All-purpose news and politics thread: One Step Beyond!

[Iangould]

I read some Asian times, .

Jesus, no wonder you're confused.

[Iangould]

History itself is series of conspiracies. Electoral campaings are conspiracies.

No, they really aren't - and I've seen the insides of a few.

[Iangould]

FFS, just look at the current Daily Mail front page.

Big brother to log your drinking habits and waist size as GPs are forced to hand over confidential records

Former RAF sergeant, 76, bludgeoned wife to death with GARDEN GNOME after blazing row

A country divided: Stunning photographs capture lives of ordinary black Americans in segregated deep South
(The pictures in question are from 1967 but you'd need to read the fine print to know that.)

'They sold the children's toys for drugs': Ex-husband of lesbian who murdered pensioner reveals horror

A show of hands! That's how the Socialist Workers Party cleared a comrade of rape

[Iangould]

Let's try an exercise.

Here's a typical piece of horseshit from the front page of the Asia Times. you try and work out why the author is full of shit.

It's after midnight and I have a full day's work tomorrow so I'll probably get back to this in around 18 hours with the answers.

[Paradox]

Choblik makes the invisible connections:

It's simple. Most of the time some smart guys get together and try to get as many suckers as they can selling them an invisible product.

No, SOMETIMES UNSCRUPULOUS people get together and do that. Most of the time, it's just rapacious bastards that have the same aims without ever talking to each other.

[Iangould]

Most of the time some smart guys get together and try to get as many suckers as they can selling them an invisible product.

And one o those invisible products is conspiracy theories.

[Iangould]

The suicide bombing of the US embassy in Istanbul turns out to be the work of Marxists not Islamists.

But that doesn't fit with the standard narrative nor with my fellow atheists' "Those religious people sure are stupid and violent" narrative so lets all pretend we didn't know that.

[Paradox]

People are stupid and violent. But, oddly, it seems a foreign concept to so many.

[Iangould]

Here's your first clue that it's bullshit: it's by Pepe Escobar.

Google "Pepe Escobar" and "Osama Bin Laden" and then ask yourself why anything this guy writes should ever be taken seriously.

[Iangould]

Next clue: Mali's gold production is totally fucking trivial in the world context.

[Iangould]

Third clue: Chinese gold imports have nothing to do with the Bank of China buying gold.

Fourth clue: since the 1980's, China has held around 60% of its foreign reserves in dollars with most of the rest in Yen and Euros (well since the launch of the Euro). After the GFC China bought several hundred billion dollars in US bonds for the dual purposes of preventing a total economic collapse in their largest market and preventing a collapse in the US dollar which would have made their exports more expensive. Dollar assets as a percentage of Chinese foreign reserves peaked at around 60%. Since roughly the end of 2010, they've been selling dollar assets in order to get back to that 60% weighting.

Fifth clue: China's has a policy of eventually getting rid of the dollar peg since the 1990's and has been gradually widening the trading band and allowing the central value of the band to increase. The Yuan reached fair market value a couple of years ago, so formally abandoning the peg would have little impact on either currency.

[Ship]

Did The IMF just chant "Liar, liar, pants on fire" in unison at Argentina?

They did.

So does this mean it's time for another round of David Cameron is a douchebag from Kirchner in the hopes that Argentines won't notice what the IMF said?

Here's your first clue that it's bullshit: it's by Pepe Escobar.

Appeared on Press TV and the Alex Jones show. Quite the resumé.

[Iangould]

So does this mean it's time for another round of David Cameron is a douchebag from Kirchner in the hopes that Argentines won't notice what the IMF said?



Appeared on Press TV and the Alex Jones show. Quite the resumé.

Osama bin Laden - also the No 1 target of the CIA's counter-terrorism center - is now a superstar playing the bad guy in some sort of planetary Hollywood fiction. Yet inside Afghanistan today, where the Saudi Arabian lives in exile, Osama is a minor character. He is ill and always in hiding - usually "somewhere near Kabul". Once in a while he travels incognito to Peshawar. His organization, the Al Qa'Ida, is split, and in tatters. The Taliban owe him a lot for his past deeds towards the movement and in putting them in power in Afghanistan - contributing with a stack of his own personal fortune of millions of dollars. But no longer an asset, he has become a liability.

Pepe Escobar 30 August 2001.

That's right, less than two weeks before 9/11 Escobar was proclaiming Al Qaida was "in tatters".

[Shikidum]

So does this mean it's time for another round of David Cameron is a douchebag from Kirchner in the hopes that Argentines won't notice what the IMF said?



Appeared on Press TV and the Alex Jones show. Quite the resumé.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLkWvFbXBhw

I wonder when will Krugman show up there.

[Iangould]

Choblik take 8 minutes and learn far more of value than you could from a year of Escobar's drivel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=8mz8MJ9gSio