Man in a Shed: Gaza war

Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Another view on Gaza

From the receiving end of Hamas's campaign to murder :

And a slightly longer video fro Sderot.

This is a view that gets too little airtime, though I do note the BBC has at least mentioned these subjects and that some interviewers ( notably R5L ) challenge Hamas spokespeople and supporters on the morality of this. ( The answer is always the same to go on about calling random murder resistance and to cite other issues ).

Personally I'm not sure I would have taken the approach the Israelis have just now - but its to be remembered that they have tried a large range of other options first. Every concession is seen as weakness rather than a desire for an accommodation. Hamas has tried to kill Israeli citizens randomly and used its own as a human shield combined with its sick death cult of martyrdom.

The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman