šŸ“° The most exciting thing to happen in Salisbury since Stonehenge was created

You expect it in Internet discussions.

Thatā€™s our fucking Foreign Secretary.

Stupid fucker should have spent less time in English and more time in History. That is being charitable.

An honest assessment would suggest that heā€™s a very educated man who knows the period very well, including the part where his hero won the war but lost the Empire.

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Not wanting to support batty Boris, but wasnā€™t he just agreeing with Labour MP Ian Austinā€™s comments about Putin and Hitler?

This Ian Austin?

Ian Austin is a twat. Heā€™ll be deselected provided Labour get enough time to do it. Weirdly enough, he probably wonā€™t if the Tories call a really big Russia-based election with Corbyn painted as Stalin.

Bonus Ian Austin twattery. An impassioned defence of zero-hours Maccy Ds while digging the knife into the leadership.

https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/labour-mp-slams-partys-snobby-11213803

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Thought this was going to be Bristolian trip hop:

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Ah how many weeks has it taken to bring in Independent Experts?

Meanwhile Iā€™m off out to our local Chinese Mall, Dragonmart.

Itā€™s the only place in town that sells obscure and weird cheap stuff.

We need a couple of Hazmat suits as weā€™ll be visiting the family in Salisbury at the end of April.

(Only staying for the least amount of time possible obviously and sure wonā€™t be going out for any Pizzas)

Just blame the Ruskies eh?

Strangely I didnā€™t notice a mention on BBC news, but there was the usual anti Russian take on the Russian press conference about the poisoning episode & the Putin / Hitler comedy comparison.

Funny thatā€¦

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Well, the judgement does pretty much sum up the fact that the Govt are liars.

The Porton Down official doesnā€™t confirm it is definitely a Novochok but categorically says it is Novochok or similar

&

The NHS Trust refuses to be drawn on non clinical matters.

Worryingly, or sadly, the Judge also has to rely on Court of Protection rules as no one has come forward in support of the victims, who appear unlikely to recoverā€¦

I had an interesting chat in the local last night with a neighbour who is an ex Colonel in army military intelligence. He is firmly of the opinion that ā€œweā€ had nothing to do with this and that it was Russian ops. When I asked him why they just didnt take him out when he defected he said that this sends a stronger message to anyone thinking of defecting. That they can take you out any place, any time. You are never safe. It is also Putin playing the biggest swinging dick game - he can do what he wants, where he wants and doesnt give a stuff about sovereignty. When I asked him how he could be so sure it wasnt a set up he said that our ops teams donā€™t do things like this. This comes from a man who served in Iraq and Northern Ireland.

@saintbletch once said that we should follow people on social media that we donā€™t agree with. This bloke is one such for me.

He is a very clever person who plays on semantics a lot. He accuses the governement of semantics all the time yet is happy to play with them himself.

Donā€™t get me wrong I think BoJo (sorry for the contraction NYS) is a buffoon and a liability and he should be very careful with what he says. However I do think La Murray has a very big axe to grind and he also needs to be careful what he says.

Wonā€™t stop me reading him with @saintbletch 's excellent advice ringing in my skull

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Seeing as this is the same chap who was sued for libel by some dude from the Mail, he still perserveres with strong headlines and content. Either he is a brave man or a fucking idiot.

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He won the libel case, so smarter than the mail bloke. That doesnā€™t really tell us anything about how smart he is admittedly.

He seems to be outdoing May and Boris as well, but thatā€™s no help in determining intellect either.

Smarter than the mail and the bulk of cabinet ministers, iā€™m disappointed to say, no longer gives any insight to a persons intellect.

I agree with myself.

I have a similar reaction to Murray as you, Bob. Thereā€™s something about the way he lays out his case that seems as extreme as those that heā€™s calling out.

That doesnā€™t mean that I doubt what heā€™s saying is true. On Salisbury I could quite easily believe heā€™s a lone voice of truth, but I get a sense that heā€™s over-egging it and that he has quite some agenda.

But donā€™t we all?

He made a post a couple of weeks ago where he suggested that Israel had the capability to have been behind the Salisbury nerve agent attack and I really couldnā€™t understand why he brought them into the discussion.

It struck me as an odd direction for his discussion to go in.

Still does.

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More like settled out of court

He also burnt through Ā£100k of other peoples money defending it

Will he ask other people to fund the next one?

Yes. It worked last time.

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The Israel connection gets mentioned in relation to nuclear weapons too, largely because the nation has them but isnā€™t signed up to any non-proliferation treaties.

It is one of five voting countries not to ratify OPCW. The others are South Sudan, Palestine, Egypt and North Korea.

Why isnā€™t Israel signed up to the OPCW? How does it get to criticise the likes of Syria in unproven cases when it cannot even say, officially, that chemical weapons are a bad thing and must be controlled, subjecting themselves to international inspection?

If one were to begin an investigation of where a proliferated chemical weapon sprung from, I do not think it unreasonable to look at countries that officially, arenā€™t that arsed about their proliferation.

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Fair comment there @pap

Yep, absolutely fair comment.

I can see why the Israeli position on such weapons should be discussed.

However, IIRC, the suggestion that israel has chemical weapons appeared midway through a blog article criticising the lazy leap to a Russia-shaped conclusion to the question of the source of the weapons.

At one point he was saying the leap to the conclusion that ā€œRussia has weapons ergo Russia is responsibleā€ was lazy, next he lazily introduces Israel to the conversation.

Bringing Israel into the discussion at that point and at such a tangent (from somebody who has been critical of Israel in the past) made him look like a man carrying a hammer thinking that everything he sees is a nail.

I even asked @goatboy if Iā€™d missed a real connection to Israel. He said I hadnā€™t.

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I think Murray could and should have joined the dots much better. Had he linked it to the 2013 chemical attack in Syria, he might have been on solid ground. The OPCWā€™s report eventually ended up pointing blame away from the Assad regime.

Itā€™s also a very similar story, structurally. In both cases, the blame is cast before an investigation was undertaken. In both cases, calls for international interventions ensued. In both cases, it made no political or strategic sense for the quickly identified perpetrator to have perpetrated the attack.

To recap 2013, the attack took place six months after Obama had issued a US red line that any chemical weapons use would trigger a US military intervention in Syria. Government forces were turning the tide against the rebels, the course of the war already shifting to where we are now. Assad was winning, and as long as he didnā€™t use chemical weapons, the US would not get involved.

The winning strategy was not to use chemical weapons, yet we are to believe that he and his government would do the one thing that would guarantee US involvement, and defeat.

In both cases, the ā€œweasel wordsā€ Murray refers to were used, and in both cases, the accusations were never proven.

If Murray had written that, and pointed out that the Israeli government officially confirmed_ _that Assad had used chemical weapons, its inclusion might have been less incongruent.

He might also have waited for Israelā€™s official statement this time, which doesnā€™t mention Russia at all.

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Would it be ok to mention a country, if said country had already been identified with certainty, as having attempted to assassinate someone on foreign soil with a nerve agent?