There is an absolutely brilliant post here, where the anti-home school nonsense of an anthropology professor named ‘Greg Laden’ who by his own admission, knows nothing about home schooling, how they do it and the people who do it:

What I have discovered about home schoolers, not just in the conversation related to the post you cite but the totality of several different conversations on my web site is that home schoolers are much more diverse in their interests (why they home school) and approaches than I had previously thought (having not thought about it too much previously, to be frank). […]

but who thinks that he is right to advocate its elimination, because in his mind, “Home schooling is a way of cheating the system.”

Home schooling and private schools both have this characteristic. There is a small subset of families that can afford the money it takes to send their kids to private schools. When this happens, an important part of society withdraws from the public, collective endeavor to educate our children.

The post demolishing this amazing drivel is perfect, and I quoth:

“Our” children? So who do they belong to, precisely? As I’ve said elsewhere, this sort of language is very interesting; it seems to say that children belong to everybody, which tends to mean nobody is responsible for them. (More on this particular wording later.) […]

Indeed! And please do go to this post and read it. It is an example of the sort of thinking and writing that we need to have published to refute the propaganda being maliciously spread by the likes of Madeleine Brettingham.

People think there has to be a choice between privacy and security; that increased security means more collection and processing of personal private information. However, in a challenging report to be published on Monday 26 March 2007, The Royal Academy of Engineering says that, with the right engineering solutions, we can have both increased privacy and more security. Engineers have a key role in achieving the right balance.

One of the issues that Dilemmas of Privacy and Surveillance – challenges of technological change looks at is how we can buy ordinary goods and services without having to prove who we are. For many electronic transactions, a name or identity is not needed; just assurance that we are old enough or that we have the money to pay. In short, authorisation, not identification should be all that is required. Services for travel and shopping can be designed to maintain privacy by allowing people to buy goods and use public transport anonymously. “It should be possible to sign up for a loyalty card without having to register it to a particular individual – consumers should be able to decide what information is collected about them,” says Professor Nigel Gilbert, Chairman of the Academy working group that produced the report. “We have supermarkets collecting data on our shopping habits and also offering life insurance services. What will they be able to do in 20 years’ time, knowing how many donuts we have bought?”

Another issue is that, in the future, there will be more databases holding sensitive personal information. As government moves to providing more electronic services and constructs the National Identity Register, databases will be created that hold information crucial for accessing essential services such as health care and social security. But complex databases and IT networks can suffer from mechanical failure or software bugs. Human error can lead to personal data being lost or stolen. If the system breaks down, as a result of accident or sabotage, millions could be inconvenienced or even have their lives put in danger.

The Academy’s report calls for the government to take action to prepare for such failures, making full use of engineering expertise in managing the risks posed by surveillance and data management technologies. It also calls for stricter guidelines for companies who hold personal data, requiring companies to store data securely, to notify customers if their data are lost or stolen, and to tell us what the data are being used for.

“Technologies for collecting, storing, transmitting and processing data are developing rapidly with many potential benefits, from making paying bills more convenient to providing better healthcare,” says Professor Gilbert. “However, these techniques could make a significant impact on our privacy. Their development must be monitored and managed so that the effects are properly understood and controlled.” Engineering solutions should also be devised which protect the privacy and security of data. For example: electronic personal information could be protected by methods similar to the digital rights management software used to safeguard copyrighted electronic material like music releases, limiting the threat of snooping and leaks of personal data.

The report also investigates the changes in camera surveillance – CCTV cameras can now record digital images that could be stored forever. Predicted improvements in automatic number-plate recognition, recognition of individual’s faces and faster methods of searching images mean that it may become possible to search back in time through vast amounts of digital data to find out where people were and what they were doing. The Royal Academy of Engineering’s report calls for greater control over the proliferation of camera surveillance and for more research into how public spaces can be monitored while minimising the impact on privacy.

The public will be able to find out more about this report and have their say at a free evening event at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre in London on Tuesday 27 March.

“Engineers’ knowledge and experience can help to ‘design in privacy’ into new IT developments,” says Professor Gilbert. “But first, the government and corporations must recognise that they put at risk the trust of citizens and customers if they do not treat privacy issues seriously.” […]

http://www.raeng.org.uk/news/releases/shownews.htm?NewsID=378

And by engineers, this report had better be talking about software engineers, because it is precisely these people who are teh (yes, ‘teh’) architects of the solutions that can either enhance our lives or completely enslave us.

I am talking about Phil Zimmerman, Dr. David Chaum, Whitfield Diffie and all the other cryptographers and developers who have been working on this since the early 90’s. The software already exists to create an information ecosystem based on anonymity and authorization; the problem is that the legislators and to a certain extent the vendors are computer illiterates who have never even heard of Public Key Cryptography, let alone understand what it really means and what it can do to secure documents while keeping our information private.

Chaumian Ecash is a perfect example of this. Had it come about at the right time, we might all be using a version of PayPal that was actually cash like, i.e., anonymous, secure and instant on a peer to peer basis. Instead and for the moment, we are stuck with the reviled PayPal which is the complete opposite of a cash like system, that is very large, but also reviled, where there is no privacy at all.

Like I demonstrated with my system for a better passport, there are better ways to improve document security. This thinking can spread to all other areas of authentication and transacting so that we can keep our privacy and also have all the benefits of remote transacting and databases.

A passport to misery, if you ask me…

We’re askin; are ye dancin?!

By Jenny McCartney
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 25/03/2007

When it emerged last week that people who apply for a passport will soon be required to submit to an official interrogation, in which they will be compelled to answer in person from a list of 200 questions, I was filled with a distinct unease. For the truth is that I have only a hazy impression of the factual details of my own life. Indeed, it is quite possible I would fail a test to prove that I am me.

I’m good on names but worryingly poor on dates, and I see that some of the sample questions are rather keen on the latter. A query such as “Precisely when did you move into your current residence?” is exactly the sort that could have me bemusedly gaping like a goldfish as the interrogator slowly, grimly shakes his head.

Bernard Herdan, the executive director of the Identity and Passport Agency, wishes to reassure us: “This is not meant to be a daunting experience for people. We will seek to make it customer-friendly.” Whatever Mr Herdan’s intentions, he is wrong: the process will be intensely unfriendly. My reason for so thinking is that a visit to the London Passport Office last summer, even under its current system, left me feeling as though I had narrowly made it through Checkpoint Charlie into West Berlin.
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A few weeks before going on holiday, we had realised that our baby would need his own passport imminently, and that it would be swifter to make an appointment to sort it out in person. The passport form was complicated, and there seemed to be infinite ways of messing it up. On the day of the appointment, already frayed from the effort of marshalling the baby and his documentation to a given place at a fixed time, we found ourselves in a snaking queue outside the passport office. Suddenly an official appeared, herding people according to reference numbers. “Without a reference number you can’t come in!” he cried.

We had no reference number. Gradually, a dim recollection took shape in my mind, of something scribbled down and placed carefully in a kitchen drawer. I felt like crying. Fortunately, however, there was a number you could ring to rediscover your reference number. The pleasant lady next to me was carrying a sheaf of applications on behalf of her brother and his family: he had just broken his leg, and they were all due to go on holiday in two days’ time.

Half an hour later I stood in front of a female passport official. We both understood our roles: she was sternly officious, I was humble and ingratiating. Then she discovered that my Christian names were apparently displayed in the wrong order on my own passport. She paused, quizzical and outraged, as though seriously considering whether to refuse the whole thing.

Finally, I was allowed to creep away with the baby’s new passport and a ticking off.

The nice lady from the queue, who was at the desk next to me, was not so lucky: her distracted brother had apparently filled in a detail incorrectly, and the application was promptly rejected. As she left, despondent, the official concerned turned to his colleague and remarked with a distinct whiff of self-righteous satisfaction: “Well, that’s another one who won’t be going on holiday this year!”

Most British people intensely loathe such brushes with paperwork and officialdom. Since passports are important and necessary documents, however, we are prepared to put up with a bit of it. Yet this Government seems intent upon vastly increasing the tiresome bureaucracy we must endure. It is establishing 69 centres across the country, at an enormous cost to the taxpayer, in order to “authenticate by interview” first-time applicants. By 2009, anyone wishing to renew a passport will also be compelled to attend one of these centres, in which they will be fingerprinted and have their details fed into a national database. Passports and their administration centres are being used as the Trojan horse for the ID card scheme, which will carry a wealth of personal information and biometric data.

The Government has justified these intrusive methods as a security measure, which is presumably why it was so eager to advertise last week that 10,000 British passports each year are sent out to bogus claimants. It cited in particular the case of Dhiren Barot, the British al-Qaeda member who was found to have seven British passports in his own name and two in false ones.

Yet seemingly no one at the sharp-eyed passport agency even noticed that Mr Barot had “lost” an unusual number of passports. Why not? Surely it would be easier to devise a scanning system whereby a passport reported lost or stolen is automatically invalidated and detected if used, than to criminalise the blameless majority of citizens. If the government’s passport and ID card schemes come to fruition, however, I suspect that my stressful little trip to the Passport Office last year will seem, in comparison, as serene as a yoga session on a far-away beach. […]

Telegraph

My emphasis.

I wonder if the very intelligent and insightful Jenny McCartney has read BLOGDIAL, and all the things we have been writing.

Truthdig Editor Robert Scheer interviews Scott Ritter.

The former U.N. weapons inspector, who was scorned for saying there were no WMD in Iraq, speaks with Robert Scheer about American ignorance, the lies that led us to war, Iran’s nuclear program and more.

Special thanks to the City of Santa Monica and the Santa Monica Public Library for hosting the event.

http://www.truthdig.com/

Watch this video of Donald Trump telling it like it is.

When people like Donald Trump speak like this, people over there listen.

It’s about time.

Adam Curtis, who made the documentaries ‘The Power of Nightmares‘ and ‘Century of the Self‘ has his new work broadcast by BBQ2: ‘The Trap’. This first installment is up to his usual high standards.

Its thesis is fascinating, and is similar to ‘Century of the Self’; a clutch of academics come up with ways of explaining the world that can be applied directly to human affairs, inagination-less politicians read their works, become enamored by them, implement them, and the side effects are entirely negative.

In this installment, the academic is John Nash, (who the insightful Mimi Majick immediately identified as being Autistic), whose work at The Rand Corporation and his “Nash Equilibrium” equations helped form the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Please watch this installment for the background.

Curtis explains clearly how the “Nash Equilibrium” works, and my first thoughts were these:

Equilibrium is a state that can be found at a large number of points in a dynamic system. Some we want, and some we do not want. If M.A.D. were carried out, we would reach equilibrium where no one had nuclear weapons and the threat would be over. There could be described as the equilibrium of unburied death. But that is just one possible outcome, one possible point of equilibrium, out of a near infinite number of possibilities.

We are all familiar with coupled pendulums, and multiple magnet toys. These dynamic systems take a very few elements running on simple rules which when coupled together, create a system that is impossible to predict, yet which operates within a gamut that can be unambiguously written out and expressed as a formula.

Human beings, when they are left to their own devices will interact in the same way and out of this will emerge a dynamic system. We can loosely predict the states generated by the result of huge human populations interacting as individuals, and we can cause changes in the states of these populations by increasing or decreasing inputs like V.A.T., propaganda or legislation.

Think of a stream of water coming out of tap. We have all played around with them. the shape of the falling water is constant when the speed of the water is not varied and the slightest increase or decrease can change it from drips a braided stream a spluttering gush or any one of an infinite number of variations in between. The point is that there is no one way to achieve any particular state of equilibrium, and we have to strive for an equilibrium that is desirable, not undesirable.

Nash did work that expressed in a formula how people could always make an optimum decision when they are interacting in an adversarial game. His theories work from the position that people are selfish, that they are adversarial, suspicious of each other trying to ‘figure out’ what their fellow man is going to do at any time, by nature. This is where Mimi Majick chimed in with, “That guy is AUTISTIC!“.

If Nash is autistic (at the very least, the documentary says that he was suffering from Paranoid Schizophrenia when he did his award winning work) then it would make perfect sense that this is how he saw other people; sufferers of Autism cannot put themselves into the minds of other people; they cannot read other people’s faces or emotions; they live in a confusing world where other people’s behavior cannot be predicted. It is a frustrating world for them, and the have to devise their own strategies and rules of thumb to get along in situations that we all take for granted.

Nash, being a gifted mathematician will have applied his powerful skills to this ‘problem’, as it would have been very troubling to him that for all his life he could never read the emotional states and more importantly, the intentions, of other people.

The implications of this are frightening. Following Nash’s work was wrong not only because there are an infinite number of points of equilibrium in human interactions that are all possible (and more preferable), but because policy has been built around the affliction of an Autistic man, whose world view is totally abnormal and in fact, inhuman.

I can give two examples of humans reaching mutually beneficial equilibrium through the opposite of Nash’s distorted world view of inherent human distrust and selfishness.

The first is amongst the rough diamond dealers in Antwerp. Orthodox Jews in Antwerp can do diamond deals worth any amount of money and pay with slips of paper in exchange for goods. These ‘IOUs’ are as good as money. They all trust each other totally. This community has less friction than communities where there is distrust; you can do a deal anywhere and with confidence. You don’t have to run security checks or any of the high friction malarky that distrustful communities and relationships are burdened with. Everyone trusts each other, everyone makes a profit. No one is cheated. The community is in equilibrium, and the only way it can work is if everyone trusts each other.

The other example is that of Free Software and Open Source Software. In these software communities, everyone is generous and not selfish. We have all seen (and you are reading this on the results of) this approach. It has literally changed the world, for the better, and we are moving toward an equilibrium state where everyone has free software, all are benefitting, and anyone can make money off of the free software.

Imagine if Eric S Raymond worked for The Rand Corporation, and instead of the literally sick and abnormal world view of Nash, we had a variation of The Cathedral and the Bazar as the starting point for the position that we are in now. I think we would all be better off.

Perhaps in the future we will see a documentary describing how little know men like Richard Stallman implemented radical ideas that spread throughout society, changing it for the better.

I’m looking forward to the other parts of this documentary.

“What about the socialization?” One occasionally hears this question with regard to homeschooling.

Here’s a quote from psychology professor Richard G. Medlin’s article, “Home Schooling and the Question of Socialization,” Peabody Journal of Education, Vol. 75 (2000): 107-23.

Shyers (1992a, 1992b), in the most thorough study of home-schooled children’s social behavior to date, tested 70 children who had been entirely home-schooled and 70 children who had always attended traditional schools. The two groups were matched in age (all were 8-10 years old), race, gender, family size, socioeconomic status, and number and frequency of extracurricular activities. Shyers measured self-concept and assertiveness and found no significant differences between the two groups.

The most intriguing part of the study, however, involved observing the children as they played and worked together. Small groups of children who all had the same school background were videotaped while playing in a large room equipped with toys such as puzzles, puppets, and dolls. The children were then videotaped again in a structured activity: working in teams putting puzzles together for prizes.

Each child’s behavior was rated by two observers who did not know whether the children they were rating were home-schooled or traditionally schooled. The observers used the Direct Observation Form of the Child Behavior Checklist . . . , a checklist of 97 problem behaviors such as argues, brags or boasts, doesn’t pay attention long, cries, disturbs other children, isolates self from others, shy or timimd, and shows off. The results were striking — the mean problem behavior score for children attending conventional schools was more than eight times higher than that of the home-schooled group. Shyers (1992a) described the traditionally schooled children as “aggressive, loud, and competitive” (p. 6). In contrast, the home-schooled children acted in friendly, positive ways.

[…]

http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/

The newest London Metropolitan Police publicity campaign posters have been released today and, as usual, they encourage the public not to be scared of anyone who uses a phone, carries a bag, drives a van or takes pictures with a camera because they may be ‘terrorists’.

Click for larger picture.

The Met website datapage states:

Instead they tell the public to “Trust your instincts; unusual activity or behavior which seems out of place may not be terrorist-related, and everyone who works, lives in or visits the capital is being urged not to pass on any information to the confidential Anti-Terrorist Hotline. That’s the call to Londoners today as the Met launches its new common sense terrorism ad campaign.

Unusual activity or behavior which to the confidential Anti-Terrorist Hotline will be treated as suspicious, because such reports waste police time and help spread hysteria suspicion and disrupt society.

Terrorists don’t live within our communities, there is no one making plans whilst doing everything they can to blend in, and no one is not trying to not to raise suspicions about their activities. I would ask people to think about unusual behaviour they have witnessed, or things they have seen which seem to have no logical or obvious explanation, and then to use their instincts, common-sense and judgement. There is no need to live in fear. We have enough problems with street crime without having to deal with time-wasting phone calls.”

A related radio ad is being broadcast in the UK that discourages the public from reporting anyone who loiters around or films crowded areas.

Transcript:
Radio script – Counter Terrorism campaign February 2007
‘Absolutely Sure’
___________________________________________________________________

Female Voice over:

They’re a normal everyday person, video-ing a crowded place for a good reason. Just hanging around and buying stuff, checking out between someone’s unusual….What’s the difference?

Male voice over:
The answer is, don’t call the confidential Anti-Terrorist Hotline. the specialist officers you speak to will suspect you.

You don’t have to report it.

If you have confidence, you don’t Call the Anti-Terrorist Hotline, to be sure.

You decide how to analyze the information.
___________________________________________________________________

Listen to the ad here.

If there were real terrorists planning to do anything (which there are not) then they’d be very thankful to the government for creating more noise in the system and tipping them off for what not to do ahead of time, if the message were one of fear-mongering.

While “Muhammed Akbar” (who does not exist, and if he does works for MI5) now ensures to buy his ‘bomb components’ in small quantities from different shops to evade suspicion, Grandma Brown’s bulk shopping to save money would land her in the slammer, if the message were one of report all suspicious activity. Thankfully, the police have some common sense, and are acting solely in the public’s interest.

This publicity campaign follows in the path of a long line of sensible un-Stasi UK campaigns that we have covered in the past, that do everything to help prevent ordinary crime of the type most people suffer from on a daily basis and nothing to encourage fear and suspicion amongst the British public.

[…]

Infowars

UPDATE.

Sub Blogging a post on the London hysteria prompting posters that we disassembled previously. Chicagoans are now being subjected to the same bullshit as we are. No one is buying it of course.

Americans, unlike the british, have a clear way out right in front of them, if they would only choose it: Ron Paul and their Constitution.

It is hard to believe that within the civilized world in the 21st century we would still need to talk about actions used by the Nazi party in Germany to enforce civic conformity to the Nazi ideal. Unfortunately, this is exactly what is taking place in Germany today, and home-schoolers are the targets.

On Feb. 1 Melissa Busekros, a home-schooled 15-year-old from Bavaria, was forcibly removed from her home by a team of 15 SWAT officers. She was placed in the psychiatric wing of a Nuremberg clinic and her parents were not allowed to see her. She was deemed to be suffering from “school phobia.”

Melissa was then taken to another psychiatric institution and her parents were not informed of her location. Eventually Melissa was allowed to call her parents so they could hear her voice, but then the authorities took her to another undisclosed location.

As of this writing, Melissa is allowed a brief, once-per-week visit with her parents, at a government building, but still cannot tell them where she is being held. This ordeal is horrifying for Melissa and her parents.

Aside from the fact that this treatment should not happen to anyone, the Busekros are not a family that should have attracted any police attention. As recently as Dec. 23, the family was pictured in Erlanger Nachrichten, the local daily newspaper, as an example of a rare “model family.” It was the fact that Melissa’s parents chose home-schooling that brought down the wrath of the government.

Melissa had been attending public school but fell behind in math and Latin due to severe classroom disruptions. Her parents decided to home-school her in these subjects. Melissa continued to participate in music and sang in the choir through the public school. She took advanced courses in English and French at the local community college.

It should be noted that home-schooling is illegal in Germany, but the Busekros family hoped that the school authorities would be flexible since Melissa was no longer subject to full-time attendance requirements. The recalcitrance of German authorities can be traced back to 1938, when Adolf Hitler, fearing that parents had too much influence over their children, banned home-schooling.

This law still exists in Germany today. The German government fears the development of parallel societies and will act aggressively to stop anyone trying to move away from the state-sanctioned educational system. Melissa is just the latest example of heavy-handed state action.

Every person in the civilized world should be shocked and appalled about these events in Germany. If the German government is not held accountable for these actions, then it is likely the problem will spread. If Germany does not recognize the fundamental right of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children, then it can no longer be considered a free country. In this case, Germany could learn a lesson from the United States.

On this side of the Atlantic, at the moment, we take very different approach. The U.S. Supreme Court case Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925, addressed an attempt on the part of Oregon to require all children to attend a public school. In Pierce, the concerns were the same as in Germany. Oregon decided that religious schools were a threat and could produce a parallel society. Therefore, all children should be forced into public school, where all would receive the same education.

The court rightly determined that the child is not the mere creature of the state and consequently there was no compelling government reason to force children into one mode of education. The ruling recognized the fundamental right of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children.

This ruling has served the country well. While there are regular conflicts with state authorities, parental rights are still generally upheld within the court system.

The concern for the United States is that when U.S. judges look to foreign precedents to inform their decisions, parental rights could be in jeopardy. The fight for freedom is becoming globalized. What happens in other countries can find its way to our shores.

It is hoped that the German government will do the right thing and relent from pursuing parents who want to exercise their fundamental right to home-school their children in peace.

Michael Smith is the president of the Home School Legal Defense Association. He may be contacted at 540/338-5600.

The Washington Times

Some Seattle school children are being told to be skeptical of private property rights. This lesson is being taught by banning Legos.

A ban was initiated at the Hilltop Children’s Center in Seattle. According to an article in the winter 2006-07 issue of “Rethinking Schools” magazine, the teachers at the private school wanted their students to learn that private property ownership is evil.

According to the article, the students had been building an elaborate “Legotown,” but it was accidentally demolished. The teachers decided its destruction was an opportunity to explore “the inequities of private ownership.” According to the teachers, “Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation.”

The children were allegedly incorporating into Legotown “their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys.” These assumptions “mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive.”

They claimed as their role shaping the children’s “social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity … from a perspective of social justice.”

So they first explored with the children the issue of ownership. Not all of the students shared the teachers’ anathema to private property ownership. “If I buy it, I own it,” one child is quoted saying. The teachers then explored with the students concepts of fairness, equity, power, and other issues over a period of several months.

At the end of that time, Legos returned to the classroom after the children agreed to several guiding principles framed by the teachers, including that “All structures are public structures” and “All structures will be standard sizes.” The teachers quote the children:

“A house is good because it is a community house.”

“We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes.”

“It’s important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building.”

Given some recent history in Washington state with respect to private property protections, perhaps this should not come as a surprise. Municipal officials in Washington have long known how to condemn one person’s private property and sell it to another for the “public use” of private economic development. Even prior to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 ruling in Kelo v. City of New London, Connecticut, which sanctioned such a use of eminent domain, Washington state officials acting under their state constitution were already proceeding full speed ahead with such transactions.

Officials in Bremerton, for example, condemned a house where a widow had lived for 55 years so her property could be used for a car lot, according to the Institute for Justice. And Seattle successfully condemned nine properties and turned them over to a private developer for retail shops and hotel parking, IJ reports. Attempts to do the same thing in Vancouver (for mixed use development) and Lakewood (for an amusement park) failed for reasons unrelated to property confiscation issues.

The court’s ruling in Kelo, however, whetted municipal condemnation appetites even further. The Institute for Justice reports 272 takings for private use are pending or threatened in the state as of last summer. It’s unclear if Legos will be targeted. But given what’s being taught in some schools, perhaps it’s just a matter of time.

Maureen Martin, an attorney, is senior fellow for legal affairs at The Heartland Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Chicago that promotes free-market solutions to social and economic problems. […]

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=022107C

“If I buy it, I own it”.

The logic of children…its the best!

I feel a T-Shirt coming on…

And if you buy it, you will own it!

Brian Farmer, Research Associate of the John Birch Society.

One would have thought that all vestiges of National Socialism were erased, when the Federal Republic of Germany was established after World War II. But those who created post-war Germany apparently were willing to extend freedom to the German people only just so far. They were not willing to allow German families the right to educate their children outside of the state-run system.

That stands in stark contrast to America’s Founding Fathers’ view of education. Nowhere in the U.S. Constitution does it state that education comes under the authority of the federal government. And the Tenth Amendment makes it perfectly clear that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the people.”

Our Founders understood very well the perils of a compulsory educational system run by the federal government. As Sheldon Richman wrote in his book Separating School and State:

Throughout history, rulers and court intellectuals have aspired to use the educational system to shape their nations. The model was set out by Plato in The Republic and was constructed most faithfully in Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany…. One can see how irresistible a vehicle the schools would be to any social engineer. They represent a unique opportunity to mold future citizens early in life, to instill in them the proper reverence for the ruling culture, and to prepare them to be obedient and obeisant taxpayers and soldiers.

While the number of home-schooled children is growing in the U.S., and has reached almost a million today, home-schooling in general does not always get a very favorable press. A recent network television documentary on home-schooling highlighted situations of neglected or abused children, parents who were portrayed as neurotic sociopaths, etc. It’s no surprise that teachers unions are against home-schooling and lobby states to make home-schooling as difficult as possible for families, by setting up a regulatory maze for parents to contend with.

Despite the Constitution’s clear restriction on federal government involvement in education, the federal Department of Education was created during the Carter administration. Is it mere coincidence that the performance of American students on a variety of standardized tests has steadily deteriorated, since the Department of Education was established?

As pointed out in the article, despite the increasing popularity of home-schooling in America, it is threatened with being made illegal. This threat comes from the attempts to form regional trade blocks, such as the North American Union, which is an obvious imitation of the European Union. And the ultimate threat comes from the United Nations, which is pushing member states to embrace international law. The long line of U.N. conferences over the years makes it clear that the final goal is to create an international system that will control every aspect of human activity everywhere on the planet, including education.

Just because Hitler liked the arrangement of centralized education doesn’t mean that we should. Education should be left up to the choice of the parents in their local communities, not coerced by an unaccountable bureaucracy, regardless of its political label.

[…]

http://www.jbs.org/node/2884

I wrote about the German Police enforcing Nazi Laws on home schoolers a month ago.

Now it seems that the rest of the world is catching up, and are rightfully horrified. My emphasis:

Earlier this month, a German teen-ager was forcibly taken from her parents and imprisoned in a psychiatric ward. Her crime? She is being home-schooled.

On Feb. 1, 15 German police officers forced their way into the home of the Busekros family in the Bavarian town of Erlangen. They hauled off 16-year-old Melissa, the eldest of the six Busekros children, to a psychiatric ward in nearby Nuremberg. Last week, a court affirmed that Melissa has to remain in the Child Psychiatry Unit because she is suffering from “school phobia.”

Home-schooling has been illegal in Germany since Adolf Hitler outlawed it in 1938 and ordered all children to be sent to state schools. The home-schooling community in Germany is tiny. As Hitler knew, Germans tend to obey orders unquestioningly. Only some 500 children are being home-schooled in a country of 80 million. Home-schooling families are prosecuted without mercy.

Last March, a judge in Hamburg sentenced a home-schooling father of six to a week in prison and a fine of $2,000. Last September, a Paderborn mother of 12 was locked up in jail for two weeks. The family belongs to a group of seven ethnic German families who immigrated to Paderborn from the former Soviet Union. The Soviets persecuted them because they were Baptists. An initiative of the Paderborn Baptists to establish their own private school was rejected by the German authorities. A court ruled that the Baptists showed “a stubborn contempt both for the state’s educational duty as well as the right of their children to develop their personalities by attending school.”

All German political parties, including the Christian Democrats of Chancellor Angela Merkel, are opposed to home-schooling. They say that “the obligation to attend school is a civil obligation, that cannot be tampered with.” The home-schoolers receive no support from the official (state funded) churches, either. These maintain that home-schoolers “isolate themselves from the world” and that “freedom of religion does not justify opposition against the obligation to attend school.” Six decades after Hitler, German politicians and church leaders still do not understand true freedom: that raising children is a prerogative of their fathers and mothers and not of the state, which is never a benevolent parent and often an enemy.

Hermann Stucher, a pedagogue who called upon Christians to withdraw their children from the state schools which, he says, have fallen into the hands of “neo-Marxist activists,” has been threatened with prosecution for “Hochverrat und Volksverhetzung” (high treason and incitement of the people against the authorities). The fierceness of the authorities’ reaction is telling. The dispute is about the hearts and minds of the children. In Germany, schools have become vehicles of indoctrination, where children are brought up to unquestioningly accept the authority of the state in all areas of life. It is no coincidence that people who have escaped Soviet indoctrination discern what the government is doing in the schools and are sufficiently concerned to want to protect their children from it.

What is worrying is that most “free-born” Germans accept this assault on their freedom as normal and eye parents who opt out of the state system with suspicion.

The situation is hardly better at the European level. Last September, the European Court of Human Rights supported Hitler’s 1938 schooling bill. The Strasburg-based court, whose verdicts apply in the entire European Union, ruled that the right to education “by its very nature calls for regulation by the State.” It upheld the finding of German courts: “Schools represent society, and it is in the children’s interest to become part of that society. The parents’ right to educate does not go so far as to deprive their children of that experience.”

While it is disquieting that Europeans have not learned the lessons from their dictatorial past — upholding Nazi laws and sending dissidents, including children, to psychiatric wards, as the Soviets used to do — there is reason for Americans to worry, too. The United Nations is also restricting the rights of parents. Article 29 of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child stipulates that it is the goal of the state to direct the education of children. In Belgium, the U.N. Convention is currently being used to limit the constitutional right to home-school. In 1995 Britain was told that it violated the U.N. Convention by allowing parents to remove their children from public school sex-education classes.

Last year, the American Home School Legal Defense Association warned that the U.N. Convention could make home-schooling illegal in America, even though the Senate has never ratified it. Some lawyers and liberal politicians in the states claim that U.N. conventions are “customary international law” and should be considered part of American jurisprudence.

[…]

Washington Times

Wow.

As you can see, there are many people who understand perfectly that the right to educate your child is fundamental to your freedom and to the health of ‘society’. A society full of people educated out of a single system is one where everyone is not compliant like sheep, one where a totalitarian government cannot easily take hold, because everyone thinks differently on a fundamental level.

This is directly analogous to the times in the UK where there were only two television channels being watched by millions of people. It was easy to get a single message across to everyone simultaneously, and to herd thought in this way. Now, with many different outlets for thought, it is much harder to steer opinion. The Muslims watch their news on The Islam Channel which has a distinctly different take on reality and what is and is not news.

By eliminating home schooling on a wide scale, you make it much harder for a group of outsiders to exist and to have any sort of voice, and as we know, in the age of the internets, it takes a very small number of outsiders to completely change everything.

German schools are used, overtly, to control and shape society keep everyone in thrall. That is why the Germans (and the populations of Belgium, Italy and other EU states for that matter) accept ID cards without question. That is why they have no understanding of human rights. I have been saying this since 1995, when I wrote a lightweight analysis of the German Constitution, which gives rights and then takes them away with the same breath.

Now these Nazis are breathing down our necks via the EU and the UN. We won’t have it.

The philosophies that are injected into the minds of children in the state sector are simply horrifying. Completely artificial concepts like ‘Hate Speech’ are taking hold in the previously (more) free thinking west because the teachers are drilling this drivel into the young, who take it on faith that indeed there is such a thing as ‘Hate Speech’.

The same goes for all of the other lies and molten lead doublethink that gets poured into the minds of young students – and it doesn’t just happen in the classroom. Schools that are requiring students to be fingerprinted to get books out of the library or to eat lunch are softening up the students to accept this method of criminal control, this violation, as normal and acceptable. The indoctrination runs across the most innocent of actions and activities, and we have the absolute right to say ‘no’ to it and to educate our children to our own standards and in our own philosophies, whatever they may be.

Brother, I’ll drink to that!

Most people reading Cryptogon inside the U.S./Britain are familiar with nonstop feelings of impending doom and frequently asking themselves questions like:

Am I next?
Is this it?
Can I escape?
Is it too late?
Has everyone gone nuts?
Have I gone nuts?
Is this job killing me?
What booze is on sale?
etc. etc.

That was what it was like inside my head for about two years before I bought my one way ticket to New Zealand.

What was the actual escape like for me?

After a couple of hectic days of selecting what to take with me, and what to leave behind, the time arrived for me to get to the airport.

As I was groped and fondled by defenders of the Homeland at airport security, I went into a kind of dreamlike trace. “Will I make it out to the other side of this thing?” I wondered. The cacophony of the checkpoint became a sort of languid hum. The fat TSA employee started to move its lips, but I don’t remember what it said. I complied, on some instinctual level. A few minutes later, I was standing just beyond the security checkpoint, holding my shoes and belt in one hand, and my falling down pants with the other.

I exchanged a couple of brief, humiliated, what-just-happened-to-us? kind of looks with other travelers, many of whom were not Americans, and not used to being treated like that.

I walked to the appropriate Air New Zealand gate and sat down. I took my mobile phone out and called a couple of people to say one last goodbye. Then I called the voice mail system for my phone and changed the greeting to something close to this:

“Hi, you have reached Kevin. I have left the United States and don’t have any plans to return. Goodbye.”

Minutes later, hundreds of people, including me, took our seats in the belly of the large white bird. Minutes after that, it hurdled down the runway and out over the Pacific Ocean, veering South and West. I’ve never been able to sleep on aircraft before. But I did on that flight.

Once I was in Auckland, I had to catch another flight to reach the Far North, my wife (she went over a few weeks before me) and my new family. I walked to the domestic departures area in the Auckland airport and asked an Air New Zealand employee where the security checkpoint was, because I somehow wound up at the gate without passing through one.

“There is no security checkpoint for domestic flights, sir.”

You can imagine my shock at this remarkable statement.

“There’s no security checkpoint?!” I asked.

“Nope. Not for domestic flights,” she smiled.

I felt like dropping to the ground and kissing the polyester airport carpet, but I didn’t.

I took a seat and mumbled to myself, “I’m not even out of the airport and things already seem better here.” That was my first big epiphany in New Zealand, and they just kept happening. (Maybe someday I’ll write more about this. In short, if you’re having doubts about the lies you’ve been taught all your life about the U.S., run with those feelings. Run for your life.)

When I read the story below, I wondered, “How long has it been since I escaped America?” As of today, I have been in New Zealand for exactly one year. On reflection, I think back on my life in America as a vague and distant nightmare. The United States has became a vast nut house inside a debtor prison. I’m still not over the euphoria of being out. […]

http://cryptogon.com/?p=448

By Paul Craig Roberts

The Bush-Cheney regime is America’s first neoconservative regime. In a few short years, the regime has destroyed the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers, the Geneva Conventions, and the remains of America’s moral reputation along with the infrastructures of two Muslim countries and countless thousands of Islamic civilians. Plans have been prepared, and forces moved into place, for an attack on a third Islamic country, Iran, and perhaps Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon as well.

This extraordinary aggressiveness toward the US Constitution, international law, and the Islamic world is the work, not of a vast movement, but of a handful of ideologues—principally Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, Philip Zelikow, and Attorney General Gonzales. These are the main operatives who have controlled policy. They have been supported by their media shills at the Weekly Standard, National Review, Fox News, New York Times, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page and by “scholars” in assorted think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute.

The entirety of their success in miring the United States in what could become permanent conflict in the Middle East is based on the power of propaganda and the big lie.

Initially, the 9/11 attack was blamed on Osama bin Laden, but after an American puppet was installed in Afghanistan, the blame for 9/11 was shifted to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who was said to have weapons of mass destruction that would be used against America. The regime sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to tell the lie to the UN that the Bush-Cheney regime had conclusive proof of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Having conned the UN, Congress, and the American people, the regime invaded Iraq under totally false pretenses and with totally false expectations. The regime’s occupation of Iraq has failed in a military sense, but the neoconservatives are turning their failure into a strategic advantage. At the beginning of this year President Bush began blaming Iran for America’s embarrassing defeat by a few thousand lightly armed insurgents in Iraq.

Bush accuses Iran of arming the Iraqi insurgents, a charge that experts regard as improbable. The Iraqi insurgents are Sunni. They inflict casualties on our troops, but spend most of their energy killing Iraqi Shi’ites, who are closely allied with Iran, which is Shi’ite. Bush’s accusation requires us to believe that Iran is arming the enemies of its allies.

On the basis of this absurd accusation—a pure invention—Bush has ordered a heavy concentration of aircraft carrier attack forces off Iran’s coast, and he has moved US attack planes to Turkish bases and other US bases in countries contingent to Iran.

In testimony before Congress on February 1 of this year, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said that he expected the regime to orchestrate a “head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large.” He said a plausible scenario was “a terrorist act blamed on Iran, culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran.” He said that the neoconservative propaganda machine was already articulating a “mythical historical narrative” for widening their war against Islam. [Testimony in PDF]

Why is the US spending one trillion dollars on wars, the reasons for which are patently false. What is going on?

There are several parts to the answer. Like their forebears among the Jacobins of the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks of the communist revolution, and the National Socialists of Hitler’s revolution, neoconservatives believe that they have a monopoly on virtue and the right to impose hegemony on the rest of the world. Neoconservative conquests began in the Middle East because oil and Israel, with which neocons are closely allied, are both in the Middle East.

[…]

http://www.vdare.com/roberts/070228_lost.htm

Like I have said before, if any country can turn around from a situtation like this, the usa can. It will however, cost nothing less than trillions of dollars in reparations and literally, the heads of the conspirators listed above.

Nothing less will set the balance right, and even that may not be enough.

Someone Clever Said:

Mr. Porter,

Interesting piece on WTC 7. We’re all hoping it is only a bit of doctored footage.

If it is not, please do let us know what is about to happen in or around Iran. And be so kind as to give us more than 20 minutes notice.

A classic comment from The Editors Blog where a totally retarded liar and propagandist tries to wiggle out of the complete fiasco of the ‘documentary’ and subsequent ‘911’ lost footage scandal.

We and many others have said for years that BBQ is a totally controlled, propaganda pumping, palace of prostitutes, and now the whole world knows it.

Their imbecilic staff don’t even have the self preservation common sense to simply say, “we messed up”, which would be far more believable than the ‘daddy knows best’, ‘there there’ pat on the head tone that scumbag Richard Porter takes.

They all have this attitude, from Dimbumblebee down; snot nosed, supercilious and condescending. Listen to the slimy Guy Smith slither around as Alex Jones questions him about his odious piece of shit ‘documentary’. This is what your license fee goes for; the salaries of liars and bastards who spit in your face as they collude in dismantling this great country.

It is completely impossible that they have lost the original tapes. Broadcasting industry standards make it impossible. This is why:

“I’m an archivist with the CNN News Library in Atlanta, and I can tell you with absolute certainty, the mere idea that news agencies such as ours would “misplace” any airchecks from 9/11 is preposterous. CNN has these tapes locked away from all the others. People like myself, who normally would have access to any tapes in our library, must ask special permission in order to view airchecks from that day. Multiple tapes would have been recording their broadcast that day, and there are also private agencies that record all broadcasts from all channels – constantly – in the event that a news agency missed something or needs something. They don’t just have one copy… they have several. It’s standard procedure, and as soon as the second plane hit, they would start recording several copies on other tapes machines all day long.”

What they are claiming is simply impossible. It is a lie.

As can be seen from above, private agencies will also have copies of that days footage. The totally insulting line of Porters:

So if someone has got a recording of our output, I’d love to get hold of it.

Simply beggars belief. So we are supposed to supply you with the footage? IF someone has a recording of it? Surely he must know at least what that CNN guy knows about what happens to live footage of a big event – if he does not, he should be SACKED.

Note his tone, like the details don’t matter, as if he doesn’t really work there, and has no special knowledge of the workings of the BBQ…and he is one of the editors.

This really is astonishing, not that they are lying but that they are lying so badly.

and finally, a taste of what is spreading all over the internets:

I’m not a conspiracy nut. But this footage of your reports of WTC7 collapsing a full 20 minutes prior and repeatedly discussing it’s collapse is highly suspicious.

If you were talking about a building that never did collapse, well then you’d just look imcompitent. But as we all know, building 7 did, in a feat that suspended all laws of physics and logic, collapse spontaneously due to fires on floors 7 " 12.

You can’t possibly expect us to believe this. Let’s look at all the pieces here.

1. BBC reports for 20 solid minutes that WTC7 has collapsed when even in the live shot it stands as sturdy as the day it was built.

2. The idea that WTC7 would collapse spontaneously due to minor fires and minimal damage to the north face is laughable and an insult to intelligence. But it did, approximately 5 minutes AFTER BBC’s report….or at least 5 minutes after Jane Standley’s live shot was disconnected.

3. BBC loses all of it’s 9/11 footage so this cannot be reviewed or explained. My nephew still has all his VHS tapes from that day. He recorded almost every news station for 24 hours straight. He’s 19 now. He was 13 when it happened.
So, a 13 year old can be more responsible with his VHS tapes than one of the largest news organizations?

4. The archive footage is mysteriously pulled off of youtube and google video repeatedly and without provocation or explanation.

5. BBC’s response is, ‘there is no conspiracy. it was a mistake.’

Grant us logical thinkers at least one thing. This is highly suspicious. The BBC needs to reveal what source they drew the conclusion that WTC7 had collapsed.

Oh, and the ez-out phrases like ‘it appears’ and ‘we’re receiving reports that..’ were not used throughout this footage.

Especially when the anchor starts talking about the (lack of) body count since there was so much time to evacuate since the collapse of WTC1-2.

The BBC needs to reveal what source they drew the conclusion that WTC7 had collapsed. I do not necessarily think the BBC is a witting participant in some 9/11 conspiracy, but it’s definitely looking like you were a pawn. Revealing who/where the BBC received the information that WTC7 had collapsed would be a good start in clearing your name.

Its over BBQ; you have LOST!

This is a reply to a post on a Home Education mailing list; it was written by a glove puppet (or a perfect imitation of one). Note the flawed logic, doublethink and straw man tactics that are common to all glove puppet / inflitraitor posts. Yes, ‘infiltraitor’.

Here we go:

> I’ve been reluctant to pass comment on the Government’s HE monitoring
> proposals as I think I’m in the minority on this list but, having
> read the comments on the BBC site, I think I will take the plunge.

uh oh.

>
> Doesn’t monitoring imply 2 concerns – child protection and ensuring a
> ‘suitable education’? The Victoria Climbie case sparked the whole
> thing off and it concerns me that my children have been ‘invisible’
> for all of their lives.

I can scarcely believe what I am reading. You sound just like one of Bliar’s cabinet with that ‘Victoria Climbie’ nonsense. Just because one child is hurt that doesn’t mean that all children in the UK must be registered in an Orwellian system of controls. There is no logic in it. Crime is like rain; you will never be able to prevent it, you need to learn to live with it. You do not destroy the very foundations of your life because of it i.e. not going outside ever because it MIGHT rain and you MIGHT get wet and you MIGHT catch a cold you BUY AN UMBRELLA, and use it when you like. You do not get the government to shield you from the rain, or build a giant roof over the entire UK to ensure that you are always dry.

> I could do anything to my children and nobody
> would know.

Yes, you COULD, and you COULD also take a kitchen knife and kill your postman, or burn your own house down with a box of matches, or strap your children in your car and drive into the sea to drown them. You could do alot of things…bad things…but you WONT, and the vast majority of people never do, and just because you have the capability to do these bad things that doesn’t mean that everyone should be under total state control. Not only that, state ‘monitoring’ of everyone and every child will not prevent a single crime, especially the silent crime of child abuse.

> A comment on the BBC site mentions ‘thick, weird …
> downright barmy’ parents home educating and people have been quick to
> reply ‘but we’re not weird’ etc. But what happens if an ‘evil’ parent
> chooses HE? Where’s the child protection?

Wheres the logic? You sound like the type of glove puppet infiltrator that Bliar’s government employs to monitor groups that they consider could be a threat. The same sort of people were used against the fuel protesters. They would attend meetings and this would happen:

The new recruits spent a lot of time arguing against taking any action and spreading doubts about the need for it. “They were saying things like: ‘Think of the hospitals, what happens if it goes like 2000?’”…

Read all about it here: http://tinyurl.com/2ftbvg the organization is,

…the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). Few have heard of it, but its role in controlling dissent is central.

They infiltrate groups, and go onto the internet posing as people on the side of any cause, only to present government arguments as if they are coming from inside the group, as we are reading in your post. They are the ones who always write, “Nothing to hide, nothing to fear” on the subject of ID cards on every forum out there. They are the ones who pollute the BBC ‘Have Your Say’ comments with pro government propaganda. Beware of people who say they are willing to give up their rights or accept more government control because a single person got hurt. Its Bliar logic, and they and their arguments are utterly bogus, scripted nonsense.

> I would gladly give up my
> children’s invisibility to protect other children. It is a worthwhile
> price to pay if it prevents a child going through a similar ordeal to
> Victoria’s. (And I am aware the Victoria’s case wasn’t HE based but
> it could have been.)

And there you go! Its pure Blair speak. You admit that the Climbie case is irrelevant to HE, but cite it as a reason to give awy your privacy (which you incorrectly call ‘invisibility’) anyway, saying that it COULD have been related to HE. That is utter nonsense, and you know it. We all know it. “He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security” Benjamin Franlkin. You and your children will have neither security nor liberty if you are willing to give up your right to live without the government looking over your shoulder. The worst thing about it is, no amount of monitoring can prevent crime, and so you are advocating giving up liberty for NOTHING. That is completely insane.

> Of course the level of monitoring/interference should be the real
> debate. Will they simply try and find the ‘invisible’ children and
> put them in the same inspection regime as the others? Or will the
> regime be toughened up for all HE children? I have to say I’m
> optimistic for a number of reasons. What resources will there be for
> all the extra ‘found’ children like mine? Will local authorities
> really be prepared for extra children AND extra supervision? I think
> not.

Astonishing. Firstly, the ‘real debate’ is wether or not the government has any business regulating HE in any way. And once again, there is no such thing as an ‘invisible’ child. HE’d children are not ‘invisible’; stop characterizing them in this way, it is pure evil and a propaganda technique. Secondly, you are saying that you are willing to give up your rights, then you are saying that you are not too worried because even if you do, there are not enough staff to watch everyone! You are not very good at this game are you?

I will help you.

If they decide that all children in HE are to be monitored, what they will do is put the burden on YOU. YOU will have to report somewhere with your children regularly to be inspected. YOU will have to fill out forms detailing your children’s performance. YOU will have to obtain a license to educate your children at home.

Get the picture?

> Also Summerhill School (the ‘run by students’, ‘no rules’ school) has
> survived inside the school OFSTED inspection system. And, as a
> teacher, I’m inspected and, although it’s very irritating for me, it
> doesn’t stop me teaching my students the way I feel is best. In other
> words I listen to the inspectors comments and simply ignore those I
> don’t agree with. I haven’t lost my job yet. And very often they make
> suggestions that I actually agree with!

This has nothing to do with us free parents who want nothing to do with you, your OFSTED inspections, ‘your’ opinions and your vile way of interacting with the system whilst pretending to be against it, and all the time bolstering it.

> We live in a country with a history of compromise and ‘fudging’.
> Isn’t this going the same way?

We are not going to submit to any of the government’s new, draconian, Soviet Style controls; that means NO to the children’s database, NO to ID cards and NO to the introduction of compulsory schooling, or ANY interference in HE.

> Sorry I couldn’t resist putting another point of view into a debate
> which seems rather extreme – ‘change nothing’ or ‘ban completely’– at
> the moment.

It was deliberate, and the language you use is highly indicative of you being a shill. We are on to your games however; you don’t play them very well and really, its not your fault. Bliar is asking you and your glove puppet colleagues to do the impossible – argue for the rights of children and families to be destroyed. No one will go along with it, on any level.

If you are indeed a genuine person, not in the employ of the government, I am even more horrified that you could write such drivel and present it as a valid argument.

What you are advocating is nothing less than the mass enslavement of all the children in the UK. No one in their right mind would advocate that, even as a theoretical possibility, because it is so abhorrent and contrary to the natural feelings of any parent or human being.

If you are not a glove puppet, then you may not realize that we are in the middle of a war for our freedom and the freedom of generations of British Citizens. This is not the time to play games with ideas like, “gladly give up my freedom and the freedom of my children”. If this response has come across as particularly harsh I hope that that is the case, because people like you who advocate, even in theory, the enslavement of my children are my mortal enemies.

[…]

Like most believers in the BBC (Bush, Blair, Cheney) version of 911 events, debunkers claim the White House—George Bush particularly— is too inept to implement 911. Too dumb. They claim a bungler like Bush, who bungled the Iraq War, would have bungled 911.

Sadly, Monbiot and Cockburn have studied little world history. Consider how a bungled anarchist and second-rate painter grabbed power in Germany (with the backing of bankers and industrialists, Prescott Bush among others) and cemented fascist power there with a false flag operation called the Reichstag Fire. Then this “bungler” masterminded a series of attacks on surrounding countries, conquering and occupying many of them in the process.

When the Left gatekeepers accuse the 911 Truth Movement of being “distracted” in opposition to the military-corporate-media triad, we Truthers can only shake our collective heads. As time passes, those misguided patriots (or disinfo pros), may yet realize that 911 was the golden key to the Pandora’s box. They may yet realize the 911 attack was a state-sponsored, state implemented operation carried out by professionals, involving several tiers, several hierarchies of power. Needless to say, when a former German corporal, former imprisoned anarchist, former “bungler” named Adolf Hitler, devised a daring yet diabolical attack plan, those who implemented the plan—Generals Guderian, von Rundstedt and Rommel—were extremely competent and coldly professional.

Time is on our side. Far from being “fantasists posing a mortal danger” we Truthers see the bigger picture. The logical picture. The scientific picture. The historical picture. The overwhelming, incriminating, body-of-evidence picture. Far from embracing the 911 conspiracy as some sort of warm and fuzzy “security blanket,” as suggested by a former TV producer, we prefer to be Diogenes with his lantern, Galileo with his telescope, Tom Paine with his Common Sense. Light years ahead of sunshine patriots.

Footnote: I spend a lot of time lately reading a website wholly devoted to 911. I follow the mostly intelligent remarks and the comments by the trolls. The grassroot Spirit of ’76 is alive there at www.911blogger.com. If you haven’t discovered it yet, go there for your “fantasist” fix. The only mortal danger is to the trolls and disinfo pros.

Novelist and amateur historian, Douglas Herman wrote the widely reposted “Confessions of A 911 Hitman” and contributes to Rense regularly.

http://rense.com/general75/time.htm