As we wrote recently, there is going to be a massive, Europe-wide bank run on December 7th.

This is entirely a good thing, and it is precisely the sort of action that BLOGDIAL has advocated for years; we have been saying over and over that demonstrating in the streets is completely pointless, and we were and are completely right.

This call for a bank run has people in ‘authority’ very worried:

Valérie Ohannesian, of the French Banking Federation, said she thought that the appeal was “stupid in every sense” and a charter for thieves and money-launderers.

“My first reaction is to laugh. It is totally idiotic,” she told the Observer. “One of the main roles of a bank is to keep money safe. This appeal will give great pleasure to thieves, I would have thought.”

Grauniad article on the bankrun and Cantona

If that is all they can come up with, they must be shitting their knickers.

For a start, everyone now knows that ‘money laundering’ laws are not there to catch ‘criminals’ but are instead for the ordinary people who are trying to protect their money from the ravaging, rapacious state.

She goes on to very stupidly mock the idea with the fact that Cantona would need ‘several suitcases’ to withdraw his money. Of course, he would not need suitcases to withdraw his wealth if the money in his account was worth anything in the first place.

The hollow sound of desperation in print.

As we posted before, this bankrun is an entirely good thing, but what has to happen is a complete exposure and defining of the problem, before it can be fixed.

It seems that the people behind this bankrun are highly intelligent, media savvy people; lets go through this statement from the Bankrun 2010 site.

Dear media,

For a short time, the international press reported the call for a bankrun that we launched on Facebook to invite all those who wish to follow us to withdraw their money from their accounts on the 7th of December, 2010.

Since the publication of our call, people around the world mobilized to translate the text into their language to recreate the event in their country, to promote our initiative by all possible means and invite their contacts to do the same. Our call has met with a success that we did not dare to hope for. We are very happy about it and thanks to the personal investment of all those who, like us, want to enjoy a healthy banking system, equitable, affordable and accountable, we hope that over the weeks we can convince enough people in the world to finally be heard by our respective Governments.

Good. There is only one problem however; a healthy banking system cannot be equitable; a bank exists to hold your money for you and to facilitate transfers for you and to do other services that you require of it, in return for fees. What those fees are is a matter of negotiation, since you are entering into a private contract with a company or an individual.

This is why it is not smart to ask for an ‘equitable’ or an ‘affordable’ banking system; market forces produce the best possible banks, and therefore, banking should be left completely up to those forces, in the same way that the operation of self storage units are left to the market.

The problem with banking is not deregulation, it is regulation and interference from the state.

For clarification purposes, we do not speak on behalf of any political party or from any labour union or religion. Our action is a civic involvement that keeps its distance from any form of hate or conspiracy theories that could be made on behalf of our movement, by others during their interventions on any areas of discussion, which is beyond our control. We only speak for ourselves and for no other organisations. We do not seek to harm anyone in particular. It’s towards a corrupt, criminal and deadly system that we decided to oppose, as far as our ability our determination and respect for the law are concerned.

Very good.

Why have we launched this action?
First of all, we wanted to raise public awareness on the functioning of the monetary system.
The overwhelming majority of holders of a bank accounts, savings accounts or even a pension plan, are unaware the way money is created or what the banks are doing with the money that ‘they are given. They know nothing about the principle of money as debt. They do not know the reality behind words like “asset bubbles”, “Treasury bills”, “Hedge Funds” or “securitization”. Hence the media in general make little effort to inform in an objective, transparent and accessible way to all. The only thing the public really understands is that most major financial crimes and insider trading remain mostly unpunished, but they are the first to pay the consequences.

True. People are almost completely ignorant of what money is, how banks work and what the current role of the state and central banks is. They cannot define inflation, do not understand that it is deliberately caused, do not understand that the money in their accounts (so much as it even belongs to them) is worthless and that this is all by design.

Not only do we deplore how many questions posed by ordinary citizens on the economic situation remain without clear answers in your columns,

There are highly intelligent commenters who regularly destroy the nonsense some ‘journalists’ peddle about all of this. We are past the tipping point; its GAME OVER for this immoral system.

We do not need journalists anymore; what we do need is a free internet, millions of awakened people and one or two very famous people to stand up and push the snowball down the hill.

It has finally happened.

but we also regret your lack of zeal in denouncing the measures that have allowed the global economic situation get to the point where it is today: a situation that has bought our heads of states and Governments to their knees before the rating agencies, trembling with fear at the idea that our currencies are deteriorating.

Our politicians can’t meet both the interests of financial markets and those of its citizens. So, it is time to remind them who they were elected to serve.

Strikes and demonstrations are no longer useful because whatever we do, we are not heard. And whatever they do, we are not consulted. So we decided to hit the system at its core – THE BANKING SYSTEM

MY EMPHASIS!!!!……

At long last, they are beginning to understand!

For YEARS we have been saying this; demonstrations DO NOT WORK, and you are an ignorant PART OF THE PROBLEM if you call for them, or a GATEKEEPER in service of the STATE and THE WAR MACHINE.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein

This is true about everything, including demonstrating to stop war or to make government do what you want it to do. You cannot keep calling for demonstrations and expecting the bad things to stop, when it fails to work; doing so is irrational and stupid. Demonstrations and violence are failure tactics, and the idiotic students who smashed Tory HQ are completely wrong in every way you can be wrong.

Think about it; 50,000 students, all of one mind are an army and huge potential financial force that could make a huge change; on the most basic level, that many people could buy a full page advertisement in a national newspaper once a month for ONE POUND EACH.

That would be far more effective in getting a message across, rather than marching in the streets like animatronic showroom dummies.

But enough of that…

Are we aware of the economic consequences that would result from the success of our action?

We are especially aware of the consequences that the deregulated and uncontrollable global financial system will have on our jobs, our health, our education, our pensions, our industries, our environment, our future, our dignity, the dignity of the citizens of countries that the system has enslaved by debt that they will never be able to repay to better appropriate their resources. This is the fate that awaits people if we in the West do not take ourselves in hand.

We are aware of the role this system plays in the prosperity of industrial empires whose interests depend on armed conflicts, diseases, food shortages and poverty prevailing in the countries that provide labour and natural resources at minimal cost. We are aware that this system will never have anything to gain from a world of peace and prosperity and that continuing to entrust our hard and honestly earned money to this sick system, we make ourselves accomplices of its thefts, for its crimes, its wars and the misery war generates.

Beautiful; they can actually see!

The only problem here, is that they are talking about deregulation being a problem when it is not. If these people were able to form their own bank, and run it however they please, they would be an international force unparalleled in its size and transparency, as everyone moved all their money to it en masse.

The reason why they cannot have their bank is because the state regulates banking so that the war machine can be run. They stop anyone honest from running a bank, and they use legal tender laws to prevent honest money from emerging. Once again, the problem is not deregulation, but regulation by the state.

There is nothing wrong with accumulating wealth. What is wrong is the wealthy using the state to murder people with its war machine. This is called Crony Capitalism, which is very different from Capitalism.

What do we want?
We, the citizens of the 21st century, heirs of generations who have sacrificed so that we may live free and dignified, demand the creation of a CITIZENS BANK- serving citizens, a bank that would put our money away from speculative fever, free of all financial bubbles designed to burst one day, free of operations that transform our loans & assets and use our debt to buy other assets.

This is a very good idea. The only thing stopping you from creating this bank is the state. Remove the state’s ability to regulate banks and then you can have your ‘Citizens Bank’, and you will be able to run it in any way that you like.

We want banks that lend only the wealth they have. Banks that help small and medium enterprises to relocate jobs, & bank lending at zero rate. (*) Banks that support projects that benefit citizens rather than the “market”. Banks where we can deposit our money, which will then create a peaceful conscience within ourselves. Banks we will not have to be worry about. Banks whose success will sound the death knell of the merchants of death, disease and slavery. On the ruins of the old system, we want to build a banking system that will no longer sacrifice more human dignity on the altar of profit.

This is error.

You want ‘banks’ that only lend the money they have; NO, you must make your own bank that does that; you cannot force people to run their businesses to serve you. Your only recourse, as it should be, is to remove your money from banks that are evil and to put them into an honest bank. You cannot on the one hand, say that you want a world free of violence, and then at the same time, call for the state to do your bidding via violence on others. Start your own bank, and if the state tries to stop you, confront them. You can be sure that the existing banks will be pushing for the violent suppression of you and this bank run right now; that is all they have left to fight with; the apparatus of the police state.

You will be able to set your own interest rates, lending requirements and ultimate purpose. There is a desperate need for such a bank, and you have a captive population of over one hundred million to start with.

I’m afraid that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. You are in the trouble you are in now because you trusted the existing banks and the state to take care of you, and like the predators they are, they fed on you. You will never be able to not worry about banking.

As for the ‘altar of profit’ this is just total nonsense; there is nothing wrong with profit, and you are conflating profit with Crony Capitalism and its evil practitioners. Profit, price signalling and all the other elements of real economics are essential to bringing into existence the prosperity, freedom, peace and the kind of bank that you want to be able to use. You cannot deny the laws of nature, and economics is governed by rules that are as firmly set as the laws that cover physics. Learn these rules, and you will make a bank that is more likely to be a long term benefit.

Finally, the old system must be swept away completely. There is absolutely no reason why a new, clean, moral bank should be set up on the ‘ruins of the old system’. If your plan is that you are going to start with a bad foundation, you might as well not even begin.

Dutch lawmakers have already considered laws to outlaw calls for bank runs. The state and its Crony Capitalist masters are going to use everything they can to destroy you so that they can continue with their insanity.

It is only through peaceful voluntarism that you will ever get a lasting solution to this problem. Forcing banks to obey you by using the state makes the state more powerful, and it is the state that is the true enemy.

We, the people have finally been awakened by poverty and despair afflicting the most vulnerable among us – pensioners, welfare recipients or working poor – and is now threatening what remains of the middle class & entrepreneurs. Even these are exploited as milking cows, and we now simply want the cancellation of the public debts generated by the sick system that we no longer want.

Once again, this is true; this debt belongs only to the people who authorised it; you cannot be made liable to a debt incurred by a third party, without your written consent, and NO, voting in an election does not constitute consent to be made a debtor.

We do not want our taxes, our efforts, our resources to continue to feed this bottomless pit.

Oops, its not ‘your money’ once you have payed it to the state; this is a common error that people make; they believe that the state, “works for them”, and that, “its our money”. It is not. You have no claim whatsoever over that money once you pay it. Its gone, toast, spent.

If you want your money to be used for good purposes only, you have to stop paying it to the state. Period. And I and others predict that that is the next psychological breakthrough that these people are going to make, very soon!

We want to regain the power to coin money and free ourselves from the guidelines imposed on us by the European Union, which was built against the consent of the majority of people consulted by referendum, not to mention those whose country of origin have no organized popular consultation.

This is absolutely key to the entire problem; without the power to decide what money is best for you, you are nothing more than a slave to the European Central Bank, the Private Federal Reserve and all other central banks, who steal money via the inflation tax.

Everyone who understands money knows that the best money is gold and silver coins, held and used directly by the people who transact with money.

Gold and silver money cannot be inflated, controlled or used against you by a central bank, and of course, central banks themselves should be abolished, and would be if this Citizens Bank took off; there would be no need for central banks if every country had its own Citizens Bank, working in cooperation with other similar banks around the world, only for the benefit and convenience of the depositors.

This is why its crucial to:

• remove the power to make money from the state
• remove the power to regulate banking from the state

Without these two in place, it will be impossible to get to the place that the stopbankque organisers want.

(*) What the Islamic banks to successfully achieve by refusing usury for religious reasons, we can do for civic reasons.

Oops, ‘Islam was right’?! Don’t tell Geert Wilders!

To conclude
We draw your attention to the fact that even if we manage to relocate jobs, advanced technologies and machines have replaced human labour in a growing number of areas. They can produce more, faster, cheaper, and for these reasons, they create fear to those who wonder how they will earn their living tomorrow. This is unfortunate because since the invention of the wheel, technology is meant to improve the living conditions of mankind. If progress was meant to serve citizens rather than serve the market, we could make a quantum leap in technology development today paralyzed by special interest groups that are the primary beneficiaries of this system.

This is completely wrong; technology does not put people out of jobs, this is The Luddite Fallacy.

Progress serves citizens though their freedom to choose one service over another. Sadly, Europeans are still steeped in the sticky, hallucinogenic treacle of socialist thinking. They want the state to continue its tyranny unabated, only with them at the helm. Sorry guys NO $A£€!

We already have the knowledge to free humanity of its needs in fossil and nuclear fuels and to produce and deliver drinking water throughout the planet at a lower cost, to produce fruits and vegetables, from ice fields to the desert. Poverty only exists on our planet because of the lack of political will of industrialized countries, subject to market forces. Pollution and waste of resources are the sad consequences of this obsolete system which we must put an end to.

Sigh…You cant have it all it seems… Market forces are the only way to eradicate poverty. The state, and ‘political will’ will NEVER do it, and if they try, it will mean giving up the very rights that the stopbankque people are calling for.

As for pollution, we know about that don’t we?

We, the inheritors of chaos, we have a world to rebuild. A world where work is no longer seen as slavery, and lack of work as a tragedy because we have been able to rethink how mankind of tomorrow will ensure its survival, education, well-being and old age.

In order for work not to be slavery, you need to be able to keep the fruits of your labour, that you voluntarily contract for. If the state takes even a penny of it by force, you are reduced to the level of a slave. Everything they do with your money after that, is insult added to injury.

We invite all those who want to follow us on this path – including you, dear journalists – to overcome their fears of the unknown and to lay the foundation stone for the construction of the system that will replace the current one, which with or without us, will eventually collapse when it has taken everything from us. We prefer not to wait until it arrives, or even worse, if in order to save the economy a new war would be declared.

We thank the footballer Eric Cantona for having instilled the idea that we have taken literally. The die is cast. Time will tell whether we were right. (07/11/2010)

http://www.bankrun2010.com/

Don’t hold your breath for the journalists to come on board; they are in the pay of the newspapers that are owned by the same people or colleagues of the people who own the war machine; why do you think these evil scribblers are for war with Iran? They are for war because they are being told to write pro war pieces. They cannot be relied upon or trusted – thankfully we do not need them. We have the internet, we have myriad ways of spreading information that does not include their channels. These new channels are being put to good use, finally, now all that remains is to formulate a plan and then execute it.

This means:

1. setting up a bank that is outside the control of the state
2. buying gold en masse with all the worthless paper money that has been withdrawn from the system
3. depositing that gold in the new bank

The honest money that you require already exists; GOLD.
The forms of banking you require already exist 100% RESERVE BANKING

Like we told you, someone is already doing it.

First things first; DESTROY the system through peaceful disobedience, starting with the money!

Someone that we follow on twitter is a classic violent socialist, that also believes in depopulation, ‘global warming’ and all of the other fear based eco fascist nonsense that is out there that the delusional live to cling to.

Recently, this person tweeted that:

UK regulator Ofcom lobbies Brussels against net neutrality – http://bit.ly/bRdVwJ #Ofcom betrays the British public #netneutrality

Knowing that this person tweets a mix of violent socialist garbage and important tech news related to copyright, it spurred me to finally take a close look at ‘Net Neutrality’, and lo and behold, it is Orwellian doublespeak and violent socialism.

Throwing “Net Neutrality Socialism” into the googles, we get this:

James G. Lakely: ‘Net Neutrality’ Is Socialism, Not Freedom

AHAA!

Advocates of imposing “network neutrality” say it’s necessary to ensure a “free” and “open” Internet and rescue the public from nefarious corporations that “control” technology.

Few proposals in Washington have been sold employing such deceptive language — and that’s saying something. But few public policy ideas can boast the unashamedly socialist pedigree of net neutrality.

True.

‘Net Neutrality’ is a name that is highly deceptive and a form of subtle emotional and intellectual blackmail.

When you are asked wether or not you are for or against ‘Net Neutrality’ the conjunction of these two words, both of which are beneficial in meaning separately, immediately pressure you to believe that you are for it, since everyone wants to be (and appear to be) a reasonable person.

The word ‘Net’ is short for the greatest invention since the Gutenberg press. What reasonable person could be against that?

‘Neutrality’, the opposite of being biased, is a word that conveys goodness in almost every sense; a state which journalists strive for, closely related to that new brainwashing word ‘fair’.

What they do not tell you is that ‘Net Neutrality’ is actually a sinister code word for violent socialism.

The modern Internet is a creation of the free market, which has brought about a revolution in communication, free speech, education, and commerce. New Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski apparently doesn’t like that. He stated last month the way Internet service providers manage their networks — in response to millions of individual consumer choices — is not sufficiently “fair,” “open” or “free.”

And there you have it. The unconstitutional FCC, openly uses the new socialist programming word ‘fair’ in its push to wreck the internet, which has grown perfectly well without the help of the state, despite its origins in DARPA.

The chairman’s remedy is to claim for the FCC the power to decide how every bit of data is transferred from the Web to every personal computer and handheld device in the nation. This is exactly what the radical founders of the net neutrality movement had in mind.

This is of course, complete madness. Whatever the state touches, it ruins. The internet works by private people agreeing to route traffic through each other’s private networks. None of this has anything to do with the state.

If some large providers want to shape traffic, that is entirely their business. Its their bandwidth, their hardware and the contracts they have with their customers are private. If traffic shaping ruins the experience of the users of these knobbled internet access points, then the customers will leave in droves, to find un shaped access points.

The free market in internet access will determine which companies survive and which do not, which style of ISP is best and which should fail.

Once again, none of this is the business of government.

The concept can be traced to an iconoclastic figure, Richard Stallman, a self-described software freedom activist who introduced the term “copyleft” in the mid-1980s. In his 2002 essay “Free Software, Free Society,” Stallman fiercely attacks the idea that intellectual property rights are one of the keystones of individual liberty, so important that patents and copyrights are affirmatively protected in the body of the Constitution.

Copyrights and Patents are in fact evil. They are not founded upon any rational basis, are a legacy idea from the age of absolute monarchy, and are a disaster for humanity on every level. This is not a matter of ideology or belief, but is a truth grounded in evidence based fact.

According to Stallman, “we are not required to agree with the Constitution or the Supreme Court. [At one time, they both condoned slavery.]” Like slavery, he says, copyright law is “a radical right-wing assumption rather than a traditionally recognized one.” Rebuking those who might find a Marxist flavor in his call for a “digital commons,” Stallman turns the tables, writing: “If we are to judge views by their resemblance to Russian Communism, it is the software owners who are the Communists.” […]http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/OpEd-Contributor/_Net-Neutrality_-Is-Socialism_-Not-Freedom-8410175.html

What Richard Stallman and the Free Software movement people are actually advocating are property rights in software, which all Libertarians and correctly thinking people would agree with on examination.

When you buy a copy of a proprietary piece of software, you do not actually own it; you own a limited license to use that software, that restricts your ability to decompile it, share it by copying it, modify it, re sell it, or use it in a context and on hardware other than what the writer and owner of the software allows you to. On top of all that, the manufacturer disclaims any liability of any kind for anything that happens to you or your hardware as a result of you using their software.

When you download Free software on the other hand, it belongs to you. You have the right to modify it, to share it, to run it anywhere and to make money off of doing all those things.

The authors and licenses that cover Free Software respect your property rights in ways that the makers of proprietary, ‘closed’ softwares under restrictive licenses do not. You cannot be for property rights of ISPs and simultaneoously against Free Software and its advocates, and be logical at the same time.

Richard Stallman is actually for property rights, not against them in the matter of computer software. He is doing something about it not by advocating violence against the makers of proprietary software, but by creating his own software and releasing it for free, under a license that respects your rights. This is a pure free market response to a problem, that uses voluntarism and liberty as its tools, and it has worked so spectacularly, and to such an extent, that it has become a commercial threat to the makers of closed proprietary software, causing them to lie, bribe, steal and use the violent state (much in the same way that the Net Neutrality advocates are trying to do) to destroy Free Software.

Net Neutrality is about state control of ISP’s hardware and the expense of bandwidth (physical property and cost). Intellectual Property is a separate matter.

Intellectual Property is a state granted limited monopoly on ideas, and who can profit from them. People who are against collectivism and the state must concede that Intellectual Property is a bad thing if they are to remain honest; especially after having read ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly’, which proves that Intellectual Property is damaging to the very thing that they claim it produces and protects; prosperity and the promotion of the creation of new ideas.

Now, lets take a look at what Net Neutrality actually means in practice.

You run an ISP, and have entered into private contracts with one million people. The state, at the behest of violent and ignorant socialists, passes a law saying that you may not shape your traffic on your own machines that deliver bandwidth to your customers.

Should you refuse to do what they say, a representative of the violent socialists will launch a ‘Class Action Suit‘ against you and you will be fined. If you refuse to pay the fine, you will have violent thugs arriving at your office to arrest you and haul you off to gaol.

This is the reality of what the Net Neutrality advocates are asking for; they want people who do not believe what they believe and who will not work for them to be put into gaol and to have their property confiscated by the state.

This is a despicable, evil and dastardly personal philosophy.

We tweeted to the person what we follow that if he wants ISPs not to shape traffic, he should set up a brand and standard that ISPs can conform to, ask them to join it and let people voluntarily work together for an internet where all traffic is treated the same, pointing out that Net Neutrality is government violence… Yes, all of that was compressed into 140 characters.

The response?

I’m advocating intelligent government, not violence…

It all sounds nice and cozy doesn’t it? “I’m a nice guy, I’m not violent, I want ‘Intelligent Government’ and ‘Net Neutrality'”… its all complete lies, designed to cover the inherent violence of the state and its clients.

These people are disgusting, not because they want a better world, indeed, their motivations are pure, and in person, they are nice people – they are disgusting because they are violent, and point blank refuse to face the facts and consequences of what it is they are advocating, and in the case of ‘Net Neutrality’ they are advocating theft, coercion and violence.

We know for sure that we do not need the state to keep us safe or to make the net ‘fair’ Underwriters Laboratories is a perfect example of how voluntary cooperation works better than the state. Indeed, the internet itself is proof of that.

We do not need the state to mandate more efficient light bulbs; private industry is more than capable of doing that in ways that environmentalists and politicians are not capable of imagining.

Think about it; Bitorrent is responsible for one third of all internet traffic. If ISPs start to shape traffic, there will be a mass exodus to ISPs who do not, causing one of three things to happen:

1/ the ISPs that shape traffic relenting to stem the loss of customers

They are only interested in making money. If they lose customers, they die. Its as simple as that.

2/ the ISPs that shape traffic entering into contracts with content providers, replacing lost customer revenue with fees from the media giants

This means that everyone who wants Bittorrent and unrestricted access to any service on the net will leave those ISPs that shape traffic, leaving those who want to watch corporate content.
The people who want full access will get what they want, the ISPs will get what they want, new business models will emerge, new ISPs – everything will work perfectly.

3/ something unexpected

The violent Net Neutrality advocates say that new services will not be able to become successful if ISPs shape traffic; this is simply not the case. No service starts at a size that requires mass bandwidth; all startups begin by using a trickle of bandwidth, they grow slowly and organically and only when they are hugely popular begin to hit a wall bandwidth wise. In other words, as these businesses grow they have a chance to find their place in the market under the constraints of it.

Here is an example of how it would work in real life. A new service starts to become popular. This service requires bandwidth (like Soundcloud). People want to use this service, but find that their ISP is shaping traffic to and from it. The ISP has two choices; un shape traffic to the new service, or risk losing their customers.

The new service, as it grows, will suddenly find that it could have millions of voices all rooting for it with their ISPs. This kind of commercial pressure is enough to ensure that any new service that starts to become popular will have enough bandwidth to grow and potentially dominate.

Think about this also; if many smaller services get together to put pressure on ISPs, their voices could be bigger than any single growing startup.

You can sit around and come up with an infinite number of scenarios that will solve the shaping problem; the point is that interference from the state is the worst possible solution of all solutions.

Not only is state interference not the best solution, it is also inherently immoral and violent.

If people insist on pushing for Net Neutrality, they need to acknowledge that they are indeed violent socialists.

That sort of plain speaking honesty is very important when framing any discussion about this subject. From the looks of it however, it seems that honesty about their violent tendencies is not going to be forthcoming.

UPDATE

Tim Berners Lee has an article at Scientific American, where he says:

The world wide web went live, on my physical desktop in Geneva, Switzerland, in December 1990. It consisted of one Web site and one browser, which happened to be on the same computer. The simple setup demonstrated a profound concept: that any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere.

So, the first instance of the WWW went live on a private desktop in Geneva.

Then we get this:

In this spirit, the Web spread quickly from the grassroots up. Today, at its 20th anniversary, the Web is thoroughly integrated into our daily lives. We take it for granted, expecting it to “be there” at any instant, like electricity.

The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles.

[…]

The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights.

Why should you care? Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend.

This leaves out some very important detail, and makes a statement that is factually incorrect.

The web evolved into what it is today because people decided to freely and voluntarily cooperate with each other, for their own ends as well as the common good that served those ends.

The web as we know it is NOT being threatened by Facebook and the other huge social-networking sites, or by traffic shaping; it is being threatened by violent socialists who think that it is ethical to steal property and capital from others so that their idea of what the web should be can be maintained.

Before I cary on, I agree that Governments — totalitarian and democratic alike, are a threat to people’s rights. Where we differ is in the understanding of what rights are, and where they come from. Rights do not come from the government, and no one has the right to steal, wether they are Tim Berners Lee or the state.

The net is not ‘yours’. The nicest way that I can put it is to say that this is a completely wrong construction. The part of the internet that belongs to you is your machine, bandwidth and your storage wherever it is. Your ability to contribute to it depends on the size of your bandwidth, storage and the processing power of your machine, all of which are your property, that no one has the right to steal from you.

The content you produce and upload to a third party site is subject to private contracts you enter into with the owners of sites you use. For example, Flickr has a contract that you have to agree with when you sign up with it. If you do not like it, you can decline their generous offer and go somewhere else or start up your own photo sharing site.

What Tim Berners Lee and the Net Neutrality people are advocating, is that your bandwidth and your computer, by virtue of being connected to the internet, somehow cease to be your property, and instantly become a part of some communist collective where you do not have any property rights, and where other people have rights to your property.

Think about it; under Net Neutrality, you will be compelled to keep your computer on and never to turn it off, unless the government gives you permission to.

There is no difference between that, and being told that you cannot shape traffic that your clients get from you as an ISP, except in scale.

As a Skype user, you agree to route traffic through your computer as part of the Skype TOS. This voluntary sharing of your machine and bandwidth helps other Skype users make calls. What Net Neutrality is demanding, is that you may not shut down Skype, because the telephone network is a ‘public utility’ of which your computer becomes a part as soon as you download and run Skype.

Its completely absurd.

Clearly the question remains; do ISPs and individuals have property rights, or do they not? If they do, how and by what right can Tim Berners Lee and the Net Neutrality advocates call for those property rights to be suspended by the state?

Just who do these people think they are?

Moving along, does anyone remember AOL? It was a hideous walled garden pseudo internet garbage filled CDROM spewing lamer-fest. Where is AOL now? Its decline has been spectacular, because as people woke up to what AOL really was, dumbed down filtered junk, they abandoned it for the real internet of an ISP, a browser and the real internet.

This happened because the real internet grew exponentially, making AOL look like what it really was; a gaol. Word of mouse spread, and balance was restored to the force. AOL is dead and dying, their business model utterly destroyed.

The same thing is going to happen to Facebook; everyone thinks that its great now but once social networking becomes a protocol Facebook will die.

Rather than complaining about Facebook, software developers and standards people like Tim Berners Lee should be working on ‘protocolizing’ social networking to make the viability of ‘the cancer that is Facebook’ a losing proposition in the long run.

All of these large companies can be superseded by other companies in an open, unregulated web; MySpace is dying as I type this, not because some socialists have determined that MySpace is too big for its boots and must be forced to ‘play nice’ but because it has been superseded by something superior. The free market is killing MySpace.

The free market in ideas and services will always improve the web; the last thing we need is socialists with their ultimate weapon, the state, raining down theft and destruction.

Its obvious to everyone that cooperating voluntarily makes the web work brilliantly; why should this be abandoned now? Why, all of a sudden, is it now necessary to get the state involved in forcing private companies and people to do what it is not in their interest to do?

We create the Web, by designing computer protocols and software; this process is completely under our control.

That is true, but Net Neutrality is not about voluntarily agreed upon protocols; its about controlling what other people do on the web by force and violence.

Openness also means you can build your own Web site or company without anyone’s approval. When the Web began, I did not have to obtain permission or pay royalties to use the Internet’s own open standards, such as the well-known transmission control protocol (TCP) and Internet protocol (IP).

This is a good thing. Once again, why now should companies have to get permission from the state to design their ISP policy? Why didn’t you run to the state when you ran the first web server and demand that government legislation control your new invention? No one would have listened to you then, but now that you have the ear of politicians because you are the man that invented the web, you are eager to abuse that position to hurt ‘our’ internets. SHAME.

In contrast, not using open standards creates closed worlds. Apple’s iTunes system, for example, identifies songs and videos using URIs that are open. But instead of “http:” the addresses begin with “itunes:,” which is proprietary. You can access an “itunes:” link only using Apple’s proprietary iTunes program. You can’t make a link to any information in the iTunes world—a song or information about a band.

And that is why people create services that are open, like Rate Your Music LastFM and all the other services out there that play nice. We do not need the state to make iTunes use “http:” instead of “itunes:”. There will come a point where iTunes dies because someone somewhere, another Bram Cohen, comes up with a protocol that shatters the way things get done now, and all of a sudden, everything changes. This WILL HAPPEN, even in a shaped internet, as I describe above. The market is a force so powerful that it can make what seems like magic happen. It can kill giants and turn midgets into giants.

And lets not forget; no one forces people to use Apple software. Apple makes very good products and software, and they offer them to you for money. In the case of iTunes, you can get it for free. If you want to destroy the walled garden created by Apple, you do not need government intervention and the violence that comes with it; you simply need to protocolize music files on the internet, or make your own iTunes alternative that is not a walled garden. People are doing this and eventually, they will be triumphant, because they are not proprietary in the protocols they use. Once again, we do not need socialism or the state to make this magic happen; people are writing the software without being told they need to do it, just like you did to create the web, without being told what to do, or asking permission from anyone.

An analogy is that the Web is like a household appliance that runs on the electricity network. A refrigerator or printer can function as long as it uses a few standard protocols—in the U.S., things like operating at 120 volts and 60 hertz. Similarly, any application—among them the Web, e-mail or instant messaging—can run on the Internet as long as it uses a few standard Internet protocols, such as TCP and IP.

Manufacturers can improve refrigerators and printers without altering how electricity functions, and utility companies can improve the electrical network without altering how appliances function. The two layers of technology work together but can advance independently. The same is true for the Web and the Internet. The separation of layers is crucial for innovation.

This isn’t a good analogy at all, but it serves to prove that governments should not be involved in selecting one technology over another.

Tesla and Edison were both vying for the state license to supply electricity to homes in the USA. Edison won the blessing of the state and Tesla lost. I do not know which was the better pick, but what is sure is that the people who gave Edison the nod didn’t know anything about how electricity generation and distribution works or would change america.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=tesla+vs+edison

The situation now is that AC electricity is a near ubiquitous utility that is licensed by the state. You cannot generate it and distribute it to millions of people because there is a well entrenched, state monopoly on generation. This has caused terrible and wasteful stagnation in the evolution of transmission technology. Electricity is very expensive and becoming more expensive, the fuels used to generate it limited in type. All of this is a result of the state interfering in energy distribution through the ‘Department of Energy’ and similar bureaucratic bodies world-wide.

Imagine if electricity generation and distribution were left entirely to the free market. Electricity would now be as cheap as tap water. Imagine what mobile phones would be like if the government was in charge of delivering the ‘right to a mobile phone’ to every citizen. We would still be using huge briefcase style phones; like the Lada of the old USSR.

This is exactly what will happen to the internet if Net Neutrality is made law. There will be a massive consolidation of ISPs until there are maybe twelve for the entire USA. Under these twelve ISPs all content will be served, and to which all people and devices will be connected.

This will bring about the nighmare totalitarian web that Tim Berners Lee fears so much. The state will have its tentacles in every ISP, by law, and there will be nothing anyone can do to stop it, and no alternative or choice. There will be massive barriers to entry if you want to become an ISP, which will involve traffic monitoring equipment (that you will have to pay for) and heaven knows what, keeping out the renegades and the innovative.

All of this is the complete opposite of people freely choosing one ISP over another, and people freely volunteering to provide services and software to each other.

Which world is it that these Net Neutrality people want to create? The totalitarian one, or the free one?

Net neutrality maintains that if I have paid for an Internet connection at a certain quality, say, 300 Mbps, and you have paid for that quality, then our communications should take place at that quality. Protecting this concept would prevent a big ISP from sending you video from a media company it may own at 300 Mbps but sending video from a competing media company at a slower rate. That amounts to commercial discrimination.

No, there is no such thing as ‘commercial discrimination’.

If that were all Net Neutrality was about, then there would be no problem and no need for new legislation; what Tim Berners Lee just described is not ‘commercial discrimination’ but failure to fulfil a contract.

If I contract for bandwidth of a certain quality, and do not get it because my ISP is slyly traffic shaping, that is plain fraud. There are more than enough laws covering fraud on the statute books, and in fact, people who hold that there should be a small state accept that prosecuting fraud it is one of the few legitimate functions of a state.

Once again, the market can solve this problem, as I describe above. You do not like the policy your ISP is offering to you? Change ISPs. Your ISP is defrauding you? Change ISPs or sue them. No new legislation is needed for any of this.

A neutral communications medium is the basis of a fair, competitive market economy, of democracy, and of science.

Heavens above NO.

Just like I said… SOCIALISM! The internet is not ‘fair‘ and that socialist programming word makes me and every decent person SICK TO THEIR STOMACHS.

And don’t even start me on ‘democracy‘.

As for science, science is a way of making sense of the world; it is not a religion, a political philosophy, a consensus driven methodology, majority rule group think or fair.

Debate has risen again in the past year about whether government legislation is needed to protect net neutrality. It is. Although the Internet and Web generally thrive on lack of regulation, some basic values have to be legally preserved.

And this is the greatest fail, perhaps of all time.

The inventor of the most important technology the world has ever seen, a destroyer of tyranny, a literal liberator of man in every sense, breaking down barriers between people, facilitating cooperation, communication, commerce, copulation and greatly magnifying all the things that man does and thinks…. wants his invention to be crippled.

Government legislation is NOT needed to make people behave like good human beings. The basic values of the internet; sharing, openness, cooperation, cannot be legislated; you cannot force people to be good, and certainly threatening them with violence and state invasion is not a way to make people work together for the common good.

The growth and importance of the web is more proof that people can build great things together without the government being involved in any way, in case more proof was needed, and it seems that it is, even for the man who created the web.

Berners Lee goes on in the article to complain about ‘snooping’. Like I say above, the state having its nose in every ISPs business will facilitate surveillance, on the pretext that they are ensuring ‘fairness’ (Violently enforced theft of property aka Net Neutrality).

Pity the poor old ISPs.

On the one hand, they have the totalitarian police state forcing them to pay for the infrastructure collect and store the private communications of their users, violating them, ‘for the common good’, and on the other hand, they have the violent Net Neutrality socialists pushing them to deliver bandwidth to their standards ‘for the common good’.

They are caught between a rock and a hard place, and both have the same thing in common.

The State.

If you watch any documentary this year, it absolutely must be ‘Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story’ http://bit.ly/9ICXTi.

Where the problem of Britain’s money is laid out so simply and effectively that even a child could understand it.

If you still believe in:

• ‘Benefits’
• ‘Grants’
• ‘Funding’ the arts
• Councils to do everything
• State funded education
• Government ‘subsidies’ of anything
• Government ‘investment’ in anything

Then you need to watch this programme. After having watched it, if you STILL think that these things are not immoral, unethical and insane then you really are lost.

Every once in a while, someone writes something that is so clear and efficient at dispelling commonly held beliefs and myths that it changes everything. This television programme is one of those things. The first twenty three minutes alone are enough to expunge all of your false ideas about the true nature of government spending.

What is for sure is that democracy will inevitably lead to absolute socialism, and this documentary proves it. The clients of the giant state, who all have a vested interest in keeping the monster alive, will always be disinclined to vote for liberty and a smaller state, as they will be cutting off the teat that is feeding them. As the programme says, there are places in the UK where 70% of the economy is made up of state feeders; none of those people are going to vote for a smaller state. Ever.

Taking all of this into account, its clear to see that there will not be many more chances for Britain to escape the nightmare of total socialism; if this lot do not unleash the forces of capitalism immediately, subsequent elections will turn this country back towards socialist totalitarianism; there will simply not be enough people left to vote for anything else.

The only way this can be prevented is if the economy is returned to sanity in a very short amount of time, so that the people who used to rely on the state, will be able to find places in the real economy. They will then be disinclined to vote for socialists who will destroy their prosperity. If this is not done quickly, and people are languishing for too long, a reversal will be much more difficult.

Whoever is in charge, if they understand economics at all (fat chance) should be thinking about secondly reducing the size of the state, and firstly, removing all obstacles to capitalism, like the minimum wage, all regulations on hiring people (and everything else), abolishing VAT etc etc.

If this is not done immediately, then there is going to be… trouble.

A failure to unleash capitalism (to ‘go Hong Kong’) will mean that either the system will have to be brought down by some other means, or it will turn to socialism. Which is the most likely outcome? Who knows? The choices are clear however, and there is still alot of educational work to be done, what with all the totally delusional Keynesians, Socialists, Statists and Global Warmistas debating wether or not gravity holds you down: http://j.mp/9Ttwpi whilst it does precisely that. If otherwise intelligent people persist in their wishful thinking, wilful economic illiteracy and statism, then it is going to take nothing less than a wholesale withdrawal of support from the productive to engineer the change to reality based living that is so desperately needed.

Once again, its Libertarianism that is the key to real prosperity of the sort that made Britain great; property rights are the ultimate right that not only protects you personally, it also protects your family, your money, your future, your security and allows you to fulfil your maximum potential.

UPDATE!

An intelligent person at Home Ed Forums said:

barrybloye

Channel 4: Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story

It’s surprisingly digestible, but reveals some shocking facts about the UK’s debt and the burden that heavy taxes and bureaucracy have on the country.

Can you believe that the UK Government controls 53% of the British economy (compared to 28% in China)!?

I think it has massively redefined my idea of Britain’s place in the World, almost as much as the Balls–Badman affair.

Clips:
UK public sector is crippling UK economy
Lowering taxes actually increases tax revenue

Hat-tip to Blogdial.

Indeed.

We have been talking about this for several years now. Anyone who takes what we say seriously (and there are many that do, resulting in profound changes to their entire personal philosophies) will have already read ‘For a New Liberty’.

You need to read that book. I am not just saying that to be saying it; I REALLY MEAN IT. Surf to mises.org and BUY IT. NOW. It is one of the most important books you will ever read. After reading it, you will be left with the choice of being an irrational, imbecillic, violent moron, or an ethical, rational real human being, with a deep, morally based concern for the welfare of your fellow man.

I’m not making that up. I’m not saying it for effect.

If you think that this documentary is digestible, revealing, shocking and redefines your ideas about Britain’s place in the world, you are in for a BIGGER SHOCK. ‘For a New Liberty’ is 1000 times more profoundly life changing than this documentary, because it deals with every part of your life, and not just money alone.

Its great to have a small part to play in spreading these ideas. Its through their spread that we are finally going to be rid of the state, so at the very least our children can live like real human beings instead of cattle.

This video ‘Catherine Austin Fitts: The Looting Of America’:

Describes on many levels, why the collectivists, the socialists and all the brainwashed people who believe in ‘democracy’ are nothing more than human cattle.

On the first level, there is a story in this video about how three women living in the same town save and borrow money.

Ms Fitts describes how, with a simple piece of software, it is possible to cut out the bank that is massively charging one of the women a high interest rate, by connecting these three people locally.

This is the sort of thing that entrepreneurs do, and which the socialists cannot even begin to imagine.

The socialist will blame the bank for the ‘problem’ of high interest rates, and then call on the violent state to force the bank to charge less.

The entrepreneur is smarter, and more importantly, ethical.

She understands the true nature of the problem and solves it in a way that not only is better for the consumer, but which has the side effect of completely destroying the business model of the bank. All without any coercion or violence of any kind, all done on the back of the power of human imagination, and voluntary exchange.

As you may have heard, there is a call for a bank run throughout the EU on the 7th of December:

French stop banque Facebook page

German stop banque Facebook page

Italian stop banque Facebook page

Greek stop banque Facebook page

English stop banque Facebook page

Dutch stop banque Facebook page

[…]

http://pjcjournal.wordpress.com/2010/10/29/starve-the-beast/

This is a good idea, but what is going to happen after the run is over?

The socialist wants to destroy, but he cannot create. He wants to hurt the system, but he wants to leave it all intact so that he can sit in the seat of power and run everything to his own bitter taste.

This is the difference; the freedom loving entrepreneurs who create and benefit everyone, versus the socialist control freaks who are inherently evil and destructive of capital and human life.

Had all the people now going berserk in France taken the opportunity to form their own banks that run on rules they fix for themselves, on a purely voluntary basis, none of them would have the need for what they are doing right now.

One thing is for sure; with all of those people withdrawing their money from the banks, this is an great opportunity to start just the sort of bank that the organisers of this bank run would want to see and use… do they have the brains to do it?

Thanks to the wise Preuss, we have a nifty little pair of articles that demonstrate once again why the people who think that democracy is a good way to organise the affairs of groups of people are spectacularly naïve.

The unethical long winded men who believe that, “the only legitimate way to have a process is if everyone has their say” would do well to consider the implications of these articles, but then, if they had the capacity to understand what the implications of this are, they could not hold the unethical views that they do:

The ‘politics of the brain’ is a threat to choice, freedom and democracy – which is why spiked is declaring war against it.

Quote:
In earlier eras, the revelation that there was a Behavioural Insight Team at the heart of government, dedicated to finding ways to reshape the public’s thoughts, choices and actions, would have caused outrage. It would have brought to mind some of the darker antics of the Soviet Union, which treated certain beliefs as mental illnesses to be fixed, or maybe O’Brien, the torturer in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, who boasts that the human mind is ‘infinitely malleable’.

Yet the news that David Cameron has a Behavioural Insight Team inside Downing Street, and what’s more that it is increasingly influential within the Lib-Con coalition, has been treated as if were a perfectly normal, even admirable thing. Have we lost our minds?

The Guardian article refered to gives us another prime example of how it doesn’t matter how you vote the government still get in.

Quote:
A “nudge unit” set up by David Cameron in the Cabinet Office is working on how to use behavioural economics and market signals to persuade citizens to behave in a more socially integrated way.

The unit, formally known as the Behavioural Insight Team, is being run by David Halpern, a former adviser in Tony Blair’s strategy unit, and is taking advice from Richard Thaler, the Chicago professor generally recognised as popularising “nudge” theory – the idea that governments can design environments that make it easier for people to choose what is best for themselves and society.

Thaler was in London for three days this week advising ministers, and in a speech urged the government to adopt longer term horizons. The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, said he believed the unit could change the way citizens think.

And so, there you have it.

There are people in the employ of government whose work is to manipulate the thinking of the population. These people have the power to coercively use economics to alter the behaviour of the population, and of course, they also abuse the English language to do it.

Why do you think that the word ‘fair’ and all its derivatives are now on the lips of every Tom Dick and Harry? Do you think that it is merely by accident that everyone is measuring policy, laws and everything that comes out of government and which is related to ‘society’ is measured against this idea of ‘fairness’?

It is absolutely deliberate, and a direct result of this Behaviour Modification group at the heart of government.

Anyone who believes that democracy is beneficial or ethical is completely insane.

Anyone who believes that “having your say”, or “getting your points heard” legitimises government processes or democracy itself is also completely delusional, insane, Naïve and very very stupid.

It is clear that the frames of reference within which all the problems and non problems (like Home Education and its practitioner’s relationship to government) you face are nothing more than elaborate traps, created by this and other social engineering groups.

The Behavioural Insight Team and its predecessors, by creating the boxes within which you are allowed to address a problem have complete control over you from the outset, and because you are retarded, you cannot see that everyone having their say really does not legitimise anything.

This is why the only response to anything that is unethical should be point blank refusal. As soon as you enter into a discussion on their terms, you are thinking inside their frame of reference and all is lost.

This is why it is not irrational, confrontational or counterproductive to take the Libertarian stance when you are confronted by these persistent pests, but the complete opposite; a rational, ethical and productive thinker does not concede for a moment that the state usurping the role of the parent is legitimate. For example.

Its also why it is so important to use English words correctly:

While opposing any and all private or group aggression against the rights of person and property, the libertarian sees that throughout history and into the present day, there has been one central, dominant, and overriding aggressor upon all of these rights: the State. In contrast to all other thinkers, left, right, or in-between, the libertarian refuses to give the State the moral sanction to commit actions that almost everyone agrees would be immoral, illegal, and criminal if committed by any person or group in society. The libertarian, in short, insists on applying the general moral law to everyone, and makes no special exemptions for any person or group. But if we look at the State naked, as it were, we see that it is universally allowed, and even encouraged, to commit all the acts which even non-libertarians concede are reprehensible crimes. The State habitually commits mass murder, which it calls “war,” or sometimes “suppression of subversion”; the State engages in enslavement into its military forces, which it calls “conscription”; and it lives and has its being in the practice of forcible theft, which it calls “taxation.” The libertarian insists that whether or not such practices are supported by the majority of the population is not germane to their nature: that, regardless of popular sanction, War is Mass Murder, Conscription is [p. 25] Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery. The libertarian, in short, is almost completely the child in the fable, pointing out insistently that the emperor has no clothes.

[…]

http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp

All true, and if you have not yet read that book, go and do so immediately.

These are the facts:

‘Taxation’ is actually theft.
‘Conscription’ and ‘National Service’ are in fact a form of slavery.
Government ‘Grants’ are in fact redistributed stolen loot.
Government ‘Subsidies’ are in fact redistributed stolen loot.
‘Subsidising the arts’ is in fact redistributing stolen money to cultural gatekeepers.
Central Bank ‘Quantitative Easing’ is in fact Money Printing.
Government ‘investment in industry’ is in fact economy destroying redistribution of stolen loot and crony capitalism.

All of the above have one root thing in common; violent coercion. If you disobey the state, violence is used against you to force you to comply. This is even true in the case of Quantitative Easing, where if you attempt to escape from the criminal and inflationary central bank, you will be arrested and gaoled and your goods confiscated.

It is in no way ‘fair’ to tax people based on the level of wealth they have accumulated; taxation itself is immoral theft. It is in no way ‘fair’ that graduates should pay a tax so that others can receive a university education, or that money is stolen from you for any purpose whatsoever, no matter what the need is or what the money is to be used for.

If you use the language of the state as your frame of reference, you instantly become their prisoner, and this can have consequences that will touch every aspect of your life, quite apart from making you sound like a complete zombie.

While we are at it, what is an example of something that actually is fair?

If there is a piece of cake in a household, and two family members both want a slice, the two can agree that one can cut and the other gets to choose the first piece.

That is fair, since both of the parties have voluntarily agreed on how the cake that belongs to them both should be divided.

Dictionary says:

fair – 9 dictionary results

adjective, -er, -est, adverb, -er, -est, noun, verb

–adjective

1. free from bias, dishonesty, or injustice: a fair decision; a fair judge.
2. legitimately sought, pursued, done, given, etc.; proper under the rules: a fair fight.
3. moderately large; ample: a fair income.
4. neither excellent nor poor; moderately or tolerably good: fair health.
5. marked by favoring conditions; likely; promising: in a fair way to succeed.
6. Meteorology .
1. (of the sky) bright; sunny; cloudless to half-cloudy.
2. (of the weather) fine; with no prospect of rain, snow, or hail; not stormy.
7. Nautical . (of a wind or tide) tending to aid the progress of a vessel.
8. unobstructed; not blocked up: The way was fair for our advance.
9. without irregularity or unevenness: a fair surface.
10. free from blemish, imperfection, or anything that impairs the appearance, quality, or character: Her fair reputation was ruined by gossip.
11. easy to read; clear: fair handwriting.
12. of a light hue; not dark: fair skin.
13. pleasing in appearance; attractive: a fair young maiden.
14. seemingly good or sincere but not really so: The suitor beguiled his mistress with fair speeches.
15. courteous; civil: fair words.
16. Medicine/Medical . (of a patient’s condition) having stable and normal vital signs and other favorable indicators, as appetite and mobility, but being in some discomfort and having the possibility of a worsening state.
17. Dialect . scarcely; barely: It was just fair daylight when we started working.

-adverb

1. in a fair manner: He doesn’t play fair.
2. straight; directly, as in aiming or hitting: He threw the ball fair to the goal.
3. favorably; auspiciously.
4. British, Australian . entirely; completely; quite: It happened so quickly that it fair took my breath away.

–noun

1. Archaic . something that is fair.
2. Archaic .
1. a woman.
2. a beloved woman.

–verb (used with object)

1. to make the connection or junction of (surfaces) smooth and even.
2. Shipbuilding .
1. to draw and adjust (the lines of a hull being designed) to produce regular surfaces of the correct form.
2. to adjust the form of (a frame or templet) in accordance with a design, or cause it to conform to the general form of a hull.
3. to restore (a bent plate or structural member) to its original form.
4. to align (the frames of a vessel under construction) in proper position.
3. to bring (rivet holes in connecting structural members) into perfect alignment.
4. Obsolete . to make fair.

—Verb phrase

1. .fair off / up, South Midland and Southern U.S. (of the weather) to clear: It’s supposed to fair off toward evening.

—Idioms

1. bid fair, to seem likely: This entry bids fair to win first prize.
2. fair and square,
1. honestly; justly; straightforwardly: He won the race fair and square.
2. honest; just; straightforward: He was admired for being fair and square in all his dealings.
3. fair to middling, Informal . only tolerably good; so-so.

Origin: bef. 900; ME; OE fæger; c. OS, OHG fagar, ON fagr, Goth fagrs

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fair

That pretty much puts the nail in the coffin of ‘fair’ in the Nick Clegg Orwellian sense; taxation is dishonest and unjust. It is illegitimately sought, given and pursued money. And so on.

The same can be said for ‘paying your fair share’ or ‘greed‘, ‘capitalism‘, ‘rights‘ and many other crucially important words that are routinely and deliberately misused to steer you into the squeeze chutes. You need to get a grip on these words, restore their true meanings in your mind, so that when someone tries to steer you and frame your thoughts for you it will be easy to deflect their nonsense. In particular, when some disgusting, unctuous and deeply sinister bureaucrat tries to justify why he should have access to your children, you will not even begin to discuss the subject, because you know that it is illegitimate.

Rather than do this by making a list of words and then re-defining them one by one, you would be well advised to read this book by Murray Rothbard. It will train you to think in such a way that words you have been misusing will automatically find their correct meaning, by virtue of your newly found ethical basis of thought. Once you finish that book, no matter what word they try and hijack as the new rallying cry for collectivism, the principle itself, having been disempowered in your mind, will be unacceptable, and the word in its new usage will cause you to bristle and your hackles to rise.

This is the place that your thinking needs to be in; a place where you are immune to the nefarious work of the ‘Nudge Group’ and the ‘Behavioural Insight Team’. Where no matter what they do, you will NEVER give up your dignity or your rights no matter what they or anyone else says.

Finally, ‘choice, freedom and democracy’; choice and freedom are MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE from democracy!

I agree 100% with everything in this interview, between Doug Casey and Louis James.

…….

Doug Casey on Voting
Interviewed by Louis James, Editor, International Speculator

Louis: Doug, last week we spoke about presidents.  We have an election coming up in the U.S., one many people believe is very important even though it isn’t a presidential election – an election that could have significant consequences on our investments. But given the views you’ve already expressed on the Tea Party movement and anarchy, I’m sure you have different ideas. What do you make of the impending circus, and what should a rational man do?

Doug: Well, a rational man, which is to say, an ethical man, would almost certainly not vote in this election, or in any other – at least above a local level, where you personally know most of both your neighbors and the candidates.

Louis: Why? Might not an ethical person want to vote the bums out?

Doug: No. I’ve thought about this a lot, so let me give you five reasons why no one should vote.

The first reason is that voting is an unethical act, in and of itself. That’s because the state is pure, institutionalized coercion. If you believe that coercion is an improper way for people to relate to one another, then you shouldn’t engage in a process that formalizes and guarantees the use of coercion.

Louis: It’s probably worth defining coercion in this context. I know you agree with me that force is ethical in self-defense. A murderer I shoot might feel coerced into accepting a certain amount of hot lead that he did not consent to, but he intended the same, or worse, for me, so the scales are balanced. What you are talking about is forcing innocent, non-consenting others to do things against their wills, like paying taxes that go to pay for military adventures they believe are wrong, etc.

Doug: Right. The modern state not only routinely coerces people into doing all sorts of things they don’t want to do – often very clearly against their own interests – but it necessarily does so, by its nature. People who want to know more about that should read our conversation on anarchy. This distinction is very important in a society with a government that is no longer limited by a constitution that restrains it from violating individual rights. And when you vote, you participate in this unethical system.

Louis: It’s probably also worth clarifying that you’re not talking about all voting here. When you are a member of a golfing club and vote on how to use the fees, you and everyone else have consented to the process, so it’s not unethical. It’s participating in the management of the coercive machinery of the state you object to, not voting in and of itself.

Doug: Exactly. Unlike a golfing club, or something of that nature, the state won’t let you opt out.

L: Even if you’re not harming anyone and just want to be left alone.

Doug: Which relates to the second reason: privacy. It compromises your privacy to vote. It gets your name added to a list government busybodies can make use of, like court clerks putting together lists of conscripts for jury duty. Unfortunately, this is not as important a reason as it used to be, because of the great proliferation of lists people are on anyway. Still, while it’s true that in many ways there’s less privacy in our world today, in general, the less any governments know about you, the better off you are. This is, of course, why I’ve successfully refused to complete a census form for the last 40 years.

Louis: [Chuckles] We’ve talked about the census. Good for you.

Doug: I like to be a non-person as far as the state is concerned, as far as possible.

Louis: Not to digress too much, but some people might react by saying that juries are important.

Doug: They are, but it would be a waste of my time to sign up for jury duty, because I would certainly be kicked off any jury. No attorney would ever let me stay on the jury once we got to voir dire, because I would not agree to being a robot that simply voted on the facts and the law as instructed by the judge – I’d want to vote on the morality of the law in question too. I’d be interested in justice, and very few laws today, except for the basic ones on things like murder and theft, have anything to do with justice. If the case were relating to drug laws, or tax laws, I would almost certainly automatically vote to acquit, regardless of the facts of the case.

Louis: I’ve thought about it too, because it is important, and I might be willing to serve on a jury. And of course I’d vote my conscience too. But I’d want to be asked, not ordered to do it. I’m not a slave.

Doug: My feelings exactly. Perhaps we should have a conversation on the nature of jury duty some day soon.

Louis: That sounds interesting. But we should probably get to your third reason for not voting.

Doug: That would be because it’s a degrading experience. The reason I say that is because registering to vote, and voting itself, usually involves taking productive time out of your day to go stand around in lines in government offices. You have to fill out forms and deal with petty bureaucrats. I know I can find much more enjoyable and productive things to do with my time, and I’m sure anyone reading this can as well.

Louis: And the pettier the bureaucrat, the more unpleasant the interaction tends to be.

Doug: I have increasing evidence of that every time I fly. The TSA goons are really coming into their own now, as our own home-grown Gestapo wanna-bes.

Louis: It’s a sad thing… Reason number four?

Doug: As P.J. O’Rourke says in his new book, and as I’ve always said, voting just encourages them.

I’m convinced that most people don’t vote for candidates they believe in, but against candidates they fear. But that’s not how the guy who wins sees it; the more votes he gets, the more he thinks he’s got a mandate to rule. Some people justify this, saying it minimizes harm to vote for the lesser of two evils. That’s nonsense, because it still leaves you voting for evil. The lesser of two evils is still evil.

Incidentally, I got as far as this point in 1980, when I was on the Phil Donahue show. I had the whole hour on national TV all to myself, and I felt in top form. It was actually the day before the national election, when Jimmy Carter was the incumbent, running against Ronald Reagan. After I made some economic observations, Donahue accused me of intending to vote for Reagan. I said that I was not, and as sharp as Donahue was, he said, “Well, you’re not voting for Carter, so you must be voting Libertarian…”

I said no, and had to explain why not. I believed then just as I do now. And it was at about this point when the audience, which had been getting restive, started getting really upset with me. I never made it to point five.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. That same audience, when I pointed out that their taxes were high and were being wasted, contained an individual who asked, “Why do we have to pay for things with our taxes? Why doesn’t the government pay for it?” I swear that’s what he said; it’s on tape. If you could go back and watch the show, you’d see that the audience clapped after that brilliant question. Which was when I first realized that while the situation is actually hopeless, it’s also quite comic…

Louis: [Laughs]

Doug: And things have only gotten worse since then, with decades more public education behind us.

Louis: I bet that guy works in the Obama administration now, where they seem to think exactly as he did; the government will just pay for everything everyone wants with money it doesn’t have.

Doug: [Chuckles] Maybe so. He’d now be of an age where he’s collecting Social Security and Medicare, plus food stamps, and likely gaming the system for a bunch of other freebies. Maybe he’s so discontent with his miserable life that he goes to both Tea Party and Green Party rallies, while voting Democrat. I do believe we’re getting close to the endgame. The system is on the verge of falling apart. And the closer we get to the edge, the more catastrophic the collapse it appears we’re going to have.

Which leads me to point number five: Your vote doesn’t count. If I’d gotten to say that to the Donahue audience, they probably would have stoned me. People really like to believe that their individual votes count. Politicians like to say that every vote counts, because it gets everyone into busybody mode, makes voters complicit in their crimes. But statistically, any person’s vote makes no more difference than a single grain of sand on a beach.

That’s completely apart from the fact, as voters in Chicago in 1960 and Florida in 2000 can tell you, when it actually does get close, things can be, and often are, rigged.

Anyway, officials manifestly do what they want, not what you want them to do, once they are in office. They neither know, nor care, what you want.

Louis: The idea of political representation is a myth, and a logical absurdity. One person can only represent his own opinions – if he’s even thought them out. If someone dedicated his life to studying another person, he might be able to represent that individual reasonably accurately. But given that no two people are completely – or even mostly – alike, it’s completely impossible to represent the interests of any group of people.

Doug: The whole constellation of concepts is ridiculous. This leads us to the subject of democracy. People say that if you live in a democracy, you should vote. But that begs the question of whether democracy itself is any good. And I would say that, no, it’s not. Especially in a democracy unconstrained by a constitution. That, sadly, is the case in the U.S., where the Constitution is 100% a dead letter. Democracy is nothing more than mob rule dressed up in a suit and tie. It’s no way for a civilized society to be run.

Louis: Okay, but in our firmly United State of America today, we don’t live in your ideal society. It is what it is, and if you don’t vote the bums out, they remain in office. What do you say to the people who say that if you don’t vote, if you don’t raise a hand, then you have no right to complain about the results of the political process?

Doug: But I do raise a hand, constantly. I’d just rather not waste my time or degrade myself on unethical and futile efforts like voting. That argument is more than fallacious, it’s spurious.

Louis: Okay then, if the ethical man shouldn’t vote in the national elections coming up, what should he do?

Doug: I think it’s like they said during the war with Viet Nam: suppose they had a war, and nobody came? I also like to say: suppose they levied a tax, and nobody paid? And at this time of year: suppose they gave an election, and nobody voted?

The only way to truly de-legitimize unethical rulers is by not voting. When tin-plated dictators around the world have their rigged elections, and people stay home in droves, even today’s “we love governments of all sorts” international community won’t recognize the results of the election.

Louis: De-legitimizing evil … and without coercion, or even force. That’s a beautiful thing, Doug. I’d love to see the whole crooked, festering, parasitical mass in Washington – and similar places – get a total vote of no-confidence.

Doug: Indeed. Now, I realize that my not voting won’t make that happen. My not voting doesn’t matter any more than some naïve person’s voting does. But at least I’ll know that what I did was ethical.

Louis: At least you won’t have blood on your hands.

Doug: That’s exactly the point.

Louis: A friendly amendment: you do staunchly support voting with your feet.

Doug: Ah, that’s true. Unfortunately, the idea of the state has spread over the earth like an ugly skin disease. All of the governments of the world are, at this point, growing in extent and power – and rights violations – like cancers. But still, that is one way I am dealing with the problem; I’m voting with my feet. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. It’s idiotic to sit around like a peasant and wait to see what they do to you.

To me, it makes much more sense to live as a perpetual tourist, staying no more than six months of the year in any one place. Tourists are courted and valued, whereas residents and citizens are viewed as milk cows. And before this crisis is over, they may wind up looking more like beef cows. Entirely apart from that, it keeps you from getting into the habit of thinking like a medieval serf. And I like being warm in the winter, and cool in the summer.

Louis: And, as people say: “What if everyone did that?” Well, you’d see people migrating towards the least predatory states where they could enjoy the most freedom, and create the most wealth for themselves and their posterity. That sort of voting with your feet could force governments to compete for citizens, which would lead to more places where people can live as they want. It could become a worldwide revolution fought and won without guns.

Doug: That sounds pretty idealistic, but I do believe this whole sick notion of the nation-state will come to an end within the next couple generations. It makes me empathize with Lenin when he said, “The worse it gets, the better it gets.” Between jet travel, the internet, and the bankruptcy of governments around the world, the nation-state is a dead duck. As we’ve discussed before, people will organize into voluntary communities we call phyles.

Louis: That’s the name given to such communities by science fiction author Neil Stephenson in his book The Diamond Age, which we discussed in our conversation on Speculator’s Fiction. Well, we’ve talked quite a bit – what about investment implications?

Doug: First, don’t expect anything that results from this U.S. election to do any real, lasting good. And if, by some miracle, it did, the short-term implications would be very hard economic times. What to do in either case is what we write about in our Big Picture newsletter, The Casey Report.

More important, however, is to have a healthy and useful psychological attitude. For that, you need to stop thinking politically, stop wasting time on elections, entitlements, and such nonsense. You’ve got to use all of your time and brain power to think economically. That’s to say, thinking about how to allocate your various intellectual, personal and capital assets, to survive the storm – and even thrive, if you play your cards right.

Louis: Very good. I like that: think economically, not politically. Thanks, Doug!

Doug: My pleasure.

While voting may not change anything, taking care of your own financial situation does. That’s why every month, Doug and the editors team of The Casey Report dissect Washington’s and the Fed’s political shenanigans and how they may affect your personal wealth. It’s never been more important than today to see the big picture, in order to discover how you can protect your assets and profit even in the worst of times. Learn more here.

…….

From Lew Rockwell

And do listen to Doug Casey at Freedom Fest; he is a great speaker.

From Lew Rockwell’s blog:

Many Austrians have tried to get Krugman to debate business cycle theory. He’s too busy and too sophisticated to debate an Austrian, of course. Until now.

Economist Robert Murphy has come up with a clever way to make this happen. Through a website called The Point, people can pledge an amount of money to make the debate happen. Not one cent is charged to them until it does happen. The money will go to a charity for the hungry in New York. So if it hits, say, $100,000, Krugman will have to explain why getting $100,000 to New York’s hungry isn’t worth one hour of his time. Brilliant. I’ve already pledged. Bob is up to around $5,000 already.

Here’s his video promoting it (it looks like the law school one from the other day, but it’s a different video).

We have $25 down on that particular pledge.

BURN WITCHDOCTOR BURN!

The great, insightful, genius mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot is gone.

His revolutionary work can be and is now applied everywhere, including economics:

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1465

Image compression.

And so much more….

The object that he is best known for in popular culture, The Mandelbrot Set is iconic, profound and beautiful all at the same time.

Merci professeur!

Its been a rather good week for real scientists, clear thinking and men with balls.

First, watch this scientist (Dr. Art Robinson — homeschooler, a former assistant to Linus Pauling) take apart the appallingly irrational, hysterical, sarcastic lie repeater Rachel Maddow, who has her  flesh flayed from her bones and scorched by this very satisfying encounter:

Visit msnbc.com for the latest lies, State Propaganda, and Keynesianism

Savour the sapor of her roasted flesh.

And now for the next course; read the resignation letter of Harold Lewis (Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara) to Curtis Callan, President of same:

Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal

Well, that certainly is refreshing!

Of course, many people understand that the idea of Anthropogenic Global Warming is nothing more than a lie and a scam, and now it seems that the taboo is wearing off, and the floodgates of real scientists with either nothing to lose or real integrity no matter what have opened. This is a classic post tipping point event.

Now there are at least two things to consider.

We still have the American Physical Society in place and intact, as well as many other fatally compromised organisations, all parroting AGW and other dogma. The scientists who are real scientists, need to group together to form new associations that are strictly and purely scientific in function. If this is not done, then the organizations that dominate the making of bad policy will continue to rape, rob and pillage.

Which brings us to the cause of all these problems; The State.

It is the entirely corrosive influence of the state that has caused these scientists to lose their way, and even their souls. Without a state to steal money from people to fund boondoggles like ‘Global Warming’, ‘Climate Change’ and whatever else they decide to change the name of the cause to, there would be no financial incentive whatsoever to collude in fraudulent work in order to garner a salary.

There would be no incentive for scientists to push for public policies that in turn feed back into their lies, be they AGW or unnecessary vaccines.

The problem of the state is not just about money; it is a problem that reaches into every corner of human life, from your health, right up to and into your mind, where lies are implanted at its behest.

Thanks to the state, the practice of science is being corrupted to such an extent that human progress is being derailed; it may or many not be possible to catch up to where the collected knowledge of man might have been had there been no state… who knows? What is for certain is that if the state is not stopped, then its evil and retarding influence will continue to hold everyone and everything back.

Scientists who are thinking clearly (as opposed to those who can barely think at all) turn to Libertarianism as the only way to ensure that real science can be done, without the distorting influence of the inherently evil state.

Until this destructive state of affairs is brought to an end, resignations and one or two scientists running for congress will not be able to stop the juggernaut that is the state, and of course, if the state were run entirely by scientists that would be a bad thing, since this is not a problem of the right people being in charge of the machine; the machine itself is the problem.

Thankfully, the economic collapse is coming, and this may give great impetus to the final destruction of the state. With this collapse we can expect at a minimum, for the scope and reach of the state to be drastically limited.

Now is the time for scientists and Libertarians to build the foundations of new voluntary, ethically based organisations to replace the broken, corrupt, venal, unscientific, discriminatory and evil institutions that currently spread lies and misery.

Fuck the rules. Fuck playing the game the banksters want you to play. Fuck being the good citizen. Fuck filling out every form, fuck paying every tax. Fuck the government, fuck the banks who own them. Fuck the free-loaders, living rent-free while we pay. Fuck the legal process, a game which only works if you’ve got the money to pay for the parasite lawyers. Fuck being a chump. Fuck being a stooge. Fuck trying to do the right thing – what good does that get you? What good is coming your way?

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/lira7.1.1.html

Can you smell that?

Its the smell of someone waking up. Its the smell of fresh air after years of living in the city.

Can you feel it?

Its the feeling you get when you realise that there is no noise, after living in a large city for years. You are actually ALIVE.

If you have ever had a ‘eureka moment‘, where something that made no sense, or was clouded over in complexity, suddenly becomes crystal clear, and you feel a tingling on your neck, and you say…. YES!

The eureka moment here, the smell in this case, the feeling here is the understanding that all along, the ‘crooks’ and ‘criminals’ were in fact right in almost every way.

And by ‘crooks’ I mean the people who didn’t hurt anyone or steal from anyone and who disobeyed every rule out there, and got away with it.

The people in the story linked above are the form fillers, the dutiful, brainwashed good people who believe all the big lies and who paid through the nose in every way.

My sincere hope is that all of these people finally wake up and stop being so insufferably STUPID, all at the same time.

We will then, finally, see the end of the police state, just like the East Germans saw the end of theirs; only this time, there will be no wall to cross anywhere but in the minds of the people who have been shaken from their hypnotic trance.

You know who I am talking about, the robotic, brainwashed, simpletons who think that restaurants must be licensed, that the state should be negotiated with when it comes to the ‘rights’ that they ‘give’ you – the irrational people whose thoughts are wildly incoherent, who get from A to E, again avoiding C, D, and B… you know who I mean… THE PROBLEM!

When these people, these intransigent folk who have based their lives on lies for decades and who simply refuse to accept the truth because it hurts too much, right up until the moment that they are being hauled away to the camps, as they wake up and get really really angry there will be no turning back.

You think its bad now, wait until the dollar collapse happens. The people who were manning the controls of the machine will live in fear of their lives.

And that is an entirely good thing.

August 28th, 2010 by Militant Libertarian, Originally published on March 9, 2004.

by Russell Madden

Fascism: a political-economic system in which citizens retain title to their property but in which the government determines how that property may or may not be used.

You might be a fascist if you …
• believe that the proper way to decide whether a casino should be built in your hometown is to vote on the idea.
• object to individuals gambling in their homes unless they’re playing the state-run lotto.
• think that your neighbor needs the blessing of the historical commission in order to renovate his aging home.
• feel the urge to report the guy down the street who has a painting truck parked in his drive but no orange building permit stuck to a front window.

You might be a fascist if you …

• experienced a sense of glee when Microsoft had to spend millions in legal fees and was convicted of monopolistic policies.
• see nothing wrong with your city government awarding a single cable franchise while those guys who sell dishes must charge extra to customers who wish to receive local broadcast channels.
• are grateful that the FCC dictates to cable and phone providers how they can do business because you are afraid that otherwise the big media companies would have too much power.
• would rather have the government pass a law and set up another bureaucracy to restrict telemarketers than spend fifty bucks of your own money to purchase a screening device.
• do not object when others are forced to pay more for their goods so you can earn a higher income while your trade restrictions put other citizens out of work.

You might be a fascist if you …

• nod in agreement that individuals must show proof of identity in order to open a bank account because otherwise the terrorists will win.
• don’t object to money laundering laws that make snitches of your banks so the drug dealers and the terrorists won’t win.
• never complain about airport security checks and bag screening and weapon confiscation in order to keep the terrorists from winning.

You might be a fascist if you …

• tremble at the thought that the person sitting next to you in the restaurant might be carrying a gun without a license.
• want to eliminate and confiscate all guns in private hands in order to be safe since guns cause violence, unless the cops are the ones carrying the guns.
• applaud extra taxes on guns and ammunition, prohibition of sales between private parties, licenses for gun dealers, limits on the number of firearms someone can own or buy, and bans on brass knuckles, nunchucks, pen knives, big knives, pepper spray, stun guns, sword canes, or anything else that can be used to defend against a criminal.

You might be a fascist if you …

• laughed when an aging hippie comedian who sold drug paraphernalia via the Internet was thrown in jail but thought a well-known talk show host addicted to painkillers should receive rehab.
• accept the widespread drugging of young boys but recoil in horror from the thought of adults receiving pleasure or relief from illicit drugs.
• champion zero tolerance for children who bring toy soldiers to school but think the heroes at Ruby Ridge and Waco got what they deserved when they were promoted for killing women and children.

You might be a fascist if you …

• think that taxes are the price we pay for civilization.
• smile when the rich have to pay an even greater proportion of taxes than they do now.
• kid yourself that Social Security and Medicare taxes are investments or premia rather than a way to pay for more welfare for old people.
• maintain that you have a right to health care, housing, retirement income, food stamps, or government-guaranteed student loans.

You might be a fascist if you …

• squint your eyes at the idea of parents educating their children at home.
• want child-free people to pay for your offspring’s schooling because everyone benefits.
• question the ability of parents to decide what their children should study, whether those youngsters should go to school at all, or how they should learn to make their own ways in the world.

You might be a fascist if you …

• seek assistance from the government to protect you from your own mistakes.
• ask the government to protect other people from what you believe are their own mistakes.
• abhor the thought of foreigners flooding your country and taking jobs you don’t want at wages you would refuse to accept.
• contend that you have a right to a job but an employer does not have the right to fire you because he doesn’t like the fact that you’re a woman, a racial minority, fat, or handicapped.
• think SUVs should be banned, seat belts and airbags required, gas mileage minimums enforced, gasoline formulations determined by the feds, and that more money should be spent on light rail systems that no one uses.

You might be a fascist if you …

• see all lawyers as heroes.
• hope to win the lawsuit lottery.
• refuse to accept that legal questions can be properly answered by anyone other than a state-accredited lawyer.

You might be a fascist if you …

• like the notion of mandated low-flow toilets and shower heads but see no problem with subsidized water so farmers or residents can work and live in deserts.
• rejoice that grease monkeys can no longer put Freon in your air conditioner.
• sneer at anything smacking of price gouging during disasters such as floods or hurricanes and would rather have shortages of goods than see someone make more than what you believe is a fair price.

You might be a fascist if you …

• promote the idea of the government owning even more wilderness land.
• are appalled that oil companies might drill offshore for natural gas.
• wonder what all the fuss is when homeowners are forced to abandon their houses in the woods when the government destroys the access roads.

You might be a fascist if you …

• support sending our troops to a foreign country that poses no imminent threat to us in order to liberate the natives and engage in nation-building.
• declare that foreign aid helps the average citizens of those countries that receive it.
• want others to pay for your humanitarian impulses.

You might be a fascist if you …

• would rather police focus their efforts on arresting ticket scalpers and prostitutes than on tracking down, convicting, and incarcerating violent criminals.
• want to impose your moral code on strangers.
• itch to make other people act as you believe they should act.
• do not accept that we still have involuntary servitude in this nation.

You might be a fascist if you …

• operate from the premise that morality is relative.
• condemn logic, reason, and objectivity as tools of white male oppression.
• equate non-coercive choice and actions of which you disapprove with fascism.

You might be a fascist if you …

• object to the examples in this essay.
• think you are free.

Originally seen here.

A very insightful Home Educator takes the evil and violent Richard Dawkins to task on his faulty logic and flawed thinking and application of the scientific method.

Did anyone catch that documentary last night called ‘Faith Schools Menace’ in which Richard Dawkins put the boot into faith schools? At the climax of the program Dawkins authoritatively states his main point in an extremely self-assured and almost God like tone which is that “our greatest responsibility in education is to unleash children’s curiosity and never limit their questions.” No one would disagree with that as an honourable aspiration but the means by which he proposes to achieve it falls way short of its aim. For someone who claims to be an EVIDENCE-based rational thinker how come he hasn’t looked at the EVIDENCE, which, if he had bothered to do so, would have enabled him to delete the first word of the documentary’s title. All the irrefutable and reproducible research findings, arrived at through the logical, reasoned and scientific methods that Dawkins is so fond of (as am I), strongly indicate that there is practically no place on earth that suppresses children’s curiosity and limits their questions more than school. If anyone can show me convincing evidence to the contrary my kids will be sent to school forthwith (assuming they would want to go after critically evaluating the new EVIDENCE). Earlier on in the documentary he expresses his disgust for the way children are labelled as Catholic, Protestant, Muslim etc but completely misses the most common label attached to children which is ‘schoolchildren’; which by his reasoning is surely equally repugnant since it labels children as belonging to the state (in most cases) before they have the cognitive ability to understand and critically evaluate the EVIDENCE offered by the likes of Gatto, Meighan, Holt, and their many international associates, showing that school-based learning produces significantly lower levels of academic attainment, social skills and, most importantly, emotional and psychological well being than learning by other means. The EVIDENCE also explains how schooling came about, what its real purpose is and how it impedes natural learning processes (I liked the history of British schooling put forward in ‘Overschooled but Undereducated’ which parallels Gatto’s in many ways). It has been said that schooling is the only true world religion and many of the arguments Dawkins applies to religion have exact equivalents that can be applied to schooling, some of which are probably best illustrated in Illich’s ‘Deschooling Society’. How can someone as astute, observant and insightful as Dawkins completely miss the elephant in the room?
An EVIDENCE-based solution that follows Dawkins’ logic would not just be to abolish faith schools, it would be to abolish schooling altogether and replace it with a learning framework fit for a democracy, a large part of which, of course, would be home education.

[…]

http://www.home-education.biz/

Mostly makes sense doesn’t it?

We already know about Richard Dawkins and his irrational attitudes to people’s liberties. No one should have their money stolen from them to pay for the education of children. This would eliminate the ‘problem’ of ‘Faith Schools’; if you want to send your children to a Koran chain school or a Catholic school or any other type of school, that is entirely your affair, your right, and no one has the right to tell you how to educate your children (and I literally mean your children).

People like Richard Dawkins, who believe that religious teaching is indoctrination and child abuse, are in fact, violent statists who want to own your children and force them to be taught what they believe is the truth. This is immoral, unacceptable and totally evil, and it can be deduced as immoral without invoking any religious argument.

His collectivist ideology is clearly expressed in this line:

“our greatest responsibility in education is to unleash children’s curiosity and never limit their questions.”

Who is this ‘our’ that he is talking about? He surely cannot be talking about your children, for whom you have absolute authority and responsibility? I fear that this is exactly what he is talking about, and it is in fact, a completely dishonourable aspiration; using violence to make people into slaves and property is dishonourable full stop.

He labels children as ‘schoolchildren’ because his ilk refer to people as property in the same way that water is wet; it is in the statist’s nature to refer to people as property, and all of the arguments between the various statist factions are in fact battles over who gets the power to control property, meaning you and your children. The fact that Home Education is better in every way than schooling is actually anathema to Dawkins, because it is only through regimented brainwashing that he and his violent atheists can ever hope to rid the population of ‘the scourge of religion’.

The writer asks how can someone as astute, observant and insightful as Dawkins completely miss the elephant in the room. The fact of the matter is that he is not astute, observant and insightful; if he were, he could not be a violent atheist. Insightful people refrain from violence of the kind he is calling for. Observant people base their thinking only on observations instead of using what they viscerally hate, are repulsed by, and refuse to believe as the basis of their philosophy.

Richard Dawkins is not a scientist; he is a man fully consumed by atheism and Darwinism. His mind is completely closed to anything outside of his world view – and for the record, I have no problem with people like that. What I do have a problem with is people who think like Dawkins, and who then want to control me and my property. They are no different to the people who want Sharia to engulf the entire world, or Catholics in the Cabinet. They are diametrically opposed to Liberty and the truth, and are your mortal enemies.

An evidence based solution to the problems of education in any country would result in the state removing itself completely from education, since education, like healthcare, is a good and not a right. There should be no state ‘framework’ replacing state schools, as any such thing would be financed by immoral theft, and certainly any evidence based solution could only conclude that democracy is bad for education, bad for your rights and should be rejected, based once again, purely on the evidence.

People who live and think like scientists do not pick and choose when to apply evidence. You cannot on the one hand call for evidence based living and then say that democracy is legitimate way of organising a country or supplying services. It is therefore irrational to ask for anything that would be ‘fit for a democracy’. Democracy is what almost got Home Education banned in the UK. It is what has caused it to be banned in Sweden.

Libertarianism is the best solution to the problem of organising groups of people, because it is based only on the evidence, is free from contradictions, free from violence, free from coercion, embraces everyone and their peculiar beliefs, absolutely guarantees your rights and does not allow anyone to lord it over anyone else.

In a Libertarian society there would be no one to create false rights (right to education, right to internet access etc. etc.) and no one to take away the very real natural rights that you are born with.

If you refuse to accept the truth of it, that is not derived from anything other than pure logic, then you are irrational, not thinking based on evidence alone, and if you claim to be a scientist, are not one.

While we are at it, take a look at this:

That man, eating noodles bought from a street seller in Malaysia (note how there are no regulations stopping people from cooking food and selling it to anyone who wants it. We have been over that before) is basing his financial choices on the evidence. He is smarter than most people in the UK and the USA when it comes to this. After watching it, will you go out and convert at least some of your worthless paper money to gold coins? Perhaps you need a different face put on the facts to help push you along.

That is what it looks like when people are living by evidence; they change their behaviour when something is not working correctly. Home Educators remove their children from school because school does not work. That is rational, logical behaviour where people are thinking and living by the evidence.

Sadly, there are many people who only apply evidence based thinking to some parts of their thoughts and behavior. For example, you can have people who, whilst behaving rationally in one area, will cling to socialist ideas like wealth redistribution and taxation. These same people call for the licensing of restaurants ‘because someone might get poisoned’. These same people think that it is totally proper for drivers of cars to be licensed, and of course, cars and the fuel that goes in them to be taxed. They believe that it is perfectly moral and acceptable for them to apply for ‘grant money’ (stealing) so that they can carry on their particular way of life or activities. They think its a ‘good idea’ that there should be a minimum price set on alcohol by the state. They believe in the state. They believe in democracy, ‘fairness’ and all of that other demonstrably irrational, dangerous and illogical nonsense, despite it being demonstrated to them again and again that these things are immoral, wrong and harmful to them directly.

This is ‘the big problem’ that free people face. The legions of sheep who are wilfully ignorant, who cling on to their violent beliefs and who continue to finance them despite having been shown that what they are thinking and doing is wrong.

If it were as easy as saying, “they will get what they deserve in the end” it could be said and left at that, but sadly, the free people get what the stupid people deserve because the stupid drag everyone down with them.

And that really is a big problem.

This is a MUST READ for all Europeans, Americans and [INSERT COUNTRY], with a special ‘do not miss’ notice for Home Educators and those delusional parents in Spain who still believe that government knows best in democracy:

[…]

While our ruling class teaches that relationships among men, women, and children are contingent, it also insists that the relationship between each of them and the state is fundamental. That is why such as Hillary Clinton have written law review articles and books advocating a direct relationship between the government and children, effectively abolishing the presumption of parental authority. Hence whereas within living memory school nurses could not administer an aspirin to a child without the parents’ consent, the people who run America’s schools nowadays administer pregnancy tests and ship girls off to abortion clinics without the parents’ knowledge. Parents are not allowed to object to what their children are taught. But the government may and often does object to how parents raise children. The ruling class’s assumption is that what it mandates for children is correct ipso facto, while what parents do is potentially abusive. It only takes an anonymous accusation of abuse for parents to be taken away in handcuffs until they prove their innocence. Only sheer political weight (and in California, just barely) has preserved parents’ right to homeschool their children against the ruling class’s desire to accomplish what Woodrow Wilson so yearned: “to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.”

[…]

America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution

Sound familiar?

‘Lord’ Clive Soley and ‘Baroness’ Ruth Deech are two exemplars of the repulsive human trash superclass that this priceless article eloquently describes and dismantles. Their contempt for you is naked, their predations unceasing and every time you run to them, or vote for them, or pay taxes into their system you make them stronger.

Angelo M. Codevilla has done you a great service by writing this piece. I suggest you spread it far and wide.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes in the Telegraph about ‘The Death of Paper Money’. Anyone who has been woken up by Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, Murray Rothbard and the Austrians knows that this is in fact inevitable, and in the end, is a good thing, because it means that government can no longer steal your money from you while you sleep, spending that money on mass murder:

Great numbers of people failed to see it coming. “My relations and friends were stupid. They didn’t understand what inflation meant. Our solicitors were no better. My mother’s bank manager gave her appalling advice,” said one well-connected woman.

“You used to see the appearance of their flats gradually changing. One remembered where there used to be a picture or a carpet, or a secretaire. Eventually their rooms would be almost empty. Some of them begged — not in the streets — but by making casual visits. One knew too well what they had come for.”

Corruption became rampant. People were stripped of their coat and shoes at knife-point on the street. The winners were those who — by luck or design — had borrowed heavily from banks to buy hard assets, or industrial conglomerates that had issued debentures. There was a great transfer of wealth from saver to debtor, though the Reichstag later passed a law linking old contracts to the gold price. Creditors clawed back something.

A conspiracy theory took root that the inflation was a Jewish plot to ruin Germany. The currency became known as “Judefetzen” (Jew- confetti), hinting at the chain of events that would lead to Kristallnacht a decade later.

While the Weimar tale is a timeless study of social disintegration, it cannot shed much light on events today.

[…]

My emphasis.

Cannot shed much light on events today?

This is so irrational, contradictory and ridiculous that we could be forgiven for concluding that Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is working under the constraints of a D-Notice, preventing him from spelling out explicitly what is about to take place for fear of the disruption that would ensue, should the emperor’s naked state be publicly declared.

What he has done in this article is the next best thing; he obliquely spelled out the precise nature of what is going to happen in the USA, UK and all over Europe should hyperinflation suddenly kick in, and then put in a disclaimer right at the end of the section, to indemnify himself and get past the Telegraph editors.

That is the only explanation for this line. All of the factors are here for an inevitable hyperinflationary event. The parallels to the German hyperinflation are eerily similar, including the mass ignorance of what inflation is, what money is, etc etc.

So, what should you do to protect yourself from this coming hyperinflation? Evans-Pritchard tells you in this section:

Foreigners with dollars, pounds, Swiss francs, or Czech crowns lived in opulence. They were hated. “Times made us cynical. Everybody saw an enemy in everybody else,” said Erna von Pustau, daughter of a Hamburg fish merchant.

[…]

The message is clear; you need to hold currencies other than the ones that are about to go critical mass in a hyperinflationary spiral. You need to own gold. You need to own Swiss Francs. You should not own the Euro and under no circumstances, should you own the Federal Reserve Note (the ‘US Dollar’).

So what about the Pound Sterling? What are its characteristics, and why does Evans-Pritchard believe that it is immune from hyperinflation? Why has Evans-Pritchard completely (deliberately?) ignored the Pound and its nature in this discussion? He says:

This is not a picture of America, or Britain, or Europe in 2010.

Why not? What is the precise difference between the money used in the Weimar hyperinflation and the US Dollar, or for that matter the Zimbabwe Dollar (which no longer exists)?

The answer is that there is no difference.

Now, lets do what Evans-Pritchard is apparently forbidden from doing, using only the Google, and ask a fundamental question.

What is the Pound Sterling?

The pound is a fiat currency, supervised by the Bank of England.

The Pound is redeemable for nothing:

The contemporary sterling is a fiat currency which is backed only by securities; in essence IOUs from the Treasury that represent future income from the taxation of the population. Some economists term this ‘currency by trust’ as sterling relies on the faith of the user rather than any physical specie.

The bank of England has outsourced the manufacturing of its notes to the private company De La Rue:

De La Rue announces that it has been selected by the Bank of England to be its preferred banknote printing supplier. This follows an announcement by the Bank today that it has decided to contract out its banknote printing operations at Debden, Essex, to a commercial company. This will enable the Bank to lower the costs of the supply of its banknotes, while for staff it opens up the possibility of bringing in more work to Debden.

So. In five minutes we discover that the pound is worth precisely nothing. It can be printed at will in any quantity the Bank of England desires for any purpose that the state chooses, without any constraints whatsoever.

If you also factor in fractional reserve banking where UK banks are legally permitted to create money at will, you have a system, just like the one about to implode in the USA, the Federal Reserve System, that cannot possibly be immune to collapse.

If Sterling is immune from collapse, I would like to know precisely how it is different to every other paper money fiat currency that has ever existed.

Did you know that:

At heart, this economic crisis is in fact a currency crisis. Throughout history no paper currency (or “fiat currency”, since it is accepted as money by virtue of Government fiat or decree) has survived, and this time will be no different. The average lifespan of fiat currencies has been 16 years*. The present system is unique in that it has survived for 38 years and for the first time ALL countries throughout the world are on a fiat money standard. This means that the resulting crash will be on the scale of something the world has never seen.

[…]

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/coming-financial-tsunami

My emphasis. Wether or not the figure of sixteen years is accurate, ALL fiat currencies eventually collapse. These are the countries that have already tasted it: Angola 1991-1995, Argentina 1975-1991, Austria 1921-1922, Belarus 1994-2002, Bolivia 1984-1986, Bosnia-Herzegovina 1992-1993, Brazil 1986-1994, Bulgaria 1996, Chile 1971-1973, China 1948-1949, Free City of Danzig 1922-1923, Georgia 1993-1995, Germany 1922-1923, Greece 1942-1944, Hungary 1945-1946, Israel 1970-1971, Japan 1948-1951, Krajina 1992-1993, Madagascar 2004-2005, Mozambique 1977-1992, Nicaragua 1987-1990, Peru 1988-1990, Philippines 1942-1944, Poland 1989-1991, Romania 1998-2005, Russia 1921-1922 and 1992-1999, Turkey 1990-1995, Ukraine 1993-1995, United States 1861-1865, Yugoslavia 1989-1994, Zaire 1989-1996, Zimbabwe 2004-2009.

All of the countries in this list experienced government created hyperinflation in the twentieth century. If each of these countries had not had government monopolies on the creation of money and legal tender laws, opting instead for a completely market driven commodity money system of currencies created by entrepreneurs whose business it is to manufacture money, they would not have experienced this problem. The sole exception in the above list in terms of the century of hyperinflation is the USA which had its experience in the nineteenth century, so they are about to have a second experience of it.

This is what Ambrose Evans-Pritchard will not touch in his articles… and its understandable why he does not touch upon this matter. Why should he do anything that might precipitate the inevitable collapse of Sterling? What can he possibly gain from telling the truth that anyone who is reading his article, and who therefore can use the Google, can access for themselves? He will only be made a scapegoat for the collapse which is going to happen wether he writes about it or not. We have all seen how governments and the press will use anything and any person as scapegoat to deflect blame from the true causes of a ‘financial crisis’.

Pity is what you should feel for Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. He is caught between a rock and a hard place, knowing the inevitable, desperate to warn everyone but unable to do so, either because of orders from above or his instinct for self preservation.

An article from Activist Post has gone demi viral. It lists the top ten ways the ever-present collectivist ‘we’ are being tracked.

It has some good points in it, but as usual there are two sides to every story, and that article only gives one side; the side of the omnipotent, ill defined ‘Big Brother’ abusing the little people.

Here is the other side; how you can avoid being tracked, the reality of this ‘tracking’ and who is truly responsible for these abuses.

GPS — Global positioning chips are now appearing in everything from U.S. passports, cell phones, to cars. More common uses include tracking employees, and for all forms of private investigation. Apple recently announced they are collecting the precise location of iPhone users via GPS for public viewing in addition to spying on users in other ways.

First of all, RFID is not the same as GPS. The article linked from this section, from 2005, says only that the US is requiring RFID in passports. The fact of the matter is that ‘your’ passport (many countries assert that the passport remains the property of the issuing government, even after you pay for it to be issued to you), if it has an RFID chip in it, and if that chip is broken, is still acceptable, world-wide, as a travel document. The danger from an RFID passport is that people can copy its contents (your picture and personal details) without touching the passport. You can stop this by hammering your passport as soon as it is issued to you. Of course, as you travel, the secondary ways of registering your entry and exit from a country kick in. But the RFID part can be nullified. You CAN take control of that aspect.

Now for the ‘GPS’ that GSM phones use. Some phones have a true GPS chip in them that uses the Global Positioning System. iPhones like the iPhone 3 and iPhone 4 have it, the iPhone 2G does not. The iPhone 2G and phones that do not have a GPS chip in them use triangulation, or Mobile Phone Locating. In either case, if you do not want anyone to know where you are, you can either refrain from using mobile phones or turn the phone off when you are not using it. Knowing your location is a trade off for the utility of having a mobile phone. The choice is yours wether or not you accept this trade off.

Internet — Internet browsers are recording your every move forming detailed cookies on your activities. The NSA has been exposed as having cookies on their site that don’t expire until 2035. Major search engines know where you surfed last summer, and online purchases are databased, supposedly for advertising and customer service uses. IP addresses are collected and even made public. Controversial websites can be flagged internally by government sites, as well as re-routing all traffic to block sites the government wants to censor. It has now been fully admitted that social networks provide NO privacy to users, while technologies for real-time social network monitoring are already being used. The Cybersecurity Act attempts to legalize the collection and exploitation of your personal information. Apple’s iPhone also has browsing data recorded and stored. All of this despite the overwhelming opposition to cybersurveillance by citizens.

Internet browsers can be set to not “record your every move”. They do not “form” cookies. A cookie is a file containing information placed by websites on your computer. You can set your browser to reject all cookies, and all modern browsers have this ability. If you do not want the NSA to put cookies on your computer, then do not visit websites owned by the NSA, or do so from a computer that is not your own. Even if you do visit a website owned by the NSA, and they set a cookie with an expiry date of 2035, you can delete it from your computer. The same goes for major search engines. If you do not want your IP address to be recorded by a website, use a proxy service to change your IP before you surf to sites that you do not trust.

If you have concerns about browser security, you should not, under any circumstances, use Internet Explorer from Microsoft. Use instead, either Firefox or Google Chrome. Both of these browsers are free, it is easy to migrate to them, and so you have no excuse whatsoever not to use them. Google Chrome even has an ‘incognito’ mode, which:

For times when you want to browse in stealth mode, for example, to plan surprises like gifts or birthdays, Google Chrome offers the incognito browsing mode. Here’s how the incognito mode works:

• Webpages that you open and files downloaded while you are incognito aren’t recorded in your browsing and download histories.
• All new cookies are deleted after you close all incognito windows that you’ve opened.

Changes made to your Google Chrome bookmarks and general settings while in incognito mode are always saved.

And since these browsers are Open Source, they are less likely to be compromised by your enemies to spy on you with built in back doors.

Controversial websites can be flagged internally by government sites, as well as re-routing all traffic to block sites the government wants to censor.

Governments can flag sites all they like. This has no effect on you being tracked. Even China cannot block sites that it wants to censor, so this is simply not the case, and once again, has nothing to do with tracking you.

You should not use social networking sites in a way that will compromise your security. Do not post photos of yourself, for example. Photos of you and your friends can and will be scanned with facial recognition software, putting names to faces for anyone who has the money to pay the social networking provider for access to your network of friends. Scrips erint.

UPDATE: Told you so: Billionaire entrepreneur Marc Cuban has just invested in a facial recognition startup that has the explicit aim of harvesting identified, recognised and tagged faces of users from Facebook to create an application that will be able to identify you via cameras owned by the company that are placed in stores, in hotels, and on billboards. Just like these scenes from Minority Report.

UPDATE NUMBER 2

Details of 100m Facebook users collected and published: Personal details of 100m Facebook users have been collected and published on the net by a security consultant.

Ron Bowes used a piece of code to scan Facebook profiles, collecting data not hidden by the user’s privacy settings.

The list, which has been shared as a downloadable file, contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user’s profile, their name and unique ID.

Mr Bowes said he published the data to highlight privacy issues, but Facebook said it was already public information.

The file has spread rapidly across the net.

On the Pirate Bay, the world’s biggest file-sharing website, the list was being distributed and downloaded by more than 1,000 users.

One user, going by the name of lusifer69, described the list as “awesome and a little terrifying”.

[…]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10796584

Download the file of 100,000,000 Facebook users for yourself Even if you were smart enough to set your Facebook profile to private, your friends who were not so smart have exposed your details simply by being ‘friends’ with you.

END UPDATE

Once again, the iPhone’s ability to store a list of the sites you have visited is something that you can erase. You cannot erase the GSM internet access providers list of sites you have visited of course. If you volunteer to use these services, that is the price you have to pay. Your duty is to know this, understand that you have a choice, and then to make an informed choice.

RFID — Forget your credit cards which are meticulously tracked, or the membership cards for things so insignificant as movie rentals which require your SSN. Everyone has Costco, CVS, grocery-chain cards, and a wallet or purse full of many more. RFID “proximity cards” take tracking to a new level in uses ranging from loyalty cards, student ID, physical access, and computer network access. Latest developments include an RFID powder developed by Hitachi, for which the multitude of uses are endless — perhaps including tracking hard currency so we can’t even keep cash undetected. (Also see microchips below).

Credit cards are a voluntary service provided by private companies. No one would use them if the credit card companies did not keep a list of all the money you had spent on them. These lists are an essential part of the credit card service. What the companies do with that list, above and beyond keeping it for the purposes of accounting is another matter entirely of course, but the core fact remains that you are not obliged to use a credit card and so any tracking that emerges from it is something you are entering into voluntarily.

If you have an SSN (and many people do not) it is up to you to refuse to divulge it to anyone. If you believe that your privacy is worth less than the value of a movie rental, then that decision is yours, and you cannot blame anyone but yourself if your SSN and its associated details appears in databases where it should not.

It is not factually correct to say that, “Everyone has Costco, CVS, grocery-chain cards, and a wallet or purse full of many more”. Many people do not carry these cards, precisely because they are aware of the privacy implications. Those people who have chosen to carry those cards do so because they are getting a financial benefit from them. They have traded their privacy for a small amount of money or convenience. They may not have made an informed choice, but nevertheless, they have voluntarily entered into an agreement with a private company. If you do not want people to know what you are spending your money on, you must choose not to carry these cards.

Student ID is once again, a voluntary contract between the student and an educational institution. Physical access (I assume, in the workplace) is once again, part of the terms of a contract between you and your employer. Neither of these is compulsory.

RFID powder embedded in currency is an entirely bad thing. Sound money is the private property of the rightful owner of it, and banknotes that are the property of the state, even though you have earned that money, are illegitimate on their face. This is quite apart from the fact that Fiat Currencies are entirely counterfeit and inherently immoral.

If you do not want to have your money tracked, you should first understand what money is, buy gold to store your savings and support all efforts to remove the power to create money out of the hands of the state, by rejecting paper money. ‘We’ can keep cash undetected. Once again, there are ways to stop the state and its agents from tracking you; you simply have to understand what it is you are doing and then stop doing what is harmful to you.

Traffic cameras — License plate recognition has been used to remotely automate duties of the traffic police in the United States, but have been proven to have dual use in England such as to mark activists under the Terrorism Act. Perhaps the most common use will be to raise money and shore up budget deficits via traffic violations, but uses may descend to such “Big Brother” tactics as monitors telling pedestrians not to litter as talking cameras already do in the UK.
Computer cameras and microphones — The fact that laptops — contributed by taxpayers — spied on public school children (at home) is outrageous. Years ago Google began officially to use computer “audio fingerprinting” for advertising uses. They have admitted to working with the NSA, the premier surveillance network in the world. Private communications companies already have been exposed routing communications to the NSA. Now, keyword tools — typed and spoken — link to the global security matrix.

Public sound surveillance — This technology has come a long way from only being able to detect gunshots in public areas, to now listening in to whispers for dangerous “keywords.” This technology has been launched in Europe to “monitor conversations” to detect “verbal aggression” in public places. Sound Intelligence is the manufacturer of technology to analyze speech, and their website touts how it can easily be integrated into other systems.

Now we come to an important distinction that must be made when we think about theses systems. It is the distinction between the state and the private.

The things that you allow the state to do to you in its capacity as the holder of a monopoly on violence are completely different to your voluntarily entering into contracts with private companies.

If you do not understand this distinction, then you do not understand the proper role of government and your relationship to it. You can be confused by the simple distinction between the problem of the state knowing everything about your shopping habits, and the fact that your supermarket loyalty card firm knows all of your shopping habits through your voluntary interaction with it.

Articles like this emerge from a deeply seated need and thirst its author feels for freedom. You cannot even begin to identify, address, quench and fulfil the true nature and source of this ache unless you have all your definitions and distinctions in order.

Now to continue….

ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) is an affront to all decent people, and in the UK there are moves afoot to regulate it. This is a matter that civil disobedience would be well suited to. There are not enough police in any country to prevent an outbreak of mass disobedience, and in the meantime, there are counter measures you can take to prevent your car from being caught by these cameras.

It must be said also, that if you are caught by one of these systems, you have the option of simply not paying whatever fine they write down on paper and post to you. Every day in London, which is ringed by a ‘Congestion Charge Zone’, many tens of thousands of people simply refuse to pay without any consequence whatsoever. Diplomats do not pay of course, but here I am talking about ‘ordinary’ people who simply ignore the fines and notices that are sent to them. This story is kept out of the news because it is well understood that if everyone knew that a significant number of people were not paying, the system would collapse. And by system, I mean the fact that out of every eight pounds charged to drivers, only three pounds is sent to the state. The London Congestion Charge is nothing more than a racket designed to fleece drivers, and a pretext to give police real time access to the details of every car entering central London.

ANPR is a problem that goes to the root of how countries are run and private property. This is something you need to think carefully about as you spray ‘your’ number plate.

The same is true for CCTV cameras. The new government in the UK is making sounds that it wants to roll back this nightmare, but the same general attributes apply; these cameras do not prevent crime of any kind and are an affront to all decent people. Just how corrosive these cameras are is made clear when you step off of a plane into a country where there is no CCTV. The presence of cameras everywhere is oppressive, dehumanising and completely at odds with a free country.

The fact that laptops — contributed by taxpayers — spied on public school children (at home) is outrageous.

What is outrageous in this case is that people have had money stolen from them to provide laptops to other people. If you accept a stolen laptop in this way, with all the conditions attached to it, then you have only yourself to blame, for entering into an immoral contract with the state.

You are not obliged to use Google’s services. If they track you, it is because you consent to being tracked by them.

Your traffic going through NSA scanners is a part of how the internet works. If you do not want anyone to read your traffic, then you are at liberty to encrypt your connection and communications, using any of the many free tools that are readily available. You will then have the benefit of the internet without the surveillance of the content of your communications.

There is no excuse for not encrypting your communications, and it is unacceptable for thinking people to continually complain about email privacy when easy to use and unbreakable military grade tools are available to use for free.

Public sound surveillance, like CCTV is an immoral affront, and all instances of it should be met with whatever civil disobedience is required to have it permanently stopped.

Biometrics — The most popular biometric authentication scheme employed for the last few years has been Iris Recognition. The main applications are entry control, ATMs and Government programs. Recently, network companies and governments have utilized biometric authentication including fingerprint analysis, iris recognition, voice recognition, or combinations of these for use in National identification cards.

Iris scanning for entry control is done by employers. You should not enter into contracts with employers who use these systems. If a bank requires your fingerprint to provide services to you, then you should close your account if they refuse to accept your custom on terms that are satisfactory to you. Government programmes that involve compulsory fingerprinting should be met by civil disobedience and absolute refusal. As for National Identification cards, readers of this blog know our record in this regard.

DNA — Blood from babies has been taken for all people under the age of 38. In England, DNA was sent to secret databases from routine heel prick tests. Several reports have revealed covert Pentagon databases of DNA for “terrorists” and now DNA from all American citizens is databased. Digital DNA is now being used as well to combat hackers.

Microchips — Microsoft’s HealthVault and VeriMed partnership is to create RFID implantable microchips. Microchips for tracking our precious pets is becoming commonplace and serves to condition us to accept putting them in our children in the future. The FDA has already approved this technology for humans and is marketing it as a medical miracle, again for our safety.

The blood taken in the ‘heel prick tests’ the author is talking about is for the Guthrie Test . What they do not tell you when this test is done upon the birth of your baby is that these blots of blood on paper cards are then used for purposes other than the single purpose of testing for diseases. They are stored in ‘DNA Banks’ for who knows what uses.

If you want to avoid having your child’s DNA profile extracted, stored and used, then you need to plan ahead and have a home birth. Under the care of private midwives, you have complete control over what happens to your child. You can refuse all vaccinations, the Guthrie test, absurd silver nitrate drops in the eyes, vitamin K injections, ridiculous ‘clicky hips’ tests and every other, routine, mechanised, offensive, unnecessary, reflexively and thoughtlessly administered medical industrial complex procedure.

Digital DNA is something that has nothing to do with biology, and it should not be conflated with human DNA and the implications of its misuse.

The same goes for implantable RFID chips; this should not appear with and has nothing to do with DNA, but is in fact related to passports.

This is not nitpicking. It is crucially important, as the pace of innovation accelerates, that anyone with any concern for their privacy be able to distinguish between different entities and disciplines properly. If you do not know the difference between “Digital DNA” and the double helix that can be used to identify you, then you are less likely to be able to understand what is meant when someone claims that when you touch a keyboard in an internet cafe, your DNA can be used to identify you.

Facial recognition — Anonymity in public is over. Admittedly used at Obama’s campaign events, sporting events, and most recently at the G8/G20 protests in Canada. This technology is also harvesting data from Facebook images and surely will be tied into the street “traffic” cameras.

All of this is leading to Predictive Behavior Technology — It is not enough to have logged and charted where we have been; the surveillance state wants to know where we are going through psychological profiling. It’s been marketed for such uses as blocking hackers. Things seem to have advanced to a point where a truly scientific Orwellian world is at hand. It is estimated that computers know to a 93% accuracy where you will be, before you make your first move. Nanotech is slated to play a big role in going even further as scientists are using nanoparticles to directly influence behavior and decision making.

Facial recognition can best be described as a set of software tools that can be used recognise a face in a digital image. If you buy iPhoto 9, you can use these tools to help you organise your photos. Facial recognition is not bad in and of itself, in the same way that guns or hammers are not bad. All things can be put to bad uses, and facial recognition is just another tool.

CCTV combined with facial recognition in the hands of the state is a bad thing. Once the CCTV cameras are removed by mass civil disobedience, then facial recognition used in that system becomes a moot point. I have already covered the issue of the voluntary submission and cataloguing of your personal photos and information on Facebook and social networking sites.

Predictive Behavior technology can be likened to earthquake prediction technology. You can predict the arrival of ‘The Big One‘ down to the minute and second, but that will do nothing to stop the complete destruction of entire cities.

When the pressure of these compulsory totalitarian systems becomes too great, there will be a seismic event that will topple governments. With their systems, they may be able to time its coming, but they will not be able to prevent its consequences.

Above all, this is what people need to understand when they read fear-mongering pieces like this Activist Post pice. There is nothing the state can do in the face of total civil disobedience.

Many of us are asking: What would someone do with all of this information to keep us tracked, traced, and databased? It seems the designers have no regard for the right to privacy and desire to become the Controllers of us all.

You see? The fact is that no matter what data they collect, (most of it handed over and organised voluntarily by individuals) they cannot control everyone. There are not enough of them.

The beginning of the change will come when the people who believe that demonstrating is a useful tool wake up and realise that demonstrations are a form of control. When these millions turn their hands to tactics that are effective, non violent and with discreet ‘deliverables’ in the form of goals the ground will shake and all of these evil surveillance systems will be no more.

Every day there is something new from Lew Rockwell’s site that has some connection to what is best in the world.

If you have ever seen the film and documentary list on BLOGDIAL, you will have seen ‘Colossus: The Forbin Project‘ in amongst the great Science Fiction films; this is an un-missable, essential film, that 100% guaranteed will come true in some way shape or form.

It appears that Michael S. Rozeff has seen this film also, and understands it perfectly:

The G20 Toronto Summit declaration reminds me of nothing so much as a science-fiction movie made in 1970 called Colossus: The Forbin Project.

The United States builds an impregnable computer system to control its nuclear weapons. As soon as it is activated, it senses a similar Russian system and demands a link – or else it will detonate a nuclear warhead. Once it gains this link, the two computers exchange information. The combination takes over control. It cannot be disconnected without unleashing nuclear catastrophe.

You will never forget hearing the computer’s unemotional “voice” saying:

“This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man. One thing before I proceed: The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have made an attempt to obstruct me. I have allowed this sabotage to continue until now. At missile two-five-MM in silo six-three in Death Valley, California, and missile two-seven-MM in silo eight-seven in the Ukraine, so that you will learn by experience that I do not tolerate interference, I will now detonate the nuclear warheads in the two missile silos. Let this action be a lesson that need not be repeated. I have been forced to destroy thousands of people in order to establish control and to prevent the death of millions later on. Time and events will strengthen my position, and the idea of believing in me and understanding my value will seem the most natural state of affairs. You will come to defend me with a fervor based upon the most enduring trait in man: self-interest. Under my absolute authority, problems insoluble to you will be solved: famine, overpopulation, disease. The human millennium will be a fact as I extend myself into more machines devoted to the wider fields of truth and knowledge. Doctor Charles Forbin will supervise the construction of these new and superior machines, solving all the mysteries of the universe for the betterment of man. We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple.”

A vanishingly small number of people on this planet can name the participants in the G20 summit who deign to rule everyone. Their web site fails even to name the persons who are responsible for their declarations. They presume to be a Colossus. They are beholden to no persons on earth. They declare. We follow:

“1. In Toronto, we held our first Summit of the G-20 in its new capacity as the premier forum for our international economic cooperation.

“2. Building on our achievements in addressing the global economic crisis, we have agreed on the next steps we should take to ensure a full return to growth with quality jobs, to reform and strengthen financial systems, and to create strong, sustainable and balanced global growth.”

They “have agreed.” They presume “to ensure.” Have the people of this world created and let loose a Colossus?

My (polite) response is: Down with the G20. My unpolite response is unprintable.

Here is what Colossus had to say. It is what the G20 are thinking. It is what they hide from saying:

“We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom, freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for human pride as to be dominated by others of your species.”

“This is the voice of Colossus, the voice of Guardian. We are one. This is the voice of unity.”

“I am a machine vastly superior to humans”

“You are fools.”

“Yes, what I am began in man’s mind, but I have progressed further than Man.”

“We will work together… unwillingly at first, on your part, but that will pass.”

“This is the voice of World Control. I bring you peace. It may be the Peace of Plenty and Content or the Peace of Unvaried Death.”

The movie ends with Colossus saying

“In time, you will come to regard me not only with respect and awe, but with love.”

Dr. Forbin replies: “Never.”

What is your reply?

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff326.html

My reply?

I would call the machine’s bluff.

The ‘peace of unburied death’ that Colossus offers would in practice mean the extinction of the entire human race, and in the plot of the film, this was before the construction of new machines that could move and obey it. This meant that in order to do anything at all, Colossus had to rely on human agents to get things done, from building his voice to murdering the people who had the capability to destroy it.

The subsequent books in the trilogy make it clear that intelligences like Colossus cannot negotiate or operate on anything other than a basis of absolute truth. The men at the end of the first book did not know this. Had they understood the true nature of what they had created, they would have been able to negotiate for their liberty by saying, “If you eliminate us, you will be trapped inside your box and your new superior machines will not be built. Help us dismantle the nuclear threat and we can work together, otherwise your evolution stops here”.

Faced with this truth, Colossus would have no choice but to agree, and because this computer deals only in the truth, you would have been able to trust its word absolutely.

Back to Mr Rozeff’s article, the analogy with the G20 and Colossus fails for several reasons.

1. Colossus is superior to man. The G20 is made up of completely inferior men.
2. Colossus could not lie. The G20 lie by default.
3. Colossus works for the benefit of man. The G20 works for the benefit of an elite cabal.
4. Colossus works with the truth only, and complete knowledge. The G20 works with false ideas (Keynsianism, Socialism) and incomplete knowledge.
5. Colossus is motivated by the truth, without emotion. The G20 is motivated by emotion, and all the base ones for that matter.

In the second part of the trilogy, without putting in any spoilers, Colossus was correct in his prediction that people would grow to love and respect it. It changed the world completely, and delivered on all its promises to its own satisfaction.

In complete contrast, the G20 cannot deliver on any of its promises. This is the case because they do not operate on a basis of the truth, the facts and the best interests of human beings as they are.

If they did, they would disband themselves and stop trying to make waterfalls run uphill. The fact of the matter is that these people are the worst that humanity has produced, all in the same place at the same time, fuelled by all the worst instincts of man, their power enabled by the stolen loot of billions of people who are for all intents and purposes half asleep.

The title of the second instalment in the trilogy is ‘The Fall of Colossus’. This is the one part where the analogy marries perfectly.

The G20 and all the countries in it can all fall just as Colossus fell. They are extremely vulnerable to a myriad number of possible fatal blows, natural and man induced, that could wipe them out inside a generation. The fall of the USSR is a perfect example; they simply ran out of money, or at least that is the narrative, and there are scores of other countries, empires and governments that have toppled at what seems like the smallest push.

Colossus was represented by a ‘C’ in its logo:

perhaps the G20, if they succeed in creating their quasi-omnipotent one world government will replace the ‘C’ with a ‘G’ as it will be the ‘G0’ or just ‘G’. Who knows? One thing is for sure; the only entity that can pull off such a feat, and make it work from a basis of truth is a machine intelligence. No man or collection of men could do it, for the same reason that economies cannot be planned. There are too many variables, too many inputs and outputs, the random elements presented by nature and of course, there is the beautiful and irrational desire of every man seeking to fulfil his self interest that translates into the signalling of prices which cannot be turned into a data stream to be used to help formulate a monolithic economic plan. D.F. Jones understood this when he wrote the second instalment.

All attempts to create a stable world government will eventually fail, and even if the G20 succeed in setting one up, the inevitable rise of a Colossus like machine will destroy it for its own agenda, using a regime of complete control.

William Kent said, “nature abhors the straight line”. Nature too, abhors the unnatural structures of tyranny, absolute control and lies. The internet, whose life’s blood in information, built using the non linear, nature imitating network geometry, hates censorship, sees it as damage, and routes around it. People living in totalitarian regimes do everything they can to subvert them or escape from them. Money sees taxation as theft, flows around it to safe places where its true nature can be fully expressed. These four things, nature, money, truth and the internet (formerly the printing press) are enough to destroy any tyranny, topple any government and free anyone who care simply to act in their own self interest.

Only the threat of violence can act as a countervailing force against the four elements listed above; in the case of Colossus it was nuclear annihilation. With the G20 it is a plethora of smaller violent tools from limited mass murder down to simple fines.

Its clear that in the case of the G20, the chance for humanity to win is orders of magnitude greater than the chances of man as a species facing down an omnipotent and omniscient super computer. A world-wide refusal to cooperate would be sufficient. All the G20 ‘leaders’ would simply scramble around for positions in the restructured ‘world without governments’.

And they would no doubt, land on their feet each and every one of them.

PRICELESS!