Archive for October, 2008

Naomi Wolf on Lew Rockwell

Friday, October 31st, 2008

Lew Rockwell Podcast

Lew Rockwell interviews Naomi Wolf:

More from Naomi Wolf:

She wrote Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.

Her numerous appearances are documented on YouTube.

Lew Rockwell Podcast

Download

As you will remember, being an avid reader of BLOGDIAL, we are not too impressed by the reluctant Red Pill eater Naomi Wolf, who should, given her age, know better.

Nevertheless, this is an unmissable piece of audio. Naomi Wolf, despite the age of the internets, despite being exposed to Alex Jones and his fine documentaries, still doesnt kow the facts about the Federal Reserve.

I find that really hard to believe.

If she was just some mother from Jersey with one of those odd hairdoos, then it would be understandable, but someone as connected and exposed as this MUST know about the Fed; her not knowing about it is an impossibility.

If she really doesn’t know about the Fed after having been exposed to everything, after having been handed it all on a silver platter (she has had at least between now and April 2007, when we posted about her essay) she is either deliberately pretending to be ignorant, is actually ignorant (impossible, since she has been given the materials) or is stupid.

Naomi Wolf is not stupid. That is for sure.

Is she pretending to be in the dark about everything?

Who knows…who cares.

All I know is that this person has woken up too late, wether her waking up is real or not.

Further to all of this, it is interesting that the State thinks that passing laws actually means something; that they believe their wishes need to be codified in order to make them real in some way. Naomi Wolf is a facilitator of their evil by her believing that the State, by enacting laws, somehow changes reality from one thing into another.

The fact is that no matter what law they pass, their power remains just as illusory. If you choose not to obey, the law is meaninless.

People like Al Capone, Pablo Escobar, John Gotti, and all ‘Organized Crime’ figures understand reality far better than Naomi Wolf does. They understand that it doesnt matter what laws are passed; you can do whatever you like, and thrive.

The Poll Tax failed because everyone refused to obey. The Berlin Wall fell because people stopped believing that the power of the state had any hold over them. Once everyone takes for granted that the State has no right to tell them anything, from how they should measure the goods they sell to wether or not they should do anything at all whatsoever it may be, the illusion of the power of the State will simply dissapear all at once. Soldiers will take off their uniforms. The offices of the state will be abandoned. People will move freely.

And sanity will be the norm.

Before any of that can happen, the Naomi Wolfs of this world need to not only swallow the Red Pill, but digest it, and let its essence become a part of their body.

BLOGDIAL began on Friday, January 12, 2001 with a quote from The Matrix. Before BLOGDIAL, we had published articles on these important subjects. We are not the only ones who have been doing this for years, and certainly there are others who have written more and more eloquently than we did.

There really isn’t anything more that can be done for the likes of Naomi Wolf and the millions of people like her. The question now is not what is to be done to educate them, but what are we going to do to protect ourselvs from the sleeping sheeple, the half awake half wits and the legions of zombies out there who are going to drag us down.

That is the question!

Oxford Libertarian Society

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

Who are we?

We’re a student society at the University of Oxford committed to exploring and promoting libertarian ideas.

Libertarians believe quite simply in the maximisation of individual freedom. This is in marked contrast to the two main strands of political ideology in Britain: have you noticed how the Left seem to be in favour of personal freedoms but want to ban capitalist acts between consenting adults while the Right support just the opposite? If you’ve ever been troubled by this lack of consistency, look no further. We support civil liberties, private property, free markets, the rule of law and most importantly limited government as the institutions most able to promote liberty.

Prior to Michaelmas Term 2008, the society was called the Oxford Hayek Society. You can find out more about our history on the About Us page and in the first edition of our termly magazine, the Individualist.

What do we do?

Primarily we organise speaker meetings on a range of topics including current affairs, political philosophy, economics, and history. People of any political persuasion are more than welcome to attend any of our events free of charge, which are usually followed by questions and a discussion – generally the more people who disagree, the better the final discussion. Wine is normally served afterwards.

How do I get involved?

Just come along to one of our free events! If you want to keep up with the details, sign up on our mailing list.

Attendance at events is free, but we also offer life membership at £10, which has a number of benefits:

  • Free copies of The Freeman, the monthly journal of the Foundation for Economic Education, during your course at Oxford
  • Discounted entry, reduced from £85 to £50, to the Libertarian Alliance conference in October – email andrew.roocroft [at] chch.ox.ac.uk for further details
  • Free copies of the society’s magazine, the Individualist, published termly
  • Discounts on our social events, including the Annual Dinner
  • Preferential access to seminars and internship opportunities with our think-tank sponsors and donors, including the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute for Economic Affairs and Freedom Alliance

We’re extending our half price membership offer until Saturday 1st November (end of 4th week) – just bring £5 to one of our events or send a cheque, payable to Oxford Libertarian Society, to Kate McNally at Keble College.

[…]

The Exploitation of the Strong by the Weak

Run to the Hills

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

I don’t know much about fell running, but I know what I don’t like – the sensationalised scaremongering surrounding the washed-out mountain marathon in the Lake District. The overreaction revealed less about the risks facing the runners than the risk of us walking into a society where nobody is allowed to be “unaccounted for”.

When the Original Mountain Marathon was abandoned amid terrible weather on Saturday, police reported 1,700 of the 2,500 competitors “unaccounted for”. The implication was that all must be in peril. On Sunday fears were still being expressed for more than 900. By that afternoon all were safe.

It turned out that the 1,700 “unaccounted for” could account for themselves, having sheltered in farms, a school and a slate mine. A dozen were treated in hospital, which can hardly be unusual for such an event. Others reported only that the car park was flooded and “our credit cards are still in the car”.

Yet they were met with a chorus of official condemnation, as a spokesman declared: “We have come within inches of turning the Lake District mountains into a morgue. We need to learn from it.” The lesson, it seems, is that all must be accounted for, with no freedom for running wild.

These were not children lost on a school trip, but experienced, well-equipped runners who enjoy extreme conditions. As a race organiser said: “They are capable of looking after themselves.” That is seen as madness today when, notes the OMM website, “the idea of self-reliance isn’t a popular one” so that “the fact that 900 people are said to be unaccounted for” must mean “they are lost and in trouble, which is not the case”.

This is all another sign of a culture where people are not trusted to cope without support, supervision and surveillance from above; where mobile phone calls and e-mails must be accounted for, and soon you may be unable to buy a phone without a passport or to breathe without appearing on a DNA register.

As one who would think twice about walking fells in summer, I can still see that the attraction of running them in a storm must involve being “unaccounted for”. That’s why running free through woods and fields appealed to the borstal boy in Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, or to Bobby Sands, as seen in the film Hunger. Weekend reports suggested that it was a problem the runners were out of mobile phone range, but that was probably why some were up there.

No doubt Socrates was right to suggest that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. But the “unaccounted-for life” certainly is.

The Times

Quite so, and a reminder that even people with ‘nothing to hide’ are never exempt from prying minds.

Fingerprinted to smoke in London

Monday, October 27th, 2008

The joys of clubbing in England! That was at the M-nus event in London last weekend! Fuck me!!

Rules rules rules………….you will become our subordinates you worthless, druggy, addicted cunts!!

I fucking hope people stop going clubbing in this cuntry. We’re the reason these promoter/club owner bastards are in fucking business! I know its not their fault about the law, but it IS their fault with all these additional rules & charges. £1 for a fucking wristband that allows you to do exactly fuck all as you still have to do a fingerprint like a fucking criminal and a have a time limit imposed on you!

The people need to make a stand by not going anymore to clubs like this one! Only ones that are blatantly taking the piss though which one or two are starting to in my experiences. We should start a list on here of the worst offenders! Manchester’s Warehouse Project the night before wouldn’t let people take their £3.50 beers outside for a fag neither! You had to stand there and drink it first, go for a quick fag and then go in and buy another £3.50 beer! Another nice money making ploy!

By the way I’m not even a massive smoker. I just like the odd one or two through a night. Its the blatant way the clubs are screwing people for more money in these ways thats angered me! They’re starting to use a law as a way to line their pockets even more! And entrance fee’s to some of these nights ain’t exactly cheap to begin with! With all the fucking booking fee’s etc I paid £24 to the Warehouse Project!! Clubs are meant to be an escape from the real world for a few hours yet there are more rules in them these days than at work! Had to be in before 11.30pm even with pre bought tickets. Couldn’t put anything in the cloak room after 1.30am. Event finished at 6am instead of the advertised, “special” 7am license. Whats this shit all about??

Revolution for change!!

1. SE ONE [London]
2. Warehouse Project [Manchester]

[…]

http://www.littledetroit.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=25855

One day we will all look back on these insane days and think, “How on earth did we let it go so far?”

The sign reads:

Attention all Smokers

Please go to the bar and purchase a smoking wristband for thenight, the cost will be £1.00.
When you wish to smoke make your way to the designated smoking ares, where you will be requested to give an imprint of your finger, this will permit you 10 minutes to go out and smoke on the pavement opposite.
On re-entrance to the venue you will be searched again, should you fail to re-enter the venue after 10 minutes, you will be asked to pay the full entry fee by our door staff at the entrance.
Thank you for your co-operation.
The management of SeOne.

I have a feeling that SeOne are going to be quite famous for the wrong reasons in a short while.

What a bunch of total scum!

BLOGDIAL predicts mobile fingerprint madness

Monday, October 27th, 2008

Police to use handheld fingerprint scanners in the street

The scheme, called Project Midas, will transform the speed of criminal investigations, according to the police.
It is thought the new technology could be in widespread use within 18 months.

Details of the scheme were revealed by the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) at the Biometrics 2008 conference.

The Mobile Identification At Scene (Midas) project, will cost between £30 to £40 million. Fingerprints taken using the device will be compared against the national police database, which holds information on 7.5 million individuals.

Geoff Whitaker, a senior technology officer from NPIA, said Project Midas would save enormous amounts of police time and reduce the amount of wrongful arrests.

To take fingerprints currently, officers have to take a suspect into custody suites. Research shows this takes 67 minutes on average.
Mr Whitaker said: “If we scaled this [saving] up to the national level that would equate to 366 additional police officers on the beat.”
He suggested policing of sporting events and festivals could benefit, as well as immigration and border control.

He said Project Midas would give the police “a full, mobile national capability” to check identities.

The system may potentially beam images of suspects back to officers – some US police forces are already using such technology.

Project Lantern, a trial of mobile devices, started in 2006. The devices were used in police cars using automatic number plate recognition technology and stopped vehicles logged as stolen or having no insurance.

Fingerprint checks often showed they were carrying false documents.

Response time for Lantern took between two to five minutes generally, and responses were graded as “high” or “medium” depending on how confident they were of a match.

A NPIA spokeswoman said: “It will be up to each police authority to assess the benefits and see how many they want. Early indications are that the benefits will be huge.”

Liberty, the civil rights group, has warned however that fingerprints taken in such a way would require them to be deleted straight afterwards – police have already insisted fingerprints would not be stored.

Gareth Crossman, Liberty’s policy director, said: “Saving time with new technology could help police performance but officers must make absolutely certain that they take fingerprints only when they suspect an individual of an offence and can’t establish his identity.”

Telegraph

The only Midas Touch here is the gold each fingerprint reader is going to make for the vendor of this vile police state equipment.

We predicted this device long ago:

here and here (from 2004) and here (from 2004).

This is a very bad idea. It is the modern equivalent of the Apartheid ‘Pass Laws’, that were:

[…] designed to segregate the population and limit severely the movements of the non-white populace. This legislation was one of the dominant features of the country’s apartheid system. Introduced in South Africa in 1923, they were designed to regulate movement of black Africans in urban areas. Outside designated “homelands”, black South Africans had to carry passbooks (“dom pas”, meaning dumb pass) at all times, documentation proving they were authorised to live or move in “White” South Africa.

The laws also affected other non-white races. Indian people, for example, were barred from the Orange Free State.
These discriminatory regulations sparked outrage from the black population and the ANC began the Defiance Campaign to oppose the pass laws.
This conflict climaxed at the Sharpeville Massacre where the black opposition was violently put down, with 69 people killed and over 180 injured.
The system of pass laws was repealed in South Africa in 1986.

What this article fails to mention are the effects that this device will have. Everyone will be required to be fingerprinted wether they are a criminal or not. That means the Police will have discretion to fingerprint who they like at will. As I say in the BLOGDIAL posts linked above, if you are scanned on the street and the machine comes up with nothing, what does that actually mean? Are they going to let you go because they have nothing on you? Or maybe because you are not in the database you MUST be illegal.

This device will not prevent crime; in fact, it will increase the amount of crime, and exponentially increase the amount of hatred for the beleaguered police.

Liberty, that organization that is made of pure fail, once again says nothing to address the true nature of this device and the inevitable consequences of its being rolled out.

This device is useless without an NIR that contains everyone in it. Of course, criminals will not line up to enter the NIR, so anyone who turns up as un-scannable will be immediately hauled off to gaol not so that they can find out who you are, but because you are not in the database. All tourists will be put on the NIR with a ‘tourists’ flag on their entry, so if someone coming here to see Big Ben gets scanned, his details will show up on the device like everyone else’s, only with a ‘tourist’ flag.

This device will not reduce the amount of wrongful arrests. It will greatly increase the number of arrests as people who do not turn up on the database will have to be taken into custody to be identified. That is also the case for the 10% of times when the database or equipment is down.

Also, this article is mixing up ‘checking identities’ with checking people against the criminal database. Checking against the criminal database doesn’t say anything about the current intentions of a person who is stopped. Think about it; a police officer might stop a reformed burglar on the street during one of their random sweeps. They find that this guy is in the database of criminals. Does this mean he should be subjected to extra scrutiny because he was a bad guy? What about the bad guys who are not in the database because they have not yet been caught and convicted once?

This device will not and can not catch criminals. It cannot detect crime or the intention of crime. It is as useless as ID cards in crime fighting. Finding out someone’s real name and some biographical details about them does nothing to prevent crime, and in fact, fingerprinting people on the street is the only crime that is being committed here.

Then of course, there is the next step in development, where the reach of these devices is spread to the NIR, as I describe above. That is inevitable, since the majority of people are not in the criminal database, and the police will argue that they need to know exactly who everyone is at a crime scene to help them investigate crime.

Its all baloney of course, and this is just another angle from which pressure is going to be applied for the full roll out of the NIR and ID cards. This is the ultimate goal, the vendors wet dream and everyone’s nightmare.

The Myth that Laissez Faire Is Responsible for Our Present Crisis

Friday, October 24th, 2008


The news media are in the process of creating a great new historical myth. This is the myth that our present financial crisis is the result of economic freedom and laissez-faire capitalism.

The attempt to place the blame on laissez faire is readily confirmed by a Google search under the terms “crisis + laissez faire.” On the first page of the results that come up, or in the web entries to which those results refer, statements of the following kind appear:

  • “The mortgage crisis is laissez-faire gone wrong.”

  • “Sarkozy [Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France] said ‘laissez-faire’ economics, ‘self-regulation’ and the view that ‘the all-powerful market’ always knows best are finished.”
  • “‘America’s laissez-faire ideology, as practiced during the subprime crisis, was as simplistic as it was dangerous,’ chipped in Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister.”
  • “Paulson brings laissez-faire approach on financial crisis….”
  • “It’s au revoir to the days of laissez faire.”[1]

Recent articles in The New York Times provide further confirmation. Thus, one article declares, “The United States has a culture that celebrates laissez-faire capitalism as the economic ideal….”[2] Another article tells us, “For 30 years, the nation’s political system has been tilted in favor of business deregulation and against new rules.”[3] In a third article, a pair of reporters assert, “Since 1997, Mr. Brown [the British Prime Minister] has been a powerful voice behind the Labor Party’s embrace of an American-style economic philosophy that was light on regulation. The laissez-faire approach encouraged the country’s banks to expand internationally and chase returns in areas far afield of their core mission of attracting deposits.”[4] Thus even Great Britain is described as having a “laissez-faire approach.”

The mentality displayed in these statements is so completely and utterly at odds with the actual meaning of laissez faire that it would be capable of describing the economic policy of the old Soviet Union as one of laissez faire in its last decades. By its logic, that is how it would have to describe the policy of Brezhnev and his successors of allowing workers on collective farms to cultivate plots of land of up to one acre in size on their own account and sell the produce in farmers’ markets in Soviet cities. According to the logic of the media, that too would be “laissez faire” — at least compared to the time of Stalin.

Laissez-faire capitalism has a definite meaning, which is totally ignored, contradicted, and downright defiled by such statements as those quoted above. Laissez-faire capitalism is a politico-economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and in which the powers of the state are limited to the protection of the individual’s rights against the initiation of physical force. This protection applies to the initiation of physical force by other private individuals, by foreign governments, and, most importantly, by the individual’s own government. This last is accomplished by such means as a written constitution, a system of division of powers and checks and balances, an explicit bill of rights, and eternal vigilance on the part of a citizenry with the right to keep and bear arms. Under laissez-faire capitalism, the state consists essentially just of a police force, law courts, and a national defense establishment, which deter and combat those who initiate the use of physical force. And nothing more.

The utter absurdity of statements claiming that the present political-economic environment of the United States in some sense represents laissez-faire capitalism becomes as glaringly obvious as anything can be when one keeps in mind the extremely limited role of government under laissez-faire and then considers the following facts about the present-day United States:

  1. Government spending in the United States currently equals more than forty percent of national income, i.e., the sum of all wages and salaries and profits and interest earned in the country. This is without counting any of the massive off-budget spending such as that on account of the government enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Nor does it count any of the recent spending on assorted “bailouts.” What this means is that substantially more than forty dollars of every one hundred dollars of output are appropriated by the government against the will of the individual citizens who produce that output. The money and the goods involved are turned over to the government only because the individual citizens wish to stay out of jail. Their freedom to dispose of their own incomes and output is thus violated on a colossal scale. In contrast, under laissez-faire capitalism, government spending would be on such a modest scale that a mere revenue tariff might be sufficient to support it. The corporate and individual income taxes, inheritance and capital gains taxes, and social security and Medicare taxes would not exist.
  2. There are presently fifteen federal cabinet departments, nine of which exist for the very purpose of respectively interfering with housing, transportation, healthcare, education, energy, mining, agriculture, labor, and commerce, and virtually all of which nowadays routinely ride roughshod over one or more important aspects of the economic freedom of the individual. Under laissez-faire capitalism, eleven of the fifteen cabinet departments would cease to exist and only the departments of justice, defense, state, and treasury would remain. Within those departments, moreover, further reductions would be made, such as the abolition of the IRS in the Treasury Department and the Antitrust Division in the Department of Justice.
  3. The economic interference of today’s cabinet departments is reinforced and amplified by more than one hundred federal agencies and commissions, the most well known of which include, besides the IRS, the FRB and FDIC, the FBI and CIA, the EPA, FDA, SEC, CFTC, NLRB, FTC, FCC, FERC, FEMA, FAA, CAA, INS, OHSA, CPSC, NHTSA, EEOC, BATF, DEA, NIH, and NASA. Under laissez-faire capitalism, all such agencies and commissions would be done away with, with the exception of the FBI, which would be reduced to the legitimate functions of counterespionage and combating crimes against person or property that take place across state lines.
  4. To complete this catalog of government interference and its trampling of any vestige of laissez faire, as of the end of 2007, the last full year for which data are available, the Federal Register contained fully seventy-three thousand pages of detailed government regulations. This is an increase of more than ten thousand pages since 1978, the very years during which our system, according to one of The New York Times articles quoted above, has been “tilted in favor of business deregulation and against new rules.” Under laissez-faire capitalism, there would be no Federal Register. The activities of the remaining government departments and their subdivisions would be controlled exclusively by duly enacted legislation, not the rule-making of unelected government officials.

  5. And, of course, to all of this must be added the further massive apparatus of laws, departments, agencies, and regulations at the state and local level. Under laissez-faire capitalism, these too for the most part would be completely abolished and what remained would reflect the same kind of radical reductions in the size and scope of government activity as those carried out on the federal level.

What this brief account has shown is that the politico-economic system of the United States today is so far removed from laissez-faire capitalism that it is closer to the system of a police state. The ability of the media to ignore all of the massive government interference that exists today and to characterize our present economic system as one of laissez faire and economic freedom marks it as, if not profoundly dishonest, then as nothing less than delusional.

Government Intervention Actually Responsible for the Crisis

Beyond all this is the further fact that the actual responsibility for our financial crisis lies precisely with massive government intervention, above all the intervention of the Federal Reserve System in attempting to create capital out of thin air, in the belief that the mere creation of money and its being made available in the loan market is a substitute for capital created by producing and saving. This is a policy it has pursued since its founding, but with exceptional vigor since 2001, in its efforts to overcome the collapse of the stock market bubble whose creation it had previously inspired.

The Federal Reserve and other portions of the government pursue the policy of money and credit creation in everything they do that encourages and protects private banks in the attempt to cheat reality by making it appear that one can keep one’s money and lend it out too, both at the same time. This duplicity occurs when individuals or business firms deposit cash in banks, which they can continue to use to make purchases and pay bills by means of writing checks rather than using currency. To the extent that the banks are then enabled and encouraged to lend out the funds that have been deposited in this way (usually by the creation of new and additional checking deposits rather than the lending of currency), they are engaged in the creation of new and additional money. The depositors continue to have their money and borrowers now have the bulk of the funds deposited. In recent years, the Federal Reserve has so encouraged this process, that checking deposits have been created equal to fifty times the actual cash reserves of the banks, a situation more than ripe for implosion.

[…]

http://mises.org/story/3165

Flying Saucers and Science

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

Flying Saucers and Science is a comprehensive look at the scientific data on the flying saucer phenomenon. Nuclear physicist and lecturer Stanton T. Friedman has distilled more than 40 years of research on UFOs, and shares his work on a wide variety of classified advanced nuclear and space systems. He answers a number of physics questions in layman’s terms, and establishes that travel to nearby stars is within reach without violating the laws of physics.

Photographs of little known, far-out advanced propulsion systems, on some of which he worked, are included. Friedman also presents data demonstrating the ability to withstand high accelerations with some surprising results. He clearly shows that government policy on this subject has been to provide false, misleading claims and disinformation, and establishes that the subject truly represents a Cosmic Watergate.

Flying Saucers and Science presents intriguing data from a number of large-scale scientific UFO studies that almost no one, especially the noisy negativists, has discussed in detail. It deals with a host of “why” questions such, as reasons for the cover-up, reasons for aliens to come to Earth, and reasons for not landing on the White House lawn. Friedman unveils the SETI program, and details the antipathy of science-fiction writers to UFOs and other mysteries of the saucer conundrum. False notions about those who believe in the reality of alien visitors and the adequacy of coverage by the journalistic and scientific communities are reviewed.

In this book you’ll discover:

  • What type of energy and technologies could provide travel between the stars
  • The most likely locations in the universe where aliens come from
  • Why the aliens are here
  • Who believes in the flying saucer phenomenon
  • The government’s motives to cover-up
  • And much, much more.

Autographed copies available from
Stan Friedman
POB 958
Houlton, ME 04730-0958
$19.00 including priority mail in the USA

fsphys@rogers.com
www.stantonfriedman.com

Jacqui Smith: no mobile phone without passport

Sunday, October 19th, 2008

Passports will be needed to buy mobile phones

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.

Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.

A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say.

The move is targeted at monitoring the owners of Britain’s estimated 40m prepaid mobile phones. They can be purchased with cash by customers who do not wish to give their names, addresses or credit card details.

The pay-as-you-go phones are popular with criminals and terrorists because their anonymity shields their activities from the authorities. But they are also used by thousands of law-abiding citizens who wish to communicate in private.

The move aims to close a loophole in plans being drawn up by GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, to create a huge database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain.

The “Big Brother” database would have limited value to police and MI5 if it did not store details of the ownership of more than half the mobile phones in the country.

[…]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4969312.ece

Whilst in France, I needed a SIM card. I went into a shop to buy one and the man behind the counter asked for my ID. I told him that I was not French and did not have one. He refused to sell me the SIM. I got my driver to present his ID and then I had my SIM card.

This and thousands of variations of it will ensure that anyone can get a SIM card without showing ID. All of you with a working brain cell know this.

This measure is nonsense, promoted by imbeciles and supported by imbeciles. Criminals can make phone calls today that are 100% untraceable where no one even knows that a phone call is taking place. By using Asterisk and some cheap equipment, you can have your own absolutely secure private phone network. See how it works here:

http://tinyurl.com/57588k

Anyone who tells you these pathetic measures are for security, or who trotts out the tired, “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” line is, like I say above, an imbecile. These measures cannot work for the stated purpose, are actually not designed for the stated purpose, (they are there to surveil the ordinary citizen and NOT criminals) and it is high time that we point blank refuse to obey anything that this totalitarian government orders, starting with the absurd and evil ID card.

Any business that requires state ID does not get my money or money from my business, full stop. This is our anti Police-State policy, and we strictly adhere to it. If everyone who is against all of this adopts this policy in their private and business lives then the police state they are trying to build will come to a crashing halt.

Furthermore, everyone knows that they can follow the physical location of any cellular telephone on the network. They can also create relationship diagrams of every phone and then infer whatever they like from that. Criminals will always be able to get a mobile phone to use for crime. This is a fact.

Can we now expect all public phones to be dismantled and taken away? After all, they are anonymous phones that any one, any TERRORIST can use to make TERRORIST phone calls.

What about land lines in hotels, bars pubs etc etc.

This makes so little sense….until you read that GCHQ has been given one BILLION pounds to put it all together. GCHC is not keeping this money; they are spending it with vendors who will sell them the servers, and every other bit of kit they need to make this bad magic happen.

This is about money, pure and simple. This is corruption writ large. That is the only explanation that makes sense, since the case for what they are proposing is bogus on its face.

What happens when everyone hates the state

Saturday, October 18th, 2008

Lew Rockwell has posted a simply wonderful article about ‘Joe the plumber’:

Joe the Outlaw

This whole campaign has been dreadfully boring, with gaffe-avoidance techniques squelching all spontaneity, and it doesn’t help that the ideological parameters of the election have been so narrowly drawn as to make any thinking person want to shut up both the candidates and the media that cover them so lovingly.

Still, one interesting point has emerged: the archetype chosen to represent mainstream America turns out to be a thorough-going outlaw in the best sense of that term. In this, he is a symbol of the age. We can look forward to the creation and emergence of ever more people like this in the coming years, as the state tightens its grip over every aspect of American life. We will all soon be outlaws.

The whole Joe the Plumber saga began when Joe Wurzelbacher from Toledo, Ohio, confronted Barack Obama about the candidate’s tax plans. He wanted to know if Obama would raise his taxes. In particular, he was planning to buy a company with a revenue of $250,000 per year. “Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn’t it?”

Of course the Republicans seized on this and exploited it. McCain keeps bringing him up in speeches. Republicans like to talk about taxes. They always seem to corner the budget-balancing, wealth-distributing Democrats with this topic, even though it is largely a distraction in an age of fiat money when the government can print all the revenue it needs. Still, the GOP likes the symbolism, so Joe had his 15 minutes of fame as a hero of the Right.

But the New York Times did some digging and discovered – horror – that Joe is doing plumbing without a proper business license. How dare he call himself a plumber! A license is required by Toledo, not just one license for a partnership but for everyone who is called a plumber. Joe has not taken the training courses, is not a member of the union, and cannot legally call himself a plumber.

The press reports on this were explosive, with reporters speaking as if they had caught this guy red-handed and completely discredited him. But what about the complete absurdity of the idea that you have to have a license in order to have the right to fix someone else’s sink? This is Soviet like, but deeply entrenched in American professional life.

The idea of licensing is that it assures quality standards. But this is just a cover used by guilds since the Middle Ages. The real goal of licensing is to create a professional cartel. Fewer providers means higher wages for those with licenses. It is all about boosting income by restricting competition. This is of course a violation of human rights because it impinges on the fundamental freedom of association.

In a market setting, there are plenty of quality controls through professional organizations. Consumers are free to use them or not. Many private producers attempt to create cartels through this means, but it is rarely successful. There are always producers who break with the guild in order to charge lower prices for their services. This is why they often seek state regulations, such as the requirement that all plumbers have a license.

By the way, this is true of all professions, including lawyering and doctoring. There was a time when entry into these fields was governed by the free market, and the system worked fine (contrary to legend). But the big players in these industries sought and obtained state privileges to officially license service providers. It was an income-boosting tactic and it worked.

By practicing plumbing without a license, Joe is bucking the system in a truly heroic way. He shouldn’t be condemned for this. He should be celebrated as a freedom fighter. He has a lot more to complain about than just taxes. It is the state itself in all its incarnations that is his true enemy. He ought to demanding answers from the politicians about their regulatory schemes to further restrict competition in a wide range of areas (banking for example!).

Most ridiculous is the idea that he shouldn’t be called a plumber because he doesn’t have a license. Here we see how licensing attacks even the use of our language. If he is doing plumbing, he is a plumber. Period.

And yet taxes are also close to Joe’s heart because it also turns out that he is delinquent on his property taxes, which are similarly too high and similarly unjust. The Ohio Department of Taxation placed a lien against him because $1,183 in personal property taxes had not been paid. In what sense can you say that you really own your home if the state can take it away if you don’t pay what the state says you ought to be pay? This is an attack on private property in the most fundamental sense.

So it turns out that we truly do have an American archetype in Joe Wurzelbacher. He is an outlaw in the same sense that our founders were outlaws. He lives outside the regulations of the state because these regulations attack his freedom and property. It was to end systems such as this that the American revolution came to be. And yet we find ourselves back in exactly the same system, and one incredibly worse in every way.

It is going to take something different from the election of the Republican to beat back the oppressions that vex his life. It is not complicated. It is a right belonging to all people that they can do what they want and keep what they own provided they do not impinge on anyone else’s right to do the same. The state is nothing but an organized attempt to deny this right. Joe has an enemy, but it goes way beyond Obama.

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/joe-the-outlaw.html

Needless to say, I agree 100% with all of this.

Which brings me to the title of this post.

What does it look like in a country where everyone hates the state?

It looks like Spain.

I was told a story two days ago about buying property in Spain by a builder. It went like this.

He was buying a house. Everything in Spain has to be Notarized meaning essentially that the state is a third party in all important transactions.

When it came to the day of the sale, the builders lawyers, the sellers lawyers, the builder and the seller were all sat in a lawyer’s office in Seville. The contracts were laid out. The Notary came in, and read the details of the contract, including the price to be paid, signed and stamped it and then left the room. What happened next is the extraordinary part.

Apparently in Spain, when people sell property, the price quoted is always significantly lower than the real price that is to be paid. The difference is made up by a cash payment on the day of the hand-over.

Everyone knows about this illegal activity.

The lawyers know about it.
The banks know about it.
The Notaries know about it.

EVERYONE in Spain knows about it, EVERYONE does it and no one bats an eyelid because they are ALL, UNANIMOUSLY AGAINST THE STATE with an equal and total hatred.

In essence, the state in Spain is partially ignored by the entire population, who seem to have reached a bizarre equilibrium where they all offset the insane taxes and duties imposed by the state by always doing a proportion of business transactions in cash. That every legal and banking professional knows about it and participates in openly it shows that civil society in Spain is a façade.

You would think that digital money would sound the death knell for this parallel economy, but you would be wrong. Because the entire population is doing this, the lawyers, judges, police, bankers, accountants…EVERYONE, no matter what system of control the state tries to put in, no one will be there to enforce it.

The Spanish it would appear (from this story in any case) to have partially woken up from the hypnotic state many people are under, where they falsely believe that the state is all powerful. As I have said many times on BLOGDIAL, all it takes is everyone to simply not obey for the state to completely lose power. And for all you terrified children out there, the state losing power does not mean the collapse of everything and total disorder; it simply means that they are out of your life, and everything gets done without without them.

The Italians are well on their way to this situation if we take the stories of unregulated restaurants running in private houses; opening and running a restaurant is so fraught with difficulties, taxes, regulations, duties, health and safety rules, inspections and all manner of nonsense that only an insane person would comply with any of it. Some people it seems, comply with none of it, and run restaurants from their own homes where you get everything that a restaurant gives you, but inside someone’s house. They pay nothing, are inspected by no one, make good money, mind their business…

and the sky does not fall down.

If the state will not back down, then it will end up being ignored and made irrelevant as people simply wake up and refuse to be exploited.

Irdial Philosophy: ‘Synthesis of Music’

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

1. Music is a language through which all the following properties may be expressed: harmony, creativity, happiness, beauty, poetry, complexity, magic, humour, provocation and culture.

2. The use of top quality products and technical knowledge to prepare them properly are taken for granted.

3. All sounds have the same musical value, regardless of their origin.

4. Preference is given to structure and texture, with a key role also being played by rhythm, melody and other traditional methods that make up a light form of music. In recent years red electric guitar and piano have been very sparingly used.

5. Although the characteristics of the products may be modified (volume, texture, shape, etc.), the aim is always to preserve the purity of their original flavour, except for processes that call for long cooking or seek the nuances of particular reactions such as the Maillard reaction.

6. Mixing techniques, both classic and modern, are a heritage that the artist has to know how to exploit to the maximum.

7. As has occurred in most fields of human evolution down the ages, new technologies are a resource for the progress of music.

8. The family of sounds is being extended. Together with the classic ones, lighter sounds performing an identical function are now being used (drones, pads, scratches, found sounds, animal sounds, etc.).

9. The information given off by music is enjoyed through the senses; it is also enjoyed and interpreted by reflection.

10. Hearing is not the only sense that can be stimulated: touch can also be played with (contrasts of volume and percussive textures), whereby the senses become one of the main points of reference in the creative music process.

11. The technique-concept search is the apex of the music pyramid.

12. Creation involves teamwork. In addition, research has become consolidated as a new feature of the musical creative process.

13. The barriers between the notes and noise world are being broken down. Importance is being given to a new noise music, particularly in the creation of the frozen sound world.

14. The classical structure of music is being broken down: a veritable revolution is underway in technology and composition, closely bound up with the concept of symbiosis between the noise and notes world; in music the “verse-chorus-verse” hierarchy is being broken down.

15. A new way of serving music is being promoted. The tracks are finished in the mixing room by the artist. In other cases the listeners themselves participate in this process.

16. Regional music as a style is an expression of its own geographical and cultural context as well as its musical traditions. Its bond with nature complements and enriches this relationship with its environment.

17. Instruments and arrangements from other countries are subjected to one’s particular style of music.

18. There are two main paths towards attaining harmony of notes and noises: through memory (connection with regional music traditions, adaptation, deconstruction, former modern styles), or through new combinations.

19. A musical language is being created which is becoming less and less ordered and more open, that on some occasions establishes a relationship with the world and language of art.

20. Mixes are designed to ensure that harmony is to be found in small doses.

21. Decontextualisation, irony, spectacle, performance are completely legitimate, as long as they are not superficial but respond to, or are closely bound up with, a process of musical reflection.

22. Noise Music is the finest expression of avant-garde music. The structure is alive and subject to changes. Concepts such as beats, notes, voices, morphs, etc., are coming into their own.

23. Knowledge and/or collaboration with experts from different fields (gastronomic culture, history, industrial design, etc.,) is essential for progress in music. In particular collaboration with the food industry and the scientific world has brought about fundamental advances. Sharing this knowledge among music professionals has contributed to this evolution.

http://www.elbulli.com/sintesis/index.php?lang=en

We must eat our way out of the desert.

Totalitarian thought training courtesy of The Guardian

Monday, October 13th, 2008

The increasingly sinister Guardian has a neat brainwashing article:

Environment criminals build $10bn empire on ivory, timber and skins

Criminal syndicates are earning more than $10bn a year from a booming environmental crime business in rainforest logging, the trade in endangered animal skins and ivory and smuggling canisters of banned gas refrigerants, it is claimed today.

Environmental crime is a growing source of income for international gangs attracted by profit margins of up to 700% on illegal items such as tiger skins, according to the Environmental Investigation Agency. Yet the problem is being largely ignored by national and international crime fighting agencies, it says.

The UK-based charity has named several men it suspects of involvement in multimillion-dollar operations that have resulted in extensive environmental destruction, but who have not been successfully prosecuted. They include an Indian, Sansar Chand, who, according to an interrogation report from the Indian Central Bureau of Investigations, has sold more than 12,000 animal skins to Nepal-based traders. The report says his haul included 400 tigers and 2,000 leopards, worth up to $10m on the open market in China, where EIA investigators found similar skins openly, but illegally, on sale. Since June 2005 Chand has been in Tis Hazari jail in Delhi.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/oct/13/2

There is no such thing as ‘Environmental Crime’.

This is totalitarian doublespeak, of the kind used to manipulate people and push evil agendas. It is the sort of abuse of English that MEP Vladimír Železný spoke about recently on Radio Prague:

[…]
In 2004, during your term as a senator, you were against the accession of the Czech Republic into the EU, and now you are a Member of the European Union. Do you now believe that it’s good we joined?

“I am happy that we joined. I was not against our presence in the EU; I was against the conditions which came with our accession, and that’s a big difference. And I’m still not only unhappy with those conditions; I am outraged as more and more conditions, restrictions and regulations are imposed upon us. The situation is not better, it’s worse. I left the Czech Republic for Brussels as a Euro-realist, Euro-sceptical politician, and now I am a fierce Euro-sceptic. It’s an overregulated environment which strongly resembles what we know from our communist past. They are outraged and very angry when I tell them at the plenary, for instance, “Sorry, we know this; we know what the results of this will be because exactly the same regulations, exactly the same stupidity, was imposed by the communist regime in our country.” They are surprised, and they say, “But we are a democracy, we have democratic structures; that is something totally different”. Well, unfortunately it’s not.”

European Parliament, photo: European CommissionIn one of your motions in the European Parliament, you have proposed a moratorium on the use of the word “sustainable”. What is it that bothers so much about this particular word?

“It was the genius of [George] Orwell who taught us a lesson that the totalitarian regime starts with a misuse of language. It’s a loss of meaning, of words. All this is very dangerous, and we know this from our very own experience. We were not a democracy – we were “people’s democracy” under the communist regime, which was stupid because “people’s democracy” means “democratic democracy”. Such strange words improve, as jewels, some sensitive expressions, like “sustainable”. Everything is sustainable in the European Union, or it should be. The misuse of such words is the first step towards totalitarian thinking. That’s why I tried to give a warning that this misuse will change our sensitivity to the creation of totalitarian thinking.”

[…]

http://www.radio.cz/print/en/108996

And there you have it.

I heard recently (I cannot remember where or find it on the Googles) someone saying that in the end, its going to come down to a final conflict between the eco-nutcases and the rational people, with either one or the other being wiped out. The road to that event is paved with language of the type in this article; entrenching these morons in their corner, solidifying their religion until they only way out is to use violence.

No, I am not joking.

Monetary Monoculture Danger

Monday, October 13th, 2008

I have had some interesting conversations over the last few weeks, all centering around the current historic economic events. Two of them are notable.

The first was with a good friend to whom I gave Ron Paul’s ‘The Revolution: A Manifesto’. He said that he read it up to the point where the book supports the Second Amendment right to bear arms. “I just cannot support the right to bear arms and all of that sort of stuff”.

This man owns two shotguns.

I am telling this story because it demonstrates that there are many people out there who simply cannot think. I had to go through the reasoning behind the Second Amendment, why it applies today more than ever and how many people react in a knee-jerk fashion to it thanks to a constant stream of propaganda. At the end of the conversation, he said, “I have to get more ammo”.

Sadly, this unthinking reaction to the Second Amendment is not uncommon, and I have had the same reaction to Ron Paul from a software developer who had only heard a little about him, “he’s not one of those ‘Right to Bear Arms’ people is he?, because I’m not down with that”.

These people, if they are lucky, understand the importance of bearing arms only when it is spelled out to them very slowly. If they are unlucky, they understand it only when it is too late, and the state is stealing their property from them, or they are being slaughtered in ethnic cleansing operations.

Which brings us to the other of the two conversations.

I informed a friend with suitable dread that Nicolas Sarkozy called recently for a world currency controlled by a world bank. My good friend replied, “So? Whats wrong with that? It would mean that you can trade anywhere in the same currency”.

I then explained to him that a world currency would be controlled by a single group of people,  and a single bank, who would control its value by either printing or not printing it, they would also control the interest rates and there would be absolutely nothing anyone could do about it.

He gasped, “My God, that would be TERRIBLE.”

This person already has a limited (but growing) understanding of the problems with fiat currency thanks to the internet. It only took a little push to make him totally reject the idea of a world currency. That is a good thing; someone starting to wake up and who is able to see the problem with only a small amount of prompting.

We then went on to discuss why trans-national currencies ‘Currency Monocultures’ like the Euro are a bad thing.

Imagine that the Euro never happened, and each European country had kept its own currency. Each country would be able to formulate its own response to bank failures, and their currency would suffer or gain depending on their response. Each person with savings could hold a basket of currencies to protect themselves from being wiped out by inflation. The Italians might opt to let their banks fail so that the system is cleaned out of bad debt. The Lira, the Italian people and anyone holding Lira would benefit. The French might nationalize their banks and bail them out with taxpayer’s money. The Franc would suffer from inflation, the French would suffer separately from other states, and the FrenchCitoyen would have an opportunity to get out of the Franc and into a currency that was not inflating.

Monocultures make it easy for disease to spread. In computers, everyone running windows makes it easy for viruses and trojans to spread like wildfire. Flu spreads rapidly when many people are sharing the same space in a crowded city. If you want to make it impossible to have a world wide systemic monetary crash, you make sure that every economy, every country is insulated from the others by each having its own currency, its own independent financial policy and you reduce the importance to near zero of currencies like the Dollar, whose status as the world’s reserve currency exposes everyone to risk.

The absolute last thing you do is create a ‘world currency’. This would create an opportunity for a crash that would make this one look like a picnic with apple juice and marshmallows as the food. It would create a monoculture where any disease would be instantly caught by everyone everywhere, where there would be no place for anyone to run to protect their wealth, where a handful of naturally incompetent people would control the destiny of the whole world.

A world currency is the very definition of insanity.

Those in the know are heading for the Yen to get out of the way of the oncoming train. Gold is already in very short supply or sold out world-wide as people flee to it to protect the value of their money.

That last link was from The Guardian. The newspapers have demonstrated that they are no longer the place to get any sort of real information. There has been a rush for gold not because anyone in any newspaper has explained why inflation is coming, but everyone who knows about this has found out about it from the internet. Newspapers like The Guardian are still trying to sell the utter nonsense that mega salaried executives and lack of regulation are the cause of these problems. Everyone who takes the time to find out about the truth behind all of this (that it is regulation and interference by the state in the market, combined with central banks and fiat currencies, mostly the dollar, being printed to excess) knows that the Guardian, Gordon ‘Man of Clay’ Brown and all the other newspapers have got it totally wrong either because they are being told to print lies or they just do not know anything about economics.

Notice the words that are missing from every explanation of what is going on. There is no mention of ‘Fiat Currency‘, for example and never any reference to any of the people who predicted every element of all of this.

But I digress.

Anyone who calls for a bailout, anyone who calls for more regulation, anyone who calls for more centralization, anyone who calls for fewer currencies, or the worst possible scenario, a world-wide single currency, just doesn’t know what they are talking about.

They are not going to get away with this. Too many people are aware of what is really happening (as demonstrated by the rush to buy gold world-wide, without any prompting and a total lack of real information from any major news source). When they fail, we will return to local currencies on a national or even smaller basis, so that everyone will have built in protection for their wealth. The disease spreading central banks are now totally discredited. They do not have the ability to set interest rates correctly; no one can, in the same way that no one can predict the weather. The weather man always gets it wrong to some extent, but in the case of central bankers, they make the bad weather wheras the weather man merely reports it.

We will return to a state where no central control of money exists. The dynamic, chaotic yet stable, market will take control and everyone will understand that there is an underlying stability, (in the summer it is hot, and in the winter it is cold) and inside these variations there are flucituations that are understandable. Those with a background in maths know what this looks like as a picture; a Lorenz Attractor a shape that describes a chaotic system, yet which is self contained and understandable on the large scale. Students of dynamical systems will also know that chaotic systems can tolerate a small amount of parameter change without flipping into another stable state. When those parameter changes, i.e. tweaking of the economy, too much regulation insane taxation, are too great for the system to absorb, the market becomes distorted, and the attractor that describes it doesn’t stay in a shape that anyone can understand or predict, especially as the changes imposed by the state keep happening regularly.

On every level and by every measure state interference in markets is wrong. It is morally wrong because the state steals from people to do its dirty work. It is wrong objectively, and this can be demonstrated by mathematics.

It is high time that people everywhere cut the state out of their affairs and restricted them to the servant position where they belong.

ID Cards dead in the water: the ‘guinea pigs’ revolt

Sunday, October 12th, 2008

Plans to build support for identity cards by introducing them among ‘guinea pig’ groups, such as airport staff and students, are in crisis after 10,000 airline pilots vowed to take legal action to block them and opposition swept through Britain’s universities and councils.

In a move that could wreck the government’s strategy for a phased introduction beginning next year, the British Airline Pilots Association (Balpa) said it would seek a judicial review rather than see its members forced to adopt ID cards at a time when pilots are already exhaustively vetted.

Balpa’s vehement opposition is a hammer blow for the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, who had hoped to win the wider public over to ID cards by demonstrating that they were crucial to anti-terrorism policies. She intends to introduce them among groups ‘who operate in positions of trust in our society’.

In a speech in March, Smith said: ‘The first cards will be issued, from 2009, to groups where there is a compelling need for reassurance that someone is who they say they are.’

But Balpa, which represents more than 10,000 pilots working on 28 airlines, backed by the Trades Union Congress, insists that ID cards will ‘do nothing’ to enhance airport or flight security, and it fears that information about its members stored on a National Identity Register could be abused.

Jim McAuslan, general secretary of Balpa, told The Observer: ‘Our members are incensed by the way they have been targeted as guinea pigs in a project which will not improve security. We will leave no stone unturned in our attempts to prevent this, including legal action to force a judicial review if necessary.’

From late 2010 ministers intend to start issuing ID cards to ‘young people’, particularly students, on a voluntary basis in a further attempt to win the population round. Then around 2012 everyone applying for a passport will have to be on the National Identity Register.

However, the anti-ID card campaign group, NO2ID, is mobilising what it says is ‘a wave of student opposition’ to ID cards on campuses across the country.

More than 40 local authorities, as well as the Scottish parliament and the Welsh and London assemblies, have passed motions opposing ID cards. Without the co-operation of councils, which would use ID cards to verify benefit claimants and those wanting to use public services, the entire project would fail to get off the ground.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/oct/12/idcards

Finally, the masses are putting their foot down in unison. Students, Trades Unions and everyone else has now woken up to the facts about the NIR and the ID Card.

Only a completely insane person would bet on the successful introduction of ID cards. This insane project is FINISHED, and it is going to crash and burn just like the Poll Tax did.

Good!

What happens if you feed Radiohead into the mincer ?

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

http://www.radioheadremix.com/remix/?id=709