Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. With ample anecdotes and witty asides, Robinson points out the many ways our schools fail to recognize — much less cultivate — the talents of many brilliant people. “We are educating people out of their creativity,” Robinson says. The universality of his message is evidenced by its rampant popularity online. A typical review: “If you have not yet seen Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk, please stop whatever you’re doing and watch it now.”

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/66

and then…

Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law

Larry Lessig gets TEDsters to their feet, whooping and whistling, following this elegant presentation of three stories and an argument. The Net’s most adored lawyer brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the “ASCAP cartel” to build a case for creative freedom. He pins down the key shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws, and reveals how bad laws beget bad code. Then, in an homage to cutting-edge artistry, he throws in some of the most hilarious remixes you’ve ever seen.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/187

Six leading academics have written to a Parliamentary committee to express their dismay at the way biometrics has been used as a magic wand which would have supposedly stopped Darling’s great data giveaway.

The six said of claims by the Prime Minister and his Chancellor: “These assertions are based on a fairy-tale view of the capabilities of the technology and in addition, only deal with one aspect of the problems that this type of data breach causes.”

Both Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling claimed, after the loss of CDs containing 25m recipients of child benefit, that the data would somehow be protected by biometric information if we had national ID cards.

The letter points out that this is based on three suppositions – that the entire UK population can be enrolled on the database; that no one can forge biometric information; and finally that every ID check would include checks against biometric information on the national database.

The letter said:

Even if, in this fairy-tale land, it came to pass that (a) (b) and (c) were true after all (which we consider most unlikely), the proposed roll-out of the National Identity Scheme would mean that this level of ‘protection’ would not – on the Home Office’s own highly optimistic projections – be extended to the entire population before the end of the next decade (i.e. 2020) at the earliest.

The academics also note that including biometric information on a national ID register would make such records even more valuable to fraudsters, and once compromised make “fixing” the problem even more difficult.

The inclusion of biometric data in one’s NIR record would make such a record even more valuable to fraudsters and thieves as it would – if leaked or stolen – provide the ‘key’ to all uses of that individual’s biometrics (e.g. accessing personal or business information on a laptop, biometric access to bank accounts, etc.) for the rest of his or her life. Once lost, it would be impossible to issue a person with new fingerprints. One cannot change one’s fingers as one can a bank account.

The six academics also point out that leaking such personal data is not just a question of hassle for people but could be potentially fatal for “the directors of Huntingdon Life Sciences, victims of domestic violence or former Northern Ireland ministers”.

The open letter, available here, was sent to Andrew Dismore MP, chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights.

The academics behind the letter include Professor Ross Anderson and Dr Richard Clayton of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, and Dr Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute. Other signers include Dr Brian Gladman, formerly of the Ministry of Defence and NATO, Professor Angela Sasse of UCL’s Department of Computer Science and Martyn Thomas CBE FREng. ®

The Register

Finally, at the 11th hour, people are waking up and realizing that the only way to kill The War Machine is to choke it of its blood:

The Nation:

I will not pay my income tax if we go to war with Iran. I realize this is a desperate and perhaps futile gesture. But an attack on Iran–which appears increasingly likely before the coming presidential election–will unleash a regional conflict of catastrophic proportions. This war, and especially Iranian retaliatory strikes on American targets, will be used to silence domestic dissent and abolish what is left of our civil liberties. It will solidify the slow-motion coup d’état that has been under way since the 9/11 attacks. It could mean the death of the Republic.

Let us hope sanity prevails. But sanity is a rare commodity in a White House that has twisted Trotsky’s concept of permanent revolution into a policy of permanent war with nefarious aims–to intimidate and destroy all those classified as foreign opponents, to create permanent instability and fear and to strip citizens of their constitutional rights.

A war with Iran is doomed. It will be no more successful than the Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon in 2006, which failed to break Hezbollah and united most Lebanese behind that militant group. The Israeli bombing did not pacify 4 million Lebanese. What will happen when we begin to pound a country of 65 million people whose land mass is three times the size of France?

Once you begin an air campaign it is only a matter of time before you have to put troops on the ground or accept defeat, as the Israelis had to do in Lebanon. And if we begin dropping bunker busters and cruise missiles on Iran, this is the choice that must be faced: either send US forces into Iran to fight a protracted and futile guerrilla war, or walk away in humiliation.

But more ominous, an attack on Iran will ignite the Middle East. The loss of Iranian oil, coupled with possible Silkworm missile attacks by Iran against oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, could send the price of oil soaring to somewhere around $200 a barrel. The effect on the domestic and world economy will be devastating, very possibly triggering a global depression. The Middle East has two-thirds of the world’s proven petroleum reserves and nearly half its natural gas. A disruption in the supply will be felt immediately.

This attack will be interpreted by many Shiites in the Middle East as a religious war. The 2 million Shiites in Saudi Arabia (heavily concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern Province), the Shiite majority in Iraq and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey could turn in rage on us and our dwindling allies. We could see a combination of increased terrorist attacks, including on American soil, and widespread sabotage of oil production in the Persian Gulf. Iraq, as bad as it looks now, will become a death pit for US troops. The Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, which has so far not joined the insurgency, has strong ties to Iran. It could begin full-scale guerrilla resistance, possibly uniting for the first time with Sunnis against the occupation. Iran, in retaliation, will fire its missiles, some with a range of 1,100 miles, at US installations, including Baghdad’s Green Zone. Expect substantial casualties, especially with Iranian agents and their Iraqi allies calling in precise coordinates. Iranian missiles could be launched at Israel. The Strait of Hormuz, which is the corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, will become treacherous, perhaps unnavigable. Chinese-supplied antiship missiles, mines and coastal artillery, along with speedboats packed with explosives and suicide bombers, will target US shipping, along with Saudi oil production and oil export centers.

[…]

A country that exists in a state of permanent war cannot exist as a democracy. Our long row of candles is being snuffed out. We may soon be in darkness. Any resistance, however symbolic, is essential. There are ways to resist without being jailed. If you owe money on your federal tax return, refuse to pay some or all of it, should Bush attack Iran. If you have a telephone, do not pay the 3 percent excise tax. If you do not owe federal taxes, reduce what is withheld by claiming at least one additional allowance on your W-4 form–and write to the IRS to explain the reasons for your protest. Many of the details and their legal ramifications are available on the War Resisters League’s website (www.warresisters.org/wtr.htm).

I will put the taxes I owe in an escrow account. I will go to court to challenge the legality of the war. Maybe a courageous judge will rule that the Constitution has been usurped and the government is guilty of what the postwar Nuremberg tribunal defined as a criminal war of aggression. Maybe not. I do not know. But I do know this: I have friends in Tehran, Gaza, Beirut, Baghdad, Jerusalem and Cairo. They will endure far greater suffering and deprivation. I want to be able, once the slaughter is over, to at least earn the right to ask for their forgiveness.

http://www.truthdig.com/

And there you have it.

Like I have said before if only the half of the american populatoin that are against this insanity refuse to support and finance it, everything will grind to a halt.

MoveOn, and its UK equivalent StopWar and all other groups that have tens of millions of members combined, but which do not have either singly nor collectively a plan or strategy to achieve their aims other than to write letters, march in the streets like lemmings and hold candle lit vigils outside No.10 Downing Street; all of these groups, all of these people, collectively, have always had the power to stop this insanity in its tracks.

Chris Hedges is right to be doing this, but he is dead wrong that it is, “a desperate and perhaps futile gesture”. It is in no way futile, any more than the existence of a single snowflake in a blizzard is futile. Collectively, a blizzard of snow can paralyze a country in a single night. A blizzard of individual disobedience can do the same. That is not futility, that is RAW POWER, and now, thanks to the internets, it is trivial to organize such a blizzard.

I have said this over and over, and in many different ways. Ron Paul becoming President of the United States of America will put a stop to the madness; this cannot happen for over a year, so in the interim, some form of positive, effective, logical mass action has to be taken so that hell is not unleashed in advance of the Ron Paul Presidency.

Imagine the nightmare of having just the right man in the White House and him being handed Iran in flames, Iraq in ruins (this is already the case of course) and a world in 10 times more chaos than it is today. Not a pretty picture is it? Something needs to be done RIGHT NOW, at the very minimum, pledges of real, appropriate and logically correct action of the type that Chris Hedges is making.

Take a look at this comment attached to his piece:

[…] God damn right. And why do journalists on TV, where 90% of Americans get 100% of their political and policy information, keep behaving as though there is anything at all to talk about except stopping this insane plan to destroy Iran?

Even Keith Olbermann, supposedly the greatest liberal in prime time TV political commentary, doesn’t seem to get it. He should be devoting 80 to 95% of his show every single night to this subject.

This is an absolutely out and out, hair on fire emergency. And everyone is sleepwalking right into it. It isn’t even THERE for “normal” people. […]

This commenter is correct. And I have said before, all the special comments in the world will not do anything in the end; an action is required to put out this ‘hair on fire’ emergency and FINALLY people are starting to wake up to this, and when I say ‘people’ I mean writers of the type who would normally not put themselvs ‘out on a limb’. That is how serious this is.

Note also in the comments the number of people who are saying, “sign me up I’m with you”, “where do I sign up?”. This idea is going to spread until it is out of control…right where it needs to be.

Anyone with any doubts about just how ‘over’ the NIR and ID cards are should have those doubts washed away by this, from the Times:

[…]

Ms Smith had many inquisitors. The first was the senior Labour MP Keith Vaz, who is deeply oily but that makes it all the more slippery when he asks a good question. After the events of last week, he demanded, was she planning to look again at how to protect ID scheme data. As his words oozed over us, like treacle over sponge, Ms Smith just sat there. She did not jump up, eager to inform. Instead she looked over at her Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne. He popped up and trumpeted: “The House will know that, where there are lessons to be learnt from last week’s events at HMRC, then it is right that we learn them.”

This was clearly nonsense. Ms Smith nodded away earnestly. Why? Could this really be the Home Secretary? Was she in charge? Perhaps we should check her biometric data just to make sure. David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, knows exactly who he is. He is her tormentor. He can smell weakness but he asked a simple enough question. “If the Government gives away your bank account details, that is a disaster but you can change your bank account,” he noted. “What precisely do you do if the Government gives away your biometric details?”

Here was another chance for Ms Smith to tell us of her strategy or, at least, to pretend to have one. Instead she said: “Biometrics will link a person securely and reliably to his or her unique identity.”

No one looked reassured. I cannot think why: surely the news that our biometrics can link us to ourselves can only be good, but Ms Smith, or her impostor, struggled on, to loud barks of laughter. “The current plan for the national identity register is that biometric information would be held separately from biographical information, thereby safeguarding against the sort of eventuality that you are talking about.”

Mr Davis, looking like a shark who had just had a tasty snack, asked her about a European information-sharing scheme called Project Stork. “How are we going to prevent a repetition of the disaster of the last few weeks when sensitive personal data is held not by one government but by 27?” Ms Smith looked flummoxed. I don’t think she knew about Project Stork. Again, this was worrying. Wouldn’t a real Home Secretary have a clue about this?

[…]

Yes indeed; it looks like the computer illiterates in the House of Commons have all suddenly woken up to what biometrics really mean, and it has happened because either they or someone they know has been violated; so large was the recent violation that there is no way that a single member of the house was not affected.

Absolutely Brilliant. You could not have designed a better demonstration of how the NIR and ID cards are dangerous.

Members of the house are now speaking like we and the many others against this madness have been speaking for years. It is now well and truly OVER.

Now we hear about ‘Project Stork‘; so many words and images come to mind. But I will defer.

Fears over pan-EU electronic identity network
By Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor

New concerns have been raised over the Government’s multi-billion-pound ID project as it emerged that Britain’s identity database could be shared with 26 other European Union countries.

The Home Office is taking part in a scheme, codenamed Stork, which aims to make all EU electronic identity networks ”inter-operable” within three years..

Michael Wills, the data protection minister, yesterday conceded that the ”deplorable” loss of 25 million records had implications for the ID card scheme.

“We are going to obviously have to look at the national identity register in the light of all this,” he told Parliament’s joint human rights committee.

”We are going to have to learn the lessons. Everything will have to be scrutinised and then we will assess it again.”

However, Mr Wills said this did not mean the ID scheme – due to start next year for foreign nationals – would be scrapped

[…]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/27/nidcards127.xml

There cannot be anyone now, thanks to the DVDR fiasco that does not instantly understand the full implications of this. Everyone in the UK now has first hand, intimate knowledge of what this means; it means that your personal information will no longer be personal, it will be sown to the wind and spread to every corner of the globe. It will be a violation without precedent, even WORSE than the violation of the DVDR release, since, as Rt HON Vaz points out, you can change your address and bank account but you cannot change your face or fingerprints and once they are out there, they are out there forever.

The question everyone is now asking; do I want my face, fingerprints, address, date of birth and all of the other pieces of information the NIR will collect on me in the hands of, say, the Germans?

The answer, from Land’s End to John o’Groats is a resounding ‘NO’.

Anyone who signs up for ID cards now is totally insane, or has been living under a rock for the last two weeks. There is nothing you can do about your data being in the DVDR release, but there is everything you can do about staying off of the NIR / ID card database.

All you have to do is refuse to comply, and your data will never enter that system. If enough people refuse, the whole scheme will become unworkable and collapse.

There is a problem however, with passports. Something needs to be done about the new generation passports and accompanying database and the poor sheeple that have applied and been issued with them. They are all going to need to be recalled as too dangerous to be used. They then need to be replaced with ISLAND (Intrinsically Secure Legally Acquired Named Document) Passports.

As you know, the ISLAND Passport system allows you to be issued with a secure document that does not depend on a centralized database for verification and does not violate your rights by assigning a unique number to you.

It is entirely possible to reduce the amount of passport fraud without rolling out an Orwellian surveillance system.

But you know this!

The police understand intimately how reports are forged, corrupted, accusation falsely made, evidence planted and the ‘criminals’ stitched up. That is why they are shrieking like Abu Grahib inmates at the idea that their DNA should be put in the database:

PLANS to force police to give DNA samples have sparked a rebellion among rank-and-file officers.

It is understood all eight of Scotland’s police forces are about to demand that in future new recruits hand over samples to be included in a national genetic database.

This would allow any body matter, such as hair or saliva, found at a crime scene, to be compared with the DNA records of officers, so investigations are not thrown off course through accidental contamination by officers working there.

This is the same reason that they want everyone in the UK to be put on this database. What is interesting is that these police men obviously thought that as police, they would be excluded from the national DNA database. Are they in any way different from other members of the population? If everyone else is being made to go into this database, what on earth would make them think that they have an ‘opt out’?

But rank-and-file police fear that calculating criminals with a grudge against members of the force could manipulate the system to damage the careers of innocent officers.

Actually, what they think is that calculating police men with a grudge against members of the force could manipulate the system to destroy the careers of officers. There. Some substitution for you.

Members of the Scottish Police Federation believe criminals could deliberately contaminate the scene with officers’ DNA, either to implicate them in serious crimes or to give the impression that they had planted evidence. A federation spokesman said: “A point made by many of our members is that it is relatively easy for anyone so minded to obtain DNA traces of a police officer – for example from a discarded cigarette butt – and to deliberately contaminate a locus with it.

If that is the case, and police are to be exempted, then everyone in the UK who has not been convicted of a crime should also be exempted, because the same threat to the reputations and careers of ‘ordinary’ citizens exists for the man in the street and the police man.

“Apart from the suspicion which may or may not fall on the officer, it has the potential to diminish the evidential value of any DNA traces of the real perpetrator of the crime.”

If this is true of the police being on the register, then it is true for the members of the public, and even moreso, because the vectors for fraud increase exponentially when everyone in in the database; ANY cigarette butt or used condom instantly becomes a means of diverting attention away from the perpetrators of crime; every bin in the street becomes a gold mine of DNA to be sourced. If no one is in the database except criminals then this threat disappears, and in fact, when you get a match to a known criminal, the database does what it is meant to do; catch repeat offenders.

Last night the officers’ fears were dismissed as “far fetched” by a source close to the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland, which is driving the new plan forward.

But the possibility of framing police officers is an extremely sensitive issue for the force. A policewoman lost her job after being wrongly accused of leaving her fingerprint at a murder scene. All officers already have to provide fingerprints as a condition of appointment.

Former Strathclyde WPC Shirley McKie was accused of contaminating the scene of the murder of Ayrshire woman Marion Ross, who was found stabbed at her Kilmarnock home in January 1997.

McKie maintained that although she was one of the first officers to arrive at the scene, she had never been in Ross’s house.

Despite the defence argument that the murder scene had been contaminated by police incompetence, David Asbury was convicted on other fingerprint evidence and sentenced to life imprisonment. But 10 months after the conviction, McKie was charged with perjury and suspended by Strathclyde Police for allegedly lying on oath, although she was later fully acquitted.

And there you have it. A perfect example of how someone can have their lives trashed by false evidence.

Civil liberties campaigners last night voiced concerns about the DNA testing plan. John Scott, the chairman of the Scottish Human Rights Centre, said the move was “an intrusion into personal privacy”.

He said it would be easier to justify checking samples against police DNA when the need arose, rather than impose blanket DNA testing.

and the same is true for everyone in the population, not just the police.

Scott also agreed a determined criminal could attempt to frame a police officer with a stolen DNA sample. “There have been cases where it has been suspected that fingerprint evidence has been planted,” he said. “If you have access to someone’s DNA it allows greater scope for the possibility that evidence can be planted.”

The police federation also doubts whether the planned DNA database represents good value for money. It has suggested it may be cheaper simply to obtain samples as required from an individual officer if it is suspected he may have contaminated a crime scene.

Note how they are using all the attacks that the ordinary people use to get themselves off of the slippery slope towards the biometric net. This is a perfect example of ‘first they came for the communists….there was no one left to defend me’. All those police who called for universal DNA collection now have the light shined on them, and they do not like it when the horror of it is applied to them.

Typical.

But the Scottish Executive, which is prepared to change the law to allow the testing regime to begin shortly, rejected such concerns. An Executive spokeswoman said: “The creation of such a database has clear benefits in terms of providing operational, time and financial savings.”

The requirement for new recruits to provide a DNA sample as a condition of appointment has been in place south of the Border since last summer.

Under the Scottish plan, samples would be stored on a database to be searched only if a senior investigating officer had reasonable grounds to believe that innocent contamination of a scene of crime might have taken place.

Once again, special treatment for the police. Outrageous.

Supporters say because technological developments had produced highly sensitive analytical techniques, there is a risk that a DNA profile could be inadvertently contaminated – for example as a result of an officer sneezing, coughing or shedding a stray hair.

OR, deliberately, through planting of evidence.

While this may not lead to a wrongful conviction, it could delay an investigation or at worst prevent the real offender being identified.

Backers of the policy say that if investigators could quickly identify such innocent contamination using the DNA database and discard it, inquiries could proceed quicker.

A spokeswoman for Acpos confirmed that following a meeting last week, all forces had agreed to require new recruits to take a DNA test and follow the English model, although Scotland’s biggest force, Strathclyde Police, is considering requiring all its officers to provide a sample.

A source close to the association said: “The fact that you’ve got someone’s DNA at a crime scene does not mean people will believe that person is responsible.

Well, we know that is a lie don’t we?!

“It is simply an indication that the person may have been at the locus. It would merely start an investigation which would require to look for corroboration.”

[…]

http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/scotland.cfm?id=902562003

The key here is MAY and thanks to the way thick people (‘cumpuuta sez nooooooooooo’) treat anything coming off of an LCD as the gospel truth, there is a real problem with the perception of DNA evidence mixed with computer delivery.

One thing is for sure, there are people out there who understand how insane this is, and as the injustices mount up and the people wake up the inevitable conclusion is that the plans will be completely scrapped.

Lets hope it is BEFORE they collect the DNA and not AFTER.

Henry Porter is almost 100% awake. Read his latest piece, where he gets is all right except for right at the end, where he say, in his sleepy headed manner:

[…] It is clear we have a short time to act. A high-profile, independent public inquiry is needed to examine the accumulation of personal data by the government, how it is stored, what it is used for and where the risks to security occur. An important aspect is the technology. Is it desirable for multinationals with no stake in this country’s traditions of privacy and freedom to be installing the systems that will control us? I very much doubt we will get such an inquiry because it would strike at the heart of Labour’s grasping and incompetent megalomania. But it is worth the opposition pushing for it.

I receive hundreds of emails each week from people asking what they can do. The first is to join a local group set up by No2ID, one of the best run campaigns I have seen. Terri Dowty’s Action for Rights on Children (Arch) and Helen Wilkinson’s the Big Opt Out both do very good work, as does the Our Kingdom website. We should write to our MPs – especially Labour MPs – and to local newspapers; contribute to blogs and phone-ins. We should talk to our friends and colleagues about what has been done by Labour’s centralisers and mainframe men, who Anderson properly identifies as Marxist controllers in another guise.

Each of us should understand that personal information is exactly that – personal – and that the government has only limited rights to demand and retain it. The scale of its operations and the innate weakness of the systems is a very grave concern to us all.

What is needed – and here I hope someone is listening – is a mass movement on the lines of the Countryside Alliance, which goes across all parties and absorbs the skills and expertise of countless activists. Now is the moment to create a movement in defence of our privacy, security and freedom.

henryporter@henry-porter.com

Guardian

Poor poor Henry!

A Public Enquiry? ANOTHER Public Enquiry? Are you totally INSANE? Just what on earth will another ‘Foxes guarding the henhouse’ opertaion do to stop this insanity?

You see, this is the writing of someone who is not yet completely awake, despite the loudest ever alarm bell ringing right next to his sleepy head. He still believes in the process of ‘democracy’ and the once great institutions of the British, which are now totally at the mercy and control of Murder Inc. We must give credit where credit is due however, and really, Henry Porter has done more than most to help get this problem the exposure that it needs out to those living under rocks without internets.

Proof of the last part of his awakening will be his public commitment to disobedience, like Dame Shirley has done (that line is bullshit. he has already done this, and said he will not submit. a.). No self respecting person will sign up for this nonsense. No self respecting person will willingly submit to it. I will not submit to it. My family will not. My friends have all said categorically that they will not.

What say you Henry? (Said, done and dusted. a.)

You can join all the groups that you want, but as we have said on BLOGDIAL so many times if there is mass non participation the whole scheme will collapse. You are under no obligation to obey laws that are harmful to you or others, and ID cards are a perfect example of this.

In conjunction with joining anti-ID groups like NO2ID, it is very important that people pledge not to cooperate with the system, on an individual and business level.

The business level is more important than the individual, because business is used as a proxy control mechanism by government. All businesses must be forced to give a commitment that they will not cooperate with the ID card / Database state controls. All those who will not give that written commitment must be boycotted. In the end, the power in any country boils down to the money in your pocket as an individual.

Airlines that do not clearly state they will not participate in the data collection crimes should be lightning boycotted. All it will take is a single week of no passengers to bring them to their knees. Once this happens the measures will be dropped. I guarantee it. And by the way, airlines are a perfect example of control by proxy. They are handed edicts from government and then obey them without any regard to the human rights and dignity of passengers. They do it seamlessly and in a fine grained way through their use of databases as a normal part of their business, handing over the cost free spoils to governments under threat of prosecution. Well, the threat of non existence is more frightening to them than any fine for non compliance and this is what it is going to take to make them do what is correct.

Finally, here is a comment attached to the Henry Porter piece. It is brilliant and very enlightening, and was previously touched upon in a post by Meau²:

There already is direct action, by criminals, corrupting the DNA database by deliberately seeding their crime-scenes with other people’s DNA – eventually making this 800 million pound database a next to useless white elephant.

http://www.scotlandonsunday.com/scotland.cfm?id=902562003
“But rank-and-file police fear that calculating criminals with a grudge against members of the force could manipulate the system to damage the careers of innocent officers.
Members of the Scottish Police Federation believe criminals could deliberately contaminate the scene with officers’ DNA, either to implicate them in serious crimes or to give the impression that they had planted evidence.
A federation spokesman said: “A point made by many of our members is that it is relatively easy for anyone so minded to obtain DNA traces of a police officer – for example from a discarded cigarette butt – and to deliberately contaminate a locus with it.”

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg18725163.800
“Police in Manchester in the UK say that car thieves there have started to dump cigarette butts from bins in stolen cars before they abandon them. ”

http://www.out-law.com/default.aspx?page=3436
“Databases on this scale change the nature of society.
For instance, if a criminal were to deposit someone else’s DNA sample at the scene of a crime, then that someone else might have to prove themselves innocent.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,,1835971,00.html
“The court heard how in order to substantiate her claims, which she made in a letter to the board of Dr Falkowski’s hospital trust, Maria Marchese had obtained one of his used condoms from a rubbish bin and had transferred a specimen of his semen on to a pair of her own knickers.
She handed the underwear to police and Falkowski was arrested, although the case against him was eventually dropped. “The professional consequences were
devastating,” Dr Falkowski told the jury: “I lost my private practice, my reputation was irreparably damaged.”

Paul Nutteing

Awesome.

Once again, those who protect themselves by not submitting to any of this will never be fished out by ‘DNA / fingerprint seeding’ of crime scenes. If however, they manage to put every sheep in the UK in the DNA and or fingerprint database…. the consequences do not bear thinking about.

What the above refers to is obvious, mainly the presumption of innocence lost (OMW a triplet!), and like it says in Meau’s post, the police will simply say, “the computer says you did it, therefore you did it”….until it comes to THEM of course, and the logical conclusion to this is that all police will be put on a special DNA white list along with legislation saying that whenever their DNA is found at a crime scene they are to be presumed innocent!!

Mark my words.

This is a short film which vividly explains the concept of liberty as it relates to a human being.

It is explained in a way that even the Eloi can understand.

“All Clear”

Listen to this recording of a phone call between Alex Jones and an Iranian, from Friday the 9th of November.

In the 15 minutes and 24 seconds that it lasts, you get more information about what is happening and what has happened than, frankly, most people can handle.

A lurker sent me this:

Its almost like she’s quoting from Blogdial.

Heh…

Peer ‘ready to defy ID card law’
The Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Williams has said she would rather go to prison than carry an identity card.

Baroness Williams said the cards would seriously undermine individual liberty so people were entitled to refuse their co-operation, using non-violent means.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions, she described the plans as “a Big Brother scheme of the most terrifying kind”.

From 2010, all UK passport applicants will be issued with biometric ID cards.

The £5.6bn scheme will also mean all foreign nationals will have to carry them from next year.

The government says cards will help protect people from identity fraud, will tackle illegal working and illegal immigration, and disrupt criminals and terrorists’ use of false identities and ensure free public services are only used by those entitled to them.

But Baroness Williams said: “Because it is so expensive the government has proposed that it will sell our data to commercial interests who will then be able to track down every damn thing you do from dawn until dusk.

“And you won’t be able to escape from it because the ID card which will be checked against your credit card will be a record of exactly where you’ve been, what you’ve done, who you’ve talked to.

“My view quite simply is that the ID card will undermine individual liberty so seriously that one’s entitled to say one won’t co-operate with it.

“I have not suggested I would use violence. I am suggesting I wouldn’t co-operate with it, nor will I.”

Asked whether that meant she would go to prison for breaking the law, she replied: “So be it – and I’m not suggesting any act of violence but we’ve got to not co-operate with something as bad as this.”

Nick Clegg, one of the party’s leadership candidates, has also stated he would take part in a civil disobedience campaign against ID cards.

Last month, he said if legislation were passed, he would lead a grassroots campaign of civil disobedience to thwart the programme and thousands of people would simply refuse to register.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7088315.stm

She is right of course.

But what she has failed to understand (or at least failed to say) is that exactly the same dangers exist if you simply apply for a passport and hand over your fingerprints.

Once they have your fingerprints, they can use both stationary and mobile fingerprint readers to interface with the NIR in lieu of a physical card.

It is the NIR which is the danger, not the physical card alone.

If Dame Shirley is really serious, she should encourage everyone to refuse to be fingerprinted by the authorities for any reason. That means not applying for a new passport until the requirement of fingerprinting is eliminated.

Violence is absolutely not required. All you need to do is get everyone to agree to refuse to co-operate. That is the only thing that is required.

As for her reading BLOGDIAL, that may or may not be the case. What we do know with absolute certainty is that she has read the ‘Frances Stonor Saunders‘, which spells out beautifully and perfectly what ID cards are all about. We know this because everyone in the Lords read it.

This scheme is going to fail. The next part they are trying to bring in is the fingerprinting and registration of all foreigners. This is not only discriminatory, but it is insanely stupid, as we have said over and over again.

Firstly:

[…]

It’s certainly possible that people might find ways to mount legal challenges to compulsory ID cards, but the most obvious potential challenge would be over the introduction of an ID card for EU citizens resident in the UK. This is specified in the ID Cards Act, and can only go ahead without being challenged by Brussels if compulsory ID cards for all UK citizens also go ahead. The moment Gordon Brown’s Government admits that compulsory ID cards aren’t going to happen for UK citizens is the moment that he also has to abandon them for non-UK EU citizens, because he’s not permitted to discriminate against them.

[…]

The Register

And secondly, you cannot discriminate against foreigners who are not EU citizens because that is….DISCRIMINATION.

Thirdly, this doesn’t make any sense on a practical level. If you stop someone (you being a police man) and then use your mobile NIR fingerprint reader to scan the person, and they are NOT in the NIR, what does this mean? IT can mean one of several things:

This person is not in the database because he is an:

1. Illegal immigrant
2. ID card Refusnik
3. British Citizen without a passport

So, what do you do?

You have to haul in the person wether they are entitled not to be in the NIR or not, just like they do in Belgium if you are caught in the street without your ID. You are taken to the police station until they can find out exactly who you are. Them not knowing who you are at all times is a crime in Belgium, and it is the logical conclusion of having a compulsory ID card. But I digress.

The only way to be sure that only criminals are not in the database is to put all the law abiding citizens in the database. Fingerprinting only foreigners is insanely stupid because it is impossible to distinguish between a foreigner and a True Brit^®. An identity database that only targets foreigners or that is voluntary is useless for the purposes of identifying people on a routine basis. The above leaves out all the moral objections any of which is enough to destroy a scheme like this.

Fingerprinting is for criminals and the detection of crime. It should be done only when a person is convicted of a crime, and if someone is convicted and later acquitted, those records should be erased. That is the only fit purpose for this technology, and it should be used to speed up the identification of known criminals and nothing more.

Fingerprinting everyone in a country is very much the ‘Nuclear Option’ in the identity arena, and this option should be and will be shunned by all decent and properly informed people.

Just you watch.

By Paul Craig Roberts
Online Journal Guest Writer

Nov 8, 2007, 01:00

The US dollar is still officially the world’s reserve currency, but it cannot purchase the services of Brazilian super model Gisele Bundchen. Gisele required the $30 million she earned during the first half of this year to be paid in euros.

Gisele is not alone in her forecast of the dollar’s fate. The First Post (UK) reports that Jim Rogers, a former partner of billionaire George Soros, is selling his home and all possessions in order to convert all his wealth into Chinese yuan.

Meanwhile, American economists continue to preach that offshoring is good for the US economy and that Bush’s war spending is keeping the economy going. The practitioners of supply and demand have yet to figure out that the dollar’s supply is sinking the dollar’s price and along with it American power.

The macho super patriots who support the Bush regime still haven’t caught on that US superpower status rests on the dollar being the reserve currency, not on a military unable to occupy Baghdad. If the dollar were not the world currency, the US would have to earn enough foreign currencies to pay for its 737 oversees bases, an impossibility considering America’s $800 billion trade deficit.

When the dollar ceases to be the reserve currency, foreigners will cease to finance the US trade and budget deficits, and the American Empire along with its wars will disappear overnight.

[…]

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2616.shtml

And so, another BLOGDIAL, ‘Told you so’ post.

We TOLD YOU over and over again that the way to stop the war machine is not to demonstrate, but to shun the thing that fuels the war machine: bad money in this case, the dollar. Now that this is happening world wide, the great and the good are saying what we said, if the dollar dies, the war machine dies.

No amount of protesting, candlelit vigils or anything else like that solved the problem. Simply doing what you do every day and refusing to fund the war machine is enough of a tactic, in fact, it is the best tactic of all, because only the bad guys lose and everyone else wins.

For the record, no one that I know wanted this. We only wanted the war machine to die. If it could have been killed without dismantling america, that would have been preferable, but now, with Iran on their minds and in their cross hairs, it is clear that there is no other option.

For the n^th time, there is one country on the earth that can recover, even from this. And that country, is the USA. It now looks as if they actually have someone who can pull it off too.

Sadly, none of this will restore the lives of the millions of mass murdered peoples who were the victims of the war criminals.

Check out this powerful video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXxKOkzciG4

taking apart the ‘Global Warming™’ cult and its groupthink tactics.

One of the most annoying things about ‘the Gore Effect’ is that you have to constantly deprogram your children because of it.

When they use modern science textbooks, the publishers slip in fake ‘environmental issues’ everywhere they can. For example, on a chapter about the principles of electricity generation, global warming is (inappropriately) mentioned. The same happens in the chapter about the definition of energy. And this is in a text book for relatively young (and sometimes impressionable) children.

What people I know are doing is teaching their children to learn how to spot propaganda, i.e. critical thinking; it is a difficult skill to learn but once it is in place, no one will be able to lie to their children with ease.

The children in that film are clearly brainwashed. They are repeating parrot style what they have been told, and there is no sign of any real thought going on in their heads. What is also worrying is that they all believe the same thing unanimously, not even one dissenter.

That is very frightening. It also means that the parents are not thinking either.

This is from an extremely useful post at Consent of the Governed, where the following pure common sense is written:

What’s worse is that scientists are being silenced and threatened.
Is this what the scientific community has come to?

I thought the church in medieval times was evil to stifle astronomical and scientific advances by people like Galileo, but now fanatic environmentalists and people in the IPCC are assuming that role.

They are blaming mankind, technology, and they are even changing the way science is practiced.
Bogus theories are allowed to be heralded as fact.

Case in point, Gore’s timeline showing CO2 and temperature – he neglects to point out that rise in CO2 levels come AFTER temperature changes NOT BEFORE!

The scientific method is becoming bastardized for the sake of monetary gain.

Should we recycle and use resources wisely – sure.
Should we work towards clean water and air – certainly.
Should we minimize the number of trees we cut down – probably
But those are all facets of wise stewardship of our home.

Is climate changing?

Perhaps… but not because of mankind and CO2, or the result of modern technology.
It isn’t because we fail to install the new mercury filled lightbulbs in our homes or drive an expensive Prius.

Climatic cycles have been happening for millions of years.
Species die and new ones evolve.
Land masses come and go.
Waters recede and then swell.
Ice caps melt and then they freeze again.
We have ice ages and then warm spells.
Mankind and technology were not the reasons for that happening.

The IPCC should be ashamed of themselves.

Indeed. We have been saying for years, as have many others, that Science is a cult with its own religious dogma, its own priesthood, Popes and systems of policing and destroying anyone who does not toe the line.

That is not to say that all scientists are members of this evil cult, many are not, and often they do the best work. Look at this list of scientists who were called crazy and all sorts of other undeserved and nasty names, but who in the end, were proven to be absolutely correct in their ‘outlandish theories’:

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

The greatest scientists of all are not so STUPID as to think they know everything, and are VERY WARY of religiosity penetrating scientific thought:

Concepts which have proved useful for ordering things easily assume so great an authority over us, that we forget their terrestrial
origin and accept them as unalterable facts. They then become labeled as ‘conceptual necessities,’ etc. The road of scientific progress is frequently blocked for long periods by such errors.”
– Einstein

Check out these theories that were ridiculed, and later found to be absolutely true:

Some ridiculed ideas which had no single supporter:

* Ball lightning (lacking a theory, it was long dismissed as retinal afterimages)
* Catastrophism (ridicule of rapid Earth changes, asteroid mass extinctions)
* Child abuse (before 1950, doctors were mystified by “spontaneous” childhood bruising)
* Cooperation or altruism between animals (versus Evolution’s required competition)
* Instantaneous meteor noises (evidence rejected because sound should be delayed by distance)
* Mind-body connection (psychoneuroimmunology, doctors ridiculed any emotional basis for disease)
* Perceptrons (later vindicated as Neural Networks)
* Permanent magnet levitation (“Levitron” shouldn’t have worked)

All of this from here.

The worst part about this appalling behavior is not that these people could not find funding or supporters, but that their work was actively suppressed and senselessly ridiculed by the religious order and priesthood of science. They were subjected to irrational attacks, had their careers damaged, and humanity as a group was made to suffer because people in ignorance are worse off than people who are enlightened.

Of course, the cult of science is not about enlightenment; it is about maintaining absolute control over the perception of reality, so that political agendas can be rolled out without friction.

The IPCC will never feel ashamed of what they are doing I am afraid, because they are DELIBERATELY LYING in order to aid in the rolling out of the system that will exert 100% control of all human beings.

No one should let these monsters invade their homes and the thoughts of their children with their hysterical lies and propaganda, and in the age of the internets, there is no excuse for it.

Anyone who says that something is ‘impossible’ or who turns to ridicule, or university censure procedures to attack someone else’s theories and works is by definition, an enemy of mankind.

Thankfully there are people out there who have some decency and humanity whilst also being scientists. They are the shining lights that keep everyone on the straight path to enlightenment.

And in the end, they always win.

Remember when we tore apart the essay by Naomi Wolf?

Well, now it seems that she has finally woken up to why the Founding Fathers put the Second Amendment into the American Constitution.

In a very recent talk, she correctly identifies Blackwater as a fascist tool and a predictable stage of one of the ten steps that all dictators use to take power, and the reason why everyone needs to have guns.

Better late than never Naomi.

The question is Naomi, what are you going to do about it? Are you now going to dump the Cintons? are you going to finally admit that there is no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans?

This video shows that she is highly intelligent, able to think, insightful, and yet, she is still inside the box. She is still inside the Matrix. She, thanks to being more awake, has been able to predict everything that Lord Bush and the Murder Inc. Cabal have been doing by comparing what they do with the methods of previous, by her own words, fascist dictators (Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin). What is missing is how she (we) are going to stop it. She says, “we are all going to rise up and stop it…right?”.

Well, I hope that you have been going down to the shooting range Naomi, because that is what it might take in the end.

Lets see what she concludes.

She says if enough people rise up and push back in a weakened democracy, the trend to fascism, can be reversed. To do this, she and some ‘political leaders’ have started The American Freedom Campaign to restore democracy in time to save us. They are 5,000,000 strong and hope for 20,000,000.

She says that the need for a national uprising to restore democracy is absolutely urgent in the face of the violence, the tasering, pepper spraying and the violence of Blackwater.

Her answer to “them ratcheting up the violence and oppression”:

We need to prosecute for treason.

She says that the founders intended ordinary Americans to take care of this problem themselves, and that they should not depend on a professional class of pundits or scholars or lawyers to do this task for them.

She will not say the words. She will not face the final thought.

She says, “assume the patriot’s task and lead the fight to restore democracy”.

Please Naomi…

SAY IT! SAY IT! SAY IT! SAY IT! SAY IT! SAY IT! SAY IT! SAY IT! SAY IT! SAY IT! SAY IT!

Let me help you:

GUNS!! GUNS!! GUNS!! GUNS!! GUNS!! GUNS!! GUNS!! GUNS!! GUNS!! GUNS!! GUNS!!

When blackwater come to your town to bully you just like the blackshirts did, “believing in your power” will not stop them, only GUNS will stop them.

Do you REALLY THINK that Darth Vader will simply lie down and allow himself to be arrested for TREASON? Go back to your history Naomi; would Hitler just give up? Mussolini?, Stalin?

Stop kidding yourself, get down to the firing range and tell your 5,000,000 friends to do the same. If you are going to storm the Bastille you had better be armed, able and willing to shoot and kill.

Better yet, tell those 5,000,000 to donate twenty dollars each to Ron Paul’s campaign, THEN you might have a chance at avoiding to have to learn how to shoot.

What is most astonishing about Naomi, is that america has gone so far down the road to tyranny that even people like her are starting to wake up and get very frightened, and I feel that she wanted to say ‘Guns’ but was too frightened!, after all, she threw away a book she was carrying rather than have it seen by TSA staff…the end of america indeed.

Thanks to Among These for it.

This man almost GETS IT:

He is saying what we have been saying for YEARS about the impotence of 20th century strategies (demonstrating, petition writing, candle vigils etc. etc.) against the 21st century war machine and the Murder Inc. Cabal™

[…]

I am asking you to disrupt the business as usual on your campuses. It wont be enough as it has become painfully obvious to simply mimic the techniques and the cool chants of the ’60s and ’70s anti-war movement. Our current anti-war movement is impotent.

We need new ideas, we need youth. We need YOU YOU YOU to wake up. A new age and a new war demand new ways of protest. Where are these new ways these new ideas going to come from?

They are gong to come from YOU.

YOU young people.

YOU young students who have been anethstetized for too long.

Its time to snap out of it.

[…]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Fzt4Q9VCpc

Something the losers at StopWar need to heed and obey clearly.

Anyone with one working brain cell knows that the old rules do not apply to this new game; not because the old rules were not good but because the ‘other side’ is playing by a different set of rules that the StopWar, CodePink, sheeple have not yet woken up to.

Clearly, and thankfully, there are many people who are waking up. That video has been seen by 2,038,058 people.

It is not too late!

Legalise all drugs: chief constable demands end to ‘immoral laws’
By Jonathan Brown and David Langton
Published: 15 October 2007

One of Britain’s most senior police officers is to call for all drugs – including heroin and cocaine – to be legalised and urges the Government to declare an end to the “failed” war on illegal narcotics.

Richard Brunstrom, the Chief Constable of North Wales, advocates an end to UK drug policy based on “prohibition”. His comments come as the Home Office this week ends the process of gathering expert advice looking at the next 10 years of strategy.

In his radical analysis, which he will present to the North Wales Police Authority today, Mr Brunstrom points out that illegal drugs are now cheaper and more plentiful than ever before.

The number of users has soared while drug-related crime is rising with narcotics now supporting a worldwide business empire second only in value to oil. “If policy on drugs is in future to be pragmatic not moralistic, driven by ethics not dogma, then the current prohibitionist stance will have to be swept away as both unworkable and immoral, to be replaced with an evidence-based unified system (specifically including tobacco and alcohol) aimed at minimisation of harms to society,” he will say.

The demand will not find favour in Downing Street. In his conference speech this year, Gordon Brown signalled an intensification of the existing battle. “We will send out a clear message that drugs are never going to be decriminalised,” the Prime Minister told the party.

The Tories also rejected the proposals. David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, said a more effective move would be the creation of a UK border police force to stop drugs getting into the country as well as expanding rehabilitation centres. He added: “We would put police on the streets to catch and deter drug dealers and we would ensure sufficient prison capacity so they could actually be punished.”

Mr Brunstrom, whose championing of speed cameras has made him a hate figure among some motoring groups, also found his suggestion that the war on drugs was unwinnable dismissed as a “counsel of despair” by the Association of Chief Police Officers. “Moving to total legalisation would, in our view, greatly exacerbate the harm to people in this country, not reduce it,” an Acpo spokeswoman said.

But the 30-page report, entitled Drugs Policy – a radical look ahead, includes a number of persuasive voices. Today Mr Brunstrom will urge his colleagues to submit the paper to Westminster and the Welsh Assembly. In it, he quotes the findings in March this year of a Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts commission, which stated that “the law as it stands is not fit for purpose” and argues for the replacement of the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act with a new Misuse of Substances Act.

That would mean scrapping the ABC system introduced by the home secretary James Callaghan with a new scale that assesses substances, including alcohol and tobacco, in relation to the harm they cause – although he admits banning booze and cigarettes is not likely.

But he notes that figures from the Chief Medical Officer have found that, in Scotland, 13,000 people died from tobacco-related use in 2004 while 2,052 died as a result of alcohol. Illegal drugs, meanwhile, accounted for 356 deaths. The maximum penalty for possessing a class A drug is 14 years in prison while supplying it carries a life term.

Mr Brunstrom indicates that there is a growing mood for change. He cites the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, which criticised the Government for failing to switch to an evidence-based policy approach. The report also includes quotes from former home secretary John Reid, admitting “prohibition” doesn’t work, and the Olympics minister, Tessa Jowell, conceding “it drives the activity underground” . There is also supportive evidence from former Chief Inspector of Prisons Lord Ramsbotham, a retired High Court judge, and Scotland’s Drug Tsar, Tom Wood.

As well as hitting the country hard in economic terms – class A drug use in England and Wales costs the country up to £17bn a year, 90 per cent of which is due to crime – there are also a series of socially damaging knock-on effects, he says.

He argues that prohibition has created a crisis in the criminal justice system, destabilised producer countries and undermined human rights worldwide. By pursuing a policy of legalisation and regulation, he concludes, the Government will “dramatically reduce drug-related criminality and will enable significant funds to be transferred from law enforcement to harm reduction and treatment procedures that are known to work.”

There was a mixed response from groups that work with users. Danny Kushlick, a director of the charity Transform Drug Policy Foundation, praised Mr Brunstrom for his “great leadership and imagination”. But Clare McNeil, a policy officer for Addaction, said talk of legalisation distracted attention from the more important issue of rehabilitation. “We have some sympathy with his views and the reasons and why he believes this but we are not in favour of legalisation,” she said.

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said it was ” significant” that a senior police officer had spoken out although he too thought the police chief’s views went too far. “Where he is absolutely right is that the Government’s drugs policy is failing and failing spectacularly. The refusal of the Government to think radically means we are letting thousands of young boys and girls down.

“I am not persuaded that full legalisation is the way forward but what is necessary is that a more logical and evidence-based approach is needed which is less susceptible to whims of individual home secretaries … The system does not work as it is.”

The Chief Constable’s verdict

• British drugs policy has been based upon prohibition for the last several decades – but this system has not worked well. Illegal drugs are in plentiful supply and have become consistently cheaper in real terms over the years.
• The number of drug users has increased dramatically. Drug-related crime has soared equally sharply as a direct consequence of the illegality of some drugs. The vast profits from illegal trading have supported a massive rise in organised crime.
• The ABC classification of drugs is said by the RSA Commission to be indefensible and is described as “crude, ineffective, riddled with anomalies and open to political manipulation”. Most importantly, the current ABC system illogically excludes both alcohol and tobacco.
• Mr Brunstrom says: “If policy on drugs is in the future to be pragmatic not moralistic, driven by ethics not dogma, then the current prohibitionist stance will have to be swept away as both unworkable and immoral. Such a strategy leads inevitably to the legalisation and regulation of all drugs.”
• The chief constable asserts that current British drugs policy is based upon an unwinnable “war on drugs” enshrined in a flawed understanding of the underlying United Nations conventions, and arising from a wholly outdated and thoroughly repugnant moralistic stance.
• He concludes: “The law is the law. In the meantime, I will continue to enforce it to the best of my ability despite my misgivings about its moral and practical worth.”

Independent

What struck me about this story is that the police man behind it says that prohibition is immoral.

Anyone with one working brain cell knows that prohibition is not only immoral, but that it is the very mother and engine of ‘organized crime’.

The Mafia in the USA was born out of the prohibition era when the manufacture, buying and selling of alcohol was outlawed.

That includes beer and wine.

The ‘war on drugs’ has been nothing more than a flimsy pretext to bring in police state measures and absurd ‘money laundering’ laws and surveillance that impact the ordinary person more than any ‘criminal’.

I single quoth criminal because no one today would say that Seagrams and any brewwer of beer is a criminal, yet, if you grow a single plant in your own garden, you can be sent to gaol for a long time. It is completely absurd, and what’s more, everyone knows it, including the poor beleaguered police who have to waste their time enforcing these insane laws.

This article says that there is a ‘growing mood for change’. This is true not only about the bogus, immoral, stupid and pointless war on ‘drugs’ but about everything. It is the same mood that is behind the mass exodus from this country. It is the same mood that is behind the meteoric rise of Ron Paul.

Everyone, everywhere has HAD ENOUGH, and they are slowly waking up, asking the right questions, and, more importantly, taking steps to do something about it.

With the elections over and the 110th Congress settling in, the media have been reporting ad nauseam about who has assumed new political power in Washington. We’re subjected to breathless reports about emerging power brokers in Congress; how so-and-so is now the powerful chair of an important committee; how certain candidates are amassing power for the 2008 elections, and so on. Nobody questions this use of the word “power,” or considers its connotations. It’s simply assumed, in Washington and the mainstream media, that political power is proper and inevitable.

The problem is that politicians are not supposed to have power over us– we’re supposed to be free. We seem to have forgotten that freedom means the absence of government coercion. So when politicians and the media celebrate political power, they really are celebrating the power of certain individuals to use coercive state force.

Remember that one’s relationship with the state is never voluntary. Every government edict, policy, regulation, court decision, and law ultimately is backed up by force, in the form of police, guns, and jails. That is why political power must be fiercely constrained by the American people.

The desire for power over other human beings is not something to celebrate, but something to condemn! The 20th century’s worst tyrants were political figures, men who fanatically sought power over others through the apparatus of the state. They wielded that power absolutely, without regard for the rule of law.

Our constitutional system, by contrast, was designed to restrain political power and place limits on the size and scope of government. It is this system, the rule of law, which we should celebrate–not political victories.

Political power is not like the power possessed by those who otherwise obtain fame and fortune. After all, even the wealthiest individual cannot force anyone to buy a particular good or service; even the most famous celebrities cannot force anyone to pay attention to them. It is only when elites become politically connected that they begin to impose their views on all of us.

In a free society, government is restrained–and therefore political power is less important. I believe the proper role for government in America is to provide national defense, a court system for civil disputes, a criminal justice system for acts of force and fraud, and little else. In other words, the state as referee rather than an active participant in our society.

Those who hold political power, however, would lose their status in a society with truly limited government. It simply would not matter much who occupied various political posts, since their ability to tax, spend, and regulate would be severely curtailed. This is why champions of political power promote an activist government that involves itself in every area of our lives from cradle to grave. They gain popular support by promising voters that government will take care of everyone, while the media shower them with praise for their bold vision.

Political power is inherently dangerous in a free society: it threatens the rule of law, and thus threatens our fundamental freedoms. Those who understand this should object whenever political power is glorified.

What Does Freedom Really Mean?

“…man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”
Ronald Reagan

We’ve all heard the words democracy and freedom used countless times, especially in the context of our invasion of Iraq. They are used interchangeably in modern political discourse, yet their true meanings are very different.

George Orwell wrote about “meaningless words” that are endlessly repeated in the political arena*. Words like “freedom,” “democracy,” and “justice,” Orwell explained, have been abused so long that their original meanings have been eviscerated. In Orwell’s view, political words were “Often used in a consciously dishonest way.” Without precise meanings behind words, politicians and elites can obscure reality and condition people to reflexively associate certain words with positive or negative perceptions. In other words, unpleasant facts can be hidden behind purposely meaningless language. As a result, Americans have been conditioned to accept the word “democracy” as a synonym for freedom, and thus to believe that democracy is unquestionably good.

The problem is that democracy is not freedom. Democracy is simply majoritarianism, which is inherently incompatible with real freedom. Our founding fathers clearly understood this, as evidenced not only by our republican constitutional system, but also by their writings in the Federalist Papers and elsewhere. James Madison cautioned that under a democratic government, “There is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.” John Adams argued that democracies merely grant revocable rights to citizens depending on the whims of the masses, while a republic exists to secure and protect pre-existing rights. Yet how many Americans know that the word “democracy” is found neither in the Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence, our very founding documents?

A truly democratic election in Iraq, without U.S. interference and U.S. puppet candidates, almost certainly would result in the creation of a Shiite theocracy. Shiite majority rule in Iraq might well mean the complete political, economic, and social subjugation of the minority Kurd and Sunni Arab populations. Such an outcome would be democratic, but would it be free? Would the Kurds and Sunnis consider themselves free? The administration talks about democracy in Iraq, but is it prepared to accept a democratically-elected Iraqi government no matter what its attitude toward the U.S. occupation? Hardly. For all our talk about freedom and democracy, the truth is we have no idea whether Iraqis will be free in the future. They’re certainly not free while a foreign army occupies their country. The real test is not whether Iraq adopts a democratic, pro-western government, but rather whether ordinary Iraqis can lead their personal, religious, social, and business lives without interference from government.

Simply put, freedom is the absence of government coercion. Our Founding Fathers understood this, and created the least coercive government in the history of the world. The Constitution established a very limited, decentralized government to provide national defense and little else. States, not the federal government, were charged with protecting individuals against criminal force and fraud. For the first time, a government was created solely to protect the rights, liberties, and property of its citizens. Any government coercion beyond that necessary to secure those rights was forbidden, both through the Bill of Rights and the doctrine of strictly enumerated powers. This reflected the founders’ belief that democratic government could be as tyrannical as any King.

Few Americans understand that all government action is inherently coercive. If nothing else, government action requires taxes. If taxes were freely paid, they wouldn’t be called taxes, they’d be called donations. If we intend to use the word freedom in an honest way, we should have the simple integrity to give it real meaning: Freedom is living without government coercion. So when a politician talks about freedom for this group or that, ask yourself whether he is advocating more government action or less.

The political left equates freedom with liberation from material wants, always via a large and benevolent government that exists to create equality on earth. To modern liberals, men are free only when the laws of economics and scarcity are suspended, the landlord is rebuffed, the doctor presents no bill, and groceries are given away. But philosopher Ayn Rand (and many others before her) demolished this argument by explaining how such “freedom” for some is possible only when government takes freedoms away from others. In other words, government claims on the lives and property of those who are expected to provide housing, medical care, food, etc. for others are coercive– and thus incompatible with freedom. “Liberalism,” which once stood for civil, political, and economic liberties, has become a synonym for omnipotent coercive government.

The political right equates freedom with national greatness brought about through military strength. Like the left, modern conservatives favor an all-powerful central state– but for militarism, corporatism, and faith-based welfarism. Unlike the Taft-Goldwater conservatives of yesteryear, today’s Republicans are eager to expand government spending, increase the federal police apparatus, and intervene militarily around the world. The last tenuous links between conservatives and support for smaller government have been severed. “Conservatism,” which once meant respect for tradition and distrust of active government, has transformed into big-government utopian grandiosity.

Orwell certainly was right about the use of meaningless words in politics. If we hope to remain free, we must cut through the fog and attach concrete meanings to the words politicians use to deceive us. We must reassert that America is a republic, not a democracy, and remind ourselves that the Constitution places limits on government that no majority can overrule. We must resist any use of the word “freedom” to describe state action. We must reject the current meaningless designations of “liberals” and “conservatives,” in favor of an accurate term for both: statists.

Every politician on earth claims to support freedom. The problem is so few of them understand the simple meaning of the word.

*Politics and the English Language, 1946.

Two essays by Congressman Ron Paul
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/

Our leaders would undoubtedly be happy if we “moved on” from Iraq. They don’t want to talk about it any more: it was a dreadful blunder, and reflects little credit on any of them. Presumably this is why the question has hardly been debated in parliament. Although the majority of the public were always against the war, this was not reflected by their elected representatives. The government behaved in a way that was transparently undemocratic but the Conservatives won’t call them on it, for without their almost unanimous support the whole project couldn’t have happened.

But to conveniently forget Iraq now is to forfeit the only possible benefit the war might have: the chance to rethink the dysfunctional political system that got us into this hole. If we don’t, we risk digging a series of ever deeper holes. The Iraq adventure was justified as the planting of a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Not only did it utterly fail at that, it also undermined our democracy. Appealing to our paranoia more than our vision, George Bush and Tony Blair obtained restrictions on freedoms that had taken centuries to evolve. They said these were necessary to ensure our security – a device used by authoritarian leaders since time immemorial.

Civil liberties never seem important until you need them. But by definition, that is the very time you won’t be able to get them, so they have to be in place in advance, like an insurance policy. In his book Defying Hitler, the historian Sebastian Hafner describes how Germany slid into nazism. At first people laughed at Hitler and played along with what seemed trivial changes in the law. For most Germans it was all rather abstract, and they were expecting things to return to normal when Hitler faded back into obscurity. Only he didn’t, and civil liberties were so compromised there was no way to stop him.

If we don’t stand up about Iraq then we tacitly sanction the next steps in this deadly experiment of democratic evangelism. Those will likely include an attack on Iran, a permanent force of occupation in Iraq (probably always the intention), the complete militarisation of the Middle East, and a revived nuclear future.

What do you mean by ‘stand up’? This is the question.

Stop the War Coalition planned a march from Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square on Monday – the day parliament resumes – to draw attention to the fact that a lot of us are still thinking about Iraq and to call for the immediate withdrawal of troops. Using an archaic law (the 1839 Metropolitan Police Act), that demonstration has now been banned. Now why would that be? Stop the War Coalition has organised dozens of such demonstrations, and as far as I know not one person has been hurt. So it can’t be public safety that’s at stake.

No, it’s the elephant in the room. This government wants to show itself as clean and new, and doesn’t want attention drawn to the elephant and the mess it has left on the carpet. So it invokes an old law, to shave a little more off the arrangements by which citizens communicate their feelings to government (a process, by the way, called democracy).

The elephant in the room is Stop the War. They are wearing the emperors new clothes. They are engaging in the inexplicable and illogical behavior that needs to be explained.

Two million people marched in the streets against the illegal, immoral, unjustified, murderous invasion of Iraq; a demonstration which Stop the War organized, and that two million were supported by at least another ten who didn’t turn up, and they were all ignored.

Anyone who now calls for more demonstrations is part of the problem. I have said this again and again on BLOGDIAL, and it took the failure of the march to get my fellow BLOGDIALERS to swallow that bitter pill. It may be your ‘democratic right’ to protest but the fact is that demonstrating is a useless gesture, and this has been comprehensively proven.

The time you have spent writing this article Eno, and the thought you put behind it was wasted. It would be far better for you and Stop the War to break out a pack of Oblique Strategies to allow you to come to a solution that will solve the actual problem, since it appears that you cannot synthesize on on the fly or off the cuff. Your problem is the momentum of the war machine and the attack on Iran that is on the horizon. That is what you need to comprehensively defeat; that is the fire you have to put out.

Demonstrations are an energy sink; they are a distraction. Your essay about you not being able to demonstrate has diverted your energy away from the problem by two degrees; firstly, you are complaining about not being able to demonstrate, which in itself is useless, because demonstrations do not work to solve the problem.

This is how they keep you under tight control, you and Stop the War and anyone else who is decent and moral. You need to stop working for these people, because they are not offering any real solutions. All they are offering is a never ending series of useless marches and petitions. It has to stop. If you do not accept this, then you must be prepared for war without end.

It would take courage for Gordon Brown to say: “This war was a catastrophe.” It would take even greater courage to admit that the seeds of the catastrophe were in its conception: it wasn’t a good idea badly done (the neocons’ last refuge – “Blame it all on Rumsfeld”), but a bad idea badly done. And it would take perhaps superhuman courage to say: “And now we should withdraw and pay reparations to this poor country.”

I don’t see it happening. But the demonstration will, legal or not: on Monday Tony Benn will lead us as we exercise our right to remind our representatives that, even if Iraq has slipped off their agenda, it’s still on ours. Please join us.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2184946,00.html

WE ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT.

Tony Benn and Stop the War are gatekeepers who’s only aim is to pacify the outrage of the public and to channel it into useless acts that will not solve the problem.

Anyone who marches at this event is a FOOL.

One of two things will happen at this event:

• All of you or some of you will be arrested, and nothing will change.
• They will let the march go ahead, and you will all go home and nothing will change.

If you are really serious about putting an end to war, you all need to think hard. Think about how you solve other problems in your life, like leaking pipes or repairing a tyre puncture. You need to apply that logic to this problem, the problem of the war machine.

If you really think that marching will change anything then you are either delusional or deliberately acting to keep the whole obscene war economy running. I do not know or care which one it is, but what you cannot do is call for more impotent marches without being challenged.

2007 is turning out to be a terrible year for the music industry. Or rather, a terrible year for the the music labels.The DRM walls are crumbling. Music CD sales continue to plummet rather alarmingly. Artists like Prince and Nine Inch Nails are flouting their labels and either giving music away or telling their fans to steal it. Another blow earlier this week: Radiohead, which is no longer controlled by their label, Capitol Records, put their new digital album on sale on the Internet for whatever price people want to pay for it.

The economics of recorded music are fairly simple. Marginal production costs are zero: Like software, it doesn’t cost anything to produce another digital copy that is just as good as the original as soon as the first copy exists, and anyone can create those copies (meaning there is perfect competition and zero barriers to entry). Unless effective legal (copyright), technical (DRM) or other artificial impediments to production can be created, simple economic theory dictates that the price of music, like its marginal cost, must also fall to zero as more “competitors” (in this case, listeners who copy) enter the market. The evidence is unmistakable already. In April 2007 the benchmark price for a DRM-free song was $1.29. Today it is $0.89, a drop of 31% in just six months.

P2P networks just exacerbate the problem (or opportunity) further, giving people a way to speed up the process of creating free copies almost to the point of being ridiculous. Today, a billion or so songs are downloaded monthly via BitTorrent, mostly illegally.

Eventually, unless governments are willing to take drastic measures to protect the industry (such as a mandatory music tax), economic theory will win out and the price of music will fall towards zero.

When the industry finally capitulates and realizes that they can no longer charge a meaningful amount of money for digital recorded music, a lot of good things can happen.

First, other revenue sources can and will be exploited, particularly live music, merchandise and limited edition physical copies of music. The signs are already there – the live music industry is booming this year, and Radiohead is releasing a special edition box set of their new album for £40.00 simultaneous to the release of their “free” digital album.

Second, artists and labels will stop thinking of digital music as a source of revenue and start thinking about it as a way to market their real products. Users will be encouraged (even paid, as radio stations are today) to download, listen to and share music. Passionate users who download music from the Internet and share it with others will become the most important customers, not targets for ridiculous lawsuits.

The price of music will likely not fall in the near term to absolutely zero. Charging any price at all requires the use of credit cards and their minimum fees of $0.20 or more per transaction, for example. And services like iTunes and Amazon can continue to charge something for quality of service. With P2P networks you don’t really know what you are getting until you download it. It could, for example, be a virus. Or a poor quality copy. Many users will be willing to pay to avoid those hassles. But as long as BitTorrent exists, or simple music search engines like Skreemr allow users to find and download virtually any song in seconds, they won’t be able to charge much.

http://www.techcrunch.com/

Of course, we wrote about this and released our entire catalogue under the FMP in 1999, before there was a Creative Commons, Bittorrent or any of the cool ways that people use to share music.

The Conet Project is a perfect example proving what we did was correct, and how it can work for other people. It has been downloaded over 200,000 times from the Internet Archive alone (it is mirrored at Hyperreal where they do not keep any stats) so I would guess that the number is at least double that taking all the mirrors past and present into account, and all the private sharing that we encourage.

We have sold many copies of TCP and demand is still strong for it; opening your archive allows you to reach more people than ever, and those that value what you do will buy other products from you and license your work.

It has taken eight years for people to finally start to wake up to this, and even today, there are still buggy whippers who trott out the same rubbish arguments against freeing music railing against Prince for example, for giving away his new CD.

The above article is very good, and there is a howler in there:

With P2P networks you don’t really know what you are getting until you download it. It could, for example, be a virus.

MP3s cannot contain viruses…heh.

but lets go further. The impact on music culture will be absolutely enormous. Everyone everywhere will be able to get any music they read about as they read about it or have it reccomended, and not only that, you can now get the entire catalogue of an artist in a single movement, so that you can study their body of work, become familiar with it and then use it to inform your own work.

This is a highly significant development. In the past, it was very difficult to do this both in terms of tracking down the physical sound carriers and then paying for them. This was especially true of classical music. People used to use cassettes to trade rare music, which once again, involved buying of cassettes, the manual copying of them and distributing them. All of these steps made the cassettes more valuable than the music on them, and because they were ‘bootlegs’ the psychology surrounding them bumped the price up because someone was taking a risk to bring this sound to you. I wont go into the generational loss of quality caused by making tape to tape copies.

Today however, none of this is a factor. Getting any music you like is a near frictionless process; the only barrier being the one time initial learning curve; understanding where the music lives and how to use the tools to get it. Once you have those in place, the only problems you encounter are that there is not enough time to listen to everything, finding people you can trust to introduce you to new music, and a place to store it all.

There are also some other effects that we have an interest in.

If the quality of people who make music is low, we might never again see a flourishing of amazing groups. If the quality of music makers is high, then access to everything that has been recorded will be used as a blacklist ensuring that we get something really new and interesting. If word of mouse works efficiently however, it will bring us whatever small number of great artists who are out there and they will instantly rise to the top of who is being downloaded / listened to; that is the other payoff of this new era – ‘the death of the underground’. No one will be stuck in the absurd ghettoes of the past, where artists were ‘underground’ thanks to the inefficiencies of the market, meaning, money, distribution and journalists. Money doesn’t count anymore, distribution is now frictionless, and music journalists are almost completely irrelevant, since anyone with an MP3 blog and good taste is as powerful as any journalist.

The pyramidal structure of music culture has been dismantled and it is now in the shape of a two dimensional network of nodes, each listener being a transmitter and receiver of the music itself and information about the music. With LastFM, the very act of listening to music turns you into a node that recommends and promotes music.

All of this is a good thing. Combined with the astonishing tools that are now available to everyone for free, if the people who make music are up the challenge, they can make whatever they want and find people to listen to them. And not only find people to listen to them, find all the people in the world who are capable of understanding what they are doing. This is a very important and significant step forwards.

The old evils of the huge record companies will die with them, but this does not mean that the ecosystem that surrounds music will completely die. The lawyers will always have a role to play. Music still belongs to the people who create it, and those laws need to be enforced. Licensing and the revenues from music need to be controlled and monitored – in the short term, people will still make a fortune from radio airplay for example.

What has happened is that an inefficiency and an evil have been removed from the music distribution equation, but more importantly, human beings will have better, more enriched lives thanks to freed music. We will inevitably, I believe, get more variety and richness from new artists, and certainly there is for all intents and purposes an infinite amount of old music to charm and thrill us.

We are also at the very beginning of a greater understanding in the general public of just what it takes to produce music. Radiohead fans are showing that they are not irresponsible; they understand that the group need money to live and they are paying for the music they are downloading – even though they can get it for a price of zero. This is highly significant, and demonstrates that people are not actually stupid, and will pay to get more music if that is what they need to do. This means Radiohead get all the advantages of free music AND the advantages of running a central place to download from. I have no doubt that other groups will follow Radiohead, and that still more groups will devise their own tweaked systems to nickel and dime their fans to keep everything running.

Finally, what happens next is that the people who came up with these ideas in the first instance and those that saw it coming and who put their money where their mouths are will get the credit that is due to them. The people who thought and who still think that freed music is ‘no good’ (“I worked very hard to make my music, I don’t just want it out there for anyone to get for nothing”) will of course, not be heard or hear-able by anyone, and they will totally disappear from culture.