One of the best bits of running a blogsite is the ability to read live responses, and learn from the comment threads that follow one’s posts….and also the emails sent direct to the author. The downside of nutters and occasionally seriously deranged people can be a trial, but usually I find value is added to a piece whether threaders agree with me or not. So just for a change, I thought it might be nice to include some recent stuff I’ve written in reply. [In each example, I have used a précis to sum up what the threaders wrote, because I want to protect their anonymity.]
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The Tommy Robinson case
There are few more highly-charged issues at the moment than the arrest and imprisonment of the man who has given himself the pseudonym ‘Tommy Robinson’. He is without question a showboating attention-seeker with a troubled life history. He’s certainly not my cup of tea, and it has emerged since his arrest that Robinson was in clear contempt of a previous Court Order: thus his imprisonment was “legal” in the very narrowest sense of the term.
A lot of law, however, is about intent: of the defendant, and also of the police, State and judiciary trying him. My view remains as follows:
- TR is an exhibitionist, but in a cause he believes to be just. As it happens, so do I. I think if there were more “exhibitionists” in the Waspi organisation, for example, they would be a lot further down the road to justice than they are.
- The intent of the police in this case was, it seems clear to me, to make an example of Robinson. I understand from reliable sources that they knew in advance what he was going to do, an intent they could have foiled by asking him on arrival – given the nature of the case – to show restraint in the interests of a genuinely fair trial….and further trials to come.
- The British State was also very happy to be given an opportunity to virtue-signal against “racism”, but in the case of TR I have yet to see a single positive piece of evidence to suggest he is a racist. His beef is with a religion which not only has precepts most British people would regard as abhorrent, it is alos actively engaged (and has been for some time) in shouting about its population weight while showing serial contempt for democracy and liberal values relating to the expression of an opinion.
- The arrest and imprisonment of “Tommy” does not compare in any ‘fair’ sense with the consistent leniency shown to Britain’s Islamic population – where, for example, the most ludicrous defences – “He did not realise that raping children was wrong in British culture” and “His English is limited” – have been accepted by Judges and resulted in very light sentences.
After my second post on the subject, I was referred to The Secret Barrister’s blog by a Slog reader, and found it on the one hand extremely informative, but on the other hand hugely élitist and Left-biased. So I posted to that effect.
A threader then appeared at my site to wonder why this was all I had against TSB, explaining (in that and a second thread) that I seemed unable to distinguish between points of law and socio-political opinion. His thread comment on the whole, however, was again enlightening and well-argued. This was my response:
‘I understand perfectly well your desire to make the Law and personal opinion mutually exclusive; but they aren’t and never have been. The term used when approaching lawyers (of which I have over forty years of corporate and private experience) is “to seek a legal opinion”. The Law (its existence or wisdom or indeed perversion) is not fixed at all: it is almost always a matter of opinion. I have many times asked a counsel whether we would win or not in a given case, only to be told, “Hard to tell old boy…it all depends on the Judge on the day”.
The Law doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Andy Coulson didn’t get 17 weeks in jail for industrial scale phone hacking, nor did Rebekah Brooks get to choose her charges, because the Law is unchanging and sacrosanct. Coulson didn’t get off his second trial for libel by a judge dismissing the jury on that basis. They escaped justice because of who they were and what they knew. Elm House, Monday Club paedophilia junkets et al led directly to grooming gangs because the Law turned a blind eye.
Your outlook I take to be systemic, which is your choice. My choice is to analyse socio-legal issues on the basis of social anthropology: I am more your Dahrendorf kind of “people” bloke than a Talcott Parsons “little boxes” chap.
Everything is connected. JW’
I think we must make a distinction between legal opinion and political bias. To me – as with journalism – political bias has no place in the Law. It leads inevitably to the Show Trial if allowed to flourish.
I’d like to hear what other readers think – and obviously, this offer is fully open to the threader who felt I was wrong.
Central banking’s real role in the World
I recently received an email referring to this video on the subject of “how global banking really works”. The person felt that it might be a bit “out there” and down the rabbit-hole. Having viewed the interview (it dealt a lot with how the various central banks, the BIS and the IMF variously loot the wealth of nations) I responded as follows:
‘I wish it did sound “out there”, but it isn’t at all. We still lack a sensible explanation for why Brown sold our Gold on BoE advice at its lowest point in history….a move that has increased our vulnerability to geopolitical pressure. The system operates on the basis of its institutions sounding like government-owned concerns, but of course they aren’t. The US ‘Federal’ Reserve has nothing whatever to do with the federal government, being owned and run by monetary economists and banks. The IMF is directly answerable to the BIS, although the oil-State Dept-Pentagon axis of the US has a dominant role in it. Hiring Lagarde was a sop to Basel. At the same time, the ECB under Trichet lent the fledgling ClubMed sums they could never repay, and from that stemmed total control of Greece as a vassal State.
Draghi, it goes without saying, is a senior member of the Club.One interesting aspect for me over the years, however, has been the almost total lack of Jews in the operation. Neither Washington nor Basel wanted DSK, as a left-wing Jewish reformer, to get the IMF job, so they took him out….a joint operation between the French & American security services, and one in which Fed Treasury chairman Tim Geithner was heavily involved. Jewish influence in the banking system is obviously enormous, but when you dig down into it they have almost nothing to do with senior globalised central banking
Jewish wealth is overwhelmingly in real estate, infrastructure, a dozen or so private wealth (family) fronts and of course Israel. They have little or nothing to do with oil, arms, multinational marketing or hitech. But they do wield immense power via their genius for auditing, legalese, accountancy and banking product development. The most powerful banking firm in that sector is Goldman Sachs.
As I’ve tried to point out on the blog, there is no one ‘deep state NWO Elders of Zion’ secret society running the show. In reality, there are several Alt States. The current list consists of fractional reserve banking, energy (oil), the media on & offline, the militaries, Islam, the Church of Rome, multinational business, the CIA, MI5 & 6 and coming up fast, the cybernetics of hacking and weaponry.
Much of the time, these self-styled élites have shared interests and rub along together perfectly well. Sometimes they are in direct opposition. I don’t think Trump is part of this – if anything he’s caught up in it. He hates the oil business, for example, and distrusts Wall Street. He’s more your sort of brainless pussy-grabbing alpha male with a heavy streak of schmalz and nostalgia.
There are people there who’ve been thrust upon him like Dimon and McMasters: he talks glowingly in public about them, but he’s been trying to fire McMadman for ten months. The CIA/State club (whom Trump helped to stuff the FBI) seems now to be in the ascendancy – witness the Pompeo and Bolton appointments – but they too are tied to Texan oil. So every step he takes has the potential for blowing his legs off. Even in the White House, we see various Alt States squabbling and jostling for power. The Republican Party, in stark contrast, is absolutely nowhere.’
Most of this response is based on hard factual information and recorded events. Some of it is informed conjecture. Again, I’d like to know what others think.
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