As the people I make the programmes with will testify, I have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with TV. It’s the F factor, as in F for faff, that holds me back from doing more, and it surprises me that an industry that has become so advanced, and such a big part of our lives, still requires a van load of equipment to make a film.
That being said, I am happy with the two telly films I have out this coming week. They are very different, Monday night being a Panorama on Britain’s relationship with alcohol, Tuesday night a Sky Arts ‘First Love’ film on my relationship with bagpipes.
The timing is a little unfortunate, I guess, in that it might look like overkill to have two documentaries on telly on successive nights, but the scheduling was out of my hands.
In some ways, the timing of the alcohol film could not be better, with David Cameron this week making clear he is taking a personal interest in the development of the government’s new alcohol strategy. I just want them to look at the right questions. I have an interview in the Sunday Express tomorrow on some of the themes from the film, Britain’s Hidden Alcoholics.
As for the bagpipes film, you will get to meet members of my family, my Mum included, and some of my relatives from the Hebridean island of Tiree where my Dad was born and raised. There are some fabulous shots of the island, and I hope a few tourists are drawn there as a result. You’ll also get to meet my piping mentor, a young guy called Finlay Macdonald, who is one of a group of young Scots adapting pipe music for a new generation. He is a terrific player, and a great teacher. The film culminates in me playing tunes chosen by Finlay in front of a frighteningly well informed audience of 2,500 people in Glasgow.
I suppose both films have me looking back at different parts of my life, my drinking in one, my music (in which drinking played a big role) in the other. But I hope they also have a sense of the future as well as the past, that the alcohol film gets a few people to reassess their relationship with booze, and the bagpipe film does a little to promote pipe music and the attractions of Celtic culture and Hebridean scenery.
PS … The new coat, which features in both programmes, is the one I have mentioned before, sold to me by a brilliant Louis Copeland sales assistant at Dublin airport … The one who taught me how to get four bags into one and defeat the Ryanair luggage police.
I am a teetotaller, but I enjoyed bagpipes on This Week.
Finns spend three hours a day watching TV. I myself only watch TV on Saturdays. A football match followed by a British detective series followed by a good movie.
Lot of interesting articles in the Guardian today.
Jonathan Freedland on eugenics. Stories also about Sun on Sunday, Iran, Greece, Libya (editorial) etc.
With Syria also in the news, 2012 will be an interesting year – albeit difficult and dangerous one.
Looking forward to the coming week, to watch both the telly films…Both very interesting topics Hidden Alcoholics and Bagpipes, how ancient…..
Looking forward to watching both telly films, Hidden Alcoholics and Bagpipes….very ancient…..
Looking forward to the coming week to watch both telly films, great themes, very ancient, Hidden Alcoholics and Bagpipes…..
I hope the Panorama programme won’t frighten me about my own intake, it shouldn’t but I know it’s a slippery slope. With three close ancestors having died of drink-related illnesses I find thinking of their ends is quite a deterrent.
http://www.radiotimes.com/episode/pk7fr/panorama–britain%27s-hidden-alcoholics—panorama
No Sky here; the difficulty of choosing just between the free channels and the beloved radio is confusing enough :-s
Yep, I linked to the Eugenics one in the last blog. Very commendable article. For those who accuse free marketeers of wanting to throw the poor and weak to the wolves, they should check out what Keynes and Beveridge wanted to do to them.
Do you have any plans to publish The Happy Depressive in a hard copy? I don’t want a Kindle.
Bagpipes are probably my least favourite instrument however your recent performances on Saturday Live and This Week may have given me some hope and the inclination to watch you on Sky Arts next Tuesday.
Other eugenic names include Marie Stopes, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, all ‘progressives’ in some ways and some of them ‘socialists’ according to some definition. Before I read Freedland’s Grauniad article I’d just read an extract from H. G. Wells’ ‘The Future in America’ (1906) which is full of assumptions about the racial degeneracy of the Chinese in particular and East Europeans and the Irish in general. Racist ideas of this kind were mainstream until 1945, and they continue today, though marginalised. I think there is a lot of this kind of thinking in the work of a relatively contemporary writer and former Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes. John Carey’s ‘The Intellectuals and the Masses’ gives a good account of ideas and attitudes which were not confined to a few cranks in the Nazi Party but included people like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence and other beacons of high culture.
The big difference is that the left has since rejected these odious eugenecist ideas (which not everyone on the left ever subscribed to anyway), not least because of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis. In contrast, the free market Tories continue to throw the poor and the weak to the wolves and spout some of the same bogus justifications that they’ve been spouting since the early nineteenth century.
Why should they? Is there anyone on our political horizon NOW with similar ideas?
The past matters but not when it’s only used as a tool to dirty with. I don’t see what anyone learns by knowing about past proponents of eugenics, you’re using it as blackwash.
Your banter about the dire ideas some people had in dire times that we are a long way past is merely for shock and awe. We all know that the extreme left can be as cruel as the extreme right and I’m sure we all understand that the words themselves are often ascribed in different ways than western Europeans do.
That eugenics yadder belongs on a Delingpole blog where I hope the Texan is still confined (doubtless still screeching about people in third world countries needing to be sterilised before aid is budgeted) or on a Wail one if they exist.
The e-petition requiring 100k signatures is nearing 150k.
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/22670
This medical researcher :
https://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofHistoryandAnthropology/Research/HistoryResearchStudents/EoinClarke/
has a blog running about what it says in its title (and vastly increased donations from ‘health’ businesses to ld party) :
eoin-clarke.blogspot.com/2012/02/is-this-540000-reason-that-nick-clegg.html
Which of you is the echo? !
Just pointing it out seeing as Beveridge has been mentioned a lot lately and Olli linked to that article.
It depends on whether you think it matters for example that Newt Gingrich ditched his wife while she had cancer, or that Bill Clinton did what he did with an intern, or that Cameron was in the Bullingdon club. I think it matters that the two I mentioned were eugenicists.
It doesn’t mean those people can’t have good ideas, or that they are wrong about everything, but it has to say something about their thinking and morals.
Anyway, I’m going to post something conciliatory re tax credits if you want to read it.
(Don’t know what you mean about Texan on jd blog.)
Its just that when I mention that I believe in markets (to an extent) on other forums/blogs I get called “right wing” and told that I don’t care about the poor. Which is untrue as I have been poor and may well be poor again. So I felt I had to point out that some of those who were supposedly heroes to the poor and weak, were not as benevolent as they seemed.
I wouldn’t tar all “the left” with this brush, even in those times I am quite certain if I had been born in those times I would have voted for Clement Attlee but I would always have believed eugenics to be evil. I am sure most of the left feels the same way.
Didn’t know most of that, thanks Dave.
Michele, regarding Tax Credits. Its not the concept I am against so much as the complicated way we implemented it, which cost a fortune. I think tax cuts would have been better, they would save money which could be passed on to the recipient, and they involve less room for control.
But one of my favourite ideas is what the right calls a “negative income tax” and the left calls “basic income guarantee” or “citizens income” where you give every person money (dole, credit) and let them keep anything they earn on top of that, up to a threshold where you start to tax. If there is going to be a minimum wage then the threshold should be higher than that This would be a much simpler system, giving everyone an incentive to work, but without forcing them to do so like the current proposal.
I think GBs tax credits and IDS universal credit are influenced by these systems, but still a long way away.
You could say the two World Wars was a form of eugenics, but in a detrimental way for society, where quite a proportion of the brave and strong were snuffed out. A large proportion of applicants (lower ranks mainly, obviously) in WW1, hoping to fight for the cause, were rejected due to health problems, from bad diet and environment usually.
Even high society was affected, with all those Lieutenants and Captains that were chopped down leading the over the top from the trenches in WW1 Then only the high class twits were left in around the 1920’s. Wooster of P.G. Wodehouse’ ‘Jeeves and Wooster’ comes to mind.
Eugenics should be discussed for free thinking reasons. But not to be applied to any sort of extreme. Doesn’t steralisation still go on in certain extreme cases? I might be wrong – maybe it is just mandatory birth control with implants these days, but no idea about the male sex. And by the way, extreme sex addiction does exist – saw such cases when worked as a hospital porter for a while at a psychiatric hospitalwhen young. Being backed up to a wall by this lady patient when waiting for the nurse to come across the ward was an interesting experience.
Why don’t Sky have a type of iplayer that doesn’t need for you to register with them? Sky Arts programmes can be seen for free from them, as long as you register, and then for them to spam you with junk mail, no doubt. (don’t partake in Sky by the way, Freeview does me)
But looking forward to your programme on the beeb tomorrow night – it will be an obvious education to myself, since I am a boozer, who yo-yo’s from a couple of quiet pints couple of times a week, to most nights getting smashed on a couple of them a week, and back to quiet drinking, since about my mid-twenties. Before that age, usually drove everywhere whenever I went out and about.
However, have caught the supermarket disease, and that has helped my detrimental indulgent intake in, say, the last decade. However, have had about three periods where I abstained for at least two years, but that was because I was occupying myself with something else, heavy sports training usually.
Oooops, hoist by my own petard !!
Jumping to the easist ‘opposite’ to whitewash oh dear look what I’ve done.
Daggers at dawn ….
AC: Allister Heath was on bbc 5 live at 10am sunday explaining credit ratings agencies. He is not the most articulate, but he knows his stuff, except when it comes to spelling Alastair of course. Mr Darling struggled with it too – must be something to do with finance/chancellory chaps.
Hehe good one!None, actually they all have their own identity of repetition of muscial phrase, and reflecting beam of rays….
Sian Williams on the couch tomorrow morning Alastair? Say hello from Llanelli to her (chanechi/kluneky, will do). Sian has family from there, don’t you know. Big boozing town, as Griff Rhys-Jones found out on his “Who do you think you are” tv programme discovery trail – his great-grandad or something got knocked out and didn’t recover in front of Llanelli library due to drink, before it was a library that is. We are trying to breed rugby players now, or tv breakfast telly presenters, these days, not drunks. Two steps forward, one step back, and that is when sober, and all that.
And furthermore, tell Sian to move to Cheshire, for near Salford. Chester city is an incredible place – join the footiebroker-belt from near there. Chester with it’s rows and walls and all. Remember seeing Daniel Craig about there in the late 1980’s when I lived there – can never forget those eyes, even if I am a straight bloke.
I’ll bet it was Ehtch.
—–
It’s the linkage of eugenics with leftists in such a tit4tat way that I objected to. People are people, there are rightists that I love to bits (don’t ask me to name any) and leftists that I don’t …….. plenty are mean spirited and object to anything being luxurious as if being leftist demands one wears sackcloth 7dpw.
Being left or right doesn’t infiltrate every part of the brain and to even try assuaging the dislike for present day proponents of eugenics by reminding anyone that there have been (so-called) leftist supporters of the ideas was a pathetic post. The acronym ‘Nazi’ actually came from a group of words including the German word for national socialism ….. does that mean the Nazis would have supported Labour?
It was a pathetic and sorry way of discussing something, hence I objected and object to it.
Want to talk eugenics? Do it.
See my post to Ehtch which explains why I object to your tit4tat linkage.
On JD’s blog, which I posted on about 18m ago, there was a screeching poster blasting on about foreign aid and making hateful posts about the floods of the time in Pakistan, all in between being part of the cyber gang-banging against anyone with concerns about global warming.
She (if indeed it was one) was registered in Texas but had either forgotten about having provided that info (or misinfo). When it was pointed out that it might explain their spleen about green issues the reg info changed ….. titter.
……………………. Newt Gingrich ditched his wife while she had cancer ……………….
It hardly matters what I think about it, it matters that you would throw it in so casually when it is hotly disputed by him.
Don’t use Mrs Gingrich to get one over in a cyber spat, it’s cheap.
OIC
lahlahlahlahlahlahlah
You’re quite right to point out that Keynes and Beveridge were eugenics believers. Both are being mentioned at present because of 2008 (Keynes) and the seventieth anniversary of the Beveridge Report (1942). But whatever their ideas and attitudes about eugenics – now discredited since the opening up of the camps in 1945 – I can’t help feeling grateful to both of them for state intervention in a capitalist economy (Keynes) and the safety net (Beveridge). There are problems attached to both – state intervention can kill off enterprise, and the safety net can get abused – but both are preferable to letting market forces rip off the majority in favour of the few and destroy wealth as quick as they create it.
Furthermore, the other stories I have got in my time at working at that psychiatric hospital in West Wales would curl the hairs off the back of a donkey. Apart from the usual drink and drugs patients, who were always what you could describe as day to day normal away from their weakness, there were the real bad brain wired ones, but not bad in themselves, just viewed the world on a different concept to the rest of us. And my god, you couldn’t make it up – I could give examples what they were like, but it is worse than a horror film or story. Medicinal drugs then in around 1980 was available to take the edge off them, but the stories I heard how such patients were a few decades previous, again, would curl the hairs off that proverbial donkey. Quite an education it was, for one observent.
Saw a Gregory Peck film today, of war experiences bringing that part of the mind out due to war experiences, that would otherwise would have been kept under order by them personally, starring Tony Curtis, and he was brilliant in it, as well as Gregory, as well as Angie Dickinson of Police Lady fame, or whatever it was called, anyway, something of the film, of yank PTSD WW2 armed force members, in the nuthouse, “Captain Newman, M.D.”,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YnioZK-fBc
PTSD, bringing the worst of what they suffered before magnified on what they then experienced in service, as I mentioned below to Michele, available to watch in full in parts on youtubby – Tony Curtis is very funny in it. The other side of war, where viet vets were swept aside unlike WW2 as here, which is shamful on republicans in the US that obviously turn the wheels then, the liitle world kiddies that they are. Part one,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUYdJKVWJzg
By the way, that certain young lady was the same age as me, maybe a year or two younger than me, and by christ she was a looker, but… Hope things turned out alright for her. Blonde, blue eyes, slim, unstable? Yes. Totally beautiful, but I do hope it has turned alright for her, but who knows. Haunting memories. No doubt if she is still around, she still does struggle. That is the mind for you. Sad, I know. Heartbreaking.
Says it will be available in March to print on demand, ie concept that when you order it they will print it and make you a book, ie yes.
If it’s any use, Amazon do an ebook reader for your PC.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000423913&tag=googhydr-21&hvadid=7117605006&ref=pd_sl_31kqfvvp90_b
Good link under the previous blog post reaguns.
In fact I left a reply for you there, before reading this blog and comments.
Just gone bonkers trying to cancel my facebook account in a pseudonym in the last two hours. had to tell someone, my foerhead is sore and my wall is bloodstained.
Bastard load of rubbish. Run my phone out of charge trying to get a code to cancel it – they are nuts, and making me nuts with it. Why did I bother it in the first place a few weeks back, after signing onto it years ago. They are a crazy frightening mad set up. Knew it wouldn’t agree with me, and I think they know it, not being the sheep they are after.
Right, time for twitter, and to bother Sian and Alastair… : )
only joking for god’s sakes. The Big Bang Theory got me trying to rearrange my facebook profile, as per here, from them yesterday,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7xA-Smed34
Facebook! my fat behind, hate the load of rubbish, and even more now. My computer was working perfect before I bothered that load of shite. Douglas Adams, wish you were here now for us.
Why do I sound like Raj from The Big Bang theory all of a sudden?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjNKwEV_QPM
Alastair, your preview vid is up on drinking on Panorama’s beeb site,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/panorama/hi/front_page/newsid_9696000/9696664.stm
Panorama page,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/panorama/hi/front_page/newsid_9696000/9696398.stm
The reason why I wanted to highlight eugenics is that I do not think this sort of thinking is restricted to the past.
Globalists these days want to have a world population of 500m in the name of “sustainable development”.
The United Nations, which was founded by bankers´ Council on Foreign Relations, has its Agenda 21.
And what do people think about the work Bill Gates is doing in Africa?
The difference between Fabian socialism and Communism was gradualism.
Fabian socialism still lives in the minds of people who want to turn the EU into a federation – whether they are bankers or politicians. Or freemasons.
H.G. Wells, a freemason, wrote books The Open Conspiracy (1928) and The New World Order (1939). He wanted to have a world government.
But there is nowhere to run from a global government – especially if it is totalitarian one as it will be.
Aldous Huxley knew about these plans thanks to his brother. Brave New World should be a warning to all of us. And do not forget Orwell.
The future with microchipped population will be even worse than the past under Communism. Collectivism will once again be used to control the masses.
United States of Europe will be formed after the fiscal union becames political union. This will the first step towards utopian socialist world government with total control of humankind.
As for racism, excellent article on the subject by Deborah Orr in the Guardian recently.
Racism has no basis in fact. We are all part of human race.
And we should all oppose the plans of globalist bankers and politicians who want to destroy capitalism, democracy and personal freedom.
We must say strong NO to their plans of world government, global currency and one-world religion.
Well said Olli, I entirely agree.
People are waking up slowly to what’s going on in this world. Alas some never will until it is far too late.
Re. the ‘work’ Bill Gates is doing in Africa! a tiny part of me does think that it would be better(for them) if those poor little children had never been conceived in the first place. However, no one should be ‘playing God’ with other people’s lives.
What is it you’re suggesting Gbc?
Bill Gates and his wife know they have become mega-super rich by happenstance and to a ridiculous wasteful level. The intellectual input would have been about the same had they made one hundredth or thousandth of what they have.
If they had limited the production and sales of their goods by quantity or by nation as some potty
method of not getting so uber-rich they could have been accused of even worse than the suspicions being suggested here (if I’m understanding your reticence properly).
Who is it that should not be playing god? The Gates or the NGOs?
I’m getting squeamish about the cynicism about philanthropy (without which the UK would have had even fewer libraries for the past 100yrs than it will have in the next few).
Are you really suggesting people like the Gates should not fund vaccination and education projects? Should they limit themselves to ‘modesty’?
Totally agreed Olli, good post. Eugenics is not only for the past, plenty of people still believe certain people should not be allowed to “breed”. How would they feel if their own children were killed?
There are governments with population control in place already, even though the evidence shows that in developed countries people limit their families anyway.
One world government would be the worst thing that could happen to the world, and one EU government would be the worst thing that could happen to the EU. I pray that Uncle Sam says strong and free to save us from it (without becoming it).
Absolutely it doesn’t mean they couldn’t have good ideas. People can disagree with them on that but think they are right on other things, just as some say Enoch Powell was clever even though they disagree with him on rivers of blood and all that.
I think the Beveridge report was a good thing, Keynes I’m not such a fan of though there is a school of thought that says its Neo-Keynesians who give Keynes a bad name.
E-petition has gained 3k since yesterday.
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/22670
Past 152k now.
Question is still whether the backbench schedulers will make time for the discussion these 152k people want (given that Dave had promised such slots whenever 100k have supported a petiton).
Today Dave has refused to include NHS professionals in talks at No10 unless they belong to groups that are declared pro-bill.
Apparently he is also unhappy with the appointment Vince Cable has just made to the HE equal access role. The backbench shcedulers have made time for discussion of that today.
So who’s the autocrat? Dave or head of scheduling?
I want Gingrich to win the nomination! He’s by far the smartest candidate in the field.
I merely wanted to talk about Keynes, Beveridge and eugenics. I didn’t seek to smear “the left” just because 2 of its number (if beveridge was indeed such) believed in something so horrid. Dave has demonstrated that there were plenty of others who believe in this too, and of course most of the left did not.
I fear your faith in ‘Uncle Sam’ is gravely misplaced reaguns.
There is a big question mark over the ‘vaccination’ projects M. I’ll try and find some links for you.
Further to my previous reply M. I’ve just googled Bill Gates vaccination population control – I don’t have time to read it all there is a lot of info. there.
Have I got it right?
You’re not a racist but you still have a variety of paranoia?
Don’t think I’d call it eugenics Ehtch but yes I know there is an argument that many of “the greatest generation” were lost and our gene pool felt the effects.
Don’t think I’d call it eugenics Ehtch but yes I know there is an argument that many of “the greatest generation” were lost and our gene pool felt the effects.
Well not so far Gilliebc. They have stood up for democracy and against totalitarianism pretty well so far, and if not them, who?
Well not so far Gilliebc. They have stood up for democracy and against totalitarianism pretty well so far, and if not them, who?
Avoiding the 2letters2aline problem 🙂
” ………………….I’ve just googled Bill Gates vaccination population control – I don’t
have time to read it all there is a lot of info. there……”
There certainly is a truckload Gbc, some odd domains and provenances in the hyperlinks.
I’m not sure eugenics is the same as birth control (although I suppose we are performing eugenics when we have amniocentesis tests. I had one and don’t know what I’d have done if I’d had a positive result … well I do but I’d have regretted it forever).
Yawning at myself ….. most things have pros and cons. The wisdom of smaller families has led to the freely-available abortions for women with girl foetuses in places like India and China, with the result that parents there now sometimes have to look abroad for a bride for their sons and sometimes even find themselves having to agree to making arrangements with their own siblings re nieces for ‘spare’ sons. In India at the moment it’s quite common for a whole generation of a village to get married at once!
I read a tweet the other day: ‘Twitter has made me genuinely care for people I’ve never met, Facebook has made me hate people I’ve known for years’
Think they’ve got a point.
Hi Michele,
Eugenics or birth control, it’s a tricky one I think. Looking at it from a westerner’s view point I can’t understand why these Africans continue to have so many children that they must know they are unable to feed properly! So as I said before a tiny part of me thinks it a good idea that these children don’t even get conceived in the first place. The same thing is happening in Afganistan also (starving children) and in other places too no doubt.
I suppose the real issue is that these Africans are possibly being made infertile without their consent or knowledge. It may be the best thing for them but I’m not sure anyone else has the right to take the choice away from them.
You’re right about amniocentesis it is eugenics if someone decides to abort a less than perfect baby. I hadn’t thought of it like that before. I was never offered amniocentesis during my one and only pregnancy and I honestly don’t know what I’d have done if things weren’t right. I think either way I would have regretted any decision. I’m not against abortion under certain circumstances but I’m afraid I have no time for women who use it as a method of birth control such as Barbara (5 abortions) Windsor. And those that choose to abort a perfectly healthy baby just because it’s the ‘wrong’ sex, that can never be acceptable I don’t think. It must throw things way out of kilter, as you mentioned the problems it’s caused in China and India. I didn’t know about those weird arrangements they have to make there nowadays! I guess the bottom line seems to be that nature shouldn’t be interfered with unless absolutely essential.
I think people should have information and be able to make a free choice.
People in developing countries traditionally have children so that the children can work, earn and support them, not vice versa.
Re the aborting of girls in developing countries – with information and choice hopefully people would one day realise that there is no point having boys if there are no girls for them to marry.
As for “amniocentesis” I have my own personal view but I know its a very difficult one.
People that have had no education and know nothing of the greater world, who don’t even have water let alone electricity/TV/news, just can’t anticipate what life can be like with fewer children. The pattern has always been for some to die of disease and that’s even more prevalent since HIV.
On the other hand we heard on Monday that polio is being eradicated; in countries where it still existed it was usual for crippled people to be left to depend on begging.
I’m sure we owe a lot to both the Gates and the NGOs about these changes and other UK schemes for texting a few pence to buy a mosquito net means malaria is being controlled too,
The whole cyclical thing – there having been no birth control so no chance to see family resources being less stretched with less children and that itself leading to lower child mortality (so less need to have more as insurance for one’s own old age etc etc etc).
If you live in a village with no FPC how do you get the pill or sterilised or even know of such things? We really don’t know we’re born …. not meant TiC 🙂
Nearly 157k this morning.
That’s 110k on in the past two weeks.
I wouldn’t disagree with any of that M.
We are very fortunate people indeed in our western world in comparison with those in the undeveloped ‘third’ world.
It doesn’t seem as if the missionary work which was very popular in the early part of the last century achieved much in terms of morality. I suppose the natives were too preoccupied in simply staying alive. We take for granted clean drinking water, education and health care. We really have very little to moan about in comparison. But I sometimes wonder that given we have all been on earth for about the same amount of time, how did we achieve so much and for others time has just stood still? I was just thinking aloud there really 🙂
Hi reaguns, yes information and education to enable people to make their own choices. That is certainly the key. Probably easier said than done though and will definitely take time, not to mention money and patience.
Incidentally reaguns I’ve just remembered you asked me somewhere or other about my sources for info. You probably may (or may not) recall the book I recommended to you recently i.e. ‘Brotherhood of Darkness’ by Dr. Stanley Monteith. It is an important piece of work because it gives an over-view of how we got where we are today and just who is in control. It is available to watch on you tube, which is what I did. Re. Voodoo Histories, is it a book?
That’s so true, Janiete.
” But I sometimes wonder that given we have all been on earth for about the same amount of time, how did we achieve so much and for others time has just stood still? I was just thinking aloud there really 🙂 ”
Read aloud as well, there are plenty of discussions of how we did so well: Democracy, capitalism, arguably socialism too, competition, technology, the rule of law, medicine.
Corruption has always been a major problem, studies have shown this in Cameroon and other places.
I know he’s seen as biased but Niall Ferguson (and rivals / contemporaries) have written good explanations.
Further to my previous reply, I found a book of that name by David Aaronovitch. Is that the one you mean reaguns?
Yes Voodoo Histories is a book by David Aaronovitch, I’ve not read it but read many reviews of it – it essentially sets out to debunk many conspiracy theories but also I believe shows that there are some real ones, sometimes hidden by the fake ones. For example US persecution of communist conspiracy in hollywood was actually a conspiracy itself.
I’ve not read Brotherhood of darkness either.
I would probably read both but have a lot of stuff to get to first.
Would rather read both in shorter article form to be honest.
Thats really good!
Thats the one yep, as I say I’ve not read it but it sounded like it tried to debunk a lot of conspiracy theories and talk about how they hide real issues. I don’t know if you’d like it, I have a friend who seems to be of the same view as you on most things and she doesn’t want to read it.
I wonder if it covers the banking industry. I presume it would debunk the “money is debt”, “the fed rules the world”, “goldman sachs rules the world” or would it? Would it say what is really going on with money? Before I’d buy it I’d need to know if it had a chapter on that.
I’m not so interested in the Elvis, Area 51, 9/11, Diana type conspiracies.
No I’m not interested in Elvis type conspiracy theories either. I’m fairly new to truth-seeking myself. In fact until about 18 months ago, I had no time for conspiracy theories or theorists at all! But someone posted a short post on AC’s site and I thought well let’s see what all the fuss is about. I like to think I’m a fair-minded person and that one should always look at both sides of any argument, so I did just that. I had been concerned for some time that all main political parties were much the same regarding big important issues and were definitely not governing in the interests of the people. And now I know why! If it’s the financial system you’re interested in reaguns you could do worse than watch the film Zeitgiest. It’s on you tube except when it’s taken off which is quite frequently. They have something to hide me thinks. Most conspiracy theories are all linked in some way to the huge conspiracy of how this world is run and exactly who is running the show. However, if what I’ve been reading about tonight has any truth in it then the whole house of cards is about to come down in the most spectacular way.