This video is a visual representation of the difference between the Austrian School Bitcoin detractors and the people who understand what Bitcoin is, what it can do, and how it is the biggest thing since email.

On the right, you have James Turk the head of GoldMoney, who is old, and on the left you have Felix Moreno de la Cova, who is young. The old man doesn’t understand computers, cryptography or the internet. The young man does. They have a very illuminating and friendly conversation about Bitcoin and money, without confrontation, rancour or irrational nonsense like, “I just don’t like the product”.

This is how discussions should take place, and I have alot more sympathy for Mr. Turk now, because he is genuinely reaching out to understand something that is clearly incomprehensible to him, and he is not intimidated or defensive, is eager to learn and is patient and thoughtful.

We need people like James Turk, because he has a vast amount of experience to offer, and once he understands Bitcoin, I would say that his presence on a board of directors would be invaluable.

Compare and contrast this gentlemanly interview with the appalling article that just appeared at The Daily Bell (which I will not link to; one click from me is quite enough) where every sort of fallacy and nonsense is trotted out in what is a blatant attack piece trolling for clicks.

As I have said before at length, GoldMoney is a fundamentally flawed idea:

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=3103

and it is now suffering from its exposure to the State, and is becoming harder and harder to use thanks to suffocating regulations. The exact opposite is true of Bitcoin, which is becoming easier and easier to use, with better software and more outlets accepting it every day, and a response from the State which amounts to a shrug of the shoulders.

When the economic collapse starts to bite, I am betting that GoldMoney will be forced to shut down entirely, because it serves its customers against the interests of the State. The gold confiscation of 1933 is a precedent that can happen again in a heartbeat; this is not beyond the realms of possibility. People who hold real money with third parties are going to face the institutionalized theft of their savings. Bitcoin on the other hand, will never be shut down by the State, it cannot be confiscated en masse or stopped, just as Bittorrent will never be shut down.

Whatever your opinion on what Bitcoin is or is not, it is here to stay, and it is going to change everything. Wether or not you take advantage of it is up to you, but the future is not going to wait for you to wake up and catch up.

Take a look at this:

http://youtu.be/McNo62gpw6M

Stephan is a great thinker, but it seems that what he cannot do is empathise with other people.

While he is sipping coffee in his house in Canada, Hillary Clinton and Obama are at this moment concocting another lie / pretext to unleash mass murder on people, namely Iran:

http://politics.salon.com/2011/10/12/the_very_scary_iranian_terror_plot/singleton/

Canada, which he funds with his taxes by his own admission, will no doubt be a part of this criminal act.

Should Ron Paul become president before they are able to launch this mass murder, he will be able to prevent it.

For this reason alone, Ron Paul should be supported. Its all very well sitting in the safety of your own home in the empire, and paying taxes to support it, complaining that Ron Paul doesn’t want to dismantle the state, while your money is being used to kill Iranian children. Read the rest of this entry »

It appears that Anonymous is not releasing its mothelode containing 4GB of News of the World emails, because it may ‘prejudice the case’.

This is an error.

Seeking justice from a court that is run by the State is not rational in this case, and here is why.

Lets say that News International is found guilty of a crime and then is fined 500,000 pounds, or 5,000,000 or 50,000,000… so what?

What if both the Murdocks are sacked; once again so what?

News International continues to promote and lie on behalf of the bogus war on terror, the bogus war on drugs, democracy, lies in general, the erosion of liberty and it continues its unequivocal unquestioning support for the regime(s). A small fine is the most you can expect from any judgement a court might hand down, and of course, this is reasonable. Just because they have done some bad things, that doesn’t give a court the right to completely annihilate their business.

Justice in this case would be a total and completely effective boycott of News International by properly informed public. It would destroy them comprehensively and utterly, based on nothing more than their own words, as contained in the email motherlode.

No court in any country that wants to preserve its patina of ‘fairness’ can ever deliver this deathblow result, which would be real justice. Consider what happened to the jewellers Ratner’s who were almost put out of business overnight thanks to the honest words of its head in a single speech. That was all it took.

Anonymous has in its hands, a weapon that could be millions of times more powerful than the single utterance of the boss of Ratner’s. The News of the World has been listening in to the voicemails of thousands of people, now their communications are going to be probed. This is true, like for like justice. See Retributive Justice.

Libertarians understand that the State should not be the sole dispenser of justice, and that justice is a service, just like any other. The same people that murder men in other countries protect themselves with the courts that they effectively own. This is why Tony Bliar will never be brought before a British court to answer for mass murder, even though he is guilty of that crime as an accomplice and instigator.

Seeking justice from inside the matrix on its terms and inside its controls cannot, by definition, be real justice; it can only be a simulation of justice.

Anonymous can do whatever they like with the docs they have obtained. They took the risk to get them, and its up to them how they want to dispose of them, wether that is doling them out piecemeal, deleting them or releasing them in their entirety.

What they must understand is that they have the power to dispense justice themselves, by releasing the docs. The question that immediately comes to mind is are they being influenced by the media outlets they are working with:

who knows?

One thing is for sure; working with newspapers is retarding their movement, which is the job of the Mainstream Media gatekeepers like the Guardian.

For the record, justice does not mean violence. The State and its fear soaked control addicts conflate justice dispensed outside of its courts with violence to frighten people away from the idea that justice is a service. Justice does not mean hanging or imprisonment or other violence, it means (in general) an equitable settlement of partie’s claims, based on the facts of a grievance, that is mutually satisfactory.

If the Anons wants justice, they should let everyone make up their own minds wether or not News International is a fit company to receive their money. The only way to do that is to release the documents in full.

Consider this. There must be information in that 4GB motherlode that might be useful to a victim of the State, that has no meaning to you as you gate-keep the gigabytes of information.

Imagine that some poor person without the connections or resources to fight the oligarchy / State has been suffering under their heel; lets say someone powerful wants his land or his house, and has framed him up to steal it from him. The evidence of this might be in a motherlode of files that you are poring over, that you might miss because it doesn’t seem important; but it is important to that man who is being victimised.

An even more germane example would be evidence that the News of the World has run a smear campaign against a person or company; the evidence is in there waiting to be released to vindicate the vilified person. Even more interesting would be an expose of all the PR companies that have been feeding stories to the News of the World. We all know that Facebook has been caught running a PR campaign against Google, can you even begin to imagine the number of emails from PR companies that must be in that motherlode, and how they will completely expose the way newspapers simply churn out stories that are fed to them? That would be a real public service, and no one would ever read a newspaper with the same eyes ever again. The spell of churnalism would be broken forever, and everyone reading a newspaper story would immediately, instinctively put up a barrier between them and the print that keeps the story from entering their consciousness uncritically. From then on, the first thing everyone reading a story would ask before and after reading it would be, “Now, I wonder who is paying for this story”. It would constitute an unprecedented healthy scepticism that would spread throughout the world.

All this from the release of a single tarball.

That is justice.
That is moving forward and never going back.
That is progress.
That is solving problems.

Everyone needs to have access to everything for the dam holding back justice to be broken.

Finally, some who agree with the stance that Anonymous takes on things still believe that democracy is a good thing. They claim that the Norwegian president saying that the answer to violence is more democracy is correct. This is patently false. Democracy itself is violence:

The answer to violence is to say “NO” to violence.

That means “NO” to all violence and coercion, no matter where it comes from.

Democracy is violence and coercion. You cannot be against violence and for the violence of the State at the same time. If you are for the State, and for democracy, then you are for all the bad things that come out it, its violence and all the bad stuff that you quite rightly want to see and end of. You cannot, or at least, should not, hold two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time. Unless you are a quantum physicist.

This is a difficult concept to understand at first, but once you grasp it, it becomes clear that the answer to violence can never be more violence, especially the unprecedented mechanised industrial scale violence of democracy and the State, which is more violent than any mafia gang or any organised entity in the history of the worl.

It will be interesting to see what happens to that 4GB file, especially when Topiary, who has apparently just been arrested, is made the next victim of the standard and insidious mainstream media character assassination that is done to everyone like that. You need only look at what happened to Julian Assange for a good example of how mainstream media deliberately sets out to poison the perception of people, and of course, evidence of a coordinated PR effort to smear Assange could very well be in that motherlode.

Think about it!

THe title of this blog post is the number of seconds it took for the hive mind of Anonymous to reach the next iteration that we wrote about in December 2010. Here is the tweet posted around the time of the light bulb moment:

What is so exiting about this is that 229 days (or 329,760 minutes or 5496 hours) is not very long for an iteration, and if the time between iterations is getting shorter and shorter, it will not be long (since Anons are highly intelligent) before they come to the Final Boss of of this game: The idea of the State itself.

When they come to the conclusion that the State is not needed, is the source of all the evils they are railing against, that it is a new cancer and not at all inevitable, Murray Rothbard will spell everything out for them in a tome that is not TL;DR, and which will simply blow their minds.

PayPal’s ridiculous regulations are a product of the State. If if were not for the State, they would not be doing what they are doing, i.e. blocking access to accounts, closing accounts at the behest of the state, restricting the flow of your money etc etc.

If you look behind the curtain at everything that is going wrong, from the insane wars, to the restrictions on free speech, DRM, the ban on vitamins, the RIAA/MPAA, Domain seizures, your money becoming worthless, widespread poverty, the ‘War on Drugs’, the patent trolling, the endemic corruption, the bank bailouts… EVERYTHING – the State is the direct cause of it.

People who are clear thinking are not wedded to any particular idea out of habit. They hold their ideas because they are arrived at by reason, and if by reason they must abandon wrong ideas, they do so immediately.

The idea of the State is a habit, a bad one, like heroin, and anyone who refuses to accept the State as the Final Boss is a brainwashed, drug addled addict.

It looks like the tipping point has been reached. Anonymous and its legion are moving inexorably towards the locus of Libertarianism. They are quickly shedding all operations that are ineffective or that involve disrupting other people’s property (like LOIC). Closing your PayPal account and switching to another service is an incredibly powerful act. By moving to another service, you can ensure that the flow of information (money) is not interrupted. The question then becomes, which service to switch to?

If you switch to any service that is regulated by our enemy, the State, you will be moving from one frying pan into another. What is needed is a way to move information (money) that does not involve a third party. A middlemanless system that is controlled by the masses for the masses.

That means Bitcoin.

The next obvious iteration is to get millions of people to move to Bitcoin as the main way they transact with money on the internet. That means dumping credit cards, PayPal and any other payment system that is regulated by the State.

Even if the number of places where you can buy things with Bitcoin is small now, if millions of new challengers appear holding it and eager to spend it, I guarantee you that Bitcoin will be integrated into every e-commerce package out there in less than a month. This will dramatically bootstrap the Bitcoin economy, decimate PayPal and the credit cards and bring forward the date of the inevitable demise of the State.

Remember; the taint of the State is the root problem. Apply this simple test to anything that you can think of that chafes at your sense of decency and liberty.

“Is there a law or regulation that makes this bad thing happen?”

If the answer is yes, then the State is behind it.

Try it. You will be amazed at how everything bad you can think of can be traced back to and is a direct result of the existence of the State.

The inevitable next question is “what are we to do without a State to tell us what to do?”. Murray Rothbard and the Libertarians have the answer, and this answer is not based on theory alone; it is based only on provable facts.

A critical mass of non violent change is coming where the State will simply cease to exist, just like it did in East Germany. This time it will be different however. There will be no West Germany to fill the void. There will be nothing; nothing but the good will and power of collective non violent voluntarism and the unprecedented prosperity that will follow as day follows night.

One last thing.

Some people say, “this is how you do it, keep it legal and legit”. This is wrong, ‘in the matrix’ thinking.

If you restrict yourself only to what is legal, then you will most certainly fail.

If they outlaw Bitcoin, or any of the other 17 alternatives to PayPal, and remove your ability to change services and stay ‘legal and legit’ how will your boycott end? It will end in total failure.

Your strategy should not be based on doing what is or is not legal, because the State, the enemy, decides unilaterally what is or is not legal. Constraining yourself in this way is thinking inside the box created for you by the State. It will not work.

Your strategy must be based only on what is moral and what is effective. That means refraining from doing anything that is immoral and only doing things that are effective.

If they make payment systems other than PayPal illegal, that is an attack on your liberty that you can respond to without committing an immoral act; in the same way that smoking marijuana, despite it being illegal, is responding to an outrageous infringement of your liberty without committing an immoral act. You simply refuse to obey, en masse.

What has changed is that everyone is connected to everyone else, and withering, debilitating, concentrated, tsunami death blow boycotts can strike with incredible ferocity if the conditions are correct.

Just wait for the critical mass condition to arrive, when the penny drops and the State dies… I imagine that it will be like the change of weather on a day where it has been raining and all of a sudden, the rain stops and beautiful sunshine burst into the day.

The green rain of the State will be stopped!

There is another interesting article over at Lew Rockwell about Bitcoin, which is a transcript of a conversation with Doug Casey, who we have blogged about before. This man is a truly great speaker and thinker, and as proof of this, I direct you to watch Mr. Casey in action.

In the interview, Doug Casey says something truly astonishing, because if it is true, it means that the next iteration of Bitcoin is already here and is sure to fulfil the promise of a decentralised, unregulated, freedom and pure value centred money. Here is the line that I am talking about:

So, way before the dollar value of Bitcoins stepped off a cliff last weekend, I was telling people who asked me that I didn’t use them and didn’t plan to use them.

Frankly, I can’t see why anyone would, when there’s already an electronic digital currency like Bitcoin but backed with gold: GoldMoney. I should disclose that I’m a small investor in the company.

http://lewrockwell.com/casey/casey89.1.html

My emphasis… What?!

An electronic digital currency like Bitcoin, backed with gold?!

I had to find out more about this!

GoldMoney has a good looking website:

http://www.goldmoney.com/

It says its ‘simple and secure’ and that you have ‘Complete ownership of the metal you buy’.

Better and better!

But where is the ‘download’ link? I want to start using it right now!

When you click on ‘Find out more about how to get started with GoldMoney’

Ooookkkkkk.

OnMouseDown we are not presented with a link to some software but instead we are displayed the following:

At GoldMoney we make it very easy for you to conveniently buy, own and store precious metals. The first step is to sign up for free to open a Holding, which is a personal record of your activity in GoldMoney and the metal you own. After a short verification process, you can transfer money to fund your Holding and start buying metals to preserve your purchasing power.

You have to sign up for a ‘holding’, complete ‘identity verification’ and then transfer funds.

Personal Record?
Verification process?

This doesn’t sound like Bitcoin at all!

It gets worse.

They then ask you for your country of residence. What on earth has that to do with MY MONEY?

And then it gets even WORSE:

Country of Residence

Depending on the country you live in, you can sign up for different types of Holdings. GoldMoney accepts customers from 93 countries. If your country of residence is not one of the countries listed above, unfortunately we are currently unable to accommodate your application. If you are temporarily living in a country not listed above but your primary country of residence is on the list, please contact us to discuss your situation. For example, if you are an international aid worker temporarily assigned to a non-listed country but your primary residence is in the UK, we will most likely be able to accept you as a customer.

If you move to another country after you open a Holding, please take into consideration that this could affect the type of Holding you are able to have.

Netherlands & Netherlands Antilles

Due to a review on the rules applicable to the sale and storage of precious metals, we are currently unable to accept applications from Dutch residents.

Sucks to be Dutch then. I guess that the Dutch don’t have any property rights. I guess that if I am Dutch, I can’t spend money on the internet, with this ‘Bitcoin like’ money. What?

And then it gets unimaginably worse:

We claim that we are from Italy, and then say submit. You then get this:

Enter your name and contact details during the sign-up process

Upload a scanned image of a bank statement or bank cheque before the initial funds are sent from your bank account

Upload a scanned image of your photo ID (passport, national ID card or driver’s license)
Send a certified copy of your photo ID and an original bank statement or utility bill along with a completed CAP Form (letter or A4-size) to us by post

Additional verification of your identity and the source of your funds may be required depending on your circumstances and the Holding value

Unbelievable.

And this, given the interview, is the most surprising thing of all:

Security and integrity

As a company regulated by the Jersey Financial Services Commission, GoldMoney complies with anti-money laundering legislation, which requires GoldMoney to know the identity and residential address of each of its customers. We make use of a Customer Acceptance Policy (CAP), to ensure the security and integrity of the GoldMoney system. More information about the CAP and how to sign up for your GoldMoney Holding can be found in our CAP FAQ.

But in the interview, Casey says:

That’s why the U.S. government and its media lapdogs have been so antagonistic to Bitcoin, claiming it’s primarily of interest to drug lords who want to use it as soap for their money laundering. They always mention it in conjunction with Silk Road, which claims to allow purchase of any drug through mail order, using Bitcoin as its payment system. I have no problem with that, but it’s a totally impractical idea in today’s world. It’s just an idea intended to scare witless Americans. Frankly, I’m disgusted at the fact money laundering is even accepted as a crime; thoughtless people believe whatever they’re told. It’s not a crime, by any rational definition. But that’s another subject for another day.

Well, I certainly agree with that sentiment; there is no such thing as ‘money laundering’… but I digress.

This service is as far from Bitcoin as you could possibly be. There is no software to download, you cannot buy and sell it from anywhere without restriction, you have to integrate with the state at a very intimate level, indeed, they cannot even offer this service to everyone, even Europeans like the Dutch, thanks to the State.

What if the State says that all gold in private hands is to be confiscated, as they did in 1933, and as they appear to be heading for right now. Is this company, for ‘Security and Integrity’ going to simply go along with the State and steal your money?

Who knows. Who cares.

I would never put my money into a service like this where the State is alerted of all your details and ‘holdings’. They offer no utility whatsoever in comparison with Bitcoin. You cannot spend your GoldMoney at retailers directly, you can only redeem your stored gold for cash, which you then have to either take in person or spend through another intermediary if you want to buy something from Bangalore. And of course, there are the myriad fees and taxes you have to pay each time you move YOUR MONEY around between these entities.

This is the reason why Bitcoins are valuable. There is no service like it anywhere.

You can get started with them instantly.
You do not have to identify yourself.
You can use them from any location.
You can send them to any location.
You can fund them with any currency.
You can spend them immediately.
Your transactions are private.
There are no taxes on transactions.
Transaction fees are so small as to be irrelevant, and if you are a miner, you get the fees back from other users.

All of these features and more make Bitcoin a tool with a very high level of utility. Bitcoins are scarce, and you need them if you want to make purchases without the onerous and illegitimate predations of the State.

If the ideas of Liberty are spreading, and they are, Bitcoin will have a very large and primed population of users who recoil at something like GoldMoney.

The utility of Bitcoin, which is a function of the number of users who want it, will entrench it, or at the very least, the idea of it.

We will never go back to government run money, just as we are not going back to music pressed on vinyl. The quality of sound has been sacrificed for Digital Convenience, and more music than ever before is in everyone’s hands, accompanied by a new economy where the middle man is being killed off. Digital music is here to stay, and so is Bitcoin. The middle men are going out of business, and everyone is going to benefit.

The frictionless utility of Bitcoin, like the experience of finding music, books, films and software and then downloading them immediately is something that once you taste it, changes your perception forever.

No one who uses Bitcoin is going to accept GoldMoney as ‘digital currency like Bitcoin’. Its like saying buying DRM’d iTunes files for 99¢ is like sharing FLACs on IRC / Dropbox with your friends (sorry, I slipped into ‘tecchie speak’ as the illiterates call it. What I mean is the experience of downloading and sharing unencumbered music files that you can play anywhere, freely, between friends and colleagues for nothing, is not at all like paying money for files from Apple, where what you get are files that you cannot share or use on all of your music devices. Apple is a cumbersome, restrictive and invasive intermediary vendor that spoils your music experience. Is that better? I can only dumb it down so much… sorry!).

The genie is out of the bottle, just as it is with file sharing. Eventually no one will pay for entertainment files. It will be culturally unacceptable and commercially impossible. Similarly in the near future, no one will accept that you cannot spend your own money whenever you want, however you want, without anyone other than you and the recipient having a say in it.

Bitcoin, or its immediate decedents will provide the secure infrastructure for this, and most certainly not GoldMoney or services like it.

This does not, obviously, invalidate the immutable, irrefutable idea that the best money is gold. All it means is that on the internet, if you want to spend money, the best way to do it is Bitcoin. It is the easiest, the most Libertarian styled, the most secure (yes, the most secure, all the recent problems with Bitcoin users have not been due to a problem with Bitcoin, but with the people who are running it and the incorrectly managed computers that they control) and transparent way of spending money.

Finally, it seems like the Ghandi rule is sweeping through the Libertarians who at first, instinctively and irrationally railed against the idea of Bitcoin.

The people on the wrong side of history appear to be very quickly moving from the laughing stage, and are already past the fighting stage it seems.

Bitcoin has already won.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

UPDATE!

Jon Matonis hit the nail on the head about this company back in 2009. His article is just the sort of thing that journalists cannot produce, and that the best Bloggers are good at; concise, rational even handed, insightful and purely fact based writing that spells it out just as it is. Read it!

And check out this informative, in depth interview with Mr. Matonis: Jon Matonis on Agorist Radio

WE TOLD YOU!

RC: irc.lulzco.org (channel #LulzSec | port 6697 for SSL)
BitCoin donations: 176LRX4WRWD5LWDMbhr94ptb2MW9varCZP
Twitter: @LulzSec
Contact us: 614-LULZSEC

. /$$                 /$$            /$$$$$$
.| $$                | $$           /$$__  $$
.| $$       /$$   /$$| $$ /$$$$$$$$| $$  \__/  /$$$$$$   /$$$$$$$
.| $$      | $$  | $$| $$|____ /$$/|  $$$$$$  /$$__  $$ /$$_____/
.| $$      | $$  | $$| $$   /$$$$/  \____  $$| $$$$$$$$| $$
.| $$      | $$  | $$| $$  /$$__/   /$$  \ $$| $$_____/| $$
.| $$$$$$$$|  $$$$$$/| $$ /$$$$$$$$|  $$$$$$/|  $$$$$$$|  $$$$$$.$
.|________/ \______/ |__/|________/ \______/  \_______/ \_______/
                          //Laughing at your security since 2011!

.--    .-""-.
.   ) (     )
.  (   )   (
.     /     )
.    (_    _)                     0_,-.__
.      (_  )_                     |_.-._/
.       (    )                    |lulz..\
.        (__)                     |__--_/
.     |''   ``\                   |
.     | [Lulz] \                  |      /b/
.     |         \  ,,,---===?A`\  |  ,==y'
.   ___,,,,,---==""\        |M] \ | ;|\ |>
.           _   _   \   ___,|H,,---==""""bno,
.    o  O  (_) (_)   \ /          _     AWAW/
.                     /         _(+)_  dMM/
.      \@_,,,,,,---=="   \      \\|//  MW/
.--''''"                         ===  d/
.                                    //   SET SAIL FOR FAIL!
.                                    ,'_________________________
.   \    \    \     \               ,/~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
.                         _____    ,'  ~~~   .-""-.~~~~~~  .-""-.
.      .-""-.           ///==---   /`-._ ..-'      -.__..-'
.            `-.__..-' =====\\\\\\ V/  .---\.
.                     ~~~~~~~~~~~~, _',--/_.\  .-""-.
.                            .-""-.___` --  \|         -.__..-

Greetings Internets,

We have blissfully obtained records of every single citizen
who gave their records to the security-illiterate
UK government for the 2011 census

We're keeping them under lock and key though...
so don't worry about your privacy
(...until we finish re-formatting them for release)

Myself and the rest of my Lulz shipmates will then embark upon
a trip to ThePirateBay with our beautiful records
for your viewing pleasure!

Ahoy! Bwahahaha... >:]

Cap'n Pierre "Lulz" Dubois

LINKS:
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6467131/Bethesda_internal_data

BONUS ROUND! SENATE.GOV!
http://lulzsecurity.com/releases/senate.gov.txt

+++++++++++++++++++++

http://pastebin.com/K1nerhk0

This is not a substitution, or an extraploated future scenario of the type we have used in the past to illustrate the dangers of centralized databases of your personal, private and sensitive data.

THIS IS REAL! >> UPDATE: OR MAYBE NOT!

LulzSec:
Not sure we claimed to hack the UK census or where that rumour started, but we assume it’s because people are stupider than you and I.

Anyone in the world can copy and paste The Lulz Boat ASCII art and general lighthearted theme. Smarten up, check the feed first.

But hey, if someone out there hacked the UK government in the name of #AntiSec, well done sirs!

It seems that LulzSec may NOT have access to the UK Census Data! Or maybe someone else does, and wants to post it under their name…. who knows? If something turns up on The Pirate Bay, then we will know that its true. Even if a single entry from the Census DB is leaked, with the table structure and everything, that would mean that the data is O.U.T. OUT!

LulzSec should start PGP signing their statements so that no one can forge them…

Even if this time, the data has not escaped, this doesn’t invalidate what we and all the people who understand this problem have been saying.

There is nothing in the world that can stop a determined person from copying the data from any database, and there is no way that the UK Census Data is secure in any database where it is stored. That is an incontrovertible and indisputable fact. There is no way of knowing wether or not this data has not already been copied by someone. The statement relased by the UK Census people in response to this fake Lulzsec announcement said only that they are ‘looking into it’ not, “we have your data safe, and no one has copied it”. See what I mean?

We warned you again and again and again and again about this.

Did not fill out the 2011 Census? You are safe.

Yet again, BLOGDIAL is vindicated.

for the 100th time…

Don’t enrol.
Don’t register.
Don’t hand over your data.
Don’t fill out their forms.
Say ‘no’ everywhere you can.

I just came across this very wonderful post on copyright, excerpted here. Read the rest of it, its a classic, and do spread it.

A Crescendo of Copyright

Natural Finale and Reprise

Rejected by The Rethink Music Conference, April 2011, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University

Abstract

• A prologue – mankind’s culture and copyright in perspective

Copyright’s 18^th Century Overture

• 1709 Queen Anne’s privilege of copyright
• 1787 the philosophy of Paine and the (natural) rights of man
• 1790 the prestidigitation in which a privilege is inveigled as a natural right

Copyright’s Confrontation with Cultural Liberty reaches a crescendo

• C19-20 the printing industry’s exploitation of its privilege
• 1990s the propertisation of published intellectual works as an entrenchment
• 2000s the piracy of published intellectual works as a natural liberty
• 2010s the persecution of the people for their piracy (cultural liberty)

Copyright’s finale, and the reprise of natural rights

• 20?? the prospectus for mankind’s future

Prologue

The extent of mankind’s primordial cultural activity stretches back at least half a million years, but thanks to repeated erasure by glaciation we start the notable cultural events calendar at 50,000_BC.

51,709 years later a nascent empire and its pampered press have the impudence to decide that mankind’s cultural commonwealth would be so much better if a law was created to prohibit people from copying each other.

There are a few words for the precursory, unbridled cultural intercourse that still remain in the English language, though they are almost obsolete: ‘folksong’, ‘folkmusic’, ‘folktales’, and ‘folklore’. These primeval springs are still known to a few among us and can be found seeping through the pre-renaissance foundations upon which our modern culture stands.

Today we have the luxury of looking back over the last three centuries of ‘protection’ to see how much richer our culture has become, being effectively manacled and enclosed by corporations such as Disney. Permitted the liberty only to create purely original works, albeit with some tolerance for cultural cross contamination (if not too flagrant), we enjoy a far more creative and diverse culture. Or rather, this is what Queen Anne’s Stationers’ Guild and its descendant publishing corporations would persuade us is the consequence of her wise enactment of law to ‘protect’ published works from the grubby hands and mouths of the great unwashed.

Nothing to do with the printers’ monopolies then…

Let us see the historical accident of copyright in perspective:

65,000,000BC	Primates
2,000,000BC	Homo Erectus
500,000BC	Division into Neanderthal & Homo Sapiens
200,000BC	Homo Sapiens’ ancestral basis
140,000BC	Glacial retreat after 40,000 year long glacial period
50,000BC	Dawn of mankind’s culture: language, music, drawing, etc.
32,000BC	Cave paintings
30,000BC	Neanderthals extinct
20,000BC	Glacial retreat after 50,000 year long glacial period
17,000BC	Lascaux Cave Paintings
10,000BC	Holocene – modern epoch
9,000BC	Jericho
8,000BC	Stonehenge site’s significance
3,100BC	Stonehenge construction begins
2,611BC	First Egyptian Pyramid
753BC	Foundation of Rome
300BC	Library of Alexandria
48BC	Library of Alexandria accidentally destroyed by Julius Caesar
300	Book format outnumbers scroll format
1282	Water powered paper mill
1403	Corporation of London forms Stationers’ Guild
1440	Development and use of printing press begins
1492	Europeans discover New World
1536	Erasmus dies – 750,000 copies of his works sold
1557	Stationers’ Guild granted control over all printing
1572	Fall of Inca Empire
1695	Stationers’ Guild loses control upon expiry of the Licensing of the Press Act 1662
1703	Daniel Defoe endorses commercial piracy of his work – if true copies
1709	Queen Anne Establishes the Privilege of Copyright
1787	US Constitution
1790	Madison re-enacts Statute of Anne (tweaked for the US)
1791	Thomas Paine deprecates privileges
1814	Steam powered printing press
1837	Babbage designs Analytical Engine
1937	Relay computers
1943	Valve/Tube computers
1953	Transistor computers
1969	Internet begins with two nodes
1971	Microprocessor computers
1991	World Wide Web begins
2000	The people obtain the means of mass reproduction and communication
2010	The successors to the Stationers’ Guild seek possession of the Internet via ACTA
2011	Copyright recognised to be ineffective vs the people’s cultural liberty/piracy
2015??	Copyright is reformed to exempt individuals in the digital domain
2020??	Copyright is reformed to exempt individuals
2025??	Copyright is reformed to exempt the digital domain
2030??	Copyright is repealed
2031??	The author’s exclusive right to their writings is properly secured at last – ethically

Seen in a proper perspective, copyright is a legislative misadventure borne of political expediency and commercial self-interest. It is a hiccup in mankind’s history and, in the face of the diffusive nature of information, is coming to an abrupt and natural end.

[…]

read the rest of this epic, classic, brilliant, informative and insightful post here:

http://culturalliberty.org/blog/index.php?id=276

No wonder it was rejected, it is so true it jumps off the screen and knocks you off your chair!

Some people believe that the design of Bitcoin is flawed, and that it cannot work. David Kramer is one of them and has made an interesting post over at Lew Rockwell, about Bitcoin. Lets take a look.

I’m sure by now many of you have heard about Bitcoin. The fact that it’s called “virtual currency” gives you an idea about its actual value as a real medium of exchange.

This isn’t true; the only thing that gives you an idea about its value as a medium of exchange is what you can exchange it for. Right now you can trade a bitcoin for 26.141 Federal Reserve Notes. This is the truth about what the value of a Bitcoin is right now.

While many people who are touting it on Facebook are enamored with the fact that it was voluntarily created by the marketplace (i.e., is not forced down our throats by a private central bank), I’m afraid that those people are losing sight of how a real medium of exchange arises in a free market.

Bitcoin was developed as a way to exchange between people in a cash like fashion at a distance, without a central clearing authority. It was created because there is a need for this service, which has been recognised since the days of Dr. David Chaum’s E-Cash.

The people who work on this project were not directed to by anyone, and no one told the man who made the breakthrough that this is what he should be doing. This is yet another example of free people solving problems for themselves, and that is a good thing.

We should point out that Satoshi Nakamoto could have patented this idea but choose not to; instead, he released his idea and the software he wrote to implement it as Open Source, so that everyone everywhere can benefit from his concept. This is a noble act, and it is proper that we recognise this.

A medium of exchange arises from something that had a material use/value in the market prior to becoming a medium of exchange, i.e., it was also a good being bartered for other goods and services. Over the centuries, gold and silver won out as the two most preferred mediums of exchange—with gold holding the number one position due to it being more scarce than silver.

You could argue that the electricity and the CPU cycles that are used to generate bitcoins had a use in the market prior to their use to create a Bitcoin, but we will leave that for today.

Over the centuries, gold and silver have been settled upon as the best medium of exchange by the market, and this is still true today.

Now fast forward to the twentieth century, which is happening right now. How can I transmit gold (or any thing that I and another person want to trade) without double spending, anonymously, to a person that is half way around the world, without a central clearing authority? Before Bitcoin, this was not possible, and now it is.

Bitcoin, whilst not conforming strictly to the definition of what money is, is a very useful tool to exchange value. It takes some understanding and knowledge of mathematics to grasp exactly how it works and why it is so brilliant, but even without that knowledge, it can still be used by everyone eventually.

Mr. Kramer can use email to send and receive messages without understanding SMTP or POP syntax. He can write blog posts without understanding HTTP requests or MYSQL, and most certainly he will be able to use credit cards and buy books from Amazon whilst his transaction is protected by SSL. None of these things, these very complicated things, need to be understood fully before you can grasp their importance. SSL, upon which the entire commerce infrastructure is built, is nothing like putting a paper document in an envelope to be mailed by the government monopoly postal system and yet, it is used every day to secure documents in transit. PGP and Public Key Cryptography is used every day to sign documents in a way that means they cannot be forged; signing a document with Public Key Cryptography is not the same as putting your ‘John Hancock’ on a piece of paper, but it is a quantum leap in a different direction that has uses way beyond what signing a piece of paper can do for you.

This is what Bitcoin is all about; it is a breakthrough in sending and receiving acknowledgement of ownership.

Anyone who scoffs at this is simply not seeing the big picture.

What was Bitcoin’s prior material use/value? Zero. It is just bits in a computer.

This is a straw man argument. David Kramer’s post, and the two links in his update to Murray Rothbard’s books (one of which I have read; ‘What has Government done to our money?‘) are just ‘bits in a computer’ and yet, these bits can be used to transform the thinking of men. Bitcoins when they are stored on a device, are represented by bits, but it is what those bits represent and their relationship to other bits on other people’s computers that is important. This line of Kramer’s shows that he really does not understand what computers are, how they work and why Bitcoin is a breakthrough.

And what’s with the “fixed” amount of Bitcoins? Who determined the “proper” amount? A computer programmer?

And why not a computer programmer? This is exactly the same as Lacy Clay saying Thomas DiLorenzo cannot talk about economics ‘because he is an historian’. For what reason are computer programmers excluded from inventing something that has a potential use in economics? Or should this be left only to the high priests? This is not a serious argument against the design of Bitcoin. Clearly there needed to be an upper limit to the number of Bitcoins in circulation, otherwise it would not be useful as a way of transmitting ‘money’. The person who designed Bitcoin, a computer programmer, set the upper limit. If the market will not accept this limit, then the system will not be used. But I digress.

Data is infinitely copyable. There is no limit to the number of times data can be copied. This means that any token in a system of exchange can be copied at will by anyone with access to the system at any level. This is where the problem of double spending comes from, and part of the breakthrough in Bitcoin is the solution to this problem, which computer programmers have been searching for for decades.

When you have even a slight grasp of how data and computers work, and you understand that the double spending problem has been solved, your first reaction would be to gasp, as the enormity of what Bitcoin is dawns on you.

Only the free market can voluntarily determine how much of a real medium of exchange is needed in the marketplace over time.

This is true, but once again, this has nothing to do with Bitcoin. By releasing Bitcoins slowly over time, by the efforts of the people who use it, there can never be a flood of Bitcoins. Satoshi Nakamoto must have grasped on some level, if not entirely, that money is a commodity, which is why he designed Bitcoin to be mined in this way, instead of starting off with 21,000,000 coins in circulation all at once. All we know about his thinking is what we see in his software and in his original proposal. We have between now and 2142 to see what the market voluntarily determines how much of a real medium of exchange Bitcoin is, and if the number of bitcoins is too small or too big. Whatever the outcome, there is nothing stopping someone else with another system from supplanting or improving on Bitcoin, by whatever means they can come up with.

While the idea of attempting to get rid of the Bankster monopoly on creating money out of thin air is commendable, Bitcoin is also money created out of thin air. Bitcoin is just substituting one bogus medium of exchange for another.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/89471.html

Declaring Bitcoin to be ‘Just Another Bogus Medium of Exchange’ is not an argument and is clearly false. It is also not true that Bitcoins are created ‘out of thin air’. Bitcoin is new and unique, and that is a fact; even if you believe it to be bogus, you have to demonstrate why it is bogus.

If you want to refute Bitcoin (or anything for that matter) you have to address the facts about it. Here is an example of someone who has done precisely that.

Tav addresses how Bitcoin works, acknowledges its breakthrough, demonstrates an understanding of economics, identifies what he believes the specific flaws in Bitcoin are, and explains why he concludes it cannot work, clearly and with precision. Here is another critique and another by the same author.

If you want to contribute something meaningful and useful that is the way to do it. There are arguments swirling around the ‘hoarding problem’; it would be nice to read a good analysis of hoarding and how it applies to real money like gold and silver, and how those dynamics apply to Bitcoin. In any case, I don’t care much for people who refuse to think hard about subjects like Bitcoin; something that is voluntary, harmless, an exiting breakthrough and which has massive potential even if in this iteration, it fails.

We have seen the failure of other systems, like Chaumian E-Cash before. Each of these iterations causes analysis, innovation and new products to emerge. This is something to celebrate, to think hard about, to address with logic and facts and indeed, to even try out on your own computer so that you actually have a grasp of what is involved in it.

Finally, whatever happens with Bitcoin, the individual wins.

If Bitcoin becomes the de-facto way of spending money on the internet, displacing all other systems like Credit Cards and PayPal, the public wins, and the State loses. That is win.

If Bitcoin fails because the State outlaws it, hatred for the State increases. That is win.

If Bitcoin fails for economic reasons, it will not be tried again in this form and the lessons learned will be folded into the next iteration. That is win.

If Bitcoin fails for technical reasons, same again, the lessons learned will be used in the next iteration, which is win.

Whatever way you choose to look at it, Bitcoin is a good thing.

+++++++ UPDATE! +++++++

In a well considered article, which I linked to above, “BitCoins: All Buzz, No Substance” by Grant Babcock, the problems with Bitcoin as perceived by the author are addressed. In listing his objections to Bitcoin, he actually argues for it. Lets take a look.

A given good’s exchange value has a tendency to snowball.

This is happening with Bitcoin right now.

If I believe that a larger number of people are willing to trade for a good, I am more willing to trade for that good myself.

This is happening right now with Bitcoin.

Eventually, we expect a single good or a handful of goods to emerge as the predominant media of exchange; they are then called monies.

This may happen with Bitcoin on the internet. If enough people download the client and accept it, and websites use the simple tools needed to accept it, we can expect it to emerge as a form of money. Bitcoins, by Grant’s own reasoning, are no different to coconuts, feathers, tally sticks or cowrie shells.

Historically, goods such as cigarettes, precious metals, shells, and many others have emerged as monies.

And so why not digital certificates that cannot be forged or ‘printed’ (mined or generated) beyond a certain number (21,000,000)?

People’s willingness to treat an item as money is based on experience. They forecast that a good will be accepted in trade tomorrow because it was accepted in trade the day before and the day before that.

And so, if enough people accept Bitcoins, they will treat it as money de-facto by this definition.

If we follow this chain back in time, eventually we arrive at a point where the commodity is has not yet been used as a medium of exchange and is only wanted for its use value.

This is true of Bitcoins; digital certificates and signatures have been around for many years; they were never before thought of as money in and of themselves (though you can buy certificates for money; ask Mark Shuttleworth about how he became a billionaire by selling ‘just bits on a computer’).

The principle that the value of a currency can be traced back to a time when it was not yet a currency but just a commodity like any other is called the regression theorem, and interested parties can read more about it in Human Action Ch 17 § 4.

If you do not like tracing Bitcoins back to digital certificates, you could trace them back to the electricity used to make them. Or is electricity not a commodity because it is not physical? It is intangible, but is transmissible… hmmmm!

Typically once a commodity becomes a money, a variety of certification agencies will emerge.

Bitcoin has this, of course, in the form of its decentralized P2P clients. That is the breakthrough; no centralised certification agency.

Suppose for example that our money is gold — examples of certification might be an imprint on a gold coin stating its weight and where it was minted, or a piece of paper entitling the bearer to a certain amount of gold at a trusted repository.

A stamp on a bar of gold is meaningless, as we have seen with the tungsten centered fake gold bars. Bitcoin, in this respect, is superior to gold because each Bitcoin is absolutely certified.

This certification makes the commodity an even better money than it would have been without the certification. The certification is bundled with the commodity and traded, but is in principle distinct; the coin and the stamp in the coin are different “things.”

Indeed. As you can see, all the arguments presented here for gold as money, apply to Bitcoins as money.

Just as the computers and the internet changed the way letters and books are made and distributed and read, money is being changed in the same way.

This means that if you want to read a physical book, you still have to go out an buy one, or have it posted to you. If you want money in the real world, you should use gold and silver coins only.

If you want to read a book on your iPad, you get a PDF copy from somewhere on the internet, and then read it on your device. This does not mean that ‘PDFs are not books’ and no one with any sense says this. PDFs are for e-readers. That is their nature, its what they are for and the medium where they make sense is the computer.

If you want to send money to your cousin in Jodhpur, you take your gold coins to a shop in Manchester, turn them into Bitcoins and then send them. Your cousin can then turn them back into gold, or he can buy goods and services with them on the internet. Bitcoins are to money as PDFs are to books. Its not hard to understand, and the wow factor comes in when you understand that whilst PDFs can be copied ‘double spent’ ad infinitum, Bitcoins cannot, even though they are both digital.

That is simply incredible and its why everyone is so exited about them. Add to the mix the anonymity, the lack of central authority, the transparency in both the client software and the network, and you begin to see just what a revolution this is any why the word ‘revolution’ is appropriate.

Finally read this excellent analysis of gold vs Bitcoin by Anthony Freeman.

Chinese translation of this article.

Thanks to Old Holborn, we just read this breathtakingly wonderful piece. It says many of the things we have been going on about for years:

• Demonstrations do not work
• The State has no right to control you
• The State has no power to control you unless you consent
• StopWar and the like just don’t get it
• Doing nothing is better than marching
• If everyone simply stops cooperating, the State dies
• Only a small percentage of the population needs to quit the system for massive beneficial change to take place

You read BLOGDIAL, so you know what I am talking about.

This piece comes from TPUC. We really are heading for a significant tipping point, where a confluence of factors is going to unleash everyone. This will be a good thing, because Britain is full of locked up potential that if released, would transform the entire world.

Here it is, in full:

A direct challenge to the authority of the State

by bogbeagle » Mon May 30, 2011 8:54 am

Hi chaps. Haven’t posted here for some time, but I’d like to introduce to you a new “strategy” which has potential … well, I think so.

It’s a pretty long post, but I’d ask you to persevere and tell me whether you think the logic of my argument is sound. And, is my proposal sound?

Let me precis … I propose that we can demand, of government, the answer to an “impossible” question. That, if asked publicly, this question is sufficient to undermine the “assumed authority” of government.

A refutal of Government’ authority

I’ve always been told that I am “governed and taxed by consent”.

And, when you think about it, this must be true.

It stems, of course, from the Christian’ idea that we are each born free and of equal worth. Now, if two people are equals, it follows that one may not direct the other, nor impose his will upon that other, except with the consent of both parties. When no such consent is present, it must be the case that one ‘man’ is imposing his will by force, or the threat of force. In effect, that would mean that one ‘man’ has enslaved the other to his bidding.

So, to avoid that accusation, Western governments have invented the idea of “consensual governance” … wherein each of the governed agrees to abide by the rules, sanctions and taxes which are laid down by “Government”.

There is little doubt that this relationship serves many people adequately. It’s also true that few people ever question its validity; that’s why we are known as “sheeple”, I guess.

Logically, if I am “governed and taxed by my consent”, there absolutely must be a mechanism by which that consent may be withdrawn. If no such mechanism exists, then the concept of “consensual governance” is clearly untrue; I would be governed without my consent and thus be a slave to the will of other men. There are parallels with the slave-owning society of the C18th, if you’ll just ponder awhile.

A strategy

My strategy has two prongs:

1 … A concerted and public demand that the “Government” inform me of the mechanism by which I may withdraw my consent to its governance. If no such mechanism exists, then said “Government” should state that I am, in fact, its slave. I would, in effect, be challeinging the Government’s “lawful authority” to govern.

2 … An attempt to unify the disparate campaigning and lobbying groups, each of which is hindered by the same, fundamental, deficit. That is, each group is suffering a deficit in Liberty. If the members of the “stop-the-war” group can be shown that their cause is the SAME as that of the “I-want-to-smoke-weed” group, then the number of those who would live as Free people, will swell; and at some point, their mass will become critical.

OK, the first prong involves a direct challenge to government itself. Traditionally, those who would be Freemen, have sent off their affidavits and been thoroughly ignored … am I right? Well, that’s the treatment that I received, anyway.

This time, we must act in concert and very publicly. But, this will not involve travel or mass demonstrations, or confrontation. No, I suggest that we use the Royal Mail and the Internet (our best friend).

I propose that, en masse, we flood the PM and our MPs with demands (recorded delivery) that they tell us how we withdraw our consent to governance. Of course, they cannot truthfully reply, since their reply must either tell us that we are enslaved OR furnish us with the freedom to opt out of the State. I’ve thought about this for quite some time now, and I’m confident that any and all answers, which they might construct, ultimately lead to the same truths … we are enslaved. The thing is, we have to force them to admit it or else retire embarrassed and blustering. The facts of this strategy should motivate thousands more people to question their status within the community. Now, I do expect that 90% of the public could not give a toss, but if just one percent sit up and take notice … well, that’s 650,000 people.

Running in tandem with this mass “interrogation”, would be our internet campaign to promote the concept. This will be largely via the alternative media (we all know the value of the MSM, by now). I’m thinking of numerous campaigning websites, Zerohedge, Max Keiser, Adam vs the Man, Freedomain Radio, Alex Jones … you get the idea. We have to put the PM and our MPs in a position such that a refusal to comply with our demands is simply untenable … they will then be forced to bullshit. They’ve no other option, because they DARE NOT speak the truth of the matter. We, of course, anticipating the bullshit answers, will have raised and dismissed them, publicly, before the politicians have even uttered them.

As to the unification of campaigning groups. Let me give you an exemplar. I’m sure that it’s obvious to you that a Free man of good conscience would not support an unjust war. But, that’s exactly what we are forced to do, via taxation. And, “forced” is the right word to use.

It serves the ends of the peace campaigner to withdraw his consent to taxation, when the money is being used for evil ends.

So, too, with the campaigner who wants to smoke his weed (or whatever). As a Free man, it is clear that the State has no business in defining what substances he may ingest. And yet, the State assumes de facto ownership over his body by compelling him to ingest only that which the State deems acceptable.

Each of these two campaigners is suffering from a common deficit .. a Liberty deficit.

I don’t know whether it’s possible to make that case to them. I don’t know whether their other concerns will over-ride my arguments. It could be that the peace campaigner also wants to have the State extort money from other people and give it to him in the form of benefits. If that’s the case, then it’s a clear example of “having your cake and eating it”, since it is impossible to have your own Liberty whilst denying it to others … except by the use of force. Well, that’s a moral dilemma for them to ponder. I’d suggest that you’ve no business in labelling yourself “peace campaigner” whilst encouraging the State to extort money from others, on your behalf. But that’s just me!

In passing, I feel that it’s important to avoid confrontation with the executive arm of the State. Our campaign should be one of ideas. The State is well prepared to fight a campaign of riots and bottles, but woefully unable to challenge logic. How can it challenge the Truth?

Now, I don’t know where this might lead. It could be another dead-end. But, I think that the logic is unassailable. What is your opinion?

——-

My opinion is that you rock, you are 10000% correct, and if this takes off, you will have pushed the button.

The Hargreaves report on intellectual property recommends setting up a ‘digital exchange’ for the clearance of copyright. Here is the full text of the report, broken into chapters served as PDFs. You are free to copy them and distribute them at will.

Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Creation Under Competition
Chapter 3: How Competition Works
Chapter 4: Innovation Without Patents
Chapter 5: The Intellectual Monopoly Apologists
Chapter 6: The Evil of Intellectual Monopoly
Chapter 7: The Devil in Disney
Chapter 8: Does Intellectual Monopoly Increase Innovation?
Chapter 9: The Pharmaceutical Industry
Chapter 10: The Bad, the Good, and the Ugly

Its about time that the state has the power to violently prevent you from exercising your property rights removed from it.

In the UK, it is illegal to make a copy of a CD you own for your own use. That is completely immoral; if you own a CD it is your right to copy it, destroy it, lend it or do anything else you like with it.

If you concede that the state is legitimate in telling you that you cannot make a copy (rip a CD to MP3s) then you must also concede that you should be forbidden from destroying a CD, if the maker of that CD demands that you do not do that.

This is how absurd the copyright laws are.

There are companies in the USA that specialise in ripping your CD collection for you.

You send them your CDS, and in a matter of days, you get your CDs back along with a DVDR of MP3s containing rips of all your tracks. These companies, the service they provide and the benefits they produce cannot happen in the UK, thanks to its absurd statutes.

The Hargreaves Report will sweep all of this away in one motion. Its recommendations on patents will result in cheaper drugs and medical care for everyone, making the beloved NHS more cost effective; if you love the NHS, you should hate patents.

There is only one problem with all of this, naturally, and as soon as you read the Hargreaves Report linked above, you will instantly know what it is.

Finally, if you want to attract business to this ridiculous ‘Silicon Roundabout’ push, persuading businesses to locate to Britain, you must remove all the barriers to entry that people recoil from, like punitive non-dom regulations and other absurd anti business nonsense, of the kind that Google say would have prevented them from starting their business in the UK.

I guarantee you that there are companies, right now, that are starting up that shun Britain because it is anti business, and that there are companies in development here that once they start to fly, will fly away from Britain in order to avoid being bogged down by the entrenched anti business climate. Skype was based in Estonia for a reason.

Think about it.

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.

DEATH TO THE STATE!

ONCE AND FOR ALL AND FOR GREAT JUSTICE!

This video about the true nature of bullying:

should make Home Educators in the UK feel warm inside; you are free to Home Educate as you choose, in a country that (for the moment) is not bothering you in anything like the repressive, unjustifiable, nasty, fascist ways the other ‘Democratic’, ‘fair’, ‘inclusive’ and ‘just’ countries do. Your children are not being subjected to the horrors that are described so eloquently above.

Enjoy!

Its very difficult to persuade people that they are supporters of violence by being in favour of Democracy. The brainwashing that they have been subjected to for the entirety of their lives presents an almost impenetrable barrier of disbelief and pavlovian disdain that even the sharpest scalpel cannot cut.

As soon as you tell these poor deluded fools (and calling people ‘poor deluded fools’ does not, of course, help), that they are violent people, they recoil like slugs that have been sprinkled with salt; no one wants to think of themselves as a violent type, and yet, that is exactly what people who are for Democracy are; violent human beings.

Decent people with intact moral centres and sound ethics are not violent and are against initiating violence. They would never dream of using violence to get what they want from other people, or to make them behave in a certain way, or to refrain from behaviours; the very idea is repugnant to them. This is how it should be.

Sadly, there is a huge sea of people who have been brainwashed into thinking that the state is not only necessary, but that it is an inherently good thing, it is not violent and that the democratic process justifies anything that the state cooks up, no matter what it is.

This is why you can find people who believe that the state has the ‘right’ to ban or regulate Home Education, or to kidnap children from families because ‘the children’ are ‘too fat’.

Even people who are intelligent have fallen for this evil, to the extent that they believe that the State, and its violence is noble.

I have some bad news for these people.

The idea that the State is inevitable is false, and every day, people are waking up to this fact.

Seemingly out of the blue, comes this clip:

as you can see, it beautifully, and gently demonstrates to anyone with a single brain cell how the state is violent and immoral, and how it doesn’t matter how many people vote for it, it is still violent and immoral.

A critical mass of understanding is on the way, and this video is evidence of it When we reach the tipping point, there will be a majority of people who do not accept the States’ alleged, self proclaimed ‘right’ to steal money and murder.

The coming economic collapse, the discrediting of the state through Wikileaks and every other thing that is just around the corner will push people towards Libertarianism and the true idea that people do not need a state to live in peace and prosperity.

Already in the UK, there is open talk of the illegitimacy of the State, and clips like this and the ones that will surely follow will help guide and solidify people’s thinking.

Any attempt to shut down the free internet will only make things worse for the State. Their best option now, if they want to survive in any shape or form, is to adapt. Already in the UK, some councils are thinking about going semi voluntary; slashing their ‘council tax bills‘, reducing the number of ‘services’ they have a monopoly on providing, leaving the rest to private companies. This would be a good move; garbage collection should not be done by the state at all for example.

If they fail to switch to pure voluntarism, essentially becoming charities without any pretence that they have the right to demand money from anyone, they will be swept away entirely, and the people who work in these places, their pensions and jobs also swept away.

It would be far better for them; they have the infrastructure already in place, local knowledge and an immediate ability to act in everyone’s interests immediately. The only thing that would change would be they would lose the power to steal money. Most people would go along with a town council that worked only to clean the roads, keep them salted in winter and the hedges trimmed.

These new councils would be very responsive to what people actually want, because everyone would have the option of paying someone else to do the work, and of course, any talk of planning permission and the other big brother, rights destroying nonsense would be instantly dead in the water.

How everything would work precisely (or not work) is irrelevant; its important to remember that the foundation of the State is pure evil. There is no option to say, “well, if statelessness doesn’t work out, we can always go back to violence”. No, you cannot go back to immorality chaps; immorality is not a choice on the table for moral men. The violence of the state must be stopped. Period. It is unacceptable to all decent people that a society based on violence is simply tolerated as, “things just as they are”.

The State is a house built on immorality. It is a loathsome, noxious and bad smelling weed that has grown from a bad seed. This is the root problem that has to be fixed, and without it being fixed things are only going to get worse. Its time to pour the RoundUp® on this parasitic plant to kill it right down to the roots.

Finally, here is another video for you, that explains what is about to happen with the forthcoming collapse that we have been talking about:

it is these events that will be the turning point.

Lets hope that when this happens it spells at the very least, the end of the State. As everyone walks out of the wreckage, we can but hope that the shock wakes them up out of their hypnotic trance as the fatal blow to the Stat, its apparatus and apologists shuts the hypnotic transmitter that has kept everyone asleep.

There are enough Libertarians in circulation in the USA to save it from a return to a murderous imperial government. Perhaps with their example the rest of the civilised world will follow along. Certainly, if the USA turns to Libertarianism, they will drain the brains out of every other country with a population.

What a life!

In today’s Telegraph they have a story about the Police planning to ban all demonstrations to prevent disorder:

Police may ban future marches to prevent disorder
Police may ban anti-Government marches through central London to prevent further disorder and strain on officer numbers.

By Martin Beckford, Heidi Blake and Steven Swinford 7:00AM GMT 15 Dec 2010
The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, said that outlawing the demonstations was an option for the authorities but conceded it could anger protestors further.

He admitted he was “very worried” about the effect on law and order in town centres and suburbs caused by large numbers of officers being sent to the centre of the capital.

Despite widespread criticism over the policing of the protests, and warnings that the Met’s tactics risk leading to the death of an innocent bystander, Sir Paul said he was proud of the professionalism of the 3,000 officers on duty last week.

[…]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8201906/Police-may-ban-future-marches-to-prevent-disorder.html

I’ve said it before; the police are in an impossible position. On one side, they have the socialist PC nanny state, making them enforce all sorts of insane and draconian laws that have nothing to do with protecting people and property, causing them to misallocate time and resources. On the other, they have the people who spit on them and hate them for doing what they are told. Then we have the protestors who are pushing on another side, with their irrational, violent and destructive behaviour, and for their troubles, they are paid next to nothing for the amount of personal danger they face.

All of that aside, we have already written about demonstrations, how they are entirely useless and how they are nothing more than a way to keep people inside an illusion that they are free.

Now this police ban on protesting is going to do exactly what we say demonstrations do, only it will be explicit and not implicit; banning demonstrations will cause all those unenlightened people who think that demonstrations are effective to spend their time fighting for the ‘right to demonstrate’ instead of working to solve real problems with strategies that achieve discreet and real goals.

Alex Jones says that Britain is de-facto going into martial law. This is very probably true, but the fact remains that there is nothing any state can do to stop people from spreading ideas and then acting on them, especially when those acts are essentially private. This is why it was impossible to completely eliminate alcohol sales during prohibition, for example.

Demonstrating in the streets does not solve problems, so what needs to be done to reverse the rot?

For a start, you have to understand that the state does not have enough staff to control everyone. Widespread control of the population can only be achieved with the consent and help of business.

For example, VAT is going to rise to 20% in January. The people who are going to collect this Tax are the businesses of the UK. The individual shoppers are not the ones who are forced to collect and hand in this money; if every business refused to collect VAT, then the system would be abolished by default. It could happen in a single week.

Just as we wrote in the ‘Zero TRust Society‘ essay and proposal, the key to stopping any predation of the state is to convince the businesses that do the work of the State to stop doing that work en masse.

ID Cards would have become useless if every business refused to interface with the NIR and the cards; business is the crucial interface that allows police states to function. The smoking ban could not have been implemented without the every publican acting as a locum policeman; indeed, in Germany, the smoking ban has failed precisely because the publicans are ignoring the ban:

Many methods of getting around the ban have been utilised; mobile smoking bars now drive around towns catering for smoking customers, one restaurant cut holes into the walls so that diners could pull open a curtain and lean outside to smoke and with Germany bordering a wealth of more democratic countries many people now pop across the borders into tolerant countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia to enjoy an evening out. In many parts of Germany the anti smoking laws are simply ignored completely.

[…]

http://www.thesmokingban.org/germany.php

Instead of demonstrating, people who want real change and an end to the police state have to convince every business owner not to cooperate with the apparatus on any level, they have to make it so that the businesses who choose the side of freedom rather than the side of the State, profit from doing so and are protected.

In the end, this act of banning demonstrations is going to push the population towards the conclusion that we have laid out here.

Already the French have woken up and understood that demonstrations do not work; this was the key insight that led the instigators of Bankrun 2010 to do what they did… and did you notice that there was nothing about it in the news? Have you also noticed that the incredible violence and disruption in Greece is also not being reported?

But I digress.

People are slowly waking up to the fact that they are not making any headway on any front, and the tools they are using are simply not working. Things are getting worse through no fault of their own, and everything that they have been trying is not making things better.

At long last, they are beginning to sense the truth.

Richard Stallman informs the public in the Guardian with his opinion on Cloud Computing.

He is absolutely correct that the way Cloud Computing works right now is insane, and that anyone who trusts Google or any other Cloud Computing service with their data is ‘a sucker’.

The main problems that should concern anyone who is thinking about using these services are these; the sysadmins (the owners of the Cloud Computing service) can see all the data on the cloud that they manage, if they decide to cut you off for any reason, Wikileaks style, your data is lost. All it takes is a single phone call from the State, no warrant, no legal process. Lastly, the police can serve a warrant on the host company and not you personally to look at your data.

All of these are legitimate concerns, but what is not being seen here is why Cloud Computing could be attractive to millions of consumers.

Like many men who are confronted by difficult subjects, processes, realities and facts that they find inconvenient, consumers simply do not want to think about how their computers work; they just want to ‘do their email’.

The vast majority of people who use computers today do only two things on them; surfing the web and email. The Google Cloud Computing platform will do both of these wonderfully; it turns on instantly, has a very long battery life, and you can access your gmail (or any other webmail service) in an interface that you are already familiar with.

That is all most people need, and Cloud Computing does it identically to a local storage machine running a browser…. and there are still people out there, believe it or not, who ask ‘what is a browser’. This is the point that Richard Stallman does not understand, and it is the reason why Cloud Computing could take off in a big way. There are people, from the highly intelligent to the most stupid amongst us who are uninterested in ethics or the consequences of their actions, or how the world and technology really works.

There is another aspect to this that we have already touched upon on BLOGDIAL, and for the record, software is perhaps the only speech for which this statement always returns ‘true’ the answer to attacks on free speech is more speech.

As we wrote before, the problem of your data being visible to the sysadmins of Cloud Computing services can be solved by encrypting all the data on the users platform before it is stored in the Cloud so that Google cannot see it even if they wanted to. This would mean that the State serving a warrant on Google would be pointless, since all Google would be able to present to the police is unreadable ciphertext.

You solve the problem of privacy on Cloud Computing services not by complaining about them, or asking the State to outlaw what you do not like, but by writing software libraries and interfaces.

Then there is the problem of the State cutting you off from your files by forcing or intimidating the Cloud Computing service provider to do so.

This can also be solved by writing software; a simple adaptation of the Open Source tool rsync (a powerful mirroring tool) could do it; all the data that you generate on your Cloud Computing tablet or laptop is seamlessly sent to a mirror on your home or office computer, over SSL so that no one can see it in transit. It is stored in plaintext, in an identical folder structure so you can retrieve it at any time without downtime.

And there you have it.

There is no reason whatsoever why Cloud Computing cannot give you all the convenience of its particular innovations, with the security that your data cannot be seen or seized; all it takes is a little (in fact, very little) thought.

Looking back through the BLOGDIAL archive, we find that this negative attitude towards companies and their innovations is a bit of a theme with the FSF.

Defective By Design ran a campaign to try and get everyone to ‘not buy an iPhone’, the best ever mobile phone at the time.

When they were making this boycott call, Jailbreaking had already become wildly popular, with over 25% of all iPhones in circulation have been jailbroken / liberated.

Instead of helping that software effort, and using Jailbreaking as a means to educate people about all the important issues surrounding the Apple ecosystem, Defective by Design got precisely nothing and nowhere. It would have been far more useful to them if they had joined forces with Saurik so that he could improve the usability of the jailbreaking process and non Apple ecosystem software.

The lesson here is clear; in this information war, writing software is the key to winning anything real. Protesting, calling for boycotts of philosophically malodorous products and all other tactics like that simply do not work. The iPhone is bigger than ever, and so is Jailbreaking, which has now been determined to be legal; the FSF lost a big opportunity by not supporting it.

Android is gaining ground on iPhone sales; this is because the software is better philosophically. Apple is going to lose this one, in the same way that it lost the ‘PC war’, and the same way that Microsoft is going to be superseded by GNU/Linux. These behemoths may seem to be in an unassailable position, especially in the case of iTunes but in the end, they will fall, because the systems are not open, and they control the users like serfs. In particular, once everyone can do an A/B comparison to Android’s upcoming music service, or some other future service, iTunes will be dumped en masse.

With the Google Cloud Computing platform, there is an unprecedented opportunity to change the way it works by taking the Chrome OS source and altering it to make it privacy centred. Why would you, as a consumer, not take something that is private over something that is not, and which gives you local backups for free, without any change in the interface and no effort on your part? Even a sucker would go for it, and furthermore, the development of this is something that I would pay for and financially contribute to the building of.

One thing is for sure, all the complaining in the world will not make Chrome OS sane. The only sensible, moral and ethical way to fix it is to take it and modify it in a way that makes it trivial for anyone to have ‘Cloudy Chrome’ on their machine, with a simple patch or by any other simple means. People are willing to patch and modify their property in their millions, as we have seen with the iPhone jailbreaking phenomenon. Privacy and freedom are popular; what needs to be done is to make it easy for people to be free on Chrome OS.

Finally, what you cannot ever justify is calling on the State to force Google to respect the privacy of its users. There are some out there who have no problem with the idea of calling on the State to violate millions of people as a means of spreading their personal philosophies. They would, in a second, lobby for new law to force Google and all Cloud Computing service providers to add privacy and local backup facilities to their products. Calling on the state in this way is fundamentally unethical and unacceptable to all decent people. The way to change people’s minds about anything is to show them why doing it ‘my way’ is better. This means writing software that they can use, that costs them nothing to switch to (either in money or learning curve terms) that is clearly better for them.

Roll on Jailbroken Chrome OS!

Every once in a while, you come across something that is so infuriating that you are compelled to try and set it right.

The other day, I came across a man’s plea to a government to tax all its people so that the ‘creative’ among their population can be ‘fairly remunerated’ with the collected monies.

Obviously, to a Libertarian, this is anathema.

It is a call for theft through violence on behalf of a special interest group. It is entirely illegitimate, unethical and immoral. I sent an email to try to start the process of showing this man that stealing is immoral.

Part of this man’s plea for theft included the claim that the state has the ‘right’ to tax one group to redistribute money to another. I pointed out in the email that states do not have rights, only man has rights. This error of attributing rights to states was fobbed off in his reply as ‘a figure of speech’, and that he, “would say that ‘persons have rights'”.

Finally his reply ended by saying that he thinks taxes are legitimate, and that the money can be spent in good ways or bad ways.

He then ended by saying, “I don’t have time to think about this”.

What?

This is like a ship owner, upon being told that his boat is being used to smuggle human beings without his knowledge, saying “I don’t have time to think about this”.

It is like a man committed to non violence who unwittingly is supplying tools and supplies to torturers saying “I don’t have time to think about this”.

This sort of attitude is completely unacceptable to decent people.

By all means, if you agree with paying taxes, you can do so voluntarily; but to call for a nation to forcibly steal money from its entire population, simply because you believe it would be a good idea is beyond passive support for the regime – it is initiating a new form of theft on a massive scale, and famous people (like this man is) have the power to make these bad laws come into force by virtue of their reputations. These people are actually dangerous.

If you are informed that what you are proposing is in fact immoral, you are duty bound as a human being to think about it and to be absolutely sure that you are not doing evil. You cannot blithely say that you ‘do not have time’ to consider the ethics of what you are doing, when two hundred million people could be violated.

The attitude displayed by this man is quite frankly, disgusting.

It seems that there is alot of work still to be done to educate people about the true nature of the state; there are still people out there who are fast asleep, or at the least, so focused on what they are doing that if the whole world ended as a result of their passive action or inaction they would shrug their shoulders and say “I don’t have time to think about this”.

The fact of the matter is, you must find time to think about this, now more than ever, because the world is actually changing at a rapid pace, towards a worst possible case dystopia scenario.

Having said all of this, its important to bear in mind that only five percent of the population was actively involved in the American Revolution. The rest of the people just went along with what was going on, probably because they ‘didn’t have time to think about tyranny’. We do not have to wake up everyone in order to be successful.

Today, many millions of people are awake, world-wide, and are actively repelling the advances of the criminal, mass murdering thieving state.

Thinking purely tactically, we only need to wake up the people who are capable of being woken up, the rest will simply follow along; and judging by their subhuman response to a direct threat, we could, if we were violent, even destroy them without them lifting a finger in response.

Luckily for them Libertarians are not violent, because we are going to win, and there is no doubt about this.

There are however, many people who are violent, and who are willing to destroy to preserve their ability to steal from you.

These deluded, misguided and violent people are surely to become the first great challenge of any newly emerged free society; how are we, the free people, to deal with the violent socialists and statists who want to restore a system of organised criminal theft and mob rule for themselves and their clients through violence?

It will mean putting to the test the very idea of having a free and purely voluntary society, where everyone voluntarily pays others (or does it themselves) to protect their property from the violent socialists.

It will almost certainly end in people being killed. This will be entirely the fault of the socialists and their brain dead followers who are hell bent on controlling other people, invading their property and stealing from them. They will not listen to reason, understand only force, and even those violent types who have the intellectual capacity to come to the correct conclusion, “don’t have time to think about it”.

Libertarians have the truth on their side, and the truth always triumphs over lies.

An army of non violent volunteers, backed by people with an economic interest in bolstering them will present an unstoppable defensive force for the preservation of Liberty in any future battle between the violent statists and free people.

As time wears on, and prosperity spreads like wildfire, the idea of statism and violence will become completely discredited, to the point that the people who try and rally troops for initiating violence will find that their prospective thieves and killers saying…

“I don’t have time to think about this”