August 28th, 2010 by Militant Libertarian, Originally published on March 9, 2004.

by Russell Madden

Fascism: a political-economic system in which citizens retain title to their property but in which the government determines how that property may or may not be used.

You might be a fascist if you …
• believe that the proper way to decide whether a casino should be built in your hometown is to vote on the idea.
• object to individuals gambling in their homes unless they’re playing the state-run lotto.
• think that your neighbor needs the blessing of the historical commission in order to renovate his aging home.
• feel the urge to report the guy down the street who has a painting truck parked in his drive but no orange building permit stuck to a front window.

You might be a fascist if you …

• experienced a sense of glee when Microsoft had to spend millions in legal fees and was convicted of monopolistic policies.

• see nothing wrong with your city government awarding a single cable franchise while those guys who sell dishes must charge extra to customers who wish to receive local broadcast channels.
• are grateful that the FCC dictates to cable and phone providers how they can do business because you are afraid that otherwise the big media companies would have too much power.
• would rather have the government pass a law and set up another bureaucracy to restrict telemarketers than spend fifty bucks of your own money to purchase a screening device.
• do not object when others are forced to pay more for their goods so you can earn a higher income while your trade restrictions put other citizens out of work.

You might be a fascist if you …

• nod in agreement that individuals must show proof of identity in order to open a bank account because otherwise the terrorists will win.

• don’t object to money laundering laws that make snitches of your banks so the drug dealers and the terrorists won’t win.
• never complain about airport security checks and bag screening and weapon confiscation in order to keep the terrorists from winning.

You might be a fascist if you …

• tremble at the thought that the person sitting next to you in the restaurant might be carrying a gun without a license.

• want to eliminate and confiscate all guns in private hands in order to be safe since guns cause violence, unless the cops are the ones carrying the guns.
• applaud extra taxes on guns and ammunition, prohibition of sales between private parties, licenses for gun dealers, limits on the number of firearms someone can own or buy, and bans on brass knuckles, nunchucks, pen knives, big knives, pepper spray, stun guns, sword canes, or anything else that can be used to defend against a criminal.

You might be a fascist if you …

• laughed when an aging hippie comedian who sold drug paraphernalia via the Internet was thrown in jail but thought a well-known talk show host addicted to painkillers should receive rehab.

• accept the widespread drugging of young boys but recoil in horror from the thought of adults receiving pleasure or relief from illicit drugs.
• champion zero tolerance for children who bring toy soldiers to school but think the heroes at Ruby Ridge and Waco got what they deserved when they were promoted for killing women and children.

You might be a fascist if you …

• think that taxes are the price we pay for civilization.

• smile when the rich have to pay an even greater proportion of taxes than they do now.
• kid yourself that Social Security and Medicare taxes are investments or premia rather than a way to pay for more welfare for old people.
• maintain that you have a right to health care, housing, retirement income, food stamps, or government-guaranteed student loans.

You might be a fascist if you …

• squint your eyes at the idea of parents educating their children at home.

• want child-free people to pay for your offspring’s schooling because everyone benefits.
• question the ability of parents to decide what their children should study, whether those youngsters should go to school at all, or how they should learn to make their own ways in the world.

You might be a fascist if you …

• seek assistance from the government to protect you from your own mistakes.

• ask the government to protect other people from what you believe are their own mistakes.
• abhor the thought of foreigners flooding your country and taking jobs you don’t want at wages you would refuse to accept.
• contend that you have a right to a job but an employer does not have the right to fire you because he doesn’t like the fact that you’re a woman, a racial minority, fat, or handicapped.
• think SUVs should be banned, seat belts and airbags required, gas mileage minimums enforced, gasoline formulations determined by the feds, and that more money should be spent on light rail systems that no one uses.

You might be a fascist if you …

• see all lawyers as heroes.

• hope to win the lawsuit lottery.
• refuse to accept that legal questions can be properly answered by anyone other than a state-accredited lawyer.

You might be a fascist if you …

• like the notion of mandated low-flow toilets and shower heads but see no problem with subsidized water so farmers or residents can work and live in deserts.

• rejoice that grease monkeys can no longer put Freon in your air conditioner.
• sneer at anything smacking of price gouging during disasters such as floods or hurricanes and would rather have shortages of goods than see someone make more than what you believe is a fair price.

You might be a fascist if you …

• promote the idea of the government owning even more wilderness land.

• are appalled that oil companies might drill offshore for natural gas.
• wonder what all the fuss is when homeowners are forced to abandon their houses in the woods when the government destroys the access roads.

You might be a fascist if you …

• support sending our troops to a foreign country that poses no imminent threat to us in order to liberate the natives and engage in nation-building.

• declare that foreign aid helps the average citizens of those countries that receive it.
• want others to pay for your humanitarian impulses.

You might be a fascist if you …

• would rather police focus their efforts on arresting ticket scalpers and prostitutes than on tracking down, convicting, and incarcerating violent criminals.

• want to impose your moral code on strangers.
• itch to make other people act as you believe they should act.
• do not accept that we still have involuntary servitude in this nation.

You might be a fascist if you …

• operate from the premise that morality is relative.

• condemn logic, reason, and objectivity as tools of white male oppression.
• equate non-coercive choice and actions of which you disapprove with fascism.

You might be a fascist if you …

• object to the examples in this essay.

• think you are free.

Originally seen here.

Old Holborn has an interesting post about rubbish collection:

When I purchase something with money I have earned, I was under the impression that it belonged to me, to do with as I wished. It is my “property”.

Apparently Brent Council do not agree. With recycling now being big business, the London Council has decided if you don’t want it anymore, it belongs to them and failure to hand over valuable aluminium, glass and paper will see you the recipient of a £1000 fine. No, really.

http://www.oldholborn.net/2010/08/rubbish-police.html#idc-cover

Old Holborn then goes on to repeat the sanctions the council will use for those who refuse to recycle their garbage, which include surveillance, hand delivered letters, visits from ‘officials’ and ultimately a fine of £1000.

The answer to all of this is simple, and Old Holborn’s impression is completely correct.

The things you buy really do belong to you; that means the packaging that they were delivered in and all the goods you do not consume that become your waste.

When you throw your waste away, you should contract with a private garbage collector to remove it.

You then do not have to deal with eco loon control freak socialist councils and their absolute nonsense. I say its absolute nonsense because it is:

RUBBISH: In Palo Alto, California, citizens are ordered to separate their trash into seven neatly packaged piles: newspapers, tin cans (flattened with labels removed), aluminum cans (flattened), glass bottles (with labels removed), plastic soda pop bottles, lawn sweepings, and regular rubbish. And to pay high taxes to have it all taken away.

In Mountain Park, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, the government has just ordered the same recycling program, increased taxes 53% to pay for it, and enacted fines of up to $1,000, and jail terms of up to six months, for scofftrashes.

Because of my aversion to government orders, my distrust of government justifications, and my dislike of ecomania, I have always mixed all my trash together. If recycling made sense – economically and not as a sacrament of Gaia worship – we would be paid to do it.

For the same reason, I love to use plastic fast- food containers and non-returnable bottles. The whole recycling commotion, like the broader environmental movement, has always impressed me as malarkey. But I was glad to get some scientific support for my position.

Professor William L. Rathje, an urban archaeologist at the University of Arizona and head of its Garbage Project, has been studying rubbish for almost 20 years, and what he’s discovered contradicts almost everything we’re told.

When seen in perspective, our garbage problems are no worse than they have always been. The only difference is that today we have safe methods to deal with them, if the environmentalists will let us.

The environmentalists warn of a country covered by garbage because the average American generates 8 lbs. a day. In fact, we create less than 3 lbs. each, which is a good deal less than people in Mexico City today or American 100 years ago. Gone, for example, are the 1,200 lbs. of coal ash each American home used to generate, and our modern packaged foods mean less rubbish, not more.

But most landfills will be full in ten years or less, we’re told, and that’s true. But most landfills are designed to last ten years. The problem is not that they are filling up, but that we’re not allowed to create new ones, thanks to the environmental movement. Texas, for example, handed out 250 landfill permits a year in the mid-1970s, but fewer than 50 in 1988.

The environmentalists claim that disposable diapers and fast-food containers are the worst problems. To me, this has always revealed the anti-family and pro-elite biases common to all left-wing movements. But the left, as usual, has the facts wrong as well.

In two years of digging in seven landfills all across America, in which they sorted and weighed every item in 16,000 lbs. of garbage, Rathje discovered that fast-food containers take up less than 1/10th of one percent of the space; less than 1 % was disposable diapers. All plastics totalled less than 5%. The real culprit is paper – especially telephone books and newspapers. And there is little biodegradation. He found 1952 newspapers still fresh and readable.

Rather than biodegrade, most garbage mummifies. And this may be a blessing. If newspapers, for example, degraded rapidly, tons of ink would leach into the groundwater. And we should be glad that plastic doesn’t biodegrade. Being inert, it doesn’t introduce toxic chemicals into the environment.

We’re told we have a moral obligation to recycle, and most of us say we do so, but empirical studies show it isn’t so. In surveys, 78% of the respondents say they separate their garbage, but only 26% said they thought their neighbors separate theirs. To test that, for seven years the Garbage Project examined 9,000 loads of refuse in Tucson, Arizona, from a variety of neighborhoods. The results: most people do what they say their neighbors do – they don’t separate. No matter how high or low the income, or how liberal the neighborhood, or how much the respondents said they cared about the environment, only 26% actually separated their trash. The only reliable predictor of when people separate and when they don’t is exactly the one an economist would predict: the price paid for the trash. When the prices of old newspaper rose, people carefully separated their newspapers. When the price of newspapers fell, people threw them out with the other garbage.

We’re all told to save our newspapers for recycling, and the idea seems to make sense. Old newspapers can be made into boxes, wallboard, and insulation, but the market is flooded with newsprint thanks to government programs. In New Jersey, for example, the price of used newspapers has plummeted from $40 a ton to minus $25 a ton. Trash entrepreneurs used to buy old newspaper. Now you have to pay someone to take it away.

If it is economically efficient to recycle – and we can’t know that so long as government is involved – trash will have a market price. It is only through a free price system, as Ludwig von Mises demonstrated 70 years ago, that we can know the value of goods and services.

[...]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/anti-enviro.html

From the priceless ‘Rockwell’s Anti-Environmentalist Manifesto’. And of course, once you have your own garbage collected privately, you can deduct the amount that that council is charging you for their ‘service’ since you do not avail yourself of it. Old Holborn already does this for the services he does not require from his council.

Once again Libertarian principles, specifically the property right you have in things you have voluntarily exchanged for, offer the best solution to a problem as opposed to the inherently immoral solutions put forward by collectivists, coercion the state and its insanity.

But what about the economics of it all? If garbage has a value after it has been collected, then someone will sort it and extract what is valuable. This is what it looks like:

The problem with this system is that it is entirely efficient. If private enterprise sorted garbage like this, the loony left salary addicted control freaks at Brent would not be able to justify going out to people’s homes and threatening them.

Furthermore, have you ever seen a garbage compactor in the kitchen of a UK household:

One of the consequences of people having to pay private contractors to remove their waste is that normally you are charged by volume for what you have removed from your household. If you have less volume of garbage to remove, the cost of removing it is less, so there is a great incentive to squeeze as much trash as you can into the smallest possible space.

That is why in many American kitchens, you find garbage compactors; an under the counter machine that you throw your waste into day after day, that compacts it all into a very small shape that is easy to handle and which dramatically reduces your waste disposal costs and storage hassles.

These compact cubes of refuse greatly increase the efficiency of garbage disposal; trucks can carry more garbage, make fewer rounds, you use less bin liners, put garbage into external bins less often and into fewer bins etc etc.

All of this efficiency is lost thanks to the crazy as a coot collectivist crap of councils like Brent.

Even fast food restaurants use them:

The side effects of the free market in terms of efficiency are always beneficial. Other desirable side effects are that the need for nosey parkers sniffing around in your trash is completely eliminated.

That is why the statists hate private enterprise. Sadly in the UK, people are so inured to the idea that ‘the council’ is in charge of everything, from leisure to garbage collection, that it appears that they cannot imagine even the most simple solution to everyday problems without invoking the state in some way as facilitator.

‘The Andromeda Strain’, a must see film had its soundtrack released in this packaging:

Not only did you get the original sound with the vinyl, but the package is absolutely wonderful; a perfect match for the biology of the bioweapon ‘Andromeda’:

All the iTunes, FLACs and MP3s in the world will never replace the intimacy of this; a physical object, designed by man, in your hands, with its smell, its feel and its reality.

601!

John Pilger has an article at Lew Rockwell, saying that Tony Blair “must be prosecuted”. Anyone that has an interest in permanently stopping the war machine and ending the state knows that prosecuting Blair, as satisfying as that event might be, will do nothing to stop the war machine and its murderous intentions towards Iran.

Lets do it.

Tony Blair must be prosecuted, not indulged like his mentor Peter Mandelson.

I for one, am sick and tired of the soap opera of political personalities and the writers who promote it by talking about it. It hasn’t done anything to stop the war machine in the past, and it will not going forward. This sort of thinking distracts from getting to the solution, as people vent all their energy on hating a single individual instead of the war machine itself.

There are an unlimited supply of Blairs waiting to fill his shoes. Anything other than an idea to stop the next Blair from taking the levers of the war machine in his hands is a waste of time.

Both have produced self-serving memoirs for which they have been paid fortunes. Blair’s will appear next month and earn him £4.6 million. Now consider Britain’s Proceeds of Crime Act. Blair conspired in and executed an unprovoked war of aggression against a defenseless country, which the Nuremberg judges in 1946 described as the “paramount war crime.” This has caused, according to scholarly studies, the deaths of more than a million people, a figure that exceeds the Fordham University estimate of deaths in the Rwandan genocide.

I could not care less about how much money Blair makes from his memoirs. If the price of stopping the war machine for all time is that Blair becomes a multi billionaire, so be it.

This is nothing more than jealousy politics wrapped in a cloak of moral outrage over the genocide committed by Blair. Once again, this is a complete distraction from what sensible people should be thinking about; the next ‘Blair’ and Iran.

People like Pilger, by failing to get to the solution and distracting everyone with his brilliantly crafted exposés is actually a part of the problem. Like Tony Benn and StopWar, these people are not spreading the solution; they are diffusing the anger of the vast majority who are sick of war and want a stop put to it.

In addition, four million Iraqis have been forced to flee their homes and a majority of children have descended into malnutrition and trauma. Cancer rates near the cities of Fallujah, Najaf and Basra (the latter “liberated” by the British) are now revealed as higher than those at Hiroshima. “UK forces used about 1.9 metric tons of depleted uranium ammunition in the Iraq war in 2003,” the Defense Secretary Liam Fox told parliament on 22 July. A range of toxic “antipersonnel” weapons, such as cluster bombs, was employed by British and American forces.

We know all of this, and all of it is now irrelevant.

The only thing that matters is the next war and how it is to be stopped. Nothing can be done to de-poison Iraq, and an eloquent recital of the crimes committed there will do nothing to stop the attack on Iran. We know this, because similar writing was done before the Iraq colonisation for decades; from Agent Orange on the crimes of the war machine have been carefully documented and exposed. More exposure will not stop the next outrage. John Pilger, who is deeply experienced in all of this, knows this perfectly.

Such carnage was justified with lies that have been repeatedly exposed. On 29 January 2003, Blair told parliament, “We do know of links between al-Qaida and Iraq ….” Last month, the former head of the intelligence service, MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, told the Chilcot inquiry, “There is no credible intelligence to suggest that connection … [it was the invasion] that gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad.” Asked to what extent the invasion exacerbated the threat to Britain from terrorism, she replied, “Substantially.”

Once again, BLAH BLAH BLAH.

The bombings in London on 7 July 2005 were a direct consequence of Blair’s actions.

Only in the sense that he personally ordered it to happen. Are you shocked by that accusation? You need to watch this documentary.

Documents released by the High Court show that Blair allowed British citizens to be abducted and tortured. The then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, decided in January 2002 that Guantanamo was the “best way” to ensure UK nationals were “securely held.”

So what? Blair is out of office and Labour are not in government. What do you have to say about what is happening NOW and what is being planned NOW? And is what you say going to make any difference? These are the questions that need to be asked; these are the points that need to be made, not all of this emotion stoking garbage.

Instead of remorse, Blair has demonstrated a voracious and secretive greed.

Once again, who cares if Blair shows remorse? Will that bring back the dead, or clean up the mess he left behind? Will it stop Iran from suffering the same fate? Of course it will not; Pilger (an author himeself) only cares about how much money Blair is making through his lucrative publishing deals, “I do not murder anyone and I cannot sell the number of books Blair does. I am telling the truth, history is on my side, I have the moral high ground, why can I not sell as many books as a mass murderer? ITS NOT FAIR!”.

Since stepping down as prime minister in 2007, he has accumulated an estimated £20 million, much of it as a result of his ties with the Bush administration. The House of Commons Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, which vets jobs taken by former ministers, was pressured not to make public Blair’s “consultancy” deals with the Kuwaiti royal family and the South Korean oil giant UI Energy Corporation. He gets £2 million a year “advising” the American investment bank J P Morgan and undisclosed sums from financial services companies. He makes millions from speeches, including reportedly £200,000 for one speech in China.

More jealousy, more nonsense, all of it irrelevant to the next act of mass murder and none of it able to bring back a single life.

In his unpaid but expenses-rich role as the West’s “peace envoy” in the Middle East, Blair is, in effect, a voice of Israel, which awarded him a $1 million “peace prize.” In other words, his wealth has grown rapidly since he launched, with George W. Bush, the bloodbath in Iraq.

No mention of BDS which is the best way of making people change their ways. Why not? This article is a complete waste of time!

His collaborators are numerous. The Cabinet in March 2003 knew a great deal about the conspiracy to attack Iraq. Jack Straw, later appointed “justice secretary,” suppressed the relevant Cabinet minutes in defiance of an order by the Information Commissioner to release them. Most of those now running for the Labour Party leadership supported Blair’s epic crime, rising as one to salute his final appearance in the Commons. As foreign secretary, David Miliband, sought to cover Britain’s complicity in torture, and promoted Iran as the next “threat.”

So, what should be DONE about the personalities who are about to step into the cockpit of the war machine? We know they are all for mass murder, no matter what their names are. Stop wasting everyone’s time with the soap opera!

Journalists who once fawned on Blair as “mystical” and amplified his vainglorious bids now pretend they were his critics all along.

And if they were critics all along, what difference would that have made? None whatsoever.

As for the media’s gulling of the public, only the Observer’s David Rose, to his great credit, has apologized. The WikiLeaks’ exposés, released with a moral objective of truth with justice, have been bracing for a public force-fed on complicit, lobby journalism. Verbose celebrity historians like Niall Ferguson, who rejoiced in Blair’s rejuvenation of “enlightened” imperialism, remain silent on the “moral truancy,” as Pankaj Mishra wrote, “of [those] paid to intelligently interpret the contemporary world.”

All of this, except the Wikileaks exposé is irrelevant.

Apologies are irrelevant.
Journalists are irrelevant.
Historians are irrelevant.

The only thing that matters is what is going to happen next, and how it can be stopped. If it is true that the majority do not want more war, then war can be stopped. The massive march against the Iraq invasion showed that there are literally tens of millions of people in the UK alone who do not want any more war. The question is, what can they do (or more likely refrain from doing) to stop it.

We know that marching again would be totally pointless, and that for every one of the two million people who marched on that day, there were probably five people who would have gone but who did not make it. We wrote about this before.

Something oblique, unexpected, unstoppable, simple and effective needs to be unleashed. That is the only way an attack on Iran will be stopped. What is for sure is that this strategy will never come from a journalist or a historian.

Wikileaks has demonstrated that it is possible to damage the war machine. So effective is its operation, run by a handful of people with almost no money at all, that there have been open calls for its public face to be assassinated.

That is what we need; a harnessing of all the tools we have to hand to make it impossible for the war machine to operate. Wikileaks does what it does without marching, demonstrating, picketing or any of the other now discredited 20th Century methods of changing the world.

Even in the face of this revolution, the Pilgers of this world keep harping on like its 1999.

Is it wishful thinking that Blair will be collared? Just as the Cameron government understands the “threat” of a law that makes Britain a risky stopover for Israeli war criminals, a similar risk awaits Blair in a number of countries and jurisdictions, at least of being apprehended and questioned. He is now Britain’s Kissinger, who has long planned his travel outside the United States with the care of a fugitive.

If Blair is collared, then what? All of the above still applies, and if Kissinger is a war criminal, and you compare Blair to Kissinger, then Blair has a long life of influence and wealth ahead of him, no matter what you say or write.

Two recent events add weight to this. On 15 June, the International Criminal Court made the landmark decision of adding aggression to its list of war crimes to be prosecuted. This is defined as a “crime committed by a political or military leader which by its character, gravity and scale constituted a manifest violation of the [United Nations] Charter.” International lawyers described this as a “giant leap.” Britain is a signatory to the Rome statute that created the court and is bound by its decisions.

But not retroactively, and its over broad, as what is or is not a ‘crime’ is open to debate (dumping the dollar might be construed as an act that in its character, gravity and scale could be construed as a ‘crime’ by some). Statists want more state power knowing (or not) that this leads to more war, more aggression as people are forced to conform to artificial ‘norms of society’.

On 21 July, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, standing at the Commons despatch box, declared the invasion of Iraq illegal. For all the later “clarification” that he was speaking personally, he had made “a statement that the international court would be interested in,” said Philippe Sands, professor of international law at University College London.

I have a new phrase to describe Pilger, StopWar and all the other well meaning statists who incessantly whine about the war machine without offering any solutions ‘The Cathartics‘. I like it!

The Cathartics grasp onto any word or slip of the tongue and then scream and shout about it like it means something when it means precisely nothing. The House of Commons is the one of the centre stages of the soap opera, and Pilger quoting lines from its script is no better than a scarf wearing washer woman recounting what happened on Coronation street last night as if it were real.

Tony Blair came from Britain’s upper middle classes who, having rejoiced in his unctuous ascendancy, might now reflect on the principles of right and wrong they require of their own children. The suffering of the children of Iraq will remain a specter haunting Britain while Blair remains free to profit.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/pilger/pilger86.1.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Blair, reflecting on what he did means nothing. What Pilger actually means is he should feel ashamed of making so much money out of his publishing deal and post PM contracts. Get over it Pilger; Blair lining his pockets is not the problem.

As for the principles of right and wrong he requires of his own children, that is an entirely personal matter that is also, not the problem, and I guarantee you that Blair is not haunted in any way by what he did. He believes that what he did was of benefit in the long run, and nothing you can say will change that. Finally, venting jealousy is a poor substitute for a solution to the end of the war machine.

What a total waste of time; Lew Rockwell, one of the biggest websites in the world, where articles are not only read but copied, re-posted and emailed by the millions; a platform of extraordinary reach, has been used by this man to spew a completely pointless jealous rage piece, repeating what everyone already knows about Iraq, singularly failing to mention even a single possible solution to the next war crime. Even offering a bad solution would be better than nothing. Not a single hyperlink to any resource that could help stop the possible attack on Iran… but there is a link to Amazon so you can buy his book.

If the attack on Iran is to be stopped, do not look to John Pilger for an answer. It will emerge from the internets via social networks, and then, all of a sudden, the war machine will be shut down.

What we are waiting for is a text; a small piece of writing containing the very simple instructions that everyone needs to follow to bring down the machine. The idea is coalescing in the mind of someone somewhere, and soon, it will arrive in your inbox, or in your timeline and it will hit you with its simplicity and its beauty. You will commit to doing it and you will forward it to all your friends and re-tweet it, and the machine will die on that day.

Tony Benn, war enabler and thief has a piece over in the Grauniad that simply cannot be allowed to stand:

The time to organise resistance is now
We reject these cuts as simply malicious ideological vandalism, hitting the most vulnerable the hardest. Join us in the fight

Gravity is not an ideology, it is a fact. In this matter, the fact is that the state is STEALING money from the productive to disburse as it sees fit. This is theft, pure and simple. It is immoral and unacceptable to decent people.

It is time to organise a broad movement of active resistance to the Con-Dem government’s budget intentions. They plan the most savage spending cuts since the 1930s, which will wreck the lives of millions by devastating our jobs, pay, pensions, NHS, education, transport, postal and other services.

What has wrecked the lives of millions is SOCIALISM. The STATE is responsible for all the ills that have been suffered in the twentieth century, and thanks to the internet, everyone can now see that this is the case.

There is no such thing as ‘our jobs’ jobs are created by entrepreneurs, not the state. They are not collective property; they are the property of the people who create them. Pay is what is due to people who do work. The rate of pay is a private matter between employer and the employed. The state should have no say in that private contract whatsoever. Education is not the business of the state; it is not a right, but is in reality, a good like Health Care. Transport is also no business of the state, and niether is the delivery of anything, including the post, and any other service, like the internet, which some deluded people want to claim is a right.

The government claims the cuts are unavoidable because the welfare state has been too generous. This is nonsense. Ordinary people are being forced to pay for the bankers’ profligacy.

This is a straw man argument. It is completely wrong that anyone other than the shareholders and depositors in banks were made to bail out the banks. In a properly functioning country, no one would be forced to pay for a bailout, or other people’s food or anything else, and the fact that this has happened is no excuse for more organized theft by the state.

The £11bn welfare cuts, rise in VAT to 20%, and 25% reductions across government departments target the most vulnerable – disabled people, single parents, those on housing benefit, black and other ethnic minority communities, students, migrant workers, LGBT people and pensioners.

It is absolutely wrong that the state should levy a ‘value added tax’. This is an unjustifiable interposition in the private transactions of individuals. As for that shopping list of people who are going to suffer because of these cuts, they would not be suffering at all if everyone were free to interact economically with 100% of their money, and those that were left out would be take care of by charity.

One thing is for sure, Labour and socialism has utterly failed to produce the prosperity that they promise again and again, and they will never be able to produce it. All they can do is destroy capital, technology and redistribute wealth by force.

If their ideas were great, people would voluntarily finance them. The fact is that people who are creative and productive see their sham for what it is, and run from it like horses run from fire.

Women are expected to bear 75% of the burden. The poorest will be hit six times harder than the richest. Internal Treasury documents estimate 1.3 million job losses in public and private sectors.

The ‘public sector’ is entirely parasitic. Those jobs are not real jobs; they are invented by government and financed by people who are productive in the real economy.

What happens in the ‘private sector’ or the real economy, is not the affair of the state, and if the state had no power to interfere in the real economy, it would be many times more prosperous, with greater opportunities for both job seekers and entrepreneurs.

We reject this malicious vandalism and resolve to campaign for a radical alternative, with the level of determination shown by trade unionists and social movements in Greece and other European countries.

You cant make stuff like this up.

This man is a representative of the most malicious, vindictive, destructive and anti-human philosophy ever known to man. They are violent thieves who steal money from the productive to give away to their friends and to finance their hair brained schemes.

What do they mean by ‘radical alternative’? What can it possibly mean other than more theft, more wealth redistribution, a return to Orwellian bureaucracy and everything evil that all the British are fed up to the teeth with?

These people understand NOTHING about economics and money. Even a child can be made to understand it if they read the right books.

And as for other European countries, Britain is not a European country. Everyone has had ENOUGH of Europe and its insane policies, and rioting like the Greek parasites will only destroy the infrastructure that you need to steal the billions you are craving for like the vampires you are.

I have a feeling that Tony Benn and his band of modern day Robin Hood criminals are going to find that everyone hates them, will not tolerate being stolen from by them, and will push back against them with such ferocity that they will be knocked over.

This government of millionaires says “we’re all in it together” and “there is no alternative”. But, for the wealthy, corporation tax is being cut, the bank levy is a pittance, and top salaries and bonuses have already been restored to pre-crash levels.

Like it or not, it is the millionares and everyone beneath them that owns and runs a business that creates all the wealth in any country. They should be cherished, free to operate their businesses as they see fit, without any interference from the state of any kind. If you want to start a union, that is entirely your absolute right; but the owners of businesses also have rights, and yours do not trump theirs.

This is the principle, that everyone has the same rights, that Tony Benn cannot accept. His position, in his mind, is one of superiority. His rights trump all others. The rights of his friends and followers trump the rights of all others.

He is DEAD WRONG.

An alternative budget would place the banks under democratic control, and raise revenue by increasing tax for the rich, plugging tax loopholes, withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, abolishing the nuclear “deterrent” by cancelling the Trident replacement.

Banks are private property. What Benn is advocating is that the banks be nationalised, STOLEN from their owners if you will. Once again, the word ‘democratic’ is being used as a synonym for ‘fair’, ‘just’, ‘honest’, and ‘good’ when it is none of those things. Democratic control means control of the mob, against the wishes of the owners of property. That is THEFT, IMMORAL and EVIL.

Raising revenue by increasing tax for the rich is just theft. There should be no taxation by the state, full stop. The state should not be engaged in wars of aggression, no matter where they are being fought. And without a state, there would be no money for a nuclear deterrent unless everyone voluntarily wanted to pay for one, which I doubt would ever happen.

All of our problems come from the state, and people like Tony Benn, who control it.

An alternative strategy could use these resources to: support welfare; develop homes, schools, and hospitals; and foster a green approach to public spending – investing in renewable energy and public transport, thereby creating a million jobs.

Welfare is a soul destroying disease, and even those who deal with poverty have come to understand this.

We commit ourselves to:

Oppose cuts and privatisation in our workplaces, community and welfare services.

Those workplaces do not belong to you, they belong to the people who created them you THIEF! The welfare services you claim are yours are financed by money you STEAL.

Fight rising unemployment and support organisations of unemployed people.

Fighting rising unemployment can only be done correctly by freeing business to do what it does best, creating jobs, capital and progress. We do not need you, or the state to make this magic happen.

Develop and support an alternative programme for economic and social recovery.

There is no alternative to reality. Money and human nature are fixed. Go and read about it.

Oppose all proposals to “solve” the crisis through racism and other forms of scapegoating.

And no scapegoating of the people who create the jobs you want so badly, the ‘rich’!

Liaise closely with similar opposition movements in other countries.

No matter how many people you gather together in your bogus and immoral cause, you will still be bogus and immoral.

Organise information, meetings, conferences, marches and demonstrations.

YES! please do that, after all its so very effective!

Support the development of a national co-ordinating coalition of resistance.

That sounds to me like a call to arms to all thieves. Absolutely appalling. They want more theft, more immoral redistribution of wealth, more tyranny, more bureaucracy, a bigger hungrier state, more control over business. Just how stupid can people be?

It seems that there is no limit.

We urge those who support this statement to attend the Organising Conference on 27 November 2010 (10am-5pm), at Camden Centre, Town Hall, London, WC1H 9JE.

Signed:

Tony Benn

Caroline Lucas MP

[...]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/04/time-to-organise-resistance-now

And then there is a list of the usual, delusional suspects.

Thieves to a man, all rotten to the core, leeches, unproductive, insane, destructive, anti-human and all bad!

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes in the Telegraph about ‘The Death of Paper Money’. Anyone who has been woken up by Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, Murray Rothbard and the Austrians knows that this is in fact inevitable, and in the end, is a good thing, because it means that government can no longer steal your money from you while you sleep, spending that money on mass murder:

Great numbers of people failed to see it coming. “My relations and friends were stupid. They didn’t understand what inflation meant. Our solicitors were no better. My mother’s bank manager gave her appalling advice,” said one well-connected woman.

“You used to see the appearance of their flats gradually changing. One remembered where there used to be a picture or a carpet, or a secretaire. Eventually their rooms would be almost empty. Some of them begged — not in the streets — but by making casual visits. One knew too well what they had come for.”

Corruption became rampant. People were stripped of their coat and shoes at knife-point on the street. The winners were those who — by luck or design — had borrowed heavily from banks to buy hard assets, or industrial conglomerates that had issued debentures. There was a great transfer of wealth from saver to debtor, though the Reichstag later passed a law linking old contracts to the gold price. Creditors clawed back something.

A conspiracy theory took root that the inflation was a Jewish plot to ruin Germany. The currency became known as “Judefetzen” (Jew- confetti), hinting at the chain of events that would lead to Kristallnacht a decade later.

While the Weimar tale is a timeless study of social disintegration, it cannot shed much light on events today.

[...]

My emphasis.

Cannot shed much light on events today?

This is so irrational, contradictory and ridiculous that we could be forgiven for concluding that Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is working under the constraints of a D-Notice, preventing him from spelling out explicitly what is about to take place for fear of the disruption that would ensue, should the emperor’s naked state be publicly declared.

What he has done in this article is the next best thing; he obliquely spelled out the precise nature of what is going to happen in the USA, UK and all over Europe should hyperinflation suddenly kick in, and then put in a disclaimer right at the end of the section, to indemnify himself and get past the Telegraph editors.

That is the only explanation for this line. All of the factors are here for an inevitable hyperinflationary event. The parallels to the German hyperinflation are eerily similar, including the mass ignorance of what inflation is, what money is, etc etc.

So, what should you do to protect yourself from this coming hyperinflation? Evans-Pritchard tells you in this section:

Foreigners with dollars, pounds, Swiss francs, or Czech crowns lived in opulence. They were hated. “Times made us cynical. Everybody saw an enemy in everybody else,” said Erna von Pustau, daughter of a Hamburg fish merchant.

[...]

The message is clear; you need to hold currencies other than the ones that are about to go critical mass in a hyperinflationary spiral. You need to own gold. You need to own Swiss Francs. You should not own the Euro and under no circumstances, should you own the Federal Reserve Note (the ‘US Dollar’).

So what about the Pound Sterling? What are its characteristics, and why does Evans-Pritchard believe that it is immune from hyperinflation? Why has Evans-Pritchard completely (deliberately?) ignored the Pound and its nature in this discussion? He says:

This is not a picture of America, or Britain, or Europe in 2010.

Why not? What is the precise difference between the money used in the Weimar hyperinflation and the US Dollar, or for that matter the Zimbabwe Dollar (which no longer exists)?

The answer is that there is no difference.

Now, lets do what Evans-Pritchard is apparently forbidden from doing, using only the Google, and ask a fundamental question.

What is the Pound Sterling?

The pound is a fiat currency, supervised by the Bank of England.

The Pound is redeemable for nothing:

The contemporary sterling is a fiat currency which is backed only by securities; in essence IOUs from the Treasury that represent future income from the taxation of the population. Some economists term this ‘currency by trust’ as sterling relies on the faith of the user rather than any physical specie.

The bank of England has outsourced the manufacturing of its notes to the private company De La Rue:

De La Rue announces that it has been selected by the Bank of England to be its preferred banknote printing supplier. This follows an announcement by the Bank today that it has decided to contract out its banknote printing operations at Debden, Essex, to a commercial company. This will enable the Bank to lower the costs of the supply of its banknotes, while for staff it opens up the possibility of bringing in more work to Debden.

So. In five minutes we discover that the pound is worth precisely nothing. It can be printed at will in any quantity the Bank of England desires for any purpose that the state chooses, without any constraints whatsoever.

If you also factor in fractional reserve banking where UK banks are legally permitted to create money at will, you have a system, just like the one about to implode in the USA, the Federal Reserve System, that cannot possibly be immune to collapse.

If Sterling is immune from collapse, I would like to know precisely how it is different to every other paper money fiat currency that has ever existed.

Did you know that:

At heart, this economic crisis is in fact a currency crisis. Throughout history no paper currency (or “fiat currency”, since it is accepted as money by virtue of Government fiat or decree) has survived, and this time will be no different. The average lifespan of fiat currencies has been 16 years*. The present system is unique in that it has survived for 38 years and for the first time ALL countries throughout the world are on a fiat money standard. This means that the resulting crash will be on the scale of something the world has never seen.

[...]

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/coming-financial-tsunami

My emphasis. Wether or not the figure of sixteen years is accurate, ALL fiat currencies eventually collapse. These are the countries that have already tasted it: Angola 1991-1995, Argentina 1975-1991, Austria 1921-1922, Belarus 1994-2002, Bolivia 1984-1986, Bosnia-Herzegovina 1992-1993, Brazil 1986-1994, Bulgaria 1996, Chile 1971-1973, China 1948-1949, Free City of Danzig 1922-1923, Georgia 1993-1995, Germany 1922-1923, Greece 1942-1944, Hungary 1945-1946, Israel 1970-1971, Japan 1948-1951, Krajina 1992-1993, Madagascar 2004-2005, Mozambique 1977-1992, Nicaragua 1987-1990, Peru 1988-1990, Philippines 1942-1944, Poland 1989-1991, Romania 1998-2005, Russia 1921-1922 and 1992-1999, Turkey 1990-1995, Ukraine 1993-1995, United States 1861-1865, Yugoslavia 1989-1994, Zaire 1989-1996, Zimbabwe 2004-2009.

All of the countries in this list experienced government created hyperinflation in the twentieth century. If each of these countries had not had government monopolies on the creation of money and legal tender laws, opting instead for a completely market driven commodity money system of currencies created by entrepreneurs whose business it is to manufacture money, they would not have experienced this problem. The sole exception in the above list in terms of the century of hyperinflation is the USA which had its experience in the nineteenth century, so they are about to have a second experience of it.

This is what Ambrose Evans-Pritchard will not touch in his articles… and its understandable why he does not touch upon this matter. Why should he do anything that might precipitate the inevitable collapse of Sterling? What can he possibly gain from telling the truth that anyone who is reading his article, and who therefore can use the Google, can access for themselves? He will only be made a scapegoat for the collapse which is going to happen wether he writes about it or not. We have all seen how governments and the press will use anything and any person as scapegoat to deflect blame from the true causes of a ‘financial crisis’.

Pity is what you should feel for Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. He is caught between a rock and a hard place, knowing the inevitable, desperate to warn everyone but unable to do so, either because of orders from above or his instinct for self preservation.

Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, said the Census, which takes place every 10 years, was an expensive and inaccurate way of measuring the number of people in Britain.

The herd owner has decided that there are better ways of counting the head of cattle….hmmmmm!

Instead, the Government is examining different and cheaper ways to count the population more regularly, using existing public and private databases, including credit reference agencies.

And these databases will fit in the palm of your hand.

It will represent a historic shift in the way that information about the nation’s population, religion and social habits is gathered.

The suggestion is likely to be approved by Cabinet next week. It will be too late to prevent the next Census on March 27, 2011 from going ahead, although Mr Maude said he was looking at ways of reducing the £482million cost.

FOUR HUNDRED AND EIGHTY TWO MILLION POUNDS? I would love to see a breakdown of how that number came about. That is

cost of census / (number of adults in UK / 3)

482000000/(50893318/3) = 28.4123742924

£28.41 per productive person in the UK.

And why exactly is it too late? Why not scrap it right now and save one hundred million pounds? Perhaps the contractors might have something to say about its cancellation; that is probably the TRUE reason why they are unwilling to stop it.

Britain has carried out a Census every decade since 1801, with the exception of 1941 during the Second World War.

It is the only time that everybody in the country is counted, and is used by the Government to determine spending priorities and track population movements.

In other words, there is no sound reason for it whatsoever.

Academics, charities and religious organisations all rely on information gathered in the Census as it asks wide-ranging questions relating to people’s households, nationality, faith and marital status.

The needs and interests of these groups does not constitute a sufficient argument for the theft of this money to count people.

The information is also a significant source of research for future generations. The online publication last year of the 1911 Census proved hugely popular, with three million people accessing the database within its first few months.

Completely irrelevant. If there was a reason to collect and store this information, then someone other than the state would do it at their own expense. The latter uses of this data are secondary extra benefits, not the primary consideration. Even if those benefits did not exist, the state would still claim that they had to collect this data.

Mr Maude, who has responsibility for the Census, told The Daily Telegraph that the Government was looking for a “fundamentally” better way of doing it. “There are, I believe, ways of doing this which will provide better, quicker information, more frequently and cheaper,” he said.

The ID Card would have become a one stop shop for all this data and more. Now they have to piece it together from disparate sources. What they should do is give this task to people who are good with big and dirty data sets, like Google. Why should the state do this at all in the first place? As long as no state data is given to Google in preparation of its national data set, why should this valuable data, which everyone thinks is such a good idea, cost people who want nothing to do with it a single penny?

Just as it is with the ridiculous ‘Your Freedom’ website, which is total rubbish and is costing £20,000 to run, this task would be much better handled, for free, by Google. Imagine ‘Your Freedom’ run by Google; it would have no scaling problems, would have been properly thought out and executed… but you know this.

Mr Maude said Britain needed a new way to keep track of the population because the Census was often inaccurate and out of date. About 1.5million households failed to fill in their forms in 2001.

What’s that you say? 1.5 million?!

Once again we see that there is nothing that the state can do if large numbers of people simply refuse to cooperate.

In the USA, there are many people whining about the census, its intrusive nature and unconstitutionality. All they need to do is simply not do it. If they do this, nothing will happen. There is no need to give (perfectly correct and proper) explanations about why the census is immoral, illegitimate and illegal. All you have to do is simply refuse to answer or respond in any way. All that will happen is that a note will be made, and everyone will move on.

This is what it sounds like:

01:21:23
He appears to be heading outside the city.
Repeat, he is heading outside the city.

01:21:27
All I can do is note your information.

01:21:31
Stand by.

01:21:47
Please come back.
You have nothing to be afraid of.

01:22:05
The THX account is 6 percent
over budget.

01:22:08
The case is to be terminated.

01:22:10
Discontinue operation.

01:22:12
Report to thermal station 62.

01:22:15
Discontinue operation.

[...]

From THX-1138

“Economics make it necessary to terminate any operation which exceeds 5 percent of its primary budget.” This is the absolute truth of this matter, and the matter of your liberty. Unless they have your money to enslave you, they cannot enslave you.

Mr Maude said the Census was “out of date almost before it has been done” and was looking at ways to count the population more frequently — perhaps every five years — using databases held by credit checking firms, Royal Mail, councils and Government.

And so, what they will have, if people are careful, is a data set that is always inaccurate to a certain degree, but which is always up to date.

Anyone who is not stupid enough to vote, will not be counted. Anyone who uses more than one name will not be counted. Or may be counted twice. In short, anyone who is aware of their privacy and how to protect it will never be counted by this new system of real time census taking. It also means that you can get out of the count at any time by taking yourself off of the electoral register, and using shield identities for all your activities. We wrote about this ages ago.

“This would give you more accurate, much more timely data in real time. There is a load of data out there in loads of different places,” he said.

The first part of this is not true. The data will not be more accurate, and if this is not correct, I would like to know how it would be more accurate than the traditional census. There may be a ‘load of data’ out there, but there is no guarantee that that data is clean. Its an interesting problem!

Mr Maude said he hoped that the new way of counting the population would be less intrusive.

Translation: “We can do this in a more stealthy way, without the citizen knowing what we are collecting, storing and sorting on him.”

Questions for next year include the name, sex and date of birth of any visitors staying overnight.

The majority of people that I know and have ever known do not fill out census forms on principle.

He was also examining ways to save money on the 2011 Census, which will be organised by the Office for National Statistics. However, Labour had already spent £300million on the project.

Ah yes, I remember now; its going to cost so much because Lockheed Martin, arms company, won the contract to run the UK Census! File under $500 hammers and $2000 ‘toilet seats’.

It is common practice around the world for governments to carry out a census and the Government is required by European Union law to count the population regularly.

“Everyone is doing it, so its OK.”
“The EU says we have to do this.”

Makes you want to puke doesn’t it?

Geoffrey Robertson QC, a constitutional barrister, said the news was “regrettable” since some sort of count had been carried out by the monarch or government for almost 1,000 years.

Geoffrey Robertson QC

Oh dear me…

“Tradition is the illusion of permanance.”
Woody Allen (American Actor, Author, Screenwriter and Film Director, b.1935)

“A tradition without intelligence is not worth having.”
T.S. Eliot (American born English Editor, Playwright, Poet and Critic, 1888-1965)

“Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay”
Jiddu Krishnamurti (Indian Theosophist Philosopher, wrote The Future of Humanity, Songs of Life, Kingdom Happiness. 1895-1986)

“Tradition is an explanation for acting without thinking”
Grace McGarvie

“Tradition is a guide and not a jailer”
William Somerset Maugham (English short-story Writer, Novelist and Playwright, 1874-1965)

“Tradition is a prison with majority opinion the modern jailer”
unknown

Nuff said.

“Future historians will be less able to interpret Britain in the Cameron/Clegg era as a result of this decision — maybe that is the reason for it,” he said.

Utter rubbish.

David Green, a director of the Civitas think tank, said the decision was “a terrible mistake”. “It is a question of whether the alternatives are reliable,” he said. “The Census is expensive but I think it is worth the money for the historic continuity.”

“Worth the money”? Where is and what is the source of this ‘the money’ that David Green speaks of so freely? If he thinks it is ‘worth the money’ why does he not gather up ‘the money’ himself, all £482m of it, and conduct his own census for posterity? He could even charge people for access to his priceless data… now there’s an idea.

These people really are beyond belief. What do you expect from a ‘think tank’ run by an ex Labour councillor? A basic understanding of economics?!

Under the 1920 Census Act, citizens can be cautioned under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act and fined £1,000 for failing to answer questions. However, the powers have not been properly enforced previously. In 2001 just 38 people were fined for not filling in forms.

[...]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

What on earth does the census have to do with Police and Criminal Evidence? That aside, do you see what I mean? one and a half MILLION people did not fill out their census forms, and only 38 people were fined. That means only 0.000253333333% of people who did not fill out ‘their’ census forms were prosecuted, or one out of 394,736 This ratio would continue to get smaller as the number of people refusing to comply increases. According to this article, 3,000,000 people refused to obey, so the ratio is smaller than we realize.

What these numbers say is that if you do not fill out a census form, no matter where you are (in fact, in America, the number of people prosecuted for not complying is even smaller than that of the UK) nothing will happen. There is nothing they can do to make you comply, and you have to be very unlucky to win the lottery of those vanishingly small number of people who are chosen as examples to the population of disobedience.

The power of the state is an illusion. The only people who suffer from it are the very unlucky. The state cannot and never has been able to resist a mass refusal to obey on any matter.

If you do not want to fill out a census form, just don’t do it.

Or as Nick Clegg has wisely advised the people of the UK, Don’t Accept it!

Now that the coalition has a full grasp of the scope and seriousness of the deficit, and they are practically and philosophically minded to take the necessary austerity measures to attempt to ameliorate the problem, its clear that the new Department for Education must permanently abolish Ofsted.

In a system where parents have greater, real control over schools, and those schools are directly accountable them, an organisation whose sole purpose is to inspect schools and produce reports on them for central government is surplus to requirements.

Parents have all the feedback they need from their schools directly since the schools are to be made responsible to them, and not the state. That makes the generation of annual reports that very few people read or make use of a complete waste of scarce resources.

The performance of schools is better monitored by the examination results that they produce; parents who are not getting what they require are to be given the power to change how schools are run; Ofsted clearly has no role to play in any of this. It is only in a system where the parent has no say or control over a school, and where everything is run by a monolithic central government that a structure like Ofsted has anything like a meaningful purpose.

Ofsted has no control over the day to day running of schools. They can only comment, recommend and generate yearly assessments that have no direct impact on how schools run between their reports. In other words, the work that they do is next to worthless when it comes to how a school is run, the services and the outcomes that affect students and parents daily.

There is a clear and logical case for Ofsted to be closed down permanently. Fine grained, locally accountable schools that report to and that are controllable by parents make Ofsted obsolete. With a budget of £236m in 2007, and no useful function, Ofsted is a prime candidate for the axe.

It’s not perfect. In fact it is FAIL, this expulsion of the foetal police state. Two articles demonstrating some of the limited progress, bearing in mind that the sinister, racist, apartheid style ID Cards are still… on the cards. It’s a catalogue of FAIL, with each measure leaving just enough cancer behind so that it can return one day to kill the body.

Face-to-face passport interviews catch only eight fraudsters

A multi-million pound scheme to tackle passport fraud has been branded a failure after it was revealed that only eight people have been caught as a result of the project.

Since 2007, first-time applicants for passports have been required to attend face-to-face interviews with officials from the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) in an attempt to spot fraudsters.

Out of half a million people interviewed so far, just eight have been refused passports on the basis of the evidence obtained, according to official figures.

Although 4,000 fraud investigations have been triggered as a result of the interviews, not one has led to a prosecution or conviction.

Yet the government has admitted that on its own estimate, 4,400 fraudulent applicants per year are still managing to slip through the net and obtain passports.

Phil Booth, of campaign group NO2ID, said: “This expensive project was an attempt to introduce a network by stealth for the national identity card scheme. These figures show it has failed to have any significantly effect on passport fraud.”

The system of face-to-face interviews cost £93 million to set up, with £30 million a year running costs on top. It has helped push the price of a standard passport up from £28 in 2001 to £77.50 today.

Mr Booth added: “Now the ID card scheme has been binned and we have seen off, for the time being at least, proposals to fingerprint for passports, will this network be closed and will the cost of a passport be cut by this Government?”

Under the new system, applicants for passports aged 16 or over, who have never held a UK passport before, must first pass a background check and are then told to arrange an interview at one of 69 offices across the country.

[...]

While the interviews appear to have make little impact on levels of fraud, traditional paper checks continue to detect thousands of bogus applicants a year.

In 2006/7, 6,100 applicants were identified as fraudulent by the existing safeguards and prevented from obtaining British passports.

In the same year, according to an official government estimate, 9,700 slipped through the net and obtained passports to which they were not entitled.

By 2008/9, the most recent year for which data are available, the number identified as fraudulent and stopped through paper checks had risen to 9,200, while the number estimated to have slipped through the net had fallen to 4,400.

[...]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/7823456/Face-to-face-passport-interviews-catch-only-eight-fraudsters.html

Remember, this is 9,700 out of an undisclosed number of passports that are issued or renewed every year. Without the number of passports that are issued correctly, this number is meaningless. If the total number of passports renewed or issued for the first time is 9,701 then the problem is huge. If the number of passports renewed or issued for the first time is 1,000,000 then the problem is very small, and the vast majority should not be penalised. Also, if this 9,700 number is correct, it shows that the state is able to detect these passports and intercept them in order to make a count, rendering the number of carriers of bad passports at any one time very small indeed compared to the tens of millions of people who are British passport holders.

Like the pathetic and paranoia, vendor snake oil fuelled US VISIT system, this absurd face to face interview system is a total waste of time.

The vast majority of passports are correctly issued. Even the ones that are correctly issued can be misused at will by criminals and murderers, especially now that cloning them is meade simple by the RFID chip in each passport. That is why, by the way, you should hammer the chip page in your biometric passport if you are unfortunate enough to have one.

When it is proposed that a working system is altered to accommodate a problem caused by a statistically small number of cases, that is a good indication that the proposed changes are wrong and should be rejected.

See our other posts on this subject:

The Times on Biometric Passports: Do they FINALLY understand?

Fingerprints as ID – good, bad, ugly?

What about the Children?

and one from 2005 etc etc.

And now, on to the insanely stupid ‘vetting and barring scheme’:

Ministers slammed the brakes last night on Labour’s controversial scheme to force millions of parents to undergo anti-paedophile and criminal records checks.

Home Secretary Theresa May pledged to change ‘fundamentally’ the deeply unpopular Vetting and Barring Scheme which was due to expand dramatically from next month – but she stopped short of scrapping it entirely.

The plans for new registrations from July 26 have been scrapped and Home Office officials are working out how the scheme will be scaled down.

Nine million adults were due to undergo intrusive checks by a new government agency, the Independent Safeguarding Authority.

But there was outrage after it emerged parents taking their children to Scouts or sports events could face fines of up to £5,000 if they failed to comply.

The scheme, which was designed to protect children and vulnerable adults, prompted major civil liberties concerns over its size and intrusion into private lives.

Last night Mrs May said checks on vulnerable groups should be ‘proportionate and sensible’.

She said: ‘The safety of children and vulnerable adults is of paramount importance to the new Government.

‘However it is also vital that we take a measured approach in these matters. We’ve listened to the criticisms and will respond with a scheme that has been fundamentally remodelled.

‘Vulnerable groups must be properly protected in a way that is proportionate and sensible.

‘This redrawing of the VBS will ensure this happens.’

Civil liberties groups welcomed the move, but urged Mrs May to abolish the scheme entirely.

Dylan Sharpe, campaign director of Big Brother Watch, said: ‘A review is not a solution.

‘The vetting and barring scheme should be scrapped and the Independent Safeguarding Authority should go with it.’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1286639/Vetting-plans-parents-scaled-ministers.html

You cannot be a little bit pregnant. This scheme, like the foul ID Card and NIR must be entirely abolished forever. Absolutely appalling that they are even considering keeping it, especially when they have the perfect storm of pretexts for getting rid of it.

I had a chance to watch this again. What struck me about it was how it highlights the complete reversal of right and wrong, normal and abnormal that we are suffering today.

In the 1960′s its clear that the ideas of mistrust by default, preemptive war, attack as the best defence was the line that the purely evil, venal, greedy villain took, whilst peace, patience, negotiation, understanding, empathy for strangers (and in this case, VERY strange strangers) was the position of the absolute hero, the ideal and model human being, the normal, decent and true spirit of man.

This episode is startling, because it reminds anyone who watches is that the world really was a very different and better place even with all the unpleasant things that were happening at that time.

There is absolutely no reason why the better nature of human beings should not re assert itself in the 21st century. All decent people refuse to go along with the anti human Zero Trust Society, the economic slavery, the systematic silencing of anyone who does not go along with the group think.

It looks to me that thanks to the internet, it is now nearly impossible for a lie to have a long life. This means that means that all lies that are used to reshape the world now cannot do so, since reshaping the world with a lie takes time. If the truth is told all the time everywhere, then the end result must be more liberty and not less. This is why it is vitally important for people to retransmit the truth; it is more important than demonstrating, violence or any of the the 20th century ways of making things that are wrong, right.

And while we are talking about the truth, do take the time to watch all of the documentary ‘Free to Choose‘. The facts that make up the science of Economics are not a matters of opinion. It is up to you to make yourself familiar with the truth, to face it, embrace it and spread it.

For great justice!

Take a look at this:

After massive public rejection of the surveillance state, and country wide vandalism of the millions of CCTV cameras in the UK, it was decided to remove all traces of the monitoring apparatus that cast a debilitating fog over life in the UK. Like the fall of East Germany and the STASI, the changes came overnight as the revulsion over the mutated form of British life became universal and ‘went nuclear’.

“We are not going to live like this anymore. Britain has been turned into a prison, and we have had enough”

Parliament has drawn up a list of all ‘database state’ laws going back to the early days of the now discredited Blair government, all of which are to be struck off the books in one fell swoop.

“This has been a long time in coming, but the writing has been on the wall for years; the silent grumbling of the British public has turned into an earthquake of non-violent dissent. Just like the Berlin Wall, the database state has been dismantled one camera at a time in a single day, without any opposition from the police.”

That was an imaginary scenario concocted to paint a picture of how the fall of the Police State would look.

Sounds familiar doesn’t it? It’s from an old BLOGDIAL post.

BLOGDIAL is great because the people who write on it are:

• way ahead of the pack
• know their subjects backward
• do not mince their words
• can synthesise the facts of the present to produce accurate predictions of how the future will look
• all have impeccable taste

The BLOGDIAL archives are chock full of gems like the one above, and we keep getting better and better as we hone our understanding and expand our learning.

Unlike others, who believe that writing about Liberty is likely to ‘bore readers’ we understand clearly that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Now is absolutely NOT the time to pack up and go home; in fact, it is time to redouble all efforts to push back our mutual enemies and mush them underfoot for all time.

With all of that trumpet blowing out of the way, the Queens speech has just been read, so lets rip through it.

Many of the items in it are predicated on the idea that the state is legitimate in the first place, which it is not. We can however look at each item from a point of view of wether or not it makes any sense or is good in the short term:

Office for budget responsibility bill. Sets up the OBR to take responsibility for producing budget forecasts, meaning the chancellor – who under the current arrangements is in charge of producing his own forecasts – won’t be able to twist the figures.

This makes sense, because the people in charge of the money of the state should not audit themselves or do anything like that.

National insurance contributions bill. Raises income tax allowances, so that “most people would be better off relative to the previous government’s plan”, funded by a rise in national insurance. Reallocates tax worth around £9bn.

This does not make sense. It is more borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, exactly like the completely immoral Child Credit scheme, which took money from taxpayers to give to children.

You could not refuse this ‘free’ investment money, and your child was given a unique number as an identifier. If you did not respond to the agency running this fiasco, they invested the money for ‘your’ child on its behalf and sent you as the parent or guardian, regular updates by post about how ‘your child’s investment’ was doing. A scandalous, immoral, deeply offensive and irrational misuse of other people’s money, which does not seem to appear in this speech, even though its abolition is promised.

Welfare reform bill. Simplifies the welfare and benefits system, improving work incentives and “removing the confusing complexity of the benefits system”.

We all know about the Welfare Warfare state do we not?

Pensions and savings bill. Implements the findings of the review of the state pension age being conducted by the government. Currently the state pension age will increase to 66 after 2024. The review will propose bringing that forward. The bill will also restore the earnings link from 2012.

This is another Ponzi scheme. The people who pay in today are being remunerated in the future with devalued money, thanks to the fiat pound.

Financial reform bill. Gives the Bank of England control over macro-prudential regulation in the City. Not clear yet what will happen to the fate of the Financial Services Authority.

The only thing that needs to be reformed is the nature of the Pound.

Equitable Life bill. Pays compensation to savers who lost money when Equitable Life came close to collapse.

Where will the money come from for this? It’s another bailout, as immoral as any other.

Airport economic regulation bill. Promotes competition in the airport market, possibly breaking up the BAA monopoly.

Makes sense; airports should be entirely privately owned and run for profit.

Postal services bill. Allows the sale of part of the Royal Mail, in line with the plans originally drawn up by Lord Mandelson. The exact proportion being sold has not been specified.

The post office should be entirely private and for profit, just like Federal Express.

Energy bill. Promotes energy-efficiency measures in home by introducing a “green deal” charging system, with incentives to suppliers and households to save energy. The bill may also regulate emissions from coal-fired power stations and create a Green Investment Bank.

This is utter Glegish nonsense of the first order. Readers of BLOGDIAL already know why.

If the idea of a ‘Green Investment Bank’ was commercially viable, it would already exist and entrepreneurs would have created one. Nick Clegg is a complete idiot when it comes to this subject; he is more like a religious fanatic, ranting and frothing at the mouth than a rational human being. That bank WILL FAIL without government concessions to the industries that the bank lends money to, so they can generate profits which are not really profits at all but cost savings since the state will not have its protrusible proboscis on those industries, as it does on all others. This bank will therefore destroy businesses and jobs, just like the Green Jobs of Spain, that destroy 2.2 jobs for every real job. It will also divert capital from the real economy into a false ‘Green Economy’.

These are FACTS.

Academies bill. Allows more schools to become academies, giving them more freedom from Whitehall.

But this is to be paid for by the state, so it is still completely immoral at its base. Still, its better that central control is abolished, so it is a move in the right direction.

Health bill. Replaces the “top-down approach” with “the devolution of power and responsibility to doctors and patients”. Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, will set out more details of his vision in the next few weeks.

Is the NHS Spine going to be dismantled or not? That is what everyone wants to know!

Police reform and social responsibility bill. Makes the police more accountable through “directly elected individuals”. The bill will also create a dedicated border police force, ensure health and safety laws do not stand in the way of “common sense policing” and overhaul the Licensing Act.

‘Overhaul the licensing act’ which means ending the freedom to drink when you please, where you please, while the patrons of the House of Commons bar can drink and smoke all day every day year round.

Public bodies (reform) bill. Cuts the number of quangos, with a view to saving £1bn a year.

Makes sense.

Decentralisation and localism bill. Gives more power to councils and neighbourhoods. Also gives residents the power to instigate referendums and veto excessive council tax increases.

What? Give more power to the same councils who use RIPA to investigate dog fouling? These people need LESS power, and to be FORCED to behave like Public Servants. Do you know what a Public Servant is? Read that last link if you have even a sliver of doubt that you do.

Local government bill. Stops the creation of unitary councils in Exeter and Norwich.

Ok….

Parliamentary reform bill. Introduces fixed-term parliaments, gives voters the right to recall MPs found guilty of serious wrongdoing and sets up a referendum on the alternative vote system.

We all know about why voting is illegitimate, and so there is no need to go into that. Recall of MPs would make them more like Public Servants, so that is good. If it ever works.

Freedom (great repeal) bill. Restores freedoms and civil liberties and repeals “unnecessary” laws.

THERE’S THE RUB! What is “unnecessary”? In whose opinion? The predicted backdown starts here!

Identity documents bill. Abolishes the identity card system and destroys the national identity register.

At long last. VICTORY!

After many years of a hard fought information war, we have WON this important battle. Without an NIR and ID Card, it will be very difficult if not impossible to run a totalitarian police state. This is the most important part of the Queen’s Speech!

Scotland bill. Implements the final report of the Calman commission, giving more devolution to Scotland.

Freedom is not free, and if the Scots want freedom they have to have their own money and complete financial separation from England. Without it, all of this is just TALK.

European Union bill. Ensures that there is a referendum on any future plan to transfer power to the European Union.

What about the Lisbon treaty you TRAITORS. There should be a referendum on that and the very idea that Britain is in the EU in the first place.

Armed forces bill. Continues in force the legislation giving the armed forces a legal basis, as well as improving provisions for service personnel.

I’m not even going to go there.

Terrorist asset-freezing bill. Gives the government firm powers to seize assets from terrorists, following a supreme court decision that quashed the previous legislation in this area.

So the court says the law is wrong, so they are changing it so that it is right. So much for all their promises of doing things differently. And of course, this law will be used on ANYONE who they want to destroy. Oh well, what do you expect? Miracles?

And there you have it.

The two most important parts of this speech, the death of the NIR/ID Card and the Great Reform act mean that at least to some extent, things are going to be much better than they would have been under the totalitarian Labour government. Sadly we have already seen the backing down on this Reform Act, which should include ALL legislation that infringes the liberties of people in Britain.

That is why now is NOT the time to stop writing; any newspaper writer with one brain cell will now be getting ready to submit a comprehensive list of ALL legislation that is immoral and an affront to liberty, so that at the very least, it can be rejected and Mr. Clegg can be made to explain why he must retain control over everyone’s personal victimless pleasures; so he can explain why he is the master and not the servant in matters where there is no harm whatsoever.

Rand Paul has won the Republican nomination in the race for the Senate seat in Kentucky, and since this has happened, all the mainstream media are being prompted to pour over what ‘Libertarian’ actually means (even though Rand Paul says he is not a Libertarian) in practice, and they are finding that it is to say the least not to their taste.

In particular, they have discovered the part of Libertarianism that, quite logically, extends the idea of property rights to the subject of restaurant owners excluding people from their establishments for what many feel are not good reasons.

The fact of this matter is simple; either people have property rights or they do not. If the government can mandate that a restaurant must accept me as a client, then the owner of that restaurant does not have property rights in his establishment; the state is the owner of that place because ultimately, they are able to force the owner to serve people he would rather not serve. They are also making the owner into their servant, by forcing him to work for someone he would rather not work for (the act of cooking).

If the state can do this to restaurant owners, then they can do the same thing to any person, for any reason, including you. This is the reason why we must accept the risk that there are people in the world who discriminate, and accept that we have to share the world with them. We cannot gang up against them and force them to believe what we believe; doing that is immoral, and there are no two ways about that.

The possibility of discrimination is one of the risks of living in a space where people are at liberty to live as they see fit and exercise control over their property. You are going to get some people who discriminate, who hold and publish opinions that we find objectionable and who we would not care to associate with. We cannot eliminate risk from the world, and we cannot eliminate behaviours that we do not like. We are obliged to live with these people just as they are obliged to live with us. As long as they do not use violence against us, or gang together to coerce us, there is no problem whatsoever with restauranteurs, who are to our minds, savage, behaving like savages.

Sadly, people in the mainstream believe many contradictory ideas simultaneously. They believe that censorship is wrong, but that there should be such a thing as ‘hate speech’. They believe that they should have the right to Home Educate without being licensed because bad home Educators are practically non existent, but restauranteurs should be licensed, because “someone might be poisoned”. Similarly, these people believe that the property rights of others should be nullified, whilst their property rights are enshrined and protected. This is illogical and irrational thinking.

People in the mainstream of thought are outraged that artists are forbidden from drawing depictions of religious figures, but at the same time, will not support other people who espouse ideas or draw pictures that they find distasteful.

Libertarians do not suffer from this contradictory thinking. Libertarians understand rights correctly; you cannot use the government to enforce your beliefs or ideas; it is immoral and coercive. Banning Facebook because it hosts ideas you do not like is exactly the same as putting someone in gaol because you do not like his view of history. Supporting restauranteurs’ right to ban people from bringing handguns into their premises (or even more likely banning smokers) means you must support the right of restauranteurs to ban anything or any person for any reason. You cannot pick and choose what rights restauranteurs should have based on your own personal prejudices and personal circumstances.

There is a distinction between the state and the private sphere that is not properly understood by ‘normal’ thinkers. If we are to take the premise of democracy and representative government at face value, then anyone who votes or pays taxes or who is a member of ‘society’ has, by default, the same rights to services and to serve as any other member of society. That means that as equal stakeholders in society, the state cannot discriminate against a person for any reason whatsoever, as each person is an equal participant in the collective. The state, with its monopoly on coercion and violence has an obligation to treat all people equally that private people and the businesses they own and control do not. This is the key difference between the realm of the state and the world of private property. Private people do not have the right to use violence to extract monies from individuals, and neither does the public have a quotal share in the property of private people. Private people are also under no obligation to be in service to anyone; any other position than this is to condone slavery. The state, on the other hand, has the power (but not the right) to use violence, has an explicit obligation to serve the electorate, and the public has a quotal share in it and by its own rules, has ‘rights’ granted by it. The two could not be more different, and it is crucial, if you are to understand why restauranteurs have the right to exclude types of potential patron, that you have a clear delineation in your mind separating the state and private spheres.

As this argument rages on, you will see bad thinking swirling around this subject, grouped by the type of speaker. You will hear the same arguments, smears and nonsense again and again from the violent, statist, anti-Libertarians, and they will look like this:

They will:

• Conflate the disturbing imagery and injustices of the past with the core idea that man has rights, including unpleasant people who own restaurants.
• Insist that the state is needed to remove the rights of some people for the good of the whole.
• Mischaracterise Libertarians as people who are against the rights of ‘minorities’, when the exact opposite is the case.
• Use an endless stream of straw men to try and stamp a mark of disapproval on Libertarians.

Libertarians are the most pure anti racists out there. The whole of Libertarianism rejects the idea that people have different or separate rights depending on what they look like, what they believe, or who they prefer to have sex with. They are also the most rights conscious and clear thinking. They are the sworn enemies of almost all conventional wisdom and every foul thing that comes from it.

The logic of Libertarianism is unassailable, civilised, and completely embracing of all people; this may be the reason why it is greeted by such hostility by self selecting groups who make a living out of defining themselves by artificial and false distinctions. These groups are on to a good thing, and widespread adoption of Libertarianism would shut them down permanently. They would no longer be in line for special treatment at the expense of others, neither would they be able to exert control over other groups in any way.

As Libertarianism continues to grow, we can expect more of these desperate and flailing attacks. When the mainstream gatekeepers of public opinion start to delve into the writings of Murray Rothbard, they will find much that is offensive to them, and they will try to use what they find there to demonise and discredit Libertarianism.

Unfortunately for them, the very act of exposing these ideas will cause hundreds of millions to embrace them, because Libertarianism makes perfect sense and is in perfect tune with the true nature of man.

When men are living in a state of liberty, people’s feelings are going to be hurt. There are going to be bad people. There are going to be people who discriminate. There are going to be people who offend others with their ideas. All of these things are a price worth paying for liberty, such is the sweetness of that condition.

A lurker sent this to us; it appears that the Germans have plans in motion to return to their own currency, in the light of the inevitable Euro crisis:

Thinking the Unthinkable

BERLIN (Own report) – Following the passage of the 750 billion Euro bailout package, the debate on Germany's leaving the monetary union has become more intense. Business representatives confirm that German industry, which exports heavily to other countries within the Euro zone, has up to now greatly benefited from the common currency. If an austerity program can be successfully imposed on Southern Europe, establishing a pan-European economic "model" patterned on Germany, the Euro will remain advantageous for Germany. But strong resistance is expected from Greece and other countries. If expensive transfer payments cannot be avoided, it may become necessary "to think the unthinkable" of Germany "leaving the monetary union" writes the business press. In the long run, Germany's withdrawal from the Euro zone is, in fact, highly probable, the Swedish economics scholar Stefan de Vylder tells german-foreign-policy.com. The first insinuations about the probable consequences indicate that serious tensions can be expected in Europe.

The passage of a 750 billion Euro bailout package is being very angrily commented in Germany. According to the German media, the bailout package was part of France's plan and should not be limited to German resources being transferred to Southern Europe, but should also be a first step in the direction of creating a European economic governing body. Influential circles are demanding that a stand be taken against these efforts and that resistance be put up against French pressure. Beyond this, a debate of principles has begun around the question of the Euro's utility for Germany.

[...]

Resistance
But Berlin is not sure if the expected resistance against these budgetary dictates and sanctions can be defeated. Attentively German media are reporting that in Athens, a draft law taking national budgetary decisions away from the country's parliament is creating "unrest". This law would relinquish a basic democratic right of sovereignty. Also unclear is whether the protest movement that has developed against Greece's austerity program can be repressed. "Part of the Greek problem lies in the fact that the Greeks are very skeptical toward their rulers," writes the business press.[5]

[...]

Centrifugal Force
The consequences of Germany's leaving the monetary union have, so far, only been insinuatively discussed. "Europe's unraveling would create an immense centrifugal force that would be impossible to bridle" according to one commentary, "up here, a rich, industrialized north, down there, a poor south, and a deeply impoverished southeast"

[...]

http://www.german-foreign-policy.com/en/fulltext/56342

My emphasis.

And from the Financial Times:

On Thursday we poured scorn on the bizarre rumour that German officials have already prepared for a “plan B” contingency involving the return of the Deutsche Mark as soon as this weekend.

Although it might not have been as far fetched as we thought…

May 14 (Bloomberg) — French President Nicolas Sarkozy threatened to pull out of the euro unless German Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed to back the European Union’s bailout plan at a meeting last weekend in Brussels, El Pais newspaper said, citing comments Spain’s premier Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero made at a meeting of socialist politicians. The report didn’t say how it obtained the information.

[...]

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2010/05/14/231861/now-about-those-dem-rumours-redux/

This is all VERY interesting.

A German 'Plan B' (or should that be 'Plan ß'?) to return to the Deutschmark.

What would this mean practically?

First of all, if the Germans have a Plan ß ready to launch, it means that they must have a huge cache of Deutschmarks already printed, enough for every German, in preparation for the return to their own currency.

If this is true, it means that they saw all of this coming, and started preparing for it ages ago.

If they have this currency stored in a bunker somewhere, there will have to be some rules as to who has the right to exchange their worthless Euros for Neu Deutschmarks.

In order to keep the number of new Deutschmarks in circulation low, they would need to legislate that only Germans can exchange their Euros for Deutschmarks, at a fixed rate, and that this should be possible for a short window of time. As soon as the announcement is made, the Euro will suffer a massive crash.

The reason for limiting the Neu Deutschmark to Germans is simple; if everyone in the world who held Euros was able to exchange them for Neu Deutschmarks (which we can be sure will not be inflated) at a fixed rate, there would be:

• Too many Neu Deutschmarks in circulation, reducing their value as the fixed rate makes it increasingly advantageous to obtain Neu Deutschmarks for Euros of rapidly diminishing value
• A huge cost to germany in printing Neu Deutschmarks
• Germans losing out to foreigners on the chance to preserve the value of their money

This will mean presenting your passport or German ID Card when you exchange your Euros.

Absolutely possible and doable, and for the Germans, desirable.

Of course, if the Germans did this, the French would follow soon after, and every other Euro tied country, as the Euro imploded and became so much wallpaper. In the near future, stories like this one about 'criminals' and €500 notes will seem rather silly. They already are, obviously.

And now for this bit:

a draft law taking national budgetary decisions away from the country's parliament is creating "unrest". This law would relinquish a basic democratic right of sovereignty.

The idiotic Greeks are only now beginning to understand what giving up the Drachma actually meant. When they gave up their currency, they gave up their sovereignty. They sold their country to foreigners. Even now, they are begging like… beggars to the French and the Germans for alms so they can keep their fantasy world running.

The people who organised the selling of Greece to Europe should be held responsible for this, and certainly, the Greek citizens should now take matters into their own hands and go straight for privately created money; in other words, the power to create money should not be the responsibility of the Greek government ever again.

Sadly, the Greek socialists are so completely insane and misguided about how money works, they would never be able to identify this as the solution, since they do not posses any knowledge about economics and the true source of the problem.

But I digress.

Lets look at a speech by Margaret Thatcher, the last one she made in the House of Commons as Prime Minister:

Well well well.

It seems that Margaret Thatcher was 'clued up' on what money is and its true importance to the sovereignty of a country. Now we see that she was absolutely right about the 'ECU', and that the people who wanted to adopt it, and those imbecile traitors who still do, are completely and utterly wrong.

IF (and thats a big 'if') you believe that the sovereign nation state is a beneficial thing (and I do not) then in order to keep your sovereignty, you need to be in control of your own laws and your own currency. If you give up control of your currency, you give up the power to control the money supply. In Keynesian economics, this is the main tool, along with interest rates (controlled by a sovereign central bank), used to 'manage' an economy. If you are a Keynesian, and you want a sovereign state, you need to keep control of the printing press and the central bank. Giving them both to the Germans is simply insane, even under the upside-down circus voodoo economics of Keynesianism. Even in the bizarre world of Nick Clegg, giving up the pound doesn't make any sense if he thinks Britain should make its own laws.

Gold broke through the €1000 barrier today, and you can expect it to go even higher if newly printed bailout Euros ever enter the economy.

I say, why wait for these people to either save the Euro or destroy it? By using fiat currency you encourager les autres to carry on with the criminal counterfeiting that they have been getting away with for decades. If everyone simply moved all their wealth into gold and silver, no matter how small the amount, and then only accepted gold and silver for goods and services, the predatory leech state would have no choice but to go along with it.

It would mean the end of central bank counterfeiting and the inflation tax. This would have a beneficial side effect of ending the possibility of paying for war without raising taxes. Huge standing armies would dwindle to sane defence forces, where they persisted at all.

Furthermore, your money, the value of the work you were compensated for that you are storing in worthless paper notes would be safe from 'theft by evaporation' which is exactly what the hidden 'inflation tax' is, when you store your earned value in gold. No matter how small your savings are, if you have any at all, they are being evaporated right now if they are denominated in Euros, Dollars or any currency that is being inflated. And don't let them fool you with euphemisms; 'Quantitative Easing' is PRINTING MONEY, or INCREASING THE SUPPLY OF MONEY, which is the inflation tax, or INFLATING THE CURRENCY. Remember; 'inflation' is not a rise in prices at Waitrose, the rises in prices are the result of inflation, the symptom if you will.

The death of the Euro and a return to national currencies will be a very good thing IMHO. Without a single currency, you cannot have a single political entity; you cannot have (for example) a European Army, because you cannot fund it. A single, monolithic political entity, like a Federal Europe, is anathema to anyone who loves freedom. Its as far away from Libertarianism as you can get, and Libertarians want to live in spaces that are the polar opposite of Federal Europe.

Google ‘not interested’ in privacy, say information tsars

Google has repeatedly shown a “disappointing disregard” for safeguarding private information about its users, the privacy officials from 10 major countries have said.

Britain’s Information Commissioner Chris Graham and equivalent officials from Canada, France, Germany and Italy were among the signatories to a letter to the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, which condemned the way the company has delivered both its Streetview mapping service and its Buzz product, which was conceived as a rival to social network Facebook.

The letter, organised by Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, calls on Google to lay out how it will meet concerns about its use of public data in the future, and says that it has “violated the fundamental principle that individuals should be able to control the use of their personal information”. The search giant has already acted to address a number of the points now raised in the letter, but said that it had no further statements to make on its privacy policies.

The launch of the Buzz network in February sparked an international wave of protests because it took information about email users’ most common correspondents and automatically built each individual a network of followers. This meant that links which people wished to keep private could immediately become public.

Google Streetview, which provides an eye-level picture of almost every street in dozens of cities around the world, continues to cause “concern about the adequacy of the information [Google] provides before the images are captured”, the commissioners said. The product has also been launched some countries “without due consideration of privacy and data protection laws and cultural norms”, they added.

In a statement Google said that it had quickly rectified the problems that caused Buzz users concern. “We have discussed all these issues publicly many times before and have nothing to add to today’s letter,” the search company said. “Of course we do not get everything 100% right. We try very hard to be upfront about the data we collect, and how we use it, as well as to build meaningful controls into our products.“

The commissioners, however, said that they “remain extremely concerned about how a product with such significant privacy issues [as Buzz] was launched in the first place”.

[...]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7612988/Google-not-interested-in-privacy.html

The hypocrisy of the state is a bottomless well full of the excrement of a thousand years of violence, theft, lies and bastardy. They “remain extremely concerned about how a product with such significant privacy issues [as Buzz] was launched in the first place”. What an extraordinary statement, especially coming from the people who issue mandatory Passports, ID Cards, forced enrolment in ContactPoint and all the other harmful things that these states have deployed, knowing full well in advance that they were harmful to the privacy of the people who would be forced into being violated by them.

Lets think about what Google DOES NOT DO, compared to what these states DO DO.

Google does not:

• FORCE people into a National Identity Register, where your fingerprints are taken BY FORCE.
• Operate a system of MANDATORY passports where if you want to exercise your right to travel, you need their permission in advance.
• FORCE people to apply for and carry a driver’s license to drive their own cars
• FORCE people to carry an ID Card when they leave their own houses
• FORCE people to ‘register’ their children at birth
• FORCE people’s children onto databases like ContactPoint
• FORCE people to reveal their private banking transactions to facilitate theft
• FORCE private companies to violate the privacy of their users
• SPY on people’s telephone conversations
• SPY on people’s emails
• READ people’s snail mail to spy on them
• FORCE people to be locked into their violations and predations with no opt out
• FORCE people to _________ their own ________ so that they can __________

Google is a provider of VOLUNTARY SERVICES that exist on a PRIVATE NETWORK OF COMPUTERS that is the internets. In this respect, they are absolutely moral, clean and without blemish of any kind. You do not like their services? Go to Yahoo, Hotmail or the devil for all they care. Google will not hunt you down with guns and murder you for refusing their voluntary services, unlike the state.

All of these purely evil people, namely Jennifer Stoddart Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Alex Türk
 Chairman, Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (France), Peter Schaar
 Commissioner, Bundesbeauftragte für den Datenschutz und die Informationsfreiheit (Germany), Billy Hawkes 
Data Protection Commissioner of Ireland, Yoram Hacohen 
Head of the Israeli Law, Information and Technology Authority, Francesco Pizzetti
 Garante per la protezione dei dati personali (Italy), Jacob Kohnstamm
 Chairman, College Bescherming Persoonsgegevens (Netherlands)
Chairman Article 29 Working Party, Marie Shroff 
Privacy Commissioner, New Zealand, Artemi Rallo Lombarte
 Director, Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (Spain), Christopher Graham
 Information Commissioner and Chief Executive (United Kingdom)

Are ALL guilty of working for criminal and immoral organisations that routinely steal, murder and violate the property and privacy of hundreds of millions of people on a daily basis. There is no escaping this, and they have a huge amount of PURE GALL attacking Google in this way.

When these idiotic, violent, violating, computer illiterate agents of the state offer:

giving people simple procedures for deleting their accounts and honouring their requests in a timely way.

so that the state has none of the information they hold on citizens, THEN and ONLY THEN will they be in a position to say ANYTHING to Google. The state should not have a monopoly on privacy violation; this is what it has now, and that is unacceptable to any decent person with a properly formulated code of ethics.

While we are at it, we must make special mention of Germany and Canada, who outlaw speech that they find objectionable. Obviously (you read BLOGDIAL after all) you know that what anyone feels about a particular speaker is irrelevant. Freedom of speech is a non negotiable absolute. It is entirely illegitimate for the state to proscribe strings of words.

But I digress.

These people, these unproductive, unethical parasites, have a hell of a nerve writing a letter to a company that provides a useful and completely voluntary service to anyone who wants it.

People do not like being on streetview. This is understandable. If all the roads were private, then streetview would be impossible. The people who own the streets would have the right to exclude the streetview cars from travelling down their roads. Libertarians WIN again!

Of course, this would not stop people making drawings of what is on a street and publishing them; those would be just as useful as photographs and would not violate anyone’s privacy.

Thankfully, Google has some balls:

As we have written before, there are definitely questions to be asked over the privacy implications of StreetView and the so-called ‘joined-up’ online world Google is creating with phone, email. social networking, GPS mapping and, potentially, medical records all being held on the database of one large multinational company.

Well, it seems that Google took the accusations to heart and – in a wonderfully catty reaction – has today published a a tool that shows how often governments around the world have either asked it for data on users or asked that data be removed from Google search results.

This ‘Government requests tool’ (click here to view the fascinating table) reveals some very interesting results. As explained by tech site V3.co.uk:

Top of the list of user information requests is Brazil with 3,663 inquiries, reflecting the strength of Google’s Orkut social networking system in that country. The US comes second with 3,580 requests and the UK third with 1,166, the highest in Europe by a considerable margin.

Brazil also tops the lists of information removal, with 291 requests. Germany comes second with 188 and India third with 142, edging out the US, which made 123 requests.

Congratulations should go out to Google for publishing this table and revealing the extent to which Governments around the world are prepared to lean on internet-based companies – and potentially control what we see on the web. Congratulations are also due to our Information Commissioner for recognising the privacy issues with StreetView etc.

It further proves that it is not just state databases we should be concerned about.

[...]

http://www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/home/2010/04/google-reacts-to-government-privacy-complaints.html

Actually, Big Brother Watch is wrong about the non state databases being something of concern; it is only the state’s mandatory access to private data that causes the problem, not the fact that company owned databases are used as a tool. If there were no state, there would be no threat from databases because it is the violence of the state that makes a database dangerous.

Google and more recently Talk Talk are demonstrating that they have some guts and are not willing to passively be the apparatus of the state.

At last, a ram amongst the sheep!

Environmental Hysteria

Because they know that the vast majority of Americans would reject their real agenda, the environmentalists use lies, exaggerations, and pseudo-science to create public hysteria.

EXXON: The environmental movement is cheering the criminal indictment of the Exxon Corporation for the Alaska oil spill, with the possibility of more than $700 million in fines. The one shortcoming, say the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, is that Exxon executives won’t be sent to prison.

Exxon cannot be allowed to get away with an “environmental crime” which despoiled the “pristine wilderness of Alaska,” says Attorney General Richard Thornburgh. But the legal doctrine underlying this indictment is inconsistent with a free society, notes Murray N. Rothbard.

Under feudalism, the master was held responsible for all acts of his servants, intended or not. During the Renaissance with growing capitalism and freedom, the doctrine changed so there was no “vicarious liability.” Employers were correctly seen as legally responsible only for those actions they directed their employees to take, not when their employees disobeyed them. But today, we are back in feudal times, plus deeper-pocket jurisprudence, as employers are held responsible for all acts of their employees, even when the employees break company rules and disobey specific orders-by getting drunk on duty, for example. From all the hysteria, and the criminal indictment, one might think Exxon had deliberately spilled the oil, rather than being the victim of an accident that has already cost its stockholders $2 billion. Who is supposedly the casualty in the Justice Department’s “criminal” act? Oiled sand?

In fact, Exxon is the biggest victim. Through employee negligence, the company has lost $5 million worth of oil, a supertanker, and compensation to fishermen, or the cost of the clean up. The total bill could be $3 billion.

Yet every night on television, we were treated to maudlin coverage of oily water and blackened seagulls, and denunciations of Exxon and oil production in “environmentally sensitive” Alaska. Though why it is more sensitive than, say, New Jersey, we are never told. In fact, environmentalists love Alaska because there are so few people there. It represents their ideal.

Despite all the hysteria, oil is – if I may use the environmentalists’ own lingo – natural, organic, and biodegradable. As in previous oil spills, it all went away, and the birds, plants, and fish replenished themselves.

The Exxon oil spill was hardly the “equivalent of Hiroshima,” as one crazed Alaska judge said. And who knows? Oil might be good for some wildlife. This year, the salmon catch is almost 50% bigger than any time in history.

WETLANDS: One of the great engineering achievements of the ancient world was draining the Pontine Marshes, which enabled the city of Rome to expand. But no such project could be undertaken today; that vast swamp would be protected as wetlands.

When John Pozsgai – an emigrant from communist Hungary – tried to improve some property he found this out. After buying a former junkyard and clearing away the thousands of tires that littered it, Pozsgai put clean topsoil on his lot in Morrisville, PA. For this, the 57-year-old mechanic was sentenced to three years in prison and $200,000 in fines, because his property was classified as wetlands by the federal government.

After ordering a bureaucrat to “get the Hell off my property,” Pozsgai was arrested, handcuffed, and jailed on $10,000 bail. Quickly tried and convicted, Pozsgai’s brutal sentence will – said the prosecutor – “send a message to the private landowners, corporations, and developers of this country about President Bush’s wetlands policy.”

John Pozsgai has a different view: “I thought this was a free country,” he told The Washington Post.

RUBBISH: In Palo Alto, California, citizens are ordered to separate their trash into seven neatly packaged piles: newspapers, tin cans (flattened with labels removed), aluminum cans (flattened), glass bottles (with labels removed), plastic soda pop bottles, lawn sweepings, and regular rubbish. And to pay high taxes to have it all taken away.

In Mountain Park, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, the government has just ordered the same recycling program, increased taxes 53% to pay for it, and enacted fines of up to $1,000, and jail terms of up to six months, for scofftrashes.

Because of my aversion to government orders, my distrust of government justifications, and my dislike of ecomania, I have always mixed all my trash together. If recycling made sense – economically and not as a sacrament of Gaia worship – we would be paid to do it.

For the same reason, I love to use plastic fast- food containers and non-returnable bottles. The whole recycling commotion, like the broader environmental movement, has always impressed me as malarkey. But I was glad to get some scientific support for my position.

Professor William L. Rathje, an urban archaeologist at the University of Arizona and head of its Garbage Project, has been studying rubbish for almost 20 years, and what he’s discovered contradicts almost everything we’re told.

When seen in perspective, our garbage problems are no worse than they have always been. The only difference is that today we have safe methods to deal with them, if the environmentalists will let us.

The environmentalists warn of a country covered by garbage because the average American generates 8 lbs. a day. In fact, we create less than 3 lbs. each, which is a good deal less than people in Mexico City today or American 100 years ago. Gone, for example, are the 1,200 lbs. of coal ash each American home used to generate, and our modern packaged foods mean less rubbish, not more.

But most landfills will be full in ten years or less, we’re told, and that’s true. But most landfills are designed to last ten years. The problem is not that they are filling up, but that we’re not allowed to create new ones, thanks to the environmental movement. Texas, for example, handed out 250 landfill permits a year in the mid-1970s, but fewer than 50 in 1988.

The environmentalists claim that disposable diapers and fast-food containers are the worst problems. To me, this has always revealed the anti-family and pro-elite biases common to all left-wing movements. But the left, as usual, has the facts wrong as well.

In two years of digging in seven landfills all across America, in which they sorted and weighed every item in 16,000 lbs. of garbage, Rathje discovered that fast-food containers take up less than 1/10th of one percent of the space; less than 1 % was disposable diapers. All plastics totalled less than 5%. The real culprit is paper – especially telephone books and newspapers. And there is little biodegradation. He found 1952 newspapers still fresh and readable.

Rather than biodegrade, most garbage mummifies. And this may be a blessing. If newspapers, for example, degraded rapidly, tons of ink would leach into the groundwater. And we should be glad that plastic doesn’t biodegrade. Being inert, it doesn’t introduce toxic chemicals into the environment.

We’re told we have a moral obligation to recycle, and most of us say we do so, but empirical studies show it isn’t so. In surveys, 78% of the respondents say they separate their garbage, but only 26% said they thought their neighbors separate theirs. To test that, for seven years the Garbage Project examined 9,000 loads of refuse in Tucson, Arizona, from a variety of neighborhoods. The results: most people do what they say their neighbors do – they don’t separate. No matter how high or low the income, or how liberal the neighborhood, or how much the respondents said they cared about the environment, only 26% actually separated their trash. The only reliable predictor of when people separate and when they don’t is exactly the one an economist would predict: the price paid for the trash. When the prices of old newspaper rose, people carefully separated their newspapers. When the price of newspapers fell, people threw them out with the other garbage.

We’re all told to save our newspapers for recycling, and the idea seems to make sense. Old newspapers can be made into boxes, wallboard, and insulation, but the market is flooded with newsprint thanks to government programs. In New Jersey, for example, the price of used newspapers has plummeted from $40 a ton to minus $25 a ton. Trash entrepreneurs used to buy old newspaper. Now you have to pay someone to take it away.

If it is economically efficient to recycle – and we can’t know that so long as government is involved – trash will have a market price. It is only through a free price system, as Ludwig von Mises demonstrated 70 years ago, that we can know the value of goods and services.

[...]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/anti-enviro.html

From his priceless ‘Rockwell’s Anti-Environmentalist Manifesto’

Tom Chivers the Telegraph.co.uk’s “Strategic Events Editor”, ‘science nerd and pedant’ startles us by the stupidity of his unintelligent and pedestrian twaddle on UFOs:

Marvellous. An “American professor” has called for UFOs and other “unexplained phenomena” to be a university subject.

Science IS marvellous… what is your problem?

It’s in the US, not in Britain, mercifully,

Properly executed Scientific method not being practiced in the UK is a good thing?

although with our excellent range of pseudoscientific BSc options you feel it’ll only be a matter of time (the University of Westminster’s course in “Vibrational Medicine” is a case in point).

I smell a Saganite, Shostlackite skeptic. And it smells BAD.

I’ve put the words “American professor” in inverted commas, not because he isn’t really American or really a professor, but because it’s a direct quote from the news story. It’s a funny thing that being a professor – of any subject, at any university – seems to make you an authority on anything at all.

In the same way that a “Strategic Events Editor” makes you an expert on Science. I guess.

So Prof Philip Haseley, a professor of anthropology at the Niagara County Community College in New York State, is now held up as an expert on alien life.

He at least, appears to be a real scientist, which is quite different to a skeptic; skeptics are not scientific, they are religious fanatics in the cult of Science. This cult of science has its own dogma, its high priests and rabid followers, just like Tom Chivers, who is, apparently, a fully paid up member.

Let’s be clear: I’m not saying a belief in alien life per se is ridiculous. The debate over whether or not we are alone in the universe is huge and ongoing.

That debate is over; haven’t you heard?

The most famous tool we have is the Drake Equation,

Here comes the dogma!

which – using estimated figures like how many stars there are in the universe, how quickly they’re formed, how many planets they have on average, how many of those planets could support life (and how many of those then do), and so on – attempts to work out how many extraterrestrial civilisations we might, in principle, be able to communicate with.

One set of current figures puts that number at two, but that is highly controversial; a few minor tweaks to the estimated inputs can easily raise it as high as 20,000 or as low as 0.000065, which would imply that we are almost certainly alone in our stellar neighbourhood. This continuing argument is the basis of SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, which for 50 years has scanned the skies for signals which could only come from intelligent life (and there is, of course, a further argument over what that means).

Now lets hear from an actual, real scientist:

“Drake’s Brave Guess”. He waxed poetic about the Drake Equation, originated 45 years ago by radio astronomer Frank Drake (now co-director of the SETI Institute) which supposedly is a scientific approach to determining the number of civilizations in the galaxy capable of sending radio signals. The idea is that, if we just keep listening, we will make the great discovery that man is not alone in the galaxy. The reasoning is a great example of pseudo-science. The primary reason for the article was the fact that the new Allen Telescope Array with 42 dishes, each 20 feet in diameter, is just going on line at Hat Creek in Northern California.

Eventually there will be many more dishes. He really seems to believe the quaint notion that our best systems are on a par with alien civilizations’ best capabilities apparently assuming they would not have improved in what could easily be the billion years during which such systems have been around. I was using a slide rule 50 years ago. I don’t anymore. A laser printer is not just a better IBM Selectric Typewriter. Atomic bombs are not just bigger 10 ton block busters that were used earlier in WW 2.

Of course Shostak doesn’t mention that Hat Creek can’t tune into Southern sky alien radio transmitters,even assuming they are still transmitting using very old, for them, technology. In the “Zeta Reticuli Incident” by Terence Dickinson, which discusses Marjorie Fish’s very exciting research on the Betty Hill star map, it is noted that many sun like stars in the neighborhood can only be seen from below the equator.

Shostak presents the Sacred Drake equation and then plays dartboard physics to try to come up with values for such things as on what fraction of planets life develops; on what fraction of those intelligence develops; and on what fraction of those the ability to send radio signals develops and perhaps most important, the lifetime of a civilization.. Considering that we have data for some of these factors from one planet around one star in a galaxy of a few hundred Billion stars, one can see that this is just a mite of a stretch, a rather huge extrapolation. The galaxy may be 13 Billion years old and the sun is only about 4.5 billion years old. But Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli, just 39 light years away, are a billion years older than the sun and just down the street.

[...]

http://www.theufochronicles.com/2006/06/drake-equation-by-stanton-t-friedman.html

My emphasis. Quoting Stanton Friedman is not an appeal to authority by the way, it is simply quoting facts. Here are some more facts about the Drake Equation:

Cast your minds back to 1960. John F. Kennedy is president, commercial jet airplanes are just appearing, the biggest university mainframes have 12K of memory. And in Green Bank, West Virginia at the new National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a young astrophysicist named Frank Drake runs a two week project called Ozma, to search for extraterrestrial signals. A signal is received, to great excitement. It turns out to be false, but the excitement remains. In 1960, Drake organizes the first SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) conference, and came up with the now-famous Drake equation:

N x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x fL = ?

Where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet’s life during which the communicating civilizations live.

This serious-looking equation gave SETI a serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses — just so we’re clear — are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be “informed guesses.” If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It’s simply prejudice.

As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from “billions and billions” to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing…

In the case of the Drake equation, we wind up with a formula that would be science if the values were known, but they aren’t so it doesn’t tell us anything. They may claim to use conservative estimates in their calculations, but if the value has no known basis then there’s no good reason to suggest the “guesstimate” is conservative or wildly optimistic. Of course, looking for ET to call home, or Earth, is not that serious a question so we cut the SETI folks some slack even though they are spending taxpayer money.

[...]

http://www.terrycolon.com/4features/quasi.html

And by the way SETI SHOULD be closed down, not only because it is junk science, but because it is being funded with stolen money. They should be cut no slack whatsoever, they should just be CUT.

But I digress.

But even if we assume the 20,000 figure, the nearest alien civilisation would probably be about 1,500 light years from Earth. So what Professor Haseley is proposing we take seriously is the following:

All true scientists take everything seriously. It is precisely the same sort of mocking and illogical posture that ‘scientists’ in the 1800′s took when they shouted down the real scientists who proposed that meteorites came from space.

1) That one or more alien civilisations have either developed vastly faster-than-light propulsion systems or flown for a minimum of 1,500 years across space to find us

This argument is faulty. First of all, it is like arguing that the only way to cross the atlantic in three hours is by building a boat that travels at twice the speed of sound. You do it in a plane, not a boat. There are probably many ways of travelling long distances that have nothing to do with the holy laws of physics (thou canst not travel faster than the speed of light. To say so is HERESY!). victims of such experimentation. It would look inexplicable, unfathomable, terrifying. It would leave marks, and of course, your fellow polar bears would say you were insane when you recounted the story. If polar bears could talk.

They’re big claims. And, as Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

ALL HAIL SAINT SAGAN, SAGE OF SCIENCE, SOOTHSAYER, SKEPTIC, SAVIOUR – PARAGON OF REASON AND OUR GUIDING LIGHT!

And there is no such evidence.

That is a lie. One out of three.

The trouble with the whole field of “UFOlogy” is that it relies on a logical fallacy. “You can’t explain this photograph/video/experience”, say the UFOlogists, “therefore aliens did it.”

That is another lie. Two out of three.

It’s reminiscent of creationist logic – “you can’t explain this chemical pathway/complex organ/unfound fossil, therefore God did it”, and like creationist logic it cheapens what it wants to promote.

And yet another lie. Three for three.

It is a weak and attenuated religion that hides God in a dwindling supply of feeble, unexplained details, instead of seeing God in the whole glory of the universe; and it is a sad misrepresentation of the serious and important search for alien life to reduce it to conspiracy theory and nonsense.

I don’t know Prof Haseley, or the Niagara County Community College. Maybe the course will be sceptical and scientific. But I think the really interesting university course – and one more appropriate for a professor of anthropology – would be one examining why humanity has such a powerful urge to believe that they have seen ET. What is it in our psyche that needs to know we are not alone?

[...]

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tomchivers/100007612/a-degree-course-in-ufology-cheapens-the-real-search-for-alien-life/

Here is an interesting question; how would a “Strategic Events Editor” recommend the release of information relating to the reality of UFOS as alien spacecraft, so that the minimum number of people goes insane when the trigger is pulled?

We may never get the answer to that one, but one thing is for sure, this particular “Strategic Events Editor” does not have the intellectual capacity to design that programme.

Another classic example of weak mindedness, poor logic, religious dogma masquerading as science and ostrich posturing.

Finally, science is not something that can be ‘cheapened’, at least, not in the minds of people who actually have an understanding of how science works.

The scientific method can be applied to anything. Your personal prejudices, deeply held superstitions, religious beliefs and childish thinking have no effect on what is and is not true. If someone is applying the scientific method to a subject that offends you, science is not in any way cheapened. This is the language of the religious fanatic; what this man is really saying is that studying UFOs is blasphemy and that the people who are doing it are fit only for ridicule and then excommunication.

The history of science is littered with this sort of bad behaviour:

• Arrhenius (ion chemistry)
• Alfven, Hans (galaxy-scale plasma dynamics)
• Baird, John L. (television camera)
• Bakker, Robert (fast, warm-blooded dinosaurs)
• Bardeen & Brattain (transistor)
• Bretz J Harlen (ice age geology)
• Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan (black holes in 1930)
• Chladni, Ernst (meteorites in 1800)
• Crick & Watson (DNA)
• Doppler (optical Doppler effect)
• Folk, Robert L. (existence and importance of nanobacteria)
• Galvani (bioelectricity)
• Harvey, William (circulation of blood, 1628)
• Krebs (ATP energy, Krebs cycle)
• Galileo (supported the Copernican viewpoint)
• Gauss, Karl F. (nonEuclidean geometery)
• Binning/Roher/Gimzewski (scanning-tunneling microscope)
• Goddard, Robert (rocket-powered space ships)
• Goethe (Land color theory)
• Gold, Thomas (deep non-biological petroleum deposits)
• Gold, Thomas (deep mine bacteria)
• Lister, J (sterilizing)
• T Maiman (Laser)
• Margulis, Lynn (endosymbiotic organelles)
• Mayer, Julius R. (The Law of Conservation of Energy)
• Marshall, B (ulcers caused by bacteria, helicobacter pylori)
• McClintlock, Barbara (mobile genetic elements, “jumping genes”, transposons)
• Newlands, J. (pre-Mendeleev periodic table)
• Nottebohm, F. (neurogenesis: brains can grow neurons)
• Ohm, George S. (Ohm’s Law)
• Ovshinsky, Stanford R. (amorphous semiconductor devices)
• Pasteur, Louis (germ theory of disease)
• Prusiner, Stanley (existence of prions, 1982)
• Rous, Peyton (viruses cause cancer)
• Semmelweis, I. (surgeons wash hands, puerperal fever )
• Steen-McIntyre, Virginia (southwest US indians villiage , 300,000BC)
• Tesla, Nikola (Earth electrical resonance, “Schumann” resonance)
• Tesla, Nikola (brushless AC motor)
• J H van’t Hoff (molecules are 3D)
• Warren, Warren S (flaw in MRI theory)
• Wegener, Alfred (continental drift)
• Wright, Wilbur & Orville (flying machines)
• Zwicky, Fritz (existence of dark matter, 1933)
• Zweig, George (quark theory)

and the very least we can expect from people with even one brain cell is caution when ridiculing a scientist. Not only does it serve no purpose, but you might just find yourself having to eat your hat.

Richard Dawkins has hatched a plot to arrest the head of a sovereign state. We are talking about the Pope, who is the head of state of the Vatican:

Vatican City /ˈvætɪkən ˈsɪti/ (help·info), officially the State of the Vatican City (Italian: Stato della Città del Vaticano, pronounced [ˈsta(ː)to delːa tʃiˈtːa del vatiˈka(ː)no]), is a landlocked sovereign city-state whose territory consists of a walled enclave within the city of Rome, the capital city of Italy. It has an area of approximately 44 hectares (110 acres) (0.44 km2), and a population of just over 800.

Vatican City is a city-state that came into existence in 1929. It is distinct from the Holy See, which dates back to early Christianity and is the main episcopal see of 1.147 billion Latin and Eastern Catholic adherents around the globe. Ordinances of Vatican City are published in Italian; official documents of the Holy See are issued mainly in Latin. The two entities even have distinct passports: the Holy See, not being a country, only issues diplomatic and service passports; the state of Vatican City issues normal passports. In both cases the passports issued are very few.

The Lateran Treaty in 1929, which brought the city-state into existence, spoke of it as a new creation (Preamble and Article III), not as a vestige of the much larger Papal States (756-1870) that had previously encompassed central Italy. Most of this territory was absorbed into the Kingdom of Italy in 1860, and the final portion, namely the city of Rome with a small area close to it, ten years later, in 1870.

[...]

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

The supremely deluded Dawkins and his followers object to living in a society where the people who rule over them use religion as the basis of the law making. Specifically, they are talking about monsters like Ruth Kelly, Roman Catholic with four children, member of Opus Dei, being in a position to create laws that they have to obey, set school curricula etc etc. They want to replace the de facto theocracy with a completely secular state, where religion has absolutely no influence or place.

The error that Dawkins and the other shrill and irrational types like him make is that they are concerning themselves with the wrong problem.

The problem with people being religious is not that they use their religious convictions to control others, but that there is a state in the first place that provides them with the power to control.

Dawkins’ partner in crime Christopher Hitchens, neocon, lover of the good life, is a to the bone statist. He is way beyond help, and it is a waste of electrons discussing him.

Dawkins on the other hand, claims to be a scientist. Any properly thinking scientist would by now have come to the correct conclusion that the state itself is the problem when it comes to religion ‘being the bane of humanity’. He should have reasoned by now that democracy can be used by any religious person, Roman Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist, all of whom will bring their terrifying brand of thinking to the levers of the machine. In order to be free of these deluded people, you need to have no machine at all, or at the very least, a machine with a lever the size of a fly’s leg, so that no matter who has their hands on it, they cannot pump their religious poison into the minds of children and force their religious laws upon unwilling citizens.

Then there is the matter of the logic in arresting the Pope. This is like singing a song to put out a fire, or holding a candle lit vigil to stop a war. Arresting the Pope will do nothing to solve Dawkins’ problem of the power of religion over people. Even if the Pope is put in prison, the Bishops will simply elect a new one, and lo and behold, in a puff of smoke, there will be another Pope!

More than that, Dawkins now has billions of people wishing that he was dead, and many others openly calling him a coward for not attacking Islamic figureheads; of course, he doesn’t attack Muslims because he knows that they will hunt him down and cut his head off for the slightest provocation. You could fairly conclude that Dawkins is just a crass publicity seeker, but he does highlight a crucial problem, albeit in an oblique way – the problem of the state.

I for one, find the idea of a state run by ANYONE highly distasteful, and a state run by the likes of Dawkins to be the worst of all possible states. Here we have a man, who, because he cannot get his way, is willing to personally use violence against the Pope. Imagine this monster and his legions of psychopathic devotees at the controls of the entire apparatus of the state!

Imagine how they would react to the idea (for example) that people have the right to refuse vaccination. They would without any hesitation, order the rounding up of all people who have not been vaccinated, frog march them to prison hospitals where the poisons would be injected under the restraints of leather straps. Of course, these people would be easily rounded up, because people like Richard Dawkins would have no hesitation in putting everyone in a national database where every fact about you is held; after all, they are not deluded by religion, they are clear thinking scientists who have logic and the laws of science as their only guide… they cannot by definition be wrong. Sounds a bit like the ‘heroes’ in this film.

For all their mass murder, child raping, stealing, brainwashing, currency counterfeiting insanity, Roman Catholics under restraint are greatly preferable to Richard Dawkins and his ilk. And I say greatly only because compared to the number 0, 1 is a great amount. A stateless space is of course, millions of times more preferable to a state run by Roman Catholics.

Richard Dawkins, if he really wants to be free of the influence of religion, should embrace Libertarianism.

The ethics of Libertarianism are not derived from religion. Its implementation produces the most natural and efficient spontaneously ordered, stable and just society possible. It is in formulation and by its nature, completely scientific and simultaneously absolutely human, since it is based on the reality of what a human being is.

Libertarianism allows everyone to believe whatever they like, whilst preventing anyone from forcing their beliefs on others. That means atheists cannot tell the religious how to live and what to think, and the religious cannot tell others what to do or think. It is literally the perfect solution to everyone’s problems, including the economic ones; true Scientists everywhere should be Austrians, because Austrian Economics is a science; any scientist who believes that value can be created out of nothing (fractional reserve banking, fiat currency) is nothing more than an alchemist.

But you know this!

Now that election season is in full swing, all the violent, misguided, deluded statists are coming out of the woodworks to claim that their brand of violence is the best.

Mails are circulating the internets asking people to look at The Green Party, The Venus Project, and SIMPOL (Simultaneous Policy)… all bogus, all violent, all garbage.

The Green Party is particularly vile:

Green Party policies on equality and diversity are based on core principles of recognising rights and responsibilities and that a healthy society is based on voluntary cooperation between empowered individuals, free from discrimination based on race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, age, religion, social origin or any other prejudice.

In respect of rights, the Green Party goes beyond the liberal notion of individual rights, which fails to recognise that the current inequitable distribution of resources means that individuals and groups with the most power claim their rights, and those with less power find their rights denied. The rights of minority and less powerful groups suffer. For the Green Party, individual rights are vitally important, but in addition it is important to ensure that all minorities, as well as less powerful groups, are enabled to flourish. This requires positive action on the part of the state and employers.

[...]

http://www.greenparty.org.uk/policies/equalities.html

Greens are the greatest threat to Liberty ever. In their hands, the state will become the weapon that completely eliminates human liberty. Browse through their site for yourself….absolutely REVOLTING.

And check out their education policy:

Education is a right, not a privilege, and should be free to people of all ages. Good education is about more than academic knowledge – it is also about physical and mental health, creative and artistic development, and practical and social skills. We want an education system that nurtures people’s desire to learn throughout their lives. Education should promote equality, inclusivity, and social and emotional well- being, and schools should be at the heart of communities.

[...]

http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/policypointers/index.html

The old chestnuts. Education is not a right, or a privilege. It is a good.

and now on to the meat in the sandwich.

Mark Thomas, ‘enemy of the state’ (not) chimes in with his own brand of thievery, thuggery and brainwashing in the Grauniad:

With the utmost modesty I can claim, with the aid of audiences up and down the country, to have created the ultimate political manifesto. Each night audience members are asked to suggest policies, which are then discussed and voted upon. The policy that wins the most votes joins the manifesto. On Tuesday night the crowd decided upon two policies: to re-nationalise the railways and to introduce a maximum wage – although to be fair, fining people who wear Ugg boots came a close third.

None of this is remotely funny.

The railways were the property of businessmen who laid out their capital to build them. They were then stolen by the state, financed for decades with stolen money, and then sold to a different set of businessmen. Now, these people want to steal them again.

Stealing is stealing, wether it is done by a group of people voting for it or an individual burglar.

What I would like to hear from these folks is how they think that a vote turns the act of theft from a crime into a ‘not a crime’. I would also like them to explain how a vote transfers the power to steal from individuals to their agents. Mark Thomas would (I presume, who knows?) agree that he himself does not have the right to steal from anyone, so how can he transfer a power that he does not have to others?

Its an interesting question. Its also interesting to ask if this same magic works for any act; can people who do not have the right to take life, vote to take life? Can they vote to defy gravity?

I wonder….

The manifesto has built up over the year and contains policies varying from “MPs should not be paid salaries but loans, like students. MPs often get highly paid jobs on leaving parliament as a consequence of having attended parliament, they should therefore repay the loan” to “the introduction of a Prohibition of Deception Act” and “Dog owners who do not clean up after their dogs should be forced to wear the offending turd as a moustache for the rest of the day”.

Once again, this is not funny. Violence is not funny.

“What is to happen to these policies of rare genius, Mark?” I hear you cry in a desperate and needy whimper. The answer and the wait are over. The Manifesto has a candidate standing in the election.

Ebury Press (publishers of the People’s Manifesto) agreed to fund a candidate,

Hmmm! They VOLUNTARILY agreed to fund him, or did you vote to threaten the publishers that if they did not hand over the cash, you and your ‘democracy’ would steal the money from him and close him down?

After all, you have all voted to steal Richard Branson’s trains and lines from him, why not steal the money from Ebury Press do do what ‘needs to be done for the good of society’?

What stopped you from just steaming into their offices and beating the heck out of them till they handed over all their cash?

and so we began the selection process. People were invited to submit themselves as candidates (via a website) and asked various probing questions about their policy priorities, what local issues should be highlighted and details of their campaign strategy.

The selection process started with the question “Why do you want to stand as an MP?” Anyone who responded using the words “public service”, “duty” or “needs of the community” was immediately rejected. My favourite answer, incidentally, was: “I’m not doing much for the next five years.”

All unfunny, all illegitimate.

Kushlick is a great candidate,

There is no such thing as a ‘great candidate’.

with a history of campaigning.

for what exactly?

Readers of the Guardian might recognise his name, as he has written in these pages on the issue of drug prohibition.

Complete abolition or continuation and enforcement? These details actually matter.

This is Kushlick’s subject, having worked firstly as a drug counsellor before going on to help set up Transform, the advocacy and research foundation working to end the global war on drugs and replace it with an effective, humane and just system of regulation and control.

So continuation and enforcement through the violence of the state; ‘Prohibition Lite®’. SHAME.

Not surprisingly, his main policy is the legalisation of all drugs, but he has selected four other policies he sees as priorities:

1. The introduction of a Tobin tax (Robin Hood tax) on foreign financial transactions.

Violent theft of private property by the state.

2. The Daily Mail should be forced to print on the front of every edition the words: “This is a fictionalised account of the news and any resemblance to the truth is entirely coincidental.”

Not funny. Violent control of the press, ‘fairness doctrine’.

3. There should be a referendum before going to war.

Let me get this straight, ‘we’ should only murder when a majority of us agrees that its OK. Once again, a simple vote cannot make what is inherently wrong, right.

By this logic if a simple majority of people who are voting agreed to invade Iraq (for example), for no reason whatsoever, that would make it perfectly legitimate to ‘go to war’ with them, with all that entails.

This is irrational, murderous, childish and COMPLETELY INSANE thinking.

4. MPs should have to wear tabards displaying the names and logos of the companies with which they have a financial relationship, like a racing driver.

Not funny. There should be no state, no MPs ect ect.

Oh dear me.

Kushlick’s campaign website and details will be online soon. There is an election rally on 20 April in Bristol at the Metropole: further details to be announced. Anyone wishing to help support Kushlick’s efforts in Bristol West should go to the People’s Manifesto Facebook page. In the meantime, let us celebrate the first candidate to declare: “The most important ‘special relationship’ isn’t with the US, but with your mum.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/08/political-manifesto-vote-kushlick

Your ‘mum’ should have taught you all that stealing is not right.

I’m afraid that these people are very deep in the illusion, the Matrix, where they do not posses even the slightest morsel of information to help them understand what it is they are asking for, who is really stealing from them, why things do not work, and what they need to do to solve these problems.

They are all brainwashed to believe that they have the power to do violence against others, and that this is entirely legitimate as long as there is a vote.

Appalling, and entirely unsurprising.