And in case you missed them, BLOGDIAL on Gardakil:

Gardasil…KILLS!
En Gardasil!
En Gardasil! – Touche!
En Gardasil: an update
Doing the math on Gardasil
Gardasil or Chop?
The Mengele Agenda

As we have said before on BLOGDIAL, and as others have said, changing the laws on Home Education in the UK using the pretext of ‘child safety’ is utter nonsense. Thanks to AhED, we now know scientifically that Home Educated children are in fact SAFER than children who are sent to school. It has to be said that no matter what case they bring to the attention of the press, the fact is that the vast majority of families are perfectly safe, do not need to be spied upon and should be left alone to get on with the business of the pursuit of happiness. The current and nauseating fad of holding up exceptional cases as a pretext for putting everyone under suspicion is morally wrong, socially corrosive and the result of bad thinking.

But I digress…

The only other pretext they have left in their quiver of evil is to claim that Home Educated children are not achieving academically. This has already been proven to be false, and now it has been proven yet again; the HSLDA has just released a new study proving that Home Educated children out perform state schooled children in every way. There are those who say that exams should not be the sole way that success is measured, and I agree with them; how you as a parent measure success is your own affair. What the HSLDA is doing is proving that Home Education should not come under scrutiny because people believe that the families that do it cannot achieve anything.

Finally the only reason why Home Education is under attack in the UK is that a bunch of Hard Core Socialists are hell bent on eliminating what they see as privilege, and will do anything to prevent a free thinking, high achieving superclass from coming into being. The same jealous urges that drove Labour to vow to close Eton and Harrow drives the call to ban Home Education. An army of Home Educated people, vast in number, would be a real threat to the established order and to the Socialist Utopia that is the wet dream of Ed Balls and his ilk.

What this report shows is that Home Educated children perform well across the board, and that the factors that the insane Socialists think are the divisive causes of inequality make no difference to the level of achievement; in other words, when the state is left out of education, all people do better as a result and income, gender, level of education of the parents has no effect on the much beloved outcomes. This is what they hate even more than ‘privilege’; the fact that everyone can not only live without them, but that everyone would be better off without them entirely.

Children who are not brainwashed and who can think for themselves, numbering over 100,000, constitutes a game changing army. As the state system continues to churn out illiterate, immoral, violent and destroyed people, and as the penny drops about how and why this is happening, more and more people will opt for Home Education, normalizing it and forever breaking the poison spell that has hypnotized people for generations; the spell that made people believe that the only place children can learn is in a school with a professional teacher.

[…]

New Nationwide Study Confirms Homeschool Academic Achievement
Ian Slatter
Director of Media Relations HSLDA

August 10, 2009

Each year, the homeschool movement graduates at least 100,000 students. Due to the fact that both the United States government and homeschool advocates agree that homeschooling has been growing at around 7% per annum for the past decade, it is not surprising that homeschooling is gaining increased attention. Consequently, many people have been asking questions about homeschooling, usually with a focus on either the academic or social abilities of homeschool graduates.

As an organization advocating on behalf of homeschoolers, Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) long ago committed itself to demonstrating that homeschooling should be viewed as a mainstream educational alternative.

We strongly believe that homeschooling is a thriving education movement capable of producing millions of academically and socially able students who will have a tremendously positive effect on society.

Despite much resistance from outside the homeschool movement, whether from teachers unions, politicians, school administrators, judges, social service workers, or even family members, over the past few decades homeschoolers have slowly but surely won acceptance as a mainstream education alternative. This has been due in part to the commissioning of research which demonstrates the academic success of the average homeschooler.

The last piece of major research looking at homeschool academic achievement was completed in 1998 by Dr. Lawrence Rudner. Rudner, a professor at the ERIC Clearinghouse, which is part of the University of Maryland, surveyed over 20,000 homeschooled students. His study, titled Home Schooling Works, discovered that homeschoolers (on average) scored about 30 percentile points higher than the national average on standardized achievement tests.

This research and several other studies supporting the claims of homeschoolers have helped the homeschool cause tremendously. Today, you would be hard pressed to find an opponent of homeschooling who says that homeschoolers, on average, are poor academic achievers.

There is one problem, however. Rudner’s research was conducted over a decade ago. Without another look at the level of academic achievement among homeschooled students, critics could begin to say that research on homeschool achievement is outdated and no longer relevant.

Recognizing this problem, HSLDA commissioned Dr. Brian Ray, an internationally recognized scholar and president of the non-profit National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), to collect data for the 2007–08 academic year for a new study which would build upon 25 years of homeschool academic scholarship conducted by Ray himself, Rudner, and many others.

Drawing from 15 independent testing services, the Progress Report 2009: Homeschool Academic Achievement and Demographics included 11,739 homeschooled students from all 50 states who took three well-known tests—California Achievement Test, Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, and Stanford Achievement Test for the 2007–08 academic year. The Progress Report is the most comprehensive homeschool academic study ever completed.

The Results

Overall the study showed significant advances in homeschool academic achievement as well as revealing that issues such as student gender, parents’ education level, and family income had little bearing on the results of homeschooled students.

There was little difference between the results of homeschooled boys and girls on core scores.

Boys—87th percentile
Girls—88th percentile

Household income had little impact on the results of homeschooled students.

$34,999 or less—85th percentile
$35,000–$49,999—86th percentile

$50,000–$69,999—86th percentile
$70,000 or more—89th percentile

The education level of the parents made a noticeable difference, but the homeschooled children of non-college educated parents still scored in the 83rd percentile, which is well above the national average.

Neither parent has a college degree—83rd percentile
One parent has a college degree—86th percentile

Both parents have a college degree—90th percentile

Whether either parent was a certified teacher did not matter.

Certified (i.e., either parent ever certified)—87th percentile
Not certified (i.e., neither parent ever certified)—88th percentile

Parental spending on home education made little difference.

Spent $600 or more on the student—89th percentile
Spent under $600 on the student—86th percentile

The extent of government regulation on homeschoolers did not affect the results.

Low state regulation—87th percentile
Medium state regulation—88th percentile

High state regulation—87th percentile

HSLDA defines the extent of government regulation this way:

States with low regulation: No state requirement for parents to initiate any contact or State requires parental notification only.

States with moderate regulation: State requires parents to send notification, test scores, and/or professional evaluation of student progress.

State with high regulation: State requires parents to send notification or achievement test scores and/or professional evaluation, plus other requirements (e.g. curriculum approval by the state, teacher qualification of parents, or home visits by state officials).

The question HSLDA regularly puts before state legislatures is, “If government regulation does not improve the results of homeschoolers why is it necessary?”

In short, the results found in the new study are consistent with 25 years of research, which show that as a group homeschoolers consistently perform above average academically. The Progress Report also shows that, even as the numbers and diversity of homeschoolers have grown tremendously over the past 10 years, homeschoolers have actually increased the already sizeable gap in academic achievement between themselves and their public school counterparts-moving from about 30 percentile points higher in the Rudner study (1998) to 37 percentile points higher in the Progress Report (2009).

As mentioned earlier, the achievement gaps that are well-documented in public school between boys and girls, parents with lower incomes, and parents with lower levels of education are not found among homeschoolers. While it is not possible to draw a definitive conclusion, it does appear from all the existing research that homeschooling equalizes every student upwards. Homeschoolers are actually achieving every day what the public schools claim are their goals—to narrow achievement gaps and to educate each child to a high level.

Of course, an education movement which consistently shows that children can be educated to a standard significantly above the average public school student at a fraction of the cost—the average spent by participants in the Progress Report was about $500 per child per year as opposed to the public school average of nearly $10,000 per child per year—will inevitably draw attention from the K-12 public education industry.

Answering the Critics

This particular study is the most comprehensive ever undertaken. It attempts to build upon and improve on the previous research. One criticism of the Rudner study was that it only drew students from one large testing service. Although there was no reason to believe that homeschoolers participating with that service were automatically non-representative of the broader homeschool community, HSLDA decided to answer this criticism by using 15 independent testing services for this new study. There can be no doubt that homeschoolers from all walks of life and backgrounds participated in the Progress Report.

While it is true that not every homeschooler in America was part of this study, it is also true that the Progress Report provides clear evidence of the success of homeschool programs.

The reason is that all social science studies are based on samples. The goal is to make the sample as representative as possible because then more confident conclusions can be drawn about the larger population. Those conclusions are then validated when other studies find the same or similar results.

Critics tend to focus on this narrow point and maintain that they will not be satisfied until every homeschooler is submitted to a test. This is not a reasonable request because not all homeschoolers take standardized achievement tests. In fact, while the majority of homeschool parents do indeed test their children simply to track their progress and also to provide them with the experience of test-taking, it is far from a comprehensive and universal practice among homeschoolers.

The best researchers can do is provide a sample of homeschooling families and compare the results of their children to those of public school students, in order to give the most accurate picture of how homeschoolers in general are faring academically.

The concern that the only families who chose to participate are the most successful homeschoolers can be alleviated by the fact that the overwhelming majority of parents did not know their children’s test results before agreeing to participate in the study.

HSLDA believes that this study along with the several that have been done in the past are clear evidence that homeschoolers are succeeding academically.

Final Thought

Homeschooling is making great strides and hundreds of thousands of parents across America are showing every day what can be achieved when parents exercise their right to homeschool and make tremendous sacrifices to provide their children with the best education available.

[…]

http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/200908100.asp

Public and Compulsory Schooling
Until the last few years there were few institutions in America that were held more sacred — especially by liberals — than the public school. Devotion to the public school had seized even those early Americans — such as Jeffersonians and Jacksonians — who were libertarian in most other respects. In recent years the public school was supposed to be a crucial ingredient of democracy, the fount of brotherhood, and the enemy of elitism and separateness in American life. The public school was the embodiment of the alleged right of every child to an education, and it was upheld as a crucible of understanding and harmony between men of all occupations and social classes who would rub elbows from an early age with all their neighbors.

Going hand in hand with the spread of public education have been compulsory attendance laws, which have forced all children up to a high — and continually increasing — minimum age, to attend either a public school or a private school certified as suitable by the state apparatus. In contrast to earlier decades, when a relatively small proportion of the population went to school in the higher grades, the entire mass of the population has thus been coerced by the government into spending a large portion of the most impressionable years of their lives in public institutions. We could easily have analyzed compulsory attendance laws [p. 120] in our chapter on involuntary servitude, for what institution is more evidently a vast system of incarceration? In recent years, Paul Goodman and other critics of education have trenchantly exposed the nation's public schools — and to a lesser extent their private appendages — as a vast prison system for the nation's youth, dragooning countless millions of unwilling and unadaptable children into the schooling structure. The New Left tactic of breaking into the high schools shouting "Jailbreak!" may have been absurd and ineffective, but it certainly expressed a great truth about the school system. For if we are to dragoon the entire youth population into vast prisons in the guise of "education," with teachers and administrators serving as surrogate wardens and guards, why should we not expect vast unhappiness, discontent, alienation, and rebellion on the part of the nation's youth? The only surprise should be that the rebellion was so long in coming. But now it is increasingly acknowledged that something is terribly wrong with America's proudest institution; that, especially in urban areas, the public schools have become cesspools of crime, petty theft, and drug addiction, and that little or no genuine education takes place amidst the warping of the minds and souls of the children.

Part of the reason for this tyranny over the nation's youth is misplaced altruism on the part of the educated middle class. The workers, or the "lower classes," they felt, should have the opportunity to enjoy the schooling the middle classes value so highly. And if the parents or the children of the masses should be so benighted as to balk at this glorious opportunity set before them, well, then, a little coercion must be applied — "for their own good," of course.

A crucial fallacy of the middle-class school worshippers is confusion between formal schooling and education in general. Education is a lifelong process of learning, and learning takes place not only in school, but in all areas of life. When the child plays, or listens to parents or friends, or reads a newspaper, or works at a job, he or she is becoming educated. Formal schooling is only a small part of the educational process, and is really only suitable for formal subjects of instruction, particularly in the more advanced and systematic subjects. The elementary subjects, reading, writing, arithmetic and their corollaries, can easily be learned at home and outside the school.

Furthermore, one of the great glories of mankind is its diversity, the fact that each individual is unique, with unique abilities, interests, and aptitudes. To coerce into formal schooling children who have neither the ability nor the interest in this area is a criminal warping of the soul and mind of the child. Paul Goodman has raised the cry that most children would be far better off if they were allowed to work at an early age, learn a trade, and begin to do that which they are most suited for. America was built by citizens and leaders, many of whom received little or no formal schooling, and the idea that one must have a high-school diploma — or nowadays, an A.B. degree — before he can begin to work and to live in the world is an absurdity of the current age. Abolish compulsory attendance laws and give children their head, and we will return to a nation of people far more productive, interested, creative, and happy. Many thoughtful opponents of the New Left and the youth rebellion have pointed out that much of the discontent of youth and their divorce from reality is due to the ever-longer period in which youth must remain at school, wrapped in a cocoon of dependence and irresponsibility. Well and good, but what is the main reason for this ever-lengthening cocoon? Clearly the whole system, and in particular the compulsory attendance laws, which preach that everyone must go perpetually to school — first to high school, now to college, and soon perhaps for a Ph.D. degree. It is the compulsion toward mass schooling that creates both the discontent and the ever-continuing shelter from the "real world." In no other nation and in no other age has this mania for mass schooling so taken hold.

[…]

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

It seems like the great and the good are finding that Britain has lost all of its appeal:

Cory Doctorow has written an article that sums up what is wrong with this country, and his piece chimes with what I have been writing.

Although he is a Candian native, Cory’s family came from the Soviet Union: he asked his grandmother why she didn’t stay there.

I asked her why she didn’t stay, and she shook her head like I’d asked the stupidest possible question. “It was the Soviet Union”, she said. She waved her hand, groped for the answer. “Papers,” she said, finally. “We had to carry papers. The police could stop you at any time and make you turn over your papers.” The floodgates opened. They spied on you. They made you spy on each other. Your grandfather wouldn’t have been allowed to stay – he was Polish, they wouldn’t let him stay with the family in Russia, he’d have to go back to Poland.

There are many people who are simply not going to put up with what is happening in the UK and are either planning to leave or have already left. Many more will fight till the bitter end. This is not just ‘foreigners’, but British citizens also.

Only a total fool, having full knowledge of recent history, would wait around to be ‘Kristallnacht’d’; and of course, if that does not happen, there are an infinite gradation of bad things that can happen beneath that, like the state saying you cannot remove ‘your’ money or your property when you leave. There was a time in the very recent past where the maximum you could take out of the UK was £100. Anyone that does not think this can happen again is insane, especially with the economic chaos that is about to unfold before our eyes. The US has already passed laws that are aimed at stopping americans from leaving – the ‘Hotel California’ laws – what makes anyone think that Britain will not follow them? They follow them everywhere else, so why not there?

Cory then moved to Britain, where he found—as Bella has—that his status here is at the whim of the disgusting, petty, spiteful little cunts in government, responding to the BNP dog-whistle morons who populate this green and increasingly unpleasant land.

Britain is run by disgusting, petty, spiteful little cunts; it is not populated by disgusting, petty, spiteful little cunts. The same Britain that we all remember and loved is still there, as are most of the people who inhabited it; its just hidden under a layer of grime that needs to be jetwashed off.

Britain can be great again. This next election is clearly its last chance; the things that have been done since the Bliar regime are so contrary to everything that is right, if the Tories do not move to undo them, Britain will be lost. I know many people who are going to leave this beleaguered island if the Tories do not clean house. There are only so many chances that people are willing to give a place, and if it does not improve, it is pointless to stay and suffer the indignities of a police state when you can simply get on a train and LEAVE.

People from all over the world have given up on Britain. They do not come here for medical treatment anymore (for example) instead, they fly to Dubai, where they get a high standard of treatment, equivalent or better than what you get in Britain, without having to be treated like a criminal. In the end, when this country starts to wither, as it becomes culturally isolated, they will either have to change their ways or end up being just like a Soviet satellite state; grey, grim, paranoid, devoid of innovation on all fronts, purged of individuals and individuality, freedom-less and inert… like soot, the chemically spent remains of combustion.

A few years later, I was living with my partner, and had fathered a British daughter (when I mentioned this to a UK immigration official at Heathrow, he sneeringly called her “half a British citizen”). We were planning a giant family wedding in Toronto when the news came down: the Home Secretary had unilaterally, on 24 hours’ notice, changed the rules for highly skilled migrants to require a university degree. My immigration lawyers confirmed it: people who’d established residence in the UK for years and years, who’d built businesses and employed Britons here, who owned homes and given birth to British children, were being thrown out of the country, taking their tax-payments, jobs and families with them.

My partner and I scrambled. We got married. We applied for a spousal visa. A few weeks later, I presented myself in Croydon at the Home Office immigration centre to turn over my biometrics and have a visa glued into my Canadian passport. I got two years’ breathing room. My family could stay in Britain.

Then came last week’s announcement: effective immediately, spousal visa holders (and foreign students) would be issued mandatory, biometric radio-frequency ID papers that we will have to carry at all times. And I started to look over my shoulder.

You must do what you think is right of course.

We have spoken about this before; about changing the rules half way through the game:

[…]

Many people came to the UK because the rules were favorable. Now, after settling down, doing good work, bringing prosperity and creativity to the UK, the government wants to change the rules halfway through the game. That is not cricket.

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=986

The financial crowd understands this better than anyone, “… if the rules can change in this way, arbitrarily, unfairly, insanely, then its best to get out NOW before some other, even worse, more insane rules come down the pipeline, locking us in here”. That is why so many financiers have already left and have vowed never to return.

When someone asks you to ‘hand over your biometrics’, which actually means GETTING FINGERPRINTED LIKE A CRIMINAL, it means that a fundamental line has been crossed. With the NIR, once you hand over your fingerprints, YOU ARE IN THE SYSTEM. It doesn’t matter if they issue an ID Card or not, the mobile fingerprint scanners they are going to deploy mean that your fingerprints ARE THE ID CARD.

Its pointless to now, after having submitted to violation, leave the UK because they are discriminating against foreigners by compelling them to carry ID Cards. You are already in their system to the exact same degree that you would be had you been made to get an ID Card right now.

Biometric (violating) VISAS are vendor driven garbage. They do not improve border security or stop illegal immigration. There are better ways to issue VISAS that do not threaten the recipient.

Canadians can get six month entry when they come to the UK at any port. It is a mistake to get a VISA if you are a Canadian, IMHO. Everyone has their limits, their pain threshold…

Yes, that’s right. And why should immigrants have to do this? They are easy targets, of course. I am now caught up in a similar situation: I am in a relationship—and have been for some time—and the continuance of that relationship is at the whim of bureaucrats and filthy, disgusting, morally bankrupt politicians and the filthy, disgusting, morally bankrupt morons who elect them.

This is a problem that is similar to stock traders and market timing; when is it the optimum moment to exit the market and cash out? If you leave too early, you might miss out on some market movements. If you leave too late, you might not get out at all.

I have seen, at first hand, the second-rate status accorded to those who want to live and work here, and the callousness with which their situation is dealt with. I have seen the way in which this country deals with immigrants, and I dislike it intensely.

The horror stories from Lunar House are legend.

Every one of these measures was beta-tested on less-advantaged groups before it was rolled out to the general public.

It is, quite simply, a divide et impera tactic and it is one that I, as a positive libertarian who believes that we are all human, find morally repugnant.

Libertarians know all about this. There are a growing number of Libertarians in the west. Sales of seminal individualist works are skyrocketing. If enough people get the message, and the coming collapse will make this more likely, then it is possible that we might get the sort of countries that we desire. By the way, if you have not seen it, see this.

I have constantly pointed out that all of these measures tested on minority “undesirables” will be applied to us sooner or later—and probably sooner.

CCTVs used the be the exclusive territory of bank vaults and prisons. Network wiretapping and censorship began in schools, “to protect children”.

Now, we immigrants are to be the beta testers for Britain’s sleepwalk into the surveillance society. We will have to carry internal passports and the press will say, “If you don’t like it, you don’t have to live here – it’s unseemly for a guest to complain about the terms of the hospitality.” But this beta test is not intended to stop with immigrants. Government freely admits that immigrants are only the first stage of a universal rollout of mandatory biometric RFID identity cards. What happens to us now will happen to you, next.

Even if it were not the case hat what happens to immigrants now will happen to the natives next (Kristallnacht) it is wrong, and you should not put up with it.

Everyone, when they study Germany, wonders, “what would I have done if I was living in Germany then?”. Now is your chance to find out. As we have seen, some people run to legitimize themselves with the state, getting into a marriage at a time other than their choosing, and them to ‘turn over their biometrics’ for the sake of immigration status. Others opt to disappear, or leave or game the system. The ones with nothing to lose burn their fingerprints off and go hard core. There are many different responses to threats.

Of course, everyone with half a brain cell knows that no one would desire to come to Britain as a ‘sponger’ if there was no welfare state. Libertarians abhor the welfare / warfare state because it is founded on stealing. A Libertarian society would be able to accommodate ‘foreigners’ since the state would not be stealing from anyone to pay for the ‘scroungers’. All resentment of immigration would virtually disappear; the only people harboring ill feeling being the racists who have ethnic identity issues.

ID Cards are going to be justified as a way to control the scroungers, and set the world to rights. They are an unintended consequence of the welfare state; something started with good intentions but which has ended up almost destroying Britain.

No, we aren’t seeing people wandering around with yellow stars on their clothing—but we are seeing them forced to get ID cards that we would never wish to carry ourselves. And what do we do?

Nothing.

The conclusion is simple: had the Nazis risen here, we would have not put up any more protest—as our neighbours were taken to the ghettos and then to the death camps—than the Germans did. In fact, we would probably complain less.

As the repulsive general population continue to make shitty jokes about “not mentioning the war”, they are blind to the fact that—had it happened here—they would have been happy to hassle those Jews onto the cattle trucks.

Because, as our own pogrom happens, I hear not a fucking spark from the “great British public”. They are too busy devouring Coronation Street to care.

If this is true, it means that you will have to do what the Doctorowictz family did. Leave, and never come back. This is the choice that you face; you either stay and fight risking everything, or preserve yourself and your wealth and leave. If the British really have degenerated to the degree that you describe, then they are beyond saving. Many people who felt that they owed a debt to this great country, and who fought to help it keep some semblance of sanity, like Doctorow, who in writing that article is contributing to a place that has been his home and which gave him his wife and daughter, are going to have to decide when the time is right to get out before it is too late. If they decide to flee.

Nothing lasts forever. And that really is literally true. The Britain that we all loved may well be gone forever… and we were lucky to have tasted it at all. From what I can tell, there are many people who are still The Real British™ they think like the British used to think, they act like the British used to think, and, most encouragingly, some of them are young.

Very encouraging.

On the other hand, we have, The Cancer That Is Killing Britain, the physical embodiment of which can be seen in the shapes of the presenters and talking heads in this clip:

This is, essentially, a battle against Cancer, a biological struggle. Either the body will survive, or the cancer will kill it.

We are encouraged to spy on our neighbours and report their suspicious activity. We can be stopped and searched with no particularised suspicion, and during these searches, police officers can and do examine such things as the books we’re reading and the personal notes we’ve made.

This is all true, and all horrible.

What we have to do is look to history, recent history, to see how it can all end. It is important to say not only the truth about how things are bad, but what can happen to turn it all around.

East Germany is my favorite example:

If the British are anything like the Germans, the ID Card alone will not be enough to force a massive change in Britain. They might be made of stronger stuff… who knows? One thing is for sure; the ID Card, if it is not scrapped entirely, along with the NIR, is just the beginning; the aparatchicks have many new monstrosities planned that will be hinged on the NIR/ID Card. When they roll them out, and they begin to bite, THEN we will see a Poll Tax style revolt in the UK.

The question is, once again, are you going to wait around for everyone to wake up, are you going to cut your loses and get out, or what?

It might take seventy years for Britain and its people to grow a backbone; if you are over thirty, you are not going to see it, that is for sure, and even if you do, the only pleasure you will get is seeing the evil apparatus destroyed on TV while you are on your deathbead.

This country is dead as a free nation—when an article about a fundamentally unimportant subject such as computer OSes can get more comments than anything about civil liberties, it is an indication of the intellectual paucity of our citizens—yes, even the bien pensant of the blogosphere.

OSes are actually VERY important. A free OS keeps you and your information private. In a country where omnipresent surveillance of computers and communications is on the horizon, the free OS is the modern equivalent of an unlicensed photocopier in the Soviet Union. It is a computer under YOUR control doing YOUR bidding, that cannot be hacked into by default under secret arrangements with the manufacturers.

But I digress…

Cory has said that—if nothing changes—he will leave this shithole we call Britain. I don’t know if I can do the same—where is there to go?—but for the very first time, I am seriously considering it.

Even if there is ‘nowhere to go’, which is not the case, wherever you go, if it is the same as Britain police state wise, at least the weather will be better.

I am ashamed and afraid: I thought that I lived in one of the world’s great and tolerant civilisations: over the last few years, I have come to realise that is it simply a gilded cage.

There is nothing to be ashamed of. If you did not make it this way, you are not to blame. You actually did live in one of the world’s greatest and tolerant countries; in many ways, it still is. Britain has just lost its way, and it is not too late for it to change course and restore its former greatness. There are still enough people to make it happen, and believe it or not, you are one of them.

It is why this end to V For Vendetta, desirable though it may be, will never happen.

I wouldn’t be so sure.

There is a reason why that film has struck such a chord with everyone who watches it.

Nor will the people of Britain walk the streets in masks. Our “respresentative democracy” is just a sympton of the greater malaise—the shits in Parliament simply reflect the shits who elected them.

Libertarians know what representative democracies really are, so lets not go there.

For every one person who thinks, and evaluates and tries to be just, there are ten thousand ignorant bigots—repulsive in their stupidity and prejudice—whose voice carries far more weight (ten thousand times the weight, in fact) than that of those who can think. It is why this country is such a fucking shithole—because the filth who live in it vastly outnumber those who are decent.

Cough! cough!:

[…]

And this, I fear, is the problem. This genial idiot is the sort of person who will be the interface between you and the NIR. They will accept anything that is put in front of them; they have no idea of literally any concept of morality or the reality of ‘the other’. They are the people who when told that pressing a button someone will recieve an electric shock, press the button without any hesitation. They are without imagination, human drones, Eloi, animals, sub human, and the worst thing about them is that they have the vote, which means that they have control by proxy over how the world evolves. This is unnaceptable to anyone with even half a brain cell.

[…]

BLOGDIAL 2006

Look out for the yellow stars: the concentration camps will not be far behind. And as their friends and neighbours are carted off to the gulags, then the British people take to the streets.

But it will not be in protest, it will not be to condemn—no, it will be to cheer.

[…]

http://devilskitchen.me.uk/2009/08/no-it-isnt-greener.html

You can thank your lucky stars that you will not be (t)here to see and hear it.

Watch Pam Probst – History of Government Schools (The Libertarian Alternative) in Educational  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

10
Under the doctrine of Meyer v. Nebraska, we think it entirely plain that the Act of 1922 unreasonably interferes with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control. As often heretofore pointed out, rights guaranteed by the Constitution may not be abridged by legislation which has no reasonable relation to some purpose within the competency of the state. The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.

[…]

http://openjurist.org/268/us/510

A beautiful part of the Supreme Court decision mentioned in that video. Sadly, the rest of the decision (as far as HE is concerned) is not what it should have been, but the principle here is spelled out correctly. Children are not creatures or property of the state. The state has no right to standardize children. Those who nurture children and direct their destiny, THE PARENTS, have THE RIGHT coupled with the HIGH DUTY to prepare them for additional obligations. Note how ‘additional obligations’ is not defined. What those obligations may be and to whom is up to THE PARENT and not THE STATE.

People who advocate the opposite of this, that children should be standardized, that the state has the right to do this, and to determine the obligations that a child must prepare for (the Every Child Matters outcomes) are, by definition, anti-liberty, anti-family and fundamentally wrong headed.

But you know this!

Jeremy Yallop is a home-educating parent who thinks attempts to intervene are based on faulty evidence, and says ‘No, learning is both more enjoyable and effective without coercion’

Some parents, we are told, believe that their children should be free to follow their own interests at their own pace. Mr Webb finds this “bizarre”; he apparently prefers to force them to learn things of no interest to them at a pace outside their control.

In fact, the autonomous educators so despised by Mr Webb simply practise what most people know instinctively: that learning is both more enjoyable and more effective without coercion. Every teacher knows the impossibility of teaching disaffected pupils; anyone with a hobby knows the joy and effortlessness of learning when the interest is engaged. Such learning may involve teaching, books, conversations, experiments and whatever else proves helpful. Extensive research by Dr Alan Thomas and Harriet Pattison at the Institute of Education in London has shown the autonomous approach to be “astonishingly effective”.

Chris Ford, now completing a biomedical research PhD, was autonomously educated from birth until he went to college, aged 14, to take A- levels.

Alex Dowty, autonomously educated from the age of eight, decided against GCSEs and A-levels; instead, he took Open University courses in politics and humanities, which led to an unconditional offer to read law at Oxford. So autonomous education does not bar children from the professions, as Mr Webb fears.

Graham Badman’s review of home education is a striking example of what happens when there is no interest in the subject studied. He has produced a pitiful excuse of a report, the shortcomings of which include an embarrassing failure to understand the existing law. The confusion between rights and duties that Mr Webb rightly deplores does not reside with home educators but with Mr Badman, who assures us that he will not argue against “the rights of parents as set out in section 7 of the Education Act 1996”, although he does imagine a need to balance these with the rights of children. In fact, the passage he refers to does not confer rights at all; instead, it imposes a duty on parents to provide a suitable education. The propaganda about “balance” fails in the face of this simple truth. Nobody will believe that parents’ duties are incompatible with children’s rights.

Mr Badman wishes to appear very concerned for children’s rights, especially their right to have a “voice”. Strangely, he did not consider giving them a voice in his report. There are quotes from vested interests (teachers’ unions) and irrelevant campaign groups (the British Humanist Association). There is a quote from the Church of England’s submission, carefully cropped to conceal the fact that it opposes the report’s recommendations. Yet, although he received about 2,000 submissions from “home-educating parents or children”, Mr Badman fails to mention the view of a single child. The charity Education Otherwise surveyed 588 such children, who overwhelmingly rejected Mr Badman’s proposals.

What are these proposals that children reject so strongly? One of the most shocking gives local authorities the power to enter the homes of every home-educating family and take children from their parents for interrogation. A second abolishes the freedom to educate at home without official permission. Instead, a licence is required, which may be refused.

Politicians of all parties are joining home-educated children in condemning the proposals. Fifty-six MPs have signed early day motions expressing concern. A parliamentary inquiry into the review is already under way.

Mr Badman was tasked with linking home education and child abuse in order to justify a change in the law. He failed spectacularly, producing only a single sentence of evidence, which falls apart under scrutiny: “the number of children known to children’s social care in some LAs is disproportionately high relative to the size of their home educating population”. In fact, talk of proportions is meaningless, as the number of home educators is unknown, and the statistic itself is irrelevant, since children may be “known to social care” because of poor health, referrals by neighbours alarmed by children not at school, or many other reasons. Freedom of information requests submitted to all local authorities by Action for Home Education reveal that abuse is actually significantly rarer among home educators than in the general population.

Ill-informed prejudice and shoddy statistics are poor grounds for changing the law. Mr Webb’s and Mr Badman’s failed arguments only confirm there is no convincing case to be made.

[…]

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6019184

and that, my friends, is what we call ‘total pwnage’.

Despite the unprecedented outrage, universal condemnation, and being proven wrong, they still plan to ‘legislate in the autumn’. If they dare to do so, everyone will call on the Tories to undo this utter nonsense after the general election, where Neu Liebour will be wiped out. I imagine that the Tories will use the instrument of a single act to erase the total evil that has been unleashed upon Britain; ‘The Restoration of Liberty Act’, which will at a single stroke, remove from the statutes every ill conceived, fascistic, totalitarian pice of garbage Bliar and Brown and their corrupt cohorts brought in. It will simultaneously remove:

the ID Card

the National Identity Register

ContactPoint

the ‘anti paedophile database’

RIPA

for starters.

Not surprisingly, we have been over this before on BLOGDIAL, 2006.

In the meantime, if they dare to enact any legislation to try and control Home Educators, they will create a new class of criminal – up to 120,000 of them – who will all refuse to allow the state to interfere in their rights and duties. Many who do not want to be criminalized are already planning to escape to Scotland and places beyond this beleaguered place.

And there you have it. No matter what evil the dying scorpion manages to squirt out of its bladder before it is crushed under foot, no one is going to obey it, and the Tories are going to erase it.

Translation… YOU LOSE you swines!

James Gillray (1756-1815) was the pre-eminent caricaturist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and is considered by many to be the father of the political cartoon. His colorful political and social satires were wildly popular in his own time for their cruel and scurrilous content, which was often directed at George III, his family, and other leading political figures. Just as popular were his military caricatures of Napoleon and both French and British forces during the Napoleonic Wars.

James Gillray, sometimes spelled Gilray (13 August 1757 – 1 June 1815), was a British caricaturist and printmaker famous for his etched political and social satires, mainly published between 1792 and 1810.

He was born in Chelsea. His father, a native of Lanark, had served as a soldier, losing an arm at the Battle of Fontenoy, and was admitted, first as an inmate, and afterwards as an outdoor pensioner, at Chelsea Hospital. Gillray commenced life by learning letter-engraving, at which he soon became an adept. This employment, however, proving irksome, he wandered about for a time with a company of strolling players. After a very checkered experience he returned to London and was admitted a student in the Royal Academy, supporting himself by engraving, and probably issuing a considerable number of caricatures under fictitious names. His caricatures are almost all in etching, some also with aquatint, and a few using stipple technique. None can correctly be described as engravings, although this term is often loosely or ignorantly used of them. Hogarth’s works were the delight and study of his early years. Paddy on Horseback, which appeared in 1779, is the first caricature which is certainly his. Two caricatures on Rodney’s naval victory, issued in 1782, were among the first of the memorable series of his political sketches.

Gillray is still revered as one of the most influential political caricaturists of all time, and among the leading cartoonists on the political stage in the United Kingdom today, both Steve Bell and Martin Rowson acknowledge him as probably the most influential of all their predecessors in that particular arena.

The look of the Vogon race in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film were in part inspired by Gillray’s work.
There is a good account of Gillray in Wright’s History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art (1865).

[…]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gillray

The prints of James Gillray come from a time when Britain was a very different place. It was a nation of tough, independent minded people, freedom loving and enjoying, with a love of free speech to the extent that the caricatures of James Gillray, that ‘attacked’ anyone he liked (or rather disliked), from the King down, were widely circulated and much admired. It was a time of reason, of true scientists exploring and improving life; when the true spirit of Britain was out in the open, working in the world for the good (mostly).

What is Britain like now?

It is a country where not only are the citizens disarmed, and where they cannot even send a shooting team to compete anywhere, but they cannot even use their own language for fear of reprisals from a group of unaccountable aparatchicks, leeches and social engineers. The new ‘hate speech’ laws have turned Britain into a place where even in private, you cannot say what you think without fear of losing your job.

Schoolboy ‘bullies’ are now hauled into court for speaking words. Whatever you might think about the way children should behave in a school, it is totally insane that the headmaster of a school should not be able to discipline and expel a bad pupil who breaks school rules, and that an actual court case was brought against the pupil in that last link.

Which brings us on to the Badman report saga, which is becoming more absurd by the day.

DCSF have refused to release the Submissions to the Elective Home Education Review, citing that its author is being ‘harassed and vilified” on the internets.

All of the Home Educators commenting on this independently and quite naturally come to the same conclusion; they have been hurt by this report, which equates their parenting to a form of abuse. It is THEY who have been vilified:

M Stafford left an annotation (19 July 2009)

So telling the general public in purposely twisted press releases that home education is a cover for abuse and servitude is not vilifying and harassing.

Graham Badman has produced a poor and dishonest report, misused statistics and compared apples and pears in order to produce a predecided result.

The DCSF needs to be open and transparent about this information, that is what would be in the public interest instead of trying to hide the duplicity involved in this report.

and

Emma Hornby left an annotation (20 July 2009)

I think Mr Badman should be looking long and hard at his conscience.

He is being heavily criticized for a piece of work which, it gradually emerges, is substandard in many respects. It went beyond the explicit terms of the brief, and the terms on which he consulted the public, and the recommendations follow neither from the brief nor from the data, so far as that can be verified. The use of stats is embarrassing. He has misrepresented the submission of the CofE and at least one selectively-quoted HEer, as well as, it emerges, working from notes of meetings with people who are not prepared to sign off those notes as an accurate record of the conversation.

There are two possible courses of action for Mr Badman here. One is to reject the criticisms, instead seeing himself as vilified and harassed (and this course becomes harder to sustain with every fresh revelation, to be honest), and the second is to say “mea culpa”, withdraw his report and either rewrite it more honestly and competently, or return the fee and let the DCSF commission someone else to complete the task.

I do not intend either to harass or vilify Mr Badman here. But his report and his conduct are both vulnerable to justified criticism, and the sooner he appreciates that, the sooner he will be able to begin restoring his reputation.

Those are just two of the many comments swirling around the internets. The fact of the matter is that this report, if it had been done with any kind of academic rigor, would be able to withstand any scrutiny. And another FOIA requester, Harold Davis, puts it very plainly, that there is no justification whatsoever for these submissions to be withheld:

[…]

You refer to vilification and harassment. Vilification means presenting as vile, and while it may often be uncondonable, it is not a criminal offence, and politicians and other public servants are vilified in numerous publications every day. As you are doubtless aware, many have been vilified in respect of expenses claims they have made. Indeed, when such information has been released, many in the population have very quickly formed or agreed with the view that the makers of such claims are “vile”. That is all part and parcel of the holding of public officials to account. Such a course of events does not in itself constitute the breaking of any law or the commission of any civil wrong. When vilification goes too far, surely the correct course of action is a civil suit for defamation or an application for a court order against the individuals responsible, not the use, without the prior launch of any such suit or the application for any such order (I presume you would have referred to these if they had happened), of s38 of the Freedom of Information Act.

If you would maintain that the risk of vilification is so great as to endanger Mr Badman’s health, this of course raises the question of what information you might hold that, if released, would give grist to the mill of the unidentified vilifiers. Section 38 is not meant to be invoked to protect individuals against the effects of the disclosure, for example, of actions by them which, if disclosed, would JUSTIFIABLY affect their reputations in a negative direction. This is so even if other individuals are already speculating in public that such information may exist, to the “distress” of the individual concerned. Of course there is a risk test, but the test, in my submission, is much stronger than the Department appears to believe. The assumption should be in favour of disclosure.

[…]

Home Ed Forums

Now this is an interesting situation. They do not want to release these documents, clearly because their release will fatally compromise this report, and destroy the reputations of everyone involved in its manufacture. It would not take a great leap of imagination to speculate that all the submissions have said the same thing that the CofE said; that there is no need for a change in the law, and that the status quo is more than adequate.

If they do go to court over this ‘vilification and harassment’, then during the discovery process the opposition will certainly demand everything submitted to this report to be released and entered into the public record, since they are material in determining whether or not what everyone is saying about the report is true or not, and whether the ‘vilification’ was justified or unjustified.

That is what is called being between a rock and a hard place.

This report, as we said before, should never have been written. Had it never been written and the conclusions of the 2007 consultations taken on board as the final word, Britain would still be the best place to Home Educate, and no one would have had to waste their time knocking down this utter rubbish. Now we have the very real prospect of families being disrupted as they either fight this insanity or flee the country to more rational freedom loving countries.

What sort of country can produce a report like this, where the submissions that fed it are made secret on the most weak and irrational of pretexts, the report being clearly biased, ill informed and wrong, which subsequently be accepted unchallenged and unquestioned to make new law? I would guess that reasonable people who know what Britain used to be like would not say that Britain is that sort of country. Secret contributions to false reports used to make bad law are the sort of thing you used to expect and get in the Soviet Union, not a ‘free society’ or ‘free country’ like Britain.

The Home Educating parents that are mounting a vigorous defence of themselves are demonstrating that they are head and shoulders above the crowd. These are the parents who are going to unleash a generation of Britons who are of the same quality and strength of character that we know the British used to have in the days of James Gillray. Even now, some of these Home Educated children are writing letters to complain that they do not want to be disturbed in any way, taking the authorities up on the claptrap that the voices of children are to be heard, only to be patted on the head and patronized.

Those tactics might work with a child, but they are clearly not working with the parents of these children.

Apart from the nauseating patting on the head, the people who are refusing to release the submissions are allowing themselves to be sucked into the black hole that this report has become. Clearly they are not being advised correctly, or are being given orders to suppress this information. If they have been advised to withhold this information, they need to say who it is that gave them this advice or these orders in order to separate and insulate themselves from these incorrect decisions; clearly the people who are the public interface for answering these requests are not applying the law correctly, and this could come back to damage them as this report is destroyed and discredited, as they will have acted improperly by invoking rules that should not have been invoked to try and stop the report being exposed. The first people that will be sacrificed as scape goats are these low level aparatchicks who are, in every instance, expendable. All the people who were responsible for this debacle have already secured new jobs for themselves or will never be discarded from their high level positions; they might get shuffled around, but they will not be brought down. It is the underlings, the messengers who are being ordered to act improperly who will get the chop.

If I were any of the people behind any of this I would now declare that this has been a monumental error in judgement. They failed to understand the true nature of Home Education, and this caused them to ask for a report with a pre-determined outcome that they should not have commissioned. They misjudged the parents who Home Educate who are clearly amongst the most intelligent, creative, capable, resourceful, dogged and passionate people in the UK (actually, they are REAL PEOPLE of the type that made Britain Great). These Home Educators have demonstrated that they are able to act in concert when necessary. This is highly effective in both Home Educating and in refuting and repulsing attacks, as has been amply demonstrated by the spectacular results reflected in the children of Home Educators, and the state’s pathetic response to being put under a high powered microscope controlled by Home Educators.

Many Home Educators are working on this problem from every conceivable angle. They are not going to rest until this report is totally exposed for what it is, and it is thrown out in its entirety. They have been forced to do this in order to protect their families from the outrageous, unjustifiable and absurd recommendations of this report.

It is patently absurd that the staff of a department and the people associated with it can discriminate against and call an entire group of people unfit parents and accuse them of being child abusers, who must allow their children to be separated from them for arbitrary, humiliating and deeply suspicious inspections during a home invasion; only to withdraw into their dirty little shells when those very same offended and injured parents defend themselves vigorously by requesting the facts and using all their skills to expose the villains.

But then again, this is just about what we expect from these people who are The Cancer That Is Killing Britain.

Take a look at this, “Godfrey on Home Education”:

“An attack on home educators is?an attack on all our Liberties. They must be defended from an all powerful state.”

“What is it that they are so afraid of?” asks Godfrey Bloom, UKIP MEP.

If you read BLOGDIAL, you already know what it is they are afraid of:

[…]

What is worse, is that where there are data on how Home Education performs, the pupils that are measured outperform the state fodder in every way. The top universities are bending over backwards to recruit these exceptional students, taking places away from the state educated ‘customers’. Once they see this trend increasing, the immediate reaction of the state is to imagine a worst case scenario, where there are hundreds of thousands of Home Educated children in the country that will eventually emerge as a superclass that will dominate everyone like the old public school boys did (and still do).

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1818

They are terrified that a superclass of people are being created, that will number over 100,000 in a very short number of years. These people will be independent thinkers, who have been properly trained in ways that produce (and that historically have produced) the greatest minds. They will be capable, unflappable, unprogrammable, steadfast, quick witted and very very powerful.

100,000 people is an army. The Home Educated army of the future will be, at the very least, able to totally dominate society. They will ascend to all the highest positions in industry, finance and politics, completely shutting out everyone else. And by the way, everyone else will be so dumbed down and brainwashed that it will be easy for even the weakest Home Educated child to shine like Einstein in comparison.

That is a real and present danger to the people whose aim it is to create a docile, pliable and unthinking population.

As it is today, they have partially succeeded. There are very few people in the western world coming out of the state school system who understand the scientific method. This is why it has been so easy to sell the Global Warming Hoax to the masses; and of course the most dangerous people, legislators, are unable to tell the difference between science and junk science. Had the legislatures of the west been filled with Home Educated people, Cap and Trade (for example) would never have been brought to the legislature for consideration.

Which brings us back to the Badman report. AHEd have released a briefing paper in response to the Elective Home Education Review Report and Recommendations. It is a great piece of work, and it calls a spade a spade:

The freedoms threatened by these proposals are freedoms necessary to every family and not just home educators. To put it simply, the party currently in power does not trust parents to raise their children and wish instead to control all aspects of our lives to ensure they are in line with a centralised agenda.

Anyone who thinks that undermining the homes and families of children in this way will not destabilise children and deprive them of a sense of security is wrong.

Anyone who thinks that forcing children to exhibit to strangers their educational attainment and progress will not disrupt and undermine their education is wrong.

Anyone who thinks that obliging families to undergo forced access to their home and forcing children to allow stranger access to their person separated from parents, will not make children confused and vulnerable to illicit approaches by other adults is wrong. It is child abuse.

The officials who agree to carry out such state sponsored grooming of school age children may do so in a gentle voice and with a big smile on their faces, but that will not change the nature of what they are doing. It is child abuse.

The purpose of forced registration, home visit inspections and compulsory interview of children separated by law from parents is control. For what?

[…]

http://ahed.pbworks.com/BriefingPaperHEReview

AHEd have hit the nail on the head, and their conclusion is completely correct. What the report’s proposals are advocating is child abuse nothing more, and nothing less.

Like the title of this post says, this is deeply, deeply sinister.

Alex Jones has been investigating this for over fourteen years.

A broad spectrum of opinion on this matter has been delivered in many places, from people in all walks of life. These proposals are most definitely WRONG, and they should be DROPPED IMMEDIATELY. It is abundantly clear that there are enough safeguards and checks in place and that the law is already adequate.

If these proposals are not dropped, then harm will come to families and children in this country. Harm is the only thing that can come out of this unless the report fails and no changes are made and the status quo is solidified by virtue of the report being utterly condemned.

Right, that’s it. We now have a new category called ‘TC TI KB’ (The Cancer That Is Killing Britain) I would pronounce it, “Tick Tea Kay Bee”…. but thats just me:

Can a film critic claim to be libertarian while calling for the banning of a film he hasn’t watched?

This (oxy)moron thinks so.

There’s a new film out filled with sex and violence. Sounds like fun. I know there are those who think Libertarians would have infant-school day trips to watch it, but not so. It would be the parents’ responsibility to decide whether their child can watch it and once they’re old enough to join the Army, they’re old enough to make their own decisions. Joining the Army can be a life or death decision. No bigger decision is possible so if they’re judged old enough for that, they’re old enough for anything. Currently the Army takes recruits at 16 and a half years old and they could be killed defending the country before they’re old enough to go into the booze aisle of a supermarket. If you think that makes sense, I have a very nice bridge for sale.

Back to our authoritarian libertarian, Christopher Hart.

A film which plumbs new depths of sexual explicitness, excruciating violence and degradation has just been passed as fit for general consumption by the British Board of Film Classification.
General consumption? You mean they’ll shelve it with Disney films?

They have given the film an 18 certificate.

Aha, this is the restricted general consumption that goes along with compulsory volunteering, killing in the name of peace and A* grades without knowing the subject – also known as ‘freedom is slavery, war is peace, ignorance is strength’ in that order. I see.

As we all know, this is meaningless nowadays in the age of the DVD because sooner or later, thanks to the gross irresponsibility of some parents, any film that is given general release will be seen by children.
Ah, but Libertarianism is all about responsibility. Corrupting children harms them, and the central tenet of Libertarianism, ’cause no harm to others’, is therefore violated and the parents will be held responsible for their actions. As it is, they aren’t allowed to take responsibility, so many of them don’t. Besides, films like A Clockwork Orange, The Exorcist, Hellraiser and much stronger stuff is all on DVD now. If parents are likely to let their kids watch this one (which I doubt many would) then those kids have already seen some blood and boobs. I’m not saying it’s right, I’m saying it’s happened already.

You do not need to see Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (which is released later this week) to know how revolting it is.

Actually, I would need to see it to know how revolting it is. There’s no other way to judge. I’m not going to take your word for it just because you didn’t like it.

I haven’t seen it myself, nor shall I

Huh? So you’re telling me I shouldn’t be allowed to watch a film you have decided is utterly without merit, and you haven’t even watched it yourself? How did you come to this conclusion, pray tell?

and I speak as a broad-minded arts critic, strongly libertarian in tendency.

You’re not sounding very libertarian here. You’re sounding New Labour to the core, I’m afraid. Are you trying to give the impression that libertarianism is the same as Labour, Tories, Lib Dems etc? It’s an interesting new approach but it’s not working.

But merely reading about Antichrist is stomach-turning, and enough to form a judgment.

Is it? Depends who wrote what you’re reading, wouldn’t you say? Someone who didn’t like it, wrote a review and exaggerated? Someone in PR thought it might be a good idea to hype it up? The British Board of Film Censors actually watched it and let it through. They didn’t rely on second-hand reports. Neither will I. As a ‘libertarian critic’, neither should you. At this point I’d like to ask – isn’t watching films your, ah, job?

The husband and wife go to stay in a log cabin to recover from their grief. There, horrors the likes of which I have never witnessed unfold in graphic detail.

Well of course you’ve never witnessed them. You’ve never watched the film. You don’t know what these horrors are, how they are portrayed, whether they are on screen or off screen, nothing. Yet you deride the film and call yourself libertarian!

Now the anonymous moral guardians of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), in their infinite wisdom, have passed this foul film for general consumption

But you don’t like it, so the anonymous moral guardians are wrong. We must all bow to the Morals of Hart, for they are superior to ours.

Oh, and he doesn’t miss the ‘for the cheeldren’ part…

Another bizarre but typical judgment from this panel of experts whose names we don’t even know (and so we don’t even know if they are parents).

No, they are Augustine monks watching films on a remote Scottish island in a cinema powered by harnessing lightning with a big machine run by a hunchback called Igor. I don’t know if they are parents either but odds are, some of them have children. But we don’t know their names, remember, because Hart has said so twice. Then he says –

We do know that its president, Sir Quentin Thomas, gets £28,000 for 25 days’ work a year. Nice job if you can get it.

How can this be? The name nobody knows is here, in print before our eyes. What dark magic is this? And he earns £28,000 a year for 25 days of work. Shocking. He could be on triple that if he was an MP. But we cannot possibly know this man’s name, salary or working hours because he is an anonymous moral guardian. Mr. Hart, meet Mr. Logic. You haven’t met before.

I tried to find out more from the Institute, but to my small surprise they disdained to reply. But you can be sure that they in turn are funded by the EU and so by my taxes – and yours.

Possibly. But you’re assuming here, not declaring a definite truth. It would be wrong to carry on as if your assumption were true.

How do you feel about that? If not shocked, then weary, furious, disgusted? Well you can complain all you like, but no one is listening. Our arts mandarins, along with the rest of our lofty liberal elite, don’t work like that.

What, you mean how do I feel about your assumption that the film was paid for by taxes when you present no evidence? Shocked, perhaps. How would I feel if the film actually was funded by taxes? Well, our taxes are spent on much more wasteful and pointless things than films so I don’t mind all that much, actually.

Oh, and I don’t agree that our elites are ‘liberal’ in any sense of the word other than the doublethink one.

How odd that while government-appointed health czars are so obsessed with anything that might harm the nation’s physical wellbeing – hanging flower baskets, conkers, too much sunshine, not enough sunshine – any concern with the nation’s moral or spiritual well-being has completely vanished.

Ah, Mr. Pretend Libertarian, you seek to justify adding more control to our lives by saying ‘well, all that stuff is controlled so we should control this too’. That is not libertarian, that’s insidious Righteous creeping totalitarianism, which is what we’re going through now. Those things you mention cannot harm the nation’s well-being, only the individual’s, and the individual should be allowed to assess their own risks and make their own choices. You use these spurious examples to justify control of the entire population’s morality. Specifically, everyone must think as you do or they are immoral.

As for this –

Censorship today seems to have been reduced to the feeble principle that if it doesn’t harm children, then it should be allowed.

As soon as it’s released on DVD, Antichrist will harm children anyway, deeply and irrevocably. But when did this principle of protecting only children arise anyway? What about harming adults?
He’s extended ‘For the cheeldren’ into ‘For the adults too’ and he calls himself libertarian! He wants to decide what ADULTS can and cannot watch! Look, some people won’t want to see this film because it contains sex and violence and that’s fine. Nobody is going to pin their eyelids open and force them to watch it. It’s a matter of choice. A Libertarian would understand that.

A Righteous would not.

If I were to see Antichrist, I don’t believe for a moment that it would incite me into copycat violent behaviour or make me a danger to others. But it would poison my mind and imagination, with explicit, ferocious scenes of sexual violence that would stay with me for ever.

Then don’t watch it. Some of us have minds made of stronger stuff. We haven’t all lived permanently comfortable lives and some of the stuff I’ve seen – without choosing to – in real life means that nothing on film is going to ‘poison my mind’. I can tell what’s real and what’s not. Most adults can.

Isn’t that good enough reason to ban it, or at least demand extensive cuts?

No. Just because you don’t like a film you’ve never watched, funded from a source you imagine is taxes but might not be, passed as okay by nameless people you then name and give salary details for, is not a good enough reason for a ban. You don’t like the sound of it. Fair enough. Don’t watch it. Do NOT attempt to control everyone else’s morals and then have the gall to call yourself libertarian.

But have we – that is to say, the hesitant, fumbling, comfortably cushioned, value-free Leftish elite who now govern us – got the guts? I doubt it.
All I can say is – wow. What planet has this man been on for the last decade? Have the government got the guts to ban something? Look around, Righteous Hart. They’ve banned pretty much everything and you, calling yourself Libertarian, want to ban some more!

It seems ‘Libertarian’ has become a ‘cool tag’ now, and is used here by one of the most ferocious Righteous I’ve come across. He clearly has no idea what ‘libertarian’ means.

Here’s a clue for the clueless, Righteous Hart. It does not mean ‘total control’.

[…]

Old Holborn

Well said, I have to say.

I would like to distribute to every idiot that calls himself a Libertarian but who so clearly is not one, a copy of For ‘A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto’. There are several strains of libertarianism out there, but this Hart fellow is none of them. Not even close.

And you all know what we think of the BBFC.

Chairman
Home School Legal Defense Association

Introduction

His name is Badman. Graham Badman. His June 2009 “Report to the Secretary of State on the Review of Elective Home Education in England,” which proposes draconian changes in English home education law, lives up to his name.

His core premise is that the current education law does not properly balance the rights of parents and the rights of children.

However, he reaches this conclusion on a faulty basis. Most significantly, he fails to fully and accurately describe the current legal framework that governs home education. He avoids any discussion of the power of local education officials to intervene with the force of law in a situation where they have found a home education program to be unsuitable.

Despite his failure to accurately describe the current situation, he makes a series of recommendations to remedy the problems he has “discovered.” Central to his scheme is the requirement that a government official be empowered to compel entry into the homes of families engaged in home education. Then he wishes the official to have the power to interrogate each child in order to “hear” the child’s wishes and make an independent determination of the suitability of the home education program.

A cryptic quotation appears as a preface to the entire report:

The need to choose, to sacrifice some ultimate values to others, turns out to be a permanent characteristic of the human predicament.

This statement was by Isaiah Berlin in a 1969 work published by Oxford University.

Badman’s apparent meaning is that one cherished value needs to be sacrificed to achieve a different cherished value. From the body of the Badman Report there is little doubt as to his intended application of this principle.

The Badman Report opines that traditional English concepts of parental rights and liberty must be sacrificed to achieve the value of adherence to children’s rights theory—specifically, the theory contained in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

But as so often is the case with meddlesome interlopers, it is easy to demonstrate that Badman’s conclusions are premised on numerous fallacies.

How the English Legal System Works

Section 7 of the Education Act of 1996 provides the legal framework for home education in England.

The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable—
(a) to his age, ability, aptitude, and
(b) to any special educational needs he may have, either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.

Badman asserts that the terms “efficient” and “suitable” are not defined. This is true enough insofar as the statutory language is concerned. However, this does not mean that English courts are incapable of interpreting and applying these terms with common sense. Badman cites and quotes judicial definitions of both “efficiency” and “a suitable education,” but fails to give us the source for the quotation of the suitability determination.¹ Accordingly, it is simply false to say that these terms are undefined in English law.

Section 437 (1) of the Education act imposes a duty on “a local education authority” to give notice to any parent “if it appears that a child of compulsory school age in their area is not receiving suitable education.”

After quoting Section 437(1), Badman merely states that local authorities are encouraged to use informal means.

At this point, Badman simply stops reading the statutes and fails to include in his report the balance of the statutory scheme which empowers local authorities to take action to seek remediation if a home education program appears to be unsuitable.

Here is what he left out:

Under Section 437, “[i]f it appears to a local education authority that a child of compulsory school age in their area is not receiving suitable education” the officials may issue a notice to parents requiring them, within 15 days, to demonstrate that the education their child is receiving is in fact suitable. If the school officials are not satisfied with the response, they have the ability to issue an attendance order, forcing the child to attend a school designated by the officials. The parents may ask for a lawful alternative school placement. However, there is no lawful option to simply continue a program of home education that had been found to be wanting.

But the law permits parents two paths to seek review of the attendance order.

Administrative review. Under Section 442, a parent may request the local authority to remove the attendance order on the grounds that suitable education is being provided. If the local authority refuses to remove the order, the aggrieved parent may appeal to the Secretary of State who is given wide discretion in fashioning a course of action for the child in question.

Judicial option. A parent may simply refuse to comply with the attendance order. This is an offense which may be prosecuted under Section 443. Parents may raise an affirmative defense in such a prosecution. A parent will be exonerated if “he proves that he is causing the child to receive suitable education otherwise than at school.” Upon such a judicial determination, the attendance order would be vacated.

The Badman Report leaves the distinct impression that there are no effective means available for local education officials to pursue home educating parents who are failing to provide a proper education for their children.

Both the objectivity and the professionalism of the Badman Report are called into serious question by its failure to fully describe the complete operation of current law.

There is nothing ineffective about the current English law when all of the elements are considered:

• Homeschooling parents are under the same educational duty as all other parents.
• This standard has been subject to further definition by English courts.
• Local school officials have both the duty and authority to take action if they have reasonable grounds to believe that suitable education is not being given to any child.
• Parents are given notice and an opportunity to cure any deficiency.
• If the school officials are not satisfied, they may order a cessation to home education.
• If the parents disagree with this decision, they may elect to appeal to the Secretary or make their defense in court.

An Incomplete Comparison

The Badman Report asserts: “International comparison suggests that of all countries with highly developed education systems, England is the most liberal in its approach to elective home education.”

Seven lines of analysis follow this naked assertion. He mentions Germany, “most European countries” (without elaboration), and New Zealand.

The omission of the United States is a particularly blatant error when it comes to the subject of home education. There is little doubt that more children are being homeschooled in the United States than in the rest of the world combined. By comparison, the Badman Report discloses that there are between 20,000 and 80,000 children being homeschooled in England.² The United States Department of Education estimates that there were between 1,277,000 and 1,739,000 (median 1,508,000) being home educated in 2007.³ Independent researchers place the number even higher. “There were an estimated 1.8 to 2.5 million children (in grades K to 12) home educated during 2007–2008 in the United States.”⁴

North Carolina’s Department of Education reports that in the 2007–2008 school year, there were 38,367 homeschools with an estimated 71,566 children being taught in those homes.⁵ A 2008 decision of the California Court of Appeal estimated 166,000 children were being homeschooled in that state alone.⁶

It is important to note that, just as in England, the United States cannot provide a precise count of the number of children being home educated. If the implication that the inability to enumerate home educated children was an indicium of educational failure, it should have become apparent by now in the United States. The numbers are simply too great for the problem to have been hidden.

Moreover, once the United States is brought into play in the international comparison, it is simply unfair and inaccurate to suggest that England is the most liberal in it is approach to home education regulation.

The Education Act of 1996 is similar to some of the older American home education laws. For example, Massachusetts law requires “instruction in all the studies required by law equals in thoroughness and efficiency, and in the progress made therein, that in the public schools in the same town.” Mass. Gen. Laws Ch. 76, § 1.

Oklahoma law provides:

It is unlawful for a parent of a school aged child “to neglect or refuse to cause or compel such child to attend and comply with the rules of some public, private or other school, unless other means of education [i.e., home schooling] are provided for the full term the schools of the district are in session.” Stat. Ann. tit. 70 § 10-105(A).

The phrase “other means of education” in the Oklahoma statute is virtually identical to the English phrase “at school or otherwise.” Homeschooling flourishes in Oklahoma with no governmental interference in the ordinary case.

Illinois law provides an example of law with broad, undefined standards for home education. In that state parents must ensure that “children are taught the branches of education taught to children of corresponding age and grade in public schools, and where the instruction of the child in the branches of education is in the English language.” 105 ILCS § 5/26-1.

A summary of the home education law in all 50 American states is attached. It is evident upon review that some states are more lenient than the English system, and some have more specific requirements. None differ greatly from the general approach of English law that parents should be trusted and authorities are empowered to intervene in the extraordinary case.

There is simply no basis for widespread alarm concerning the well-being of children. Freedom works. This is especially true when, as in England, the authorities have the clear statutory power to intervene when they believe that there is a problem.

Badman’s Reliance on The UN Convention of the Rights of the Child

Badman begins his review of the regulatory framework of the current English system by citing Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). This Article provides that “in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child [be] given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.”

Badman then says: “Yet under the current legislation and guidance, local authorities have no right of access to the child to determine or ascertain such views.”

Accordingly, Badman suggests that Parliament enact mandatory provisions to require parents to have an official enter their home to interrogate their children concerning their “views” and to make an independent assessment of the suitability of the home education being provided.

However, under the express terms of the UNCRC, Article 12 states a universal principle applicable to all children. If Parliament intends to implement the provisions of Article 12 to determine the “wishes” of the child with regard to his education, then this requirement must be imposed vis-à-vis all children in all forms of education. The Preamble of the UNCRC mentions the principle of “equality” in two separate statements. Article 28 states that education decisions for children must be made “on the basis of equal opportunity.”

Moreover, if home education parents are not to be allowed to be present when their children are interrogated concerning their “wishes,” both logic and the principle of equality require that local school officials must be excluded from the interviews when children from such schools are likewise enabled to express their “wishes.”

Reading Article 12 and 28 together, favoritism or selective enforcement is not permitted. If the child’s wishes are to be received by independent reviewers, then it must be for all children and the reviewers must truly be independent.

Obviously, the Article 12 system would vest the independent reviewer with extraordinary power of subjective judgment. Such a methodology is antithetical in any society that places any value on the rule of law, privacy, and liberty.

The Badman Interrogation Program: A Violation of Human Rights

Badman’s key recommendation is that local authorities should be given the power to:

• Compel entry into the homes of families engaged in home education.
• Separate the child from his or her parents.
• Interrogate the child both concerning his or her wishes and to satisfy the interrogator that the child’s education is “suitable.”

This approach flies in the face of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

This Article, protecting the privacy of both family life and the home, has been made binding on the United Kingdom by virtue of the Human Rights Act of 1998. No reservations to this Article were made at the time that the United Kingdom became a party to this treaty. According to the Human Rights Act, it is unlawful for any agency of government to violate these protected rights of privacy.

The privacy provision in the Human Rights Act has parallel provisions in the American system of constitutional rights. Significantly, American courts have dealt directly with the question of whether a compulsory invasion for home education inspections constitutes an unconstitutional violation of family privacy.

The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts considered the question of the legitimacy of a compulsory “home visit” for homeschooling families. Under the doctrine of family privacy, the highest court in Massachusetts held that “the school committee … cannot, in the absence of consent, require home visits, as a condition to the approval of home education plans.” Brunelle v. Lynn Public Schools, 428 Mass. 512, 702 N.E.2d 1182 (1998). The court also ruled that “the approval of the home school proposal must not be conditioned on requirements that are not essential to the state interest in assuring that all children be educated.” Home visits are not essential for children to be educated.

Similarly, a New York court held In the Matter of Dixon, No. N-37-86, (Fam. Ct, Oswego County 1988), that the school district’s “desired on-site inspection was arbitrary, unreasonable, unwarranted, and violative of the [home school parents’] due process rights….” Slip. Op. at 5. See also In the Matter of Standish, No. N-125-86, Oswego County, Dec. 23, 1988.

Badman believes that unless officials can enter a home, no one can know for sure what is happening with a child. There is a certain truth to this assertion. However, this is true for all homes, not just those engaged in home education. Unless and until the government is willing to install surveillance cameras in the home of every family, there is no way to absolutely guarantee that officials truly know what is happening in each home. Freedom comes with some risks. But, it is generally believed that the totalitarian alternative is far worse in the long-run.

However, the adherence to principles of human rights and privacy does not mean that the authorities are without power to protect a child’s need for a suitable education. It must be remembered that when there is any appearance that the home education program is unsuitable, the Education Act gives local officials the authority to require proof of the suitability of the education and gives them the power to order the cessation of home schooling if they are not satisfied.

In light of this authority, there is utterly no need for an official to compel entry into a home to make an on-the-spot subjective judgment about the child and the suitability of his or her education.

Would Badman’s Inspectors Be Professionally Qualified to Assess the Suitability of Home Education?

Finally, there is serious doubt that such an inquisitor would be qualified to evaluate the effectiveness of a home education program. Any form of assessment (including testing and measurement) is generally required to meet four professional standards for accuracy and reliability. A clear statement of these standards is found in a publication by the British Council describing certain examinations for English proficiency:

Examinations must be “designed around four essential qualities: validity, reliability, impact, and practicality. Validity is normally taken to be the extent to which a test can be shown to produce scores which are an accurate reflection [of the subject tested]. Reliability concerns the extent to which they can be depended upon for making decisions about the candidate. Impact concerns the effects, beneficial or otherwise, which an examination has on the candidates or other users, whether these are educational, social, economic or political, or various combinations of these. Practicality can be defined as the extent to which an examination is practicable in terms of the resources needed to produce and administer it.”⁷

Any assessment by a home inspector/interrogator would need to comply with these accepted professional standards for educational assessment.

An American court used essentially identical standards for the validity of educational assessment to overturn an improper crafted program of home education assessment.

The legislature of South Carolina required that homeschooling parents be subjected to an examination employed for public school teacher candidates. However, the legislature conditioned this requirement on the performance of a professional validation study to determine whether or not the items being tested were in fact valid measurements of the skills required for successful home instruction.

After the validity study was performed, parents sued claiming that the study was done improperly and that half of the panelists in the study were unqualified participants and had no basis for measuring factors needed for successful home instruction.

The parents relied on the expert analysis of Dr. Lawrence Rudner, the Director of Testing and Measurement for the ERIC Clearinghouse (a program of the United States Department of Education).

In Lawrence v. S.C. State Board of Education, 412 S.E.2d 394 (S.C. 1991), the Supreme Court of South Carolina described the panel members that had been assembled to conduct the study:

[T]he Department of Education contracted with IOX Assessment Associates to evaluate the EEE’s suitability to test home schooling instructors. IOX assembled a panel of thirty-three members; seventeen panelists were home schoolers, the remaining sixteen were public school and college teachers.

Panelists who were not home schoolers were given no description of the requirements for successful home schooling. These sixteen panelists were not familiar with home schooling or were never asked if they knew anything about it.

Task-relatedness evaluations required a panelist to judge whether the EEE item tested some knowledge or skill that was “a necessary prerequisite” to home schooling. Sixteen of the panelists were not qualified to make this evaluation since they were given no information as to what the prerequisites for home schooling were.

This is a very important principle. Public school teachers and college professors of education were held to be “not qualified” to evaluate effective home education. The application of professional educational standards to the task at hand demonstrated that there are significant differences in the methods and strategies of successful home education and the strategies employed in institutional schools. Evaluators who have neither professional expertise nor in-depth study of home education simply are unqualified to make valid assessments.

The Badman method of home interrogations fails all four of the criteria outlined by the British Council for proper assessment and measurement:

Validity. The interrogators would have no objective tools of measurement and would lack the proper expertise in home education.

Reliability. Subjective home interrogations of children would never survive a reliability assessment. This method simply cannot produce results that have any semblance of national consistency, accuracy, or fairness.

Impact. The massive invasion of family privacy as well as the contraction of the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights are just the beginning of the negative impact of the Badman home interrogation methodology. The impact on the child must be considered. When a strange adult appears in the home with the announced purpose of interrogating the child separately and apart from his or her parents, a considerable degree of anxiety can be anticipated. Moreover, the long-range impact on the child’s view of a free society is severely damaged. If the government may enter the child’s home, with no requirement of any showing of wrong-doing, the child is left with a residual view toward his government that is not unlike that experienced by children who feared the KGB in the USSR. Even though adults may well be able to distinguish between the KGB and a Badman home interrogator, to a young child all he knows is that a stranger is in his home asking questions of him in private and his future depends on the stranger’s views of his answers. This is an incredibly high-stakes venture with almost no chance of producing results that would survive the other measures of assessment for validity and reliability.

Practicability. The costs for implementing the Badman method of home interrogations would be staggering.

It is once again important to remember that the choices are not between “doing nothing” versus the Badman home interrogation method. The current law has reasonable measures in place. Rather than invading the home, the local school officials may, if they have reasonable grounds to doubt the suitability of a home education program, require evidence of education—not through subjective interrogation of the child—but through the objective method of looking at the work performed by the child.

The Badman method simply cannot survive any review of its appropriateness as a method of educational assessment. The current law does not need fixing. It contains all the tools necessary for a balanced and proper review whenever school officials have reason to believe that improper education is occurring.

The Article 29 Problem

Badman also urges new substantive requirements to be adopted to define what is “suitable” for a child’s education. He cites Article 29 of the UNCRC as setting the standard for guiding such new requirements.

Accordingly, it is crucial to obtain an in-depth understanding of Article 29’s requirements to understand the dramatic nature of the Badman proposal.

Subsection (a) contains little more than current English law requiring a suitable and efficient education. It is sections (b) through (e) that attempt to control the substantive content of the education and require the promulgation of certain worldviews that are controversial, not just among homeschoolers, but among many segments of the population.

In a 2006 treatise entitled The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child: An Analysis of Treaty Provisions and Implications of U.S. Ratification⁸, advocates of this treaty make this clear and bold declaration concerning the meaning of these sections: “Article 29(1)(b) through (e) directs state parties to instill particular values in children through education.”

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has issued General Comments concerning the meaning of Articles 28 and 29. This official UN Committee says:

The effective promotion of article 29 (1) requires the fundamental reworking of curricula to include the various aims of education and the systematic revision of textbooks and other teaching materials and technologies, as well as school policies. Approaches which do no more than seek to superimpose the aims and values of the article on the existing system without encouraging any deeper changes are clearly inadequate. The relevant values cannot be effectively integrated into, and thus be rendered consistent with, a broader curriculum unless those who are expected to transmit, promote, teach and, as far as possible, exemplify the values have themselves been convinced of their importance.

The American Bar Association, supporter of the UNCRC, opined that Christian schools, which reject alternate worldviews and teach that Christianity is the only true religion, “fly in the face” of Article 29.⁹

It is not necessary to debate the legitimacy of each of the values enshrined in this list of viewpoints to be instilled in every child in every type of school. A few examples of potential conflicts will suffice.

• Does instruction in “human rights” values require children to be taught the moral legitimacy of homosexuality?
• Does it require the promotion of same-sex marriage to children?
• Does a family that rejects the concept of one-world government violate Article 29? The American Bar Association thinks such views are a violation (see fn. 4).
• Do children have to be taught that religions are equally valid?
• If parents teach and believe that the husband should be the head of the family, does this violate the requirement of equality of the sexes? Any casual reader of the literature surrounding the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women will know that such traditional views are considered a violation of human rights standards.

We need not contemplate an answer to these individual questions. The real issue is: Does England intend to mandate the inculcation of certain “approved” values to children?

England’s current law is clearly on the side of freedom and contrary to any regime of government-compelled indoctrination in any particular system of values.

The Education Act provides in Section 9:

In exercising or performing all their respective powers and duties under the Education Acts, the Secretary of State, local education authorities and the funding authorities shall have regard to the general principle that pupils are to be educated in accordance with the wishes of their parents, so far as that is compatible with the provision of efficient instruction and training and the avoidance of unreasonable public expenditure.

Nothing in English law allows government officials to dictate the worldview, opinions, or viewpoints which must be taught in home education. Moreover, before Britain pursues a policy to implement Article 29 to control the content of its education law, it might wish to compare its current educational practice relative to religious instruction (which teaches broad-based Christianity) with the practice of Christian education in the state schools of Norway¹⁰, which was held to be in violation of the UNCRC by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child.

It would be a violation of the principle of equal protection to impose a duty on home schools to teach the values of Article 29, while the English schools operated by the government were in open contradiction with this same Article.

Conclusion

The Badman Report:

• Failed to give a full, fair, and accurate description of the current law governing home education in England. The system has a comprehensive system of checks and balances.
• Inaccurately claimed (by this failure of complete disclosure) that local education officials are limited to informal methods of seeking remediation. They possess effective and powerful tools to protect children.
• Inaccurately claimed that English homeschoolers were governed by the most liberal laws among peer nations.
• Proposed a method of compulsory home interrogations of children that violates the Human Rights Act of 1998 and Article 8 of the ECHR. This method has been held to be an unconstitutional invasion of family privacy in the United States.
• Proposed a method of home interrogations as a means of evaluation of the suitability of home education which fails the four standards for proper assessment: validity, reliability, impact, and practicability.
• Urges that English homeschoolers be required to comply with Article 29 of the UNCRC, which imposes a regime of compelled indoctrination in controversial values.

The Badman Report should be rejected. He advances no sustainable reason for changing current English law on home education.

Endnotes

1. Badman Report, p. 6.
2. Badman Report, p. 2.
3. http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009030.pdf
4. http://www.nheri.org/Research-Facts-on-Homeschooling.html
5. http://www.ncdnpe.org/documents/hhh233.pdf
6. Jonathan L. v. Superior Court, 165 Cal.App.4th 1074, 1089, 81 Cal.Rptr.3d 571, 582 (fn. 17) (Cal.App. 2 Dist.,2008).
7. http://www.britishcouncil.org/colombia-exams-yle-handbook-2007.pdf
8. Jonathan Todres, Mark E. Wojcik, Cris R. Revaz; Transnational Publishers, Ardsley, New York (2006).
9. American Bar Association, Center on Children and the Law: Children’s Rights in America: UN Convention on the Rights of the Child Compared with United States Law, p. 182.
10. Paragraph 20, Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child: Norway, Committee on the Rights of the Child, 39th sess., U.N. Doc. CRC/C/15/Add.263 (2005).

http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/200907130.asp

Since the esteemed climatologist Al Gore declared that “the debate is over,” it seems the number of scientists denying both this fact and the accuracy of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis has continuously increased. Perhaps the “skeptics” have found the courage to speak out at this point when AGW has become universal religion and the movement’s leaders are calling for “global governance.” The threat from this movement is much clearer now and the ultimate goal of the AGW prophets is finally spelled out, which of course has nothing to do with environment or climate.

The “global warming” movement is now calling for enormous “investments” in certain public policies and new political institutions to supervise people’s and firms’ emissions of CO2. To most scientists in climatology this change in the movement’s agenda is most likely unexpected; if you are not used to the political game you are not prepared when your opponent makes his politically obvious (in normal situations denoted “irrational”) move.

Of course, the debate is not primarily between scientists even though such debates do exist. The literature in peer-reviewed journals in the relevant scientific disciplines have since long disproved the politicized Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios. It has even been established that the global warming according to reliable data sources ended in 2001, despite the fact that CO2 emissions are greater than ever and continue to increase.

The AGW hypothesis with man-made climate change through emissions of CO2 and other “greenhouse” gasses lives on, however, as politicians and the media find in it an extremely powerful thesis that makes people feel both vulnerable and defenseless and desperate for “help.” Politicians need a threat to increase their realm of power and make the masses cling to their belief in government, and the media needs disasters to attract readers and viewers (selling real news is a long-gone idea in mainstream media). To be honest, climate change is the perfect issue for the fascist state – it is a win-win game for powerful politicians, their buddies in the media, and big business.

Yet more people seem to realize that things don’t add up and that there is another side to the story, which is not generally allowed to be told. Even though most people still believe “we” are to blame, a thesis we are fed from cradle to grave by our all-too-mighty government through public schooling and media outlets, the number of people doubting the truthfulness of the theory is growing. This is why the mainstream posse needed to increase the level of blame in the overall blame game; people doubting man-made global warming were compared with holocaust deniers. People with no connection whatsoever with the study of weather and climate did not hesitate to join their fellow state worshipers, like the ignorant-of-economics-economist Professor Krugman.

Most of us laymen AGW skeptics have been dismissed with the proclaimed truth that “scientists all agree” (which really means “talking heads all agree”), but a lot of people are nevertheless beginning to doubt. We may be approaching a tipping point, at which politicians will be desperate to find another made-up disaster to rally support for their destructive policies. In other words, this may be an opportunity to not only get rid of the climate change scare – but also force the “noble” savages back to their Platonic caves.

One way of doing so is to be ready for and engage in the discussion – and do so wisely. This is the purpose, I believe, of Joanne Nova’s comic-book-style The Skeptic’s Handbook (PDF), in which she describes how to “[r]ise above the mud-slinging of the Global Warming debate.” The book shows how to use the existing and scientific facts properly and how not to accept non-answers such as referring to authority or cheap ad hominems. It also supplies the facts and the only points that matter. It is a short manual for constructively pursuing debates with AGWers and in that sense it is truly a “skeptic’s handbook.”

Perhaps Newton was right in that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction” and that this is applicable to public political discourse. There is just a slight delay between the action and the reaction, just like there is a proven time lapse between increase in temperature to increase in CO2.

by Per Bylund

From Lew Rockwell.com

Philip Johnson writes in the Telegraph about ‘the database state’ and how evil it is. It feels like he has had a whiff of coffee and is waking up. What he REALLY needs are some smelling salts:

Beware Labour’s quest for a database state

There’s no reason why the Government should know so much about us, argues Philip Johnston.

By Philip Johnston

Here is a good idea. Instead of handing over personal information to the state, why don’t we keep it and control it ourselves?

Indeed. That is a really good idea. I have another one. Why not, instead of handing over all your money to the state, why dont you keep it and control it yourself Philip? If you do that, then they would not have the means to build the database state that you are so rightly frightened of.

Simple, eh? For a start, it means the state would not be able to get its hands on these data, which most of us would consider a good thing, not least when they get lost. It would also be significantly cheaper than the industrial quarrying of private information to be held on vast central government databases, which is estimated to cost a mind-boggling £16.5 billion a year, a lot of it spent on repairing IT projects that have failed to work properly.

Exactly. And the cost of keeping this data would be spread to each and every person. They would keep what they want, store it how they want (on hardware or on paper or in the ‘white meat’ between their ears), and share it with whom they like on whatever terms they care to agree with.

Anyone who has the temerity to suggest that the database society may have a flaw or two is often accused of neo-Luddism, usually by those who have a vested interest in its expansion. No one is suggesting that we should not exploit the extraordinary benefits of storing data.

I have to say, in the eight years of BLOGDIAL I have NEVER heard people who are against ID Cards or invasive databases being called ‘luddites’. And once again, who is the ‘we’ in this section? Who is it that decides what is or is not a benefit? This is central to the problem; what is the proper role of government.

But there is a similarity here with those who raged against the machines in early 19th-century Yorkshire – a feeling of powerlessness, an inability to control something that can have an enormous influence on our lives.

No, its is not that at all.

The luddites did not understand how business and innovation work. They (and you) would have been well advised to read ‘That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen‘.

This is one of the great subjects of our times because it is the same one that has exercised the minds of political philosophers since Plato: to what extent should the state be able to control the individual?

Ummm, you mean should there be a state at all? Its like asking, “should people be robbed every other day of the week starting Mondays or Tuesdays?”

Doesn’t work does it?

In this age-old battle, one thing is clear – information is power, and the state is now in a better position than at any time in history to possess it and access it easily. It does so, it says, for our own good.

Information is not power. Cooperation transferees the illusion of power. Information by itself is not enough to compel obedience. The fall of East Germany and the Soviet Unions are proof of that. Those were two societies with deeply invasive and all pervasive surveillance systems that could not withstand the pressures that caused them to collapse.

Under Labour, a programme, known as Transformational Government, was established a few years ago to develop the database society and to obtain what the policy papers call “a single source of truth” about the citizen, based on their behaviour, experiences, beliefs, needs and rights. Why should the state want to have “a single source of truth” about us?

Links or it didn’t happen.

In a lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies, in London this Wednesday, Damian Green, the Tory frontbencher, will tackle this question head on; and it is heartening to see that the Tories, in opposition at least, have understood the dangers here. Government, says Mr Green, can do harm even when it is trying to do good,

Some people say that government can only do harm.

though I am by no means convinced that it really is seeking “to do good”. All states collect information on their citizens.

‘Their’ is used here in the form that suggests that people are the property of the state. This reflexive use of language to describe people as the property of government is everywhere. It is a testament to the effectiveness of brainwashing over decades. Free people are not the property of anyone. Free countries do not have citizens; in a free country, the citizens have a free country, the citizens own the government… etc etc.

However, the amount they are able to collect depends upon the technology, which is clearly available nowadays, and the constraints placed upon its capture by the legislature. Such constraints are remarkably few in the UK compared to other democracies. How have we gone so quickly from being the country you would most expect to resist these tendencies to the one that adopted them so meekly?

It is simple. The abuse of language. Fascism is renamed ‘Transformational Government’. Journalists talk of ‘a country’s citizens’ as if people are the property of the state. They talk of ‘the social contract’ which is a fantasy. They refuse to address the true nature of anything, especially money, self ownership, ownership of property. To sum up, they absolutely refuse to be serious and question the core assumptions of their lives and ideas.

Mr Green has identified 28 state databases on which personal information is kept, from the obviously necessary, such as the PAYE collection system

And here is a perficio exempoator of what I just described above. Philip Johnston says it is ‘obviously necessary’ that the PAYE system collection should exist.

to some that are impossible to justify, like ContactPoint, which will hold the details of everyone under the age of 18 in England.

And again. This description of ContactPoint is very poor. ContactPoint is the compulsory database of all eleven million children in the UK, that will be accessible by over one million government workers from council workers on up. You see? by describing ContactPoint as something that ‘will hold the details of everyone under the age of 18’ you deny access to the true nature of the beast, thus preventing people from the vital starting point that will allow them to come to the correct conclusion; that ContactPoint is one of the most evil things ever created by a British Government.

The Conservatives have promised to scrap or modify many of these if they win power; but they might find in office that the temptation to hang on to the data is too tempting.

True. Nevertheless, whatever government is in place, none of these databases mean anything in the absence of cooperation. This is what Johnston misses entirely. He means well though…

What is needed is a complete reversal of the assumption that our personal data is the state’s to possess.

True.

Why should it?

It should not. And it should not do many of the other things that it does that you do not yet accept that it should not do.

This is the question that should be answered by the “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” brigade. It is not as if letting the Government handle all of this information is secure, cheap or efficient. More importantly, it is inimical to any notion of individual freedom that a central bureaucracy should possess so much personal information about us; and, no, giving private data to the state, which has the power to misuse it to our considerable disadvantage, is not the same as having a Tesco Clubcard.

The smell of coffee… finally.

Mr Green puts forward a number of proposals for reform, including US-style security-freeze laws, which allow people to lock access to their data;

The only word that should be applied here is DELETE. No one should have data about them stored without their permission. PERIOD. Just as you should not be compelled to be a party to a contract without your consent, you should not have data stored about you that you do not consent to have stored, or even worse, shared.

an “open source” system which does not dictate the technology adopted by users from the centre;

Nice try, but open source is not the problem here. To collect and store or not to collect and store is what we are discussing. The operating systems and file formats can be discussed later.

and a right to see who has accessed personal information, the so-called audit trails.

Once again, having the ‘right’ (another misuse of English by the way) to see who has violated you and when is not the issue; that you should not be subjected to violation at all is the entire point.

Health records, for instance, would be better kept by GPs and by us as individuals.

True. And despite what Stephen Glover says about Google storing your health records, they would in fact, be a perfect solution.

Google could store your health records, uploaded by you under a pseudonym known only to you and your doctor. Google would know that your pseudonym was a diabetic for example. They would display ads for diabetic related goods and services right in your account, without knowing who you are. You get highly efficient, completely private, secure hosting of your medical records, that you can ‘take with you’ wherever you go, advertisers get highly targeted adverts to precisely the people who need to hear from them… and you have to pay NOTHING for the service.

Sadly, journalists are for the most part computer illiterates. And Stephen Glover really is like the Luddites Philip Johnston describes above in this particular instance; Glover cannot see how Google storing his health records could possibly be a good thing, because he does not understand how Google works, how anonymity works, how the internets work, and he cannot imagine several steps down the line in a hypothetical scenario thanks to this missing information.

Oh yes, and I forgot; with Google, you would be able to delete your medical records with the press of a button and would be able to control with absolute precision, who can and cannot access your medical records.

There are personalised electronic card systems available which can hold our medical details without them being available to government agencies, yet which are accessible by hospitals when we need them to be. This would eliminate the need for the NHS database and be practically cost-free. Instead, we are spending upwards of £12 billion on a centralised data system that hardly anyone wants.

There you go again with the ‘we’.

And BLOGDIAL has been talking about there being no need for centralized databases for some time now.

There is now an assumption that the state should know everything about us and be able easily to access that information.

And this assumption, like all the others, needs to be countered actively. You go second.

This is justified as being good for us because it facilitates the provision of services that may be to our advantage,

It is not good for ‘us’ it is only good for THEM, and it is only to THEIR advantage.

and on the grounds that anyone who is unhappy with the prospect must be concealing something nefarious. It is time we took back control over our own lives.

[…]

Telegraph

True. Next time, watch the pronouns.

Michael Moore Gets It Wrong
Michael Moore has been working on another documentary. This time, he’s taking on capitalism:

“The wealthy, at some point, decided they didn’t have enough wealth. They wanted more — a lot more. So they systematically set about to fleece the American people out of their hard-earned money.”

How ridiculous is that? The wealthy, and everyone else, almost always decide that they don’t have enough wealth. People ask their bosses for raises. We invest in stocks hoping for bigger returns than Treasury Bonds bring. “Greed” is a constant. The beauty of free markets, when government doesn’t meddle in them, is that they turn this greed into a phenomenal force for good. The way to win big money is to serve your customers well. Profit-seeking entrepreneurs have given us better products, shorter work days, extended lives, and more opportunities to write the script of our own life.

On Thursday, Moore announced the title of the movie: Capitalism: A Love Story.

It’s a title I might have picked to make a point opposite of what I assume Moore has in mind.

Moore also fails to understand is that it was not “capitalism” run amok that caused today’s financial problems. In reality, it was a combination of ill-conceived government policies and an overzealous Federal Reserve artificially lowering interest rates to fuel a bubble in the housing market. Then it was government that took money from taxpayers and forced banks to accept it.

Moore ought to understand that, because he makes a good point when he says his movie will be about “the biggest robbery in the history of this country – the massive transfer of U.S. taxpayer money to private financial institutions.”

That is indeed robbery. It sure doesn’t sound like capitalism.

[…]

http://blogs.abcnews.com/johnstossel/2009/07/michael-moore-gets-it-wrong.html

Let us go further with this.

Michael Moore believes that people have the right to make the movies that they want with their own money, and that they also have the right to distribute them, and that people have the right to watch whatever movies they like, and to pay a price that they are willing to pay to see movies in theaters and buy DVDs of them.

This belief has made him more than one hundred million dollars.

Like all delusional people, he believes, for example, that his morality applies to everyone but him. Its OK for him to make $100,000,000 dollars out of his films, but when someone else makes money from what they do then that is ‘greed’, ‘capitalism’ and ‘fleecing the American people out of their hard-earned money’.

This smells like more than simple hypocrisy; I am guessing that it is something very different, and psychological in nature. This man almost certainly has an autistic spectrum inability to empathize with other people. Other people are not real; only MICHAEL is real, and only MICHAEL is good. When MICHAEL makes a hundred million dollars, its OK because “its ME”, “I am good. I am not a greedy person”. When I sell movie tickets, I am not fleecing the American people out of their hard-earned money, I am ‘just selling tickets’. Selling tickets and making a profit on my movies is not ‘capitalism’ its FAIR…. BECAUSE ITS ME, because I am GOOD and not EVIL and GREEDY like those capitalists.

Look at the last part of this episode of 20/20. Private health care, for profit is EVIL… but if it is ME (MICHAEL) who needs am urgent visit to a private fat farm (health clinic), then it is not evil… BECAUSE ITS ME!

Michael Moore is a capitalist. He uses capital (either his or someone else’s) to make movies, speculating that people will want to buy tickets to see his work in cinemas and buy DVDs of them. If no one watches his film, then he loses his money, his capital investment, and no one is there to foot the bill but him. If many people watch them, then he alone (and his distributors) make a fortune as the same work is played over and over and people pay tickets to see it and buy copies of it reproduced hundreds of thousands of times on DVD.

Michael Moore’s right to make movies and sell them is no different to the right of a farmer to sell his fruit, or a butcher to sell his meat, or of a car manufacturer to sell his car, or a watch maker to sell watches or any manufacturer of goods to sell their goods.

He cannot have it both ways; he cannot say that it is good for him to make a vast fortune out of manufacturing films, and that it is bad for others to interact with people freely with each other.

What these sorts of people never like to look at are difficult subjects like the actual nature of money, and how the American people are being fleeced – literally – by the Federal Reserve and their worthless fiat currency. They are the same types that put the cause of the ‘financial crisis’ down to ‘greed’ and ‘capitalism’ when in fact it has nothing to do with either.

They are the same types that are against war, but who stubbornly refuse to look at the root cause of it. They blame guns for violence, blame businessmen for unemployment, think that wages come from capital and not production and on and on and on.

Appalling!

Legislation that will require all authors who visit schools to be registered on a national database has been branded "Labour's Section 28" by bestselling author Philip Pullman. Section 28, or clause 28, a controversial piece of Conservative legislation, aimed at preventing the promotion of homosexuality in schools, was scrapped in 2003.

From November 2010, professional and voluntary staff working regularly with children in sectors including education will need to be registered on the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) database.

Pullman said: "This is Labour's Section 28—the implication being that no adult could possibly choose to spend time with children unless they wanted to abuse them. What will it say to children? It'll say that every adult is a potential rapist or murderer, and that they should never trust anyone."

The His Dark Materials author added: "Naturally I shall have nothing to do with any such 'clearance', and in consequence, I suppose, 
I shall never be allowed into a school again. I shall regret that very much, but I refuse to be complicit in any measure that assumes my guilt before I've done anything wrong. The proposal deserves nothing but contempt."

Trollogy author Steve Barlow branded the legislation "undemocratic", "ineffective" and "in violation of one of the cornerstones of English law—the presumption of innocence until proved otherwise".

Authors will need to register with the ISA through an umbrella organisation and pay a one-off £64 fee. A spokeswoman for the Vetting and Barring Scheme at the Home Office confirmed that specialist children's librarians, and those librarians and authors visiting schools, would need to be registered. Currently, checks are at the discretion of local authorities. Foreign authors visiting UK schools would also have to register, as will booksellers going into schools once a month or more.
Chair of the Children's Writers' and Illustrators' Group of the Society of Authors Celia Rees said: "We have a number of reservations because it is not clear how people will be affected by this, and what the costs and process of application will be. I am sure that, as more people become aware of it, there will be a groundswell of opinion against it."

However, author Gillian Cross backed the new checks. She said: "I understand entirely why people are enraged about the whole child abuse suspicion frenzy, which is particularly hard on men. It is nevertheless true that many children are abused. Theirs is the real suffering, and if checking can help to prevent that, I'm not opposed to it. Though I would be interested to know how often CRB [Criminal Records Bureau] checks have actually prevented known abusers from working with children."

Cross said that the scheme that replaces the current Criminal Records Bureau checks could be better as it is automatically updated rather than being repeated annually.

[…]

The Bookseller

This madness, like all other madness, will one day just go away. People will scratch their heads, and wonder how it was that people went so completely mad.

Thankfully there are people out there who will simply not comply.

If everyone refused to comply, all the schools in the country that rely upon and who enjoy visits would cry out for the system to be abolished.

Of course, Home Educators can group together and invite whomever they want into their homes, without having to consult with or receive permission from anyone.

But you know this!

This is from an article by Lew Rockwell.

If the environmental religion is not stopped in its tracks, you will see all of these steps replicated in the name of ‘saving the planet’.

[…]

Certainly Bush used 9-11 to consolidate his power and the neoconservative intellectuals who surrounded him adopted a deep cynicism concerning the manipulation of public opinion. Their governing style concerned the utility of public myth, which they found essential to wise rule. The main myth they promoted was that Bush was the Christian philosopher-king heading a new crusade against Islamic extremism. The very stupid among us believed it, and this served as a kind of ideological infrastructure of his tenure as president.

Then it collapsed when the economy went south and he was unable to sustain the absurd idea that he was protecting us from anyone. The result was disgrace, and the empowering of the political left and its socialistic ethos.

The talk of Hitler in the White House ended forthwith, as if the analogy extended only when nationalist ideology is ruling the day. What people don’t remember is that Hitlerism was about more than just militarism, nationalism, and consolidation of identity politics. It also involved a substantial shift in German domestic politics away from free enterprise, or what remained of it under Weimar, toward collectivist economic planning.

Nazism was not only nationalism run amok. It was also socialism of a particular variety.

Let’s turn to The Vampire Economy by Guenter Reimann (1939). He begins the story with the 1933 decree that all property must be subject to the collective will. It began with random audits and massive new bookkeeping regulations:

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/headed-to-national-socialism123.html

“This amazing interview was done back in 1985 with a former KGB agent who was trained in subversion techniques. He explains the 4 basic steps to socially engineering entire generations into thinking and behaving the way those in power want them to. It’s shocking because our nation has been transformed in the exact same way, and followed the exact same steps.”

Sound familiar?

South Carolina, it seems, is finally beginning to see sense. When the police start talking like this, its clear that we are post tipping point on this subject, and that the age of, or should I say, the second age of prohibition is nearing its end:

Dillon – State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) agents, flanked by police chiefs from the state’s largest cities joined 16 elected sheriffs today at South of the Border to announce their support for legalizing and taxing marijuana.

“Weed is good. Weed is right. Weed works,” said Dorchester County Sheriff B.D. Squire, spokesman for the group.
The event marks a turnaround for the state’s law enforcement officers who have counted on weed-related fines and confiscated drug money to fund their militaristic uniforms and ‘SWAT’ like attitude towards the state’s marijuana users and sellers. The officials would like to see South Carolina enact legislation to legalize and tax weed and corner the southeastern market in a way similar to the way Georgia’s lottery siphoned valuable revenue from the state’s coffers and in a way similar that our lowest-in-the-nation cigarette tax brings customers all the way from the northeast.

Democratic and Republican leaders from the general assembly are intrigued by the idea.

“This is perhaps one of the no-brainers in terms of bringing us back to fiscal health,” said Hugh Leatherman, the senate finance chairman.
“There was a half-million dollar bust a couple weeks ago in Berkely County,” said state Agriculture Secretary Hugh Weathers, “if that pot was taxed at anything near the rate of tobacco… well that would be about $500 million straight into the state coffers. Can you imagine what kind of income we’d pull in if it was planted on proper farms and not just in little patches in the woods? We wouldn’t be having a ’stimulus’ debate because we wouldn’t need the money.”

“The effects of this would be enormous,” said University of South Carolina Economics Professor Lester Nestman. “Obviously tax revenue would be huge, but we’d likely also see a surge in tourism all over the state, you’d have all manner of stores springing up at every border crossing, and I can’t even imagine how popular farmers’ markets would become. On a related note, just the mention of this possibility has caused an overnight jump of 38% in undergraduate applications to the university.”

Reactions in the business community were mixed. Cigarette executives were outwardly dismissive of the idea, but a source at RJ Reynolds speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that the company was actively looking for land to build a Marijuana packaging facility outside of Latta, near the North Carolina border.

Gregg Propps, a Charleston-area distributor for Little Debbies brand snacks was less reserved in his response.
“Are you kidding me? Holy crap, this is awesome. This is going to put my kids through college… but maybe I’ll send them to school in another state.”

http://thediscust.com/?p=573

Now that really is astonishing news. After all that wasted money, all the people put in gaol for no reason, people killed, lives ruined, the police say, “we are bored with playing SWAT, lets make some money!”.

We call it ‘Idiocracy‘.