The popular media are full of ‘news’ about Greek finances and their impact on the political landscape of Europe and beyond;

World Bank chief Robert Zoellick: Greece’s €130bn bailout merely buys it time

Robert Zoellick, the outgoing President of the World Bank, has warned that Greece’s latest €130bn (£108bn) bailout would merely buy it time, adding that a European recession would hamper crucial reforms needed to lift the area out of the crisis.

The desperate acts of vainglorious politicians (not to mention the blinkered journalists who insist political /economic restructuring is the big story here) are of interest for one reason only: to remind us of that feature noted by Thomas Carlyle in his opus of 1837.

Hunger and nakedness and righteous oppression lying heavy on 25 million hearts: this, not the wounded vanities or contradicted philosophies of philosophical advocates, rich shopkeepers, rural noblesse, was the prime mover in the French revolution; as the like will be in all such revolutions, in all countries.

I am indebted to Edward Hallett Carr and his magnificent lectures collected in ‘What Is History?’ for selecting this quote in his discussion that history is ‘a matter of numbers’.

Athens mayhem raises fears of Greek social explosion

(Reuters) – Greek political leaders say the nation must accept yet more punishing austerity or face a social explosion, but after a night of violence and destruction in Athens, some people fear this explosion may already be about to begin.

‘Punishing austerity’ lies heavy on more hearts every day. The number grows. History awaits.

It is now clear where the lines dividing freedom minded people on the issue of Bitcoin are drawn.

On the one side, you have mostly older computer illiterates who are out of their comfort zone, and on the other, you have younger computer literate people who are comfortable with both free market ideas, sound economics and computers.

The former camp, the computer illiterates, all use the same form of argumentation and fallacious reasoning to attack Bitcoin, including straw men. Here is a good example:

Approximately 2,000 years ago, Aristotle said good money must be:

• Durable
• Portable
• Divisible and consistent
• Have intrinsic value

The astute reader will immediately realize that Bitcoin does not possess any of those characteristics and was subject to trouble from the getgo — not to mention the security issues that immediately arise with anything computer– and Internet related. A computer generated currency is not durable, as the recent hack demonstrates. And it’s certainly not portable. Can you imagine bringing your computer to the door to pay for your next Chinese food delivery? You get the idea for the remaining characteristics.

[…]

http://howestreet.com/2011/06/grim-decade-employment/

The straw man here is the line about Chinese food delivery. There is no reason of course, why you could not pay for your Chinese food in advance by Bitcoin. Its like saying, “imagine ordering books by computer from a company, lets call it ‘Amazon’. Imagine the delivery man having to keep change for all the sales! Its a security nightmare. IT WILL NEVER CATCH ON!”

The astute reader recognises faulty reasoning when he sees it, and is not persuaded by straw men.

As for the Aristotelian qualities that money must have, lets go through them for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is durable. In fact, because it is not a physical good but is instead, an idea fixed in media, it can last for an indefinite time as long as it is copied to another medium. You can keep backups of it, which of course, you cannot do with physical money. Once again, the fact that you can have two copies of your money and cannot spend it twice is the breakthrough of Bitcoin.

Anyone who says Bitcoin is not portable, is not thinking clearly. Bitcoin is the most portable ‘money’ ever created. It can be sent anywhere in the world in an instant. There is no other money like it in the world in this respect.

Bitcoin is divisible. Each coin can be divided into one million equal parts. Bitcoin is consistent in value, if we accept that the value of a commodity is related to its supply.

The only test Bitcoin fails, some would argue, is that it has no intrinsic value. Lets go to the dictionaries to be absolutely sure:

What Does Intrinsic Value Mean?
1. The actual value of a company or an asset based on an underlying perception of its true value including all aspects of the business, in terms of both tangible and intangible factors. This value may or may not be the same as the current market value. Value investors use a variety of analytical techniques in order to estimate the intrinsic value of securities in hopes of finding investments where the true value of the investment exceeds its current market value.

[…]

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/intrinsicvalue.asp#ixzz1PzdrOzEy

In finance, intrinsic value refers to the value of a security which is intrinsic to or contained in the security itself. It is also frequently called fundamental value. It is ordinarily calculated by summing the future income generated by the asset, and discounting it to the present value. Simply put, it is the actual value of a security as opposed to the market or book value.

[…]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_value_(finance)

An intrinsic property is an essential or inherent property of a system or of a material itself or within. It is independent of how much of the material is present and is independent of the form the material, e.g., one large piece or a collection of smaller pieces.

[…]

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

I think the last one puts the nail in the coffin of the argument that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value.

Bitcoin has intrinsic value, by definition, because the system has value to the people who use it. It also has intrinsic value, by definition, because the amount of material in a thing is not relevant to wether or not a thing has intrinsic value; Bitcoins are immaterial, and they are part of a system that has value.

The fact that a single exchange, MTGox was hacked does not demonstrate that ‘A computer generated currency is not durable’; this is another instance of fallacious thinking. For fun, can you pick the correct one?

Once again all of these fallacious arguments are being made on the internet, and the irony of this appears to be lost on the people making them.

Even if Bitcoin is only used by one one hundredth of the entire internet population regularly, the number of people using it will be enough. More than enough. “For what?” I hear you ask… anything we need.

The people who build the systems that change the world do not need luddites, computer illiterates and sticklers to urge them to do what they do. The internet was built by a small number of people, and it has spread everywhere. Bitcoin was devised by one person, and it has already changed everything.

While we are at it, there is another prediction that has gone out of the window, the lone wolf inventor was declared extinct a few years ago, the claim being that the research and development costs involved in creating new things meant that unshaven men in their garages would not be able to produce world changing technologies.

How wrong they were. Bitcoin and Bittorrent are only two examples.

This is true for Bitcoin and the systems that are going to come after it. You need only look at at a widely adopted system like Skype, which is a decedent of ideas behind Gnutella, which itself was a decedent of Napster.

This is another problem that afflicts the discussion of Bitcoin; not only do very few people have a knowledge of how software works in general, but even fewer know about the recent history of some of the amazing tools we now take for granted.

Take a look at Nautilus, the file browser. Did you know that a company raised 11 million dollars to develop it? The company was called Eazel, and now we all benefit from that massive investment whenever we use the file browser in our Linux desktops, since Nautilus is now free and open source. Before this company, file browsers on Linux were not so user friendly. The people who invested in Eazel might not have made a profit, but that is not the point. The point here is that a world class piece of software was released that made something that was hard much more easy. The same dynamic can happen with the Bitcoin client, and when it does, we are going to experience massive, permanent disruptive change.

When thinkers like Mark Shuttleworth or Justin Frankel or a consortium of developers with many millions of dollars in the bank decides to fork and polish Bitcoin, you are going to see the emergence of a new version of the Bitcoin client, which will be as usable as the Skype client, that will sit on top of the existing Bitcoin network. Adoption will then go exponential, and all the short sighted people who claimed that it will never catch on will be forced to eat their words.

This new Bitcoin client will not only address all of the problems of the present client, but it will introduce new features that will make the adoption of Bitcoin accelerate; like being able to print out your Bitcoins so you can spend them like paper money.

Thinking is hard. Reading and understanding technical specifications is not easy; you have to spend many hours cross referencing different documents, each of which is liable to cause you to have to read other difficult to digest documents.

If you are not willing to do this, its not a problem; the world will go on without you. Thats why all these people are able to send out email newsletters, publish websites and make Skype calls without knowing how it all works or the history of the tools they are using.

What you cannot do however, is claim that something, in this case Bitcoin, cannot work when you are not capable of understanding it or even worse, are unwilling to make the effort to research it properly, and then expect people to take you seriously.

Something as important, significant and world-changing deserves proper attention and analysis, not flippant twaddle masquerading as insight.

That acephalous, elusive, networked, autonomous, intelligent and revolutionary construct Anonymous, has published a statement called “An Open Letter to the Citizens of the United States of America”, wherein they demonstrate that Anonymous is rapidly iterating towards Libertarianism.

They have a few more cycles to go however.

We have written about Anonymous before; it is interesting because it is a fulfilment of the prescient observations of Jean Baudrillard, with his assertion that there is a “mass”, with characteristics closely matching what Anonymous is and how it reacts to stimuli.

This statement is significant not only because it demonstrates that Anonymous is moving towards the locus of Libertarianism, it is also interesting in the type of thinking displayed at this iteration; Anonymous clearly understands far more than previous generations, but it is still hampered by some fundamental illusions, misconceptions and illogic, and this has prevented it from coming up with a coherent statement.

Anonymous has lofty goals. It clearly, explicitly, is seeking Natural Rights. This is a very specific goal, and one that is not compatible with some of the goals listed at the end of the statement.

Thankfully, Anonymous is full of highly intelligent, computer literate people who, once exposed to the truth, accept it as the truth, just as computer programmers must accept the syntax of a language if they are to use it, and mathematicians must accept that 1+1=2.

Let us parse through this announcement, correcting it and analysing as we go along…

Dear us citizens,

The people who live on the ‘North American Continent’ are human beings; they are not citizens or slaves of the United States Government, living in farms like cattle. It is crucial, when attacking these problems, that the persons thinking about them understand what human beings are, and what their true relationship to government and other human beings is.

Human beings are not the property of other human beings. They are individuals with inherent rights that do not come from government. Being ‘born a US citizen‘ is tantamount to being born into slavery. Anyone who wants Natural Rights for themselves rejects the idea of being born a citizen, of any state, no matter what it is called, or how that state came to be.

We, Anonymous would like to offer you, America, the opportunity to join and support our movement.

This offer cannot be made to ‘America’. It can only be made to the individuals who happen to live in what has come to be called ‘America’.

We are a group that formed on the internet – one that knows no constructs or absolutes, and one that has recently grown exponentially.

There most certainly are absolutes. There is right and wrong; stealing is wrong, for example. There are constructs also; Natural Rights is one of them. You cannot on the one hand, say that there are no absolutes or constructs, and then on the other, call for Natural Rights.

We would like to introduce an Operation. An Operation that involves Americans getting our Natural Rights and dreams back.

Your Natural Rights cannot be taken away from you. They can only be denied expression. For example, the property rights you have in paper can be denied to you if you choose to write an essay or print instructions that the state determines that you may not distribute. You have the absolute right, at all times, to own and publish; the state merely uses violence to stop you from exercising that right.

Right now, you can help by passing on the Information. Information is power. Share the power of the Information with other like minded individuals. The more people we represent, the more Power we have, both as individuals and as Anonymous. Thank you for your time and power.

I would suggest that information, that is true, needs to be shared between the like minded and the yet to be like minded.

CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Many events have taken shape over the course of only a few years, and slowly our system has been working towards the gains of itself rather than the gains of the people.

It is completely wrong to characterise the State as ‘our system‘. It never was, is not, and never will be ‘our system’. Even if it were to become some sort of collectively owned, internet mediated Communist Utopia, this is completely contrary to Natural Rights.

The State does not work towards the gains of itself; it is not a living entity with its own goals, separate from those at the levers of the controls. The State is the violent apparatus through which a small number of people (who are indistinguishable from Mafia gangsters save in scale), rob, steal murder and destroy for their own personal gain.

Before you try and understand any of the problems facing free people, it is essential that you understand the true nature of the source of the trouble; the State. It is also crucial, when trying to describe this problem, to not use collective pronouns when talking about it. It is not ‘our taxes’ or ‘our schools’ or ‘our government’. These things are the property of the State. You do not own them, do not control them, and should not refer to them with a collective pronoun. Ever.

While we have all watched and rallied against the system working against us, there have been other gains of the system that have gone without a peep as back-room deals and and bargaining allow for the passing of legislation and research funding that has resulted in the loss of more liberties such as censorship, phone and internet surveillance and eminent domain laws.

There is nothing wrong, in principle, with back-room deals. This message from Anonymous was, no doubt, written in such a back-room fashion; in private as it were. The assumption here is that the State is legitimate in principle, and that if its dealings were done in the light of day, this would ameliorate the problems faced by the human beings living under them. This is completely incorrect; the State is not legitimate, and wether or not its laws, deals and strictures are negotiated in public or private is immaterial to this fact.

Research ‘funding’ is of course, stolen loot redirected to corrupt scientists and crony capitalists. Censorship is the violent curtailing of property rights in paper, CD ROMS servers and bandwidth. Surveillance is a similar violation to censorship, since it involves interfering with private property to carry it out. Eminent domain is simple theft.

All of these violations have one thing in common; they all come from the State. When you peel away the layers of illogic, groupthink and brainwashing, the State emerges as the common enemy and problem behind all the usurpations, violence and evil that Anonymous opposes.

Not to mention the higher taxes, lower wages, and loss of work due to exports deals.

Taxation is violent theft by the State. Wages are a private contract between two people or a person and a company. You cannot on the one hand, call for Natural Rights, and then in the same breath, call for the violent State to guarantee you high wages by threatening violence to those who provide jobs. This is pure illogic.

Loss of work, in every form save natural disasters and entrepreneurial miscalculation, is caused by the State and its distortion of economic activity through its minimum wage laws right up to the Federal Reserve, fiat currencies, legal tender laws and monopoly on setting interest rates. Anonymous seems to understand this partially, as ‘End the Fed‘ is high up on its list of priorities, but you cannot call for the end of the Federal Reserve system, and then say that the State should guarantee wages or interfere in economics. There is some confusion here, that will hopefully be cleared away in the next iteration.

We repeat the history of our mistakes instead of evolving our society.

There is no ‘we’ in any of this, only individuals with Natural Rights. There are no collective mistakes, and there is no ‘our society’, collectively owned by everyone. These are collectivist brainwashing terms, used to prevent people from understanding the true nature of the problem by stopping them from identifying the State as the cause of all problems.

Generations in the past spoke of what we face as current issues, the only difference being that of our technological achievements. We have forgotten such words our society has found guidance and value in:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

This is very problematic for anyone who wants to exercise their Natural Rights. The pursuit of happiness is not a right, and rights are not secured by or granted by government. The State cannot derive power from the governed; this is a fallacy. The State cannot do things that individuals cannot do, and cannot be ceded powers that individuals do not have. You cannot, by dint of a vote, cede the power to steal, murder and destroy to the State, because you do not have that power yourself.

The declaration of independence is a beautiful document, no doubt about it, but it is fundamentally flawed in its outlining of what rights are and where they come from, and what makes government legitimate.

No one has a right to institute a government that controls people who do not consent to be governed by it, no matter how it is formed. This document can only lead to tyranny, and that is exactly what has come to pass; a monolithic Federal Government that murders at will, like an out of control monster.

This document, and its ideas should be rejected by all people who desire the expression of their Natural Rights, for as soon as you accept its principles, you are on the way down a slippery slope to despotism, theft and every vile thing that decent people loathe today.

“In the past few months, Anonymous has made headlines through the actions of a few. The media tries to instill fear of which Anonymous is as a “group”, and in the process failed to recognize it as an “ideal” that is gaining momentum.

Ideals are good, as long as their foundation is sound.

Anonymous is an ideal that the people can use to further help other people.

People helping other people is good. Voluntarism and Natural Rights is the key to prosperity. Statism, collectivism and coercion are pure evil and should be rejected by all decent people.

In this case, you’re not being heard and transparency in government operations is non-existent in many matters.

Once again, if someone is stealing from you right in front of your face, transparently, it is still immoral theft. The fact that theft is hidden or not is not material. The meme of ‘Transparency‘ is Statist brainwashing designed to keep you from coming to the conclusion that the State itself is illegitimate. There are many such brainwashing terms, ‘have your say‘, ‘transparency’, ‘accountability’ – all of these are patent nonsense. If you are having your money stolen from you, and you have your say in where it goes to any extent, this does not mean that you have not been violated by theft. If the money that was stolen from you was accounted to you, i.e. “we stole 58% of your pay-check this year”, this does not erase the immorality contained in the fact that money has been stolen from you through violence.

All of this brainwashing must be eradicated and the actions of the State put into their proper context, if you are to attack this problem correctly.

Mobilize yourself to find your information, and we’ll be giving you resources to further help you. Take the information you find and tell your government your demands.

It is not ‘your government’. You have no right to demand that the State take its stolen money and do your bidding.

We want AMERICANS to wake up! We want AMERICANS to read! We want AMERICANS to think,and above all question all things! We want AMERICANS to analyze, criticize, critique and learn to read between the lines, to expose and to deconstruct! We want you to believe in the infinite power of the people! We want you to learn that we’re all truly brothers and sisters in humanity regardless of all the artificial barriers that have been set up to separate us!

Waking up is a good thing, but make sure that you wake all the way up and not just half way, like in Inception.

If you are going to read, read Murray Rothbard’s Libertarian Manifesto as a starting point to your complete awakening. Its easy to read and understand, and after you have read it, you will never think about government and rights in the same way again.

It is crucial to question all things, but you must make sure that you really are questioning from the correct frame of reference, and not inside a box provided for you by the State and its brainwashing schools.

“Think For Yourself, Question Authority” -Timothy Leary

Reject authority, end the State.

Inform. Educate. Guide. Evolve. Wake up the People. The time for the next step in our species’ social evolution has come!

Social evolution is nonsense. Man has one nature and one nature only. The people who call for social evolution are of the same ilk as the Fabian Socialists, who want to destroy the family and recast populations into inhuman morasses of degradation and total control.

To effectively reform the system that has enslaved us, we must consider following the advice and

The system cannot be reformed, because it is fundamentally flawed and immoral. Government cannot draw legitimacy from the people; this is a lie, and anyone that understands Natural Rights already knows this.

example of those who have preceded us. Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and JFK are good places to start.

Abraham Lincoln was a monster, and should only be held up as such.
Teddy Roosevelt was pure evil.
JFK gave us the NASA moon landing.

All of this thinking is the result of brainwashing in government schools, especially the nauseating worship of Abraham Lincoln.

All took fierce positions against central banking, government corruption and corporate power.

This simply is not the whole story, and as you move towards the Libertarian position, the great historians who are Libertarians will dispel many myths for you. JFK through executive order 11110 tried to attack the criminal and fraudulent Federal Reserve System directly, and some say, this is why he was executed. Andrew Jackson put pay to The United States Bank that took root in the USA.

Finally, for the record, the moon project of John F Kennedy was a boondoggle where billions of stolen dollars were diverted to corporations to build the systems for NASA, for example. That is government corruption and corporate power writ large.

Americans and many other people are steeped in the myths dogmas and untruths found in the religion of the State. They accept as fact its assertions and its telling of history as related in its government schools, and it was very difficult before the internet to break through and get at the truth of it all. Now there is no excuse. You have the internet, you have the ability to read and can reason. You have no choice but to accept the world as it actually is.

The time has come for us to unite, the time has come for us to stand up and fight! You are Anonymous!

We are in the information era.
We are Anonymous,
We are Legion,
We do not forget,
We do not forgive,
Expect us.

For great justice.

Below: Grievances and demands
A starting point for reform could be established by citing a list of worthy objectives provided by ampedstatus.com;

These objectives are contradictory, based on violence, and stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of what rights are and where they come from.

Enforce RICO Laws

RICO Laws are illegitimate:

Under RICO, a person who is a member of an enterprise that has committed any two of 35 crimes—27 federal crimes and 8 state crimes—within a 10-year period can be charged with racketeering. Those found guilty of racketeering can be fined up to $25,000 and sentenced to 20 years in prison per racketeering count. In addition, the racketeer must forfeit all monies and interest in any business gained through a pattern of “racketeering activity.” RICO also permits a private individual harmed by the actions of such an enterprise to file a civil suit; if successful, the individual can collect triple damages.

It has been speculated that the name and acronym were selected in a sly reference to the movie Little Caesar, which featured a notorious gangster named Rico. The original drafter of the bill, G. Robert Blakey, refused to confirm or deny this.[1] G. Robert Blakey remains an expert on RICO;[2] his former student Michael Goldsmith also gained a reputation as one of the nation’s leading RICO experts.[3]

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

And they are a perfect example of the illegitimacy of the state, for a number of reasons. Without listing all of them, you should be suspicious that the author of this odious piece of legislation is now one of the foremost experts in RICO law.

Break Up the Big Banks

The phrase ‘break up’ gives you a clue to wether this is moral or immoral. This is nothing more than a call for violence to be carried out by the state on behalf of the mob. The state should not be interfering with economics. If you want to run your own bank, that is your affair; the state should not have the power to license, regulate or control banks or deposits in any way whatsoever. They should not insure deposits, bail out banks or do any of those things. If you do not accept this, then you are not for Natural Rights.

End the Fed

The Federal Reserve System is a creature of the State, and it should be abolished. The State should not have a monopoly on the creation of money.

Break Up the Mainstream Media / encourage citizen journalists

Once again, this is a despicable call for violence to be carried out by the State on behalf of the mob. Decent people who are for Natural Rights do not call for violence to be done to others, under any circumstances. The State should not be interfering in people’s affairs by encouraging one type of trade over another; in the UK, they call this ‘picking winners’. If you want to be a journalist, that is an entirely private choice, where you exercise your right to own and distribute paper, or own space on a server connected to the internet. It has nothing to do with government whatsoever.

End Closed Door Lobbying

The state itself should be ended; lobbying is nothing more than a pimple on the hideous face of the real, and very ugly problem.

Increase Government Transparency

See above.

End Corporate Personhood

People who understand Natural Rights know that you have the right to contract with others on terms that are suitable to you and your partners. This is an absolute right, derived from your property right in yourself and what you have lawfully acquired.

The idea behind corporations is that groups of people create a vehicle through which they can invest in a project without fear that should the enterprise fail, the investors would not be liable for the debts of the project. Before this idea, if your business suffered losses, you could lose all of your stored capital which may have taken your entire life to accumulate. Limited Liability protects you from this sort of catastrophe, and anyone can take advantage of incorporation; its not just ‘for the rich’.

There is nothing wrong with this in principle, as long as everyone who deals with every entity involved knows what they are becoming involved with and enters into agreements voluntarily.

If you have a particular dislike of corporations, then it is your choice not to deal with them. What you cannot do is impose your personal opinion on others with violence.

The railing against corporations is one of the pillars of the socialists, who have insinuated their diseased thinking into the minds of otherwise right thinking people. As soon as you scratch the surface of this thinking with a Libertarian fingernail, the lie of the ‘end corporate personhood’ argument becomes abundantly clear; this is Statism, coercion and violence under the cloak of ‘power to the people’. Its nonsense from beginning to end.

Amend Campaign Finance

Democracy is illegitimate. Majority rule is illegitimate. This is a call from inside the framework that holds that government as it is currently structured is legitimised and made moral by voting. It is not, never has been and never will be legitimate or moral, and so how campaigns are financed are totally irrelevant, when we consider that the true aim should be the ending of the State itself.

Verify All Votes

Votes, wether they are verified or not, do not confer legitimacy to governments. Once again, this is a call from inside the matrix, within a framework designed by the State to stop you from understanding that voting itself is illegitimate.

Investigate War Profiteers

The State is the source of all war. End the State and you end war. Investigating war profiteers is pointless while the State persists.

Investigate War Crimes

Rubbish. End the State.

End the Wars

End the cause of war; the State.

Restore Civil Liberties

The State is what restricts your liberties. End it, and the restoration of your liberties will follow as day follows night.

Uphold the Constitution

The constitution is a document that binds people who have not given their consent to be governed by it. That is illegitimate on its face. Worship of the Constitution and the principle that a State is legitimate when it has one is deeply ingrained in the minds of the brainwashed.

Clean Air, Water & Food

See Lew Rockwell’s Environmental Manifesto. The State cannot provide these things for you.

Reduce Healthcare Costs, Profiteering

This is straight out of the immoral Socialist thought process. There is nothing wrong with Profit. If you want to help people, it is up to you to help them. You cannot call for the state to steal to help people.

Make Healthcare a Human Right

Healthcare is a good, not a right. Rights cannot be created out of thin air by the State.

Improve Education For All, Reduce Costs

Once again, like healthcare, education is not a right, it is a good. Literacy and academic achievement have been destroyed by the State and those who call for ‘Education for all’. Costs have skyrocketed precisely because the violent statists have brayed for the State to step in and make Education a ‘right’. The State should be completely removed from the business of education. If there even is a State.

Reform Prison System

Many of the acts the State defines as crimes are not crimes at all. America has the world’s largest prison population because prison is a business outsourced by the State. Without the State, this problem would, like many others, disappear.

Reform drug laws (Stop spending so much money on drugs! NYC spent $75million alone on marijuana arrests.

The source of this is, again, the State. All laws in this area are illegitimate. They should not be ‘reformed’ they should be abolished, along with the State that created and enforced them.

Immigration Reform

In a place where there is no State, immigration is not a problem. You need to understand that immigration is only a problem because there is a State. There are arguments to the contrary. Either way, the State is not the answer to any problem, no matter what it is.

Rebuild Infrastructure

Translation: “steal more money to give to contractors to fix roads and bridges and lay down fibre optic cable”. Be careful what you ask for, because by doing so, you create more of the problem that you are trying to get rid of. You cannot be against Eminent Domain, but at the same time, be for stealing property so that roads can be built on them by the State for ‘infrastructure’.

Protect Internet Freedom

There would be no problems of censorship, interception and internet freedom were there no State to cause these bad things like net neutrality.

Empower States’ Rights

No. States do not have rights, only men have rights. There are no gay rights, black rights, women’s rights or animal rights. Only man has rights, and all men have the same rights. Remember this quote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”. That much of it is true. All men ARE created equal, without distinctions in terms of their rights. This is different to being entitled to any sort of service by your fellow man of course.

End Corporate Welfare

End the State that steals money to give it.

Fair taxes for everyone!

No. Stealing is never ‘fair’, and the word ‘fair’ is another brainwashing term.

Enforce corporate responsibility

There is no such thing as ‘corporate responsibility’, and in any case, you cannot be against the idea of corporations and FOR corporate responsibility at the same time!

Force corporations to apply local labor laws in their global operations

Which is it, for or against corporations? As for ‘labor laws’, they are all illegitimate strictures of the State, and unwarranted immoral interference in economics.

Strengthen environmental laws and force corporations to clean up their act

More calls for violence.

Work for a real separation of church and state – and a real split between corp and state?

There should be no State to separate from the church. And if there are no corporations, as is being asked for, there would be no corporations to separate from the State.

Reinstate Habeus Corpus

End the state that arrests people for non crimes like Prostitution and smoking marijuana.

Allow felons who have paid their debt to restore voting rights

Voting is not a right. End the State that creates felons in the first place. Realise also, that the idea of a ‘debt to society’ is completely fallacious.

Stop prison labor from competing with local businesses

End the State, and its prison industrial complex.

Additional objectives
End lifetime appointments to the SCOTUS

The Supreme Court of the United States is illegitimate, as are the laws it rules on.

Abolish the “Patriot Act”

Abolish the State that enacted it.

Abolish the lobbying system (no paid lobbyists)

Abolish the State that lobbyists attend to, and for whom they go to get their vicious laws passed, like the Mickey Mouse Copyright extension law and ACTA to name but two.

Close Guantánamo

End the state that owns it, and relinquish the illegitimately acquired property upon which it stands in Cuba.

Establish and define “financial terrorism” as a treasonous act and prosecute offenders vigorously

This is pure in the matrix thinking.

This is a call for the State to create a crime, based inside the financial system controlled by the State and its cronies at the Federal Reserve.

Without the Fed and the State, in a land where sound money flowed freely, this idea would be a nonsense. If you want to solve this problem, end the State that steals money through the printing press at the Fed, and switch to sound money in the form of gold and silver coins.

Treason is a crime against the State. Only the brainwashed and the Statists believe that such a thing is a ‘crime’. Calling for prosecution is calling for violence obviously, the end result being the perpetrators sent to the hell holes of the prison industrial complex, at the expense of the ‘taxpayer’.

This is a perfect example of thinking three levels inside the box; illogical, irrational and incapable of framing the problem correctly because all the givens are provided by the State.

If you REALLY want to do something to End the Fed and stop the criminal crony capitalist fractional reserve bankers, do what Max Kieser suggests as your next Anonymous Operation… GOLD FINGER!

Enshrine gender equality in the constitution

Freedom is not free, free men are not equal and equal men are not free. You cannot on the one hand call for Natural Rights, and then call for the constitution to enshrine ‘gender equality’ (the violent enforcement of laws upon free people) as an amendment. This error flows from the incorrect idea that women have rights that are separate from men; they do not. All human beings have the same rights; and these are all derived from the right of property.

End corporate money in the election process

See above, and pull the cable from the back of your head.

“Reduce non-emergency military funding”

The war machine is a creature of the State. There is no such thing as ‘funding’ it is theft, pure and simple.

And there you have it. There was only one item in that list that was legitimate; End the Fed.

For those who have not read any of the books, seen the lectures or read the articles cited above, you have alot of work to do, but you will be amply rewarded with an air tight way of thinking about the world at no cost to you other than your time.

As the iterations fold over and calculate in the hive mind GPU, Anonymous will come to these conclusions, as they are all inescapable now that the internet is everywhere. Thankfully Anonymous is iterating in internet time, and it will not be long before it will be calling for measures and thinking in terms that are consistent, logical and Libertarian.

On either side a Griffin Sable gorged with a Collar and pendant therefrom a Portcullis Or.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You cant make stuff like this up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He is DEAD WRONG.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We commit ourselves to:

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

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

Fight rising unemployment and support organisations of unemployed people.

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

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

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

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

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

Liaise closely with similar opposition movements in other countries.

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

Organise information, meetings, conferences, marches and demonstrations.

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

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

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

It seems that there is no limit.

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

Signed:

Tony Benn

Caroline Lucas MP

[…]

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

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

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

The Trilogy Tapes: Nippon Folk, Japan Blues

Cassette, limited to 100 copies.

I paid for it.

A great and insightful blogger Renegade Parent has just received her order of books from the Ludwig Von Mises Institute. The books she has on display will educate anyone on what is really happening with the dollar crisis, what money really is, the true nature of liberty and what needs to be done to restore and preserve it.

Happy reading!

Now on to Max Keiser. For ages I have been saying that demonstrating is pointless. All those G20 protesting morons should listen to Max, because he has just delivered the sort of 21st century tool they need to completely outflank and destroy their enemy, whilst liberating themselves in a single move. In chess it looks like this:

[Event "Human versus Crafty"]
[Date "2009.10.02"]
[Round "?"]
[White "White"]
[Black "Crafty"]
[Result "1-0"]
[BlackAI "Crafty"]
1. e4 c5
2. Nc3 d6
3. Nd5 Be6
4. Nf4 Qd7
5. Nxe6 Qxe6
6. Qe2 Nc6
7. Qe3 O-O-O
8. b3 Nd4
9. Bd3 Nf6
10. c3 Ng4
11. Qg5 h6
12. Qh5 g6
13. Qh3 Nc6
14. f3 Nge5
15. Qg3 Nxd3+
16. Kf1 Bg7
17. Ba3 Nce5
18. Ne2 f5
19. Nd4 cxd4
20. cxd4 f4
21. Qh4 g5
22. Qh5 Nc6
23. d5 Qe5
24. Rb1 Nd4
25. Bb2 Rd7
26. Qg6 Rc7
27. Qf7 h5
28. Bc3 g4
29. a3 gxf3
30. gxf3 Kb8
31. a4 Ka8
32. a5 h4
33. Rg1 Bf6
34. Rg6 Rhc8
35. Rg8 Rxg8
36. Qxg8+ Rc8
37. Qxc8# 1-0

Here is his brilliant piece of thinking:

“If everyone did buy gold, if every activist in the world who was protesting against a centralised world government or a centralised banking system in the US or the UK; if every single one of those people bought just one ounce of gold bullion, the price of gold would double and it would put these banksters out of business!”

That means for $1000 each, all the G20 protesters, instead of being kidnapped by military police, getting sprayed with pepper gas, deafened by LRAD sound weapons and held like an animal for a trophy shoot by police, they could bring down the countries of the G20 by simply using money as the the tool.

Of course, these demonstrating idiots are of the type that think ‘Capitalism is evil’ and other brainwash induced nonsense like ‘free $insert_lie’ and ‘everyone should have the right to/of $insert_non_natural_right_that_is_actually_a_good’ etc etc.

The fact of the matter is that the G20 and all the people in ‘authority’ are scared shitless. What Max suggests is the kind of thing that we have been talking about:

[…]

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

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1694

The tools to do this are available, and all the soldiers who will participate are constantly connected to them. All the people could be mobilised and activated without any of them even leaving their bedrooms or interrupting their routines. The call would go out on Twitter to ‘buy one ounce of gold on any day in November’… for great justice. Once the effect starts to take hold, everyone everywhere would start to chip in. In a very short amount of time it would reach critical mass.

Not a shot would have been fired. When South Africa was under Apartheid, there was a call to boycott Kruggerands. Now its the opposite call that will bring down the bad guys.

What a life!

This is from an article by Lew Rockwell.

If the environmental religion is not stopped in its tracks, you will see all of these steps replicated in the name of ‘saving the planet’.

[…]

Certainly Bush used 9-11 to consolidate his power and the neoconservative intellectuals who surrounded him adopted a deep cynicism concerning the manipulation of public opinion. Their governing style concerned the utility of public myth, which they found essential to wise rule. The main myth they promoted was that Bush was the Christian philosopher-king heading a new crusade against Islamic extremism. The very stupid among us believed it, and this served as a kind of ideological infrastructure of his tenure as president.

Then it collapsed when the economy went south and he was unable to sustain the absurd idea that he was protecting us from anyone. The result was disgrace, and the empowering of the political left and its socialistic ethos.

The talk of Hitler in the White House ended forthwith, as if the analogy extended only when nationalist ideology is ruling the day. What people don’t remember is that Hitlerism was about more than just militarism, nationalism, and consolidation of identity politics. It also involved a substantial shift in German domestic politics away from free enterprise, or what remained of it under Weimar, toward collectivist economic planning.

Nazism was not only nationalism run amok. It was also socialism of a particular variety.

Let’s turn to The Vampire Economy by Guenter Reimann (1939). He begins the story with the 1933 decree that all property must be subject to the collective will. It began with random audits and massive new bookkeeping regulations:

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/headed-to-national-socialism123.html

The people who run the Pirate Bay have decided to exit and hand the site over for money. Good luck to them, and thanks for the lulz.

Now we hear of a company that wants to make money off of TPB, by ‘paying people to share files’:

Cash for Pirate Bay file-sharers

The new owners of file-sharing website The Pirate Bay say users will be paid for sharing files.

Global Gaming Factory (GGF) paid 60m kronor (£4.7m) to take over the site.

In an exclusive interview with the BBC, GGF’s Hans Pandeya said that the only way to beat illegal file-sharing was to make something more attractive.

“We are going to set up a system where the file-sharer actually makes money,” he said.

According to Mr Pandeya, GGF’s chief executive, the business model for The Pirate Bay would be that it continued to be a file-sharing site. The only difference – at least in terms of content – would be that the files would be hosted legally, rather than stolen from copyright holders.
“We’re a listed company so everything we do has to be legal; content providers need to be paid and have their wishes and demands met,” he said.

Freebie beater
Mr Pandeya said that one of the biggest hurdles in overcoming illegal file-sharing was that there was zero cost to the users, while legitimate sites required users to pay for content. The only way to make something more attractive than free was to pay users to share files.

“More than half of all internet traffic is file sharing and P2P [peer-to-peer] traffic and buying Pirate Bay gives us one of the biggest sources of traffic.

“We can then use this massive network of file-sharers to help [internet service providers] reduce overload.

“Let’s say a popular song comes out. Rather than a million downloads from a site – which would cause a considerable strain on that ISP – we can take that song and put it out on P2P.

“The copyright holder still gets paid, the users still get their file, the ISP doesn’t have a million people all grabbing a file and – for the users who share that song – a payment for putting that file on the P2P network.”

Mr Pandeya said that while they would be paying content providers and file sharers, there was money to be made from helping ISPs cope with overload.

“We’ve been working with ISPs for over a year and we can cut their costs – when the system becomes overloaded – by 90%.
“All ISPs have this problem and it is one we can fix,” he said.

Computer grid
The company is also looking at harnessing the storage capacity and processing power of the file-sharing community, creating a powerful grid of P2P-linked computers.

“We’re talking about next-gen file sharing so you can create revenue from storage and internet traffic optimisation,” he said.
However, GGF said that the technology to drive this was still in its infancy.

“This technology is new. For now, we’re outlining our intentions and asking users to have faith,” said Mr Pandeya

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8128551.stm

Hmmmmm that sounds very familiar….

Those of you who are old (in internet time) will remember MojoNation. The leet amongst you will have run it.

Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow

Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow was a startup company founded by Jim McCoy et al. to create MojoNation. After several years, the company ran out of money and laid off most of its employees; Bram Cohen went on to create BitTorrent and Zooko created Mnet out of MojoNation’s source code. The company’s name comes from the game Illuminati by Steve Jackson Games.

[…]

Mojo Economy

Mojo was a digital cash currency that aimed to provide attack resistance and load balancing in a fully distributed and incentive-compatible way (see Agoric computing). Every pair of MojoNation nodes maintained a relative credit balance, with every EGTP request transferring some Mojo credit from the sender to the receiver. Once the absolute value of the debt between two nodes exceeded the size of a Mojo token, the side with the negative balance would transfer a token to the other, clearing out the debt. Because transferring a token was a relatively heavyweight event, tokens were worth 20,000 (?) Mojo. A MojoNation component called the token server acted as the mint, allowing MojoNation nodes to securely transfer Mojo.

In early versions of MojoNation, users were required to set prices for any services their node provided. Most users had no idea how to choose prices, so the Mojo layer was rewritten to use a second-price rolling auction. Each node maintained a queue of incoming requests that had not yet been processed, sorted by a bid field contained in each request. Requests were serviced in order, from highest to lowest bids. This shifted the burden of pricing decisions from servers to clients: each user could set a price he was willing to pay for services, and his node would offer that bid in outgoing requests. This scheme was intended to create a simple feedback loop: if the system is responding slowly, increase your bid and if the system is responding quickly, decrease it.

[…]

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

And there you have it. This has already been tried once.

At MojoNation where the creator of Bittorrent worked, a system was built that remunerated users of a P2P network for sharing their bandwidth and storage. The company ran out of money. Could it have worked if they had more users and deeper pockets? Who knows? What we DO know, is that if anyone is writing a system like this from scratch, they are insane, because much of the hard work on the server side has already been done, and the source code open sourced.

Whatever.

This is an interesting idea, interesting enough to be tried twice.

I’ve been reading “My Life and Work“, Henry Ford’s autobiography, I was pleasantly surprised by much of it (that is I mean you should read it too). Here are some quotes:

When we are at work we ought to be at work. When we are at play we ought to be at play. There is no use trying to mix the two. The sole object ought to be to get the work done and to get paid for it. When the work is done, then the play can come, but not before. And so the Ford factories and enterprises have no organization, no specific duties attaching to any position, no line of succession or of authority, very few titles, and no conferences. We have only the clerical help that is absolutely required; we have no elaborate records of any kind, and consequently no red tape.

[…]

Because there are no titles and no limits of authority, there is no question of red tape or going over a man’s head. Any workman can go to anybody, and so established has become this custom, that a foreman does not get sore if a workman goes over him and directly to the head of the factory. The workman rarely ever does so, because a foreman knows as well as he knows his own name that if he has been unjust it will be very quickly found out, and he shall no longer be a foreman. One of the things that we will not tolerate is injustice of any kind. The moment a man starts to swell with authority he is discovered, and he goes out, or goes back to a machine. A large amount of labour unrest comes from the unjust exercise of authority by those in subordinate positions, and I am afraid that in far too many manufacturing institutions it is really not possible for a workman to get a square deal.

I would say this is the polar opposite of ‘statist’ enterprises (e.g. BBC) and the bureaucratic mentality in general.

When a business becomes congested with bad methods; when a business becomes ill through lack of attention to one or more of its functions; when executives sit comfortably back in their chairs as if the plans they inaugurated are going to keep them going forever; when business becomes a mere plantation on which to live, and not a big work which one has to do–then you may expect trouble. You will wake up some fine morning and find yourself doing more business than you have ever done before–and getting less out of it. You find yourself short of money. You can borrow money. And you can do it, oh, so easily. People will crowd money on you. It is the most subtle temptation the young business man has. But if you do borrow money you are simply giving a stimulant to whatever may be wrong. You feed the disease. Is a man more wise with borrowed money than he is with his own? Not as a usual thing. To borrow under such conditions is to mortgage a declining property.

Substitute “a business” for “a country’s economy”

An impartial investigation of the last war, of what preceded it and what has come out of it, would show beyond a doubt that there is in the world a group of men with vast powers of control, that prefers to remain unknown, that does not seek office or any of the tokens of power, that belongs to no nation whatever but is international–a force that uses every government, every widespread business organization, every agency of publicity, every resource of national psychology, to throw the world into a panic for the sake of getting still more power over the world. An old gambling trick used to be for the gambler to cry “Police!” when a lot of money was on the table, and, in the panic that followed, to seize the money and run off with it. There is a power within the world which cries “War!” and in the confusion of the nations, the unrestrained sacrifice which people make for safety and peace runs off with the spoils of the panic.

!!!

This just came to me over ‘teh internetz’:

Elizabeth Mills response to the regulation of Home Education seemed to echo the common response from home-educators. Another opportunity for the state to control how we treat our children. And so on. It’s something I find an increasingly tiresome argument, as I seem to be one of the few people viewing regulation of home education as a positive thing.

Here we go…

I was home-educated between 1993-2001. It was an appalling experience. My mother was, in the most polite terms, a manipulative bitch, who actually never bothered to teach us at all. It was a whim for her for about a year, but then I think she just lost it and just couldn’t be bothered with anything, except keeping us in the house. As a child I barely left the house except maybe once a week to help do the shopping in Morrisons. I didn’t do science, languages, PE, art, music, or anything interesting. My interest in English Literature arose out of being a Manics fan, otherwise I suspect I would have never had that.

Your problem is that your mother was a ‘manipulative bitch’. I would also say that she failed to teach you any logic. It does not immediately follow that Home Education is bad for everyone else, just because your mother was not a very good parent. All the families in the UK should not have to suffer at the hands of the state because you were born to a dysfunctional family.

Only once did someone come round to inspect us. Once in eight years. The night before that inspection is something I try to forget. Essentially an hours beating to make sure when they ask how me and my sisters felt our response was that we were happier. My memories of the inspection were that he had no problem with our basic skills – from the few rushed examples of work pushed at him – but that he was concerned by our mothers Irish nationalist stance in everything and the lack of PE, language or music. Mostly though, he disliked that none of our work was dated, because that meant he had no idea when what he saw was produced.

I feel very sorry for you, just as I feel sorry for all the people who have ‘bad parents’. Once again, this story and all other ‘horror stories’ are not enough to smear ALL PARENTS. We do not live in a world where if there is one nutcase in the country, everyone gets a new raft of laws eliminating ancient freedo….. oops.

Yes, some people are just honestly supporting children with learning difficulties or trying to embrace their own culture, but there are cases where it does just turn into abuse. The chances are, like me and my sisters, that it isn’t really reported or known. The reason for that being that, with no real or completely accurate figures oh home education, its possible for the worst situations to slip between everyone’s fingers. Who would have considered themselves responsible for my welfare when I was growing up? We just went on living in a dysfunctional and destructive family until we were old enough to be dysfunctional adults. I’m not even sure if my sisters can read or write properly.

And there are abusive families who send their children to school. The point is, once again, that no natter what the statistics are, people have rights. People are innocent until proven guilty. They have the right to privacy. They have the right to organize themselves and their families as they see fit. We are now starting to see what it is like to live in a country where because a few people get hurt, the government tries to ban everything that could potentially cause harm, we now call it ‘the nanny state’ and everyone agrees, its not a very nice place to live in.

It seems like the majority of opinions on this are all about embracing positive alternative education. I don’t dispute that home education can be a positive experience for many and take them leaps and bounds beyond others in their schools. Equally though, I fail to understand why so many parents can’t see that it could turn into a nightmare. Surely, if you have nothing to hide or be ashamed of, then no harm will come of someone checking that your children are being educated.

‘Nothing to hide, nothing to fear‘ only the most naive of people believe this. Thankfully, their numbers have dwindled to almost nothing.

My sisters and I are all completely estranged from our mother now. She hates us because we stole her life because she had to teach us. As soon as I got to sixth form I felt that even the weakest student, with Cs and Ds, was better educated than I was. Around this time we fell out. She denies my existence now.

This is all very sad, but is has nothing to do with Home Education in general, our rights, right and wrong, or anything else. There ARE bad parents out there. There will ALWAYS be bad parents. You can never have perfection or the elimination of crime, bad parenting or any other ill. What we need to do is pay attention to the vast majority of people who are good, trustworthy and decent, and not allow ourselves to be sucked into a totalitarian nanny state because an EXTREMELY small minority of people have a bad time of life.

Your best revenge is not to try and destroy the lives of all the decent people in the UK by calling for them to be violated, but to use your pain and your experience to make the world a better place, without trampling on the rights of other people.

Surely someone checking that your children meet a standard of numeracy and literacy, and aren’t raised to believe that the world is controlled by Jew-hating-lizards from outer space is something that should be done, not beaten down by shouty hippie parents with anger issues towards the local education authority, or Labour, or Catholicism or various other issues, is a good thing? If parents become ill, or must work more, and can’t support their children’s education, shouldn’t there be someone to step in and make a stand about that?

You sound like an angry person who has deeply seated problems that you have not resolved. You want to lash out at all parents because your parents were bad. Hurting other people will not make your pain go away. You need to get some psychiatric help to get you over your problems.

After all, when you’re young, whoever teaches you tends to be your earliest guide in the world. Did you know how you should be educated when you were 8 or 9? You don’t really have any authority on this yourself when you’re young, parents decide it for you. If you did, you’d probably just sit in the dirt chopping hair off dolls and eating refreshers all day.

This is not an argument.

I fail to understand why there’s such opinion that the government/ LEAs/ the big bad whoever are anti-home education.

That is indeed, a big failure on your part. A failure to read, a failure to empathize and a failure to understand what a real family is like. This is understandable, since you never had one.

The attitude against this regulation does seem to broadly be part of a much larger anti-Labour grudge, or a grudge against local education authorities and regulation.

This is simply not true. No matter what political party is in charge, if they were to propose what New Labour are proposing they would be rounded upon. You really do not understand what this is all about!

Regulation seems to be a dirty word to these people, implying control when it equally means protection.

Regulation does not mean protection. Get yourself a dictionary. You have no experience in parenting or of parenting, you have no idea of what the nature of the state really is… you are ignorant.

Home education has grown as an alternative option since the 70s or so and there really has been very little regulation on it at all, and yet it concerns one of the most important factors in a persons life being decided by what could be the whim of an unstable parent. What seems to be recommended is an enforced and compulsory regulation of what is currently very loosely done. The suggestions made by the recent review have flaws, which have been pointed out on the previous post’s comments, but I view them as caring for the education and welfare of vulnerable children who are currently beyond any particular authority and whose lives are solely controlled by one or two people.

http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/18/regulating-home-education/

Those ‘two people’ are called PARENTS they are not just ‘people’.

Compulsory school education is a relatively new phenomenon:

Whilst the intentions of compulsory school laws were good, what we have now is a system that serves to brainwash people. Now that there is a trend away from state schools, there are many forces that want to reverse it.

Teachers unions are bitterly opposed to Home Schooling. Departments of education are against it. Communists are against it. Fascists are against it. Well meaning busy bodies are against it.

What is most bizarre is that you come off sounding just like a person who is a product of the state school system with its ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ doublespeak lines learned by rote.

Either way, The point remains the same; your deeply saddening story of suffering at the hands of your parents is not a reason to destroy the sanctity of the family in general by mandating that the state become the parent of all children.

Finally, there are only a few people viewing regulation of home education as a positive thing because it is wrong; most people understand the threat that the state represents, what their freedom is worth and have a naturally powered ferocious desire to protect their children.

And this comment, says it all:

I feel for you, I really do, but…

The current proposals would have instead turned your once in eight year beating to coach your responses into a once a year beating.* I’m sure your mother could have turned in a report every year to show she was trying, and she would have been approved, even supported, by the authorities. She was in your own words “a manipulative bitch”, and who’s to say that she, like Baby P’s mother, like Eunice Spry, couldn’t wrap the authorities round her little finger.

Your story is repeated over and over with schooled children as well, with school staff at the very least ignorant, if not complicit in wilfull silence.

The authorities have shown that they cannot prevent abuse in schooled children, or children which are under the tightest scrutiny available to them. They have also demonstrated that people who are not manipulative, who are simply anxious in the presence of authority, get their children removed from them on the weakest of grounds because social workers don’t want to be the ones in the headlines for inaction.

The hostility to authorites is not due to some airy-fairy anti-establishment dogma, but due to a history of abuse of authority, coupled with a demonstrated inability of authorities to use their existing powers effectively.

I think you’ll also find that most people who believe the world is truly ruled by jew hating lizards from outer space were, in fact, schooled, along with the vast majority of British Islamic extremists, BNP supporters, climate change believers / deniers (delete where you agree) and people who vote on Britain’s Got Talent. Being schooled does not, on present evidence, innoculate you in any way against collective insanity.

*Yes, I’m sure there were more beatings, just this one was for coaching before the authority visit.

NO $ALE!

In 1939 1,800,000 children were moved out of London to escape the bombing of that great city.

How it all happened is relevant to us today, in the light of New Labour, and its infinitely repulsive, shocking and sickening disregard for what Britain is and was, and what it is meant to be.

London was being bombarded nightly. Londoners spent their nights in shelters or deep in the Underground on the platforms as the bombs hammered away.

It was decided that children living in the areas that were being Blitzed were to be evacuated to safe parts of Britain. The first evacuations began on Friday 1 September 1939, and was code named 'Operation Pied Piper'.

The evacuated children were put on trains in London, had tags pinned on their clothes stating their names, and were then despatched to different parts of the countryside.

When they arrived at the various train stations and evacuation centres, adults who were to take in the evacuees were waiting. The children were selected on the spot, by a point of the finger and words like, "I'll take the one with red hair just there", and taken away to their new homes; those who were not wanted, judged solely on the look of the child were simply left behind:

[…]

The whole school (Sellincourt Road Infants) marched through streets to Tooting Junction station. I was carrying a small rucksack for my luggage. I remember the cornfields en route and that we changed trains at Exeter. We stopped at several villages and at each stop we got off and lined up in the road so the villagers could take who they wanted. Those of us that remained then re-boarded and went onto the next village. Those of us not selected were then deposited at a commandeered camp belonging to NALGO (trade union).

[…]

BBC

[…]

“We were walked to the rail station at Clapham Junction and from there we caught the train to Waterloo, from Waterloo we travelled all the way to north Cornwall.

“After a short period of time, I was evacuated to a farmer and his wife who had no children, and I became part of the family.”
Children at the time would wait at temporary evacuee centres were they could be selected by a family who liked them. He felt he was one of the lucky ones who got a good home.

[…]

BBC

[…]

I suppose there was about 20 of us from class seven of Christ Church. The children from other classes went elsewhere to nearby villages. I remember standing in a line next to Kenneth, my friend, feeling hot, tired and somewhat unsettled. The long journey, just undertaken, left me slightly bewildered. Was it all a dream?

Standing opposite us in the hall was quite a large group of villagers. These people had agreed to take us into their homes and become our foster parents. They had, previously, signed the necessary forms and stated their preference for boys or girls. Soon a rather awkward process of selection began, and after, watching, waiting and wondering. My friend Kenneth and I found ourselves being paired up and being led along by a tall, kindly-looking gentleman, Mr Ware, the village postman. At that moment, to use the official term, he had become our foster father. Waiting outside, no doubt very interested to see what we looked like, were two of Mr Ware's daughters, Maureen and Barbara.

[…]

BBC

And so on and so on. What an incredible story!

Now, fast forward to 2009.

We have a government that wants to force everyone to carry an ID Card that is linked to a giant database of fingerprints and faces that can identify you in a fraction of a second from one of millions of CCTV cameras that are everywhere. A country where if you change your address and do not tell the government, you can be fined £1000, where you will not be able to buy wine or withdraw money from your bank account without presenting this card. Where you cannot even buy a teaspoon without showing ID. We have a government that believes that all parents are child abuse suspects, and as such, must be put into a database.

Just what the HELL has happened to Great Britain?

How has it come to pass that in a country where people were trusted and trusting by default, to such an extent that children could be given away to total strangers without any doubt whatsoever that strangers will have nothing but absolute concern and care for the welfare of their wards, in close to two million instances… that this trust is all but completely destroyed?

How is it that the people of this fair island have become so ground down, so inured to slavery and tyranny that when over 100,000 parents are accused in a most vicious and dastardly way, without a shred of evidence, of being potential child abusers, that almost nothing is said, and that there are even parents who AGREE with the totalitarian government responsible for the perverted claims and insane recommendations?

How is it that two men, named 'Balls' and 'Badman' can get away with such a thing, and no one thinks this combination of names is in any way odd, or unusual, or freakish, monstrous, sinister or nightmarish? Are we living as characters on the pages of an edition of 200AD?

What the HELL is wrong with everybody?!

Even if you accept that it is the role of government to organize education and protect children (which I do not), any reasonable person would require that there is evidence of a real problem before you legislate; in this case, the author of the review, the singularly unqualified Badman, admits that there is no evidence that Home Educated children are at risk and that Home Education is not being used as a 'cover'. Even by those standards the conclusions and recommendations of this scabrous review are completely illogical in that light.

The fact of the matter is, quite apart from the natural rights aspect of this, parents are the most trustworthy people when it comes to the care of their children. The vast majority of people are also completely trustworthy, as the example of the evacuees demonstrates. The only people who cannot be trusted are, CRB Checked, ‘trusted’ agents of the government; the social workers, local authority workers etc etc, who are a self selected group of control freaks whose only desire is to exert their will upon others. They never refuse new powers, are keen to enter into and interfere with the private business of every family, down to the food that is eaten in the home.

The men and women of the 1930s adn 40s would never have accepted a government like New Labour; in fact, they were willing to die fighting against a government just like it; a government that explicitly banned (and continues to ban) home schooling.

They did not need to check every adult against a database before they did the evacuation. Even if they had time and the means to do it, they would not have done it, just as in the 70’s ID Cards were rejected as ‘un-British’ when the IRA was attacking England and the attackers were visually indistinguishable from the attacked by virtue of both groups being ‘European’ in appearance.

The men of that era would never accept a government like New Labour:

Clarence Henry Willcock
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Clarence Henry Willcock, (23 January 1896 – 12 December 1952) a member of the Liberal Party, was the last person in the UK to be prosecuted for refusing to produce an Identity Card.

On 7 December 1950, Harry Willcock, 54 year old dry-cleaning manager was stopped while driving in Finchley, London by police constable Harold Muckle who demanded that he present his identity card at a police station within 48 hours. He refused, reputedly saying "I am a Liberal and I am against this sort of thing". He was prosecuted under the National Registration Act 1939, convicted and fined 10 shillings.

Willcock appealed, in the case Willcock vs Muckle. Although he lost the appeal, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Goddard, spoke out against the continued use of compulsory Identity Cards and commented that they "tend to make people resentful of the acts of the police".

As a result of the court case, Willcock became well-known and he founded the Freedom Defence Association to campaign against ID cards. In a publicity event he tore up his own identity card in front of the National Liberal Club, inspiring a later similar action for the press outside Parliament by the British Housewives' League. When the Conservative government elected at the 1951 general election decided to abolish identity cards in 1952, Willcock received hundreds of redundant cards through the post to auction for charity.

Willcock was the Liberal candidate in Barking in 1945 and in 1950. He came third in both contests, losing his deposit in 1950. He had been a councillor and magistrate in Horsforth, Leeds.

Willcock was born in Alverthorpe, Wakefield, Yorkshire and died, while debating at a meeting of the Eighty Club at the National Liberal Club.
Goddard's comments are thought to have influenced Winston Churchill's decision to scrap compulsory national Identity Cards in 1952.

[…]

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

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

It is now your turn to defend your rights; the rights that people died to protect and give to you. If you give them up as if they were nothing, if you compromise one inch, go half way for a little peace, go along to get along, or sign up so that you can continue to get ‘free’ rail cards and other ‘benefits’…. then you are not fit to breath the air of this great country. You deserve whatever they put upon you. You lose your right to complain, to make a fuss or to whine about 'civil liberties'. You are already dead.

You are at the same time, very lucky. In this case, all that is required of you is that you refuse to comply. Refuse to register. Refuse to take the ID card. Refuse to engage in any way with anything that comes from ContactPoint. Never use or agree with weasel words of compromise and, 'seeing the other point of view'. Do not bow and scrape to anyone, and thank your oppressors for 'being on your side'.

I say to HELL with all of them.

I say the Home Educators by themselves are greater in number than the branches of the government that desire to violate them.

I say that there is nothing that they can do if no one turns up to their party.

I say that if Home Educators and free thinking parents everywhere all agree to rally around the one thing that binds them, that they are human beings and parents, then there is nothing that can be done against them – there are too many of them to control.

There is absolutely no reason why anyone should have to put up with the incessant abuses, violations, invasions, smears and the totalitarian apparatus that this government, New Labour, is pouring out on the land.

Enough is enough. Just as this venal and murderous government stubbornly refuses to submit to the will of the public, as it should, since it has no legitimacy (so the textbooks say) without the consent of the governed, so too can anyone also refuse to obey any illegitimate law or regulation.

Those of you who believe that you have a sacred duty to protect your family from evil are already on this page.

Those of you who have doubts, who are frightened about the consequences of 'going silent' or who are swayed by the soothing weasel words of men with an air of authority, or who are actually dumb enough to believe that what is planned is in any part a good thing; be warned – the reason why we are at this abysmal point is because the weak people between the days of the evacuees and today, allowed small concessions to their liberties year on year that mounted up to become the totalitarian state that now looms over you, and which is about to tip over and crush you, splitting open to unleash a torrent of aparatchick ants that will swarm over you and your family and bite you to death.

The only way to stop this is to draw a line in the sand and say, "this far, and no further" The power of the totalitarian state is derived directly from the cooperation of the people who are its victims. The aparatchicks who use ContactPoint (for example) will be sitting in offices on the phone, compiling lists and contacting people, trying to arrange interviews etc etc. If no one speaks to them or answers their letters, they will be completely stymied. If no one registers, they will have an intractable task on their hands of tracking everyone down, writing to them, chasing them up on foot… They will never be able to pull this off. And remember; all of this is going to happen whilst they are taking care of all their other duties, with which they are already overwhelmed. This is why it is important to make it absolutely clear; this report is rejected. We will not comply with any of it, should it become the law. You are wasting your time, and we will not waste any more of ours responding to you now, or in the future.

WE ARE DONE.

The Ludwig von Mises Institute has an article about something familiar to all americans who have looked behind their TV sets or their toasters:

Look at the back of your computer monitor, the bottom of your table lamp, or the label on your hair dryer. Chances are you will see the symbol “UL” with a circle around it. It stands for Underwriters Laboratories, a firm headquartered in Northbrook, Illinois, and an unsung hero of the market economy.

Most people don’t realize that dozens of products in their homes — toasters, fire extinguishers, space heaters, televisions, etc. — have been tested by the Underwriters Lab for safety. The Lab also tests items like bulletproof vests, electric blankets, commercial ice-cream machines, and chicken de-beakers, among thousands of other products.

But the Lab isn’t an arm of the government. It is privately owned, financed, and operated. No one is compelled by force of law to use its services. It thrives — and makes our lives safer — by the power of its excellent reputation. For that reason, its ideologically driven enemies on the Left despise it.

The firm was formed in 1894 to deal with the dangers posed by the dramatic increase in the use of electricity. Today, it employs 4,000 scientists, engineers, and safety specialists to render an independent verdict on hundreds of thousands of products.

The very existence of the Lab debunks the common civics-text view that, without government intervention, private businesses would seek profit without regard for safety; thus, bureaucrats have to police markets to impose a balance between private interests and the common good. The government, according to this view, is the only thing standing between us and unceasing fatal accidents.

The truth is the opposite. The market is well equipped to regulate itself, and does a fine job of it. It’s the government that operates without oversight. To discover the quality and value of products, no one would trust the advice of the scandal-ridden Commerce Department or the Federal Trade Commission.

Unlike quality and price, safety isn’t always at the forefront of the consumer’s mind. But that hasn’t kept manufacturers from seeking out the Lab’s testing services. For those who appreciate the virtues of private enterprise, the UL insignia is an inspiration.

The Lab was the first to set standards for certifying the safety of pilots and planes before the government intervened. It set the standards for building materials, fire-fighting equipment, air conditioners, and household chemicals. It employs safecrackers and pyrotechnicians to test safes, and a variety of unique machines and devices to test thousands of other products each year. It has been testing multicolored Christmas lights since 1905, and entered the building-code business right after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

Despite its unparalleled experience and success, the market economy keeps the Lab innovating. As engineer John Drengenberg of the Lab said,

There’s always some little twist in a new product — an innovative feature or something to make it cheaper — to keep us busy developing the appropriate test procedure.

Its effectiveness in determining safety standards (even for brand-new products) and maintaining them over time has generated an interesting result. Many government regulations, especially at the state level, merely mimic the building codes and insurance requirements of the Lab.

The Lab also “regulates” in a cost-effective way. Companies come to the Lab to present their products and the tests they have already conducted. The company pays a testing fee ranging from a couple of hundred dollars to several thousand, depending on the costs of the tests to be conducted.

If the product passes, it receives one of three designations:

1. To be “listed” means that the product has passed muster for sale as a final product, like a hair dryer.
2. If it is listed as “recognized,” it is safe to use as a component within the final product, like a transformer.
3. To be “certified” means that the product has met someone else’s standards, such as the Chicago building code.

Each product is tested for each use, and the Lab is strict about how its mark is used by manufacturers. For example, Securitron Magnalock sent a new lock to the Lab for testing. New standards had to be established, and the lock was duly tested and “recognized” as a component for a delayed-exit system.

When the company faxed all of its field representatives that the product was “UL approved,” Lab officials suspended the listing. It then required Securitron to inform all employees that UL does not “approve” any product.

To insure continued safety, manufacturers agree to let the Lab inspect their production facilities and to retest on demand. These on-site inspections, often four a year, are unannounced. Lab inspectors can require manufacturers to present data and to rerun safety trials and experiments. Companies, in turn, pay a tiny fee for every UL designation symbol they put on their products.

Manufacturers can modify their products to adapt to market conditions, but the Lab oversees changes that affect product safety. The Lab is inflexible and scientific, but it’s also driven by common sense and realism.

Nothing is perfectly safe, of course. The competitive marketplace and the Lab aim for safety in a framework of rational attention to costs. UL official Drengenberg has noted, “It would be very easy for us to come up with an overly strict standard,” but then no one could afford to buy the product.

In fact, the Lab once built a fireproof office for some of its employees. The expensive room featured ceramic tile on the walls and ceiling, a thick concrete floor, metal furniture, and similar standards. Not only was the cost high, the esthetic results were not impressive. As Robert Yereance, author of Electrical Fire Analysis says, “most of us cannot afford a fireproof dwelling and would not like living in it if we could.”

The Lab notes that 80% of accidents and fires are caused by consumers, not products. It takes this into account in its requirements. In the case of space heaters, for example, the Lab felt that enhanced warning labels would reduce as many fires as an expensive redesign, thus keeping down cost and price.

[…]

http://mises.org/story/3440

The Ludwig Von Mises institute keeps pouring out example after example of why we do not need the state for the majority of things that ‘need organizing’. The above is yet another instance showing how the market can solve any problem more efficiently than state regulation. Not only does it work better, but it is sensible, unlike the insane health and safety madness that has overtaken Britain, where, for example, every pest control company operating in the UK will soon have to have two people on hand every time a ladder is deployed…by order of the state. That means that either the companies that are currently working will need to double the numbers of their exterminators and pass the greater expense of these extra wages to the infested customers or the companies will have to do half as many jobs since they are no longer able to send a single man out with a ladder to do his job. Both outcomes will result in greater pestilence in the UK. But the government likes that, because they are the ultimate pestilence.

But I digress.

The above story proves yet again that we are all better off without the state interfering in our affairs. Wether the part of our lives is schools, money, safety or anything you can imagine, when the state is removed from the equation and people are left to organize themselves the optimum and just result emerges.

I went to the ‘Taking Liberties’ exhibition at the British Library recently and it largely covered what I had imagined what I would see – Magna Carta, Bill of Rghts, American Declaration of Independence, suffragettes and so on.

However there is a nagging problem with exhibition and that is despite the revolutions and uprisings shown, the narrative of the exhibition is not so much the rights people have taken for themeselves but those rights granted by the State (albeit sometimes under great pressure or by changes in the structure of the State) – even if a state restricts freedoms or is overthrown it is still ‘the state’ which is the arbiter of new rights, this is not interrogated in the exhibition.

This biases the exhibition to some degree and arguably is the only explanation of why there is a section on the rights enshrined by the welfare state. How so? If you don’t take it for granted that the state is the granter of freedoms and rights (poor phrasing there!) and instead individuals and groups of people can set out and guarantee their own rights you begin to get a better exhibition about ‘liberties’ and less about legislation. Back to the welfare state section, there are displays of friendly society notices and philanthropy in the form of the northern mill towns and garden cities, but these are all seen as precursors of the welfare state when finally ‘the right to a healthy life’ is recognised. Now look at it from the opposite perspective – certain people recognise that the ‘right to a healthy life’ is not enjoyed by their peers, or workers, and with their autonomy from the state (through money from subscriptions or ‘dark satanic’ exploitation) they provide the ability to enjoy this right which is finally picked up by the state and made ‘universal’ and some of the failings improved.

In terms of people recognisimg their rights hopefully the latter should seem like the correct explanation of events. The question of the what happens next (i.e. welfare state good/bad/bloated?) is not relevant to the argument above.

There are other failings in the exhibition, all interesting snippets to do with contemporary debates are on monitor/headphones which invariably break (2 when i went) and of course the interactive element where you ‘multiple choice’ vote on issues that are presented with a substantial bias towards BBC/Guardian society section thinking (to do this you use your ‘citizen number’ wrist band – above – which thankfully noone seemed to be putting on their wrist, the implications are clear).

Only two weeks left now if you want to see the show.

From today’s Daily Mail:

Sharia law SHOULD be used in Britain, says UK’s top judge

The most senior judge in England yesterday gave his blessing to the use of sharia law to resolve disputes among Muslims.

Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips said that Islamic legal principles could be employed to deal with family and marital arguments and to regulate finance.

He declared: ‘Those entering into a contractual agreement can agree that the agreement shall be governed by a law other than English law.’

In his speech at an East London mosque, Lord Phillips signalled approval of sharia principles as long as punishments – and divorce rulings – complied with the law of the land.

But his remarks, which back the informal sharia courts operated by numerous mosques, provoked a barrage of criticism.

Lawyers warned that family and marital disputes settled by sharia could disadvantage women or the vulnerable.

[…]

Daily Mail

Of course, the hoards of ignorant pigs like the first commenter on this story:

UK, I am so sorry for you. That is incredible.

– Susan, Colorado, USA, 03/7/2008 20:14

are coming out howling about how this is such a terrible thing. What is the most terrible thing of all is that these people cannot think.

What this judge has said is that for private contracts people should be free to choose a Sharia court for resolutions of disputes.

Do you understand what that means?

It means that if you choose to be governed by Sharia Law in your financial or marital dealings, you should be free to do so.

There is absolutely no problem with this whatsoever. HSBC already offer Sharia Compliant bank accounts, and Mick Jagger excused himself from paying extortion money for his divorce since his marriage was governed by a different law to UK law. The article itself says that, “Orthodox Jews operate Beth Din courts which operate according to ancient Jewish Law”. And allow me to digress, but why do they not call Sharia Law, “ancient Sharia Law”?!?! Sharia Law is many things, but modern is not one of them!

What this judge is suggesting is a great thing.

It means that you are FREE to obey your conscience in whatever way you like, as long as you do not break the law of the UK. This judge is actually expanding the freedoms of the British, against the current trend of Parliament legislating away everything, every liberty that has been built over the last 1000 years, and the judiciary backing them up to the hilt.

What he is NOT saying is that Sharia Law should be incorporated into British law, and that everyone, muslim or not, should be made to obey it. That would be and should be completely unacceptable. Sadly, many people out there, like this ignoramus from Colorado, do not understand anything about their rights, the rights of others, and the many options you have as a free human being.

People who want to follow Sharia have the right to do so. That is none of my, or your business. They can get married in whatever way they like, divorce in whatever way they like, lend and borrow money in whatever way they like and pray in whatever way they like. That is what it means to be free, and anyone who is against that is not for Liberty. In fact, true libertarians hold that the state has no business sanctioning and regulating marriage in the first place.

Lawyers are against this because by settling disputes without them, they are cut out of the loop. The same goes for all the other professions that leech off of the law; anything that undercuts them and causes them to lose status and money is a threat. People solving their own problems privately and at liberty are a threat to the system. This judge, by going against that grain is actually demonstrating a great deal of wisdom and even handedness. He will be boiled in oil for it of course.

Now, the ignorant amongst you will say, “but what about women’s rights!??!” We are not talking about women being forced by religious dictate to do anything that is illegal in the UK. We are not talking about illegal and repulsive Sharia punishments being legalized either. What we are talking about, and what this judge is talking about, are consensual contracts only; everything else to do with the ‘clash of cultures’ is completely covered by the law in the UK, the UK law takes precedence at all times, and the objectionable elements of Sharia law have absolutely nothing to do with the subject we are discussing right now.

There seems to be no end to the hoards of people eager to cut their own heads off in this insane hatred for all things Islam. Even when something comes along that increases freedom, real options (in this case, opt outs) people rail against it reflexively without THINKING and applying these scenarios to themselves.

This is our greatest problem today; the absence of THINKING.

JOHNATHAN
I’ve been thinkin’, Ella. Thinkin’ a lot. I’ve been watching. It’s like people had a choice a long time ago between…well, having all them nice things or freedom. Of course, they chose comfort.

ELLA
But comfort is freedom. It always has been. The history of civilisation is the struggle against poverty.

JOHNATHAN
No! No, that’s not it. That’s never been it. I mean, them privileges just buy us off.

[…]

LIBRARIAN
Can I help you, please?

JOHNATHAN
Yeah. I tried to order some books and they said I had to appear at the centre personally.

LIBRARIAN
That’s right, this is our circulation unit. Make your choice here or by catalogue….There must be a mistake. These books are classified. They have been transcribed and summarised.

JOHNATHAN
Who summarises them?

LIBRARIAN
I suppose the computers do.

MOONPIE
What do you need books for?

JOHNATHAN
I wanna study up on some things.

LIBRARIAN
You could go to the computer centre where the real librarians are. But we have all the edited versions here. Anything I think you’d want.

JOHNATHAN
Let’s see, then. This is not a library and you’re really not a librarian.

LIBRARIAN
I’m only a clerk, that’s right. I’m sorry, really.

JOHNATHAN
The books are really in computer banks being summarised. Where is that?

LIBRARIAN
There’s a computer bank in Washington. The biggest is in Geneva. That’s a nice place to visit.

[…]

BARTHOLOMEW
Jonathan, let’s think this through together. You know how the game serves us. It has a definite social purpose. The Nations are bankrupt, gone. None of that tribal warfare any more. Even the corporate wars are a thing of the past.

JONATHAN
I know that…

BARTHOLOMEW
So now we have The Majors and their executives. Transport, food, communication, housing, luxury, energy. A few of us making decisions on a global basis for the common good.

JONATHAN
The team is a unit. It plays with certain rhythms.

BARTHOLOMEW
So does an executive team, Jonathan. Now everyone has all the comforts, you know that. No poverty, no sickness. No needs and many luxuries, which you enjoy just as if you were in the executive class. Corporate society takes care of everything. And all it asks of anyone, all it has ever asked of anyone ever, is not to interfere with management decisions.

JONATHAN
I don’t mean to resist. I’m just tryin’ to understand.

BARTHOLOMEW
This is for your own benefit. You must know that, Jonathan.

[…]

CLETUS
Everything was much simpler when I was a kid. We still had three nations. That was before the corporate wars, even before Rollerball. Before everything.

[…]

Rollerball

Yet another film that predicts the future with pinpoint accuracy.

According to the Rollerball timeline, we would be at the stage where the Nation States are about to go bankrupt, before the New World Order consolidation into three super-states, to be followed by corporate governance, then the corporate wars and then the era of The Majors and the Executive class and Rolerball.

It seems so plausible now, more plausible than when I first saw this film decades ago. Books all digitized and the dangerous ones classified and summarized; many years ago, this was pure fantasy, now not only it is absolutely real, but it is entirely conceivable that this might be the only way people read books in the very near future. And we all know about the censorship.

The beautiful, brainwashed Ella, intones, “comfort is freedom”. These words … you do not have to struggle to imagine hearing them spoken today as if they were a truth. Who would be surprised by someone saying that at a dinner party?

This is how far everything has degenerated.

The Rollerball future is of course, not inevitable, even though it and all the other dystopian outcomes seem to be variations on the same path to the locus that we are being pulled towards.

In MY imagination, there are other, attainable and far preferable futures to achieve that do not involve going through a culling, a weeding, a winnowing or a burning out.

What is for sure, is that we cannot allow the Rollerball outcome to take root, because once it does, it will be nearly impossible to dislodge. There will be no will for it, no desire for it. This is in spite of the fact that all the women in the future are prostitutes and everyone is paralyzed with fear and paranoia. No one will remember exactly how it used to be. There will be no books describing it. No footage or recordings. The past will have been cut off. You think the zombies of today are bad, take a look at Rollerball to see what the future holds.

Do not despair, and remember…. there is always a ‘Johnathan’.

In the age of the internets, with the vast experience of VietNam Veterans and their stories being told and retold a thousand times in every possible way, and everyone (we would imagine) being on the same page about what it means to join the army, It is absolutely staggering that there are people who are still SO STUPID and UNINFORMED about what the military really means:

(CNN) — A U.S. soldier who deserted to Canada will not face persecution if he returns to the United States, Canada’s refugee agency ruled Wednesday.

National Guard Sgt. Corey Glass, 25, says he fled to Toronto in 2006 after serving in Iraq because he did not want to fight in a war he did not support.

“What I saw in Iraq convinced me that the war is illegal and immoral. I could not in good conscience continue to take part in it,” Glass said Wednesday. “I don’t think it’s fair that I should be punished for doing what I felt morally obligated to do.”

Glass, who’s still on active duty and is considered absent without leave, applied for refugee status at the Canadian border in August 2006 on the grounds of objection to military service.

But Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board denied his application for refugee status Wednesday, prompting the Canadian Border Services Agency to issue a June 12 deportation order.

The agency says it evaluates each case on its own merits to determine whether the applicant faces a “well-founded fear” of persecution or cruel and unusual punishment if he returns to his home country.

“All refugee claimants have a right to due process,” said Danielle Norris, a spokeswoman for Customs and Immigrations Canada. “When they have exhausted all legal avenues, we expect them to respect our laws and leave the country.”

Glass, of Fairmont, Indiana, says he joined the National Guard believing that he would be deployed only if the United States faced occupation. After he returned from his first tour of duty, he said, he tried to leave the Army but was told that desertion was punishable by death.

Penalties for desertion range from a demotion in rank to a maximum penalty of death, depending on the circumstances, said Maj. Nathan Banks, an Army spokesman.

“The first thing we try to do is rehabilitate and retrain the soldier to see if we can keep him,” he said. “Remember, we’re at war, so everybody counts. When you decide to desert, you let everybody down.”

Banks said that it is up to the deserter’s commanding officer to decide on an appropriate punishment if the soldier refuses to return.

Members of War Resisters Support Campaign in Canada, which is providing transitional support to Glass and at least 13 other deserters in Canada, are holding out for a political avenue of appeal through the Canadian House of Commons.

In December, the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration adopted a motion calling on the Canadian government to initiate a residency program for conscientious objectors who have left military service “related to a war not sanctioned by the United Nations.”

The motion has yet to receive approval from the entire House of Commons.

Norris says the agency has received about 40 applications for refugee claims from U.S. deserters since the Iraq war began in 2003. Of the claims that have been addressed in public, only five have made it to the country’s Federal Court of Appeals, a venue of last resort.

All five appeals were rejected, according to Norris.

The high court has yet to rule on its sixth challenge of this kind from Army combat engineer Joshua Key, who fled to Saskatchewan with his wife and four children in 2005.

“This has been our home for three years now. It’s a lot like the U.S., and it’s as close to the U.S. as you can be,” said Key, who served on the front lines in Falluja before he returned to the United States in 2002.

Key said that fleeing to Canada was a difficult but obvious choice when faced with returning to Iraq.

“There was nothing but violence and innocent civilians dying in our hands for no justification,” Key said. “We became the terrorists.”

[…]

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/05/21/guardsman.deserter/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

First of all, when you are going to desert, know where you are going to go, and be sure your host country is not on the side of your enemy:

“Dodging the draft will be more difficult than those from the Vietnam era remember. College and Canada will not be options. In December 2001, Canada and the US signed a ?Smart Border Declaration,? which could be used to keep would-be draft dodgers in. Signed by Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, John Manley, and US Homeland Security Director, Gov. Tom Ridge, the declaration involves a 30-point plan which implements, among other things, a ?pre-clearance agreement? of people entering and departing each country. Reforms aimed at making the draft more equitable along gender and class lines also eliminates higher education as a shelter. Underclassmen would only be able to postpone service until the end of their cur-rent semester. Seniors would have until the end of the academic year.* [….]

http://community.nbtsc.org/wiki/DraftEmail2;1.1

http://www.irdial.com/blogger/archive/2004_05_09_blarchive.html#108412107391695186

You get both sides of the story BEFORE you enlist:

Had this numbskull done his homework (or read BLOGDIAL), not only would he never had joined the ‘National Guard’, but had he done so, he would know better than to go AWOL and then TURN HIMSELF IN.

Once again, a simple search of the Google will turn up the fact that many Draft Dodgers WENT INTO HIDING in Canada; in other words, they just dropped off the face of the earth. The border between Canada and the usa is extremely porous; there is no reason to go through a border and declare that you are AWOL. How dumb can you BE?

And while we are at it, oh for the days of the old Canada, a country with some backbone….its own backbone:

Trudeau opens the door to draft dodgers

Broadcast Date: March 25, 1969
At the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Prime Minister Trudeau fields questions on the subject of draft evaders. He characterizes them as good, orderly students who have aroused the sympathies of many Canadians. The dodgers have been coming across the Canadian border as landed immigrants. Others pretend they are visiting the country as tourists and do not follow the formal channels of immigration.

• Immigration and Citizenship Canada estimates that between 30,000 and 40,000 draft dodgers and deserters were admitted into Canada over the course of the conflict.
• Following a serious debate, Prime Minister Trudeau extended his open door policy to military deserters. It is estimated that roughly 1,000 deserters took sanctuary in Canada.

http://archives.cbc.ca/war_conflict/vietnam_war/clips/348-1928/

And there you have it.

Corey Glass is an idiot. He is a perfect example of the cause of all our problems; he is a poorly educated, half witted drone without a shred of common sense, but with a vote in the idiocracy. He cant even go AWOL and do it right. No wonder america is being so easily dismantled; if these are the sorts of people who are the future, then all is truly lost. Even if his type are not the majority, there are enough of them in the population to cause total havoc across the entire world.

This is the problem we face.

Let this be a lesson to all those moral people who genuinely signed up to protect and serve their country, and who find themselves unable to obey immoral orders and who want to find a way out.

Use the fucking google you idiots:

The countries which have neither diplomatic relations nor extradition treaties with the U.S. are: Bhutan, Iran, North Korea, and Taiwan (which the United States does not consider a country under the One-China policy).

Don’t play by the rules and expect to be treated correctly. When you go AWOL, all bets are off, and you are going underground for the duration.

Forget Canada. And if you INSIST on going there, be prepared to go completely underground, enter by foot, and be ready to live like a hunted fugitive.

And for those of you who say that this man is honorable, and by making his stand in this way he is brining attention to the problems of the illegal Iraq occupation, you are completely wrong.

The protest methods of the 20th century no longer work. Turning yourself in and making a martyr of yourself is just stupid; people are so brainwashed today that they turn on martyrs and truth tellers with chants of “tase him! tase him!”.

The problem with these people is that they are too quick to obey. They think that there are rules, somewhere, and that there is justice somewhere. There IS no justice, there ARE no rules, especially at this level, and now that you have been on ‘the CNN’ Mr. Glass, you are going to be treated to the most unimaginable cruelty at the hands of your government. But I digress.

There is nothing honorable about what this man is doing. It would have been far better for him and the cause of ending the american empire gracefully if he had secreted himself into Canada unnoticed, and then began an ‘AWOL Soldiers Blog’, telling the world of his fugitive adventures in Canada, his Iraq horror stories, the horror stories of other soldiers and other juicy pieces of writing. But that would take some intelligence, something clearly missing in this case.

What this man’s witless actions do is undermine the efforts to dismantle the war machine; it telegraphs to all soldiers with grave doubts and thoughts of escape that, “there is no escape for you. We will hunt you down and prosecute you to the full extent of the law.” Imagine the message that would have been sent, had he done it correctly. His influence would have been global. He would have been a real hero.

Now I feel pity for him.