Later this year the venerable incandescent lightbulb is going to be banned in many countries in the west. The reasoning behind this legislative ban is that the bulbs are inefficient, and removing them from use will save energy and reduce the amount of ‘carbon’ that is released into the atmosphere by the people who use them.

As a replacement for these bulbs, ‘energy efficient’ fluorescent light bulbs are planned to replace the incandescent light bulb, by the force of law.

All of the production lines that used to produce the incandescent light bulb have either been stopped or are in the process of being stopped. Capital has been diverted to the production of fluorescent light bulbs, and manufacturing capacity of the factories that make them has been increased to meet the demand caused by the ban on incandescent bulbs.

The incandescent light bulb is an old technology, developed and patented by Thomas Edison, and refined over many decades. They are cheap to manufacture, made of simple, 100% recyclable non toxic parts (glass, steel and tungsten), and there are literally billions of receptacles that have been designed to accommodate their shape.

The new ‘Environmentally Friendly’, ‘energy saving’ compact fluorescent lightbulbs are expensive to manufacture, have plastic parts, are not simple in design and contain poisons like mercury, making it necessary to dispose of them carefully, lest the mercury escape and polluting the environment and poisoning people.

The new bulbs also produce a hideous, unpleasant light that flickers at the rate of the mains. These bulbs have been demonstrated to have deleterious effects on people who are sensitive to them, causing them migraine headaches and eye strain.

Now, as the ban on the incandescent light bulb is about to come into force, we read the following:

Boffins: Ordinary lightbulbs can be made efficient, cheaply

Incandescents nearing extinction: Impeccable timing, everyone
By Lewis Page

Posted in Physics, 1st June 2009 11:03 GMT

Just as authorities in much of the Western world have moved to phase out the incandescent lightbulb, American boffins believe they have developed a process which can make the oldschool lights more efficient than energy-saving lamps.

Optics boffins at the Rochester Uni in New York state say they’ve developed a process in which an ordinary lighbulb is zapped with a femtosecond-long pulse of extremely high-energy laser light. The laser blast travels through the glass to hit the tungsten filament, causing complex nano- and micro-structures to form on its surface.

Once the lasered light bulb is than powered up, according to the Rochester scientists, it emits a lot more light for the same energy compared to an untreated bulb – equivalent to 40 per cent energy savings. The process of lasing incandescent bulbs wouldn’t be expensive, apparently, so they’d remain cheap compared to fluorescent energy-saving jobs.

According to Rochester Uni:

The process could make a light as bright as a 100-watt bulb consume less electricity than a 60-watt bulb while remaining far cheaper and radiating a more pleasant light than a fluorescent bulb. Despite the incredible intensity involved, the femtosecond laser can be powered by a simple wall outlet, meaning that when the process is refined, implementing it to augment regular light bulbs should be relatively simple.

It seems that Professor Chunlei Guo of Rochester hit upon the idea of brightening-up lightbulb filaments following earlier experiments in which he and his team used laser zapping to turn metals completely black. This worked so well that Guo and his cohorts wondered if they could reverse the process.

“We fired the laser beam right through the glass of the bulb and altered a small area on the filament,” says the prof. “When we lit the bulb, we could actually see this one patch was clearly brighter than the rest of the filament, but there was no change in the bulb’s energy usage.”

It seems that Guo and his team of lightbulb-blasting boffins can also produce other strange effects, getting incandescent bulbs to emit partially polarised or differently-coloured light – without the energy-wasting filters that would normally be necessary.

It’s the efficiency-enhancement aspect of the studies which could make headlines, however. Both the US and European Union governments are now committed to firm timetables which will see incandescent bulbs phased out in favour of more energy-efficient alternatives, such as fluorescents. This is being done in order to save energy and so lower carbon emissions. But if it’s as simple as Guo suggests to enhance an incandescent with his laser process, this may turn out to have been an unnecessary or even retrograde step.

Guo’s research has been accepted for publication by the journal Applied Physics Letters, but isn’t out yet. In the meantime, there’s a pop-sci release from the university here.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/01/light_bulb_laser_blast_enhancement/

This is a perfect example of why the state should have no say in what technology firms can produce and which people can and cannot have access to.

In their zeal to ‘protect the environment’ the state has diverted capital and resources away from the well established incandescent lightbulb production lines to the new fluorescent lightbulb lines, that have ramped up manufacturing capacity in order to meet the artificially stimulated demand for the new bulbs.

The decision to ban the incandescent lightbulb was made with all of the information the legislatures had to hand; i.e. all the relevant facts about the different types of bulb that were available in 2007/2008. What they did not and could not take into account was the research in the above article, which, had they known about it, would have prevented them from legislating for the ban.

This is the central problem with the state interfering with technology; no one can predict the future. Now that the law is about to come into force, we are in a situation where capital has been wasted and misdirected, resources wasted and misdirected and depending on the state of the decommissioning of the incandescent bulb lines, no costless way back to the manufacturing of incandescent lightbulbs.

The state, by its nature, is incompetent. They cannot predict the future and they are not omniscient. In order to be able to legislate effectively, especially where technology is concerned, they would need to be omniscient, with perfect knowledge of every piece and field of ongoing research and technology, and the potential of each piece and field of research and technology. The enormity of this amount of knowledge is beyond the capacity of any man; it would mean being able to apply each existing technology (implemented or not) and each piece of research against each other (in the case above, femtosecond lasers and incandescent light bulbs), considering the effect of multiples of them upon each other in succession, and then considering the knock on effects of each of these, say ten levels down on the tree. This would produce a multi dimensional matrix / tree with a size bigger than the universe. Only then would they be able to synthesize an optimal plan that would maximize the production and movements of capital to reach any particular goal, and of course, who chooses the appropriate goals is something to consider…. for another post.

Applying a femtosecond laser to incandescent lightbulbs is one solution that has produced significant savings. Who knows what other treatments, changes in filament formulation, the glass envelope etc etc will produce? Certainly, the state cannot possibly predict them. What the state can do however, is prevent innovation and destroy potential breakthroughs, savings and progress.

The state is a bumbler, a reactive and ignorant dealer; they are like a cave man being tasked to turn off a diesel engine that has been left running. Instead of getting into the car by actuating the door handle and turing the key counter clockwise, the caveman takes his club out and beats against the hood covering engine until it stops running. Of course, he claims success when it stops, when in fact the tank has run out of gas and the engine cuts out of its own accord. But I digress.

This femtosecond laser process, an inexpensive, and easy add on to any incandescent lightbulb production line, would have saved billions in electricity bills, spared the environment – and our bodies – from tonnes of mercury poisoning, eliminated the need to build bulb recycling plants and spared the health of many millions of people, with all the costs attendant on that. Then there are all the other applications of this femtosecond laser technology that are now going to be delayed or which will not now come into existence.

Think about it; the widespread deployment of femtosecond flashers would mean designing modular systems for resale to manufacturers; out of that design and manufacturing process, other processes will have emerged. Also, secondary uses of these flashers would have been subsequently discovered, which would have other knock on effects. The innovation cascade resulting from this process is what the state has destroyed.

When you apply this example to any other industry or technology where the state legislates, and take into account the default incompetence that inheres in the people that make these decisions, you can begin to get a glimpse of the suboptimal world that we are now in. Imagine what sort of world it would be had the state not interfered in any way with any technology. To put it into perspective, think of the ubiquity of cheap mobile phones, and then apply that example to every expensive technology that the state has controlled in any way… like the automobile. Imagine how much more efficient, inexpensive, clean and beneficial cars would be had the state stayed out of the business of the details of car manufacture.

‘Consumer advocates’ would tell you that cars are safer now only because the state intervened in the manufacturing process. This may or may not be the case, but what is certain is that cars would be safer now had the state not interfered with the manufacture of cars. I do not know of a single person who would not pick a safer car over an unsafe one, and since competition is fierce in car manufacture, this fact would be taken into account at every point the design stage, producing just the sort of cars that people want, and cars that people did not know that they wanted. Think iPhone here; once you see it, you want it; you did not know that you would want it before it existed… the same could be said for the very idea of cellular phones themselves.

Extrapolating from all of this, it is clear that in many aspects of the way we live, we are existing in a world that is grossly distorted and sub-optimal. This world could be better in every way by orders of magnitude had the destructive and disruptive state not interfered with the innovations and interactions of men.

The single worst interference in technology has been the system of Patents. The system of state granted monopolies on ideas has been a total disaster, causing distortion and disruption for generations, throwing us off the optimal path down the years leading to a future that is literally retarded by a century or more of compounded diversions. See ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly‘ for the full, and truly horrifying story of this.

If you are one of those people who have not drunk the Environmentalism Kool-Aid, then you will realize that state intervention in technology is the worst possible thing to do to protect the environment. Only when technology is unleashed can the imaginations and inventions of men be applied dynamically across the maximum number of fields to produce the sort of efficiencies that are needed.

Then again if you have drunk the ‘E Kool-Aid’, by definition you have no imagination, are science illiterate, irrationally anti business and are incapable of understanding any of this.

Nick Clegg chimes in on the Guardian with a well crafted piece demonstrating his complete lack of understanding of what the real problem is. I was going to entitle this post ‘Foxes call for chicken coop redesign’. But thought better of it.

Nick Clegg: Bar the gates. No summer holiday before the overhaul
Warm words and rhetoric are easy. We must seize the mood and enact a radical programme of reform within 100 days

Why the rush nick? The British Form of Government^®, whatever your opinion of it, took ONE THOUSAND YEARS to get to this state. Do you really think that you have not only the right, but the capability to redesign it in ONE HUNDRED DAYS. That is the very definition of conceit. You people are so full of FAIL, so terrible, so spineless, murderous, rudderless and worthless that you could not be trusted to design a new milk bottle, let alone a form of government that is ancient.

Furthermore, if everything is to be torn up, why should YOUR voice be louder than anyone else’s? Just who the hell do you think you are?

Finally the dam has broken, and everyone is talking about changing Britain’s political system. For decades reformers have been thwarted by Westminster inertia. But the MPs’ expenses scandal has overturned old certainties and made change possible.

As bad as it may seem this ‘crisis’ is not enough of a reason to destroy something that is 1000 years old, wether you agree with it or not, and certainly the insane people who sit there should not be the ones who ‘reimagine’ it.

This moment must be seized by all who want a different kind of politics. Warm words, rhetoric and consideration are not enough; indeed, they are a guarantee that little will happen. So let us bar the gates of Westminster and stop MPs leaving for their summer holidays until this crisis has been sorted out, and every nook and cranny of our political system has been reformed.

This is so ridiculous that I laughed out loud.

You want to reform Parliament, while all of the electorate in the country are away on THEIR holidays, sunning themselves in Dubai, while you make everything WORSE without anyone watching…..ROTFL!

Today I’m setting out a plan of action to get all the changes we need delivered in just 100 days

What’s the rush? The evil that has been emanating from that house has been going on for years; why the need to act quickly? If you want to do something quickly, why not remove all laws from the statute books that are the cause of everyones anger? The expenses scandal is merely the pin that has popped the boil. It is the final straw. How is it that you cannot see this?!

– making it possible for MPs to be sacked by constituents,

Irrelevant; if your MP sits and votes your rights away, and then you sack her, what does that do to the legislation she voted for? NOTHING. Nick Clegg and his party of FAIL are sour grape class warriors, interested in punishing everyone and not in the real things that matter

abolishing the House of Lords,

See what I mean? 70′s style class war that is the hallmark of the sour graper. No one cares that there is an unelected upper house; in fact, they have been useful in resisting the excesses of the lower house. This obsession with abolishing the lords is like journalists interviewing journalists about journalism. The only thing that matters in this, the real crisis, is the killing of the British people by the incredible burden of laws and the police state. A house of lords in a country where everyone’s rights are respected is completely tolerable; after all, someone has to organize the street sweepers. As long as that is all they are doing, who cares how they got there?

getting corrupt money out of politics and changing the electoral system to give everyone a voice.

Proportional representation; this will benefit only Nick Clegg’s party. It is a non issue when put against the core problem; power itself. A proportionally represented parliament that votes for illegal wars, ID Cards and ContactPoint is just as bad as one that is elected the old way.

People will say it isn’t possible – parliament can’t act that quickly.

‘Some people say‘? Actually, we say that it doesn’t matter wether or not it is possible. But you read that.

I say the innate conservatism that marks out our political establishment is part of the problem. Let’s stop all this self-congratulatory hype about the mother of parliaments and get on with improving it.

No one cares. Dismantle the police state and the 3000+ police state laws of Tony Bliar and everything else, using the old system, before you start tearing down parliament and replacing it with Parliament 2.0.

Momentum will ebb away unless we act quickly.

Its always best to act after careful thought and never in haste. This demonstrates that you are not fit to lead a donkey.

Delay would be a victory for those who want to confine change to the bare minimum – the two establishment parties who will talk up reform long enough for the storm to pass, then kick it into the long grass for good.

The whole thing is over…. that is what you DO NOT UNDERSTAND Mr FAIL!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/27/nick-clegg-a-new-politics

Who is the ‘We’ in this? In this case, it means the foxes who want to design a streamlined chicken coop with racing lines on the outside.

No thanks Nick Clegg… 100% FAIL.

If you want to discover the truth about Bretton Woods, the Dollar and how ‘your’ money has been debased, read ‘What Has Government Done to Our Money?‘. It gives the entire history of the aspects of money that are relevant to you right now.

The hardback edition costs seventeen Federal Reserve Notes. It is a beautiful edition; I strongly recommend that you buy it.

Madeline Bunting writes at the Grauniad.

She has penned a breathtaking piece of trash; terrifying in its ignorance, its basis in illogic and bone shaking fear.

It is terrifying because she is an example of the devotees of the new secular religion of Environmentalism who are polluting our internets and taking up our time with their increasingly shrill and absurd claims.

And these shrill noises are going to get worse as more and more data emerges to destroy their false religion. They will do anything for their religion and because they are irrational and have no holy book to follow, they can change the focus of their religion at will.

First the threat to the environment was the coming of a New Ice Age. Then it was Global Warming. Now it is Climate Change. Each time, as the data shows that what they believe is not true, they change what they believe.

I have no problem with people following the religion of Environmentalism. They can believe in Santa Claus for all I care. the problem I have with the religious devotees of Environmentalism is that these people are ready and willing to make blood sacrifices on the altar of their new religion, and the blood they will be sacrificing will be yours and the families of other people.

Similar to the Malthusian “mass cull” enthusiasts Attenborogh and Porritt, Madeline Bunting wants everyone to be entered into the most fantastic and fine grained totalitarian system of absolute control in order to satisfy her insane Environmentalist agenda of complete degradation and subservience to Gaia.

These people feel a deep seated guilt at having lived in comparative prosperity, and they are desperate to ‘pay back’ for what ‘they’ have ‘taken’. The problem is, they want to superimpose their guilt onto everyone who lives in their part of the world. Like the Eugenics boosters who will not kill themselves and their children, Madeline Bunting is not willing to suffer alone as a dignified religious fanatic; she must CONVERT everyone, and drag them down into her pit of excrement.

Read the rest of this entry »

A valiant soldier alerted me to this:

Another arsehole here…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8057785.stm

Advocates of home birth have, within the last month, claimed that “the vast majority of women have low-risk pregnancies”.

In fact, by all accepted standards, more than half of women have, or will develop, risk factors that make home birth unwise.

He FAILS by not pointing out – or not even realizing, more likely – that the “accepted standards” are those which he and his ilk have determined.

100% correct.

Now.

This article was written by Professor Philip Steer who is a man, not a woman. He is, “British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology editor-in-chief”.

What is ‘Obstetrics’?

Obstetrics (from the Latin obstare, “to stand by”) is the surgical specialty dealing with the care of women and their children during pregnancy, childbirth and the puerperium. Midwifery is the non-medical equivalent. Veterinary obstetrics is the same concept for veterinary medicine.

[...]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstetrics

So, now you have all that you need to know.

This man, this MALE, has based his entire career on treating pregnancy and birth as if they were a medical condition and not a perfectly natural occurrence that does not, on average require intervention of any kind.

I can tell you this; if MEN gave birth instead of WOMEN, NO MAN ON THIS PLANET WOULD PUT UP WITH THE NONSENSE THAT THE OBSTETRICS INDUSTRY FORCES UPON WOMEN.

The fact of the matter is that only in the west are women subjected to the complete insanity and degradation of unnecessary obstetric procedures.

The fact that there is a ‘population problem’ in the world proves that obstetric intervention is totally over the top in the west. The majority of women in the world give birth OUTSIDE OF A HOSPITAL, and it is so successful, that there are ‘TOO MANY PEOPLE BEING BORN’.

The fact of the matter is the people who practice Obstetrics are doing it mostly for the money. They attack midwifery and home birth because midwives and home birth, should they become the norm, would totally decimate their incomes, industry and prestige.

All the statistics show that Home Birth is safer than hospital birth. There is no refuting this; what the BBC has done, once again, is promote the medical industrial complex by publishing its propaganda. They do it all the time. Here is another piece that just appeared saying that everyone should be taking medicine to lower their blood pressure as a matter of routine:

Blood pressure pill action urged

Everyone aged 55 and over should be taking drugs to lower their blood pressure, a London-based expert says.
Epidemiology expert Professor Malcolm Law said blood pressure drugs cut the risk of heart attack and stroke even for those with normal blood pressure.

His conclusion, published in the British Medical Journal and backed by other experts, is based on a review of 147 studies, involving 464,000 people.

However, the Stroke Association warned the drugs could have side-effects.

This is yet another article from the BBC without a named author. They do this to protect the identity of the person who accepted money to write this story on behalf of the PR companies that work for the drug companies. They know perfectly well that if the name of the author was given in every instance, someone would be able to correlate the stories and trace them to PR companies and cash payments for placement of these stories on the BBC news website.

This is why they deserve all the contempt that they get.

But I digress.

The facts about childbirth are that sometimes, a mother and her unborn child can get into distress during labor, and at those times, obstetricians can save lives. That is a fact, and I am thankful for obstetric practitioners, for the work that they do, and the lives of the mothers and children they have saved.

But.

If obstetricians try and influence the direction that birthing takes away from natural birth and towards the mechanized birth by using FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt), simply because they do not want to lose clients and money, then they need to be sharply put in their places.

Women are not animals, and pregnancy is not a medical condition. It is up to the woman to decide how she should give birth.

If she wants to give birth alone, that is her affair. If she wants an elective Caesarean that is also her business. If this is not the case, then women become a form of property, that falls under the control of the state or some other monster; in the west, pregnant women are increasingly the property of the state under the control of Obstetricians. This is totally unacceptable, and as I say above, no man would ever accept it.

What is worrying about this article is the following lie:

In fact, by all accepted standards, more than half of women have, or will develop, risk factors that make home birth unwise.

Think about the words:

‘By all accepted standards’…. WHOSE STANDARDS?
‘Risk factors’ … WHOSE ASSESSMENT OF RISK?
‘Unwise’ … WHOSE WISDOM?

The standards of an obstetric practitioner will be different from another person’s standards. Because we are dealing with PEOPLE and not MACHINES, the wishes of the mother trump everything, no matter what anyone says. The same goes for risk; it is up to the mother to decide what level of risk she wants to take with ANYTHING she does, not just pregnancy and birth. If an obstetrician can make a decision or assessment of risk and force a decision on a pregnant women, then that woman becomes PROPERTY at that instant.

Women are wise. The know how to give birth, (especially after the first time) and they know how to assess risk. They have a right to assess risk and to make decisions for themselves and their children. Anyone who gets in the way of that by force is a beast, and should be put down like one.

Women in the west are now sharing information about home birth, and finding that they want to give birth just like everyone else in the world does. Medical professionals are LIVID that they are going to be pushed out of the loop. Well, thats just tough shit. Women come before your desires for money, and if all women in the west want home birth, you have no choice but to accept that and sit patiently until your services are needed.

All of my friends who have children have opted for home birth. They all did it at home, and some of them delivered their children by themselves. The return to natural birth is now unstoppable. Medicalized birth will fade into history like the prohibition of alcohol; it will be seen as an insane aberration of the twentieth century.

The choice the medical community have to make is wether or not they want to be the enemies of their patients or their dutiful servants. I am sure that all women would prefer the latter.

Finally, ‘home birth’ is not anti technology any more than people who choose organic food are anti technology; they are exercising quality control. Take for example, the services of Caroline Flint, whose services are not about home birth, but about the woman having total control over her pregnancy and birth. She will look after you during your pregnancy, and if you want an elective Caesarean, she will arrange that for you. This is the thing the Obstetricians fear the most; being supplanted by and having their incomes at the mercy of Midwives.

ContactPoint, the pure evil paedophile directory invented by the monsters of New Labour and developed by Capgemini, has ‘gone live in a local authority pilot’.

The reprehensible and vile BBC News has a nauseating article, that has an inappropriate picture, and which trots out all the lies HMG want you to swallow unchallenged. Of course, you and I know better.

Since we have been through ContactPoint sufficiently, we can now turn to something fascinating that is related to ContactPoint tangentially.

This is an article, a dreadful article, from ‘CIO‘: “Business Technology Leadership”. This is from their ‘about’ page:

CIO is the leading information brand for today’s busy chief information officer. Available online at www.cio.co.uk and in print via our monthly magazine, CIO addresses issues vital to the success of chief information officers worldwide. CIO provides technology and business leaders with analysis and insight on information technology trends and a keen understanding of IT’s role in achieving business goals.

Ok…… if this is piece of writing is an example of what they describe above, it is no wonder that there are people out there who say things like:

The database is only intended to be accessed by professionals working with children, such as social workers, doctors and the police, and the government has said users cannot download the contents from ContactPoint.

That line was repeated in print, unchallenged by ‘Siobhan Chapman’ in Computerworld UK, who commits an unpardonable sin. Either this idiot is a paid liar for HMG, or she is computer illiterate, or completely immoral or as stupid as they come; whatever way you slice it, that she has written this article is deeply shameful and disgusting. That two magazines / websites that pretend to have expertise in IT can accept and reproduce a piece of writing like this that is clearly full of nonsense / propaganda makes them look bad and is absolutely astonishing.

Every schoolboy knows that it is IMPOSSIBLE to create a database system accessed by browsers that can prevent the users of the system from copying the entries. The fact that ContactPoint holds ‘minimal’ (more on that later) details makes it easier to copy entries, since they can all fit in a small space in the browser and can be copied with a single click of the mouse. And remember, we are talking about COPYING entries; to use the word ‘download’ is disingenuous. The point about the dangers of this database is that the entries can be copied, will always be copyable and there is nothing that anyone can do to stop copying, short of not having a database at all. It is very important that right now, some journalist puts up a bounty for a photograph of a ContactPoint entry to demonstrate that anyone can make a copy of a ContactPoint entry, and that those copies can be transmitted to anyone anywhere, and the idea that the entries are ‘not downloadable’ is purely farcical.

Now, lets get onto the insanity of Siobhan Chapman:

ContactPoint children’s database rolls out

Not so. It has not been ‘rolled out’ it is being piloted. This is important; it is easier to stop ContactPoint and the escape of all the data on the children living in Britain at this early stage. To imply that it is a fait accompli is to be on their side; the side of the paedophiles, child farmers and monsters.

System has been dogged with security faults

This is a magazine about IT. What on earth is a ‘security fault’? The people who write for this magazine should know that ContactPoint cannot be secured. They should know how databases work, how browsers work, how operating systems work, and they should have a good understanding of what data is. Someone who fits that bill would not use the phrase ‘security faults’ – it is meaningless.

A controversial database featuring the details of every child in England has become available to childcare professionals today.

Up to 800 social workers, head teachers and health officials will be able to use the new system, called ContactPoint, as it begins its national roll-out in the north west. Eventually, the system will be rolled out across the country.

This is underplaying the horror of ContactPoint. We know that over 300,000 ‘professionals’ will have access to it. To say that 800 people have access makes it sound like only a carefully selected few will have access to it, when it fact, a million people will have access. The implications of this have been discussed on BLOGDIAL, at length.

The system, which cost an estimated £224m has been dogged with data security fears and has been delayed twice due to faults.

Once again, this is a magazine for IT professionals; what were the ‘faults’ that you are writing about? And as for ‘dogged with data security fears’ have the people who created ContactPoint changed the nature of the universe and solved the problem of the security of the data on this database? If you are competent, you should know that it is impossible for them to secure ContactPoint. These are not ‘fears’ they are FACTS.

ContactPoint has also come under heavy criticism from civil libertarians. A report written by information policy experts at Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust described the database as “almost certainly illegal”, and warned that storing information leads to vulnerable people, such as young black men, single parents and children, being victimised.

If it is illegal, a legal challenge should be mounted immediately. I have £100 to contribute right now to the fighting fund.

In 2007, Deloitte and Touche said in a report that the project could never be totally secure.

And what is the opinion of Siobhan Chapman? How is it that CIO has no opinion on this dastardly database? How can a magazine like this not lambast ContactPoint? Do these idiots not have families of their own? It beggars belief. They are busy talking about greening their CIO activities as a part of corporate citizenship, but do not attack ContactPoint, which is pure evil and a clear and present danger. Absolutely pathetic.

In March, the launch was delayed after a fault sometimes exposed the information of vulnerable children, including victims of domestic violence and those in witness protection schemes.

This is nonsense. All the children on ContactPoint are vulnerable by virtue of being on the database. Since every entry on it can be copied, the system exposes all children’s information by default, no matter who they are. There are few things more annoying than a person without brains writing about something like this.

Think about it; if all the people who access ContactPoint are trusted, then how can it be a bad thing that the details of ‘vulnerable children’ are exposed to them? Surely these people, being good, can do no harm by seeing the details of ‘vulnerable children’?

The truth of this statement is that the details of the children of the rich and famous was found to be not hidden from the users of the system, meaning that curious ContactPoint users would be able to look up the details of people who have had their details ‘shielded’. If it is necessary for the rich and famous to be shielded because of harm from the supposedly trusted users of ContactPoint, how is it that the children of everyone else are safe from these trusted users? The whole thing doesn’t make any sense!

But Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary (pictured) said there has been “important and careful work” to build ContactPoint over the past four months.

Including lines from Ed Balls is…..balls.

No matter what this aparatchick says, ContactPoint is immoral and a danger to children. To repeat his words is give credence to the logic of a paedophile violator who would sell the children of Britain to a company for money.

“If we are to do our best to make sure children are protected and that no child slips through the net, then it’s crucial the right agencies are involved at the right time and get even better at sharing information,” said Balls.

This is utter garbage. To protect children, just like the children of the rich and famous, ContactPoint must be dismantled. The children of the rich and famous are vulnerable by virtue of being on the database, that means that ALL children are vulnerable by default.

Also, all of the recent cases involving abuse, like the ‘Baby P’ case were known about by social workers in detail, and yet, in each case, the worst possible outcome was the result. This database will not prevent people from being hurt, will not stop criminals from committing crime and will do nothing but violate people on an unprecedented scale, and put children at risk.

“ContactPoint is vital for this because it will enable frontline professionals to see quickly and easily who else is in contact with a child.”

Once again, total drivel, and of course, unchallenged by Siobhan Chapman, who lets this monster get away with lying in an article under her name. Absolutely horrible collaboration with evil. There is no need whatsoever to put EVERY child in the country in a database because an extremely small number of children are at risk. The common sense thing to do would be to put only those children on a list of vulnerable children not every child by default. Even then, since the state has insane ideas about who and who is not at risk (gypsies being regularly targeted for abuse from the Local Authorities) you would regularly get children put onto ‘ContactPoint 2.0′ because Local Authorities are staffed by racists. ContactPoint is a bad idea, plain and simple.

It has been welcomed by children’s charities and organisations, including Barnardo’s, KIDS and the Association of Directors of Children’s Services. Martin Narey, chief executive of children’s charity Barnardo’s, said it “would make it easier to deliver better-co-ordinated services”.

And so what? Barnardo’s is not a part of government, and will not even have access to ContactPoint; who cares what they think? Martin Narey is an imbecile, clearly. Since when does the opinions of imbeciles justify the violation of millions of children? Once again, Siobhan fails to challenge this by asking the obvious question; HOW is ContactPoint going to, “make it easier to deliver better-co-ordinated services?”. He is bullshitting of course, as is Ed Balls, and you let them get away with it Siobhan. SHAME ON YOU.

ContactPoint, built by Capgemini, is described as an “online tool” that holds “minimal” identifying information of around 11 million under 18 year olds in England, including names, addresses, dates of birth, gender and contact details for parents or carers. Each child is also given a unique identifying number, as well as contact details for the child’s school, GP practices and any other practitioner services involved.

This is incredible. To describe the information as ‘minimal’ is an abuse of the English language. There is enough information on ContactPoint to UNIQUELY identify the parents and children of all families in Britain. There is nothing ‘minimal’ about that at all, in fact, it is quite the opposite. It is more than the Nazis had when the rounded up undesirables with the help of IBM. A tatooed number on your arm is ‘minimal information’ is it not? After all, its ‘just a number’. Of course, we cannot rely on the likes of Siobhan or the anonymous propaganda repeaters at the BBC to tell us this!

The database is only intended to be accessed by professionals working with children, such as social workers, doctors and the police, and the government has said users cannot download the contents from ContactPoint.

CIO

This article appears in two different magazines, with the same unchallenged garbage. The editors of both publications failed to stop this propaganda from hijacking their platforms. This is what we call a ‘lapse of standards’.

We can only hope that a legal challenge is forthcoming, or a Tory victory and the scrapping of this, the NIR, and ID Cards; preferably all of them, all at once. One thing is for sure; with ‘people’ like Siobhan Chapman and the inexcusably inept rags she writes in propping up the propaganda, the task of getting the fact out in the public is made that much harder. We expect nothing but evil from the BBC, so that is par for the course. Thanks you jackasses.

Anyone who boosted ContactPoint, who let propaganda for it pass by them unchallenged, who coded for it, argued for it, made excuses for it, allowed data to leave their office to enter it; everyone who helped make this happen is going to BURN IN HELL for what they have done. It is inexcusable, unforgivable and totally horrible. Any council worker who touches it, trains people for it or even makes a single telephone call where the number came from it, is also going straight to the lake of fire, where they will join the concentration camp runners, PW Botha and all the other villains of history.

ContactPoint is a particularly nasty thing because it uses children it farms children for money; there is no other way to describe it. The company that developed it, Capgemini, has become the greatest abuser of children in the history of the world, along with the government that commissioned it. They are making money out of children; they will have priced for the work they did based on the size of the database, i.e. the number of children it records; they were paid per child. This is a sin in every culture in the world. How these people can sleep at night is beyond me, and the irony is clearly lost on them that they are using children to make money and justifying it by saying that the act of using ALL the children in the UK to make money is going to stop the abuse of children.

You can’t make stuff like this up…. and these days, you don’t have to. That is the problem; every dystopian nightmare is trying to come true right before our eyes.

Finally, do not suffer under the illusion that just because they have put all the pieces in place that ContactPoint cannot be completely dismantled. It CAN be dismantled, and all the data erased. The DNA database climb-down is the most recent demonstration of what it looks like when HMG is forced to stop doing evil. Not only should all the data be erased, but it should be illegal for anyone in government to create a database of children that is accessible to people outside of a council. Capgemini can keep their fee. That money will condemn them forever.

Think about it; under what circumstances would a council need to keep a database of all children in its ward? The schoolmasters know how many places there are and who is applying for places, the doctors know who is on their (preferably paper) records and do not need to be served by a database run by the council or central government; for decades everyone has done without this ‘service’, so why should the privacy and dignity of families be violated in this way? The general census provides enough data for planning, so why do they need to do this? For ‘efficiency’? If that is the criteria, then why not take all children from their parents at birth and house them in a central Kibbutz, where efficiency is absolutely maximized? I’m sure that this idea appeals to the New Labour monsters, but most normal people would reject it outright.

Efficiency is not everything and certainly people should not be violated to provide the state with greater efficiency. Inefficient systems that protect people and their dignity are infinitely preferable to efficient systems that violate people. That is why a doctor’s office that runs on paper, even though it may be less efficient than a doctor’s office that runs on databases, is far preferable than the latter. Paper is private. Paper is decent. Paper protects the sacred oath of confidentiality that all doctors pledge. That it takes more time to organize the information of a patient in a ‘paper practice’ is NOTHING compared to the loss of confidentiality, and as we have seen with ContactPoint, there are unintended consequences to ‘modernization’, like the automated uploading of confidential patient records to the NHS Spine, the elimination of prescription privacy and everything else that flows from the availability of digital information.

Unintended consequences lead to what we call ‘feature creep’. We see that ContactPoint is going to be used to see who is and who is not ‘fully recorded’. The ‘minimal information’ that is supposed to re-assure everyone that ContactPoint is benign is actually extremely intrusive. For example, by keeping a list of what doctor you have, should there be a blank in the ‘GP’ field, (because your child has never needed to see a doctor for example) a Local Authority worker will immediately say that you are an abuser because your child does not appear to have a GP. And make no mistake, ContactPoint will allow the Local Authority to print a list of all children who have missing fields; that means children not registered with a GP, children who are not registered at a school, etc etc.

At the very least, the Local Authority will generate automated letters to all the parents from these records. That means that millions of letters generated from ContactPoint will be in the post, presumably with the child’s unique identifying number. As we saw before with the stolen child benefit DVDRs, the letters that were sent out to apologize to parents ended up being sent to wrong addresses, exposing the private information of families to strangers.

This is the sort of nonsense, and worse, that we can expect should ContactPoint be allowed to go live.

ContactPoint must be scrapped and the data permanently deleted. Nothing like this must ever be attempted again. There is no justification for it by any stretch of the imagination, an you should do everything in your power not to be touched by it. It is pure evil, a recipe for multiple disasters and for sure, a child is going to die as a result of this database.

Celente Calls for “Revolution” as the Only Solution

Kingston NY – Taxed to death, angry at government bailouts, outraged by Wall Street greed, and bitterly resentful of a system that rewards the undeserving rich, the American public is ready to revolt.

“The Tea Parties and Tax Protests sprouting across the nation, which we had predicted, are harbingers of revolution,” said Gerald Celente, Director of The Trends Research Institute. “But they are not enough. Much stronger and directed action is required. Our call for ‘Revolution’ will galvanize the people, destroy the corrupt ruling systems, and produce a prosperous and more just nation.”

The Revolution Celente proposes is unique in concept and bold in execution. It is about a lot more than just “taxation without representation.”

“Nothing short of total repudiation of our entrenched systems can rescue America,” said Celente. “We are under the control of a two-headed, one party political system. Wall Street controls our financial lives; the media manipulates our minds. These systems cannot be changed from within. There is no alternative. Without a revolution, these institutions will bankrupt the country, keep fighting failed wars, start new ones, and hold us in perpetual intellectual subjugation.”

The country is restless, and ripe for radical reform. There is no doubt protests will proliferate and intensify. In response, the government will call out the troops and bring in the police. They will use the Patriot Act to silence, detain, harass, persecute and prosecute groups and individuals exercising their Constitutional rights.

But Celente’s Revolution need not degenerate into violence or open warfare.

“Intellectual Revolution”

“I am calling for an ‘Intellectual Revolution’. I ask American citizens to free their minds from the tyranny of ‘Dumb Think.’ This is a revolution about thinking – not manning the barricades. It’s about brain power – not brute force.”

For society to survive and grow, it must wake up and grow up. Americans must acknowledge what their opinions are based on, who they listen to … and why.

What are America’s prime information sources? CNN, “The most trusted name in news”? Fox, “Fair and balanced”?

CNBC, “First in Business Worldwide”? The New York Times, “All the news that’s fit to print”?

Who do the people listen to? A closed circuit of familiar faces guaranteed to take predictable positions. Authorities on nothing, yet pronouncing upon everything; a cadre of media aristocrats, pretending they’re the people’s voice.

Bill O’Reilly, Steven Colbert, Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, Sean Hannity, Jon Stewart, Chris Matthews, Jim Cramer, Joe Scarborough, Anderson Cooper, Bill Maher.

TV tough guys, broadcast big mouths and Beltway blowhards have now been joined by featherweight comics throwing powder puff punches at sitting targets.

[...]

Yonkers Tribune

We like people who can predict the future; it means that they have all the facts to hand and are able to synthesize a very small number of highly probable futures that must result from those facts. It means they are more likely to know what they are talking about now, in the present, since they knew what they were talking about before. Those are the people who will reward your scarce attention.

What I imagine people like Celente are waiting for is the tipping point of popular outrage, after which they will be able to openly call for a physical rather than intellectual revolution.

Calling for a physical revolution too early is pointless; no one will stand up and you will be picked off. At the same time however, calling for feel good actions pushes the tipping point back, since it is the opposite of feeling good and secure that is the fuel for revolution. If the criminals manage to finish the job before everyone wakes up and the tipping point occurs, they win. The question is, do we have time to wait for a tipping point that might arrive too late?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm….

Imagine a country where this intellectual revolution had happened, and everyone from coast to coast knew the entire facts and was informed to the level that Celente is. Once that point is reached, clearly there has to be a second step, the ‘real revolution’ that puts a stop to the criminals once and for all.

The media and all the know nothing (as opposed to the know everything bloggers) clowns who work in it are never going to change sides (either because they are too thick or are deliberately keeping a lid on public outrage). That means every chance we have to ‘go viral’ with a message should be taken as an opportunity to organize a real action that ‘fixes the hole in the roof’. Anything that is just a protest, which is a feel good, ‘Yellow Ribbon Moment‘, or which will have no effect is not a good thing. It is in fact, quite the opposite.

Its like draft dodgers in the 70′s having a tea party to protest going to VietNam and then showing up obediently for basic training and shipping off to fight ‘Charlie’. No, what you do is BURN YOUR DRAFT CARD and then do not show up.

Imagine 10 million people all having a ‘tea party’ and then BURNING their 1040 forms. Imagine millions of people demanding that they be paid the full amount of their wages, without any withholding of any kind, or they all go on STRIKE. Those two actions when done in the tens of millions are not something that can be ignored; demonstrations, tea parties, rock concerts, petitions – all of those things can and will be ignored. That is why we keep saying that it is pointless to do them.

Without a doubt, there is an information war going on, and educating the great mass of television fed flesh is an ongoing task. It is the furnace in the steam ship that needs to be constantly stoked. It is not however, the end goal; the end goal is Liberty in Perpetuity, and education is a means to that end.

And as for protests causing the police to be called out, once again, protesting is pointless.

Lets try and imagine an optimal revolution.

Its a revolution where no one is killed, and there is no violence. It would look something like the fall of East Germany.

All that is required for this revolution to take place is for everyone to stop obeying. That means everyone, to a man, refusing to obey anything and everything to do with the state.

That would be a revolution, an amorphous, nebulous, static swarm of disobedience, which could not be countered, any more than a truncheon wielder can batter a cloud to sweep it away. Without the compliance of everyone, the state would simply cease to exist; the monsters who control it would scream and shout hysterically at first, but would very quickly want to associate with the static mass as they desperately try to reposition themselves for a role in the new disorder. Those creatures are very good at sensing the right time to jump ship – when its about to do down – they are after all ‘political animals’ (rats).

I heard the other night, a commenter saying that if we start to win, “these people (the rats) are not going to go quietly into the night…”. That’s probably true. They will make a huge noise, but just like the aparatchicks in East Germany who lost their status and jobs, they were defeated and they did lose power there is no reason why this cannot happen via an unprecedented campaign that reaches tens of millions of people at the end of their tether. Many millions of people are ripe for it, ready for it, and as things get worse, will prefer it to having to take up arms.

The means to make this happen are at the tips of our fingers. Every month a new tool is written that shortens the time to critical mass. There is no reason why a peaceful transition to… something resembling a free country, cannot be done. It would happen in a very small amount of time; it may coincide with this event:

The Fed’s plan to increase the money supply 15-fold

But the real story starts to unfold when you realize the Federal Reserve is now hell bent on multiplying the U.S. money supply by a whopping fifteen times in 2009! This excellent article explains how this number is derived: http://www.marketskeptics.com/2009/…

Now think about this: If the Federal Reserve increases the U.S. money supply by a factor of fifteen, that means your dollars will be worth only 1/15th the value they represent right now. So a loaf of bread that costs a dollar right now could cost $15 when all this extra money ripples through the system. (Which will obviously take a couple of years, but 2009 will be the beginning of it.)

This is called “hyperinflation.” We’re talking about a loss of over 93% of the purchasing power of the dollar. That, my friends, is called a collapse of the currency.

And once it starts, the floodgates will be opened and the tsunami of investors and nations offloading dollars will be catastrophic and irreversible. By the time it’s all done, the dollar might end up losing 99.9% of its value, and you can use greenbacks to light a fire or wipe your back side, as they will be useless for anything else.

[...]

http://www.counterthink.com/025688.html

Unbelievable. It’s still hard to accept that the money really has already been wiped out, and that hyperinflation is already on its way like a mudslide coming to destroy everything in its path. It seems that either way, wether there is a revolution or not, the dollar is toast. People will either kill it trying to get out of it, or they will have their purchasing power wiped out by this 15-fold story high wave of dollars that are going to devastate everything in their path.

Anyone old enough to remember Pan Am knows what it is like to have to imagine life without something so huge, so integral to an industry, something so ‘too big to fail’, that its non existence seems an impossibility, and yet, Pan Am is no more, its just a memory…only its beautiful corporate identity remains. Pan Am also teaches us that nothing is too big to disappear from the face of the earth. No company, no system of money, including the dollar, no government (history should already have made THAT clear); literally nothing that exists is going to last forever, or even a few years if the conditions are right.

Once you accept that, the possibility of restored liberty does not seem like something in the far distance, but instead takes on the appearance of something within striking distance.

We at BLOGDIAL have blogged about this subject a few times before:

By David Coates, The Detroit News, via AP

In Detroit, three downtown businesses have created a local currency, or scrip, to keep dollars earned locally in the community.

By Marisol Bello, USA TODAY

A small but growing number of cash-strapped communities are printing their own money.
Borrowing from a Depression-era idea, they are aiming to help consumers make ends meet and support struggling local businesses.

The systems generally work like this: Businesses and individuals form a network to print currency. Shoppers buy it at a discount — say, 95 cents for $1 value — and spend the full value at stores that accept the currency.

Workers with dwindling wages are paying for groceries, yoga classes and fuel with Detroit Cheers, Ithaca Hours in New York, Plenty in North Carolina or BerkShares in Massachusetts.

Ed Collom, a University of Southern Maine sociologist who has studied local currencies, says they encourage people to buy locally. Merchants, hurting because customers have cut back on spending, benefit as consumers spend the local cash.

“We wanted to make new options available,” says Jackie Smith of South Bend, Ind., who is working to launch a local currency. “It reinforces the message that having more control of the economy in local hands can help you cushion yourself from the blows of the marketplace.”

About a dozen communities have local currencies, says Susan Witt, founder of BerkShares in the Berkshires region of western Massachusetts. She expects more to do it.

Under the BerkShares system, a buyer goes to one of 12 banks and pays $95 for $100 worth of BerkShares, which can be spent in 370 local businesses. Since its start in 2006, the system, the largest of its kind in the country, has circulated $2.3 million worth of BerkShares. In Detroit, three business owners are printing $4,500 worth of Detroit Cheers, which they are handing out to customers to spend in one of 12 shops.

During the Depression, local governments, businesses and individuals issued currency, known as scrip, to keep commerce flowing when bank closings led to a cash shortage.

By law, local money may not resemble federal bills or be promoted as legal tender of the United States, says Claudia Dickens of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

“We print the real thing,” she says.

Yes, we know; THAT IS THE PROBLEM!

The IRS gets its share. When someone pays for goods or services with local money, the income to the business is taxable, says Tom Ochsenschlager of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. “It’s not a way to avoid income taxes, or we’d all be paying in Detroit dollars,” he says.

Pittsboro, N.C., is reviving the Plenty, a defunct local currency created in 2002. It is being printed in denominations of $1, $5, $20 and $50. A local bank will exchange $9 for $10 worth of Plenty.

“We’re a wiped-out small town in America,” says Lyle Estill, president of Piedmont Biofuels, which accepts the Plenty. “This will strengthen the local economy. … The nice thing about the Plenty is that it can’t leave here.”

[...]

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2009-04-05-scrip_N.htm

Now.

Imagine if all the dimwitted and destructive demonstrators got together to disseminate the ideas behind sound money and then print and promote their own money.

Wouldn’t that be effort better spent instead of smashing an RBS office? Or gathering impotently in the streets to be corralled like cows?

We have been over this again and again and again:

We had this debate on BLOGDIAL before the historic march organized by StopWar. Demonstrations are pointless because they do not achieve their ends, and the people who go on them are nothing more than stupid monkeys; the people who organize them are actually working for the enemy. Time and time again we have said this, (and other stuff) and had it proved, sadly.
Now the directors of this film, after everything we have said and witnessed are asking everyone to:

Join Amnesty

Visit and sign up online:

web.amnesty.org/pages/join-eng
Join Liberty

Visit and sign up online:

www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/join
Email Your MP

Demand to know what they are doing about the issues raised in the film:

www.writetothem.com
Join the Mass Lone Demos

Demonstrations take place 5pm to 7:30pm on the third Wednesday of every month, forms [MS WORD] [PDF] must be handed in or sent by recorded delivery 1 week beforehand.
[...]

Joining Amnesty will not cause one law to be repealed, nor will it stop new bad legislation from being enacted.

Similarly, Joining liberty will achieve absolutely nothing at all.

Emailing the very people who pass the laws that enslave you is just STUPID.

And joining demonstrations we know about, don’t we?

Telling the truth is not enough. Acting is not enough. Correct Action is the only thing that will change what you want changed.

But you know this!

If you want to fix a problem, DO SOMETHING TO FIX THE PROBLEM, DO NOT do something THAT WILL NOT FIX THE PROBLEM.

If your problem is a currency that is being inflated by a criminal government who is stealing your value to give it to their partners in crime, and you cannot change the government, CHANGE THE CURRENCY YOU USE AND ACCEPT, since THAT IS THE PROBLEM.

Demonstrating against bailouts is like dancing to stop the damage to your car caused by hailstorms.

GET YOUR CAR UNDER COVER IF IT STARTS TO HAIL.

Demonstrating against taxation is like applauding to stop your drive from being blocked by snow in a blizzard.

IF YOUR DRIVE IS BLOCKED BY SNOW, GET A SHOVEL AND DIG YOURSELF OUT.

Demonstrating against a leaking roof is like waving a banner to stop being hungry.

IF YOU ARE HUNGRY, MAKE YOURSELF A SANDWICH.

It’s simple really, but to my constant amazement, even intelligent people persist in believing that demonstrations are a good thing. They are not, not because they are inherently bad, but BECAUSE THEY DO NOT WORK!

FOR THE MILLIONTH TIME

By Paul Craig Roberts

Envy, one of the seven deadly sins, is not unknown to Americans.

My last column noted the absurdity of Obama lumping the upper middle class in with the rich. The income distribution in the US is so skewed that the rich are found in the top one percent. The truly rich with the accoutrements associated with that class are in the top half of one percent.

Those points were lost on those Americans who regard anyone slightly better off than themselves as “rich.” A slightly bigger house in a better neighborhood, a BMW instead of a Toyota, and the ability to go on vacation without going into debt is all it takes to be rich in the minds of those whose eyes are green with envy.

This observation led me to the realization that freedom has been lost to envy.

Americans no longer know what freedom is. Historically, the definition of a free person is one who owns his own labor. Serfs and slaves were not free, because they do not own all of their own labor.

An income tax is inconsistent with the historical definition of freedom. Today in America government has a claim on every person’s labor, just as feudal lords, the government of that time, had claims on the labor of serfs and nineteenth century plantation owners had on slaves.

Understanding that an income tax was serfdom, our Founding Fathers wrote the US Constitution in a way that prevented an income tax. This was altered in 1913 with a constitutional amendment that some claim was not properly carried out.

This first step in the enserfment of the American people was taken in envy. The rich were the targets of the income tax. Once in place, the income tax was extended by law and by inflation until ordinary people were being taxed at rates several times as high as the original top rate for the rich.

After almost 100 years of income tax, generations have been born into serfdom and accept the government’s claim on their labor as normal, even just. Some say they don’t mind paying taxes to help the poor. They should look to see what share goes to the poor and what share to war, armaments, and the bailout of the Treasury Secretary’s rich friends.

The problem with a tax on a person’s labor is that it subtracts from a person’s independence. Without independence, it is difficult to exercise constitutionally protected rights, such as free speech.

In former times, family farms and businesses provided a measure of independence for many Americans. Today, most work for wages and salaries. The only real avenue to independence is to save part of one’s earnings and acquire enough wealth upon which to live. For most Americans, the government’s claim on their labor makes this impossible.

This is even more the case when government fails in its regulatory responsibilities and allows banksters to join in the plunder of the hard-pressed citizens.

The inheritance tax, another product of envy, has also done much to destroy the independence of the citizenry. For example, family owned independent media, once a source of independent power that held government accountable, has been lost to corporate media chains in order that families could pay inheritance taxes.

The same people who complain of rule by giant corporations support the inheritance taxes that transformed the face of American business. A family owned business has community roots and loyalties. A corporation’s owners are spread across the country and abroad. Their interest is the share price. The consequence has been that many corporations no longer even have national loyalties.

A corporation’s existence is not threatened by inheritance taxes, but a family owned business is. An inheritance tax is a tax on assets accumulated from income that has already been taxed. To raise the cash to pay the inheritance tax, businesses have to be sold or taken public. Eventually, their ownership is divorced from the community.

In the past, great wealth accumulations found their way into endowments of private universities, museums and public libraries, institutions that also contributed to the independence of citizens from government control.

Today even private universities and tenured faculty have lost pieces of their independence. There are subjects that cannot be investigated and opinions that cannot be expressed. We can rationalize the inhibitions by saying that they are proper subjects for censorship. However, once the process of suppressing thought and speech begins, it spreads.

The Tax Foundation has calculated that tax freedom day arrives on May 29 this year if the federal government’s budget deficit is included, as it should be, in the tax burden. That means that Americans work 42 percent of the year for the government, a higher tax rate than was endured by medieval serfs and one approaching that of a nineteenth century slave.

In the nineteenth century, there were “underground railways” that slaves could use to escape to freedom. In our time, “underground railways” are known as “tax havens.” Just as slave owners sought to abolish “underground railways,” our owners today seek to outlaw “tax havens.”

Some Americans will reject these analogies. They can test the validity of the analogies by refusing the government’s claim on their labor. Perhaps the best evidence of American serfdom is that most Americans do not even have the ability to test the validity of the analogy, because the government takes its share in withholding tax before wages and salaries are paid to us serfs.

http://www.vdare.com/roberts/090405_freedom.htm

Henry Porter has now completely discredited himself, with a shameful piece of luddite nonsense masquerading as a call for justice:

If indeed a new era of global responsibility has come into being with measures that actually restrain banks and isolate tax havens,

See this. The politics of sour grapes is alive and well at the grauniad. Irrational, illogical and destructive, like the rest of the ideas in this misguided, buggy whip cracking article.

it may be time for the planet’s dominant economic powers to focus on the destructive, anti-civic forces of the internet.

The greatest invention of the 21st century, equivalent in importance to the invention of the printing press, characterized as ‘destructive’ and ‘anti-civic’. The greatest force for empowering the little guy, thanks to which the playing field is made forever flatter; this is a ‘bad thing’. A set of devices and protocols that allow you to have a private conversation with anyone, anywhere in the world for free…and all the other myriad things it can do and will do. This is something ‘to be stopped’.

Only a total computer illiterate, luddite, anti-freedom, anti-human imbecile could believe such a thing.

Exactly 20 years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote the blueprint for the world wide web, the internet has become the host to a small number of dangerous WWMs – worldwide monopolies that sweep all before them with exuberant contempt for people’s rights, their property and the past.

The internet and the World Wide Web are two separate things, as this commenter points out:

1) Tim Berners-Lee created the WORLD WIDE WEB, which is a distinctly different thing than the Internet. The World Wide Web is a layer on top of the internet that provides the websites that we see, but the largest portion of the internet is not visible, and does not interact with home computers. The internet is hardware, software, protocols, servers, undersea cables, standards, repeaters, satellites and so forth, all operating on the same protocols (IP, Internet Protocol). Tim Berners-Lee certainly created a revolution with the World Wide Web, but the creation of the Internet is an even grander achievement, which took decades, cost billions, and was mostly the responsibility of three groups: AT&T, Cisco Systems, and The United States Department of Defense.

In the strictest sense, the internet was born in 1971, just under 20 years before Sir Berner-Lee’s breakthrough, when many of the standards and theories that became Internet Protocol were developed.

2) Google is at the very center of the information-economy, and to say it produces nothing is ridiculous. They’re purpose is to effectively organize, catalog and make searchable the sum of the information of mankind. Everything they have constructed has been purposed about this goal, from their basic search engines to Google Earth.

One day we will live in a world where everything that is quantifiable knowledge will be contained and indexed by Google. And it will be a good day for mankind, because all that information will be equally available, so long as you speak the English language.

What Google does, to put it stiffly, is vastly more important than some novelist exploring how much the human condition absolutely sucks.

Thanks to the commenter called ‘Netwrk’.

Google is the most prominent WWM,

Is that something like WMD (Weapon of Mass Destruction) I wonder? Hmmmmmmm…. Guilt by acronym association!

but let’s start with an American site that is making a name for itself in straightforward misappropriation. Scribd.com offers free downloads of every kind of book, magazine, brochure, guide, research paper and pamphlet to 55 million readers every month. Many have been uploaded illegally. Last week the publishers of JK Rowling, Ken Follett and Aravind Adiga took action to remove books that had been illegally published on the site.

First of all, Scribd is a wonderful service. It is being used by the computer literate to disseminate knowledge. Only the completely ignorant, imagination-less luddites are against it.

Mr. Porter, you are on the wrong side of history. You need, as a matter of priority, to read ‘our Scribd account, I publish some of our works, and other historical works that are free of copyright. Because Scribd is under attack from mentally retarded luddites, we were sent the following:

Subject:

Copyright notification

From Jason Bentley, on 2009-04-03:

Message:

Dear Irdial-Discs,

We have removed your document “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” because our text matching system determined that it was very similar to a work that has been marked as copyrighted and not permitted on Scribd.

Like all automated matching systems, our system is not perfect and occasionally makes mistakes. If you believe that your document is not infringing, please contact us at copyright@scribd.com and we will investigate the matter.

As stated in our terms of use, repeated incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your Scribd.com account and prohibit you from uploading material to Scribd.com in the future. To prevent us from having to take these steps, please delete from scribd.com any material you have uploaded to which you do not own the necessary rights and refrain from uploading any material you are not entitled to upload. For more information about Scribd.com’s copyright policy, please read the Terms of Use located at http://www.scribd.com/terms

Jason Bentley
Directory of Community Development
jason@scribd.com

People like you might believe that all works should be copyrighted forever no matter how old they are. The fact of the matter is that copyrights were originally tolerated in the belief that they served society, and rewarded the creators of content whilst promoting innovation and creativity. This is why the term of protection was short, so that the works would pass into the public domain, where they could spread and be of benefit to the public after the creators had reaped the benefit of protection via a state sanctioned monopoly over their ideas and how they could be used and copied.

The work in question above is by Adam Smith, published in 1776:

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is the magnum opus of the Scottish economist Adam Smith. It is a clearly written account of economics at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, as well as a rhetorical piece written for the generally educated individual of the 18th century – advocating a free market economy as more productive and more beneficial to society.

The work is credited as a watershed in history and economics due to its comprehensive, largely accurate characterization of economic mechanisms that survive in modern economics; and also for its effective use of rhetorical technique, including structuring the work to contrast real world examples of free and fettered markets.

[...]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations

In case you are unfamiliar with it.

I replied:

From Irdial-Discs,
on 2009-04-03:

Please restore this deleted document. It is in the public domain:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations

It would be an interesting project for Scribd to add the entire contents of the Project Guttenberg texts to your checking system, so that you can exclude documents like this from being flagged.

./akin
./irdial

Scribd.com complied:

Jason Bentley, Apr 04 10:33 pm:

Hi,

I’m sorry that our automated copyright protection system misidentified your document as infringing. We try very hard to protect the rights of authors, and sometimes our copyright robot get a little oversensitive.

I’ve restored your document and removed all references from your account.

Cheers,

Jason

***

Jason Bentley
Community Director and Copyright Agent
Scribd, Inc.

This is the sort of world Henry Porter wants; a world where everything is unavailable because of the incredibly small number of giant publishers and their prostitute luddite lackeys whining that the old days are over. At the very least, Porter is calling for a web where everything must be screened by copyright police before it is posted. This is the same voice that wants ‘civil liberties’; a voice that is calling for a fascist regime to enforce the insanity of copyright transposed to the web.

Scribd.com complied, but what is interesting is the company’s institutional lack of guilt when the piracy was exposed.

‘Piracy’ (as it is defined today) only takes place when someone sells a book or movie; a ‘movie pirate’ is someone who copies movies onto DVDs and then sells them instead of buying discs from the manufacturer and re-selling them. People who copy movies are not ‘Pirates’, what they do is not ‘piracy’ and in fact the act of copying music, books and movies is beneficial to society even if they sell copies. Furthermore, the people who make movies, music and who write books are able to make a living without copyright laws (state enforced monopolies) in place. This might come as a shock to people like Henry Porter, who writes in the bosom of a nest of copyright brainwashed computer illiterate vipers, but it is a fact nonetheless. Against Intellectual Monopoly has some illuminating examples of why (in this case patents) are a bad thing:

In most histories, James Watt is a heroic inventor,responsible for the beginning of the industrial revolution. The facts above suggest a different interpretation. Watt is a clever inventor who, after getting one step ahead of the pack, remains ahead not by superior innovation, but by clever exploitation of the legal system. The fact that his business partner is a wealthy man with strong connections in Parliament, is not a minor help.

The evidence suggests that Watt’s efforts to use the legal system to inhibit competition set back the industrial revolution by a decade or two. The granting of the 1769 and, especially, of the 1775 patents likely delayed the mass adoption of the steam engine:innovation is stifled until his patents expire; and very few steam engines are built during the period of Watt’s legal monopoly. From the number of innovations that occur immediately after the expiration of the patent, it appears that Watt’s competitors simply waited until then before releasing their own innovations in an effort to avoid the fate of Hornblower. Also, we see that Watt’s inventive skills are badly allocated: we find him spending as much time engaging in legal action in an effort to establish and preserve a monopoly as he does in actual invention.

Indeed, this story contains most of the important elements of our argument Against Intellectual Monopoly. The sort of wasteful effort to suppress competition and obtain special privileges we have seen in Watt is one of the greatest dangers of monopoly. It is commonly referred to as rent-seeking behavior. Watt’s attempt to extend the duration of his 1769 patent is an especially egregious example of rent seeking: the patent extension is clearly unnecessary to provide incentive for the original invention, which had already taken place. On top of this, we see Watt using patents as a tool to suppress innovation by his competitors, such as Hornblower, Wasborough and others. Finally,there is the slow rate at which the steam engine was adopted be for the expiration of Watt’s patent. By keeping prices high and preventing other from producing cheaper steam engines, Boulton and Watt hampered capital accumulation and slowed economic growth. Intellectual property, as it is currently conceived, has other damaging social effects but the three listed here and exemplified in Watt’s story are the most serious ones: rent-seeking, innovation suppression, and slow-down in the process of economic growth. We shall see that Watt’s experience is the rule, not the exception.

[...]

Against Intellectual Monopoly

Anyone with even one brain cell can see the parallels between this story and the others in Against Intellectual Monopoly in the context of Google, Scribd, the services that run on the Bittorrent ecosystem and the other services today. The world, ‘the community’ that Porter is so eager to protect and serve would have been far better served if Watt had not been able to use government force to stop other inventors from improving the steam engine. As soon as Watt’s government granted monopoly ended, the efficiency and power of steam engines increased at a rate far greater than when Watt was able to stifle innovation with his patent, and what’s more, when his patent expired, Watt’s profits continued undiminished.

This is a very important lesson for everyone involved in any sort of creativity. We at Irdial knew instinctively that releasing our catalogue for free would benefit us more than keeping it locked up. That is why we freed our works for non commercial use in 1999. If we lived in a society where there were no copyrights at all we would gladly give up the commercial use rights in an instant.

Instead of fighting the reality, resisting the new tools and clinging on to broken models, it made sense to us to embrace it all and use it to get our works in as many places as possible. To us, it’s obvious. To people like Henry Porter, the future and its wondrous tools are a threat to be destroyed, and he doesn’t care about all the historical works that are burned in his insane quest to cleanse the internet of copyrighted works. We see the direct result of people like him in the erasure of Adam Smith’s work from Scribd.

Instead of admitting it and apologising, it issued a statement claiming Scribd possessed “industry-leading copyright management system which goes above and beyond requirements of Digital Millennium Copyright Act”.

So, Scribd should now apologize for innovating, for bringing millions of documents to millions of people, for nothing. They should apologize for having to invent a piece of filtering software thanks to lobbyist bought government pressure, which might never work accurately and which diverts time away from the software developers improving Scribd, and which diverts capital away from improving Scribd. This is totally insane, and exactly what is described in Against Intellectual Monopoly. Thanks to the luddites like Henry Porter and his distant cousin Watt, innovation is being retarded, as companies divert resources to satisfy monopolists.

That’s like a drunk driver protesting innocence because he’s covered by the best insurance company. What matters is the crime, the theft of someone else’s content, which has taken care, labour, money and expertise to publish.

This is wrong. What you are doing is protesting that the internet should not exist so that you can continue to collect a rent on your works at the expense of the entire world’s population and at the expense of the progress of mankind itself.

What matters here is that copying books is in no way ‘a crime’, is beneficial to society, and in no way detracts from an authors ability to make money on the works that they have taken care, labour money and expertise to create. I have no doubt that some non-BLOGDIAL readers will not believe that this is even possible. Not only is it possible, but we have made money from giving our works away for free, and Against Intellectual Monopoly has examples in it where works that are not copyrighted have made millions for publishers; look at the case of the title The Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States where the publisher (Norton) printed this rather large book at a huge profit, despite there being no copyright on the text and it being downloaded world-wide by millions of people:

[...] To be clear: what Norton received from the government was the right to publish first, and the right to use the word “authorized” in the title. What they did not get was the usual copyright – the right to exclusively publish the book. Because it is a U.S. government document, the moment it was released, other individuals, and more important, publishing houses, had the right to buy or download copies and to make and resell additional copies– electronically or in print, at a price of their choosing

[...]

Assuming that St. Martin’s has some idea of how to price a book to avoid losing money, this suggests Norton made at the very least on the order of a million dollars. We also know that their contract with the government called upon them to donate their “profits” to charity – and we know that they did in fact “donate $600,000 to support the study of emergency preparedness and terrorism prevention.”

Against Intellectual Monopoly

[...]

The point is that even if Scribd removes books, it still allows individuals to advertise services for delivering pirated books by email, which must make it the enemy of every writer and publisher in the world. In effect it has turned copyright law on its head: instead of asking publishers for permission, it requires them to object if and when they become aware of a breach.

Advertising a service is everyone’s right. The right to publish (or ‘freedom of the press’) is not ‘the right of newspapers and journalists to write what they like without restriction’. In this case, ‘The Press’ means not ‘the press corps’ but THE PRINTING PRESS as in a device to disseminate writing to a large audience. Journalists always make this mistake; they go berserk when their newspapers face censorship, but when its Bloggers or individuals who claim their right to print and distribute whatever they like, then it’s another story. Shameful.

Scribd is the friend of every writer and publisher in the world, wether they know it or not. Copyright law needs to be abolished, not just turned on its head, and the internet has made this progress begin to happen. If it does not take place before hand, the deaths of the luddites like Henry Porter and his employers and their replacement by ‘The Pirate Generation’ will spell the end of copyright, and the removal of all related legislation from the statute books. As it is, if these laws remain on the books, hundreds of millions of people will be and are being criminalized at the behest of luddites, lobbyists and the corporations they serve…people like Henry Porter.

Google presents a far greater threat to the livelihood of individuals and the future of commercial institutions important to the community.

This is so absurd I actually LOL’d. Google makes it easy to find authors; easier than it has ever been before. It makes all sorts of research easier by orders of magnitude; every link on this page was found for me by Google. Henry Porter wants a world where this, the greatest research tool ever invented is deliberately broken, just like Scribd is being broken. This is the ‘benefit’ he wants to bring to ‘the community’, and it is laughable that he thinks that ‘commercial institutions’ work for the benefit of ‘the community’… only when they work for HIS benefit… which community PRECISELY is he talking about? I think it’s the community of published authors and publishing houses; the intellectual monopolists, who want to strangle innovation and hold humanity back.

One case emerged last week when a letter from Billy Bragg, Robin Gibb and other songwriters was published in the Times explaining that Google was playing very rough with those who appeared on its subsidiary, YouTube. When the Performing Rights Society demanded more money for music videos streamed from the website, Google reacted by refusing to pay the requested 0.22p per play and took down the videos of the artists concerned.

This is called ‘rent seeking‘; the artists concerned, Socialist Billy Bragg and his strange bedfellow, falsetto Robin Gibb, intellectual monopolists both, threatened Google that if they did not pay the rent for videos on YouTube they would face action. Google removes the videos, the infringement, and then is accused of ‘playing very rough’. Do they want their material infringed or do they not? They complained, and their wishes were acceded to; why are they complaining? The fact of the matter is that they want to collect rent. They would like their music to be posted and hosted on YouTube without them having to lift a finger, but they want the rent also. 22p per play is absolutely ridiculous, and if every rent seeker asked for and recieved this money, there would be no YouTube. YouTube is turning out to be one of the most potent political tools available from, the UK to Saudi Arabia. Henry Porter wants it killed so that his (completely irrational) rent seeking socialist friends can make money they do not deserve.

Socialists really are ridiculous creatures; they claim that they are for the masses being empowered, but when something comes along that gives them more power than anyone has ever had EVER, they are AGAINST IT, and want to DESTROY it. The fact is that Socialists are not for anyone other than themselves; they want to be the bosses, the controllers with absolute power. Billy Bragg is a perfect example of this. A luddite that would smash the internet so he can collect rent. Robin Gibb is at least consistent; he is a rich man who doesn’t want the party to end – at least he is honest.

It does this with impunity because it is dominant worldwide and knows the songwriters have nowhere else to go. Google is the portal to a massive audience: you comply with its terms or feel the weight of its boot on your windpipe.

This is total garbage. Google can in no way be characterized as putting a boot on anyone’s windpipe…though in the case of Billy Bragg, that would save us from hearing his ‘singing’.

Secondly, songwriters have everywhere else to go. This is because the internet is essentially infinite; they can set up their own site and sell their wares; they have had over a decade to do it, and have failed miserably to meet this new challenge. Instead of buying Napster, they destroyed it. Instead of working with Mininova and The Pirate Bay, they are trying to outlaw them. Even Apples iTunes store, where they were making money, met with fierce resistance from them. The fact of the matter is, these people, Henry Porter, Billy Bragg and the entertainment industry are collectively unintelligent and unimaginative. Were this not the case, they would have seen the opportunity for super-distribution of their works and embraced the internet at the beginning.

Despite the aura of heroic young enterprise that still miraculously attaches to the web, what we are seeing is a much older and toxic capitalist model – the classic monopoly that destroys industries and individual enterprise in its bid for ever greater profits.

That is incorrect; what we are seeing IS heroic young enterprise, being misunderstood and slandered by old rent seeking luddites, who are the REAL monopolists in this story, the Intellectual Monopolists. It is Henry Porter that is trying to destroy industry’s enterprise – new industries – Google, Scribd and all the other content services empower individual enterprise by allowing the creative to circumnavigate the luddite gatekeepers at the Guardian and the major record labels.

Google make profits and the entire world benefits from a tool unprecedented in human history, that no one has to pay for to use, and which helps authors and publishers make more money and reach more people than they ever dreamed possible. Only a total fool would be against it, and given the facts of the history and nature of copyright and patents, only the evil and utterly selfish would try to destroy it.

Despite its diversification, Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time.

This is covered by the comments on this very bad and revealing article:

2) Google is at the very center of the information-economy, and to say it produces nothing is ridiculous. They’re purpose is to effectively organize, catalog and make searchable the sum of the information of mankind. Everything they have constructed has been purposed about this goal, from their basic search engines to Google Earth.

[...]

To say that Google produces nothing is ridiculous. As many people have mentioned the search algorithms they have developed make the internet useful for millions. One might as well dismiss Dr Johnson for compiling a book of other people’s words.

Beyond search they have produced some of the easiest to use and most compelling software available. GMail, Google Maps, Google Docs and Google Calendar have reset expectations for what can be done in internet applications.

They may not be the perfect institution and I love to know if one ever existed. I want to live in a world of Newspapers and Google but if Newspapers don’t survive it won’t be Google’s fault.

[...]

“… Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time”.

This is utter blindness. It’s like arguing that the Ordinance Survey have never done anything useful, because everything on their maps was created by other people, or that Henry Ford added no value because he only shuffled around metals, wood and leather into different shapes.

Google have made searching on a vast scale incredibly easy, and they are the only company who has done so, covering everything from Ethiopian restaurants to the notebooks of Leonardo, at any time, from anywhere. In fact, for absolutely nothing, they provide me with a service worth several times more than any other company does, bar none. If this puts them in a position to earn a lot of money, good on them. If Billy Bragg would still prefer to be back in the workers’ paradise of the GDR, he’s welcome to it.

Closer to home, I note that 95+% of what the Guardian provides overlaps several times over with what is provided by the Daily Telegraph, the Irish Times, the Economist, etc, and that the marginal value of any one of these is minimal. The challenge for newspapers is to make themselves distinctively useful, (e.g. the New Yorker’s employment of Sy Hersh), rather than, like the Guardian, recycling a huge amount of content from the AP in manner that makes it, “in the final analysis, a parasite …”.

[...]

What a bitter and twisted load of oldschool, oldfashioned, defensive Fleet-Street-Journalist dinosaurian rubbish this article really is.

Just listen to the decription of the Internet and Google: “amoral”, “destructive, anti-civic”, “exuberant contempt”, “threat to livelihood of individuals”, “a parasite that creates nothing”, “delinquent”, “sociopathic”, “invaded the privacy of millions”, “needs to be stopped in its tracks”.

This is the typical rant of the dying newspaperman – yes, mate, your “power” as a “journalist” with your beholden readers IS on the wane, your influence IS falling, your role IS diminishing – I can understand why you see the Internet and Google as bad.

But this isn’t journalism – like so much we now see inthe papers against the Internet, it’s massively ill-informed, superficial, frightened, self-serving invective. I fear it will do nothing more than to confirm the authors as dinosaurs who have received the last rites.

[...]

And there you have it.

On the back of the labour of others it makes vast advertising revenues – in the final quarter of last year its revenues were $5.7bn, and it currently sits on a cash pile of $8.6bn. Its monopolistic tendencies took an extra twist this weekend with rumours that it may buy the micro-blogging site Twitter and its plans – contested by academics – to scan a vast library of books that are out of print but still in copyright.

Twitter, if they want to be bought by Google, is a private matter. It’spurchase will benefit the users of that service…in any case, that has nothing to do with the thrust of this article, intellectual monopoly. It does point however shine a light on Henry Porter’s hatred of the rich and innovative, his sour grapes politics. As for ‘contested by academics’, this is ‘some people say‘. That is the company that Henry Porter keeps.

One of the chief casualties of the web revolution is the newspaper business, which now finds itself laden with debt (not Google’s fault) and having to give its content free to the search engine in order to survive.

Newspapers are dying because they do not provide what people need. If the Guardian provided what people want, the truth, then it would be a thriving business. The fact of the matter is, as the commenter says above, the Guardian’s content overlaps with every other newspapers content. they run the same stories, from the same point of view, and everyone is sick of it. This is why readers have turned away from newspapers:

Definitely the most ill-informed piece of propaganda I have read in a very long time and a great example of why nobody wants to pay for newspapers

Well said commenter. This is an absurd article that flies in the face of reality and the truth; why should anyone PAY to be lied to when they can get the truth for free and unfiltered from the internets?

Newspapers can of course remove their content but then their own advertising revenues and profiles decline. In effect they are being held captive and tormented by their executioner, who has the gall to insist that the relationship is mutually beneficial. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google they would be almost certainly in breach of competition law.

Newspapers, if they were to remove their content, would be committing suicide. They should do this, and go out like an hero instead of whining like spoiled brats. They have executed themselves by prostituting their non advertising column inches for anyone with money, and the Guardian is the biggest whore of them all. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google no one would notice; the content in all the papers is the same, and so it is already like there is only one newspaper… no breach of competition rules is possible between those bird cage liners.

In 1787 Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.” A moment’s thought must tell us that he is still right: newspapers are the only means of holding local hospitals, schools, councils and the police to account, and on a national level they are absolutely essential for the good functioning of democracy.

I think this Thomas Jefferson quote is more appropriate:

“Knowledge is like a candle. When you light your candle from mine, my light is not diminished. It is enhanced and a larger room is enlightened as a consequence.” Thomas Jefferson

Quote found by Google of course.

Sharing knowledge is just like sharing a light from a candle.

Henry Porter and the intellectual monopolists want us all to live in darkness.

If, at a time of profound challenges, newspapers fall out with Google, it could be pretty serious for British society, which is why I referred earlier to anti-civic forces.

British society is in trouble because the newspapers have utterly failed to raise the alarm about the police state. They have failed to rally the people into revolt. They have failed in the very task that Henry Porter believes is their raison d’etre and sacred duty. The internet has done more than any newspaper to galvanize inform and solidify the revolt against the police state, as we are well aware; even email circulars are more powerful than newspapers in properly informing the public. Then there are the Blogs which have changed the game entirely. And now, YouTube, which shamed television news into playing catch up on one of the most important speeches delivered in front of a sitting Prime Minster ever. That is a blog post, by the way, NOT a newspaper article. No, newspapers are an irrelevance now thanks to their prostituting their power, and this article, this shameless, vulgar piece of transparent propaganda, is a perfect example of it.

Of course the company founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 – now reckoned to be the world’s most powerful brand – does not offer any substitute for the originators of content nor does it allow this to touch its corporate conscience. That is probably because one detects in Google something that is delinquent and sociopathic, perhaps the character of a nightmarish 11-year-old.

The only delusional people in this story are Henry Porter and the lobby he represents and is shilling for. The only people without conscience are the ones who would retard or destroy man’s progress for their personal profit. It is Henry Porter who is acting like a breast fed 11-year-old, whining that the world is changing and he can no longer get his ‘bitty’….”I want my rent mummy!!! WAAAAH WAAAHHH WAHHHHH”

This particular 11-year-old has known nothing but success and does not understand the risks, skill and failure involved in the creation of original content, nor the delicate relationships that exist outside its own desires and experience.

Henry Porter is painfully unaware about the history and true nature of intellectual monopoly, and how it is damaging to society. He wants to prevent failure of fossilized and sclerotic businesses by strangling innovators so that methods can never change and business and culture remain in stasis.

There is a brattish, clever amorality about Google that allows it to censor the pages on its Chinese service without the slightest self doubt, store vast quantities of unnecessary information about every Google search, and menace the delicate instruments of democratic scrutiny.

Henry Porter perfectly conveys spoiled and ignorant immorality that poses as righteous indignation. He chastises Google for obeying the laws of other countries while whining that Google does not better obeying the insane laws of the UK. This is hypocrisy, but when it comes to China, all journalists at the Guardian are in the same boat.

And, naturally, it did not exercise Google executives that Street View not only invaded the privacy of millions and made the job of burglars easier but somehow laid claim to Britain’s civic spaces. How gratifying to hear of the villagers of Broughton, Bucks, who prevented the Google van from taking pictures of their homes.

And yet, all the journalists who jumped on Google for Streetview, which everyone can use equally, did not make so much noise when the CCTV started to go up, which no one can access but the state. How is it that CCTV, ANPR etc is not as bad as Google Streetview? Henry Porter has been making the right noises about CCTV to be sure, but the newspapers as a whole have totally FAILED to make the right noises about CCTV. Google Streetview is NOTHING compared to the real-time CCTV and ANPR that the state has, and yet, where is the universal moral outrage? Where are the pig ignorant little Britain villagers taking down the surveillance cameras en masse? Oh, I remember, Henry Porter says:

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve always believed that the democratic state must be given power to act on behalf of us

[...]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1499

which means that he is FOR CCTV as long as the democratic state is behind it, acting on behalf of us. Those villagers are FOR CCTV as long as its the government behind them! They are all as thick as two short planks.

We could do worse than follow their example for this brat needs to be stopped in its tracks and taught about the responsibilities it owes to content providers and copyright holders.

[...]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/05/google-internet-piracy?showallcomments=true

I am happy to say that articles like this are the death rattle of the pure evil that is newspaper journalism.

I am also happy to report that the majority of the comments on his article are entirely against it, for all the right reasons.

Farewell newspaper journalism, don’t let the door slam behind you.

1. We, the Leaders of the Group of Twenty, met in London on 2 April 2009.

This, we know.

2. We face the greatest challenge to the world economy in modern times; a crisis which has deepened since we last met, which affects the lives of women, men, and children in every country, and which all countries must join together to resolve. A global crisis requires a global solution.

FALSE. It is not true that all countries must join together to resolve this ‘crisis’, and it is also false that this ‘crisis’ reqires a global solution.

The adage ‘Think locally act globally’ applies here. Each country needs to have its own sovereign currency that is based on Gold coins. That is the long term solution to this problem.

3. We start from the belief that prosperity is indivisible;

FALSE. Prosperity is the byproduct of liberty. It is liberty that is indivisible.

that growth, to be sustained, has to be shared;

FALSE. Not only is the idea of sustained growth not an absolute, but the idea that it has to be shared is also absurd.

and that our global plan for recovery must have at its heart the needs and jobs of hard-working families, not just in developed countries but in emerging markets and the poorest countries of the world too; and must reflect the interests, not just of today’s population, but of future generations too.

If that is true, then priority number one must be the adoption of a monetary system where the hard earned work value of the people cannot be arbitrarily destroyed by the fallible leaders of the G20. If that is true, then no one anywhere should accept a fiat currency or legal tender laws that make it impossible for people to preserve their wealth and prosperity in the long run.

We believe that the only sure foundation for sustainable globalisation and rising prosperity for all is an open world economy based on market principles, effective regulation, and strong global institutions.

It is not at all agreed that ‘sustainable globalisation’ is a desirable outcome. Rising prosperity, for sure, many people on the earth are living lives that are not optimal; the question is what is the best way that they can serve their own interests. Market principles create the prosperity that the leaders of the G20 are now able to squander. ‘Effective regulation’ is code for total market regulation, which means the death of market principles. ‘Strong global institutions’ means global governance, anathema to the free market and a death blow to it.

4. We have today therefore pledged to do whatever is necessary to:

LIE. If this were the case, they would immediately cease and desist from interfering in the process of the market.

restore confidence, growth, and jobs;

They cannot do this. The market is more powerful than any of them or even 1000 of them.

repair the financial system to restore lending;

They cannot do this. They do not have the ability to do this. If they could do this, it would be the wrong thing to do because credit was the cause of this problem.

strengthen financial regulation to rebuild trust;

Trust is not the problem. More onerous regulation will not restore it; it will further damage the market.

fund and reform our international financial institutions to overcome this crisis and prevent future ones;

You do not have the money to fund and reform international financial institutions. You can only print money or tax citizens. You cannot tax any further without a global revolt, so you will steal the money by printing more fiat currency. This will worsen the ‘crisis’, hasten and increase the severity of the implosion.

promote global trade and investment and reject protectionism, to underpin prosperity; and

Global trade does not need promotion. Companies are very good at selling their wares world-wide. Investors do not need encouragement to find places to put their money. If you get out of the way and remove regulations and restrictions money will flow at the speed of light to where it is needed.

build an inclusive, green, and sustainable recovery.

These are weasel words, inserted to placate the adherents of the new secular religion ‘Environmentalism’.

By acting together to fulfil these pledges we will bring the world economy out of recession and prevent a crisis like this from recurring in the future.

And if you fail, will you all collectively resign and cease to interfere in matters beyond your understanding?

5. The agreements we have reached today, to treble resources available to the IMF to $750 billion, to support a new SDR allocation of $250 billion, to support at least $100 billion of additional lending by the MDBs, to ensure $250 billion of support for trade finance, and to use the additional resources from agreed IMF gold sales for concessional finance for the poorest countries, constitute an additional $1.1 trillion programme of support to restore credit, growth and jobs in the world economy.

Selling Gold? Anyone with common sense will see this as a great buying opportunity. The price of Gold (real money) is going to go down on this announcement, and then, once these insane measures fail to work, it will skyrocket.

This paragraph fails to say where the $1.1 trillion dollars promised is going to come from. It also does not say who is going to receive these fiat funds.

Together with the measures we have each taken nationally, this constitutes a global plan for recovery on an unprecedented scale.

LIE. This constitutes theft on a scale previously unknown to mankind. This $1.1 trillion has to come from somewhere. It can either come from the printing press, or the savings of a nation or from taxation. Either way, it is going to come from somewhere, and then it is going to be given to someone at the diktat of a small handful of people. This is more than insanity. It is criminal. We note that none of the citizenry of the G20 were asked to vote wether or not ‘their’ money was to be used in this way. This ‘solution’ was arrived at in secret and delivered as a fait accomplit. No one with any decency would accept such a thing. And to top it all off, this solution WILL NOT WORK.

6. We are undertaking an unprecedented and concerted fiscal expansion,

You cannot make something out of nothing. Value cannot be created out of nothing. Any fiscal expansion must come from the production of work; governments are unproductive – they cannot produce anything, they can only take from the productive and give to the unproductive. This is called ‘stealing’.

which will save or create millions of jobs which would otherwise have been destroyed, and that will, by the end of next year, amount to $5 trillion, raise output by 4 per cent, and accelerate the transition to a green economy. We are committed to deliver the scale of sustained fiscal effort necessary to restore growth.

This plan will not save or create real jobs. It will in fact, destroy real jobs and capital.

7. Our central banks have also taken exceptional action. Interest rates have been cut aggressively in most countries, and our central banks have pledged to maintain expansionary policies for as long as needed and to use the full range of monetary policy instruments, including unconventional instruments, consistent with price stability.

Central banks and fiat currency are the cause of this problem. They do not have perfect knowledge, and therefore are not able to set the interest rates correctly. Only the market can do that. It was the artificially low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve that started this crisis. The fact that you do not know this disqualifies you from being able to present a solution.

8. Our actions to restore growth cannot be effective until we restore domestic lending and international capital flows. We have provided significant and comprehensive support to our banking systems to provide liquidity, recapitalise financial institutions, and address decisively the problem of impaired assets. We are committed to take all necessary actions to restore the normal flow of credit through the financial system and ensure the soundness of systemically important institutions, implementing our policies in line with the agreed G20 framework for restoring lending and repairing the financial sector.

You cannot be for the market and also be for forcing people to lend money where they do not feel that it is prudent to do so. Trying to expand access to credit to people who had no business buying a house was one of the factors that caused this situation. When you get out of the way, money will begin to flow instantly. By standing together as you are, you are in fact acting like a dam, blocking the flow of capital. Money is like information; it wants to be free. When you finally give up your delusion that you understand economics and get out of the way, the dam will burst and money will flow and wash away this problem.

9. Taken together, these actions will constitute the largest fiscal and monetary stimulus and the most comprehensive support programme for the financial sector in modern times.

And it will fail spectacularly. Stimulus packages will not work, cannot work, and have never worked.

Acting together strengthens the impact and the exceptional policy actions announced so far must be implemented without delay.

Acting together intensifies the storm, increases its devastating power and will make everything 1000 times worse.

Today, we have further agreed over $1 trillion of additional resources for the world economy through our international financial institutions and trade finance.

What is the ultimate source of the money? It can only be tax or printing press or savings. Why is it that you cannot speak plainly? Say you are going to do one of the three!

10. Last month the IMF estimated that world growth in real terms would resume and rise to over 2 percent by the end of 2010.

They could not predict this crash, and yet, we are to believe that they can predict the future now?

We are confident that the actions we have agreed today, and our unshakeable commitment to work together to restore growth and jobs, while preserving long-term fiscal sustainability, will accelerate the return to trend growth.

And this is why you FAIL. Confidence is not enough; confidence does not get work done, it does not create value. What confidence DOES do, is deceive the confident into believing paper money is real, that it has value, and that by printing it, you create value out of thin air. Commitment to a false idea is suicide. In this case, that is a good thing. Long-term fiscal sustainability can only be had with gold coins as the money. The trend growth that you refer to was produced by the printing of fiat currency. Those graphs should be thrown out immediately, as they represent an unattainable goal.

We commit today to taking whatever action is necessary to secure that outcome, and we call on the IMF to assess regularly the actions taken and the global actions required.

If you want to fix this, you need to STOP TAKING ACTIONS. It is your taking of actions that has been and which is causing the problem!

11. We are resolved to ensure long-term fiscal sustainability and price stability and will put in place credible exit strategies from the measures that need to be taken now to support the financial sector and restore global demand.

Long term pice stability can only be had with a gold coin standard for money. Since gold cannot be printed, its value cannot be corrupted – the money cannot be debased. When denominated in gold, the price of almost everything has not changed in decades. Global demand is not your affair. You do not have the competence to engineer it, and everything you do to try and generate it causes more problems.

We are convinced that by implementing our agreed policies we will limit the longer-term costs to our economies, thereby reducing the scale of the fiscal consolidation necessary over the longer term.

People used to be convinced that the earth was flat. You are all in the same camp. You all believe that paper money has value, that you can control ‘the economy’, and that your insane spending measures will fix this, when every indicator says that it will make things worse. Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein.. What you are doing, is, by this definition, INSANE. It was debt that created this problem. You cannot borrow your way out of debt.

12. We will conduct all our economic policies cooperatively and responsibly with regard to the impact on other countries and will refrain from competitive devaluation of our currencies and promote a stable and well-functioning international monetary system.

The only way to create “a stable and well-functioning international monetary system” is to get out of the way and allow the market to determine what money should be and how it should work.

We will support, now and in the future, to candid, even-handed, and independent IMF surveillance of our economies and financial sectors, of the impact of our policies on others, and of risks facing the global economy.

The IMF did not see this crisis coming. They are not omniscient. They do not have the ability or the right to supervise the private affairs of nations.

Strengthening financial supervision and regulation

13. Major failures in the financial sector and in financial regulation and supervision were fundamental causes of the crisis.

This is a LIE.

Confidence will not be restored until we rebuild trust in our financial system.

This is FALSE.

We will take action to build a stronger, more globally consistent, supervisory and regulatory framework for the future financial sector, which will support sustainable global growth and serve the needs of business and citizens.

This is NONSENSE.

Global consistency means the absence of a free market, where the individual can choose the best jurisdiction to do business. A world run by incompetents at the IMF and the G20 is a world where innovation and business will be stifled. The needs of business and citizens are best served by each of the two groups acting without onerous regulation laid down by incompetent people.

14. We each agree to ensure our domestic regulatory systems are strong.

They already are strong. So strong in fact, that people spend all their time thinking up ways to get around the regulations so that they can make a profit. No one would put their money into risky derivatives if there was a less risky alternative that paid the same returns. The fact of the matter is that the already overburdened regulatory and taxation system makes it very hard to earn a profit; this is the true mother, the genesis of the exotic financial products.

But we also agree to establish the much greater consistency and systematic cooperation between countries, and the framework of internationally agreed high standards, that a global financial system requires.

The ‘global system’ does not require this. Greater consistency means a playing field where no one has the incentive to win, much less step out onto the field.

Strengthened regulation and supervision must promote propriety, integrity and transparency; guard against risk across the financial system; dampen rather than amplify the financial and economic cycle; reduce reliance on inappropriately risky sources of financing; and discourage excessive risk-taking.

Regulation cannot promote propriety or integrity. Regulation in fact, promotes and exacerbates the tactics of evasion. Transparency already exists in the place that it matters; between the client and the entity that offers a financial product. You cannot “risk across the financial system” AND be in favor of fiat currencies and fractional reserve banking, the latter being the most dangerous. The economic cycle (which is actually The Business Cycle) is the creature of governments with their bad money, regulations and interference in the market. The state cannot decide what is and is not inappropriate. Only individuals can make this determination. When the state involves itself in legislating risk-taking, moral hazard is the result.

Regulators and supervisors must protect consumers and investors, support market discipline, avoid adverse impacts on other countries, reduce the scope for regulatory arbitrage, support competition and dynamism, and keep pace with innovation in the marketplace.

Regulators failed to spot Madhof (the scapegoat). They are incapable of protecting consumers, even if it was appropriate for them to do so, which it is not. Markets are self disciplining, just like the weather. No doubt you at the G20 would like to control that also. Avoiding adverse impacts is also impossible. If it were possible to do it, the IMF would have stepped in to stop the current crisis from emerging.

You cannot,”support competition and dynamism” and also be FOR regulation and the sort of fine grained supervision you are advocating. We understand what you mean by ‘keep pace with innovation in the marketplace’; stop any and all new internet based payment systems from taking root and supplanting the ossified, corrupt, sclerotic financial system over which you preside, or pretend to preside.

15. To this end we are implementing the Action Plan agreed at our last meeting, as set out in the attached progress report. We have today also issued a Declaration, Strengthening the Financial System. In particular we agree:

to establish a new Financial Stability Board (FSB) with a strengthened mandate, as a successor to the Financial Stability Forum (FSF), including all G20 countries, FSF members, Spain, and the European Commission;

Pointless.

that the FSB should collaborate with the IMF to provide early warning of macroeconomic and financial risks and the actions needed to address them;

This will never work. The IMF did not see this crisis coming, the biggest ever in world history, and they will not see the next one, if there is going to be a next one.

to reshape our regulatory systems so that our authorities are able to identify and take account of macro-prudential risks;

This will be used to blackmail institutions that are the personal enemies of the insiders.

to extend regulation and oversight to all systemically important financial institutions, instruments and markets. This will include, for the first time, systemically important hedge funds;

Total control by incompetent unproductive over the productive.

to endorse and implement the FSF’s tough new principles on pay and compensation and to support sustainable compensation schemes and the corporate social responsibility of all firms;

This is UTTER NONSENSE. There is no such thing as a ‘sustainable compensation scheme’, and executive remuneration has nothing to do with this problem. The fact that this childish, sour grapes scapegoating language is in this document demonstrates your complete lack of understanding of the problem, its root cause and the steps that need to be taken. It proves that you are incompetent, dull witted and doomed to failure.

to take action, once recovery is assured, to improve the quality, quantity, and international consistency of capital in the banking system.

recovery will not be assured by this plan, and even if it were possible, by what metric are you going to declare that it has happened? Improving the international consistency of capital in the banking system means a global currency. We are not stupid!

In future, regulation must prevent excessive leverage and require buffers of resources to be built up in good times;

It is not the place of the state to say what is or is not excessive leverage. Banking is a private business. So is risk. Neither is the business of government.

to take action against non-cooperative jurisdictions, including tax havens.

Tax ‘havens’ have nothing to do with this crisis. You would do better to ask why it is that money is fleeing your jurisdictions; once you address that problem, no one will have the incentive to remove their money from your shores. As for non co-operative jurisdictions, this means that the G20 is now going to act as if it is the de-fact world government, and there will be no more national soverignty. People will not be able to choose places to invest based on thier own requirements, and nations will not be able to organize their affairs as they see fit. All laws will now pass through the filter of G20, and if you do not agree, you will be listed as an ‘outlaw nation’. This will be the case even if the country, through the democratic process, decides that it wants nothing to do with the G20 and its absurd and destructive policies.

We stand ready to deploy sanctions to protect our public finances and financial systems.

This is a non sequitur. You do not use sanctions to protect YOUR public finances, you use YOUR LAWS to do that. Sanctions are used to disrupt OTHER PEOPLE’S finances and financial systems. The money in sovereign nations is not YOURS it is the property of the OWNERS of that money, and the responsibility of the sovereign nation where the funds are stored.

The era of banking secrecy is over. We note that the OECD has today published a list of countries assessed by the Global Forum against the international standard for exchange of tax information;

None of this has anything to do with the financial crisis. Banking secrecy has no effect on anything, other than the ability of the venal government’s ability to steal the wealth from its beleaguered citizenry. You are using this crisis to extend your reach into places where you have no business being.

to call on the accounting standard setters to work urgently with supervisors and regulators to improve standards on valuation and provisioning and achieve a single set of high-quality global accounting standards; and

None of this will work. You will not have enough time to roll it out; the collapse will see to that. Barring the collapse, there will be a ground-swell of rage that will permanently scupper your plans.

to extend regulatory oversight and registration to Credit Rating Agencies to ensure they meet the international code of good practice, particularly to prevent unacceptable conflicts of interest.

16. We instruct our Finance Ministers to complete the implementation of these decisions in line with the timetable set out in the Action Plan. We have asked the FSB and the IMF to monitor progress, working with the Financial Action Taskforce and other relevant bodies, and to provide a report to the next meeting of our Finance Ministers in Scotland in November.

The only confilct of interest that matters here is the prevalence of financial insiders in the corrupt governments.

17 to 24, snipped, as it is repetitive and refuted.

Ensuring a fair and sustainable recovery for all

25. We are determined not only to restore growth but to lay the foundation for a fair and sustainable world economy. We recognise that the current crisis has a disproportionate impact on the vulnerable in the poorest countries and recognise our collective responsibility to mitigate the social impact of the crisis to minimise long-lasting damage to global potential. To this end:

The state cannot determine what is ‘fair’ and what is not ‘un-fair’. Global potential, like gravitational potential energy, is storable. Sound money stores value; it is called capital (potential to invest). If you want to minimise long terme damage to global potential, sound money must replace fiat currencies that can be printed and debased at the will of incompetents.

we reaffirm our historic commitment to meeting the Millennium Development Goals and to achieving our respective ODA pledges, including commitments on Aid for Trade, debt relief, and the Gleneagles commitments, especially to sub-Saharan Africa;

Others haver written about this, Google them.

the actions and decisions we have taken today will provide $50 billion to support social protection, boost trade and safeguard development in low income countries, as part of the significant increase in crisis support for these and other developing countries and emerging markets;

Where is this money coming from, for the thousandth time, and is this not giving fish to people instead of teaching them how to fish?

we are making available resources for social protection for the poorest countries, including through investing in long-term food security and through voluntary bilateral contributions to the World Bank’s Vulnerability Framework, including the Infrastructure Crisis Facility, and the Rapid Social Response Fund;

More failure on the cards.

we have committed, consistent with the new income model, that additional resources from agreed sales of IMF gold will be used, together with surplus income, to provide $6 billion additional concessional and flexible finance for the poorest countries over the next 2 to 3 years. We call on the IMF to come forward with concrete proposals at the Spring Meetings;

Who is going to buy this gold, and what will they give in exchange for it? Gold is money. The people who want to buy it have fiat currency. People who want to protect the value of their money will line up for this bargain price gold, hand over their worthless dollars and euros and then sit back and watch the spectacle unfold.

we have agreed to review the flexibility of the Debt Sustainability Framework and call on the IMF and World Bank to report to the IMFC and Development Committee at the Annual Meetings; and

we call on the UN, working with other global institutions, to establish an effective mechanism to monitor the impact of the crisis on the poorest and most vulnerable.

A waste of money.

26. We recognise the human dimension to the crisis. We commit to support those affected by the crisis by creating employment opportunities and through income support measures.

How is this going to be paid for?

We will build a fair and family-friendly labour market for both women and men.

It is not the place of the state to build labour markets. While we are at it, a ‘family-friendly’ labour market would be one where the mother gets to raise her children full time, instead of being forced to earn money because the prices of houses is so great (which is a direct result of interference in the market by the state).

We therefore welcome the reports of the London Jobs Conference and the Rome Social Summit and the key principles they proposed. We will support employment by stimulating growth,

Growth cannot be stimulated.

investing in education and training, and through active labour market policies, focusing on the most vulnerable. We call upon the ILO, working with other relevant organisations, to assess the actions taken and those required for the future.

More nonsense.

27. We agreed to make the best possible use of investment funded by fiscal stimulus programmes towards the goal of building a resilient, sustainable, and green recovery. We will make the transition towards clean, innovative, resource efficient, low carbon technologies and infrastructure. We encourage the MDBs to contribute fully to the achievement of this objective. We will identify and work together on further measures to build sustainable economies.

28. We reaffirm our commitment to address the threat of irreversible climate change, based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, and to reach agreement at the UN Climate Change conference in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Utter, unscientific garbage.

Delivering our commitments

29. We have committed ourselves to work together with urgency and determination to translate these words into action. We agreed to meet again before the end of this year to review progress on our commitments.

It is the prayer of every free man on this planet that you meet with TOTAL FAILURE.

Anti G20 ‘Rioters’ display total ignorance, impotence, incompetence, idiocy and irrationality:

A comment from The Times:

To be fair to the protesters, one this occasion they have paid for the damages in advance.
David Masu, Zürich, Switzerland

And check this out:

I have a better idea chubby: Why don’t you get yourself out of the government’s economy??!?!

And of course, the police agent provocateurs were in full force:

Snarfed from The Daily Mail.

Now for some common sense:

NEW WORLD DISORDER

The G-20 meeting begins this week in England. Here, political leaders from 20 major nations meet to share ideas on how to solve an international financial crisis that their central banks created, following the lead of Alan Greenspan’s FED. They never saw it coming. Not any of them – not the central bankers, not the politicians, not the regulators. They were all caught flat-footed.

Then they assemble at a meeting and send out press releases. These press releases are designed to assure the investing public that they, the creators of this crisis, know what went wrong – they don’t – and that by discussing the causes of the crisis, which they don’t understand, they will be able to come up with a joint solution that does not involve either (1) mass inflation or (2) a worldwide depression that lasts for years.

It is a song and dance. It is shuck and jive. It is bait and switch. It is Custer’s last stand.

These people don’t know what to do. If they did, there would be two or three well-defined, fully documented proposals out there, each with national co-sponsors. All of them would have major flaws. They would be mutually exclusive. Economists of various schools of opinion would be mobilizing behind one or another program.

Instead, there are no published plans. There are no working papers. There are only vague promises of joint action. Like what?

There are no detailed plans out of which this team of egomaniac politicians might conceivably hammer into an acceptable plan.

There is no centralized international planning agency.

There is no international enforcement agency. There is no agreement among central bankers.

There is no unanimity to do anything.

There is not going to be, either. The G-20 meeting will issue some sort of bland statement of hope, and everyone will go home.

They refuse to adopt the only system that every brought unity to governments and central banks: an international gold coin standard. The politicians and central bankers could not control the movements of gold out of inflating nations and into non-inflating nations, 1815–1914. They resented the ability of common people to exercise control over domestic monetary policy simply by going down to a bank and demanding payment in gold coins. They all took away this authority in the summer of 1914, when World War I broke out.

These deal-doers, these politicians, these seekers of power don’t trust each other. That is the famous bottom line. They do not trust the common people, which means that they do not trust a gold coin standard. But they do not trust each other.

They are trapped by the dollar standard. They have told their voters that their nations can get rich by exporting to the United States. They have not explained that in order to export lots of goods to the United States, their central banks must create fiat money to buy depreciating dollars at a favorable rate of exchange. They have not told the voters that modern mercantilism depends on lending tax money and central bank fiat money to the U.S. government, which will not pay back the loans. Ever.

[...]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north700.html

All BLOGDIAL readers know why this protesting and violence is pointless / futile / stupid /.

That which is seen …. if you have the right equipment.

That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen

If you have the right equipment.

A member of Congress is warning the Obama administration to keep its hands off the U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s international currency.

U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn., has introduced a resolution that would bar the U.S. from recognizing any other currency than the dollar as its reserve currency.

Her action comes in response to suggestions from China, Russia and the United Nations that another currency be explored. Even U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has admitted he would be open to the idea, although he quickly backtracked when the stock market plunged on his announcement.

“During a Financial Services Committee hearing, I asked Secretary Geithner if he would denounce efforts to move towards a global currency and he answered unequivocally that he would,” Bachmann said. “And President Obama gave the nation the same assurances. But just a day later, Secretary Geithner has left the option on the table. I want to know which it is. The American people deserve to know.”

Although Title 31, Sec. 5103 USC prohibits foreign currency from being recognized in the U.S., the president has the power to engage foreign governments in treaties, and the president is principally responsible for the interpretations and implementation of those treaties according to the Constitution, according to the congresswoman.

As a result, legislation prohibiting the president and Treasury Department from issuing or agreeing that the U.S. will adopt an international currency would need to come in the form of a Constitutional Amendment differentiating a treaty used to implement an international currency in the U.S. from other types of treaty agreements, she said.

“If we give up the dollar as our standard, and co-mingle the value of the dollar with the value of coinage in Zimbabwe, that dilutes our money supply. We lose control over our economy. And economic liberty is inextricably entwined with political liberty. Once you lose your economic freedom, you lose your political freedom,” Bachmann told the Glenn Beck program on the Fox News Channel today.

Her proposal, H.J.R. 41, isn’t complicated:

It is titled: “Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to prohibit the president from entering into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States ”

Already with several dozen sponsors, it states:

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years after the date of its submission for ratification:”

It would add to the Constitution:

The president may not enter into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the latest voice to endorse an “alternative” to the dollar was the head of a U.N. expert panel discussing solutions to the financial crisis.

“The president may not enter into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States.”

[...]

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=93086

Incredible.

These people can smell that something is wrong, but are not sure what it is. They feel that they have to protect ‘their currency’, but they are not sure what it is that they need to do.

This amendment, as tabled, would actually outlaw the Dollar as it exists today.

The Federal Reserve is not ‘the United States’; it is a private bank. That means that ‘US Dollars’ are not issued by the United States, but by an entity other than the United States.

If this amendment is added to the Constitution, the US Dollar, AKA Federal Reserve Notes, will instantly cease being legal tender.

Interesting.

Are these people smarter than they appear to be, and are they trying to kill the Federal Reserve and its worthless fiat currency by a checkmate maneuver?

I doubt it.

It is more likely that they do not understand the nature of the money in their pockets; I would bet that Michelle Bachmann doesn’t know anything about the dollar, the Federal Reserve, fiat currency, commodity money, or anything about any of the real issues behind the problem at the center of what she is clumsily trying to address.

Until you understand the nature of money and currencies, it is impossible to draft legislation (or in this case, REMOVE LEGISLATION) that will permanently fix the problem.

FAIL.

I first heard these words on an Album by ‘The Pop Group’, called ‘For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder …‘. It is by The Last Poets, and it is called ‘E Pluribus Unum’.

Reading it again today, you could mistake the writers of these inspiring, insightful and brilliant words for a group of Austrian Economists:

Selfish desires are burning like fires
among those who hoard the gold
As they continue to keep the people asleep
and the truth from being told
Racism and greed keep the people in need
from getting what’s rightfully theirs
Cheating, stealing and double dealing
as they exploit the peoples fears

Now, Dow Jones owns the people’s homes
and all the surrounding land
Buying and selling their humble dwelling
in the name of the Master Plan

Cos paper money is like a bee without honey
with no stinger to back him up
and those who stole the people’s gold
are definitely corrupt

Credit cards, master charge, legacies of wills
real-estate, stocks and bonds on coupon paper bills

Now the US mints on paper prints, millions every day
and use the eagle as their symbol cos it’s a bird of prey

The laurels of peace and the arrows of wars
are clutched very tightly in the eagles claws
filled with greed and lust,
and on the back of the dollar bill,
is the words IN GOD WE TRUST

But the dollar bill is their only God
and they don’t even trust each other
for a few dollars more they’d start a war
to exploit some brother’s mother

Now ANNUIT means and endless amount stolen over the years
and COEPTIS means a new empire of vampire millionaires
And NOVUS is a Latin word meaning something new
an ORDO means a way of life chosen by a few
SECLORUM is a word that means to take from another
knowledge, wisdom and understanding stolen from the brother

Now there are thirteen layers of stone of the pyramid alone
an unfinished work of art
for thirty-three and a third is as high as a mason can go
without falling apart

Thirteen stars in the original flag!
Thirteen demons from the Devil’s bag!
Thirteen berries and thirteen leaves!
Thirteen colonies of land-grabbing thieves!
Thirteen arrows in the eagle’s claws!
Sixty-seven corporations wage the Devil’s wars!
Thirteen stripes on the eagle’s shield!
And these are the symbols on the US seal!

Now on the front of the dollar bill
to the right of Washington’s head
is a small seal in the shape of a wheel
with the secret that’s been left unsaid
The symbols in the middle represent the riddle
of the scales, the ruler and the key;
the square rule is a symbol
from the craft of masonry
The scales represent Libra
the balance of the seventh sign
They also represent the Just-Us
which you and I know is blind
The key unlocks the mysteries
of the secrets of the seal
So that only the Govern-u-men
would know what they reveal

The four words apart form the last parts of
the secrets of the seal
and tells how they fooled the people
into thinking paper money was real!

Now, THESAUR means the treasury
where they store the gold they stole
and AMER means to punish
like the slaves they bought and sold
Then SEPTENT means seven
like seventeen-seventy-six
when the thirteen devils gathered
to unleash their bag of tricks
The SIGEL means the images
they’ve created to fool the world
like the colors on Old Glory
the flag that they unfurled

Now the red was the color of the Indian man
White was the devil’s who stole the land
Blue was the eyes that hypnotized
with the tricks and traps they sprung
and even to this very same day
they all speak with forked tongue!

And so the power is in the hand of the ruling classes
playing god with the fate of all the masses
so the people don’t get any in the land of the plenty
'cause E PLURIBUS UNUM means 'One Out Of Many'

[...]

I fear that the attempts to speed up and deepen integration and to move decisions about the lives of the citizens of the member countries up to the European level can have effects that will endanger all the positive things achieved in Europe in the last half a century. Let us not underestimate the fears of the citizens of many member countries, who are afraid, that their problems are again decided elsewhere and without them, and that their ability to influence these decisions is very limited. So far, the European Union has been successful, partly thanks to the fact that the vote of each member country had the same weight and thus could not be ignored. Let us not allow a situation where the citizens of member countries would live their lives with a resigned feeling that the EU project is not their own; that it is developing differently than they would wish, that they are only forced to accept it. We would very easily and very soon slip back to the times that we hoped belonged to history.

This is closely connected with the question of prosperity. We must say openly that the present economic system of the EU is a system of a suppressed market, a system of a permanently strengthening centrally controlled economy. Although history has more than clearly proven that this is a dead end, we find ourselves walking the same path once again. This results in a constant rise in both the extent of government masterminding and constraining of spontaneity of the market processes. In recent months, this trend has been further reinforced by incorrect interpretation of the causes of the present economic and financial crisis, as if it was caused by free market, while in reality it is just the contrary – caused by political manipulation of the market. It is again necessary to point out to the historical experience of our part of Europe and to the lessons we learned from it.

Many of you certainly know the name of the French economist Frédéric Bastiat and his famous Petition of the Candlemakers, which has become a well-known and canonical reading, illustrating the absurdity of political interventions in the economy. On 14 November 2008 the European Commission approved a real, not a fictitious Bastiat’s Petition of the Candlemakers, and imposed a 66% tariff on candles imported from China. I would have never believed that a 160-year-old essay could become a reality, but it has happened. An inevitable effect of the extensive implementation of such measures in Europe is economic slowdown, if not a complete halt of economic growth. The only solution is liberalisation and deregulation of the European economy.

[...]

http://klaus.cz/klaus2/asp/clanek.asp?id=88EY96UW9zlp

I KNEW this man would be good!

It seems like the pressure is increasing on a daily basis. Look at this clip from the floor of the NYSE:

The seething anger is leaking out. Soon, the default action will be to say, “No”, and the REALLY angry people will be taking up arms.

It’s about BLOODY TIME.

California is broke.
Kansas is about to go broke.
New York is trying to tax everything under the sun to avoid going broke (it won’t work Mr. Bloomberg).

And in the EU, we read that the Telegraph printed a story about how

European banks may need £16.3 trillion bail-out, EC document warns

Only to immediately delete the story on orders so that bank runs would not be triggered.

Now, as we have been saying, if a bank does not operate a fractional reserve, it doesn’t matter if all the depositors come to get their money out at the same time; the money is actually there, unlike in today’s banks, where the money is NOT there.

Bit I digress a little.

The EU is, with any luck, FINISHED. When the euro collapses it will be the death blow to the EU. Each country is going to go back, re-launch their national currencies, tear up the bogus treaties and enslaving agreements that have made up this bad deal that betrays the hearts of nations and steals from the pockets and spirits of men.

No nation is going to ever again accept this extremely dangerous monetary monoculture. Think about it; why should the Italians suffer the wiping out of all their savings because some Germans made mistakes with the centrally controlled monolithic currency? If you are going to have your hard earned money wiped out, at least let it be by the act of other Italians; then you can string them upside down and shoot them for satisfaction; at least then you have someone to blame.

With the EU president chiseling from the top and all the citizens rioting from the base, the whole structure will fracture and shatter into a quadrillions pieces that will never be put back together again, and any future attempt will not look like the debacle that has been forced upon everyone today.

As for America, they are actively preparing for civil unrest. Google it for yourself. Like I have been saying for many years; if there is one country on earth that can turn itself around from the precipice it is the United STates of America. Only the men of that country have the balls (and the guns) to make the magic happen. I really do hope that they act as an example to the whole world once again. Either way, there is no going back. There is not enough money in the world to pay off the US debt. Europe cannot find the $25 trillion (twice the size of the gross domestic product of European Union) they need to ‘save’ themselves.

BOOM!