The people at Bizarre magazine have pointed out to their readers, the details of a most illogical, immoral, unjust, unworkable, idiotic, ill conceived and undemocratic piece of legislation, to be debated in October.

This bill is an illiberal bill, which no free society would even dream of tabling for debate.

It is part of the the new Criminal Justice Bill, which will make it illegal to possess certain images.

Lets take a look at what the bill says, and tear it to pieces.

64 Possession of extreme pornographic images

(1) It is an offence for a person to be in possession of an extreme pornographic image.

(2) An “extreme pornographic image” is an image which is both ~

(a) pornographic, and

(b) an extreme image.

First of all, its a good thing that the servant of satan David ‘scumbag adulterer’ Blunkett is no longer in high office; we would have no one to finally determine what is or is not pornographic or extreme.

People have been over this for the entire twentieth century. Careers and lives ruined, businesses trashed and yet, ‘here we go again’. If two people want to create an image, whatever it is, it is their business, it is also their business if they want to publish those images and it is their absolute right.

The laws of copyright are enough to protect people who publish images (model releases etc etc) and the criminal laws covering violence of all kinds are adequate to protect people whose images are taken during acts of violence.

This law is simply not needed. It is yet another knee-jerk jack-boot reaction. More on that downwards.

(3) An image is &quotpornographic” if it appears to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal.

Nonsense. People can be aroused by anything, including pictures of feet. This definition does not work.

(4) Where an image forms part of a series of images, the question whether the image appears to have been so produced is to be determined by reference to ~

(a) the image itself, and

(b) (if the series of images is such as to be capable of providing a context for the image) the context in which it occurs in the series of images.

(5) So, for example, where ~

(a) an image forms an integral part of a narrative constituted by a series of images, and

(b) it appears that the series of images as a whole was not produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal, the image may, by virtue of being part of that narrative, be found not to be pornographic, even though it might have been found to be pornographic if taken by itself.

So, if you have a movie where there is a plot where something bad happens that’s OK, but if you take a still from that film and distribute it, then that is a crime.

That is INSANE.

(6) An “extreme image” is an image of any of the following ~

(a) an act which threatens or appears to threaten a person’s life,

so all the stills of people being killed in Iraq who have their shoes off are now illegal. Very smart!

(b) an act which results in or appears to result (or be likely to result) in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals,

This line says more about the people who drafted this bad bill than any decent person would care to know. What about serious injury to a persons feet? As we all know, there are people who are obsessed in a sexual manner with feet; why are these parts of the body singled out? It is just irrational nonsense.

(c) an act which involves or appears to involve sexual interference with a human corpse,

First of all, corpses do not have rights. Secondly, you cannot do violence to an inanimate, non-living object which is what a corpse is. This bill is written by someone with no experience of life, the arts or the history of pornography, and dare I suggest, the law.

(d) a person performing or appearing to perform an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal, where (in each case) any such act, person or animal depicted in the image is or appears to be real.

This is entirely problematic.

By extending these rights to animals, you go down a slippery slope ending in the banning of meat. But I digress. This part of the bill not only outlaws the depiction of images of real bestiality, but it outlaws, simulations of bestiality you can never, ever ban the depiction of something from someone’s imagination, that is the ultimate restriction of your right to free thought and expression.

An image of an act, conjured from the imagination is protected speech. There are no victims, no animals are harmed; there is no crime, unless you consider thinking to now be a crime.

Then there is the aspect of images conjured from the imagination that are not staged photographs, i.e. simple drawings made with paint, or crayons or computer graphics. Those images too would be subject to this absurd legislation.

Your first thought when you read about this is that it is designed to prevent the ‘Mr. Sebatians‘ of this world from making and distributing images of their consensual S&M fun and games, but actually, it encompasses everything, and not just those works.

(7) In this section “image” means ~

(a) a moving or still image (produced by any means); or

(b) data (stored by any means) which is capable of conversion into an image within paragraph (a).

This is interesting from a technical point of view; all files can be turned into images and sounds; what you need is the right tool to do it. Going into the details here would be a major digression, but suffice to say, you can (circular) file this in the same place where the arguments covering DVD decoding codes (strings of nummbers) and DCMA violating t-shirts are stored. Use the Google.

(8) In this section references to a part of the body include references to a part surgically constructed (in particular through gender reassignment surgery).

???!!!

It is a defence if

(c) that the person ~

(i) was sent the image concerned without any prior request having been made by or on behalf of the person, and

(ii) did not keep it for an unreasonable time.

What is a reasonable amount of time?

It’s all garbage clearly.

Now on to the reason why this part of the bill exists.

A woman’s daughter was brutally murdered by an insane man who liked to look at ‘violent images’. This grieving mother modeled herself on Mary Whitehouse and collected 50,000 signatures in a petition that caused this bad law to be written.

I have some questions.

Why is it that a petition of 50,000 people results in a new law being written, an absurd and bad law, but if MILLIONS of people sign a petition against road pricing, that is TOTALLY IGNORED?

How is it that two million people can march in the streets of London in the biggest ever demonstration in this country’s history against an immoral illegal and predictably murderous war, and they are TOTALLY IGNORED?

Those are rhetorical questions of course, as we know the answers.

This is another piece of knee jerk legislation, as is the way in this country, where the law is created by newspaper editors and grieving parents with a disproportionately loud voice.

We see it with the ban on dangerous dogs (brought in after a child was savaged), and the ban on handguns (after some nutter killed some children, in that case, with a gun). The same process unfolds every time; the parents ‘go public’ the newspaper editors get behind them and pressure parliament to ‘DO SOMETHING’ or look like they are soft on crime.

The only law that comes out of this is bad law, and it is bad law every time.

What is also shocking (actually, not really shocking because this is normal behavior for them) is that the government gives the excuse (as Bliar did for his police state measures) that only a small number of people will be affected by this legislation.

This is astonishing and evil in equal measures.

If one person has their rights taken away by this law, we all suffer. Thats like saying, “we will only exterminate a small number of people to solve this problem”. Everyone’s rights are as precious and important as everyone eles’s and you cannot take away someone’s rights and then justify it because the numbers of the victims will be small.

I’m not making this up.

And you can read all the other lies and deceptions that they regularly take out of the Fascist Neu Labor toolbox at that link.

Needless to say, no one will obey this law should it come into force. Thanks to the internets, you can look at whatever you like in the privacy of your own home, and no one will know what you are looking at as long as you are computer literate and take the necessary precautions.

The days of risking mail order to get your copies of ‘Piercing Fan International Quarterly‘ are over, and so are the days of legislation like this being enforceable.

You BASTARDS.

Accept HillaryCare or Face Homelessness

Kurt Nimmo
Wednesday September 19, 2007

“Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday that a mandate requiring every American to purchase health insurance was the only way to achieve universal health care but she rejected the notion of punitive measures to force individuals into the health care system,” reports News for clueless Yahoos.

Sure, Clinton rejects “punitive measures,” that is if you consider homelessness and the prospect of starvation, enforced by the government, something less than punitive. Clinton said “she could envision a day when ‘you have to show proof to your employer that you’re insured as a part of the job interview—like when your kid goes to school and has to show proof of vaccination,’” Yahoo News continues. In other words, you’ll need HillaryCare in order to get a job, no word on how you’ll be able to afford it after months of unemployment. Call it a Catch-22, one the scribes over at the Associated Press did bother to mention.

Incidentally, for a presidential selectee, Clinton is awful stupid, even though former fed mob boss Alan Greenspan thinks she is a genius. Every single state in the United States allows for vaccination medical exemptions and a few even permit philosophical and/or religious exemptions, although the American Medical Association is attempting to put an end to this and force your children to be injected with thimerosal (i.e., mercury), formaldehyde, aluminum, and other toxins.

In other words, your children are not required to “show proof of vaccination” to enter school, although not going to a federal “education” indoctrination center may be considered a blessing.

Clinton is not stupid, of course. Rather she is an accomplished liar—on par with her war criminal husband—and a conniving Bilderberg doorstop, determined to impose the globalist agenda, even if it results in your kids ending up autistic, thanks to a mercury cocktail lovingly injected.

“On Tuesday, Clinton began airing a 30-second ad statewide in Iowa and New Hampshire promoting her new health care plan. The ad reminds viewers of her failed effort to pass universal health care in the early 1990s, trying to portray a thwarted enterprise as one of vision,” News for Yahoos continues. “The ad also highlights her support as senator for an expanded Children’s Health Insurance Program and for more affordable vaccines…. Her health care plan would require every American to buy health insurance, offering tax credits and subsidies to help those who can’t afford it. The mandatory aspect of her proposal, however, gets glossed over in the ad.”

It stands to reason Clinton’s plan will be “mandatory”—under penalty of taser-wielding, ninja-black drabbed SWAT cops—and, soon after she is selected by way of Diebold, Clinton will make sure millions of kids are stricken with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, seizures, mental retardation, hyperactivity, dyslexia, and other developmental disorders, such as autism.

[…]

http://adereview.com/blog/?p=48

Kurt! Kurt! Kurt! Kurt! Kurt! Kurt! Kurt!

Anti-terrorist programs depend on technology — remotely controlled cameras, automatic license plate readers, interception of cell-phone signals and high-tech explosives detectors.

It might pay to ask: Is this high-tech surveillance security or security theater? Does it provide enough additional safety to justify the added intrusiveness? Or do the bad guys just find a way around it?

For example, if terrorists don’t know that the National Security Agency can intercept their phone calls in remote parts of the world, the intercepts will be useful. Once they know, they stop using cell phones.

This is doubtless a nuisance to them, but hardly a show-stopper. If they know about automated monitoring of e-mail, again, they stop using it or, depending on what they are doing, use an anonymous, disposable Hotmail account.

The inability thus far to capture Osama bin Laden demonstrates the ease of circumventing surveillance techniques.

For a while people talked about combating steganography — the hiding of messages in, say, Web pages by various coding schemes. At least some security folk wanted specialized software to examine pages for messages exchanged among terrorists. Useful sometimes, perhaps — unless the bad guys know about it.

Then they communicate by prearranged codes. For example, a post on a classic-car site looking for a blue 1957 Chevy six-cylinder means one thing, whereas looking for a red 1958 Ford means another.

If a suicide bomber (which seems to be the threat we face) thinks he can’t get his bomb past nitrate sniffers and specialized X-ray machines at the airport, he simply blows himself up in a crowded part of the terminal. If the point is to protect airplanes, security may work.

If the point is to stop terrorism, it is useless.

There is no way to stop a guy with a backpack from getting on Metro at rush hour.

New York is set to spend $90 million on more cameras and license plate readers. What will this accomplish? A CNN story on the system quoted Steve Swain, a security specialist who spent years working with London’s net of cameras, who said, “I don’t know of a single incident where CCTV [closed-circuit television] has actually been used to spot, apprehend or detain offenders in the act.”

Cameras aid in the investigation of a crime already committed, he said, and “you need to do this piece of theater so that if the terrorists are looking at you, they can see that you’ve got some measures in place.”

But catching the offender is of trivial importance compared with preventing the terrorism. Is the theater aimed at the terrorists, or at the public? Surveillance increases apace. From the Times Online of London, “An ‘intelligent’ CCTV camera designed to predict when a person may be about to commit a crime is being tested in high streets and shopping centres.” I have encountered brain-scan research endeavoring to determine moods thought to be associated with terrorists.

According to a recent ABC News poll, the public favors surveillance by almost 3 to 1. Governments from federal to local want to integrate cameras and similar devices.

Concern with terrorism makes it difficult to oppose new measures. And there is big money in making the equipment. All of this contributes to the acceptance of more and more surveillance, without anyone asking, “Wait, what are we really going to get out of this? Will it work?” In the words of Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York ACLU, “Technology is an unstoppable train. The question is whether we can maximize the benefits and minimize the harms.”

[…]

http://washingtontimes.com/

And there you have it; another Post Tipping Point Post^®

We have been saying this for years, as have many other people.

It must be pointed out that the ‘terrrorists using Steganography’ hysteria was just that hysteria. Not a single Steg image has ever been found in the wild by researchers and, certainly not a single image has ever been traced to a ‘terrorist’.

You can guarantee that if they ever found a ‘terrorist’s’ laptop with encrypted data on it, using any of the popular crypto wares like GPG/PGP that uncle sham would trumpet this from every one of their ‘news’ outlets and use it as an excuse to bring in some sort of ’90s style insane controls.

And then of course, if these people need to use telephones, all they need to do to have secure, untracable calls where NSA will not even know that a call is being made, is to use Asterisk in a private telephone network.

Finally ACLU Donna Lieberman is wrong to say that, “Technology is an unstoppable train.”. STUPIDITY is an unstoppable train, and as everyone knows, trains run on rails, and those rails eventually reach the ‘end of the line‘.

Stupidity (them/they) WILL come to an end, and reason (us/we) WILL prevail.

Many years ago, fourteen to be exact, I saw an episode of a science fiction programme that shocked me. I couldn’t remember anything about it other than the words in a single scene that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It was a scene in a police station where one officer called one of his colleagues a “Stupid Blanco”.

What triggered my memory about this phrase and the series was the all the recent heated talk about the invasion of illegal immigration in the usa, the proposals for amnesty etc etc.

Thanks to The Internets^™ I managed to find information about the series where this scene came from by searching for the phrase “Stupid Blanco”; the series was called ‘Time Trax’ and it is (was):

a Prime Time Entertainment Network[2] American/Australian co-produced science fiction television series that first aired in 1993. It is about a police officer who has been sent into the past to track down and return convicted criminals who have escaped into the past. This was the last new production from Lorimar Television.

Premise

In the year 2193, over a hundred criminals became fugitives of law enforcement by travelling back in time two hundred years, using a time machine called Trax. Darien Lambert (Dale Midkiff) was a police detective of that period who was sent back to 1993 in order to apprehend as many of the fugitives as possible. He was assisted by SELMA (Elizabeth Alexander), an extremely small but very powerful computer (described as equivalent to a mainframe)—disguised for the mission as an AT&T MasterCard—who communicated through a holographic interface which took the visual form of a prim British nanny (SELMA was an acronym for Specified Encapsulated Limitless Memory Archive). Lambert was also equipped with a MPPT (Micro-Pellet Projection Tube) disguised as a keyless car alarm remote, which could stun the target or engulf the target in an energy field which would render him transportable to the future, at which point Selma would execute the transmission sequence to send the criminal on his way. Lambert’s biggest enemy was Dr. Mordecai Sahmbi (Peter Donat), who was responsible for sending the fugitives to 1993, and who tried several times to kill him.

Captain Lambert, fearing the possible consequences of altering the timeline, did not actively attempt to interfere with the natural flow of history, although he frequently left messages for his colleagues in 2193 (via the ‘personals’ sections of assorted newspapers). The series made occasional allusions to a theory of parallel timelines as a way of skirting the issue of temporal paradox; essentially, it implied that the time travellers went into an alternate past so that their actions there had no effect on the 2193 “present.” However, the series rarely pursued this point – probably because if Lambert was really in a parallel timeline, he would be unable to leave messages to his colleagues. Also, fugitives are sometimes seen using knowledge of the future to their own ends, which would also be impossible under the ‘parallel’ theory. The series did not have a proper ending – as of the final episode, Lambert was still in 1993 and had not yet completed his mission.

[…]

Wikipedia

Under the section named Terminology & Technology, you can find the phrase that sent my head spinning:

Blanco
It is the 22nd Century’s most abrasive racial slur. It is a reference to Caucasians, who are now a minority.

Bingo.

All the ‘European Americans’ who are shouting at the top of their lungs against the tidal wave of mass unchecked illegal immigration from Mexico and the abominable ‘North American Union’ will be frightened to death of a future where the most abrasive ‘racial slur’ applies to them.

It is destined to be called ‘the ‘B’ word’ no doubt.

This was the first time (on television) that I ever saw the issue of America becoming a Spanish speaking country treated in any serious way. I imagine that it is something, an idea, so repugnant to the current majority American English speaking public that no television company would normally finance its production.

The fact is that unless something is done to stop it and American English is legally adopted as the language of the nation and the Spanish language is actively rejected and suppressed, then america WILL become a spanish speaking nation from coast to coast. Already it is the case that over one third of the people in California speak spanish.

Then again, thanks to the internets, we learn that Spanish in america is in fact, nothing new, and as far back as 1870, California enshrined Spanish as one of the languages that the law is delivered in:

California’s first constitution approved an important recognition of Spanish language rights: “All laws, decrees, regulations, and provisions emanating from any of the three supreme powers of this State, which from their nature require publication, shall be published in English and Spanish.” By 1870, English-speaking Americans had become a majority in California. In 1879, California promulgated a new constitution under which all official proceedings were to be conducted only in English; this clause remained in effect until 1966. In 1986, California voters added a new constitutional clause by referendum stating that “English is the official language of the State of California.” However, Spanish is still spoken widely throughout the state, and many government forms, documents, and services are available in both English and Spanish.

This is an issue that has a long history. It can be a source of humor if the population is intelligent however.

On a trip to Quebec in the 80’s I saw a red octagonal ‘STOP’ sign that had been altered with red spray paint (identical in colour to the red of the sign so as to render the spray indistinguishable from the original paint) so that the ‘S’, the top sides of the ‘T’ and the curve of the ‘P’ had been sprayed out to make the sign read ‘101’.

This, which I didn’t know at the time, was an absolutely brilliant piece of political defacement.

I started to see the number ‘101’ grafittied all over the place, and of course, being the curious sort, asked my kind hosts, “what the heck are all the 101s all over Montreal?!”.

It transpired that the state of Quebec was going through a language war between the French speakers (“luh”) and the English speakers (“ay?”).

The ‘101’ refers specifically to:

The Charter of the French Language (also known as Bill 101 and Loi 101) is a law in the province of Quebec, Canada defining French as the only official language of Quebec.

[…]

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

And so, that red octagonal ‘STOP’ sign was brilliantly, and with utter inspiration, transformed from being just a ‘STOP’ sign into a ‘STOP Bill 101’ political statement.

Pure unadulterated Genius!

The French of course, with a beautiful language as their deadly weapon, were not outclassed.

I saw something that made me laugh out loud one day; someone, someone stupid, simply grafittied ‘101’ on a wall somewhere, as so many dumb people did back then, to which the following text was subsequently added by another, more inspired artist:

‘Dalmatiens’

Oh how we laughed!

Despite the inspiration of the graffiti artists, this was a deadly serious problem and people felt very strongly about the whole issue. Emotions were running high, and there was a noticeable split in Montreal between the French speakers and the English speakers.

and it got serious:

The Charter of the French Language, though popular among a majority of Francophones, has been poorly received by many anglophones and allophones. The enforcers of the Charter, widely derided in English media as the “language police” or “tongue troopers”, are able to levy fines of up to seven thousand dollars per offence to punish those who are not in compliance with the law (“Titre V”, 2004). The charter is claimed by opponents to have caused up to 244,000 people to emigrate from Quebec to other provinces since the 1970s. [21]. Many companies most notably Royal Bank and Bank of Montreal (which even considered removing “Montreal” from its name), moved their major operations to Toronto. Many angrily blame the Charter for hindering Montreal’s economic development, arguing about the status of English as a language of international business.

The Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) (which is commonly referred to as l’Office) provides several warnings before resorting to any legal sanctions. Alleged abuse of its power has led to inflated charges of racism and harassment being levelled against them by members of minority groups (Martin 2004). The OQLF urged stores to remove imported kosher goods that did not meet labelling requirements, an action perceived in the Jewish community as an unfair targeting that coincided with a high-profile case against the well-known delicatessen, Schwartz’s (B’nai B’rith, 1996). In 2002, unreliable media accounts reported cases of alleged harassment of allophone merchants who refuse to speak French. (Gravenor, 2002).

and very silly:

One of the specifics of the Charter is insistence of French instructions for all products. During the 1990s Pokémon craze, the then PQ-led government pushed for the publication of French-translated Pokémon cards, lest Wizards of the Coast and the various stores selling the cards be fined. A line of French cards was produced, but did not gain as much value among collectors as the original English and Japanese versions. However, the cards used the Pokemon names from France, because they were merely imported from France or reprinted from France’s cards and not produced for Quebec (most Quebecers knew the Pokemon from their English names, because the video games in Quebec were in English, and the Quebec French dub of the Pokemon anime used the English names).[22]A line of French Yu-Gi-Oh! cards was also produced for Quebec, but it sold rather poorly despite high demand, and only the first two starter decks, first expansion set, and promotional movie cards were released. Other French versions of games (such as Axis & Allies) were merely imported from France, like Pokemon. Some, such as Dreamblade, Heroclix and Star Wars Miniatures, do not have French versions at all, but only short French product descriptions on the package.

As of 2003, all video games sold in Quebec must include French instructions. Stores holding unused games with English-only instructions will be fined for each individual offending copy and see their merchandise seized.

Now, I use the word ‘silly’ but the fact is that these people are taking the threat of the destruction of their culture seriously, and are taking steps to stamp out or at least control English.

There are still Americans who say, “this is america, speak it or beat it”…cough… and essentially, that is what the Royal Bank of Montreal did; they beat it.

And there you have it. If you want to preserve English as the language of the USA, you have to introduce legislation to mandate it, and then get ready for a war over it.

Of course, in a truly federated country like america should be and was designed to be, if New Mexico goes 100% Spanish that is their business, and not the business of the Federal Government.

What a life!

“My love/hate relationship with Bill Maher fluctuates wildly from episode to episode. Though I love his politically incorrect sense of humor and the fact that he provides a forum for people with differing views to debate, I do hate his scapegoat arguments and constant contradictions. Still, last night’s Real Time with Bill Maher was a classic episode, mostly due to the always charismatic Mos Def, whose off the cuff bluntness drew applause and laughter in juxtaposition to Maher’s counterproductive defense of the establishment.

I’m afraid of having my account deleted for posting the full episode, but Tullycast seems to have it all if you’re interested:”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO1w1H3iZUU

This is a truly wonderful and vivid example of the slavery inured, corporate brainwashed, ostrich posturing american who despite everything, every piece of evidence, every vibration of common sense, still believe that 2 + 2 = 5.

This Bill Maher, who makes the right noises, appears to do so only because it is in vogue to be ‘alternative’, because there are ratings in it. This is why he believes Islam is a religion of violence above all others, and refers to some author to back up his nonsense. Bill Maher is part of the problem, not only because he has a popular TV programme and is himself asleep and therefore no threat, but because he is an ordinary citizen that cannot wake up, and it is people like him that keep the nightmare going, individuals believing the nightmare is reality, that day is night, that hot is cold, that water is dry…people like him who have their finger in the Dyke, believing that if they remove it thy will die and every thing will end when in fact, they are on the wet side drowning and taking their finger out will release and violently launch them them into dry land and the world of the waking.

Note Bill’s posture (leaning away from his guests like they are going to explode) as he speaks to these two men, and note also how his english deteriorates when he talks to them…I’m sure its all completely involuntary.

Council takes overweight child into care

Sarah Knapton
Monday September 10, 2007
The Guardian

A child has been taken away from his parents because, it is understood, they were not coping with his disability and social workers became anxious about his weight.

Social services in Tower Hamlets, east London, removed the boy earlier this year and placed him in council care. He has not been returned to his home.

Social workers were concerned about his increasing bulk which was far above normal for a boy of his age. The council said it could not comment on individual cases.

It follows the case of an eight-year-oldboy who was nearly taken into care this year after reaching 14 stone, more than three times the average for a boy of his age. His family claimed the youngster had an intolerance to fruit and vegetables.

North Tyneside council allowed him to stay with his family after his mother promised to change his diet.

Britain has one of the worst records for childhood obesity in the world.

Around 1 million under-16s are considered dangerously overweight, leading to fears that the country is facing a health timebomb.

In an attempt to tackle the problem the government has launched campaigns to increase fruit and vegetable consumption and has poured cash into school sports schemes. The overall cost of obesity to the NHS is currently around £1bn, with a further £2.3bn to £2.6bn for the economy as a whole.

http://society.guardian.co.uk/children/story/0,,2165891,00.html

This is an interesting story for several reasons, and thank you to that special lurker for bringing it to the attention of BLOGDIAL Man dem.

Now.

As far as I know, there is no legal definition of overweight. Without such a definition, those council workers rely on their personal prejudices to determine what a fat child is.

In Wales, this might mean a fatter child than a one living in Tower Hamlets, where a thinner child is the average.

It is completely absurd that workers in a council can exercise their personal prejudice in this way, and this has a direct bearing on those parents who Home Educate.

If a Home Educator teaches her children that there is such a thing as Sin, and a worker in Camden Council does not believe that this is the case, the council worker, by the example of this ‘overweight’ child, could remove that child from its parents so that it is taught ‘correctly’.

There is no difference between feeding a child’s stomach and feeding its mind, and if you accept that prejudiced workers at any council can take a child from its parents for the ‘protection’ of the child’s well-being in the case of obesity, then there are no limits to what these people can do.

They can take your child because you refuse to:

• vaccinate your child.
• put your child on a diet.
• visit the doctor.
• teach pluralism / multiculturalism / ‘tolerance’.
• {insert your particular belief and exercise thereof}

What they are saying is that your children do not belong to you, and you are not the ultimate parent; your children belong to the state, the state is the ultimate parent, and the state allows you to keep your children as long as you do not disobey their guidelines.

Of course, they refuse to pay for your children to attend good schools, demand taxes from you so that they can finance these evils on you and your family, and they expect you to just sit there and TAKE IT.

You will note that this child lived in Tower Hamlets, where the family is most likely to be poor and uneducated and unable to defend themselves. No council worker in a wealthy borough would DARE do such a thing to a wealthy family, because they know that they will instantly be on the receiving end of a well financed lawsuit, or even worse, be faced with parent that are themselves lawyers.

These laws and council actions are for the poor and uneducated only, who are the eternal victims on this planet.

Open letter to the Generalbundesanwaltschaft against the criminalization of critical academic research and political engagement

On 31st July 2007 the flats and workplaces of Dr. Andrej Holm and Dr. Matthias B., as well as of two other persons, were searched by the police. Dr. Andrej Holm was arrested, flown by helicopter to the German Federal Court in Karlsruhe and brought before the custodial judge. Since then he has been held in pretrial confinement in a Berlin jail. All four people have been charged with “membership in a terrorist association according to § 129a StGB” (German Penal Code, section 7 on ‘Crimes against Public Order’). They are alleged to be members of a so-called ‘militante gruppe’ (mg). The text of the search warrant revealed that preliminary proceedings against these four people have been going on since September 2006 and that the four had since been under constant surveillance.

A few hours before the house searches, Florian L., Oliver R. und Axel H. were arrested in the Brandenburg region and accused of attempted arson on four vehicles of the German Federal Army. Andrej Holm is alleged to have met one of these three persons on two occasions in the first half of 2007 in supposedly “conspiratorial circumstances”. The Federal Prosecutor (Bundesanwaltschaft) therefore assumes that the four above mentioned persons as well as the three individuals arrested in Brandenburg are members of a “militant group,” and is thus investigating all seven on account of suspected “membership in a terrorist association” according to §129a StGB. According to the arrest warrant against Andrej Holm, the charge made against the above mentioned four individuals is presently justified on the following grounds, in the order that the federal prosecutor has listed them:

– Dr. Matthias B. is alleged to have used, in his academic publications, “phrases and key words” which are also used by the ‘militante gruppe’;

– As political scientist holding a PhD, Matthias B. is seen to be intellectually capable to “author the sophisticated texts of the ‘militante gruppe’ (mg)”. Additionally, “as employee in a research institute he has access to libraries which he can use inconspicuously in order to do the research necessary to the drafting of texts of the ‘militante gruppe’”;

– Another accused individual is said to have met with suspects in a conspiratorial manner: “meetings were regularly arranged without, however, mentioning place, time and content of the meetings”; furthermore, he is said to have been active in the “extreme left-wing scene”;

– In the case of a third accused individual, an address book was found which included the names and addresses of the other three accused;

– Dr. Andrej H., who works as urban sociologist, is claimed to have close contacts with all three individuals who have been charged but still remain free;

– Dr. Andrej H. is alleged to have been active in the “resistance mounted by the extreme left-wing scene against the World Economic Summit of 2007 in Heiligendamm”;

– The fact that he – allegedly intentionally — did not take his mobile phone with him to a meeting is considered as “conspiratorial behavior”.

Andrej H., as well as Florian L., Oliver R. und Axel H., are detained since 1st August 2007 in Berlin-Moabit under very strict conditions: they are locked in solitary confinement 23 hours a day and are allowed only one hour of courtyard walk. Visits are limited to a total of half an hour every two weeks. Contacts, including contacts with lawyers, are allowed only through separation panes, including contact with their lawyers. The mail of the defense is checked.

The charges described in the arrest warrants reveal a construct based on very dubious reasoning by analogy. The reasoning involves four basic hypotheses, none of which the Federal High Court could substantiate with any concrete evidence, but through their combination they are to leave the impression of a “terrorist association”. The social scientists, because of their academic research activity, their intellectual capacities and their access to libraries, are said to be the brains of the alleged “terrorist organization”. For, according to the Federal prosecutor, an association called “militante gruppe” is said to use the same concepts as the accused social scientists. As evidence for this reasoning, the concept of “gentrification” is named – one of the key research themes of Andrej Holm und Matthias B. in past years, about which they have published internationally. They have not limited their research findings to an ivory tower, but have made their expertise available to citizens’ initiatives and tenants’ organizations. This is how critical social scientists are constructed as intellectual gang leaders.

Since Andrej Holm has friends, relatives and colleagues, they now also are suspect to be “terrorists”, because they know Andrej. Another accused individual was blamed for having the names of Andrej Holm and of two others charged (but not jailed) in his address book. Since the latter are also deemed to be “terrorists” – this is how “guilt by association” is established.

Paragraph § 129a, introduced in Germany in 1976, makes it possible for our colleagues to be criminalized as “terrorists”. This is how, through § 129a, the existence of a “terrorist group” is claimed.

Through these constructs, every academic research activity and political work is presented as potentially criminal – in particular when politically engaged colleagues who intervene in social struggles are concerned. This is how critical research, in particular research linked with political engagement, is turned into ideological ring leadership and “terrorism”.

We demand that the Federal Prosecutor (Bundesanwaltschaft) immediately suspend the § 129a-proceedings against all parties concerned and to release Andrej Holm and the other imprisoned from jail at once. We strongly reject the outrageous accusation that the academic research activities and the political engagement of Andrej Holm are to be viewed as complicity in an alleged “terrorist association”. No arrest warrant can be deduced from the academic research and political work of Andrej Holm. The Federal Prosecutor, through applying Article § 129, is threatening the freedom of research and teaching as well as social-political engagement.

Initial signatures by:
Prof. Dr. Manuel Aalbers (Universiteit van Amsterdam), Prof. Dr. Rowland Atkinson (University of Tasmania, Australien), Prof. Dr. Lawrence D. Berg (Canada Research Chair in Human Rights, Diversity & Identity, University of British Columbia), Prof. Dr. Neil Brenner (New York University, Sociology), Prof. Dr. Craig Calhoun (President, Social Science Research Council, and University Professor, Sociology, NYU), Prof. Dr. Mike Davis (Prof. of Urban History, Irvine/USA), Dr. Michael Dear (Professor of Geography at the University of Southern California/Los Angeles), Prof. Dr. Michael Edwards (The Bartlett Centre for Architecture and Planning, UCL, London), Prof. Dr. Geoff Ely (University of Michigan, Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor), Prof. Dr. John Friedmann (University of California, Los Angeles), Prof. Dr. Herbert Gans (Columbia University, New York), Prof. Dr. Alan Harding (University of Salford, UK), Prof. Dr. Michael Harloe (University of Salford, Vice-President), Prof. Dr. David Harvey (Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Graduate Center of the City University of New York, New York), Prof. Dr. Andreas Huyssen (Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University), Prof. Dr. Martin Jay (Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, University of California Berkeley), Prof. Dr. Bob Jessop (Lancaster Universtiy), Prof. Dr. Roger Keil (York University, Toronto, Canada), Prof. Dr. Rianne Mahon (Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada), Prof. Dr. Peter Marcuse (Columbia University, New York), Prof. Dr. Margit Mayer (Freie Universität Berlin), Prof. Dr. Frances Fox Piven (President of the American Sociological Association, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology, City University New York), Prof. Dr. Andrew Ross (New York University, New York), Prof. Dr. Saskia Sassen (Columbia University, New York, and London School of Economics) Prof. Dr. Andrew Sayer (Lancaster University, Sociology), Prof. Dr. Richard Sennett (Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, Bemis Professor of Social Sciences at MIT, Professor of the Humanities at New York University), Prof. Dr. William Sewell (The Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and History Emeritus, University of Chicago), Prof. Dr. Neil Smith (Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography, Director of the Center for Place Culture and Politics, Graduate Center of the City University of New York), Prof. Dr. Michael Storper (Centennial Professor of Economic Geography, London School of Economics, and Professor of Economic Sociology, Science Po, Paris), Prof. Dr. Erik Swyngedouw (University of Manchester, UK), , Prof. Dr. Peter J. Taylor (Loughborough University, UK), Prof. Dr. John Urry (Lancaster University, Sociology), Dr. Jennifer Wolch (Professor of Geography at the University of Southern California/Los Angeles).

Media contact to solidarity group in Berlin: einstellung@so36.net
German lawyer and media contact for Germany:
Wolfgang Kaleck
Immanuelkirchstrasse 3-4
D-10405 Berlin
Germany
fon: +49-(0)30-4467-9218
fax: +49-(0)30-4467-9220

Media contact for international affairs:
Prof. Dr. Neil Brenner (New York University, fon: USA-212-998 8349)
Prof. Dr. Margit Mayer (Freie Universität Berlin, fon: 030-8385-2875)

[…]

http://www.statewatch.org/swpubs.html

And these are the people that the UK wants to get into bed with.

These are the people who are in charge of the EU, whose arrest warrants are now good throughout the EU.

The fact of the matter is that this is only the beginning. If the signatories to this document and anyone else who values their freedom do not do something to stop the root cause of this, the war machine, then they might as well not bother doing anything. Certainly, petition signing will not help these people after they have been arrested.

I wonder just what has to happen before these people take anything seriously. Do people have to be kidnapped off of the street and tortured to outrage them into action? Obviously not since that is already happening. Of course, the people who are suffering rendition are not Germans, so they don’t count. Do people (specifically their German colleagues) have to be executed without trial just for doing the above? Will that be enough to spur them into action?

For a bunch of academics they are not very bright.

I sympathize with these people.

They want to believe that the world is still run by decent people. That despite the outrageous power grabs, insane laws, illegal wars and venal leaders, that in the end, everything is still essentially the same, and that decency will win out. They want desperately to believe that they merely have to point to injustice for it to dissolve under their righteous gaze.

I am sorry to report that the world is not like that anymore, because decent people are not behind the judges benches or the police uniforms or in the legislature. Those men could be arrested, imprisoned and executed and no amount of petition writing will save them. Indeed, no amount of pressure can even get them out of gaol.

It must be very startling and sad for these people to finally wake up to find that everything they counted on is gone, and their whole world is destroyed. How horrifying it must be to them as the realization that they may have to pull down everything that they depend upon and believe in in order to restore justice and freedom.

In the end, they are going to be forced to make a choice. They are going to be forced to choose a side. Outrage is just the very beginning, and their enemies are well advanced in their plans. They already have the camps ready to hold them all, and of course, none of these academics have guns, after having been brainwashed into thinking that guns and gun ownership are ‘a bad thing’.

If they ever decide that enough is enough, what are they going to do against a well equipped army?

You ‘demand’ that the “‘Bundesanwaltschaft’ immediately suspend the § 129a-proceedings against all parties concerned”. And if they say ‘no’ THEN WHAT ARE YOU GONG TO DO?

Maybe if there are some chemists amongst them they can fashion some home made weapons…but I digress, these people would rather die than defend themselves, their colleagues or their liberty.

And that is why all is lost.

The United States has the capacity for and may be prepared to launch without warning a massive assault on Iranian uranium enrichment facilities, as well as government buildings and infrastructure, using long-range bombers and missiles, according to a new analysis.

The paper, “Considering a war with Iran: A discussion paper on WMD in the Middle East” – written by well-respected British scholar and arms expert Dr. Dan Plesch, Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, and Martin Butcher, a former Director of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) and former adviser to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament – was exclusively provided to RAW STORY late Friday under embargo.

“We wrote the report partly as we were surprised that this sort of quite elementary analysis had not been produced by the many well resourced Institutes in the United States,” wrote Plesch in an email to Raw Story on Tuesday.

Plesch and Butcher examine “what the military option might involve if it were picked up off the table and put into action” and conclude that based on open source analysis and their own assessments, the US has prepared its military for a “massive” attack against Iran, requiring little contingency planning and without a ground invasion.

The study concludes that the US has made military preparations to destroy Iran’s WMD, nuclear energy, regime, armed forces, state apparatus and economic infrastructure within days if not hours of President George W. Bush giving the order. The US is not publicising the scale of these preparations to deter Iran, tending to make confrontation more likely. The US retains the option of avoiding war, but using its forces as part of an overall strategy of shaping Iran’s actions.

• Any attack is likely to be on a massive multi-front scale but avoiding a ground invasion. Attacks focused on WMD facilities would leave Iran too many retaliatory options, leave President Bush open to the charge of using too little force and leave the regime intact.
• US bombers and long range missiles are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours.
• US ground, air and marine forces already in the Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan can devastate Iranian forces, the regime and the state at short notice.
• Some form of low level US and possibly UK military action as well as armed popular resistance appear underway inside the Iranian provinces or ethnic areas of the Azeri, Balujistan, Kurdistan and Khuzestan. Iran was unable to prevent sabotage of its offshore-to-shore crude oil pipelines in 2005.
• Nuclear weapons are ready, but most unlikely, to be used by the US, the UK and Israel. The human, political and environmental effects would be devastating, while their military value is limited.
• Israel is determined to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons yet has the conventional military capability only to wound Iran’s WMD programmes.
• The attitude of the UK is uncertain, with the Brown government and public opinion opposed psychologically to more war, yet, were Brown to support an attack he would probably carry a vote in Parliament. The UK is adamant that Iran must not acquire the bomb.
• The US is not publicising the scale of these preparations to deter Iran, tending to make confrontation more likely. The US retains the option of avoiding war, but using its forces as part of an overall strategy of shaping Iran’s actions.

When asked why the paper seems to indicate a certainty of Iranian WMD, Plesch made clear that “our paper is not, repeat not, about what Iran actually has or not.”

[…]

Most significantly, Plesch and Butcher dispute conventional wisdom that any US attack on Iran would be confined to its nuclear sites. Instead, they foresee a “full-spectrum approach,” designed to either instigate an overthrow of the government or reduce Iran to the status of “a weak or failed state.” Although they acknowledge potential risks and impediments that might deter the Bush administration from carrying out such a massive attack, they also emphasize that the administration’s National Security Strategy includes as a major goal the elimination of Iran as a regional power. They suggest, therefore, that:

This wider form of air attack would be the most likely to delay the Iranian nuclear program for a sufficiently long period of time to meet the administration’s current counterproliferation goals. It would also be consistent with the possible goal of employing military action is to overthrow the current Iranian government, since it would severely degrade the capability of the Iranian military (in particular revolutionary guards units and other ultra-loyalists) to keep armed opposition and separatist movements under control. It would also achieve the US objective of neutralizing Iran as a power in the region for many years to come.

However, it is the option that contains the greatest risk of increased global tension and hatred of the United States. The US would have few, if any allies for such a mission beyond Israel (and possibly the UK). Once undertaken, the imperatives for success would be enormous.

Butcher says he does not believe the US would use nuclear weapons, with some exceptions.

“My opinion is that [nuclear weapons] wouldn’t be used unless there was definite evidence that Iran has them too or is about to acquire them in a matter of days/weeks,” notes Butcher. “However, the Natanz facility has been so hardened that to destroy it MAY require nuclear weapons, and once an attack had started it may simply be a matter of following military logic and doctrine to full extent, which would call for the use of nukes if all other means failed.”

[…]

Political Considerations

Plesch and Butcher write with concern about the political context within the United States:

This debate is bleeding over into the 2008 Presidential election, with evidence mounting that despite the public unpopularity of the war in Iraq, Iran is emerging as an issue over which Presidential candidates in both major American parties can show their strong national security bona fides. …

The debate on how to deal with Iran is thus occurring in a political context in the US that is hard for those in Europe or the Middle East to understand. A context that may seem to some to be divorced from reality, but with the US ability to project military power across the globe, the reality of Washington DC is one that matters perhaps above all else. …

We should not underestimate the Bush administration’s ability to convince itself that an “Iran of the regions” will emerge from a post-rubble Iran. So, do not be in the least surprised if the United States attacks Iran. Timing is an open question, but it is hard to find convincing arguments that war will be avoided, or at least ones that are convincing in Washington.

Plesch and Butcher are also interested in the attitudes of the current UK government, which has carefully avoided revealing what its position might be in the case of an attack. They point out, however, “One key caution is that regardless of the realities of Iran’s programme, the British public and elite may simply refuse to participate – almost out of bloody minded revenge for the Iraq deceit.”

And they conclude that even “if the attack is ‘successful’ and the US reasserts its global military dominance and reduces Iran to the status of an oil-rich failed state, then the risks to humanity in general and to the states of the Middle East are grave indeed.”

Raw Story

My emphasis.

Just read some of the comments on this story:

Well, if it happens, there’ll be violence here, guaranteed.
Igor | Email | Homepage | 08.28.07 – 11:40 am

Which ever dumb bastard gives the order for this, he should be shot dead on the spot.
The Lone Ranger | Email | Homepage | 08.28.07 – 11:47 am

How entertaining. Some of you idiots seem to think we live in a democracy. What you or I think doesn’t mean shit. They will first attack here, probably in September then say the “Database” opps I mean Al-CIAda hit us, then we can have a “justifiable” war with Iran. China and Russia, who have invested billions, will be less than over joyed and we will really be in deep shit. We will have martial law in this country which will lead to very serious infighting which will lead to a civil war. Most likely at least half of us will be dead by next year, with thousands starving as there is not currently enough food in this country to feed us all for any length of time and there will be no incoming shipments. There will be no food, water or electricity in the cities therefore you can elect to die there or in a camp, transportation will be provided. Those currently not in denial will have acquired the necessary supplies, literature, and so forth to begin an existance anew far from current population centers. The military will act much as they presently do but the areas they patrol will contain individuals that are well armed and very much accustomed to the use of such arms and that will eventually eliminate the relatively few and very worn out military we now have. Then my friends the few that are left may, if not poisoned by radiation sickness as our returning troups currently are, be able to pick up the pieces and start again.

Wake up and smell the roses for soon they will all be dead.
John | Email | Homepage | 08.28.07 – 10:02 pm

and so on…

if you had read the last comment twenty years ago, you could be forgiven for thinking that they were the words of a ‘nutcase’, but now, in 2007, with everything we know about the preparations in the USA for ‘something bad’ taking place they don’t seem so odd.

This is a strange situation. Everyone has advance warning of this attack. As we know, the people who could mobilize an army to prevent this, illegal, unprovoked, insane, criminal, attack from taking place are not intending to do anything that will be in any way effective.

One thing is for sure. If they do attack Iran and then try any sort of ground offensive, the Iranians will immediately go to guerilla warfare and the IEDs will start blasting the invaders from day one. They will also probably take this opportunity to eliminate anyone who is not ‘on side’ in their own country…though there will be few of them, because this outrage will most likely erase their differences in the short term. Or maybe not. Either way, an attack on Iran will be a disaster from every possible angle. It will be an act of absolutely pure evil, and no one who participates in it can claim that they ‘didn’t know’ they were being lied to about WMD or fall back on any other excuse, thanks to the debacle that is Iraq.

This time they will be guilty from the instant the order is given, and indeed, anyone who follows those orders should be shot, as the commenter says.

There is no excuse, no justification, no reason, no fact, no extrapolation of fact that a reasonable person could use to order this attack…but of course, we are not, and never have been dealing with reasonable people.

You know that.

Read this ‘we are doomed to live like animals’ screed from Anti-War. It is a complete lie of course and this ‘Norman Solomon’ needs to shit or get off of the pot. War is not inevitable, and neither is the so called ‘Warfare State’. Its imagination-less people like him that create, support and bolster the ‘Warfare State’ by their negativity, self-centeredness and lack of vision.

COUPEZ!

Let’s Face It: The Warfare State Is Part of Us
by Norman Solomon

There is no ‘us’. It is YOU that accepts the ‘Warfare State’, it is YOU that is defeated and resigned to murdering other people, not US.

The USA’s military spending is now close to $2 billion a day. This fall, the country will begin its seventh year of continuous war, with no end in sight. On the horizon is the very real threat of a massive air assault on Iran. And few in Congress seem willing or able to articulate a rejection of the warfare state.

First of all, it is two billion a day of YOUR MONEY (or at least money from China that YOU will have to pay back). This fundamental misunderstanding about how war is funded and waged is a key reason why your illegitimate government is able to get away with waging it. YOU are the people who cannot see the wood for the trees; YOU are the people who fund this insanity, and you are the key to stopping it.

There can be no attack on Iran without money to do it. If you continue to pay for it, it will happen. You are personally responsible for this, and this article, by not focussing on the permanent solution to this problem is actually a call for the war that you claim that you do not want.

While the Bush-Cheney administration is the most dangerous of our lifetimes – and ousting Republicans from the White House is imperative – such truths are apt to smooth the way for progressive evasions. We hear that “the people must take back the government,” but how can “the people” take back what they never really had? And when rhetoric calls for “returning to a foreign policy based on human rights and democracy,” we’re encouraged to be nostalgic for good old days that never existed.

Actually, it is your generation that is the most dangerous in the lifetime of the republic. Your singular failure to assert yourself, protect your rights and stand up for the truth with action is the cause of all our problems, and this article is another pimple on the acne scarred face of your generation; it is the symptom of your failure, your lack of will and guts. Americans have always owned their government and to say this is not the case is just a lie. The ‘good old days’ that you talk about did exist, it is your failure to understand this that is the problem. Even if they never did exist, that time is an ideal that you should be striving for, and that actually, you have the power to achieve. It will not come to pass however, on the back of cowardice, retreat and ingrained weakness.

The warfare state didn’t suddenly arrive in 2001, and it won’t disappear when the current lunatic in the Oval Office moves on.

This is another lie. If the ‘current lunatic’, your lunatic, the one you deserve, is replaced by a sane man, then sanity will flow from the Oval office. That is a fact, wether you accept it or not.

Born 50 years before George W. Bush became president, I have always lived in a warfare state. Each man in the Oval Office has presided over an arsenal of weapons designed to destroy human life en masse. In recent decades, our self-proclaimed protectors have been able – and willing – to destroy all of humanity.

And of course, all time began when you were born, and there was nothing before that.

We’ve accommodated ourselves to this insanity. And I do mean “we” – including those of us who fret aloud that the impact of our peace-loving wisdom is circumscribed because our voices don’t carry much farther than the choir. We may carry around an inflated sense of our own resistance to a system that is poised to incinerate and irradiate the planet.

There is no ‘we’ in this instance. There are many people whose actions (or inactions) make a difference, and if people like you only followed, our problems would be over. As for an inflated sense of importance, each drop of rain in a downpour does its part in creating a landslide. Each one is as important as the next, and all of them, together can cause great devastation or crops to grow. Your imagination is broken. You have no grasp of scale. You have no concept of your place in that country and its singular importance. This is why you fail.

Maybe it’s too unpleasant to acknowledge that we’ve been living in a warfare state for so long. And maybe it’s even more unpleasant to acknowledge that the warfare state is not just “out there.” It’s also internalized; at least to the extent that we pass up countless opportunities to resist it.

It is not in any way internalized, and not everyone passes up opportunities to resist it. Two million people marched in London to resist it. They and the millions of others who are against this insanity are not defeated; they simply do not have the correct tactic to hand. Once they discover the correct, twenty-first century tactic to defeat the ‘Warfare State’ then it will all be over. You are not helping with your corrosive negativity which offers nothing but a belly ache.

Like millions of other young Americans, I grew into awakening as the Vietnam War escalated. Slogans like “make love, not war” – and, a bit later, “the personal is political” – really spoke to us. But over the decades we generally learned, or relearned, to compartmentalize: as if personal and national histories weren’t interwoven in our pasts, presents and futures.

What you should have learned and what many people today have learned is that your failure is the greatest instruction that we could receive. It means that we will not and should not repeat your mistakes and failures. It means specifically that Demonstrations are pointless and the other things that we have been talking about on BLOGDIAL for years.

One day in 1969, a biologist named George Wald, who had won a Nobel Prize, visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – the biggest military contractor in academia – and gave a speech. “Our government has become preoccupied with death,” he said, “with the business of killing and being killed.”

That preoccupation has fluctuated, but in essence it has persisted. While speaking of a far-off war and a nuclear arsenal certain to remain in place after the war’s end, Wald pointed out: “We are under repeated pressure to accept things that are presented to us as settled – decisions that have been made.”

Today, in similar ways, our government is preoccupied and we are pressurized. The grisly commerce of killing thrives on aggressive war and on the perverse realpolitik of “national security” that brandishes the Pentagon’s weaponry against the world. At least tacitly, we accept so much that threatens to destroy anything and everything.

Only you accept this, there is no ‘we’ that accepts this. Stop pulling decent people into your personal nightmare of failure and despair.

We do not accept ‘the perverse realpolitik of “national security” ‘ we understand that this world view is totally false and engineered. We understand how governments are doing it, and how they are financing it. We understand what must be done to undo it.

WE are not like YOU.

As it happened, for reasons both “personal” and “political” – more accurately, for reasons indistinguishable between the two – my own life fell apart and began to reassemble itself during the same season of 1969 when George Wald gave his speech, which he called “A Generation in Search of a Future.”

Political and personal histories are usually kept separate – in how we’re taught, how we speak and even how we think. But I’ve become very skeptical of the categories. They may not be much more than illusions we’ve been conned into going through the motions of believing.

Learn to use the backspace key.

We actually live in concentric spheres, and “politics” suffuses households as well as what Martin Luther King Jr. called “The World House.” Under that heading, he wrote in 1967: “When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men. When we foolishly minimize the internal of our lives and maximize the external, we sign the warrant for our own day of doom. Our hope for creative living in this world house that we have inherited lies in our ability to re-establish the moral ends of our lives in personal character and social justice. Without this spiritual and moral reawakening we shall destroy ourselves in the misuse of our own instruments.”

The facts of the matter are that on the one hand, there are an astonishingly small number of people who are responsible for our problems, an on the other, since we are responsible for allowing it all to happen, a huge number of people who are equally responsible. But I digress. The people who commission the making of weapons and who make the policy are very small in number, and they can be controlled and their power destroyed very easily. This is a fact. The first step is to define the problem and then design a solution. This article doesn’t do this. It doesn’t even give us the benefit of your precious experience from the 1960’s which would be invaluable to us so we do not end up like you.

This article doesn’t help, doesn’t educate, offers no solutions, no analysis and so it is literally pointless. At a time when we have, by your own words, an insane man in the Oval Office, this is not the time for pointless writing on AntiWar.

While trying to understand the essence of what so many Americans have witnessed over the last half century, I worked on a book (titled Made Love, Got War) that sifts through the last 50 years of the warfare state… and, in the process, through my own life. I haven’t learned as much as I would have liked, but some patterns emerged – persistent and pervasive since the middle of the 20th century.

Your logic is flawed. You are unable to put together the pieces to this puzzle because you have not defined the problem the way that weapons designers and scientists define problems. Once you do that, you can take it all to pieces with a few simple actions. None of this is going to be found in your navel.

The warfare state doesn’t come and go. It can’t be defeated on Election Day. Like it or not, it’s at the core of the United States – and it has infiltrated our very being.

Almost correct, save the nonsense about ‘our very being’. You are partially right that it cannot be defeated on Election Day, and you are completely correct that it is at the core of the USA. What you fail to offer is a way to ‘destroy the core‘.

What we’ve tolerated has become part of us.

Nonsense.

What we accept, however reluctantly, seeps inward.

Hippy talk.

In the long run, passivity can easily ratify even what we may condemn. And meanwhile, in the words of Thomas Merton, “It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared.”

Meaningless, especially to people being murdered as bombs are dropping from YOUR government.

The triumph of the warfare state degrades and suppresses us all. Even before the weapons perform as guaranteed.

[…]

AntiWar

More twaddle.

What ‘The triumph of the warfare state’ ACTUALLY DOES is cause bridges to spontaneously collapse, causes your rights to be destroyed, causes you to be hated in the world, and causes MASS MURDER.

If you are not willing to address this problem, you should not be wasting electrons and time with stories on AntiWar that are nothing more than shoe gazing garbage.

AntiWar needs to tighten up its editorial policy…if it really exists to put an end to war. Its name however, might give a clue to its real function, to be anti-war it exists because this situation exists; it is not there to stop it, but thrives because of it. People are starving for the solution, the way out of this. They are desperate to be shown the light switch. AntiWar and StopWar drip feed them dead matches masquerading as light. Neither of these people really want to put a permanent end to the war machine. If they did, their actions would be completely different; they would actually be proposing and taking effective actions.

This has been another post tipping point post, typed out at an astonishing pace….

New immigration rules will force undocumented workers to be firedCarolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau(08-11) 04:00 PDT Washington – — People clamoring for a crackdown on illegal immigration got their wish with the Bush administration’s announcement Friday of sweeping new enforcement measures that will force employers to fire the millions of illegal workers they now employ.

“We strike at that magnet” of jobs, said Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, announcing a new rule holding employers liable for workers whose Social Security numbers do not match government records. The new rule takes effect in 30 days.

No state stands to feel the effects more than California, which has more illegal immigrants – an estimated 2.5 million – than any other state. California farmers are expected to be among the hardest hit with their heavy reliance on Mexican field hands, the vast majority of whom are undocumented. But service businesses will be heavily affected too, from hotels and restaurants to cleaning services and nursing homes.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein predicted a “catastrophe” in the state’s $32 billion agriculture industry as the new rules become effective with the fall harvest. But the proposal met no opposition from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, who issued a statement saying, “Securing our border remains a top priority for the New Direction Congress.”

This sounds like a declaration of war against business. Uncla Sam (yes, ‘uncla’) let all these people flood into the country, and now they are penalizing business for their lapses of security and imagination.

The rule that will require employers to fire employees unable to clear up problems with their Social Security numbers 90 days after they’ve been notified or face sanctions and a fine of at least $2,200 for a first offense. Up until now, employers have routinely ignored what are called no-match letters.

And this behaviour is quite right; it is not the job of business to sort out illegal immigrants from legal immigrants. The border starts at mexico, not the front door of some firm.

“In certain industries and in certain states, there will be a very significant impact on the functioning of businesses or entire sectors,” said Deborah Meyers, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. “Some employers are going to find themselves having to fire significant portions of their workforces, and I think there will be employees – some who are authorized and some who are not – who will find themselves out of a job.”

Meyers predicted the fallout to be quite visible within six months.

[…]

And then they are going to do what and go where? Has anyone actually THOUGHT about that?

Business groups pointed out that a significant fraction of no-match letters – including 11 percent for the work-authorized foreign born – are in error because of name changes and clerical mistakes, and could cause trouble for legal workers. Immigrant rights groups said the rule could drive millions of illegal immigrants who are now paying taxes underground and drive businesses who depend on them to relocate overseas.

Here it comes….

The system also has a big loophole that some experts warn could lead to more identity theft. Social Security does not catch numbers that are valid but have been stolen and used by another person, increasing the incentive to steal valid Social Security numbers.

Which is an argument for biometric REALID.

Hiring undocumented workers has been illegal for two decades, but until now, employers were not held liable for fraudulent documents.

And quite rightly.

“This is going to cause a lot of pain, but that pain I hope will be an impetus for our nation to get realistic and fix our broken immigration system,” said Larry Rohlfes, assistant executive director of the California Landscape Contractors Association. “In the meantime, people are going to be hurt.”

That is an understatement, and what is broken is not the ‘imiigration system’ but border security in the south of the USA. That is where all of these illegal immigrants are coming from, not JFK.

Rohlfes predicted that many workers would not leave the country but go underground as unlicensed contractors, where they will not pay taxes. “It’s going to hurt our remaining workers because the underground economy competes with us and because they have much lower costs,” Rohlfes said.

That is exactly what (amongst other things) that they will do. There will be a huge parallel society where the suck law abiding pay the penalties of being law abiding and everyone else lives free.

Much will hinge on how effectively the administration enforces the new rules.

[…]

No, it will hinge on wether or not any business obeys this insanity. I suspect many will not.

About 12 million people are estimated to be in the country illegally, and about half a million more have been arriving each year. They have moved beyond traditional immigrant states like California and Texas and into the South and Midwest, where their presence has created a voter backlash and spawned state and local laws intended to make it difficult for illegal immigrants to work and even find housing.

Illegal immigrants make up about 5 percent of the civilian workforce, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Most have arrived since 1990. Many have children born in the United States who are citizens – which adds up to about 64 percent of the children in unauthorized families, or 3.1 million children, Pew estimates. Most illegal migrants crossed the border from Mexico and farther south, but about 40 percent arrived legally from all other parts of the world and overstayed their tourist or student visas.

And this is the big problem; what do you do with all the hate and resentment that is growing? What do you do with all the families where the children are citizens and the parents are illegal immigrants? Its a disaster. Some of the comments on this story have it just about right:

This could be the next tactic of the corrupt Bush administration in getting an Amnesty Bill passed. If they get a panic going in business and then get a panic going in the public, through the use of the media, they could appear to sway opinion in their favor. I already see a sort of panic on the rise anyway. The economy appears to be correcting itself to all of the scams and lawlessness. Weve run up the price of our homes just like we did stock in the thirties. We were willing to out-borrow the next. It works okay on the way up. Not so great on the way down. Then youve got the presses running full speed to finance all of the wars. I have seen this sort of article over and over recently. If this is a trick, I would expect a huge backlash to follow their actions.

and

I must say I’m shocked that Bush is actually doing something about this problem but I’m fairly sure that employers will just rehire the undocumented workers after the 90 days and start the process again. Currently employers have a year to figure out the status of their workers. The process is: hire, check their SS #, govt tells the employer the worker in illegal, employer has a year to check, at the year mark they realease the worker then rehire them and start the process all over again. The only thing that has teeth is if the govt actually enforces sanctions. I assure you employers are shaken up by these types of measures.

Talk about a work around!!!

and now we get to the meat in the hamburger:

As part of the stepped-up enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security said it would expand an electronic verification system called “Web Basic Pilot” to all federal contractors, as well as continue to train state and local law enforcement to help enforce immigration laws.

[…]

The number of Border Patrol agents is expected to rise to 18,300 by the end of the year; there will also be 370 miles of fencing along with other technology such as vehicle barriers and camera and radar towers that are now being constructed.

Also, the administration announced that it would implement a long-delayed exit verification system at border crossings to find out who is overstaying their visas. That program, called US-Visit, has been hampered by the cost and technological problems. The administration said it would plow ahead with plans to require all travelers to use passports, despite the enormous backlogs that delayed travel by U.S. citizens earlier this year.

[…]

SF Gate

And there you have it. We all knew in in advance that USVISIT was not about ‘terrorists’ but was instead designed to control genpop and that is exactly what they are going to do with it. Once they expand it to solve this ‘problem’ its effectiveness will appear to have greatly increased because instead of catching just 1500+ people in violation, they will be able to claim that they have caught millions of people, illegal immigrants, with the system.

In order to do it, they will have to get everyone into the system, the biometric net, so that they can scan people randomly, all the time and deny every sort of service to people who are not allowed to be in the USA.

All those ignorant hicks from the stix who deeply resent the Mexican invasion will line up to be fingerprinted, because it will force the invaders back to Mexico.

This is the cause they have been waiting for, sufficient reason to give up liberty that not only seems entirely reasonable, but which people will clamor for of their own free will….of which there will be nothing left after there is total compliance with the Quantized Human Pleb Grid.

This is the REALREASON™ why they left the borders open for so long; to create a crisis that would allow them to put everyone in this system under artificially created conditions where no decent person would object to being fingerprinted because the threat is real and obvious.

Maybe now we can see the purpose of all those concentration camps that are being manned right now; imagine all those hot blooded illegal immigrants getting mad about this and rioting in their millions. They will have to be rounded up and put somewhere.

Horrible!

On 23 July, the text of the EU’s draft Reform Treaty was released in French only. The English-language texts were released on 30-31 July, and to date (9 August) the draft Treaty is still not available in any other of the EU’s 20-odd languages.

The draft Reform Treaty would repeal or amend every single Article of the 62 Articles of the current Treaty on European Union (TEU) and would make 296 amendments to the 318 Articles of the current Treaty establishing the European Community (TEC). It would also amend or repeal most of the current 36 Protocols to the current Treaties as well as many Articles of the separate Treaty establishing the European Atomic Energy Community (the Euratom Treaty). Finally, it would add a number of new Protocols and Declarations to the Treaties.

The EU summit meeting (European Council) decided in June that these far-reaching amendments should be agreed by the end of 2007 and that the Reform Treaty should be ratified by June 2009 at the latest. In fact, the intention of the Portuguese Presidency of the Council is to agree on the text of the Treaty by mid-October. Taking account of the summer break this leaves very little time for civil society, national parliaments and the European Parliament to examine the draft text before it is agreed – and then once it is agreed, the Treaty will be presented to parliaments on a “take it or leave it” basis.

Moreover, the text of the Reform Treaty is completely unintelligible unless it is read alongside the existing Treaties. Furthermore, the full impact of many of the amendments to the Treaties set out in the draft Reform Treaty needs further explanation. Finally, there has been much public discussion of whether or not the draft Reform Treaty is essentially identical to the EU’s Constitutional Treaty of 2004.

In order to further public understanding of and debate upon the draft Reform Treaty, the following Statewatch analyses make the text of the draft Treaty comprehensible, by setting out the entire texts of the existing TEU and TEC and showing precisely how those texts would be amended by the draft Treaty. There are explanatory notes on the impact of each substantive amendment to the Treaties, and each analysis includes general comments, giving an overview of the changes and pointing out exactly which provisions of the draft Reform Treaty were taken from the Constitutional Treaty, and which provisions are different from the Constitutional Treaty.

There are 3 analyses, divided into ten parts.

Analysis no 1
– focusses on the issue of Justice and Home Affairs

Analysis no. 2 is the amended text of the TEU, and is divided into 2 parts:
– the non-foreign policy part of the Treaty (basic principles and key institutional rules of the EU) and
– the foreign policy part of that Treaty

Analysis no. 3 is the amended text of the TEC, and is divided into seven parts more or less following the structure of the Treaty:
– Part One of the Treaty on general provisions
– Part Two on non-discrimination and citizenship
– half of Part Three on the internal market and competition(except for the JHA clauses, which are the subject of analysis no. 1)
– the second half of Part Three, on other internal EU policies (such as social policy, monetary union and environment policy)
– Parts Four and Five, on the associated territories and external relations (including trade and development policy)
– Part Six, on the institutional rules(including the rules on the political institutions, the Court of Justice and the ‘flexibility’ rules)
– Part Seven, the final provisions

Analyses of the Protocols and Declarations, and the Euratom Treaty, will follow later.

[…]

Statewatch

Well well well.

On the fifth page of the first PDF, we have this:

Article 61 [67] (III-257)

1. The Union shall constitute an area of freedom, security and justice with respect for fundamental rights and the different legal systems and traditions of the Member States.

Sounds good doesnt it? but wait…

2. It shall ensure the absence of internal border controls for persons and shall frame a common policy on asylum, immigration and external border control, based on solidarity between Member States, which is fair towards third-country nationals. For the purpose of this Title, stateless persons shall be treated as third-country nationals.

WTF? Booooooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!!!!!!!!

My emphasis.

A common policy on asylum? Lets let that one lie for the moment.

This part of the document is not only outrageous, for a legal document, it is extremely vague. As far as I know, there is no legal relationship known as ‘solidarity’. This sort of language does not belong in a legal document, unless it is defined somewhere else with great precision.

This part also uses the phrase ‘which is fair’. This is entirely nebulous. What the Germans consider to be fair is anathema to the decent English. This treaty, if it is filled with this sort of garbage, is a dead document. Any lawyer who looks at it will destroy it without getting past the first five pages.

3. The Union shall endeavour to ensure a high level of security through measures to prevent and combat crime, racism and xenophobia, and through measures for coordination and cooperation between police and judicial authorities and other competent authorities, as well as through the mutual recognition of judgments in criminal matters and, if necessary, through the approximation of criminal laws.

This cannot work, because the laws of Austria are reprehensible if applied to an Englishman. There cannot be mutual recognition of Germany’s laws for example, because they have outlawed Home Schooling; should a Home Schooling family flee to the UK for freedom, if this treaty were in place, they would be extraditable for something that is not a crime in the UK.

4. The Union shall facilitate access to justice, in particular through the principle of mutual recognition of judicial and extrajudicial decisions in civil matters.

Once again, there is no way that the UK can recognize the myriad bad law that exists throughout the EU. It is not a problem that these countries have what we think is bad law, you simply do not subject yourself to them by no going there to live or do business. What is entirely wrong is that they want to force their law down our throats.

Article 62 [68] (III-258)

The European Council shall define the strategic guidelines for legislative and operational planning within the area of freedom, security and justice.

Unelected, unaccountable, undemocratic and totally insane.

Only a traitor would sign such a document.

There cannot be a referendum on this because no one in their right mind would sign up to it. This can only be brought in by compulsion, which will make all of its provisions void on their face.

In effect, this is a soft coup. You have no obligation to obey any of its provisions, and any government that ratifies this treaty is illegitimate.

Doreen Lawrence attacks Tory frontrunner, saying black people will not vote for him

Patrick Wintour, political editor
Saturday August 4, 2007

Doreen Lawrence, the mother of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, yesterday launched a fierce personal attack on Boris Johnson, saying he would destroy multicultural London if elected mayor, and that no informed black person would vote for him.

Ms Lawrence, who does not normally become involved in party politics, said she had been moved to make the criticisms by her anger at Mr Johnson’s attitude to the Macpherson inquiry in 1999 into the Metropolitan police’s failure to bring her son’s killers to justice 14 years ago.

Her intervention comes as David Cameron, the Tory leader, steps up his efforts to woo the black vote in the capital.

Ms Lawrence said: “Boris Johnson is not an appropriate person to run a multi-cultural city like London. Think of London, the richness of London, and having someone like him as mayor would destroy the city’s unity. He is definitely not the right person to even be thinking to put his name forward.

“Those people that think he is a lovable rogue need to take a good look at themselves, and look at him. I just find his remarks very offensive. I think once people read his views, there is no way he is going to get the support of any people in the black community.”

Mr Johnson wrote a series of articles at the time of the Macpherson inquiry, claiming some of its recommendations were born of political correctness and that the furore around the murder had created the whiff of a witchhunt against the police. The inquiry team found the police institutionally racist.

Mr Johnson was especially condemnatory of a “weird recommendation that the law might be changed so as to allow prosecution for racist language or behaviour ‘other than in a public place’.”

“Not even under the law of Ceausescu’s Romania could you be prosecuted for what you said in your own kitchen,” he wrote. “No wonder the police are already whingeing that they cannot make any arrests in London. No wonder the CPS groans with anti-discrimination units, while making a balls-up of so many cases.”

He argued that “the PC brigade, having punched this hole in the Metropolitan police, is swarming through to take over the whole system” and went on to say that he feared “what started as a sensible attempt to find justice for the family of Stephen Lawrence has given way to hysteria”.

In his articles – mainly in the Daily Telegraph – Mr Johnson also made it clear that he believed there had been “grotesque failures in the Lawrence murder case, and they may well have originated in racism”, adding the police officers “may have jumped to the wrong conclusions due to a racialist mindset”.

In another article, presumably for stylistic effect, he has referred to children as “piccaninnies” and described the “watermelon smiles of black people”.

Ms Lawrence said such remarks made it surprising that Mr Cameron was backing Mr Johnson. “[David Cameron] says he is trying to change the Conservative party from its past, and support multiculturalism, and bring in new communities, then supporting Boris Johnson is not a way of doing that.”

[…]

Guardian

This woman is insane.

Under ‘Red Ken’ Livingston, London has been turned into the very model of dehumanized surveillance grid living, where everyone’s privacy is violated routinely by a system that he personally implemented; the ‘Congestion Charge’. It was Red Ken who extended it despite the explicit objection of the majority of Londoners.

Under people like him, the so called ‘blacks’ will have an increasingly hard time as the biometric net / Quantized Human Pleb Grid is rolled out. They will be the ones routinely stopped and fingerprinted. They are already the ones most represented in the appalling and unprecedented DNA database. It is people like Boris who are for removing these monstrosities; she should be FOR him not AGAINST him.

This woman simply is not thinking:

She added: “He felt that people should be entitled to say what they want. It sounds to me that what he believes is that because something is said and done in private it is acceptable, but clearly it can never be acceptable to hold those views. Anyway, what is said in private normally manifests itself out in public.”

See what I mean?

Not once does this deranged person mention a single policy that Boris wants to implement. But this is not about policy. This is about the inmates taking over the asylum.

What has happened to her is unbelievably sad, but it has clearly caused her to become irrational. The media have made her into a sort of saint figure, and they listen to and print her every word uncritically. This is crazy. Her suffering of an unimaginable injustice does not qualify her to set the standards by which we should all live, and I deeply despise people who want to control what we can and cannot say.

Boris Johnson, as a British man® is free to write whatever he wants. This is the freedom that people in Britain have, and just because he has a sense of humor that someone somewhere might find offensive, this does not exclude him from running for office, and it does not mean that he would not make a brilliant Mayor of London. I would rather have a ribald Boris as Mayor of London tearing down the Congestion Charge system, anonymising the Oyster Card system, mandating that busses take cash, reinstating the Routemaster, overturning the smoking ban … returning London to what it is meant to be, than some politically correct, fascist police state facilitator who is turning the entire city into a giant concentration camp.

Increasingly, people are going to have to accept that people ‘say things’. All sorts of things. The internets can bring you these things instantly. This woman would have us living in a paranoid world where everyone is thinking one thing and writing another; where everyone is writing as if they are under surveillance, where their freely expressed thought can come back to ‘haunt them’ in the future, as PC witchunters Google their words for expressions of forbidden thought.

That is not a world where any decent person wants to live and work. It is the world of fascism, and people who say things like she does are the absolute enemies of mankind … and she has every right to say it, as wrong headed as it is. This unelected figurehead has the right to say whatever she wants, and so does Boris. That is freedom of speech in a free country. She should not be toppled from her position as a ‘community leader’ for spouting twaddle, and Boris should not be put off the list of Mayoral candidates for using his own unique brand of expression. Everyone can choose for themselves who they want to control London…that is where the person is elected.

But I digress…

Everyone is going to have to accept that people write what they write, and this has no bearing on the sort of person they really are, or what their policies are and how efficiently they implement them. If we do not accept this, then only the people who have never written are going to be ‘fit to be employed’ or ‘fit for office’. If someone doesn’t write, keeping their innermost ghastly thoughts (if a thought can be ghastly) secret and to themselves, this doesn’t mean that they are ‘nice’, or that they will be able to do the job well. If someone only writes smooth things, does this mean that we can trust them more? Of course not. What we have to talk about are ideas applied to problems and then performance and execution. Writing for fun or employment has nothing to do with either of those things, and these personal attacks on Boris Johnson are just childish, stupid and pointless. Opinion must always be separated from Policy. Informal thought written down is NOT POLICY.

Lets see what Boris wants to do with London / what he is informally thinking shall we?

Transport

A dedicated cyclist, Boris Johnson wants to get rid of “Ken Livingstone’s 18-metre-long socialist frankfurter buses” and speed humps “which necessitate the need for 4x4s”. He has attacked legislation on car booster seats for children as “utterly demented”.

He has bemoaned “the unbelievable and chronic chaos on the tube” and the state of the railways, observing: “The fundamental problem is not that the train companies are monstrously abusing the travelling public, though they are … Gordon Brown and the Treasury are … making them pay so much for the franchise that they simply don’t have enough to invest in services.”

I agree with all of this.

Marriage

“David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith are plainly right to extol the benefits of marriage, and, if a £20 tax credit would really begin to bubblegum together our broken society, then that would clearly be a price worth paying … It is outrageous that the benefit system should be so heavily skewed in favour of single parent families,” Johnson wrote recently.

Marriage is good!

Diversity and integration

The Tory MP has argued that society must “inculcate … Britishness, especially into young Muslims”, adding: “We should teach English, and we should teach in English. We should teach British history. We should think again about the jilbab, with the signals of apartness that it sends out, and we should probably scrap faith schools.

“We should forbid the imams from preaching sermons in anything but English … we cannot continue with the multicultural apartheid.”

Last year he said localism could lead to sharia law because “large chunks of the Muslim population” did not feel British. He added: “Supposing Tower Hamlets or parts of Bradford were to become governed by religious zealots believing in that system?”

The Mayor of London cannot forbid people from preaching in Arabic… or Latin for that matter. This is just TALK. Real democracies have checks and balances in place so that no matter what the personal opinions of elected officials are, they cannot violate your rights. Sadly, the Mayor of London can violate your rights willy nilly, and there is nothing that you can do about it. If a bad man, like Red Ken is in charge, then bad things like the Congestion Charge can and will happen. The rights of people in the UK need to be enshrined….but thats another blog post.

Inequality

He admits the low tax rates enjoyed by many in the City are “odd”, but argues: “Without their efforts, there would be no squillions, and a windfall tax might simply kill the goose.” He suggests philanthropy should be encouraged instead.

He has accused Labour of waging a middle-class war against “the bottom 20% of society – the group that supplies us with the chavs, the losers, the burglars, the drug addicts and the 70,000 people who are lost in our prisons … They keep them snared in a super-complicated system of means-tested benefits … They tax them an exorbitant proportion of their incomes.”

Completely correct, and he is completely right about Philanthropy, as are others.

The environment, Housing, Health its all good. This is a man who has some common sense, who is not in thrall to political correctness, which means that he is free thinking. We need free thinkers…heavens above, we need people who can THINK. That is why Boris Johnson should be Mayor of London. ‘Shock Jock’ Nick Ferrari is just thick, and anyone who used to be ‘ShowBiz Reporter at The Sun’ shouldn’t be left in charge of a ten penny piece let alone one of the greatest cities mankind ever created. Ken Livingston has been an unmitigated disaster. Whoever the lib-dems are fielding they are unelectable thanks to their absurd local income tax ‘ideas’.

and finally, a nifty comment from a real person:

Bye ken, and welcome Boris, who is someone who will say what we all feel, and not scared by the do gooder groups, who so many bow down to now!

– Graham, Southend on sea, UK

from This is London

See what I mean?…again?

U.N. rapporteur raps Britains’s law on fingerprinting foreigners
BC-UH-Britain-Racism
By Sara Sasaki

LONDON. July 18 – A special U.N. rapporteur on racism on Thursday criticized Britain’s new immigration legislation on fingerprinting and photographing all foreign visitors as a process 0f treating foreigners like criminals.

Ooudou Diene. on his last day of a six-day visit to Britain to conduct a follow-up of his report on racism, said at a press conference in London the immigration bill that just passed through Parliament on Wednesday “illustrates something I have been denouncing in my reports for four years.”

“It is the fact that, especially since Sept. 11. there has been a process of criminalization of foreigners” all over the world, he added.

The enacted legislation will allow immigration officials to take biometric data from foreigners age 16 and above as pari of measures to light terrorism, enabling them to check for past deportees and anyone designated as a terrorist by the justice minister.

But Diene warned that the fight against terrorism is being used against foreigners worldwide and governments are criminalizing them when they are actually supposed to protect them.

The measures of the new legislation exclude ethnic Irish and other permanent residents with special status, those under 16, those visiting Britain for diplomatic or official purposes, and those invited by the state.

But foreigners living in Britain without special permanent residence status such as those on a work visa will also be fingerprinted and photographed at immigration upon arrival.

Alter his visit t to Britain last July, Diene said racial discrimination in Britain is “deep and profound,” and expressed concerns over the treatment of Scottish indigenous people, Muslim and Hindu minorities living in Britain and new immigrants originating from Asia, the Middle East Africa.

[…]

http://www.debito.org/kyodo051806.jpg
http://www.debito.org/rapporteur.html

BRITISH visitors to America will be required to register their travel plans online 48 hours before departure, according to a bill expected to be passed by the US Congress this week.

This will cause even more people to choose other places to vacation, study, etc etc. Already people are turning their backs on the USA, and this will make it even worse.

Online registration will give US authorities the chance to reject travellers before they leave their home country. Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, said: “It will avoid the problem where somebody shows up at the airport in the US, winds up getting rejected and has to fly back.”

How many times does this happen, out of the millions and millions of people who persist in visiting that country? What are the facts?

The form will ask for passport number, flight number, purpose of journey and place of stay. It will be similar to the one passengers currently fill in mid-flight and, said Chertoff, would “probably be good for a year or so”.

Probably… ‘Or so’… Nice!

It could cause problems for visitors travelling at short notice although there will be some provision for last-minute bookings. The new 48-hour rule is expected to be implemented next year.

It WILL cause problems for visitors and what it will do is put the USA down on the list of places that immediately come to mind when you want to go somewhere just for fun. From now on, only people with a compelling reason will go to that place.

Chertoff denied the system was draconian in comparison with some European security laws. “In various parts of the continent if you don’t carry an identification card you’d be put in jail whereas in this country that would not be tolerated,” he said.

This line is the one that caused me to post this wretched garbage.

Everyone knows that the usa is trying to bring in a de-facto ID card, and that the states are, one by one, enacting legislation to forbid REALID. Everyone knows that you cannot get on an internal flight in the usa without ID. Everyone knows that the police can demand ID from you and if you do not comply, you get not only put in gaol, but tazered Check out the video of this very thing happening and read some posts on Papers Please! to find out what the truth about this really is.

Pocket Satan living dead faced Chertoff, consummate lair, fear-monger and un-American bastard has no business admonishing Europeans for their (admittedly very bad) ID policies when in his own country what they are doing and what he is personally responsible for is far far worse.

Travellers to America are already subject to photograph and fingerprint checks, causing long queues on arrival.

and ‘Sarah Baxter’, who wrote this garbage, forgot to say that this is the cause of the sharp and sustained decline in the visitor numbers to the usa.

The measure would apply to Britain and 26 other countries, mostly from the European Union, whose citizens are allowed to travel visa-free to America for up to 90 days.

And it is the money from tourists and businessmen from these 26 countries that is being blocked by this insanity.

The bill is part of a series of tighter border controls being introduced.

[…]

Times

No, it is part of the insanity that has gripped the usa. Get it right you idiot!

The Morgan Fascist Coup Plot and How FDR Defeated It

by L. Wolfe
Introduction

Some 12 years ago, this news service published a report on the 1930s fascist coup plot against the Franklin D. Roosevelt government, led by a Morgan-centered cabal of powerful financial interests; the coup would have replaced FDR with a puppet government whose policies would be controlled by a cabal of wealthy financial plutocrats. As the report made clear, the intention of the conspirators was to use the anarchy and chaos produced by the coup, to eliminate for all time the threat to their power represented by the U.S. Presidency and U.S. Constitution.

Today, we are faced with the same intention by the heirs of that cabal of fascist bankers, who now control most of the Executive branch of the U.S. government and who have, through their agents such as Felix Rohatyn, attempted to emasculate the Democratic opposition. They now seek to impose a fascist government that Democratic leader Lyndon LaRouche has warned would be “Schacht without Hitler”—a brutal austerity government without the overt “messy” characteristics of the Hitler regime.[1]

In the intervening dozen years, our research has more accurately located the Morgan coup plot as part of the broader push for a fascist world order, as promoted by the Nazi-supporting, Synarchist networks of this cabal. The destruction of the U.S. constitutional system was a critical feature of this push for fascism.

Their efforts came close to succeeding and might have, had it not been for the courage of America’s then-most decorated officer, Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler, and the extraordinary political leadership of FDR himself. While Butler exposed the plot, FDR and his allies waged war against the power of the private investment banks that sponsored fascism at home and abroad, seeking to curb their power, and placing the sovereign power of the U.S. government and Constitution over them. In asserting that all economic policy must serve the constitutionally mandated principle of the General Welfare, FDR put the nation on a pathway out of the chaos and pessimism that served as the breeding grounds for fascist coup plotters. while laying the economic and moral foundation for the direct military battle with the bankers’ fascist golem in Europe in World War II.

The story of this plot was front-page news in even such establishment papers as the New York Times, as it occurred. However, since the death of Roosevelt in 1945, the Synarchists were successful in all but wiping it from the pages of history and common memory. Following the publication of our report, and especially in the recent three years, as the world plunges towards economic collapse and financial chaos worse than the Great Depression, and with it, a new bankers’ drive for fascist dictatorship, there has been a renewed interest in at least some aspects of the plot. PBS, for example, produced a documentary on it, and there are at least two new books in the offing.[2]

We present here an edited and updated version of our 1994 report as an urgent matter of interest to those who must once again rise to fight the renewed fascist threat, so that they might know their true enemies and what they are capable of […]

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2006/3332morgan_coup_plot.html

BBQ says it’s true, so it may be.

Infowars report it, so for sure its true.

and as for ‘what they are capable of’ we all know that the mythical ‘911’ is what they are capable of and what they actually did.

And finally…

I always knew it! :

What’s that you say, you don’t know who the ‘man’ on the left is?

Shame on you!

Phishers go after two-factor authentication systems

By Eric Bangeman| Published: July 11, 2006 – 01:49PM CT

One of the problems with passwords is that they can be compromised relatively easily. While brute-force cracks are possible, it is much easier to convince users to willingly part with their passwords using social engineering. That’s how phishers operate, by tricking users into entering their passwords—along with other personal information—on convincing-looking but spoofed web pages. Once they have that information, bank balances shrink while credit card balances grow.

Two-factor authentication has been touted as a solution to the problem of users giving up their passwords too easily. One group of phishers is determined to prove otherwise, as a recent attack demonstrates.

On the surface, two-factor authentication is a relatively simple solution. In order to log in to a protected site, users must enter a password as well as a second bit of information. In the case of Citibank and a handful of other financial institutions, users are given a USB dongle which displays a passphrase or string of numbers that updates every 60 seconds. It is only when the correct password is paired with a valid passphrase generated by the token that the user is granted access to their account information.

A group of phishers operating out of a Russian website attempted to trick Citibank customers in the customary manner, by directing them to a lookalike website and asking for the usual personal information. As an added bonus, the phishers also asked for the passphrase generated by the token. Once they had both pieces of the authentication information, they would presumably then transmit it onto Citibank within a 60-second time period and go about their nefarious business. It’s a simple adaptation of existing methods: just add an additional field to existing forms and they are all set.

The phishing attacks demonstrates one of the weaknesses of two-factor authentication: it’s still quite vulnerable to “middleman” attacks. If a malicious site is able to pose as the genuine article, collect the necessary authentication from the unsuspecting user, and act on it quickly enough, it is not much safer than traditional password-only attacks.

Some banks and other institutions have already made substantial investments in developing and deploying two-factor authentication systems. The central theme in marketing the systems to customers is added security. Microsoft had even planned to natively support it in Vista, although that ultimately met the same fate as other features originally planned for its new OS. However, as the latest bit of phishing demonstrates, it’s not a cure-all. When used in conjunction with other antiphishing tools, it can be more effective. But as long as there are gullible users, no combination of security measures will be completely foolproof.

[…]

ArsTechnica

My emphasis.

As we know, password abuse in the NHS is endemic. Gullible or simply exhausted users will be tricked into revealing their passwords and token numbers, and then ‘Russian Hackers’ (the media’s latest bogeyman) will get in and start to copy ContactPoint entries, i.e. the private and sensitive details of children. This will be automated, so they will have a system to harvest accounts in place that will allow them to quickly create a working copy of the live ContactPoint database.

The US VISIT programme, which is intended to record the entry and exit of every visitor, is still not working nor is there any prospect of it doing so. While most of the the 300 air, sea and land “points of entry” are operating “biometrically enabled” entry records “comparable exit capabilities are not” said a report on the evidence presented to the US House of Representatives by officials from the Government Accountability Office (GAO): Homeland Security: Prospects For Biometric US-VISIT Exit Capability Remain Unclear Over the past 4 years $1.3 billion has been spent on the system.

The report says that:

“The prospects for successfully delivering an operational exit solution are as uncertain today as they were 4 years ago.”

The Department of Homeland Security is committed to providing exit records at air and seaports it has produced no plans or analyses to achieving this and:

“acknowledged that a near-term biometric solution for land POEs is not possible”

Even where biometrically enabled system were available at 11 air and sea pilot schemes:

“on average only about 24 percent of those travellers subject to US-VISIT actually complied with the exit processing steps.”

This was because compliance was “voluntary”.

The biggest long-term problem is the land exit schemes.

“According to program officials, no technology or device currently exists to biometrically verify persons exiting the country that would not have a major impact on land POE facilities. They added that technological advances over the next 5 to 10 years will make it possible to biometrically verify persons exiting the country without major changes to facility infrastructure and without requiring those exiting to stop and/or exit their vehicles.”

Indeed land exit capabilities are “being deferred to an unspecified future time”

The report’s overall conclusion is that:

“there is no reason to expect that DHS’s newly launched efforts to deliver an air and sea exit solution will produce results different from its past efforts—namely, no operational exit solution despite many years and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. More importantly, the continued absence of an exit capability will hinder DHS’s ability to effectively and efficiently perform its border security and immigration enforcement mission.”

And what of the overall effectiveness of the US VISIT scheme? Last autumn the Acting Director of Homeland Security said that out of 63 million recorded visitors “1,200 criminals and immigration violators” had been denied entry – this report says the figure has risen to 1,500.

[…]

http://www.statewatch.org/news/2007/jul/o2usa-goa-exit-report.htm

You
Can’t
Make
Shit
Like
This
Up!

So they are counting people in, but not out? The exit system is VOLUNTARY?!

Look at the HUGE expense just to catch 1,500 people, all of them minor ‘criminals’. Use the Google to find out what we said about this before. This article demonstrates that the VAST MAJORITY of people coming to the usa are not in any way criminal. This means that they should never be treated as criminals. Period.

This is a monumental waste of money, a mass violation of people’s rights, and yet another example of ‘Vendor Hypnosis’. You can work out what that phrase means can’t you?

SHAME SHAME SHAME on the USA!