole shape of the twentieth century is stamped within its pages. By that I mean, everything rests on the ability of billionaires to create the 'public' reality of the masses.

Full title: A Century of Spin: How Public Relations Became the Cutting Edge of Corporate Power
Last edited by Harvey on Mon Jun 01, 2020 7:08 am, edited 1 time in total.
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And be loved
In return"


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Re: The Silent Spring

Postby §ê¢rꆧ » Mon Jun 01, 2020 3:55 am

Thanks for the book except and suggestion. Some of the main players mentioned I've read about before, but never so deeply. I found it on z-lib

Yes, I meant DDG (Duck Duck Go), just clumsy fingers typo'd it.
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Re: The Silent Spring

Postby alloneword » Mon Jun 01, 2020 5:19 am

Thanks for the Z-lib tip, §ê¢rꆧ

https://1lib.eu/book/935603/3339c5

Le Bon's 'The crowd: a study of the popular mind' can also be found there:

https://1lib.eu/book/511982/ec0e5a
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Re: The Silent Spring

Postby Harvey » Thu Jun 04, 2020 7:31 am

Please Sign the Open Letter
by Craig Murray, 1 June 2020
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives ... en-letter/

I should be grateful if you would join Noam Chomsky, Yanis Varoufakis, David Hare, Roger Waters, Robert Black, Kristinn Hrnafsson, Christine Assange and many others in signing the open letter against the politically motivated legal harassment of people including Mark Hirst and myself.

I am not asking you to endorse our political views; I am asking you to support free speech and oppose this rather startling authoritarianism and highly selective prosecution.

To the Lord Advocate

DEAR Mr Wolffe,

We are writing to you to express our growing concern over the actions of both the Crown Office and Police Scotland.

In recent weeks vocal independence supporters and backers of the former First Minister Alex Salmond, specifically the former UK diplomat, human rights campaigner and journalist Craig Murray along with fellow journalist Mark Hirst, have been arrested and charged in relation to comments they made publicly during and following the trial of Mr Salmond. Other supporters of Mr Salmond have also been contacted by police and warned over online comments they made in the wake of the trial.

We are particularly concerned to note that the investigating police officers are the same detectives who led the investigation against Mr Salmond over a period of two years and at considerable cost to the public purse.

As you know, the prosecution following from that investigation, pursued again at considerable cost to the public purse, resulted in the acquittal of Mr Salmond on all charges and now raises the most serious questions about why that investigation and that prosecution were pursued.

Whilst we appreciate that you cannot be involved in individual cases you will undoubtedly be aware that complaints of alleged Contempt of Court were made against six other individual journalists widely regarded as being hostile in their reporting of Mr Salmond. No action by the Crown Office or Police Scotland has been taken against any of those individuals. This leaves the distinct impression that Police Scotland, at the direction of the Crown Office, is acting in a manner that is both biased and disproportionate.

As you will be aware, for public confidence to be maintained in our independent legal system the law must be able to both demonstrate it is acting impartially and be seen to be doing so.

The actions taken so far risk establishing a public perception that both Police Scotland and the Crown Office are conducting themselves in a manner which is biased and is indeed political in nature.

Such perceptions risk seriously damaging confidence in the Scottish legal system.

We would welcome your fullest public response to the concerns raised in this letter and any meaningful public assurances you can offer that both Police Scotland and the Crown Office are complying with their obligations to act with complete impartiality and to apply the law fairly.

Professor Noam Chomsky (linguist and political scientist)
Yanis Varoufakis (Author, former Greek Finance Minister, philosopher, economist)
Professor Robert Black QC (Professor Emeritus of Scots Law, Edinburgh University)
Sir David Hare (Playwright, screenwriter and film director)
Kristinn Hrnaffson (Investigative journalist and Editor in Chief of Wikileaks)
Tariq Ali (human rights campaigner, journalist and historian)
Roger Waters (co-founder Pink Floyd, political activist)
Lawrence B. Wilkerson, (US Colonel, Ret, former Chief of Staff, US Department of State)
Paul Kavanagh (Columnist, The National newspaper)
George Kerevan (Journalist, Former SNP MP, former Associate Editor of The Scotsman)
Tommy Sheridan (Convenor, Solidarity and former MSP)
Ann Wright (US Colonel, Ret, and former US Ambassador)
Christine Assange (human rights campaigner and mother of Julian)
Gordon Dangerfield (Solicitor Advocate)
Hugh Kerr (Former Labour MEP, author and journalist)
John Kiriakou (CIA whistle-blower)
Coleen Rowley (Retired FBI Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel, 2002 Time Magazine Person of the Year)
Ray McGovern (Former CIA Officer, Founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity)
Robert Tibbo (lawyer to Edward Snowden)
Annie Machon (former MI5 officer, author and journalist)
Katherine Gun (former GCHQ whistle-blower)
Clive Ponting (former MOD whistle-blower)
Stuart Campbell (Editor, Wings over Scotland)
James Kelly (Editor of SCOT goes POP! and columnist with The National)
Neil MacKay (Singer-songwriter, Scottish independence activist)
Liz Dangerfield (solicitor)
Campbell Martin (Broadcast journalist and former SNP MSP)
Elizabeth Murray (former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East & CIA political analyst)
Robin McAlpine (Political strategist)
Bogdan Dzakovic (9/11 aviation security whistle-blower, FAA Security, Ret.)
Robert Wing (former US Foreign Service Officer)
Marshall Carter-Tripp (Political science professor and former Division Director, State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research)



Sign here: https://civillibertyscotland.com/news/a ... al-outrage
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


Eden Ahbez
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Harvey
 
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Re: The Silent Spring

Postby Harvey » Mon Jul 06, 2020 2:04 pm

Worth noting that even after the deluge of headlines (note the refrain of "10 women, 14 Charges" - all singing from the same hymn sheet) designed to create an impression of guilt (no smoke without fire, amiright?) Alex Salmond was cleared on all counts.

Having read Craigs account of the Alex Salmond trial, this did not come as a complete shock, since it was established by the court during proceedings that the accusations were baseless. One of the accusers was proved to have been elsewhere at the time of her alleged assault! Craigs only 'crime' was to properly inform his audience, a criminal inclination he shares with Julian Assange. If anyone could be accused of contempt in this case, it should be the entire mainstream media.


https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/07/i-need-a-craig-murray/comment-page-1/#comment-948830

I Need A Craig Murray

by Craig Murray

I tried to do a public service in making available to everybody key facts from the Julian Assange extradition hearing and the Alex Salmond trial, which revealed a picture very different from that portrayed in the mainstream media. I find myself wishing now I had somebody to perform the same service for me.

I am particularly constrained about what I can say in my own case. The last week has been incredibly hectic, with our reply to the Crown’s submissions (written arguments) due in last Thursday, and our responses to the Crown’s amendments in view of our responses, due in today. I previously published the indictment, called the “petition”; the written arguments are called the “submissions”. I cannot publish these at present but I think I can publish this brief extract from the Crown’s submissions, paras 48 to 50. They are slightly edited, on legal advice, to remove reference to some specific point the Crown is objecting to the publication of, and I publish with little comment but followed by some not irrelevant images. I can think of no reason you cannot comment, but please say nothing that might in any way reference specifically anybody with a protected identity.

Extract from the Submission of the Crown:

48. … The characters talk about how they can fabricate allegations of sexual offending against a previous minister, including attempted rape, in order to destroy his reputation. The script suggests that there was never any such offending and despite a large team of police working on the investigation for months, they did not find any evidence of serious offending. The characters suggest that more women from their organisation should be found to fabricate allegations against the former minister and that the criminal investigation has been orchestrated by the minister and his or her colleagues.

49. It is respectfully submitted that there are undeniable and crucial similarities with the prosecution of Alex Salmond and his readers note this in the attached comments section (production 2). The Respondent has not explicitly named Alexander Salmond … but the Website hosts comments attached to the article which do name him in connection with the content. The tenor of the article is that Alex Salmond has been the victim of a false campaign, motivated by political gain and that all of the criminal allegations against him have been concocted by members of government in order to damage his reputation.

50. It is respectfully submitted that such commentary from the Respondent … meet the test set out in the 1981 act. These articles carry a severely prejudicial risk to the course of justice. Should any potential jurors have read these articles, there is the clear implication that the witnesses are lying and the criminal investigation is at best, flawed or at worst, corrupt. Any potential jurors exposed to such material carry the risk of being prejudiced against the witnesses prior to hearing their evidence.

My personal blog. Influenced the jury. I am facing jail for that.

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Tomorrow’s (Tuesday 7 July) hearing is at 10am. It will again be a procedural one dealing with management of the case, but again I should be very grateful indeed if any of you are able to listen in and follow the process, as matters vital to the course of the case are often determined in these procedural hearings.

You will be able to access the case via the link given at the bottom of this page. https://www.scotcourts.gov.uk/coming-to ... al-hearing
The password for the case should be posted on that page on Tuesday morning.

Finally, again I do apologise that I am finding it very difficult to keep up regular blog posts on other subjects while this case against me is in train.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


Eden Ahbez
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Harvey
 
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