The General Discussion Thread

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Okay as an experiment here it is. Discuss your favourite generals here!

Well perhaps… Really this is simply the place to post news-items, fun-items or whatever takes your fancy. In short just post what you want here.

It’s just another wee experiment – comments welcome.

Squonk.

[Image: General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett (Stephen Fry)]

17,285 thoughts on “The General Discussion Thread”

  1. Now The Trump is clearing away all opposition without retorting to forming a party or organizing stormtroopers.

    All he has to do is cower the press which has already started with those TV shootings in Virginia early this morning after his continuing challenge to the media last night.

    If Hitler had seen the way, we would have gotten the full dose much earlier.

  2. Hello Folks!

    Hey Squonk, here’s a familiar OS from an unfamiliar location for your server logs. Very slow ADSL here, so bad that my GMX Webmail keeps returning error messages…

    Reposted from craigmurray.org.uk:

    https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/08/kezia-dugdale-got-just-5217-votes/comment-page-8/#comment-546084

    Greetings from the Doune the Rabbit Hole site. It’s been a brilliant festival and we’ve been extremely lucky with the weather. I drove Craig back to Edinburgh last night and then returned to the site myself; Craig runs a fine bar and has worked himself to exhaustion.

    It was very wet this morning and the site is waterlogged, but the Sun is out again now and there are still plenty of volunteers clearing stuff back to storage. It was easily the best one yet; every band I heard played well and it was an excellent atmosphere.

  3. I’ve been getting some alarming messages that the global economic system may have collapsed in the last few days. If this was the result of our festival’s generosity leeching profit from the Big Players, we’re all terribly sorry.

  4. Clark.. Stunning fest

    And good to see you enjoying the sounds n Vibrancy…and again Cheers for letting me say hi to Gannet… Safe travels.

    Dreo

    Those Strings…Aye Magical… Roy Williamson was a multi Instrumentalist, and Wood worker… He invented many of those Stringed Instruments.. Waada Guy.

  6. Now we learn that Anders Breivik had a girl fiend Madeleine all the time he was committing his most serious crimes, starting with the stealing of that entrance sign to Auschwitz, and culminating in the mass murder on that summer island.

    She must have known about them, and probably aided and abetted them.

    The DM should be calling for her trial and incarceration rather than acting as if it is just an unexpected, sweet love affair.

  7. Trow..Sometimes you are too deep n Heavy for me…

    But i’d like to thank you for persistance…Fuck the red Spelling Crap….

    But i wish you don’t feel Lonely.. You have us Guys Here.. … Peace n light to ya

  10. Glad y’all found some peace at ‘Doune’. May you experience ‘Shanti’ for your investment.

    I’ve been researching but I’m not going barmy or anything. There is just so much to learn from growing. I just read some UK guy goes to Morocco every 60 days to get hash.
    He swallows 1.5 kilos in condoms. He deserves his high. 🙂

  11. but I’m not going barmy or anything.

    Great to Again to Hear from you Ben

    Hope yir Reseach is going well… The Longest Poem i Ever had Trouble with … Sorted.. Just a few days ago..
    Then effin thing is three lines Long…Intelligence of the Japanese For ya.. And My self 🙂

    Trow.. As i say… Cheers n Thanks for being aroon

  12. Really pretty close about the identity of the Bangkok bomber – i.e., someone using Turk Adam Karadag’s stolen passport, though Thai police refuse to say he is a Turk.

    Could be another Iranian that disgusting Gould and MI6 recruited to sabotage things like planes and places to get Chinese nationals furious with their government in Beijing.

    The bomber had not left Thailand, though, thanks to the posting his sketch all over the place, and offering a 200,000-pound reward for his capture.

  13. How can The Times call Julian Assange paranoid for fearing that the CIA and British associates want to kill him too after they assassinated leaker Gareth Williams in a most brutal way for leaking the Afghan File to him which The Guardian published without redacting its personal information, killed Gudrun Loftus by throwing her down the stairs at St. John’s College, Oxford for vowing to take his place, and then assassinated astrophysicist Steve Rawlings for merely asking probing questions about it all!

    Assange may be wrong about the killers wanting to kill him too, but they don’t shy away from killing anyone they suspect might prove troublesome in some obscure way, as even I can attest in great detail.

  14. MI6 has added outrageous insult to Gareth Williams; barbaric murder by masking out that he was a scumbag hacker who wanted, it seems, to exploit former President Bill Clinton’s womanizing by helping a friend know for sure who he was privately entertaining.

    Actually, Williams was helping the American spooks, especially the FBI, learn what the American 11, headed by sexy Anna Chapman, had encrypted on their laptops. The group had been recruited somewhat from the residence Williams had in Pimlico while on special service with the SIS, and was intended to catch sleeper Russian agents.

    You can imagine Williams’ outrage when he determined by they were being set up by the CIA as the quarry they were intended to keep track of, and started investigating who was behind it.

    Once the Agency leaned what he was up to, it had him poisoned, apparently by death-cap mushrooms, and by the time he realized what was afoot, it was too late to do anything about it, as the deleted calls to his family disclosed.

    Back in his Pimlico flat while dying, MI6 agents entered it, and conveniently placed him in that carry all from from which there was no escaped, and a location which promoted a process of decay which would hide what had really happened to him.

    Beats any brutality that the KGB ever resorted to.

  17. The media threw Gary Webb under a bus, and instead of helping American intelligence, particularly the CIA, do so, it should have helped sources – like Oliver North, who wrote Under Fire: an American Story about the drugs, the Contras and Iran; Captain Simon Hayward, a fellow conspirator who helped trigger a non-nuclear conclusion to the Cold War, and wrote Under Fire; My Own Story about some of it; Joseph Nye who wrote about why it had to be this way; and GMP’s John Stalker who tried to expose the Northern Ireland dimension of the plots – to be examined and exploited.

    Even Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall’s Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, and Captain James Rennie’s The Operators could help provide the context for the covert war, but you cannot tell Anglo-American reporters much about anything important, as I learned while being one of them.

    They think that they know it all!

  18. Posters interested in how the UK’s spooks have run up a bill of 11 million pounds during three years of surveillance on Julian Assange by no less than 30 agents on duty 24/7 should read the article on BUZZFeed News – which the Daily Telegraph has an article about today.

    Seems that the drunken, oversexed paranoid is driving the Ecuadorean Embassy in London bonkers, obviously an attempt to make his incarceration there more difficult, though his alleged entrance into its prohibited code room, and most suspiciously crashing down a bookcase in his room at the crack of dawn appear most dubious.

    Then. of course, Zinoviev did write that famous letter.

  19. I posted a while back about the politics of ganja as a coming war of propaganda and that the traditionalists will seek the weak link and exploit same. I suggested that a likely tactic will be to infiltrate orgs to create a division between two illusory rivals; I will call them the THC’s and the CBD’s. IOW the psychoactive patient versus the physiological patient. I found the following article interesting in that respect;

    “At one point, when I joined a new dispensary, I was told that the owners had decided to stop carrying Girl Scout Cookies for a while. They thought it was just too strong, and didn’t have a clear therapeutic use. I got the feeling they thought it was the Everclear of pot. But it’s so popular that they had to start selling it again. Also, I would like to point out that it is genuinely helpful for my RSIs. No, I’m not kidding — I actually do have a prescription for a reason.”

    Just so you understand, Girl Scout Cookie is a hybrid of up to three strains of cannabis.

    Note the disdain for anything which is not SOMA (body). Mind is not a medicinal excuse for cannabis use. It’s already starting. Follow the link;

    http://gizmodo.com/girl-scout-cookies-or-californias-most-notorious-strai-1689966240

  20. Don’t you love former Vice President Dick Cheney claiming that Barack Obama is the worst President in his lifetime who has done irreparable damage to the United States when Cheney was Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staff who helped obtain a pardon for Richard Nixon, the worst President ever: hurried congressional investigations of Iran-Contra, the most dangerous plots of the Cold War, so its major perpetrators either escaped prosecution or received pre-trial pardons; left Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in power after the first Gulf War so the Mediterranean could be rearranged to suit neo-con aims; and had to arrange Saddam’s bloody ouster during the second Gulf War after his total mismanagement of the 9/11 attacks proved an utter disaster.

    Cheney is America’s worst public servant ever who should have been removed from office over his war crimes in Iraq, especially since he still has no regrets about the mayhem produced there, and should now be locked up over them in some prison somewhere.

  21. How bad can The Guardian get – making out that Beijing isn’t interested in making peace, only in projecting power – as it has to deal with at least three US carrier battle groups and all kinds of attack submarines off its shores, new American attack harbors on shore of China’s neighbors, and various Pentagon space weapons, particularly space lasers and Boeing X37-B space shuttles, overhead, when China has nothing of the sort around the American homeland!

    This is just the worst of Washington’s terrible propaganda about the asymmetric warfare going on in the Far East.

  22. Just more failure to supply the proper context in articles is the collapse of the trial of the IRA’s John Downey for murdering four members of the Household Cavalry in Hyde Park in July 1982.

    The Press is making out that former Prime Minister Tony Blair ruined the investigation by a Common Committee into the issuance of “comfort letters’ to former IRA members who were still on the run which, of course, Downey was one, by refusing to testify before it – which threw the whole GFA in jeopardy.

    Of course, Blair intensified the dispute by calling for the DM to take down the offending article about the letters, but now he has lost a court case over the article, apparently drawing a line under the clever diversion.

    Actually, a murder trial of Downey would have recalled so many cans of worms associated with Th Troubles – the Shoot-to-Kill campaign in Northern Ireland carried out by Life Guardsman Lt. Simon Hayward, the quashed John Stalker inquiry to get to the bottom of it, the still unheld corner hearing into the brutal murder of IRA arms mover Francis Bradley, the apparent role of Hayward and Derrick Bird in the assassination of Sweden’s Prime Minister Olof Palme, Neil Wallis’ coverage of the set up of Hayward well after the fact, Bird going on the rampage when he thought he was being set up for the Stockholm shootings, etc., ad nauseam

    Certainly, Downey threatened to bring some of this up in a prosecution which was serious in convicting him for the Hyde Park murders, starting by calling Hayward aka Captain James Rennie as a witness.

    Could have resulted in the most explosive trial ever.

  24. I thought I was too old to learn anything but I was wrong again.

    If you want to have a friend; be a friend.

  25. Facebook won’t let me be a friend on Facebook. They’ve decided that my account is fake, locked me out and won’t accept any ID I have with me. FFS, I know dogs with Facebook accounts. What’s the point of a social networking site that won’t let me network socially?

  27. Clark; Alive and well glad to see. AA?

    Bri; would be glad to accommodate if laws in your sector made sense. Curiously, I’ve found numerous seed banks in the UK that don’t ship to the US where legal. The products are offered similarly to Bongs and Hashpipes in tobacco stores marked ‘ for tobacco use only’ for legal purposes.

    BTW; Just harvested for drying and curing about 13 oz tangerine dream. It was a disappointing stunted grow due to my inexperience. Next year those mistakes will go away (and new ones will appear) and hopefully I will have an in-ground crop in the range of 20 lbs for the non-profit dispensary collective I am associated with. (I am not NON-profit btw). In two years my goal is to breed a x between Ketama Landrace and Nepalese highlands, two of the last remaining genetic grandaddys. Wish me luck. If you make it to California you can enjoy a brief respite from unjust law. 🙂

  28. This shift in biz strategy is due to the arse-pain associated with ruminant production and maintenance. Haven’t made a dime one from that debacle. The good news is they eat on the cheap, and supplemental feed cost for each is about $6 per month.

    The original plan was to retire but there is the issue of god’s plan. Illness and unwise investment necessitates a cash crop in demand.

  29. Now madman Dick Cheney has helped secure passage of the Iran nuclear agreement by calling it “madness”.

    Let’s hope that the world’s biggest war criminal just keeps spouting off.

  30. Forget Killer Weed. How about tax-killing weed. Why is the UK so backward in it’s policies? It’s quite shameful, really.

    http://www.activistpost.com/2015/09/marijuana-revenue-is-so-high-in-colorado-state-will-have-to-reimburse-taxpayers.html

    When Colorado decided to legalize the recreational use of marijuana, everyone expected the state’s tax revenue to increase. What they didn’t realize at the time was that the state government might actually make too much money. So far the state has earned over $150 million from the 30% tax on pot, which exceeded expectations.

    Now they may have to pay some of that money back to the taxpayers. According to a 1992 amendment to Colorado’s constitution called the ‘Taxpayer Bill of Rights’ when the state earns more than they anticipated from a given industry, they have to return the difference to the people. When pot was first legalized the state didn’t expect a whole lot of money, so they underestimated future profits. Now they’ll have to find some way to give $50 million back to the public.

  31. I had a convo with a fellow coffee-shop customer this am. Complains of pain (roughly my age) in shoulder and knee. Takes some poison for pain from the local witch-doctor practicing medicine. I suggest CBD’s and he comes unglued due to prejudice and ignorance. Wife says it’s just as well because he’s Gay. Cluelessly I accept her perception. 🙂

  32. Don’t you love how the USA uses scientists for its own purposes, only to go after them as spies when it proves convenient.

    Just look at how Washington used Professor Li, a Chinese national who is a world expert on mapping, who led its probes of Mars and the Moon, only to go after him now as a Chinese spy.

    Of course, he could also be seen as an American one.

    Wonder if LI knew about what happened to Professor J. Reece Roth, a plasma expert, after his discoveries had helped pull off the Sichuan earthquake in May 2008 by hiding the lasers which caused it for working with a Chinese and Iranian graduate student.

    Roth went to prison for four years for giving them access to such knowledge.

  33. Ben, 🙂 you needn’t boast too much about the relaxation of your local drug laws; you haven’t had them that long, and where the ‘States go, the UK usually follows. Brilliant news about the excess tax revenue; pot may save the world yet, political bodies that can resist potential increases in revenue proving more difficult to develop than nuclear fusion.

    Seriously, congratulations on the new local regime.

  34. Trowbridge, at long last I’ve managed to both understand and agree with one of your comments – the one of September 8, 2015 at 9:21 pm.

  35. Wish I could go along with all the hoopla about Queen Elizabeth II becoming Britain’s longest reigning monarch.

    She should have retired long ago instead just hogging it all.

    Poor Victoria stayed so long because she had far less to be happy about.

    Elizabeth has had little to be unhappy about.

    Just helped make Charles, Margaret Rose, Diana and several others basket cases.

    Neither monarchs nor college professors should stay on until they are dragged out, feet first.

  36. Clark; Apologies if any offended by my critique of backward countries. 🙂 A review of posts shows much gloating on my part.

    I suspect the favorable conditions we currently enjoy will be short-lived in a sense.

    A Northern California cannabis contest and celebration called the Emerald Cup is slated for December. I signed up for updates and noticed that NO cannabis, other than those sold on site, would be allowed.

    The politics of ganja will necessarily become more sticky as the entrepreneurs, bureaucrats and Dick-to-crats seek their own comfort levels. I know that major tobacco cos have had a game plan in place for decades with clever brand names and attractive packaging and it’s just a matter of time before the Cartel greed heads are eclipsed by the honest businessmen.

  37. Clark; Another cultural dead-fall is the evolution of growers and it’s similar to what happened when PC’s were emerging and shareware was king. There used to be a lot of ‘shareware’ type growers who didn’t see their methods as a patent application. That’s changing now and will get worse.

  39. As explained in the video above, there are pros and cons seen in accordance to legalizing marijuana for Uruguay. The people who support the pros seem to stand on selfish means as in growing their own plants, smoking their own weed, and even smoking better weed. Ergo, they do not see the cons of registering with the government, the limitations of how much they can grow, or even what kind of weed they can get from recognized/registered pharmacies. And this is where the stigma for GMO marijuana comes into play.
    If the United States were to legalize marijuana from sea to shining sea, what regulations would be incorporated into said legalization? Also, who would benefit the most from legal marijuana? To understand the answer to these questions, it should be known that GMO companies like Monsanto, DuPont, and Dow Chemical (not farmers) benefit from two of the major crops in the United State, corn and soybeans. About 88 percent of all corn and 94 percent of all soy has been genetically modified, as reported by Phys Org.
    The one detail purposely left out in the previous paragraph about corn and soybeans is they are major cash crops, used in almost everything made conventionally as ingredients. Companies like Monsanto, DuPont, and Dow Chemical see marijuana as the next big cash crop after corn and soybeans. As a matter of fact, former Microsoft executive, Jamen Shively, previously announced plans back in 2013 to patent in the U.S. the first national brand of produced hemp imported from Mexico prior to countrywide legalization, as reported by Expanded Consciousness.
    Eventually, others will follow Jamen Shively’s footsteps possibly purchasing patents on certain strains of marijuana so only their version of it can be grown in the United States. Now it is true much of the news reporting on GMO marijuana push it as a possibility and not an eventuality. However, they are basing a lot of their assumptions on past practices of pro-GMO companies, such as what they did to milk for example.

    Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/2022362/government-aiming-to-legalize-weed-monsanto-unleash-gmo-marijuana/#BAgvPYTEXeLhuXKA.99

  41. Don’t you love Donald “El Duce’ Trump trashing everyone running against him, and lumping everything together with the Iranian nuclear agreement as if America has never done anything wrong with the country.

    It never did anything to put the Shah in power and keep him there. The American spies in its Embassy in Tehran were just poor little clerks, like the spies who helped keep Iran on side with Pentagon-made earthquakes just before the two Gulf Wars.

    Now Trump claims that the Obama administration should have gotten the American spies in Iran back, especially the one working for the WP, as part of the deal when he was collecting material, like the Garratts in China, to hit Tehran with another devastating earthquake or an Israeli strike like the one which knocked the smithereens out of Saddam’s nuclear program.

    The arrogance of our rabid fascist has no limits.

    Little wonder that Iran wants to see the end of Israel, and still keeps treating America as ‘The Great Satin’.

  42. Now we learn about Canadian photographer Christopher Herwig spending the last ten years, taking a photo every hour of bus stops in the former USSR as if it had no spying significance!

    What else could it be than determining where Soviet citizens could have been going to work, and still doing so!

    Then there were all the stops Moscow made to confuse Western spies where its covert facilities, especially underground ones, were!

    It is just the kind of spying that that Washington Post reporter was involved in, but the Western media doesn’t provide any clues about what Anglo-American covert government is up to, only bizarre photos of where the most unlikely bus stops of all are!

    No wonder raving loony ‘El Duce’ is well on his way to the White House.

  46. Maybe it’s nothing, but ever get the feeling democracy is being attacked by nefarious forces. A rhetorical question. *sigh*

  47. Sorry to piss on the party, but Corbyn may just might be enjoying a temporary voter hard-on similar to Donald Trump’s so called successes.

  48. Don’t think it’s quite that bad Ben. But yea, there is some waking up to do imo.

    The ‘deep state’ will be hard at work now, as they seem to be right atm, *cough*…

  50. The ‘Establishment’ are on the warpath and the hatchet has been thrown at a known major intention gateway once again striking the weakest link in CM’s hosting, the db socket.

    A first strike attack is cardinal in the neoCon bible, yet based on a premise the perp has no means of knowing the outcome, the payback. That is their weakness, their vulnerability and where our intention triumphs.

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