Hi.

I was browsing through through some of my regular blogs and saw this. It made me think of you.

From the comments section in response to a post in the Policeman’s blog.

http://coppersblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/mainline.html

“The point of having things like ASBOs is to have as many things as possible against the law. This moves all the discretion into the hands of the government.

In a reasonable system, one could simply avoid sanctions by not stealing/murdering/raping and all would be well. Under the “nearly everything is illegal” system, most crimes are not punished. However, since one cannot avoid illegality, the state can come after you whenever you displease it. It becomes a system for enforcing loyalty to the powers that be rather than a neutral system of justice that protects life, liberty and property. The resulting epidemic of crime is seen as inconsequential- it does not threaten the established government – it even makes people more dependent upon it for protection.

In earlier times, this would have been called “tyranny.””

In the mighty France, all of the workforce, Civil Service and even the police have refused to obey the abolition of the bank holiday that would have not occured today.

When the police of this country finally grow some grapefruits and decide that ‘enough is enough’, and that they will only enforce the laws that directly affect the population that they serve, ie, crimes against the person and crimes against physical property, THEN we can take posts like this seriously.

Like we saw in the CCTV footage from the TPB raid, it only takes a handful of swine to disrupt the activities of millions of innocent people. The real policemen, the ones that are not swine, filth, ‘le flick’ etc, the ones that are there actually doing the true work of policing are all damaged by the actions of these dirty pigs, who don’t even bother to wear a uniform while they stomp on you with their boots.

That they recieved a direct order to raid that ISP is not an excuse to do it. Niether is it an excuse to violate the TPB lawyer by DNA swabbing him. They, all police, must have an intact moral compass that allows them to say, “no, I will not obey this order, because it is illegal”, or at the very least, compells them to call a neutral lawyer before carrying out orders that are clearly dubious if not totally bogus. Should they be ordered to carry out a raid on an emergency basis, they should have recourse to the law, where they can sue their superiors for leading them into an illegal action. Where there was ample time to check the legality of a raid, like the TPB one, all the officers should be liable for punitive damages. The police MUST BE GOT UNDER CONTROL, and if they dont have a moral compass, then they must either be sacked or put in fear of their livelyhoods so that there is a real disincentive to carrying out illegal orders, like the animals who raided TPB, and simultaneously took out the websites of 300 people UNRELATED TO TBP.

By Jim Mullins
Posted May 12 2006
We are now witnessing another fear-inducing barrage of propaganda mirroring the exaggeration and deception that led to the ongoing debacle in Iraq. This time the target is Iran, with the same underlying but unspoken rationale: continuing control of worldwide trade of oil in U.S. dollars and its production in pliant and friendly hands.

Saddam’s unforgivable sin was to persuade the U.N. to allow him to sell oil for euros in the Oil for Food program, bringing him a huge windfall as the dollar fell and the euro advanced. When the U.S. invaded Baghdad, it secured the oil ministry and moved quickly to convert oil sales back to the dollar.

Iran has gone further, announcing the opening next week of the Iran Oil Bourse, a worldwide exchange, trading in euros and breaking the U.S. monopoly. (When President Nixon abandoned the gold standard and converted to a fiat currency backed by the good faith and credit of the U.S., OPEC agreed to continue oil transactions in dollars only.) This will result in a flood of dollars, now held in the world’s central banks, coming back to the U.S. and hitting the wall of our massive trade deficit and without the trade surplus we once enjoyed — a dismal prospect in that we have allowed our industrial production to decline while borrowing from foreign countries to offset the deficit.

The International Monetary Fund has warned the U.S. that its trade deficit — grown from $114 billion in 1995 to $805 billion — is unsustainable. Its economic counselor, Raghuram Rajan, describes its position as “just simple economics.”

Another issue lies in Iran’s geographic advantage in transporting oil and natural gas from the Caspian Sea area. An oil pipeline through Iran to the Arabian Sea for tanker shipment, or the proposed gas pipeline through Iran and Pakistan to India, makes far more sense in every respect than the U.S.-favored route through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

President Bush’s offer to provide nuclear technology to India in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and U.S. law was a transparent ploy to get it to abandon the Iranian pipeline.

Cash-strapped Pakistan would lose both access to the natural gas and $700 million in yearly royalties. Pakistani President Musharraf is in a bind, for most Pakistanis chafe at his support for U.S. policies and have a long history of friendship with Iran. Both Pakistani and Indian oil ministers have indicated that they will sign a tripartite agreement in June that will seal the Iranian pipeline project.

We might remember that in July 2001, before 9-11, the Bush administration negotiated with the Taliban to allow the pipeline through Afghanistan, had not declared Afghanistan a terrorist state and dismissed al-Qaida as a nuisance.

Brazil has decided to enrich its uranium and denied the IAEA inspections other than of the uranium going in the centrifuge process and the end product. Brazil brags about its self-sufficiency in oil yet feels a need for nuclear energy to augment its electricity production. Iran is in exactly the same position but denied the ability to have nuclear-generated electricity — a right that doesn’t violate the nonproliferation treaty or international law.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff, has revealed that in 2003 Iran made an offer through the Swiss Embassy to our representative in Iran. It was signed by all Iranian top officials. It offered to negotiate the nuclear issue and Iran’s alleged support for terrorism as a response to Powell’s public demand. Powell was left hanging in the wind and the administration berated the Swiss Embassy for sending it.

This is what passes for diplomacy in the White House.

The House has just passed a resolution, the so-called Iran Freedom Support Act, that declares it is the policy of the United States to deny Iran the ability to support acts of international terrorism by limiting the development of Iran’s ability to explore for, extract, refine or transport by pipeline petroleum resources.” (emphasis added)

Apparently “free trade, open markets and globalization” are just empty phrases when U.S. monopolies on oil purchase and sales or pipeline routes are involved. China, India, Russia and perennial bogeyman Venezuela have expressed interest in euro trade in oil. Astute Americans are running up the price of gold.

Is anyone listening?

[…]

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/

You bet.

by Mike Whitney

http://www.opednews.com

If one day the world’s largest oil producers demanded euros for their barrels, “it would be the financial equivalent of a nuclear strike.” Bill O’Grady, A.G. Edwards commodities analyst

“Everybody knows the real reason for American belligerence is not the Iranian nuclear program, but the decision to launch an oil bourse where oil will be traded in euros instead of US dollars….The oil market will break the dominance of the dollar and lead to a decline of global American hegemony.” Igor Panarin, Russian political scientist

Overnight the story of Iran’s proposed oil bourse has slipped into the mainstream press exposing the real reasons behind Washington’s ongoing hostility towards Tehran. Up to this point, analysts have brushed aside the importance of the upcoming oil-exchange as a Leftist-Internet conspiracy theory unworthy of further consideration. Now, the Associated Press has clarified the issue showing that an Iran oil bourse “could lead central bankers around the world to convert some of their dollar reserves into euros, possibly causing a decline in the dollar’s value”.

Currently, the world is drowning in dollars, even a small movement could trigger a massive recession in the United States. There’s nothing remotely “conspiratorial” about this. It is simply a matter of supply and demand. If the oil bourse creates less demand for the dollar, the value of the dollar will sink accordingly; pushing energy, housing, food and other prices higher.

Oil has been linked to the dollar since the 1970s when OPEC agreed to denominate it exclusively in dollars. This provided the US a virtual monopoly which has allowed it to run huge account deficits without fear of crippling interest rate hikes. As Bill O’ Grady of A.G.Edwards said, “If OPEC decided they didn’t want dollars anymore, it would be the end of American hegemony by signaling the end to the dollar as the sole reserve currency.”

“If the dollar lost its status as the world’s reserve currency, that would force the United States to fund it massive account deficit by running a trade surplus, which would increase inflationary pressures.” (Associated Press)

There’s no prospect of the US running a trade surplus anytime soon. Bush has savaged the manufacturing sector outsourcing over 3 million jobs and shutting down plants across the country. His short-sighted “free trade” policies and enormous tax cuts for the rich ensure that Americans will be left to face skyrocketing energy costs and a hyper-inflationary greenback. There’s no way we can retool fast enough to “manufacture our way” out of the quagmire of red ink.

Currently, the national debt is a whopping $8.4 trillion with an equally harrowing $800 billion trade deficit. (7% of GDP) The ever-increasing demand for the greenback in the oil trade is the only thing that has kept the dollar from freefalling to earth. Even a small conversion to euros will erode the dollar’s value and could precipitate a sell-off.

Presently, oil is sold exclusively on the London Petroleum Exchange and the New York Mercantile Exchange both owned by American investors. If the bourse opens, central banks around the world will reduce their stockpiles of dollars to maintain a portion of their currency in euros. This is the logical step for Europe which buys 70% of Iran’s oil. It is also the reasonable choice for Russia which sells two-thirds of its oil to Europe but (amazingly) continues to denominate those transactions in dollars.

Washington has succeeded in maintaining its monopoly by propping up the many corrupt and repressive regimes in the Gulf States. The prudent choice for Saudi Arabia would be to move away from the debt-ridden dollar and enhance its earnings with the stronger euro. Regrettably, Uncle Sam has a gun to their head. They understand that such a transition would invite the same response that Saddam got 6 months after he converted to euros and was removed through “shock and awe”.

Regardless, of the outcome, the profligate spending, budget-busting tax cuts, and the shocking increase in the money supply (the Fed has doubled the money supply in one decade) has the greenback headed for the dumpster. Already, China and Japan (who hold an accumulated $1.7 trillion in US securities and currency) are gradually moving away from the dollar towards the euro (although the Fed has blocked the public from knowing the extent of the damage by abandoning the M-3 publication of inflows) The European Central Bank (ECB) and Japan’s central bank are frantically trying to conceal the probability of a dollar collapse by issuing carefully worded statements to allay public fears while they to prepare for an “orderly” retreat.

But, it won’t be “orderly”. The dollar has lost 5% against the euro since April and is quickly headed south. The Iran bourse could be the final jolt that pushes the greenback over the edge. This is the bitter lesson for those who choose to ignore economic fundamentals and build their house on sand. Paul Volcker anticipated this scenario in a speech last year when he said that account imbalances were as great as he had ever seen and predicted “a 75% chance of a dollar crash in the next 5 years”.

Volcker is right, but economic advisor, Peter Grandich summarized it even better when he opined, “The only one who doesn’t know the US dollar is dead is the US dollar.”

Prepare for the requiem. […]

Opednews

My emphasis, right in the middle.

Can you say ’20AC‘? Not a single bullet need be fired. No marching, no shouting…

And you can bring their house DOWN.

“In a planned emergency reshuffle, designed by the fanatical regime leader Blair to deflect attention away the disastrous election results and more importantly from the systemic rot that has taken over thereby evading the real point that nobody wants New Labour period, Blair has finally sacked his most useful pet: the porcine fabricator Charles Clarke:

“Charles Clarke has said he does “not agree” with Tony Blair’s decision to sack him as home secretary […] Mr Clarke told the BBC he could have “carried through” the reforms needed to the Home Office following the furore over foreign criminals in the UK.

The prime minister had to make “hard judgements”, Mr Clarke said, adding that he remained a supporter.” ^BBC

In a bizarre response to this long-overdue sacking of the hog-wild liar, Liberty’s Shami Chakrabarti got it all wrong in describing Clarke as some kind of statesman and hero who we all dotingly looked up to during the London bombings:

“His finest moment was hours after the London bombings last July. As frightened people hung on his every word, he made vital distinctions between distasteful speech and cold-blooded murder and admitted that ID cards would not have prevented the atrocity. He forgot party politics and demonstrated what a home secretary could and should be”

That’s not how I remember it, I recall a grandstanding dungeon keeper telling the country how many civil liberties they needed to give up to win in the Clash of Civilizations. And who’s Home Office was deliberately and maliciously leaking stories about de Menezes’ visa to revise his death and then protecting the most flawed sociopathic cretin ever to head up the Met who tried to cover up the investigation and who misled the public about the state execution?

There’s a time and place for measured language but this wasn’t it, Chakrabarti is miles off course on this one. Clarke’s finest moment was in getting sacked today and then squeeling like the wild boar he is as he realises he has no purpose outside of whatever slops Blair threw his way. Sadly he has been replaced by ‘preventative war’ advocate, bruiser and Labour attack dog John Reid.”

[…]

http://jultra.blogspot.com/

More brilliance from Jultra.

[…]

I know many people—I am one of them—who were not born here, nor have the applied for citizenship, and who yet love America with deeper passion and greater intensity that many natives whose patriotism manifests itself by pulling, kicking, and insulting those who do not rise when the national anthem is played. Our patriotism is that of the man who loves a woman with open eyes. He is enchanted by her beauty, yet he sees her faults. So we, too, who know America, love her beauty, her richness, her great possibilities ; we love her mountains, her canyons, her forests, her Niagara, and her deserts—above all do we love the people that have produced her wealth, her artists who have created beauty, her great apostles who dream and work for liberty—but with the same passionate emotion we hate her superficiality, her cant, her corruption, her mad, unscrupulous worship at the alter of the Golden Calf.

We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America. How else is the world to take America seriously, when democracy at home is daily being outrages, free speech suppressed, peaceable assemblies broken up by overbearing and brutal gangsters in uniform ; when free press is curtailed and every independent opinion gagged. Verily, poor as we are in democracy, how can we give of it to the world? We further say that a democracy conceived in the military servitude of the masses, in their economic enslavement, and nurtured in their tears and blood, is not democracy at all. It is despotism—the cumulative result of a chain of abuses which, according to the dangerous document ,the Declaration of Independence, the people have the right to overthrow.

The District Attorney has dragged in our Manifesto, and he has emphasized the passage, “Resist conscription.” Gentlemen of the jury, please remember that that is not the charge against us. But admitting that the Manifesto contains the expression, “Resist conscription,” may I ask you, is there only one kind of resistance? Is there only the resistance which means the gun, the bayonet, the bomb or flying machine? Is there not another kind of resistance? May not the people simply fold their hands and declare, “We will not fight when we do not believe in the necessity of war”? May not the people who believe in the repeal of the Conscription Law, because it is unconstitutional, express their opposition in word and by pen, in meetings and in other ways? What right has the District Attorney to interpret that particular passage to suit himself? Moreover, gentlemen of the jury, I insist that the indictment against us does not refer to conscription. We are charged with a conspiracy against registration. And in no way or manner has the prosecution proven that we are guilty of conspiracy or that we have committed an overt act.

[…]

Emma Goldman

And others

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps:

collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist;
negotiation;
self-purification;
and direct action.

[…]

As in so many past experiences, our hopes bad been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self-purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves : “Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?” “Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?” We decided to schedule our direct-action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic with with-drawal program would be the by-product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.

[…]

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling, for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

[…]

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

[…]

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s antireligious laws.

[…]

Martin Luther King’s letter from Birmingham jail

[…] there’s the question of the rate at which we’re all going to be put on this thing – I’ve done some calculations before on the speed at which the system will have to work based on 700,000+ people turning sixteen every year for ever, which showed that for normal office hours there isn’t actually very long to do all the ‘background checks’ and duplicate biometric checks that would be required for a gold standard database. Now I’ve seen the first official figures for the rate as estimated by the S.E. and his hapless sidekick Andy ‘Noddy’ Burnham, and they’re alarming from the point of view of a professional IT worker or indeed anyone with a basic mathematical knowledge:

About 80% of the UK population has a passport and all will have to be renewed within the next 10 years, at an initial rate of about 7 million people a year, a Home Office spokesman said.

Now, even leaving out anyone *wanting* to go on the damn thing or people over 16 getting their first passport (who’d have to go on it, like it or not) or the several hundred thousand foreigners coming into the country whom we now find will be put on it* (does this mean another fully manned registration centre at every port of entry, working round the clock, or do you just trust them to roll up of their own accord after entry?), we’re looking at a system workload in the first year of ten times the long term load. In a new system set up by a Government IT contractor, paying the kind of wages for operating the kind of systems that have led to such high morale and efficiency in organisations like the CSA that’s a hell of a task. This is all supposed to kick off and be working at that rate in 2008. Assuming December 2008 (and December is a really bad month to launch new IT kit for myriad reasons) that’s 32 months away.

Let’s examine what 7 million NIR entries per year looks like:

Days in a year – 365 (ok, I know 2008 is a leap year!)
Weekends – 104 days
Weekdays – 261 days

Public Holidays: usually 8 days a year or so including time off around Christmas

Working days for NIR per year – 261-8 = 253

Registration centres : 70

Number of registrations per year per centre : 7m/70 = 100,000

Per centre per day : 100,000/253 = approximately 400

Working hours of centre – well, since you’re forcing people to come along you can’t make it the middle of the night, so say 9 to 5 inclusive – 8 hours per day (or 8*253 = 2024 hours per year)

So adding it all up, from NIR Day 1 for ten years you’ve got to keep processing people at the rate of 50 per hour at every centre, or one every 72 seconds, each of whom requires a scan of the whole central NIR to avoid multiple registrations, so the database has to be up and accessible every minute of the day to avoid delay.

In the early days it’s a nailed on certainty that we’ll get failures, resulting in potentially hundreds of people making pointless journeys (say it’s down for an hour during a particular day – that’s 50 people at each centre having their time wasted, a total of 3500 people). I have no idea of the MTBF for major government IT projects, and they almost certainly won’t tell me on the usual ‘commercial confidentiality’ grounds. What I can do is provide some figures based on possible percentage reliability and estimate the number of people inconvenienced per year and the kind of reliability that would be required *from day one* to stop the scheme sliding into chaos.

I’d suggest that anything much below 99.9% reliability is going to be seriously political in terms of people claiming loss of earnings, loss of holidays etc. 99.999% is cloud cuckoo land for a scheme of this complexity built in 32 months. Not a lot of margin for error between those two really. You reach the million people inconvenienced per year mark at about 85.8% uptime, by the way. […]

http://www.blairwatch.co.uk/node/945 

From: Tony Blair To: Henry Porter Subject: Liberty

Dear Henry Porter,

Frankly it’s difficult to know where to start, given the mishmash of misunderstanding, gross exaggeration and things that are just plain wrong. A few explanatory facts might help.

I can’t wait.

You say I have ‘pared down our liberty at an astonishing rate’, then list a whole lot of fundamental rights, as if these had all been drastically curtailed. We are proposing that the right to trial by jury be changed in one set of circumstances: highly complex serious fraud cases. The reason is simple. The cases last for months, sometimes years – they are incredibly difficult for juries for time and complexity reasons; it is over 30 years since Lord Roskill recommended the change because otherwise such cases often collapse at huge expense and the guilty go free. The estimated number of cases per year is around 20, out of a total of 40,000 jury trials.

“Defenders of this practice say it is justified if a single murderer is prosecuted.” indeed. Then the same is also true about trial by jury. If even one person’s rights are reduced, then it is not worth it. Indeed, if one persons rights are infringed the entire society is damaged. To justify murder by saying “only 20 people out of the millions of living britons will be murdered, so it OK” is a mark of this Nazi inspired, venal gang of bloodsoaked murderers.

The right to silence was already restricted by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (Sections 34-38), which enables a court, if it wishes and in certain circumstances, to draw an adverse inference from a defendant’s failure to answer questions on any charge. The only change introduced by this Government was to clarify (in the light of subsequent case law) the circumstances under which inferences can be drawn from silence in cases where the charge is one of causing the death of a child or vulnerable adult. This again is in a tiny number of cases.

“We are already half way up your ass, we just pushed it in all the way; what is your problem with that?” Honestly, if this is the quality of Bliars thought we can begin to assume that he is not really in control, and is just going along with a flow pushed by people in the background.

You say people can only have blank placards outside Parliament and can’t protest. Go and look at the placards of those camped outside Parliament – they are most certainly not blank and usually contain words not entirely favourable to your correspondent. Outside Downing Street, virtually every day there are protests of one sort or another.

The one man who is camped there can only be there because he started his protest BEFORE the new legislation came into force. A person was arrested for simply reading out a list of people. inside your own devils gathering a man was arested for heckling, and the terrrorism act was the pretext. You are a LIAR and a destroyer of liberty Tony Bliar, and everyone knows it!

It’s correct that, again in a small number of cases, we have introduced unusual restrictions to combat terrorists. There are 12 control orders in place. But we did suffer the death by terrorism of over 50 of our citizens last July. In common with virtually every major nation in the world, we are tightening our restrictions but there are, in every case, elaborate mechanisms of scrutiny and oversight.

First of all, over 40,000 people have been arrested using the terrorism act. That is totally unnaceptable. Secondly, even if the terrorists killed 50,000 people, that is no reason to dismantle this nation. MILLIONS of men gave their lives to protect Britian and its way of life. That you think you have the right to throw away this countries rights because 50 people were killed by a random act by unafiliated and deranged students shows your complete and utter insane state of mind. What other nations may or may not do, this is BRITAIN and BRITIAN LEADS it does not FOLLOW. Especially into the abyss that you are trying to drag it. The Soviet Union had internal passports; did that mean that everywhere should also have them? This sort of ‘reasoning’ is beneath contempt.

And, of course, the reason why even these types of restrictions can end up in our courts and be struck down, is that this Government gave British citizens for the first time ever the power to challenge Executive action or legislation, through the incorporation of the European Convention.

Indeed! wonder if this means that we can strike down the ID cards bill? Shall we try?

We enter the realm of fantasy with your and others’ strictures on the Regulatory Reform Bill. This legislation is proposed for a straight-forward reason. Much regulation becomes redundant over time. It’s a real problem for business. It costs money and causes hassle, often in circumstances far removed from its original purpose. The problem is that if it is in primary legislation then only by formal Act of Parliament can it be changed. In a busy schedule where usually the legislation is very arcane, it can take years, if ever, for necessary change to occur.

The proposal is that in circumstances closely defined and expressly where it doesn’t interfere with people’s basic rights, ministers can propose removing the regulation by order. But before this can actually happen, first the order is subject to public consultation; second, it is scrutinised by independent committees of both houses of parliament; third, there is then a debate before the order is passed in Parliament, which can naturally refuse to accept it. To describe this as the ‘abolition of Parliamentary democracy’ – as some critics have – is more than a little far-fetched.

Firstly, the reason is bogus. Secondly, parilaiment, if it was doping its job properly, and as I have said on BLOGDIAL before, should be sitting and REMOVING legislation, not ADDING legislation. This bill allows parliament to ADD TO and AMEND existing legislation without oversignt, not REMOVE it wholesale. If it was there only to remove legislation it might be arguable that it could not affect rights since only the ADDITION of laws can remove rights from the person.

Next comes some vomit inducing electioneering wrapped in double tall:

When we talk of civil liberties, what about theirs, the law-abiding people; the ones who treat others with courtesy and good manners and expect the same back? Don’t theirs count for anything?

Bliar knows perfectly well that ‘civility and ‘civil liberties’ are two different things, and that he is masterfully conflating them in this piece of disgusting double talk. If there is an estate with a problem, send more police in there. Removing the rights of everyone in the UK because there are some crime hotspots is simply absurd, and he knows this, because he is not stupid.

You complain of the DNA database samples being retained. Since we allowed this, over 14,000 offences have been successfully matched to over 8,000 suspects including over 100 murders and 100 rapes – and as far as I am aware, no one is on the database for dropping litter!

There is nothing funny about this you Nazi piece of filth. Just as an 80 year old heckler was arrested using the terrorism act right in your face, this too will be done, and then what will you say?

And as for the murders and rapes that were solved, this is good, but that has nothing to do with KEEPING THE DNA OF THE INNOCENT ON RECORD. When someone is innocent of any crime, they should have no police record of ANY KIND. and the fact that the police are keeping the DNA of 24,000 INNOCENT children on file – which is child abuse – has nothing to do with the solving of the crimes you mention above. You are a devil, and not even a devil in disguise. Under your orders, 24,000 innocent british children have been VIOLATED, and that is a FACT.

You can’t deal with the levels of sophistication in today’s organised crime by traditional methods. That’s why we are giving the new agency new powers to force suspects to disclose information, to open up their accounts; to ensure that their advisers can’t conceal evidence; and to track their movements not just in Britain but abroad.

That is utter nonsense. The police have more than enough powers to detect any crime, and once again, this is no excuse for removing the rights of ALL the UK citizens. When Bliar says’ “to ensure that their advisers can’t conceal evidence” he is talking about the removal of lawer client privacy; see how he cannot even bring himself to say what he has done? Inside his insane head somewhere, he realizes just how fundamentally outrageous what he has pulled off is.

The issue of ID cards is a little different, because I think there are very good reasons of practicality why, in today’s world, people should be able to protect their identity from fraud or abuse. The figure of £10bn for the cost is ludicrous; and in any event 70 per cent of the cost is because of the move to biometric passports, happening round the western world.

People can protect themselvs from identity fraud primarily by not entering the NIR, ie refusing the ID card. The reality of this has been made crystal clear and soon, not one person in the UK will not have been informed about it. Just because the rest of the world is moving to biometric passports that doesnt mean that the UK should, and also, ‘biometric passports’ does not mean the UK NIR. The new passport standard sets a minimum level of security features which the UK is unilaterally exceeding to the most absurd of levels. Once again, a bald faced lie, from the mouth of a lying murderer!

Ultimately, for me this whole issue is not about whether we care about civil liberties, but how we care for them in the modern world. If the traditional processes were the answer to these crime and law and order problems that are an age away from Dixon of Dock Green and the stable communities of 50 years ago, then we wouldn’t be having this debate. But they’re not. They’ve failed. They are leaving the innocent unprotected and the guilty unpunished. That’s why we need them changed.

This is a total lie, and one he and his cohorts have repeated before form his liars clipboard. The innocent are unprotected because there are not enough police, not because the inadequate numbers have too few powers. This is everything to do with civil liberties, and thanks to Murder Inc, a permanent solution to this problem is around the corner, so that never again will the likes of this mass murderer will be able to single handedly destroy Britain.

[…]

Go and read this apalling exchange yourself. Sadly, Henry Porter doesn’t know how to thread email, otherwise, he could have taken that lying sack of shit apart line by line.

The Government began the whole sorry process by saying that the Bill would be valuable in the fight against terrorism; yet, to be fair to the Home Secretary—I am occasionally fair to him—on 8 July he said that identity cards would not have prevented the tube attacks on 7 July. We know that 9/11 would not have been prevented by identity cards. The people who committed those crimes had pilots’ licences and passports. Those who committed the crimes on 7 July were perfectly happy to be filmed by the railway station closed circuit television. The problem was not hiding their identity, but hiding their intention—[Interruption.] I am glad to see that Members on the Treasury Bench find the subject so tremendously funny.

When the Government lost their first argument they said, “Oh, perhaps we’ll try benefit fraud”. However, we know that benefit fraud will not be dealt with by the possession of identity cards or by the information in the national identity register. Then they said, “Well, let’s try immigration, that’s bound to help”. The Home Secretary is trying that again this evening, but the problem is that one does not have to register on the national identity register or hold an identity card if one is in the country for less than three months. When a person enters the country as a tourist, how are the Government to know that they have not remained beyond the permitted time?

There is the problem of the free travel area between the UK and the Irish Republic and the free travel area in the European Union. What will that do? Far from preventing immigration illegalities, it will exacerbate ethnic problems and cultural division in the UK. Do the Government want to give a free hand to the British National party? Anybody who thinks that is a good idea should vote for this sordid Government this evening.

The Government then said, and the Home Secretary repeated this evening, that the measure would deal with identity fraud. When the Bill began its passage in the summer, identity fraud cost the economy £50 million, but during the summer months the cost rose to £1.5 billion. I do not know why, and the Government have produced no evidence to support that fact. Indeed, we are having a Third Reading by assertion with an absence of proof. We cannot have legislation that is created in this form or pushed through in such a way, and we cannot tolerate a Government who have absolutely no understanding of the constitution of this country.

The Government moved on to say that the scheme would prevent other forms of serious crime. As the hon. and learned Member for Medway (Mr. Marshall-Andrews) pointed out on Second Reading, no serious criminal will be too bothered about whether he is required to register for, or have, an identity card. The money would be far better spent on police officers, gaining intelligence about the activities of criminals and producing a proper border control police.

The Government have blustered and demanded that we agree with all their assertions, despite the lack of evidence to prove them. Eventually, they have ended up saying that it would be more convenient for us all if we had identity cards and information was stored away on the national identity register. If the Government want to see the population of this country wandering around with a form of barcode across our foreheads, or with a mark to allow us to come out of our houses, they are not the sort of Government whom this country needs. We should certainly not be promoting such a society.

The Bill is obscene and absurd and it will do nothing but damage the country’s interests as a whole. It will do nothing to advance the causes that we all share: defeating terrorism; doing away with benefit fraud; and tightening up our immigration rules, which the Government have randomly let fall apart. Of course we want to deal with identity fraud and serious crime, but the Bill will not do that in its present form and would not have done that in its first form. It is a ridiculous and stupid Bill.

What will the scheme cost the citizen? All of us over the age of 16 will have to pay not only the £30 cost of buying the wretched card, but the travel costs of getting from the outer isles to the Glasgow centre at which one will be processed, as though one were in some gulag, or from rural parts of the country to other cities.

What will the scheme cost the country as a whole? We all know that the cost will be somewhere between £8 billion and £19 billion, but the Government say that the cost of a card will be only £30. The whole thing is utterly absurd, and the more one examines what the Secretary of State has to say, the more absurd it becomes and the more absurd the Government are.

Let us step aside from the practical arguments against the Bill and consider a matter of principle: the relationship between the citizen and state, about which the Government care little and know nothing. They have forgotten about constitutional history—if they knew anything about it—and the proper relationship between the Government, Parliament and the judiciary. All that is swept aside with great windy bluster from the Home Secretary and his junior Ministers. It is time for Parliament to stand up for what it is supposed to and to defend the liberties of the citizen, not to kowtow to this appalling Government and go down on bended knee and grovel as they pass more and more appalling legislation to destroy the rights of the citizen. It is no good for the Government to say that this is all exaggeration—just look at what they have done already and what they intend to do through this Bill and other legislation to eat into the liberties of the citizen.

This is a bad Bill from a sad Government. It is legislation by statutory instrument. The Government are providing 61 separate powers to enable the Home Secretary or his successor to produce secondary legislation. The Bill contains very little detail. It increases the penalty for misbehaviour. One could easily be fined up to £2,500 for what the Government politely call a “civil penalty”, and if one does not pay that, off one goes to prison.

The Bill amounts to little more than a denial of democracy. The House should be ashamed of it, and I trust that all people of honour in the House will increase the Government’s embarrassment by reducing their majority to way below 32—indeed, we should kill this Bill. […]

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2005-10-18c.797.2

When the history of all this is written, it will not be possible to say that no one was warned, and that no one spoke up and stood up to be counted.

It is time for new labour legislation in this province. At present, it is too one-sided. Individual rights are being totally ignored.

We have far too many strikes in Saskatchewan, which could have been prevented if we had some politicians with a little backbone. It appears they are only interested in the public at election time for votes.

Controversial issues are not touched or discussed.

Unionized employees of the Sobey’s grocery store on south Albert Street have been on strike for six months. It is a great store with honest, hard-working and self-reliant workers.

[…]

If joining a union is so good for its members, then way should they be forced to join? It should be voluntary, as in other organizations.

If a union member is not satisfied with the salary or working conditions, then he or she should look elsewhere for a job that fulfills all expectations and demands.

Compulsory unionism is called “the new slavery” because once a union has been voted into a workplace, there is no going back, especially for workers who didn’t want to join in the first place. Freedom of association is lost in the labour movement and in its place is coercion of its members. Coercion is contrary to all principles of freedom.

The Leader Post

[…]

You get the picture.

And in case you think I use that article because I couldn’t easily find harsh words about the UK government:

From time to time I, like many of us, muse on what is wrong with the people who run our country. Are they stupid? Are they naïve? Or are they actually downright wicked?

[…]

Consider, for example, the likely outcome of possibly the nastiest Bill to go before Parliament since the Six Acts of 1819, the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. The Commons has given a second reading to this Bill, which would increase the already great ability of ministers to bypass Parliament in enacting, repealing or amending (according to Clause 2 of the Bill) “any legislation”. The Bill would especially be used, if enacted, to import EU law into our own without any parliamentary scrutiny, but could be used for even worse things besides.

[…]

Frankly, these plans are so absolutist that one could make a strong case that the Queen should abdicate rather than give her assent to either of them.

To obviate that horror she, Parliament and the British public must demand a straight answer to a straight and vital question: what is so wrong with our democracy that Labour wishes so ruthlessly to end it?

There have been quite a few views aired like this in the Telegraph recently, by ‘Establishment’ figures, it makes wonder whether there was a time when the nobs could simply ‘arrange an accident’ for ‘here today gone tomorrow’ political figures.

The notion that queen should abdicate rather than assent to the legislation talked about is interesting – is it a veiled call for her loyal subjects to oppose the proposed laws? Like I say interesting, and on a day when the Guardian publishes a piece explicitely citing Marx!

The truth seeps through grasping fingers across forked-tongued mouths… and dribbles away, unseen by the many, reviled by the few…

Ministers also announced that the new agency will operate a passport verification service so that businesses can guard against identity fraud by checking the credentials of their customers against the biometric database. The Home Office claims this could be worth £325m in benefits to business.

And the benefits to individuals…. ?
There you go. You will be asked for your ID card by anyone who wishes to ask. And you will be denied service if you refuse to comply.

This was tagged on the end of a piece in the Grauniad noting that the Safety Elephant will charge you the full price of an ID card plus passport, even if you ‘opt out’ of having the physical card itself. This is to make having the card seem like a bargain, obviously!

One notable thing is that the Guardian (not alone, but…), while obviously opposed to ID cards, appears to be doing nothing to spell out their danger. They pick up on minor quibbles, like cost, and ignore major stuff like unfettered database access to anyone who will pay! Government charging people for data-rape, and then selling access to the data!! Ignored!!!

Why am I surprised? I’m not. Just very disappointed.

So instead, be inspired. Remember the wise people who came before us and Got Things Done. Remember those who despised the way things were, the way they were going, and got up and changed them themselves.

Today, I remember Margaret Mead.

Remeber what she knew to be truth:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

‘Labour isn’t wicked – but it’s doing just what the Nazis did’

That is the headline of an article in The Telegraph an asonishing headline and attack, and a part of the fallout from the anonymous email that is breaking the hypnotic spell that the wholley owned subsidiary of Murder Inc. has spread over this great nation.

Once again, these are pretty strong words…surprisingly strong.

In 1948 George Orwell wrote 1984. He envisioned a nation whose citizens have no expectation of privacy under a dictatorial government that relishes in perpetual war. A state whose alliances are arbitrary, and where deviation from the party line is considered a lapse in loyalty that is subject to harsh retribution. Orwell’s city is a prison where there is no place to hide from a government that can track a persons every move and even read their minds. People live under constant scrutiny and must show I.D. to travel in their own town. The goal; to know everything about everyone. People randomly disappear, or are publicly kidnapped. If an error is made, history can be revised or erased by a propaganda machine that is subject to no restraint. When the year 1984 rolled around, people thought Orwell had got it all wrong. Now it looks like the only thing he got wrong was the date.
2006 is the new 1984.

According to CardTechnology Magazine, parts of southern Taiwan are trying out a contactless digital money card, branded by MasterCard, for bus passengers. Apparently, the card cannot be validated fast enough for subway use. The cards are also being used for purchases at stores.

The Taiwanese trial is one of many that are going on around the world. The Feb 2006 print issue of CardTechnology magazine asks the question “Will Banks and Transit Create A Common Contactless Card?” on the front cover. There is a move all over the world to force citizens to give up hard currency and printed identification in favour of digital forms. Besides making our lives more costly, there are many people concerned with the negative repercussions on our lives.

These types of cards are part of a wave of digital identification measures that make it easier to identify someone anywhere in the world. The Observer Guardian has a strongly cautionary article regarding the possible erosion of civil liberties due to national identity types of cards, and the scare tactics that the UK government is using in media campaigns urging people to get a card.

These cards, originally intended to be voluntary, seem to have become mandatory, or so the article suggests. Without it, the UK government suggests, you can’t do this or this or that. Apparently, you will not be able to get a job, drug prescriptions, or even an Internet account without it. In short, you need it.

Consider how difficult it would be for travellers new to a country to get around, purchase stuff, get medical attention, etc, without somehow being part of the process. Gone are the days when you could just get on a plane and visit somewhere. Now, if you’re not part of a tour package, you have to worry about having the right identification and even the right transit cards, etc.

If you’re coming from a country that no longer uses print passports, what happens when you go to another country? Can they use your digital passport? Do they still expect a print passport, or do they have a digital system as well – one that’s incompatible with your digital passport?

Anyone who can access your digital identity card(s), in any country, can find out a lot about you. As human beings, we are flawed, and in our youth, we may make mistakes on our path to wisdom. Some of these mistakes might be recorded for eternity, available to far more people than you’re comfortable with having access.

This and many other social issues need to be sorted out before citizens should accept such drastic changes to the way we live our lives. […]

An excellent and insightful piece snarfed from here.

It is clear that anyone with even the slightest amount of intelligence understands that all of this is a very bad idea. I have a feeling that it will be difficult for it to be pulled off, either in the short term (preferable) or the long term. Like the Soviet Union that all of this is based on, tyranny simply cannot survive. There will be an explosion of hate, or just as the Berlin wall fell, people will simply ignore the rules en masse, so that the system collapses completely. I just hope that it doesnt take seventy years like it did for the Russians. I think that it wont take that long, because the means to mass communicate to millions is in the hands of everyone.

…No this is not the new Home Office ID computer building. Spiegel Online have a nice virtual tour of Hitler’s Chancellery designed to intimidate his foreign visitors. The Führer would have loved to have got his hands on the sort of technology being proposed by theHome Office. In German the gradual erosion of civil liberties that happened in the Third Reich is known as Salami-Taktik, as in slices of salami. New Labour has got hold of the same idea. Tony Blair’s legacy will be a lot of bad legislation that little by little will push Britain towards the genteel fascism spoken of by George Orwell, the author of 1984. The proposed ID card database is a massive intrusion into our civil liberties by a government drowning in its own sleaze. The dream of total social control that already costs us 100,000 pounds every day and any illusion that this is going to be a voluntary scheme is a sick joke. And, to honour the memory of the Nürnberg Race Laws, Section 13 deals with the creepy “invalidity and surrender” of a person’s ID card, or the withdrawal of a person’s identity by the state. Without the card it will be impossible to function as a citizen in the UK. In spite of the cost the card will remain the property of the state. Die Untermenschen kommen wieder. […]

http://ceridwendevi.blogspot.com/2006/03/cyber-walkabout.html 

You see?

A NATIONAL identity card scheme will be a “present” to terrorists, criminal gangs and foreign spies, one of Britain’s most respected former intelligence agents has told ministers.

[…]

Baroness Park, who was made a peer by Margaret Thatcher, passed a withering verdict on the proposed cards, ridiculing ministers’ suggestions that the system will make people safer. In fact, she said, the complete opposite is true.

“The very creation of such an enormous national identity register will be a present to terrorists; it will be a splendid thing for them to disrupt and blow up [!!!-mm],” she said.

“It will also provide valuable information to organised crime and to the intelligence services of unfriendly countries. It will be accessible to all of these,” she said.

[via bribery and database cracking, but of course peoples lives will be disrupted by ‘functionally fit’ false ID without the need for accurate NIR information – because some companies or institutions will accept the cards at face value]

The warning about the risk of foreign spying comes at a time when MI5, the domestic security service, has cut its counter-espionage budget, prompting concerns among MPs who oversee the UK intelligence services.

Baroness Park concluded: “I find it extraordinarily difficult to believe why anyone would voluntarily and enthusiastically come forward and say: ‘Do let me join this dangerous club’.”

Baroness Park is not the first former intelligence officer to question the value of a national ID card. Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, last year said she did not believe the cards would make Britain any safer from terrorist attack; they would quickly be copied, she said.

Whereas Dame Stella’s background was in combating internal threats, especially the IRA, Baroness Park has extensive experience of foreign intelligence operations.

[…]

From The Scotsman

–

In other news another government IT project has failed it – but this time due to ‘user non-compliance’, ;

At the meeting, the head of the watchdog, Sir John Bourn, said his report will say the government project had failed to win the “hearts and minds” of the NHS staff required to use it.
The project’s failure to “take the people in the National Health Service with them” meant it had become a “focus of dissension” amongst GPs and consultants.

And of course I mean;

At the meeting, the head of the watchdog, said her report will say the NIR project had failed to win the “hearts and minds” of the public required to register.
The project’s failure to “take in the people of the country” meant it had become a “focus of dissension” amongst Citizens and Residents.

So. Americans are now outraged that Murder Inc. wants to make it illegal to report that Murder Inc. is doing illegal stuff.

Someone on a forum sowhere had the AUDACITY to say:

Soon, a spew of British websites were set up to post reports Americans sent in :P

To which came the blistering reply:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,,1329858,00.html

the last time the british tried to tell the americans to get rid of bush, there was a torrent of abuse about bad teeth and mind your own fucking business you limey loosers. the brits were right of course, now you have more dead in iraq, patriot act passed again, and the further dismantling of your constitution and your democracy.

“Have you not noticed that Americans don’t give two shits what Europeans think of us? Each email someone gets from some arrogant Brit telling us why to NOT vote for George Bush is going to backfire, you stupid, yellow-toothed pansies … I don’t give a rat’s ass if our election is going to have an effect on your worthless little life. I really don’t. If you want to have a meaningful election in your crappy little island full of shitty food and yellow teeth, then maybe you should try not to sell your sovereignty out to Brussels and Berlin, dipshit. Oh, yeah – and brush your goddamned teeth, you filthy animals.
Wading River, NY”

So, dont expect the brits to come rushing to help you break the laws that you voted for in a childish fit of pique.

Every country gets the government it deserves. Britian is in the grips of a police state powergrab. We are busy. Clean up your own dogshit.

POW! POW! POW! POW! POW!

President Bush is facing criticism both abroad and at home. But that doesn’t mean that the British government is going to weaken its relationship with Washington. After Britain got into the Second World War, the British people began to learn a lot about the USA. Prior to the war, Hollywood was the only American institution that people knew a great deal about.

The American government had pursued an isolationist policy for many years and so I suppose it didn’t make much sense to be deeply interested in what Washington was thinking when every day the headlines were dominated by Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.

How different from the situation this week when the American President, though nominally supported by us, is in fact cruelly isolated.

Last week President Bush made a trip to Asia, which had a strange atmosphere to the point of being weird. He turned Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, into a kind of ghost town. The reason why could be found in a Punjabi opinion poll. 3% thought the USA was a trusted partner for Pakistan, while 60% didn’t even support the war on the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Oblivious to opinion polls and the eerie silence, President Bush gently urged Pakistan’s President Musharraf to get his agents into al-Qaeda and bring the terrorists to justice.

He also recommended a strong dose of American style democracy for Pakistan, apparently convinced that once the government of Pakistan did what the man in the street wanted all would be well – even though the man in the street had made his feelings towards the United States clear enough by keeping the same streets empty during the President’s visit. […]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4794164.stm

The contrast between ordinary BBQ writing and the writing of invited guests or people who are allowed to write whatever they feel, like the producer of Newsnight climbing down from his ‘Bittorrent is PeadoTerror’ shill piece is astonishing.

The sound of real thought, real history clear analysis and proper context is quite refreshing is it not?

Did anyone read reports about the streets of Islamabad being empty?

Hmmmmmmmmmm!