In a move backed by children’s charities today, Baroness Delyth Morgan has announced routine mandatory checks on the genitals of all female children in England and Wales for signs of circumcision. The yearly examinations are to take place in the homes of every British family with a female child.

An amazing, impossible headline and story you would say yes? The fact of the matter is however, that this is exactly what is being asked for by Baroness Delyth Morgan, with her absurd and insulting assertion that Home Education is a cover for arranged marriage, and that all Home Educators need to be registered and then examined regularly to make sure that arranged marriage is not taking place.

A blogger we admire, Renegade Parent, has actually been called a racist for questioning the logic of this. She is right to say that this is insane, and her logic in this matter is flawless.

Arranged marriage does not occur in the families of the ‘ethnic British‘, who are the majority in this country. To force EVERYONE to be regularly examined for ‘signs of arranged marriage’ by compelling them to register with their Local Authority and then to submit to arbitrary inspection in their own homes is therefore, totally insane.

Only those people who come from cultures that do arranged marriages (which by the way, is their absolute right) should be targeted, if anyone is going to be targeted at all. Of course, if you target one type of person based on their ‘race’, the politically correct lunatics will accuse the government of being racist and of using racial profiling, both of which would be true in this instance.

There is no reason whatsoever to check ethnically British families (or the families of Trinidadians, Jamaicans, Americans, Canadians, Russians etc etc) to see if arranged marriage is taking place. The fact of the matter is people with a different culture, one in which arranged marriages are normal, are now entrenched here. You have to accept them for what they are, since they have no intention of changing their ancient and completely legitimate ways. It’s either that, or destroy your own culture and ways in a vain attempt to try and force them to adapt, i.e. erasing the rights of parents, destroying civil liberties, dismantling the family, making the state a third parent just as New Labour are doing right now.

None of this has anything to do with racism. It is common sense.

This attack on Home Education is completely baseless, evil and fraudulent. The people behind it are weak minded, paranoid, delusional, ignorant, tunnel visioned family wreckers, who if they had one brain-cell and shred of decency between them would have researched Home Education and seen that it is taking off in the USA and world-wide reaching over 1.5 MILLION children in the USA alone and that it is something to be encouraged, not banned, like their spiritual leader had it banned. US State legislatures are now routinely removing the artificial and immoral barriers to Home Education whilst Backward Britain™ created by Neu Liebour is moving in precisely the opposite direction, turning Britain from one of the best places to Home Educate into one of the worst places.

How. Stupid.

Back to the subject at hand. Let’s look at it another way for the lulz (courtesy of Mimi Majick); imagine this statement from Baroness Delyth Morgan:

All girls in the UK are to be screened for testicular cancer. We are doing this so that we do not appear to be sexist in our quest to eliminate this terrible disease.

These examinations would obviously coincide with the proposed mandatory checks for female circumcision.

You think that is insane of course, and that nothing remotely like it could ever happen… and you are WRONG.

The deadly anti cervical cancer vaccine Gardasil has been proposed for BOYS as well as girls. If I remember correctly, only the female of the species has a cervix. Home Educated people of course, are up on their anatomy, unlike their state schooled counterparts.

These people are completely mad, and when the little boy (in this case Renegade Parent) stands up and says, “the empress has no clothes” the morons come out of the woodwork and start calling names. Well, I have some news for you morons; 2+2 always equals 4. It will always equal 4, until the end of time. You are WRONG.

Baroness Delyth Morgan, Graham Badman, Ed Balls and all the other creatures of the night are wrong in what they think, what they do, what they propose and the conclusions they come to. They are the wreckers of civilization, the enemies of common sense and liberty and their time has come to an end, even if they do not yet know it.

Finally, to Renegade Parent directly, you are a voice of pure common sense, a true voice for liberty and the rights of man. People like you are what made this country great. We support you, we know that you are correct, and join with you in denouncing these pig ignorant brainwashed monsters that are trying to kill everything that is good.

Even if you were to say something that we do not agree with, we defend your right to publish it. I have said it before; this is what distinguishes us from the rabble, the sheeple, the sleeple and the eloi; our philosophy does not require anyone to obey us, whereas their philosophy requires everyone to obey them.

We are the best.

And that means YOU.

I’ve been reading “My Life and Work“, Henry Ford’s autobiography, I was pleasantly surprised by much of it (that is I mean you should read it too). Here are some quotes:

When we are at work we ought to be at work. When we are at play we ought to be at play. There is no use trying to mix the two. The sole object ought to be to get the work done and to get paid for it. When the work is done, then the play can come, but not before. And so the Ford factories and enterprises have no organization, no specific duties attaching to any position, no line of succession or of authority, very few titles, and no conferences. We have only the clerical help that is absolutely required; we have no elaborate records of any kind, and consequently no red tape.

[…]

Because there are no titles and no limits of authority, there is no question of red tape or going over a man’s head. Any workman can go to anybody, and so established has become this custom, that a foreman does not get sore if a workman goes over him and directly to the head of the factory. The workman rarely ever does so, because a foreman knows as well as he knows his own name that if he has been unjust it will be very quickly found out, and he shall no longer be a foreman. One of the things that we will not tolerate is injustice of any kind. The moment a man starts to swell with authority he is discovered, and he goes out, or goes back to a machine. A large amount of labour unrest comes from the unjust exercise of authority by those in subordinate positions, and I am afraid that in far too many manufacturing institutions it is really not possible for a workman to get a square deal.

I would say this is the polar opposite of ‘statist’ enterprises (e.g. BBC) and the bureaucratic mentality in general.

When a business becomes congested with bad methods; when a business becomes ill through lack of attention to one or more of its functions; when executives sit comfortably back in their chairs as if the plans they inaugurated are going to keep them going forever; when business becomes a mere plantation on which to live, and not a big work which one has to do–then you may expect trouble. You will wake up some fine morning and find yourself doing more business than you have ever done before–and getting less out of it. You find yourself short of money. You can borrow money. And you can do it, oh, so easily. People will crowd money on you. It is the most subtle temptation the young business man has. But if you do borrow money you are simply giving a stimulant to whatever may be wrong. You feed the disease. Is a man more wise with borrowed money than he is with his own? Not as a usual thing. To borrow under such conditions is to mortgage a declining property.

Substitute “a business” for “a country’s economy”

An impartial investigation of the last war, of what preceded it and what has come out of it, would show beyond a doubt that there is in the world a group of men with vast powers of control, that prefers to remain unknown, that does not seek office or any of the tokens of power, that belongs to no nation whatever but is international–a force that uses every government, every widespread business organization, every agency of publicity, every resource of national psychology, to throw the world into a panic for the sake of getting still more power over the world. An old gambling trick used to be for the gambler to cry “Police!” when a lot of money was on the table, and, in the panic that followed, to seize the money and run off with it. There is a power within the world which cries “War!” and in the confusion of the nations, the unrestrained sacrifice which people make for safety and peace runs off with the spoils of the panic.

!!!

Gavin Webb is a Libertarian Liberal Democrat councillor for Stoke and Trent Vale ward on Stoke-on-Trent City Council.

He has just written something that was sent to us, so lets look at it shall we?

Those who can, teach – like parents!

As a matter of principle, Liberal Democrats should support home educators in their opposition to Graham Badman’s recommendations in the Review of Elective Home Education in England. However, I fear the Party leadership will not do so.

That is because they have no principles, obviously.

Instead, it looks at though it will be seeking to find a ‘balance’ between the rights of parents to decide for themselves how best to educate their children, and the collective welfare of children as a whole.

Why am I so concerned that the Party may side with collectivism as opposed to defending individual rights? Upon seeking clarification on the Party’s policy on home education from Cowley Street’s policy boffs, and in particular on the Badman recommendations, I was reliably informed of the need to find that balance. In short, I was told the Party is generally supportive of the Badman recommendations.

Which is just what we expect from a party filled with irrational people.

I have several problems with siding with this subjective piece of rubbish. As a libertarian, I say the Party should not be endorsing coerced collectivism at all. Sure, if a group of parents want to voluntarily come together and register their children with the State and the evil database that is ContactPoint, then let them do so. I would say they are foolish in their choice but they should be free to do so nonetheless.

Parents should not be ‘free to register with ContactPoint’. That is completely absurd. If the government of TODAY says its voluntary, any future government could suddenly make it COMPULSORY. This is why we should never support totalitarian infrastructures being built in the first place; you may trust Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith, but in the future, someone who you do not trust may take the reigns and do something dastardly with all that collected data. Also, for some parents to be able to use ContactPoint, the parents who do not want it will have their money stolen from them to pay for it by the state. The state should never put something like this together. If parents want to create and run their own private ContactPoint, that is another thing, but one designed and run by the state is always unacceptable to Libertarians. This is pretty basic stuff, how can you get it so very wrong AND support No2ID?

If however, parents decide they want nothing to do with the State, they too should be free to exercise their rights.

They should be free to live without interfacing with the state.

Under the Badman proposals home educators will not be permitted their rights.

They will have their rights stripped from them. They will not be free to exercise their rights.

They will be forced to register their children with their local education authority, and their children will be entered onto the ContactPoint register, and if parents’ standard or type of education doesn’t conform with that which is prescribed by the State – which most of us know to be crap – then the freedom to home educate their children will be denied them. Opposition to this is a matter of principle for all Liberal Democrats.

No, it is a matter of principle for all libertarians. Liberal Democrats HAVE NO PRINCIPLES except BAD ONES.

Of course, if a child is being abused – which, as an aside, government do-gooders have attempted to use as a justification for more regulation and control of home education – then that is another matter. No-one should be aggressed against contrary to their will. If there are victims of abuse, then the full weight of relevant laws should fall upon the aggressors.

Home Education has nothing to do with children at risk. The two should never be used in the same context, except to refute that vicious lie.

And the current laws and systems in place are more than adequate. In fact, in every one of the cases that the state trots out as pretexts for more control, the social services and police were fully aware of the families involved, were concerned and took no action. The fact of the matter is that they consistently fail to protect children; this is the message that is never propagated and brought to light. More powers will not help them improve their common sense. Putting ALL children into a database harms ALL children; it creates a needle-in-a-haystack scenario where people are looking into the affairs of perfectly innocent and ordinary people for no good reason.

If however a child is not receiving an ‘adequate’ education, this in itself should be no business of the State’s to resolve. Despite it being written in man-made Human Rights laws (that by the way also protect the State so should perhaps be referred to as Human and States’ Rights laws) the truth is that under natural law no-one has a right to education.

Agreed.

Yes, it would be nice if every single human being on this planet had access to not just a ’suitable’ education, but excellent education too; but I say this again, no-one has a ‘right’ to education. For if they had, the question is then what standard of education? Mediocre to poor? For that is the general standard delivered by the State to our children.

True.

If people want better than the State can provide, they should be able to opt out of State provision without fear of threat and hindrance from government and its agents. They should have unrestricted freedom to choose what they believe is best for their own kids because – and this is a fundamental point – the kids belong to the parents, not to society or government!

True!

Once bureaucrats gets involved and starts dictating the terms, quoting laws and targets, the already high standards that are achieved in most cases through home education – and indeed independent sector education – will be dragged down to State level.

True.

I hope the Party leadership sees sense and doesn’t allow the collectivist malaise undermine home educators’ freedoms, for if it does, it may as well ditch the word ‘Liberal’ and replace it with ‘Social’.

It is YOU that clearly have no place in the Liberal Democrat Party.

Are you a Libertarian, or are you a Liberal Democrat? How can you possibly remain a member of a party that explicitly wants to eradicate the rights of people to run their families as they choose?

You cannot serve two masters; you can either be FOR liberty or AGAINST it, and liberty is indivisible. Its like someone who is a member of the BNP saying on the one hand that they are FOR immigration but at the same time they are members of a party that is explicitly AGAINST immigration.

Gavin Webb’s council is going to run ContactPoint. Unless they say otherwise, he will be involved in the mass violation of children by working in a place that runs that system. I would like to see a written declaration that he is going to refuse to do any work that comes from, is in any way touched by ContactPoint.

When populations are being rounded up for ethnic cleansing, many people working in the apparatus simply got on with their jobs, even though they might not have agreed with what was happening. Every person who works at a council and who touches ContactPoint instantly becomes an accessory to the sale of children. By using that database, they are helping the contractors make money out of the children they have been paid to put into that database.

I do not immediately see a policy position on ContactPoint at Stoke-on-Trent City Council’s website but we do find this:

Elective Home Education

Information for Parents/Carers

The education of your child is a great responsibility, one that Stoke-on-Trent City Council takes very seriously. We have 93 schools across the city, catering for a wide range of needs and abilities. We are proud of the way they meet the challenges of an ever changing environment, whilst continuing to provide a rich diversity of experience for pupils of all ages.

It is a legal duty of parents/guardians to secure appropriate full-time education for their children. Most parents/guardians do this by ensuring that their child attends their local school. However, for a variety of reasons, a small number of them decide to take on the duty to educate their child themselves. In Stoke-on-Trent there are about 45 families educating their children at home, out of a total school population of over 32,063.

Educating at home is sometimes known as ‘Education Otherwise’, named after one of the independent charities set up to support such parents. More information about this charity can be found on the ‘Useful Contact and Links’ page.

Children should not be taken out of school simply because of a disagreement with the local school. There are many ways of solving such problems and talking to the Headteacher, or consulting with Children and Young People’s Services, will often resolve any difficulties. In Stoke-on-Trent, we will always make every effort to find a place at the most appropriate school for your child.

Home education is a major undertaking for a family. It will require serious amounts of time, patience and energy, and can have financial consequences.

[…]

http://www.stoke.gov.uk/ccm/navigation/education/home-education/

It is not the place of Stoke-on-Trent City Council to ‘take seriously’ the education of children who they themselves admit, are ‘yours’. How many schools you have is irrelevant… and for that matter, lets take a peek inside one of the schools that you ARE responsible for:

Peer Support at Longton High School

Longton High School is a large comprehensive on top of a hill on a mostly council housing estate on the edge of Stoke-on- Trent. The building consists of a tall tower block and a maze of buildings on the ground floor.

The kinds of problems students face are racial and bullying problems such as harassment, name calling, violence and singling out occurring both in between lessons on the schools corridors, and during break and dinner. The school has had a few major racial disputes but mainly faced with minor disputes between students, which with the skills we have been taught through our training, we are confident to deal with.

[…]

Anti-Bullying Alliance

Uh huh, just as we thought, your schools are as bad as everyone else’s.

They then say that:

It is a legal duty of parents/guardians to secure appropriate full-time education for their children.

This is a LIE. The actual wording of the law is:

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

As you can see, the word ‘appropriate’ is not there. What is or is not appropriate is the affair of the parent, not Stoke-on-Trent City Council. Also, as someone clever said on a blog, if a parent sends their child to a school that they know is not providing an efficient full-time education, are they not ‘in violation’, since it is the duty of the parent to ensure that their child receives such education? Or are they relieved of all responsibility under that section of the law should they hand their children over to the state?

Hmmmmmmmmmmm!

Educating at home is sometimes known as ‘Education Otherwise’

Say WHAT?

Children should not be taken out of school simply because of a disagreement with the local school.

Says who? It is precisely because of disagreements with the local school that children are removed from school.

Home education is a major undertaking for a family. It will require serious amounts of time, patience and energy, and can have financial consequences.

Having a family is ‘a major undertaking’ educating your children is a part of it. Raising a family requires serious amounts of time (whatever that means), patience and energy, which parents (especially women) have in abundance, and having a family costs money.

We know this.

Major digression there, but I just could not let it lie. I will leave you to splutter your tea over your keyboards at their useful contacts page and their outrageous FAQ, where you will find gems like:

What evidence will the Local Authority expect to receive?

Basically, we are satisfying ourselves that the education received by the chid is ‘efficient, suitable and full-time’, so the sort of evidence will be:

• long and short-term planning;
• possibly a weeks outline programme;
• a diary of work covered; and
• evidence of the child’s own work.
• Often talking to the child will be important evidence

and

What does the law actually say about the parent’s duty?
A parents’ duty is actually defined under section 7 of the 1996 Education Act, which says:

“…to cause the child to receive efficient full-time education suitable to his/her age, ability and aptitude and to any special educational needs he/she may have either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.”

Unfortunately the words ‘efficient’ and ‘suitable’ are not defined. ‘Efficient’ is usually taken to mean that the activity achieves what it sets out to achieve, and it is ‘suitable’, if it prepares the child for life in our society and enables the child to fulfill their potential.

My emphasis on the last one.

We are now at the stage where everyone has to draw a line and say, “I am morally obligated to refuse to work with this.” Everyone has their limits and their pain threshold, however it is clear that unless people refuse to take a stand and refuse to assist this infernal machine, it will continue to gain momentum and end up turning us all into hamburger meat.

Its good to read words from people who are waking up; we must give credit where credit is due, every time. At the same time, illogic, inconsistency, errors of judgment etc have to be flagged, otherwise, people persist in believing nonsense. Im sure Gavin is a nice guy. Clearly he can think, and he is aware of what is going on to a great extent. What I cannot accept are inconsistencies that actually hurt people. By all means, everyone can believe what contradictory stuff they like. When it becomes a matter for concern is when those people have their hands on the levers of the machine.

FURTHERMORE

I updated and reinforced the section about parents who want ContactPoint being entitled to it.

Renegade Parent uses substitution to see into the future:

24 hour home surveillance -a glimpse into the future

Someone to watch over you:

"It sounds like a fantasy straight from The Truman Show George Orwell's 1984: a house that monitors your every move, from bedside to bathroom and from medicine cabinet to fridge. The aim, however, is to help the elderly to ensure that children lead safe and independent protected lives.

"Researchers are working on a “health safe house” so sophisticated that it will not only track everyday habits but also check weight and blood pressure and predict whether a person is at risk of a serious fall child abuse.

"Britain is one of the largest investors in “telemedicineprotection” — using medical surveillance and monitoring technology to help chronically ill deprived and older people indeed all children to be treated for longer continually inspected at home rather than in hospitals or care homes through visits by social workers or education welfare officers.

"The system, developed by GE Healthcare and Intel Becta and the NSPCC, uses sensors that track a person’s behaviour and send alerts when unexpected disruptions or data are picked up. Similar networks are already being used by for about 3,000 people children in care-home settings but researchers now hope to introduce a much more sophisticated model for private homes.

"Patient data, such as risks of hypertension, diabetes and respiratory emotional disturbance, sleep disorders, over-attachment, concentration or eating problems, would be combined with information on daily routines to create an algorithm capable of identifying subtle health abuse indicators or behavioural changes that might signal more serious problems.

"Examples might include how many times a person opens the fridge door or uses a tap logs onto NotSchool; repeat trips to the fridge could signal mental impairment a danger of obesity while failure to use the tap log onto NotSchool might suggest an increased risk of dehydration lack of a suitable education.

"The next generation of sensors also studies activity such as use of the lavatory, time spent sleeping and when medicine mood stabilisers or enhancers are taken, plus vital signs such as blood pressure, weight and blood-oxygen levels.

"Work is under way on more advanced alerts that could identify changes to a person’s gait — providing an early signal of instability learning or behavioural difficulties, feelings of isolation or depression, lack of meaningful relationships or even substance misuse and heightened chances of a serious fall abuse by a neglectful parent — and how long it takes to get out of bed in the morning."

[…]

http://www.renegadeparent.net/post/A-glimpse-at-the-future-home-surveillance.aspx#top

What this looks like, long time readers of BLOGDIAL and sci-fi fans know is THX-1138.

Will your children be able to do it without etracene?

That is the question!

People are waking up to what all of this really means, and how all the dots join up.

By Chris Buratta

A father has refused permission for his daughter's Oxford school to take her fingerprints – fearing it is step towards a 'Big Brother' state.

IT IS a step towards exactly that, and even if this library system is self contained, i.e. does not connect to any other database anywhere, the very fact that they have it serves to soften up the students into accepting this sort of technology as a part of ordinary life, when it is not. It is a total invasion and violation, and as we can see below, even the ignorant pigs administering it do not know how it works.

Ben Emlyn-Jones's daughter Louisa, 12, attends St Gregory the Great School in Cowley – which is planning to use fingerprint recognition software in its library.

On Tuesday, it was revealed that Windale Primary School, Glory Farm Primary School, Matthew Arnold Secondary School and The Cherwell School currently use fingerprint systems in libraries and Cheney School uses the technology to register pupils.

Absolutely ridiculous. Whats more, I would like to know how much this system cost the school. I wonder how many BOOKS you could buy with the same money….hmmmmmm!

Mr Emlyn-Jones said: "I am really quite disturbed about it, it reminds me of a Big Brother state.

"There may be advantages in having a fingerprint database, but the price you pay is too high."

There is NO advantage to it. Library books in a school, where all the pupils are known and where only pupils can enter has no need to install a system whose purpose is to uniquely identify an individual. The people who allowed this to be introduced into the school simply cannot THINK.

He refused to allow his daughter's fingerprints to be taken and was also concerned that the school had not contacted parents.

Well done Mr Emlyn-Jones, you are a hero, and a good parent.

He added: "It is as if they know it is wrong and have done it secretly, hoping no-one finds out."

That is EXACTLY what they are doing, otherwise, they would have contacted everyone in advance. The amount of time, effort to explain and money to roll this out is a complete waste of scarce resources.

Mr Emlyn-Jones said he was opposed to the principle of biometric data being used by schools.

"Once people are on a computer then the world's your oyster as far as the Government is concerned.

Exactly right.

"It also desensitises kids. When they're grown up and they apply for a passport and apply for jobs they won't bat an eyelid about having fingerprints taken or a laser being shined in their eyes."

This man's brain is switched to 'ON'. And what is great is that his daughter will also have her brain switched on also.

This week, Liberal Democrats called for Government guidelines to be introduced to control the use of the technology in schools.

But Mr Emlyn-Jones said that would not satisfy his concerns.

He said: "Once the infrastructure is in place those guidelines could be abolished. That's my concern."

Once people have their brains working, its impossible to placate them with doubletalk and weasel words, at which the Liberal Democrats are masters. They want to cancel ID cards because of the 'privacy concerns' but then want to replace the rates with a local income tax which would mean the council getting into far more of your private affairs than they do now, either by having data shared with them or by collecting it to calculate your new 'more fair' rates. You see? COMPLETELY STUPID. But I digress…

Now comes the ignorant pig part:

St Gregory the Great's learning resources manager Hilja Bassett said the library system, which would be operational next term, was very efficient and secure.

Just because it is efficient, that does not make it right. And in what way is it more efficient? By what measure? Does that library exist for the convenience of the students or the convenience of the staff? As for 'secure' how does she know it is secure? Did she design the system? Does she know wether or not it connects to any other computers over the internets? Does she know ANYTHING ABOUT IT AT ALL? Or is she just repeating verbatim from the sales pitch?

She added: "It can only be used in this one place, in this one way, for this purpose."

And that one way and one purpose are illegitimate.

She said fingerprints were not stored, just certain data taken from the print.

And there is the proof that Hilja Bassett is a completely ignorant pig, computer illiterate student violating jackass. NO biometric fingerprint system stores the ENTIRE PRINT. They ALL work by mapping the print, finding points to store and then storing those points; that is enough to (90% of the time) uniquely identify the person whose finger it is on the scanner. THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT YOU STUPID RETARD its not about actual images of the fingerprints, its about being identified by a part of your body that is unique to you. And of course once it is in the database it can then be transferred (along with all the prints and the names and addresses of the other students) to other databases and systems where if the admins are corrupt, your UNIQUE IDENTIFIER can be placed alongside a criminal profile turing YOU into the criminal, even though you have never done anything whatsoever. Don't believe me? IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING:

Old news department, or a taste of how NIR information will be implemented. I emphasise.

A FYLDE coast student was arrested after posting Christmas cards to his family

Stunned David Atkinson found himself at his local police station under suspicion of stealing the festive greetings he last saw when he put them in a postbox five years ago. Due to fingerprints found on the mail – which was stolen then recovered – police thought they had their man. However, it transpired the “suspect’s” fingerprints were those of the student who had innocently sent the cards to relatives when he was 15.

Mr Atkinson, now 21, of [address omitted – gosh, to think that his address was posted online after this, mm], was arrested because his DNA and fingerprints had been kept on record under controversial Government laws to combat terror.

It was only after Mr Atkinson asked officers to look more deeply into the crime his innocence was proved.

The law student said it has shattered his confidence in the system. He said: “The potential incompetence, laziness, or over enthusiasm of an individual officer means an innocent, law-abiding citizen can never truly have confidence in the giant police database.”

It was the second time Mr Atkinson had been arrested – twice for crimes he did not commit. He has now lent his support to a campaign to force a rethink by the Home Office.

The mix-up began last March when Mr Atkinson was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage – but, when the real culprit gave himself up to police, he was released without charge.

During his short time with the police, he had his fingerprints and DNA taken as part of the arrest procedure but, under recently passed laws, all details – no matter whether the person is innocent or guilty – are kept on a national computer.

Mr Atkinson thought nothing of it until he got a call from officers a month later asking him to go along to the station. He said: “I was arrested as soon as I went in. “The officer told me he had a computer report which had automatically matched my fingerprints with those recovered from a number of items of post which had been stolen from a letter box in December 2000.

“As a result of this report alone, and no further investigation, the officer advised me to ‘get the matter out of the way quickly and take a caution now’.

“After refusing to admit a crime I’d not committed, I was bailed while further investigations were made.”
“The recovered letters were in fact my family Christmas cards which had been taken after I had posted them five years ago.
“This innocent explanation had not even crossed the officer’s mind and, as far as he was concerned, if his computer report said I was guilty then I had to be.”

Mr Atkinson complained to Lancashire Constabulary and eventually received an apology. But, he claims, without the Government’s “menace to our freedom”, he would not have been put through the ordeal. A police spokesman said: “We can confirm that we did receive a complaint in August about a wrongful arrest concerning stolen post. “This was investigated thoroughly under our normal complaints procedure and dealt with locally to the satisfaction of both parties. “Under current legislation, all police forces can retain and record DNA taken for arrestable offences no matter what the eventual outcome of the investigation.”

ben.rossington@blackpoolgazette.co.uk

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=304

And there you have it. These systems are EXTREMELY DANGEROUS, and should not be in schools for any reason WHATSOEVER.

Parents had been informed through a newsletter, she added, and pupils who did not wish to use the system could still make use of library services.

Oxford Mail

So out the window goes Mutterschwein Hilja Bassett’s claim that it is for efficiency; if people can opt out of the system, that means they will be running two concurrent systems, the old and venerable Library card system and the new one, causing inefficiency.

And apologies to all Mutterschwein out there; calling Hilja Bassett a pig is an insult to pigs.

If you are a Home Schooler, you never have to deal with any of this of course!

FURTHERMORE

This courtesy of Home Ed Forums:

The truth about biometric systems used in schools (using verifiable references)

“People have to be stark, raving mad to use conventional biometrics to improve the efficiency of a children’s lunch line.” Kim Cameron , Microsoft’s Identity Architect, 05 April 2007 (read more from Kim Cameron)

“If a child has never touched a fingerprint scanner, there is zero probability of being incorrectly investigated for a crime. Once a child has touched a scanner they will be at the mercy of the matching algorithm for the rest of their lives.” Brian Drury , IT security consultant, 12 March 2007 (read more from Brian Drury)

Schools that introduce fingerprinting usually try to reassure parents by saying “the system does not store a fingerprint, just a number. It is not possible to reconstruct an image of a fingerprint from what is stored”.

• The short answer is that fingerprint templates are what is stored on these systems. These are the equivalent of fingerprints – rather like the difference between a drawing and a photo – otherwise the systems simply wouldn’t work.
• Police, the security services, and governments use fingerprint templates to identify criminals.
• There are international standards to ensure that biometric templates from different manufacturers are compatible – so what’s stored on one system can be read by any other, including government systems.
• Where fingerprint templates are stored in an encrypted form, it is impossible for anyone to guarantee that this won’t be broken during a person’s entire lifetime. A PIN number can easily be changed. A fingerprint, and the template dervived from it, cannot ever be changed.
• Moreover, the Government has the power to demand encryption keys from the system supplier, under the terms of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 Part III.
• In the future, fingerprint templates will be used to authenticate passports, bank accounts, etc. Thus biometric templates are extremely valuable and need to be kept in a highly secure environment.
• In addition, fingerprint templates can be used to rapidly link different databases and to build up a disturbingly accurate profile of an individual without their knowledge or consent.
• The US government’s official National Science & Technology Council says you CAN reconstruct a fingerprint image from a fingerprint template.
• Government security experts have successfully hacked the fingerprint scanners used in schools.
• Schools cannot possibly provide the level of security necessary to protect children’s data.
• A school might not even be aware that children’s data had been compromised until it was far too late.

“If you want to find out who owns a fingerprint, just convert the fingerprint to a template and do a search for the template in one of these databases. Call the template a binary number if you want to. The point is that all you need to save in the database is the number. Later, when you come across a “fingerprint of interest”, you just convert it to a number and search for it. Law enforcement can use this information – and so can criminals.”

Kim Cameron , architect of identity and access in Microsoft’s connected systems division, 09 May 2007

http://www.leavethemkidsalone.com/facts.htm

First, take a look at this:

Then read this.

In the past, the facts and subsequent analysis about an event like this would have taken months to propagate. Accurate analysis would never come to the attention of the wider public at all. Now both are happening in a matter of hours, thanks to teh internetz. The very systems that are being used to destabilize countries are self healing and nullifying the ill effects of dastardly plots like ‘Operation AJAX 2.0’:

We know that the US funds terrorist organizations inside Iran that are responsible for bombings and other violent acts. It is likely that these terrorist organizations are responsible for the burning buses and other acts of violence that have occurred during the demonstrations in Tehran.

A writer on pakalert.wordpress.com says that he was intrigued by the sudden appearance of tens of thousands of Twitter allegations that Ahmadinejad stole the Iranian election.

He investigated, he says, and he reports that each of the new highly active accounts were created on Saturday, June 13th. “IranElection” is their most popular keyword. He narrowed the spammers to the most persistent: @StopAhmadi @IranRiggedElect @Change_For_Iran. He researched further and found that on June 14 the Jerusalem Post already had an article on the new Twitter. He concludes that the new Twitter sites are propaganda operations.

[…]

http://vdare.com/roberts/090621_iran.htm

which has been underway in Iran as the ‘Green Revolution’, the occurrence of which was known about before it actually started to happen:

Neoconservative Kenneth Timmerman let the cat out of the bag that there was an orchestrated “color revolution” in the works.

Before the election, Timmerman wrote: “there’s talk of a ‘green revolution’ in Tehran.” Why would protests be organized prior to a vote and announcement of the outcome? Organized protests waiting in the wings are not spontaneous responses to a stolen election.

Timmerman’s organization, Foundation for Democracy, is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) for the explicit purpose of promoting democracy in Iran. According to Timmerman, NED money was funneled to “pro-Mousavi groups who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds.”

The US media has studiously ignored all of these highly suggestive facts. The media is not reporting or providing objective analysis. It is engaged in a propagandistic onslaught against the Iranian government.

[…]

http://vdare.com/roberts/090621_iran.htm

Read that entire article by Paul Craig Roberts.

Now we have even the pro intervention, pro regime change Guardian printing an article that hits the nail on the head:

Democracy, made in Iran

By reviving memories of an ousted leader, Iran’s protesters are signalling they want to win reform without US intervention

Stephen Kinzer

Protesters displaying pictures of former prime minister Muhammad Mossadeq alongside presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi during demonstrations in Iran last week. Photograph: Anonymous (courtesy of Stephen Kinzer)

Despite efforts by Iran’s leaders to keep photographers off the streets during post-election protests this month, many vivid images have emerged. The one posted here, above, is the one I found most chilling, poignant and evocative.

By now, many outsiders can identify the man whose picture is on the right-hand side of this protest sign. He is Mir Hossein Mousavi, the reported loser in this month’s presidential election. The elderly gentleman in the other picture is unfamiliar to most non-Iranians. He and his fate, however, lie at the historical root of the protests now shaking Iran.

The picture shows a pensive, sad-looking man with what one of his contemporaries called “droopy basset-hound eyes and high patrician forehead”. He does not look like a man whose fate would continue to influence the world decades after his death. But this was Muhammad Mossadeq, the most fervent advocate of democracy ever to emerge in his ancient land.

Above the twinned pictures of Mossadeq and Mousavi on this protest poster are the words “We won’t let history repeat itself.” Centuries of intervention, humiliation and subjugation at the hand of foreign powers have decisively shaped Iran’s collective psyche. The most famous victim of this intervention – and also the most vivid symbol of Iran’s long struggle for democracy – is Mossadeq. Whenever Iranians assert their desire to shape their own fate, his image appears.

Iranians began their painful and bloody march toward democracy with the constitutional revolution of 1906. Only after the second world war did they finally manage to consolidate a freely elected government. Mossadeq was prime minister, and became hugely popular for taking up the great cause of the day, nationalisation of Iran’s oil industry. That outraged the British, who had “bought” the exclusive right to exploit Iranian oil from a corrupt Shah, and the Americans, who feared that allowing nationalization in Iran would encourage leftists around the world.

In the summer of 1953 the CIA sent the intrepid agent Kermit Roosevelt – grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, who believed Americans should “walk softly and carry a big stick” – to Tehran with orders to overthrow Mossadeq. He accomplished it in just three weeks. It was a vivid example of how easy it is for a rich and powerful country to throw a poor and weak one into chaos.

With this covert operation, the world’s proudest democracy put an end to democratic rule in Iran. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi returned to the Peacock Throne and ruled with increasing repression for a quarter-century. His repression produced the explosion of 1979 that brought reactionary mullahs to power. Theirs is the regime that rules Iran today.

Carrying a picture of Mossadeq today means two things: “We want democracy” and “No foreign intervention”. These demands fit together in the minds of most Iranians. Desperate as they are for the political freedom their parents and grandparents enjoyed in the early 1950s, they have no illusion that foreigners can bring it to them. In fact, foreign intervention has brought them nothing but misery.

The US sowed the seeds of repression in Iran by deposing Mossadeq in 1953, and then helped bathe Iran in blood by giving Saddam Hussein generous military aid during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Militants in Washington who now want the US to intervene on behalf of Iranian protesters either are unaware of this history or delude themselves into thinking that Iranians have forgotten it. Some of them, in fact, are the same people who were demanding just last year that the US bomb Iran – an act which would have killed many of the brave young protesters they now hold up as heroes.

America’s moral authority in Iran is all but non-existent. To the idea that the US should jump into the Tehran fray and help bring democracy to Iran, many Iranians would roll their eyes and say: “We had a democracy here until you came in and crushed it!”

President Barack Obama seems to grasp this reality. During his recent speech in Cairo, without mentioning Mossadeq by name, he conceded that “in the middle of the cold war, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.” Then, after the current electoral protests broke out, he avoided the hypocrisy of righteous indignation and confined himself to saying that “ultimately the election is for the Iranians to decide.”

Anyone doubting the wisdom of those words should pay attention to the sprouting of Mossadeq pictures during protests in Iran. They mean: “Americans, your interventions have brought us tyranny and death. Stay home, keep your hands off and leave our country to us for a change.”

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jun/19/iran-protests-mousavi-mossadeq

The fact of the matter is that it is no longer possible to mount 20^th century Psy Ops in countries like Iran; cellular networks are like mass vaccination – they immunize the populations that have them from being infected by the vile propaganda of the colonialists. Centralized radio and television cannot counter AJAX style operations. Why? Because the TV is not a ‘trusted introducer’ to any idea, whereas a text message from your social network IS a trusted introducer.

Those Rock & Roll loving Iranians had better watch out; they are doing the work of the lord when they hold up signs IN ENGLISH, riot, cause mayhem and destabilize THEIR OWN COUNTRY. They have only to look to their former enemies to see what US ‘liberation’ looks like. What they are actually asking for is the complete DEATH of Iran and their culture.

Thankfully, the small deluded minority causing all this trouble will not get it.

Now let me be clear. The problem with all of this has nothing to do with the ‘right and wrong’ of how Iran runs its own affairs, and wether or not you personally agree with it. What this is about it the pursuit of global domination by monsters, who are hell bent, literally, on wiping out any culture or system that is different to theirs, or which is not under their direct and absolute control.

Tehran is the largest city in the Middle East and is the second most populated. If the Iranians should ever discover the true nature of money they could become an unstoppable economic force in the region. Right now, they are being run by Keynsian witch-doctors (John Maynard Keynes is to Economics as a Witch-Doctor is to Medicine), who are printing money like drunk sailors on the rampage at the ripperbahn.

Did you know that Tehran has an ‘Underground’?

These people are dangerous; dangerous because they are so successful, so organized and so peaceful. They are the most threatening nation to the ‘New World Order’. They are showing, through results and not rhetoric, that you can have huge prosperity without interfacing with the globalists.

That is why they must be destroyed.

You can get very tired of people voicing their ill-considered views about home-based education with no apparent knowledge of the research of the last 30 years in UK, USA, Canada, Australia and elsewhere on the subject. They are also forgetful of the dire effects of ‘compulsory mis-education’, as Goodman put it, in the day-prison system of learning called schools.

One response is to point out that their comments on home-based education might be construed as a kind of treason. After all, the Queen is a home-based education graduate, so accusations of ‘missing out on socialisation’, ‘no exposure to approved forms of knowledge’, etc., must apply to the monarch. The response to this line of argument is usually an uncomfortable silence.

Those who prefer Presidents democratically elected to unelected monarchs can look at the USA situation where of the 42 or so past presidents, 17 were home-based education graduates. Moreover, the various studies trying to rank them in order of success, consistently put the first five as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt. Yes, you have guessed it – they are all home-based education graduates.

There is a second kind of treason, to the evidence of other well-known people who were home-educated. Thus, Yehudi Menuhin went to school for only one half day.

“When I came back from the morning, my mother asked me what I had learnt. I said, ‘I really didn’t learn anything. I sat at the back of the class, and there was a little window high upon the wall, through which I could see branches. I hoped that a bird would alight. No bird alighted, but I kept hoping’, and that’s about all I could report. So my mother promptly said, “Well, we’ll educate you at home.”

He got on well enough without school to become a world-class violinist.

Patrick Moore, the astronomer and broadcaster, was educated at home and did not go to university. He tells us that he chose his curriculum at the age of seven as learning to type, which he thought would be useful, by copy typing some tomes in astronomy. This, he thought, would inform him about the subject that interested him, and would also serve as a course in improving his English. He would also spend some time on his xylophone and later the piano developing his musical skills. This ‘unbalanced curriculum’ served him well, he explains, since the central activities of his life have been astronomy, journalism and music. All other knowledge and skills that he needed were gained incidentally on a ‘need to know’ basis.

Then there was the Headteacher of Wolverhampton Grammar School who was a party to educating his two daughters at home until they were eleven because the local primary school was not able to facilitate a personalized learning system to take into account their own keen learning interests in gymnastics and music.

Bertrand Russell, distinguished philosopher and mathematician, was another home- based education graduate. He observed that:

“I was glad I did not go to school. I would have had no time for original thought, which has been my chief stay and support in troubles.”

The roll-call of well-known people can take up a whole book – see An “A” in Life: Famous Home Schoolers by Mac and Nancy Plent (1999) Unschoolers Network. It includes George Bernard Shaw, Charlie Chaplin, Claude Monet, Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, The Wright brothers (the aeroplane inventors), Agatha Christie, Noel Coward, Margaret Mead, Pearl Buck, C.S.Lewis, John Stuart Mill, two Wimbledon tennis champions, and several contemporary film actors.

There is also a third kind of treason, to the respect for research evidence, which shows that the bad news about home-based education is very hard to find and confined to a few odd cases – reported in the press, for I have never come across any myself and I have encountered thousands of home-based educating families in the years I have been researching the subject. The Home Education Research Journal has been publishing systematic studies on home-based education for over 30 years in USA. The research shows that, in the vast majority of cases, home-based education is a good news story. Mike Fortune Wood’s two books, The Face of Home –based Education 1: Who, Why and How, and The Face of Home-based Education 2: Numbers, Support, Special Needs, are two recent surveys of the scene in UK showing the same outcome.

Members of the establishment, despite showing the signs of being damaged by their mis-education at school themselves, can be won over in time. Thus, a school inspector, quoted in D. Smith, Parent Generated Home Study in Canada, 1993, said: “I so wish I’d given my daughter the opportunity you’re giving your sons.”

Roland Meighan: D.Soc.Sc, Ph.D., B.Sc.(Soc)., L.C.P.., Cert. Ed., he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Writer, publisher, and consultant/research er on learning systems, past present and future. His work on “The Next Learning System” has been translated into more than twelve languages. Roland is also Director of Educational Heretics Press, Director/Trustee of the Centre for Personalised Education Trust Ltd. He is also a former Special Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham and was Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Birmingham.

He is an acknowledged Educational Heretic for his view that mass compulsory schooling is an obsolete and counter-productive learning system which should be phased out as soon as possible and schools should be recycled into something more personalised, flexible and humane. He began researching home-based education in 1977, appearing as an expert witness in key legal hearings.

UPDATE

A wise Home Educator chimes in on Roland MeighanL

Roland Meighan has long been seen as a “champion” of home education. He spoke at a conference in Glasgow a few years ago. I cheered him and enjoyed watching some establishment types squirm. We dined with him and his wife afterwards and enjoyed the company. I do not *want* to think badly of him.

The language of “alternative education” for want of a better phrase, or “personalised education” to use a Meighanism , has been nicked, perverted, re-branded and is being used to sell some very nasty outcome-based “education” eg: http://www.home-education.biz/forum/media/352-radical-learning-reform-unveiled.html (lazy link to some of our discussion of CfE in Scotland – obviously just one example).

Roland does not seem to mind this. Recently, in the light of this “not minding” and prompted by discussion on one of the lists, I had a look back at what he had actually said in the past.

Sadly, I found this rather telling quote – afraid the link is no longer live (have emailed the person who owns the site to see where it has gone).
Roland Meighan, 2003 –

“There’s an important sense in which the people who are home schooling are trail-blazing their way to the next learning system.

They are not the next learning system but they are trail-blazing their way towards it.”

http://www.thebluecrane.com/BLUECRANEMEDIA/subhtm/education-germany/EducationOtherwiseVideoTranscript.html

This article is not quite so clear cut but is in a similar vein:

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=305041

I accept that it is easy to be wise with hindsight but surely, at best, this shows an incredible political naivety?

And then he says this in his response to the Badman crap?

“Education Otherwise and similar organisations could form a monitoring body if given the finance and resources to perform this task well. OFSTED and LEAs are not competent to do this task having been trained only in the authoritarian crowd instruction and crowd control approach to learning – ‘you will do it our way, or we will find something nasty to do to you’.”

Have a look at the connections between PEN /BECTA/ARCH/ EO and Heppell (man loves himself so much one link would be meaningless).

+++++++

I read his response to the Badman report, and those quotes jumped out. This matter is about the autonomy of parents as much as it is about Home Educating parents. EO have no business monitoring Home Educators (which will mean registering with them) or anyone else for that matter, unless people volunteer to be a member of their organization.

Having said all that, I found this piece to be worthy of posting. As usual, we do not have to agree with everything everyone says; at the same time, at a time when EO are maneuvering for the job of being the masters of all things Home Education, with funding and power handed to them by the state, it is a good idea to know precisely who is who. By posting this article and exposing the name of the author, it is possible (but unlikely) that this mans voice could be amplified by the BBC, and clearly, his ideas about EO are anathema to many Home Educators.

‘The Fog of War’….

BLOGDIAL readers know that we are for a general and permanent boycott of everything related to the police state and its apparatus (ID Cards, ContactPoint NIR, CCTV etc). In this General Boycott Everything that touches them is ‘tainted’, so if someone contacts you because they got your details from ContactPoint, those communications are tainted, and so should be ignored. Any request to show ID for purchases should likewise result in ‘NO SALE’.

Academics are taking exactly this stance within their own field:

Academics boycott visa ‘snooping’
University academics say they will boycott new visa rules for overseas students that would make them into “immigration snoopers”.

Delegates at the University and College Union’s annual conference said they did not want to become a branch of the UK Border Agency.

This is absolutely excellent. We have said many times that the state cannot run the police state by itself; they do not have the resources. They need business and the people themselvs to run it. This is why all professionals should pledge not to become proxy aparatchicks; everyone must reject the Zero Trust Society if we are to avoid the creation of a hideous STASI style state where everyone is spying and tattling on everyone else.

Under the new rules universities are expected to monitor whether overseas students really attend their courses.

The Home Office said such things were part of their normal duty of care.

Once again, this is a BBC News article by an unnamed author, quoting unnamed spokespersons; you cant make stuff like this up. Voices from nowhere, unaccountable and untraceable, issue commands from secret offices that everyone is expected to read and obey without question. Yet another example of the BBC News website acting as a propaganda repeater. Absolutely disgusting and transparent.

And Neu Labour cannot understand why they are about to be flushed down the toilet in the upcoming EU and local authority polls.

More on the ‘part of their normal duty of care’ below.

Institutions must also report concerns that a student could be involved in terrorism.

This is not the job of teachers.

In a debate at the conference, in Bournemouth, delegates argued that the rules would place a strain on the relationship between staff and students from outside the European Union.

‘Pernicious’

General secretary Sally Hunt said: “UCU members are educators not border guards.”

She said later: “Politically, UCU is absolutely opposed to this legislation and we know that many members have strong and principled moral objections as members of society and as professional educators.

At last, people are beginning to stand up and simply say ‘NO’. That is all it takes, believe it or not.

“One of the more pernicious effects of this new system will be to turn our members into an extra arm of the police force, placing monitoring and reporting responsibilities onto academic and support staff.”

Precisely. They are trying to turn everyone into a spy, eliminating the normal bonds of trust that should exist between human beings and delivering everyone into a horrible, inhuman state where trust is mediated by machines and a secret police state. And as it implies above, anyone from the EU will not be subject to this; that means in reality, profiling. This indefensible, immoral and thankfully, will not be done, because someone had the guts to stand up and say ‘NO’.

One of the resolutions tabled for discussion said the new system “makes educators into immigration snoopers which could damage UK education irreparably”.

Once the word gets out that people are being mistreated by the very institutions that they are PAYING to learn in, there will be an exodus of students to other centres. No one will trust the Universities in the UK; and why should they? If these academics did not stand up and do what they are doing, it would be stupid to come here and be mistreated when you can go to other countries and just get on with learning.

When they say that UK education could be damaged irreparably, they are talking about people not coming back here for generations. They are talking about becoming a pariah system that students avoid reflexively. They are talking about a stain that will be very hard to remove.

It deplored “this pandering to anti-immigration racism” and committed the union to “non-compliance with all such policing and surveillance duties”.

This is the key; non compliance. What is the state going to do in response?

• Close the universities?
• Deport the non EU students en masse?
• Arrest all the academics?

Imagine any of those three happening. Imagine the other, equally absurd things the state could try and do to coerce the academics into betraying their students. None of it will wash.

But a Home Office spokesman said: “Educational institutions have a duty of care to all their students and checking that they are attending and making progress in their studies is part of that responsibility.

“The records we expect education providers to keep are those which most will keep for their own purposes anyway.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8074515.stm

Now this is the most sickening part.

Is is possible that this anonymous person is so retarded that she cannot see that information that is PRIVATE and collected as a part of running a college is perfectly natural, and the sending of that information to the state is a gross violation?

There are two possibilities:

(1) Either these people think we are so stupid they can say something like this and get away with it

or

(2) These people are so stupid they can say something like this and believe it doesn’t matter.

Whatever the reason this has been proposed and put into law, it is clear that this spokesperson and the other people who are behind this are not ‘fit for purpose’. They are of the same school that believes everyone is guilty until proven innocent, that parents have no rights, that all children belong to the state, and all data belongs to the state. Except theirs of course, which is why they constantly speak anonymously.

Whatever happens next, all of this is going to end up being destroyed. The nanny state is finished. We will soon see the end of ‘legislation by grieving parent” and all the other vile garbage that has turned the UK into what it has very sadly become – a place where the lunatics are running the asylum:

Spotted today:

A female PCSO (Police Community Support Officer, or Pretend Police Officer) stopping a father (naturally, what do they know?) who was pushing his baby daughter along the road in a pushchair. She demanded to know why his baby looked so hot – I suspect it was due to the HOT WEATHER, but perhaps she’s still working on her investigative skills. The PCSO was so doubtful of this man’s ability to parent, she even checked the child’s pulse – without asking – and took a few notes. At this point the man declined to give his details and simply walked off, shaking his head.

Scary, huh?

I had two PCSO’s tell my daughter who was about 11 at the time that she shouldn’t eat the blackberries that she was picking, because they might be poisonous. I interjected and told them they were perfectly fine and popped one in my mouth (a blackberry..not the PCSO). They both nearly fainted. I then informed them that Sainsburys sell blackberries and they said, “Oh do they? but they must be safe because they come from the supermarket”. (They hadn’t even heard of blackberries!)

I then thought of showing them my trick of picking nettles with my bare hands, but thought they had suffered enough excitement for one day!

If nothing concrete happens to fix it in the very short term, people everywhere are going to fix it themselves. This is now absolutely inevitable. Reading any of the comments in the newspaper’s websites, you will see Jultra style invective forming the majority of responses to anything to do with government.

That is what we call ‘GAME OVER’; and there is no way to re-boot this particular game. The only way to go forward is to dismantle the hardware, and switch operating systems (to use a computer analogy). This is not switching from Windows 95 to Windows XP (actually, what they are proposing is to keep the same old hardware and switch from Windows XP to Windows VISTA!), no, this is switching from Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux. This is switching to stability, real security, real choice and real freedom.

This piece was forwarded to BLOGDIAL by a lurker. Its contents are simply shocking:

I raised the alarm about family 15 years ago. I still want answers

Eileen Fairweather

Every time I have seen Lord Laming, the Government's favourite child protection “expert”, wheeled out since Baby Peter's death I have gritted my teeth.

Never once has he admitted he knew the truth about this poor child's family.

Fifteen years ago, I warned Lord Laming in writing that a young relative of Baby Peter was central to a vicious London paedophile ring.

This followed one of the most disturbing and revealing inquiries ever mounted by the Evening Standard.

But Lord Laming — then chief inspector of social services — did nothing effective to rescue this terrified boy.

Since then, Lord Laming has presided over the destruction of tried and tested child protection systems, so more children than ever are at risk. He has also helped create today's surveillance society, which allows government apparatchiks and paedophiles alike to spy on innocent families.

In the early Nineties, Baby Peter's mother and a relative were under Islington council's care. Shockingly, all of its 12 children's homes then contained pimps, paedophiles and pornographers, who openly abused children. Decent staff who protested were threatened or sacked. In desperation, some bravely contacted this newspaper.

Baby Peter's relative, we were repeatedly told, was under particular pressure to introduce children to outside pimps. But the authorities thought it more important to protect politicians.

The then-council leader Margaret Hodge labelled the newspaper's meticulously-sourced investigation as “sensationalist gutter journalism”.

Laming, who later worked for Hodge, responded by letting Islington investigate itself. Inevitably, its inquiries were a whitewash.

So I and a Standard colleague met Lord Laming and revealed that management had “lost” incriminating files requested by police investigating three separate child sex rings. Islington's assistant director resigned a few days later “for personal reasons”.

But still no real inquiry ensued.

Hence the Standard's decision to compile a 112-page dossier of further evidence. I submitted it with real if naïve hope and Laming, to his credit, ordered a secret inquiry into Baby Peter's relative. It confirmed in August 1994 that Islington knew for two years that he was at the heart of grave concerns about pimps preying on children's homes. The council and local police had done nothing save call meetings about meetings.

A broader independent inquiry in 1995 demanded that 26 former Islington staff, given glowing references following serious allegations of rape, kidnap and pimping, be barred from social work. Still no paedophiles were raided or charged, and no children interviewed or rescued.

Social services is the lead agency in child protection inquiries, so Laming had the power to call for police action.

None followed. Thus Hodge was able to boast that no one was convicted as a result of the scandal, and no evidence was found of a ring. The ring dispersed but continued hurting children.

Three protected Islington children's home heads moved to Thailand's notorious Pattaya child sex resort. Thai police charged Nick Rabet there in 2006 with abusing 30 local children, as young as six.

The Islington cover-up had, Thai police estimated, allowed him to hurt hundreds more children. Everyone who failed the children of London rose spectacularly higher.

Sue Akers, the detective inspector then in charge of Islington's Child Protection Team, is now a Deputy Assistant Commissioner.

Hodge, infamously, became Britain's first children's minister.

Herbert Laming was awarded ermine and undertook the inquiry into Victoria Climbie's murder, whose 2003 recommendations allowed Hodge to treat all parents as potential abusers.

Her subsequent Every Child Matters (ECM) “reform” of social services abolished the Child Protection Register, and replaced it with the controversial ContactPoint database on all Britain's 11 million children.

The few children at grave risk are now almost invisible, while social workers drown under a tidal wave of paperwork about ordinary families. ECM also effectively removed police from investigating child abuse — Laming suggested in his Climbie report that the police only investigate actual crime, not a child's feared risk of harm.

The police responded by closing most child protection teams.

Baby Peter's mother was once a victim too, and became an abuser in turn, through the well-documented “cycle of abuse”.

So why did no one in power ever do anything effective to stop the evil ring which ultimately destroyed her and Baby Peter?

I asked Lord Laming recently but he would not comment.

Eileen Fairweather is a former Standard reporter involved in an award-winning investigation into Islington care homes

[…]

Evening Standard

This confirms many of the things we have been saying about ContactPoint:

• The people who organized it are dangerously incompetent.
• It will hurt children, and not help them.
• If you want to keep a register of children, you only list those at risk, and not every child.
• ContactPoint is a dream come true for paedophiles.
• ContactPoint will make ordinary people into suspects.

It is clear, in the light of this information, that ContactPoint should never have been developed, and that Lord Lamming, Margaret Hodge and everyone involved in this scandal should have been permanently barred from having anything to do with the welfare of children.

I wonder if this evidence, had it been presented during the consultations on ContactPoint, would have made a difference. I expect not. What is more clear than ever is that ContactPoint is flawed, not only in the technical sense, which is irremediable, but in its inception. The people who were behind its creation were scandal ridden molestation enablers. That people of that background should be able to commission and create a system like ContactPoint (and Every Child Matters) is a prime example of what is wrong with Britain. Monsters, literally, are in charge and enabling the worst sort of criminals to carry out their crimes.

If you were not scared by ContactPoint, this should be enough to utterly terrify you. If you are not scared by it, you are INSANE. The children listed in ContactPoint are going to be viewable by over ONE MILLION PEOPLE. It cannot ever be secured. Anyone using the system can take a screenshot from the database, and then send it anywhere they like. Once the data is out, it is out forever, and since there are over a million people using the system at once, this means that all it will take for the entire database to be copied is for every user of contact point to make 11 screenshots each (11 million children being divided by one million users). The shortest time this could happen in is less than a day. It will happen. Even if ‘only’ half of the children’s records are copied, or one 100th of them are copied, the crime is still the same. It is totally immoral, socially corrosive and evil to create a system like this; there is no excuse for it, and that it comes from the minds of monsters like Lord Lamming and Margaret Hodge is no surprise whatsoever.

The Daily Mail published a blistering attack on HMG, written deliberately to raise questions. Shall we answer them?

Why not?!

This Parliament has now lost all moral and political authority and ought, by rights, to dissolve itself.

Thats like asking a bank robber to turn himself and his bag of money in, or more accurately, a counterfeiter to hand in his printing press and plates, ink and paper stock voluntarily. No corrupt political power ‘dissolves itself’. That would be an act of decent, moral people. These are not decent moral people.

It is now not only the Government that has ceased to deserve our trust. So many members of the House of Commons have disgraced themselves so completely that their right to make laws for the rest of us has evaporated.

These people have been abusing their positions for years. All during that time, they schemed up the ID Cards, ContactPoint and countless other evils. They never had the right to make laws for anyone. So, if this is the case, should not all legislation introduced by New Labour be struck off of the books? If we are going to start with a clean slate, then let’s actually clean it; the 3000 laws of New Labour should be removed, and all of their purely evil and fascist proposals permanently scrapped. That means ID Cards, ContactPoint, the NIR and everything to do with them – SCRAPPED.

Nothing comparable has happened to British politics in modern times. The revelations of surreptitious greed – sometimes pathetic, sometimes outrageous, often both at the same time – are uniquely damaging.

These people are not greedy. They are behaving like human beings. The mistake the Mail makes is to put these people on a pedestal and expect them to not be human. Instead of asking for this, they should ask instead why these people need to ‘cheat’. Once they find the answer to that question, they will come to the conclusion that everyone in the country should be relieved of the insane burdens that they live under.

We have always known that MPs are human and imperfect, like the rest of us. In fact, it is important, for the sake of our democracy, that they are.

Nonsense. Since no one can be trusted, no one should be put in a position of trust with exceptional powers over anyone else. No one should be able to steal money or property from other people. No one should be able to murder. No one should be able to initiate force against another person. This is true of individuals or collections of individuals, no matter how that collection is selected.

But we also assumed that on election to that hallowed chamber, they recognised the seriousness of their tasks, the long, honourable traditions of freedom and courage which they had been elected to defend and the need to be honest above all things.

This is a joke right?

Nobody can assume that now. Grubby, grasping, shameless, these essentially little men and women are now shown to have become worse, not better, to have shrunk rather than grown, once they took their solemn oaths and added the letters ‘MP’ to their names. What did they think those letters stood for? Manipulate and Profit?

Murder and Pillage
Money and Power
Milking and Pilfering
Menace and Poison
Manacle and Prison
Monsters and Parasites
Money-grabbers and Prostitutes
Movies and Popcorn
Morons and Pipsqueaks
Miscreants and Poopheads
Meddling and Profane
Mad and Pathetic
Mountebanks and Pillocks
Malignant and Perfidious
MMORPG and Pwned
Muffdivers and Poodlefakers

Feel free to add to this list.

They seem to have been gripped by a sort of collective madness, combined with an astonishing heedless arrogance.

Almost there… COLLECTIVIST MADNESS!

How did they dare to finance their unearned profiteering and nest-feathering using taxpayers’ money – and then actually exempt themselves from tax?

‘Who dares wins’ thats how. People like the Mail allowed it to happen by consistently failing to rise to the challenge (as if they even had the choice) of confronting evil from the root; that collectivism itself is the evil.

Like the members of some pampered rubber-stamp Soviet in the old days of communism, their relationship with the State has been the exact opposite of that suffered by ordinary citizens.

Firstly, they are not LIKE members of a rubber-stamp Soviet, they ARE the NEW rubber-stamp Soviet Britain. Everyone knows it.

The hand of Government reaches ceaselessly into the pockets of the hard-working and the productive: when they earn, when they spend, when they travel, when they try to provide for old age, when they die.

And the solution to this is?…. Wait for it…..

For MPs it is the other way round. The State kindly subsidises their forays into the housing market, pumps other people’s money into their pensions, furnishes their little bolt-holes, provides them with free car parking and fat car allowances. Tax free.

The Daily Mail doesn’t seem to understand, THEY ARE THE STATE. The State is not separate from them, they are the State INCARNATE.

Tax free – two little words. Most of us would faint with shock if we were allowed even for a single year to see how much wealthier we would be without this burden.

There it is!

When the Daily Mail types wake up and understand that there can be no State without their cooperation, then the image will have cracked, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” will be everyone’s new reality, and all our troubles will soon after be over. Not only would everyone be wealthier, but this country would start to resemble the sort of place that it used to be; not a police state.

Yet MPs, who impose most of our taxes, do not even have to pay them on what is for many the bigger part of their income, an arrangement that places them in the luxury class. No wonder they are so carefree about loading taxes on everyone else.

‘The luxury class’ what does that even mean? Whatever it is you own or make, no one has the right to steal it from you. Whatever happens, nothing must distract from this and the fundamental principles.

Even now, they do not understand how their behaviour appears to others. Monstrously, it is proposed that the police should act against the source of the leaked information. How doubly ridiculous.

“Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done”. Hmph! What their behaviour appears like is IRRELEVANT. It is what they are ACTUALLY DOING that is important. All the time they were ‘cheating’, they were passing draconian measures to enslave the British people, all the while, appearing to be decent and behaving correctly. Correct behaviour, or at least the appearance of it is enough to keep everyone quiet in the UK. This is TOTAL INSANITY; as long as they are not spitting in your face, they can steal your money, your property, your liberty and …. you do not care? How can people BE like this?!

Modern Whitehall, so keen on gathering our secret details on its databases, so blithe in its promises that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, has proved yet again that it is not fit to be trusted with a bus ticket, let alone information of any value.

Actually, they have control of Bus Tickets also and you are right, they cannot be trusted with that either. As for all the other databases, you are paying for them; you are financing your own oppression. When are you going to join the dots and complete the hideous picture? Not only are they taking your money to live lives of ‘luxury’ but they are using your money to put you all in virtual cages from which you will never be able to escape, short of a total revolution. Wake up you dunderheads!

The 2005 Parliament is, in all important respects, not just a lame duck but a dead one. The Cabinet is an assembly of haggard political ghosts awaiting the end, bereft of ideas and even of the gimmicks and stunts that have served it so well till now.

It has been like this since before Bliar took office. This is not a new phenomenon. This is not news. What people like you need to talk about is how nothing like this is ever going to be allowed to happen again. What are you going to do to ensure that this is the case? That is the question.

Prime Minister’s Questions is a futile, modern version of bear-baiting in which nothing is revealed or gained. Nothing will come out of this nothingness.

“Welcome to the real world.”

The ‘modernisers’ and radicals who have sneered for so long at the Monarchy might now reflect on the fact that the one part of Government completely untouched by scandal and wholly above suspicion is the Sovereign herself.

I defy anyone in Britain to name a modern prime minster that would be preferable to absolute monarchy. Its an interesting question!

As she surveys the behaviour of her MPs, the pitiful failure of the Speaker and of the House of Commons authorities to check their behaviour, the involvement of Privy Counsellors and of the Opposition in the scandal, she must be more than tempted to summon her Prime Minister to the Palace and suggest to him that it would be a kindness to dissolve one of the most disgraceful Parliaments of modern times. This could begin a process of cleansing which is sorely needed.

And the Royal Prerogative to declare war should be returned to the monarch also. The power to wage war is too dangerous to be left in the hands of peasants. Yes, PEASANTS.

The Speaker should, of course, go. The officials supposedly supervising MPs’ allowances should likewise go. The MPs themselves should be compelled to face their constituents, who should all be provided with full details of their member’s expenses claims. The ex-MPs can then explain how they plan to reform their own institution and work out a system by which they would be adequately paid and properly recompensed for genuine expenses. Some of them might then be allowed back.

‘Allowed back’. This is why you FAIL. Its like voluntarily letting a thief back into your pockets for a second rifle around. Are you all TOTALLY INSANE?!?!

Voters face an awkward problem here. This is not – as will become increasingly clear in days to come – a party political issue. The Conservatives were trembling last night, wondering when their own misdeeds would begin to be exposed alongside those of Labour.

If you are a voter, then you have more problems than political parties. If you believe that voting can solve your problems, you are insane.

It is worth recalling that when The Mail on Sunday first uncovered the misuse of housing allowances in December 2002, it was the Tory MP Michael Trend who was found out.

So, between 2002 and 2009, nothing has changed and yet you want to go back to the polls, AGAIN, for MORE OF THE SAME. That is insane. There is no other word for it. Total unhinged insanity.

This newspaper has continued with its bipartisan pursuit of this abuse ever since, following a long trail. This has led more recently to the exposure of the increasingly preposterous Jacqui Smith’s slippery arrangements and to the unveiling of Tony McNulty’s similarly suspect claims.

These stories, doggedly and consistently investigated, undoubtedly helped bring about the mass exposure now under way.

It is true that Labour has made matters worse than they were, repeatedly trampling on rules and institutions which once preserved integrity at Westminster.

Without a paradigm shift, nothing will change. You can write all the articles you like; as long as you prop up the system by pretending that it is legitimate in its form and only needs ‘the right people’ to make it work properly, you will consistently FAIL and continue to be stolen from.

It has debauched Civil Service impartiality, imposing political commissars on Whitehall. It told deliberate lies to Parliament and people to gain support for an illegal war, the one single action that has done most to undermine good government, corrupting everyone involved. The lasting shame of the MPs gulled in this episode has no doubt demoralised them.

That war really and truly broke something. What you are doing by talking like this and holding back is trying to glue back together the dust of the porcelain vase that was the illusion you were living. Instead of trying to glue dust together, you should seize this opportunity to build a truly just britain, with a very small government that does not tell anyone what to do, and that does not steal money from its citizens.

Labour has also connived at torture and presided over the worst economic catastrophe for 80 years, bleating that it is not to blame.

A country with a small government cannot act as the poodle to any other country. Britain should get out of the EU, and tear up all the other treaties that cede sovereignty to foreign bodies. As for the financial crisis, if Britain had sound money no one in this country would be suffering the secret taxation of inflation and all the other problems to do with currencies controlled by a central bank.

At the same time it has extended the system of MPs’ allowances, and accelerated the process (already under way for many years) by which MPs have become the compliant, feather-bedded employees of Downing Street rather than the vigilant representatives of the British people.

When were they EVER the ‘vigilant representatives of the British people’? Those people are nothing more than warmongering ignorant control addicts hell bent on gaining absolute control of every British person down to their urine. After years of publishing articles about this, SURELY you all realize that that is the truth.

The Mother of Parliaments has been transformed into a personal wealth-creation scheme on the moral level of Las Vegas.

When has it been otherwise? It has always been an organ of organized theft and murder. It is only now that they not only steal and kill, but seek to totally oppress the population in a system of absolute control facilitated by technology. The vegas analogy is interesting. Let’s flesh it out.

At a Las Vegas casino, the house (parliament) always wins. The casino owners make a fortune. They ‘own the joint’. The difference is, people CHOOSE to gamble there, the rules NEVER CHANGE, and players can win MILLIONS of dollars with a single pull of a lever on a small stake. While you are there, you are treated with great respect and friendliness by the casino employees, there are free shuttle busses to everywhere laid on for you by the casino, you and your family have lots of fun, the food is cheap, plentiful and high quality, the weather is nice, and when you leave, you cannot wait to come back and spend more money.

Does that sound like Britain’s Parliament to you?

But both major parties have played their part in the transformation of politics into a well-paid and comfortable career for people who probably could not succeed in any other field.

True.

Both have done this as the European Union has hoovered power from Westminster to Brussels, leaving British governments with little to decide and not all that much to divide the parties.

Britain out of the EU.

Wise, experienced and forceful men and women have increasingly turned away from parliamentary politics. Inexperienced and unqualified backstairs-crawlers have taken their places.

So, you prefer to be stolen from by ‘wise, experienced and forceful’ men? That does not make sense. Also, even if those men WERE decent, there is always another Bliar or Brown around the corner. Only a system that permanently defangs government can prevent future theft, murder and abuses.

This change, until today too little noticed by the public, is now exposed in all its squalor.

Serious citizens of all parties and none should recognise that they have not been paying enough attention, that they have trusted too much and questioned too little.

Bloggers would disagree with this. Clearly.

We cannot expect Parliament to hold the executive to account, if we do not ourselves hold MPs to account, in every sense of the word.

Now is the time to do so. The people can and must recapture Westminster from the careerists and the cheats.

AND THEN WHAT?!

[…]

Daily Mail

Judging from the comments on this related post many people seem to instinctively understand that something fundamental is wrong, but they are incapable of making the leap to the final conclusion that the whole system is fundamentally evil. There is talk of throwing them all out and starting again… starting again with the same rules? That is going to inevitably end up with more of the same.

Speaking of rules, Labour’s Lynne Jones, MP for Birmingham Selly Oak, had this hilarious line:

She said: ‘It’s a very difficult situation. People retire on certain financial assumptions and we can’t just change the rules.

[…]

Daily Mail

Astonishing? Hardly.

These are the same people who do nothing but change the rules in the middle of the game (people’s lives); the most recent example is the change of the rules for ‘Non Dom’ workers:

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

This is a perfect example of the hypocrisy of government aparatchicks; the rules cannot be changed when it comes to THEIR PLANS FOR THEIR OWN FUTURES, but the plans for ANYONE ELSE are infinitely mutable. I do not need to go into how these parasites are not even productive, producing nothing ever, whereas the people in business are actually productive.

Like we have been saying for many posts, there are too many laws and regulations. If you are going to bring back parliament at all, it should sit in an unprecedented form whose sole Raison d’être should be to remove legislation.

Parliament in its current form sits to create legislation. If it continues to exist as it was, it can only make things worse for everyone, since it justifies its existence through the creation of legislation. As time goes on, they will, logically, have to legislate on every aspect of human life. This is unacceptable. Its like a runaway population of consumers producing garbage until there is no more space to live on earth. And no, the laws cannot be recycled.

Such a parliament could sit for many decades carefully undoing the byzantine and irrational laws and regulations that their venal predecessors conjured up. They would be assured of jobs for life, and great, even unprecedented popularity, as their role would change from ‘oppressors’ to ‘liberators’.

As it stands now, they are revealed as almost completely illegitimate and actually dangerous. They have very little room to maneuver; they can either go forward with the police state and risk being obliterated by force, or they can re-define their role and survive till the end of this century as heroes.

Either way, business as usual is off of the table!

The Ludwig von Mises Institute has an article about something familiar to all americans who have looked behind their TV sets or their toasters:

Look at the back of your computer monitor, the bottom of your table lamp, or the label on your hair dryer. Chances are you will see the symbol “UL” with a circle around it. It stands for Underwriters Laboratories, a firm headquartered in Northbrook, Illinois, and an unsung hero of the market economy.

Most people don’t realize that dozens of products in their homes — toasters, fire extinguishers, space heaters, televisions, etc. — have been tested by the Underwriters Lab for safety. The Lab also tests items like bulletproof vests, electric blankets, commercial ice-cream machines, and chicken de-beakers, among thousands of other products.

But the Lab isn’t an arm of the government. It is privately owned, financed, and operated. No one is compelled by force of law to use its services. It thrives — and makes our lives safer — by the power of its excellent reputation. For that reason, its ideologically driven enemies on the Left despise it.

The firm was formed in 1894 to deal with the dangers posed by the dramatic increase in the use of electricity. Today, it employs 4,000 scientists, engineers, and safety specialists to render an independent verdict on hundreds of thousands of products.

The very existence of the Lab debunks the common civics-text view that, without government intervention, private businesses would seek profit without regard for safety; thus, bureaucrats have to police markets to impose a balance between private interests and the common good. The government, according to this view, is the only thing standing between us and unceasing fatal accidents.

The truth is the opposite. The market is well equipped to regulate itself, and does a fine job of it. It’s the government that operates without oversight. To discover the quality and value of products, no one would trust the advice of the scandal-ridden Commerce Department or the Federal Trade Commission.

Unlike quality and price, safety isn’t always at the forefront of the consumer’s mind. But that hasn’t kept manufacturers from seeking out the Lab’s testing services. For those who appreciate the virtues of private enterprise, the UL insignia is an inspiration.

The Lab was the first to set standards for certifying the safety of pilots and planes before the government intervened. It set the standards for building materials, fire-fighting equipment, air conditioners, and household chemicals. It employs safecrackers and pyrotechnicians to test safes, and a variety of unique machines and devices to test thousands of other products each year. It has been testing multicolored Christmas lights since 1905, and entered the building-code business right after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

Despite its unparalleled experience and success, the market economy keeps the Lab innovating. As engineer John Drengenberg of the Lab said,

There’s always some little twist in a new product — an innovative feature or something to make it cheaper — to keep us busy developing the appropriate test procedure.

Its effectiveness in determining safety standards (even for brand-new products) and maintaining them over time has generated an interesting result. Many government regulations, especially at the state level, merely mimic the building codes and insurance requirements of the Lab.

The Lab also “regulates” in a cost-effective way. Companies come to the Lab to present their products and the tests they have already conducted. The company pays a testing fee ranging from a couple of hundred dollars to several thousand, depending on the costs of the tests to be conducted.

If the product passes, it receives one of three designations:

1. To be “listed” means that the product has passed muster for sale as a final product, like a hair dryer.
2. If it is listed as “recognized,” it is safe to use as a component within the final product, like a transformer.
3. To be “certified” means that the product has met someone else’s standards, such as the Chicago building code.

Each product is tested for each use, and the Lab is strict about how its mark is used by manufacturers. For example, Securitron Magnalock sent a new lock to the Lab for testing. New standards had to be established, and the lock was duly tested and “recognized” as a component for a delayed-exit system.

When the company faxed all of its field representatives that the product was “UL approved,” Lab officials suspended the listing. It then required Securitron to inform all employees that UL does not “approve” any product.

To insure continued safety, manufacturers agree to let the Lab inspect their production facilities and to retest on demand. These on-site inspections, often four a year, are unannounced. Lab inspectors can require manufacturers to present data and to rerun safety trials and experiments. Companies, in turn, pay a tiny fee for every UL designation symbol they put on their products.

Manufacturers can modify their products to adapt to market conditions, but the Lab oversees changes that affect product safety. The Lab is inflexible and scientific, but it’s also driven by common sense and realism.

Nothing is perfectly safe, of course. The competitive marketplace and the Lab aim for safety in a framework of rational attention to costs. UL official Drengenberg has noted, “It would be very easy for us to come up with an overly strict standard,” but then no one could afford to buy the product.

In fact, the Lab once built a fireproof office for some of its employees. The expensive room featured ceramic tile on the walls and ceiling, a thick concrete floor, metal furniture, and similar standards. Not only was the cost high, the esthetic results were not impressive. As Robert Yereance, author of Electrical Fire Analysis says, “most of us cannot afford a fireproof dwelling and would not like living in it if we could.”

The Lab notes that 80% of accidents and fires are caused by consumers, not products. It takes this into account in its requirements. In the case of space heaters, for example, the Lab felt that enhanced warning labels would reduce as many fires as an expensive redesign, thus keeping down cost and price.

[…]

http://mises.org/story/3440

The Ludwig Von Mises institute keeps pouring out example after example of why we do not need the state for the majority of things that ‘need organizing’. The above is yet another instance showing how the market can solve any problem more efficiently than state regulation. Not only does it work better, but it is sensible, unlike the insane health and safety madness that has overtaken Britain, where, for example, every pest control company operating in the UK will soon have to have two people on hand every time a ladder is deployed…by order of the state. That means that either the companies that are currently working will need to double the numbers of their exterminators and pass the greater expense of these extra wages to the infested customers or the companies will have to do half as many jobs since they are no longer able to send a single man out with a ladder to do his job. Both outcomes will result in greater pestilence in the UK. But the government likes that, because they are the ultimate pestilence.

But I digress.

The above story proves yet again that we are all better off without the state interfering in our affairs. Wether the part of our lives is schools, money, safety or anything you can imagine, when the state is removed from the equation and people are left to organize themselves the optimum and just result emerges.

Someone named Alison has written a brilliant piece on the anti Home Education propaganda war that is under way:

Open season on home education, but we aren’t all game

We will no doubt all remember for a very long time that fateful day, back in January 2009, when the UK Government declared open season on home educators in England by announcing a review of home education with a remit “to consider what evidence there is to support claims that home education could be used as a ‘cover’ for child abuse such as neglect, forced marriage, sexual exploitation or domestic servitude”.

In a vituperative attack on families who refuse to sacrifice their children to daily incarceration, regimentation and bullying, the offensive, uninformed and highly irresponsible Government minister, Delyth Morgan, pronounced that home educators were now all under suspicion, simply because some local authorities who were hostile to the educational freedom enjoyed by a minority group had misrepresented a few cases and made up some others for good measure. It wasn’t long before the NSPCC chimed in with their two penn’orth, making it all up as they went along because it was potentially a nice little earner. Did you know that Victoria Climbie was home educated? Thought not (probably because she wasn’t). When the facts don’t fit, they just make them up.

Let’s look at a some facts and cite some real cases.

Eunice Spry was an abusive parent who happened also to home educate. It is tiresome to hear this case trotted out on a regular basis by local authorities, especially when one of them (Gloucestershire) had approved Spry as a foster parent and the family was visited on a regular basis by an education officer who declared the home education provision satisfactory. This article, written by a Gloucestershire home educator, fills in the details of this appalling case, where the State failed to use existing powers, despite reports of abuse being made by the children themselves and others in the community.

There have been a number of cases where attempts have been made to link child murder to home education, which one parent has described as “tantamount to grave robbing”. Danielle Reid, for example, was a school pupil in Inverness whose mother claimed she had moved to Manchester when in fact she was already dead, murdered by her psychopath stepfather. She was never home educated and was known to be at risk. Details of the State’s failure to act can be found in this TESS article. Victoria Climbie’s death was also preventable, but the authorities, including Social Services and the NSPCC, failed to act to save her and were severely criticised in the subsequent inquiry. Like Danielle, Victoria was never home educated and was known to be at risk of significant harm. Nevertheless, both girls’ deaths have been used to push a universal child surveillance scheme which would have saved neither.

Let’s also look at the track record of the State in spotting or preventing abuse, sexual exploitation, trafficking and some of the other ills they are trying to desperately to pin on home educators in England. It is far from satisfactory, as the following examples illustrate.

According to a secret Border and Immigration Agency report obtained by the Guardian, organised criminal gangs have exploited a children’s home near Heathrow airport for the trafficking of Chinese children to work in prostitution and the drugs trade. At least 77 Chinese children are said to have gone missing since March 2006 from the local authority run home. Surely these highly vulnerable ‘looked after’ children had the right to expect better from the State?

Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, eight members of a paedophile network have been convicted of a catalogue of charges relating to child abuse and indecent images of children. One of the guilty was chief executive of a high profile youth work agency, presumably ‘approved’ by the State as suitable to work with young people, but he still sexually abused a very young child, and invited fellow paedophiles to do likewise, after gaining a family’s trust. So much for the effectiveness of Disclosure Scotland and CRO checks.

The number of teachers, social workers, medical professionals and police officers who have been convicted of child abuse and sexual exploitation are too many to list as cases are reported in the media on such a regular basis. Such ‘trusted’ professionals were disproportionately represented in the network of abusers and pornographers uncovered by Operation Ore and are similarly over represented in the abuse conviction statistics in the UK. While home educators are unlikely to be immune from an evil which cuts across the whole of our society, they are most certainly not over represented as child abusers.

Whereas there is no denying that social workers have an incredibly difficult job, they can get things very wrong. On the one hand, children can end up seriously abused, neglected or even dead, while on the other, families may never recover from being subject to statutory interventions, including compulsory measures of care and supervision, based on flawed information, overzealousness and poor professional judgement.

The Baby P case touched the heart of the nation and sparked unprecedented public outrage as it was revealed that there were countless missed opportunities for State agents to save the child’s life by removing him from the family home to a place of safety. It wasn’t long before recriminations started flying and those seen to be responsible were summarily dismissed for incompetence. In the recently broadcast Baby P: the whole truth? Panorama revealed a catalogue of failures on the part of the local authority, the frustration of the police who wanted to take action and the outright failure of the ‘joined up working’ we have all heard so much about.

Baby P is Victoria Climbie all over again. Lessons have not been learned, the most important one of all being that, in order to protect vulnerable children, the State needs to invest money in well trained social workers rather than expensive databases of children, the majority of whom are categorically not at risk from their own parents.

Apart from the headline grabbing cases in which the State has failed to take action to save a child, there are numerous cases where families have been wrongly accused of abuse or worse. Louise Mason’s case was one which made headlines; many others go unreported. Her story makes chilling reading for any parent and demonstrates the extreme fallibility of a system which is supposed to protect children but instead can lead to the persecution of innocent parents. Louise was falsely accused of child abuse when her baby was in fact suffering from a rare form of cancer, and social workers took all three of her children away. Athough two have been returned, one child remains in foster care where she is settled, since it took Louise years to clear her name. What a travesty.

In another particularly disturbing case, the reputation of a home educating family, whose child had tragically died from natural causes, was deliberately sullied in 2004 by the general secretary of the Association of Education Wefare Managers. In a letter to the then Children’s Minister Margaret Hodge, it was erroneously claimed that the child had been removed from school “then subjected to child abuse”. A retraction was duly made and a full apology issued, but the episode marked a new low in the mud slinging stakes by an opportunist who hadn’t bothered to check her facts in a desperate bid to smear a minority community on the basis of one case twisted to suit her own purposes.

There have been other high profile travesties, such as the Orkney child abuse scandal, the Cleveland scandal and the Rochdale satanic abuse case. On the basis of no more than rumour, hearsay, suspicion and improper medical diagnoses, social workers removed children from their parents who were all subsequently absolved of any wrongdoing.

Social workers are of course carrying an unrealistic workload, the profession is in the midst of a recruitment and retention crisis, and its practitioners make convenient scapegoats when things go wrong. Social workers can and do provide excellent support to families and children, but too many are poorly trained and lack experience of real world diversity, including home education as a lawful alternative to schooling. They tend to eye home educators with suspicion due to a combination of ignorance and prejudice, a situation which has only been compounded by the Government’s latest incitement to discrimination against a law abiding minority.

Liz Davies is probably best known for her whistle blowing in the Islington abuse scandal that exposed the abuse of children within the borough’s care system and is a respected social worker and senior lecturer. In an article published by No2Abuse, she outlines her own experiences of the care system and the problems facing the social work profession. Home educators who have come into contact with social workers share many of her concerns and those of No2Abuse.

Eileen Munro, reader in social policy at the London School of Economics, has pointed to the bureaucratic burden carried by social workers and the need to focus on those who are most at risk rather than surveilling all children. A vehement opponent of the Government’s misguided ContactPoint database which will record the personal details of all 11 million children in England, she argues: “When you are searching for a needle in a haystack – a child at risk – why make the haystack bigger?” Quite.

Coming on to the spurious allegation of home educated children being forced into marriage (or at risk of being forced into marriage?) no cases have ever been cited to demonstrate even a tenuous link. Indeed it is bizarre to pin such a ‘crime’ on home educators, since schooling parents have just as much opportunity during the long summer holidays to seal a mandatory matrimonial deal for their offspring. We can only assume that the Government has no understanding of the difference between arranged marriage (entirely lawful) and forced marriage (criminal), and it seems likely this particular allegation stems from racism and religious discrimination on the part of delusional local authority ‘informants’.

Despite the Government’s stated concerns that home educators might force their young people to marry against their will, some ministers appear to have no such qualms about forcing unmarried parents into wedlock. Their somewhat schizophrenic stance on forced marriage was revealed in a recent Telegraph article which reported the mooting of an idea that couples with children outside wedlock should be automatically married by the State without their consent. An indecent proposal, or just hypocrisy?

Domestic servitude is a difficult one. Does it mean home educators stand accused of being more likely to allocate household chores to their offspring? If so, they are quite possibly guilty as charged as households don’t run themselves and ‘domestic engineering’ is seen by most to be a useful life skill. If, however, it means selling children into slavery, it is difficult to imagine any such case escaping the attention of the media. Since none appears to have been reported, we can safely assume this to be another fabrication designed to smear a minority group. Sigh.

As a matter of record, the Scottish Government makes it abundantly clear in its guidance to local authorities that there is no evidence to suggest that home educated children are any more likely to suffer abuse (or any of the other ills) than their schooled counterparts. It also makes it clear that home educated children are not deemed to be ‘Children Missing from Education’ (CME) and allows eligible home educated young people to claim the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA).

Why, then, does the UK Government insist that home educating families in England should be disproportionately disposed to abusing their own children? Why does it also insist that home educated children south of the border should be defined as ‘missing from education’ when they clearly are not, and why are eligible young people in England denied the EMA?

No evidence has ever been forthcoming to support these vile allegations, which are aimed exclusively at home educators in England, or to justify their less favourable treatment south of the border, although plenty of smears have been bandied about. What is the real reason for the elective home education review, and how much money is being thrown away by the UK Government on what is simply an exercise in rubber stamping its own pre-decided agenda? We would really like to know.

[…]

http://www.home-education.biz/Blogs/11/82/open-season-on-home-education/

Brilliant, concise, and absolutely true. Well done.

From every corner, come a series of very serious, moral and forthright voices, all incandescent with rage over the state trying to destroy the family.

There are several reasons why the state will not succeed.

Firstly, Labour is about to be sent to the same place where the American Republican party now languishes; complete destruction, desolation and political wilderness.

Second, the economic crisis that is just beginning and which will last for at least a decade, will mean that brutal cuts will be inevitable. There is not enough money for all the fascist garbage that Labour has patiently built – and actually, this means there is not enough money for the projects that the Tories will not cancel outright.

Third, the people of the UK have finally had enough. Everywhere you go and every where you read a comment from the public, the sentiment is the same; unrestrained rage. The Tories, if they are true to form, will not be any different to Labour when they inevitably take power. They will however, be powerless to stop the economic disaster that is on its way. They will have to scale down operations across the board. Councils will have a large proportion of their constituents defaulting on their Council Tax bills. When we combine this with the people who will not continue to finance their own oppression that corrupt system will collapse.

With all of these events going on, there is a real chance that at the very least, the fascist rampage will be delayed by at least a decade or more. Hopefully we can get something much more than that….who knows? One thing is for sure; business as usual is off of the table.

This is the letter posted to Mr Graham Badman of the Elective Home Education Review, on May 6th 2009, calling for the review to be scrapped and including AHEd’s dossier of information and responses:

Dear Mr Badman,

AHEd members call for the Review of Home Education to be cancelled immediately on various grounds, not least because of the illegitimate Terms of Reference. We have completed the consultation document, not in recognition of the value or legitimacy of the review, but as a means of being statistically included and conveying important messages about the errors inherent in the consultation process and questions.

We attach a copy of the response of AHEd members to the six question consultation “Home Education – Your Views” on the DCSF consultation web site.

AHEd object to the claim that this is not in fact a consultation, thereby allowing for avoidance of the regulations governing public consultations set by the Better Regulations Executive. DCSF Public Communications Unit state:

“Mr Badman has decided that he wants his review to be informed by material from a wide range of stakeholders, so he decided to offer the opportunity for organisations and individuals to contribute to the review by filling in a questionnaire.”

Quite how this aim can be achieved by avoiding good consultation practice and thus limiting the scope of those reached is a mystery, especially as the major and only really valid stakeholder group, home educators, are likely to be those most frequently excluded by this methodology. Despite efforts from within the HE community to contact a wide range of home educators, it is not possible to reach anywhere near the majority of the estimated 20,000 to 50,000 home educators.

On the other hand, local authorities who also had access to the six question consultation (and who are known to be often hostile toward and uneducated about home education and who are largely responsible for the calls for unwarranted increases in their powers) have been asked to complete an exclusive 60 question missive. The questions in this document demonstrate a shocking lack of understanding of the law and constitute a blatant incitement to local authorities to illicitly harass and persecute home educating families. They also highlight the DCSF’s and Review Team’s disdain for the Elective Home Education Guidelines for England which were only recently published by the DCSF after an extensive public consultation.

AHEd members believe that the review has been composed in this skewed manner in order to attain predetermined answers for the purpose of supporting the government’s desire to impose compulsory registration, monitoring and tracking of electively home educated children and their families, including state control and prescription of educational method, content and outcome for all children. The government’s motto seems to be “If at first you don’t succeed (in getting the answers you want from your consultation) try, try, try again (using increasingly devious techniques to try to thwart those who oppose you).

Further evidence of the predetermined outcome of this review was provided by yourself in a meeting with home educators when you declared that the “status quo” cannot prevail and changes WILL be made. Saying this before the review is complete is a clear indication that you have a predetermined outcome.

AHEd members are aware of the document “Education Otherwise Prospectus for Improving Support to Home Educating Families” presented to the review and wish to distance ourselves from it and dismiss the proposals out of hand. The document was written by a handful of home educators with no reference at all to the wider home education community or even to Education Otherwise members. In our opinion it does not represent proposals we would be happy to engage with and is extremely unlikely to have support in the wider home educating community. On the contrary, it has caused outrage.

AHEd members insist in the strongest possible terms that the only necessary changes are for LAs to stop ultra vires activity and instead learn to use the legal powers they already have. If changes in legislation that reduce the freedoms of home educators are proposed, this would be an act of the utmost hostility toward home educators and would be rejected out of hand by the home education community.

The public, especially those actually involved and likely to be affected by the outcome, do not have a taste for accepting such invasion into their private business. Our members will not co-operate with their own oppression and will continue to act and speak for our historic freedom to raise and educate our children in accordance with our personal philosophies, religious beliefs and conscience. Please see our Parents’ Declaration, attached.

You may also be aware of our petition which gathered 3,126 signatures in a short time plus that of the petition creator: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Homeedreview/

Further material supporting our call for cessation of the review is included.

Yours sincerely,

[…]

This is a great thing.

It draws a line in the sand, and gives the enemy a chance to back down. Sadly, they will not back down.

We all know that petitions do not work, that the declaration is flawed because it relies on the law as a basis of rights, etc etc, but in the main, this is probably the best thing a Home Education group has ever produced.

What needs to happen next is that every parent in Britain should be made to understand what this review really means. It is actually about the rights of all parents to look after their own children in any context, wether they are in school or not:

There is no current system for safeguarding children who are educated at home. There is no need for such a system, there never has been a need and there never will be. Children who are educated at home are exactly the same as those who are educated at schools. If you think there is a need for a system to safeguard children who are educated at home, then you need to start one to safeguard children who are educated at school. All schoolchildren have home lives just like home educated ones do. There is no more risk in either type of education. This consultation is the result of the fantasies of ignorant aparatchicks who are desperate to destroy the family, and to put every child in a government brainwashing centre. It simply will not wash. All the assumptions of this are completely wrong, and everyone knows it.

[…]

Home educating families should not be monitored, any more than families who send their children to schools should be monitored. Both of these groups have family lives; the only difference being that home educating families have more of a family life than those that send their children to school. Once again, this question is borne out of complete ignorance of what Home Education is, why it is done, who is doing it, what the proper role of government is, and what the fundamental rights of parents are.

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1528

I will give you an example.

There is talk about provision for kindergarten being made available nation-wide for children of three. Imagine that you do not want your child to attend one of these state kindergartens, and that you want to keep them at home…just because you want to.

If your child is in ContactPoint (if they do not scrap it) the Local Authority will know that your baby has reached the age of three. They will also know that you have not registered your child at one of the local kindergartens. They will then assume that you are an incompetent child abusing parent because you will not avail yourself of their ‘free’ ‘service’.

This is essentially what they are saying to all parents; you are not capable of looking after your own children – only we have the necessary skills to look after children…THE STATE.

This is why I have been privately advocating for a professional PR company to engineer the reality of Home Education; to put it into its proper context and head off the inevitable smear campaign that is going to go into full gear once the review is nearing completion and the results published.

Now for the hard questions

Our members will not co-operate with their own oppression

What does this actually mean? You will have several options, and the Germans are years ahead of you when it comes to this.

You will be obliged, first of all, to ignore any and all legislation that attempts to take away your rights.

You will then have to make a choice.

You could go into hiding. In police state britain, that will be a great challenge. People are being encouraged to tattle on their neighbors over garbage – literally – and so it will be a simple thing to convince a propagandized public to report home schoolers, since, ‘everybody knows….’. You would have to restrict your movements, only going out when school is out, lest the truancy officers spot you. It would be a difficult existence to say the least.

You could opt for taking a stand and Home Educating no matter what. As in the case of the Germans you can expect huge fines, jail, and being threatened with the loss of custody of your children. Without a large fighting fund behind you to give the authorities pause, we could call such a strategy a ‘Martyrdom Path’. It might actually be a good thing, as it could wake the nation up to the insanity of the State raising all children from the age of three, wether the parent likes it or not.

Finally, you could opt to flee the country with your family. Iran is a nice place to live compared to the UK if you Home Educate and they change the law. Certainly going to another western country is not a good idea. France is out of the question (for example) since:

In France, homeschooling is legal and requires the child to be registered with two authorities, the ‘Inspection Académique’ and the local town hall (Mairie). An inspection is carried out twice yearly once a child reaches the age of six (it is obligatory from the age of eight).

[…]

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

Not very nice. Its exactly what you do not want; the state interfering in your private business through invasive and pointless registrations and inspections.

Take a look at this map:

(Green) Legal
(Yellow) Mostly Legal; may be disputed in most political subdivisions
(Orange) Generally considered illegal, but untested legally
(Red) Illegal

All the places in red are where Home Education is illegal. The Brutish government wants to join all the bad places on this map. Absolutely SHAMEFUL.

According to that map, and the Wikipedia page it came from Austria looks like the best country to move to if you have an EU passport. Home Education is just legal; no registration, no interference, no nonsense. You will not have any problems with immigration, you can travel anywhere in the EU…

Which gives me an idea.

Why not take an address in Austria, and say that you live there? Think about it; how long do you have to be in the UK before the State requires that your children attend school? If you are from Austria, and you decide to spend some time in different parts of the EU as a family exploring Europe, how can the State expect you to register your children in every country as you move around? Its completely ABSURD.

Which brings us to the final conclusion of all of this. Eventually, the government is going to have to implement exit visas for all UK subjects. You will have to apply for permission to leave Britain with your children, so that they can make sure that you are not leaving during term time, or so they can catch Home Educators. When you apply for a visa, you will of course, have to get a signature from your schools headmaster, confirming that you have his permission to leave the country with ‘your’ child. The E-Borders project will facilitate this nicely.

Think about it; it is the logical end to all of this madness. As long as you have the right to leave the country at will and relocate anywhere you like with your family, their law means nothing. As long as you are free to live anywhere in the EU and can return to Britain at will, and there is no rule about how long you have to be in Britain before you must send your children to school, all of their Home Education laws will have no meaning. In order for these laws to be enforceable, what I have just described needs to be rolled into the equation.

This is why everything that they are planning now needs to be stopped. Once all these pieces are in place, they will have a system of total control over everyone. The keys to it all are the databases. Never before in the history of man has such a comprehensive grid of control been possible. Never before have such an evil group of monsters been in a position to make it a reality.

The war on Home Education is only a part of this. All groups, need to stand their ground in their own corner, and absolutely refuse to cooperate with anything that destroys their rights. Together, as we act individually, we will be transformed by emergent behavior effects into an unstoppable force for good.

Thankfully, it appears that this is actually happening!

As Education Othewise become less and less important for various reasons, other more focussed groups are forming and asserting themselves. Action for Home Education is one of those groups. They have a ‘Parent’s Declaration’ online that they are asking HE parents to sign. This is a good start. It shows that finally, HE families are beginning to feel the very real threat to their families and are girding their loins for the upcoming confrontation with the evil state. The first step is to do this; declare your rights and your unalterable position.

Whilst its great to have a declaration, it is important that it makes sense, and does not contain any language that allows the state to assert in any way that they are the source of your rights. They are not. Your rights have nothing to do with the state, or its myriad pieces of legislation, or fake types of right that are in vogue today, like ‘children’s rights’ or ‘patients rights’ etc etc.

Let’s do it:

PARENTS’ DECLARATION

WE DECLARE our independent status and affirm our responsibility for the upbringing and education of our children in accordance with our lawful rights and natural justice.

First of all that is ‘sole responsibility’. Secondly, any rights you have come from nature, and not from the law, therefore we can only talk about our ‘natural rights’ as opposed to ‘lawful rights’, since the state can declare anything it likes to be unlawful; like drinking orange juice. If, all of a sudden, your ‘lawful rights’, in this case, to drink orange juice, are declared unlawful, are they taken away from you? Obviously not. Your rights exist with you, and cannot be legislated away. The state may make you an outlaw, but that does not erase your rights. For a particularly nasty example of the law making criminals of people who merely exercise their rights, see this. The ‘natural justice’ part is redundant. If you are exercising your rights without interference, that is just.

WE ASSERT our right to choose the place, form and content of the educational provision for our children in accordance with the following:

The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable—

(a)to his age, ability and aptitude, and

(b)to any special educational needs he may have,

either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.
(Section 7 of the Education Act 1996)

In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.

Once again, if the law changes, do your natural rights disappear? What if parliament revokes Section 7 of the Education Act 1996? That is a very real possibility, especially as all UK HE people rely on this piece of law heavily. If that is one of your pillars then you are in serious trouble if they remove it. Your right to choose the place, form and content of the educational provision for your children has nothing to do with any legislation. The Germans do not have this legislation on their books, do they not have the same rights that you do? Of course they do, because rights do not come from the law.

(Protocol 2 Article 1 of the European Convention of Human Rights)

The european court has already declined to defend the rights of German parents to Home Educate, so I would not put too much store in using them to defend your rights in the UK.

WE WILL protect the rights of our children to own their own lives, to privacy and freedom from undue official interference in accordance with the following rights:

The right to respect for a private and family life, home and correspondence

(Human Rights Act 1998)

The right to be free from “arbitrary or unlawful interference with [their] privacy, family, home or correspondence” and from “unlawful attacks on [their] honour and reputation”

(Article 16 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child)

Once again, Britain chooses to ignore what it likes when it comes to the EU, and in any case, as I say above, you cannot rely on European courts to defend what is naturally yours.

WE DEMAND that state officials remain within the bounds of the powers already conferred upon them under current law in their dealings with us, the people.

WE WILL UPHOLD AND DEFEND the above principles without fear or favour where the state forgets its legitimate function, oversteps its bounds or seeks to exert undue influence or power over our lives and those of our children against our traditional freedoms and natural justice.

Finally. This translates to (if we are taking it seriously) “we will not comply with anything that violates our rights.” That means that whatever nonsense the state comes up with, all the signatories of this declaration will simply disobey.

Once again we have some troublesome wording; freedoms are not traditional, they come from you by virtue of your existence. Traditions can be broken, are arbitrary and fleeting. Your rights are not breakable, are not arbitrary, and are eternal. Natural Justice we have already dealt with.

The next obvious step is to create a fighting fund for the inevitable lawsuits that will need to be brought, as LAs pick off the most vulnerable families to make examples of. A list of things that will not be obeyed could come in handy for those who are not up to speed on just how intertwined the monsters tentacles are.

This is good news all in all. Hopefully the numbers in HE crowd that are not willing to compromise will increase and the others who would sell their children for a pat on the head or a job in government will dwindle to a handful and then be permanently sidelined.

Snarfed from Renegade Parent.

UPDATE

The declaration has been translated into Portuguese, including all the references to British Law. Clearly this doesn’t make any sense, since the laws in the UK do not apply to Portugal. Had this document been written more carefully, it could have been adopted world-wide by any parent, since it would have dealt unambiguously with rights that everyone has in common and nothing to do with any particular state and its bogus legislation.

I have been pointed to the Renegade Parent blog, as something worthwhile. It is:

Can you live my life for me, please?

by Renegadeparent

It was G’s birthday yesterday, and we enjoyed some well-earned family time together. I am wondering if in the not-too-distant future we might have to submit a timesheet to the DCSF in order to demonstrate the daily “positive activities” we’ve undertaken, thus warding off the over-zealous local authority workers who will no doubt be adding us to the at risk list for branding their endless interventions as UNNECESSARY, DUPLICATIVE NONSENSE of which we want no part, thank you very much.

As part of the celebratory fun, I bought a donkey piñata; I suppose it’s only a matter of time before they are banned for encouraging violence towards animals. I am not joking: Asda’s policy on teaspoons has recently been brought to my attention. In order to buy these items one must now produce valid ID. Because, apparently, someone has been murdered with a teaspoon. So lock up your cutlery drawers folks!

In a similar vein, JuliaM has written about the paramedic who was refused service by Tesco because he happened to be in uniform. Despite being heavily pregnant, I regularly buy alcohol from our local supermarket – perhaps, soon, I too will be refused – in order to protect my unborn child from the possibility of me downing a bottle of Grey Goose in the car park. In which case, I might take a leaf out of the paramedic’s book and confront them wearing nothing but a thong and a pair of socks.  As I am now the size of a young adult hippopotamus, it might shock them into compliance, if nothing else.

H/T Ambush Predator and Nanny Knows Best

[…]

http://www.renegadeparent.net/

See what I mean?

My kind of blogger, and my kind of parent!

29 Apr 09, 2:23am

Can you imagine how awful it would be if Britain was run by Fascists?

They’d make sure everyone carried identity papers and you’d be arrested if you failed to show your papers to a policeman, a policeman who would be armed with stun guns and two handled billy clubs and who’d beat unarmed demonstrators to the ground if they protested government policy. The police would be granted the right to intern suspects without charge for months and if anyone spoke out against the government they’d be arrested as “terrorists”.

There would be constant monitoring of every citizen by CCTV on every street corner, the government would have access to your emails and phone messages, Jesus, they might even do crazy stuff like implanting computer chips in your bins to monitor your rubbish!

Anyone who happened to dislike some aspects of the government’s social policy would be forced out of business and making jokes or speaking your mind about certain protected classes of people could see you losing your job or even your children. The state would gain control over the lives and livelihoods of tens of millions of citizens and anyone who deviated from “acceptable” standards of behaviour would be punished by being deprived of health or welfare assistance.

The state run media would be intimidated into parroting government spin and lies and everyone from doctors and nurses to teachers and neighbours would be expected to report to the government any behaviour which was deemed to be outside government decreed standards.

Who knows they might even go crazy and start invading other countries.

Er. . .

Hang on a minute.

[…]

A comment on this utter trash in the Grauniad.

Every day brings us closer to GAME OVER.

Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, claimed House Democrats have refused to allow him to appear alongside former Vice President Al Gore at a high profile global warming hearing on Friday April 24, 2009 at 10am in Washington.

In email, some people said….

*******wrote:
Beacuse Monkton is missing the point. Nobody is trying to inform him or fool him.

Did you read the article?

The Democrats ‘…rescinded his (Monkton’s) scheduled joint appearance at the House Energy and Commerce hearing’. If anything, its the Democrats that are trying to fool and misinform the public by not allowing open debate and the submission of evidence.

Monkton is not missing any point at all, he was prevented from making any point in the first place!

We need to prepare the ignorant mass for a massive change in life style and this includes what gore has done and will continue to do

First of all, who is ‘We’ in this instance?

Secondly, lets define terms:

“Ignorance is the state in which a person lacks knowledge and is unaware of something. This should not be confused with being unintelligent, as one’s level of intelligence and level of education or general awareness are not the same. The word “Ignorant” is an adjective describing a person in the state of being unaware. The term may be used specifically (e.g. “One can be an expert in math, and totally ignorant of history.”) or generally (e.g. “an ignorant person.”) — although the second use is used less as a descriptive and more as an imprecise personal insult.”

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

So, in order to not be ignorant, we must not lack knowledge, or be unaware of something. In order to be aware, we need to learn, and that means listening and reading.

By blocking Monkton, Al Gore and his democrat friends are fostering ignorance. They are doing this deliberately to boost their social engineering agenda, that they know is based on junk science and outright lies. That is how they have got the ignorant to say by rote, “the debate is over and there is scientific consensus about anthropogenic global warming”, which is of course a bald faced lie. There is no scientific consensus on AGW, they know it, you and I, the people who are not, by definition, ignorant, know it, and they want to stop anyone else from finding out what we both know to be true.

whilst scientists debate in private what to do about the various environmental issues such as , oil depletion, ice melt, co2 rise, population increase, water shortage, food shortage, soil erosion, etc

We know better than to conflate different subjects, and I know that you are playing devils advocate, so lets go there:

• ‘oil depletion’ is a technical problem that will be adapted to by the market.
• ‘Ice melt’ is not happening like the environmental Fascists keep saying it is; you and I both know that, because we study the facts.
• ‘C02 rise’ is not the cause of ‘global warming’ and is not a problem; you and I both know this, because we have been exposed to the facts.
• Water shortage is a problem of efficiency not supply, the same with food shortage. If they are a problem of supply, the market will adjust accordingly.
• Soil erosion is a problem of mismanagement (even vandalism) by a very small number of companies, and is not related to the other things in that list.
• Finally, population increase is not a problem related to oil depletion (even if there were only one car on earth, the oil would still run out since it is a finite resource) or ice melt (AGW lie), or food shortage (there is enough food to feed everyone on earth; this is a problem of will not supply) or water shortage (once again, this is a problem of efficiency not abundance) or soil erosion.

Waste disposal, water pollution, pollution by genetically modified organisms, electromagnetic spectrum poisoning and many other unrelated items could have been on that list obviously.

Ignorant environmentalists who do not have a grounding in or basic understanding of science, or the history of science and technology, or any experience in growing crops or taking care of the land, regularly bundle all of these things together under the banner of ‘the environment’ when they are quite separate and only very tangentially related.

If we are going to talk about AGW, we must stick to AGW and the evidence for or against it, without conflating it with anything that is not related directly to the scientific evidence. Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is a theory (hypothesis). It is an unproven theory. What you do with theories is put them to the test with scientific observations. When people try and stifle observations that destroy the AGW hypothesis, as in any scientific matter, the people trying to suppress evidence are normally lying about their work or trying to preserve their positions and prestige. This is exactly what is happening, and the Monkton affair is just the latest example.

We either win this battle or we’re all to the dogs

This doesn’t make any sense, and it is certainly not ‘a battle’. If the AGW hypothesis is true, then the effects of AGW can be corrected by taking action to cut emissions. If it is not true, then trying to stop it by cutting C0₂ emissions is a waste of time and will represent a huge distortion in the progress of man, changing the future irrevocably and unnecessarily. The hypothesis has not been proven; what we have are a bunch of non scientists shouting very loud that the AGW hypothesis is correct, and who want to silence anyone with data that says it is not correct. That is not how science is done, and it is not how decisions that change ‘society’ should be made. If society is to be run on the basis of science, then the scientific method must be applied without distortion. What we are seeing is a denial and shutting down of the scientific method for political ends. That is a fact.

and monckton should know better.

This doesn’t make any sense either. Either he is lying and someone has proof of this, or he is genuine and wrong, and what he is saying can be disproved. Either way, the correct way to win debate is not to silence someone with evidence that challenges a hypothesis, but instead to provide evidence. The AGW side does not have this evidence, and Al Gore in particular, has been found to be a consummate liar, his film totally discredited as junk science and propaganda. The ignorant, unlike you and I, are emotionally invested in Gore and his unscientific garbage; that is the true reason why they hang on to all of this and him in particular, not because of any facts, but because they refuse to listen to the facts when they run contrary to their secular religion, ‘environmentalism’, the high priest of which is Al Gore.

he knows that life style needs to change.

Everyone knows that waste is bad, wether it be wasting paper or wasting water. What we must never do is throw away science in a blind ignorant panic and start to mix up things that do not belong together. We must also never run into the arms of the state for our solutions; they do not have any (competence or solutions); all they can offer is tyranny, violence and destruction.

What do you see in a decade?

This is an interesting question, and an interesting time horizon. I know some very ignorant people who thought that the world would be in total chaos, “in twenty years”….in 1980. Doomsayers have been with us for generations, environmental doomsayers are only the latest in the breed. The world is still going to be here. Technology is going to be better than we can imagine. The economy will be very different. AGW will be totally discredited as a hypothesis, and we will probably be back to ‘new ice age’ theories like the crackpot junk scientist James Hansen predicted in 1971 when he helped create the model that told us of the coming ice age. When that didn’t happen, he turned to global warming. Of course, it could be possible that the environmental fascists could stifle science with some absurd, ‘environmental hate speech’ statutes, effectively killing science in this field. Who knows? What I do know for certain, is that if the state and ignorant environmental religious fanatics set the agenda, we will be living in a sub optimal future constrained by the lack of imagination and prejudices of a small coterie of nutcases, cult leaders, power mad control freaks and their brainless followers.

How do you see yourself and your children?

That is a good question. I have five children. I do not want their fertility controlled by the people who I describe in the paragraph above. I do not want them taxed in a bogus ‘carbon trading’ scheme whose only goal is to enrich criminal bankers. I do not want their ability to travel to be restricted on the false pretext of AGW. I do not want them to live in a fascist world where science cannot be practiced because the ignorant masses forbid it out of religious fervor. It is my wish that my children are protected from the people who would make this planet a nightmare place. Anyone who wants their children to be caught in such a system, cannot possibly understand what it is they are asking for, and of course, once it is in place, it might never be removed for generations. We need only look at how long it took for the Soviet system to fall; seventy years. Millions of lives wasted and ruined by people who believed the theories of Marx and Lenin. Now we have Al Gore and his new religion of ‘environmentalism’; just as poisonous as Marxism Leninism, only now, it is not the proletariat against the capitalists, it is man against himself. In the environmentalism religion, man is is own enemy, and so he must destroy himself and his way of life to save himself. It is, like Marxism Leninism, utter, unscientific nonsense from beginning to end. If the environmentalists are not struck down, it will take until the models are disproved by the march of time to finally put to rest their wild imaginings. By that time, like Russia, all that will be left of the great civilizations will be wastelands of destroyed emasculated populations of cowed slaves.

And it will all have been for nothing.

As for me, I hope to be alive to see the utter destruction of all of this nonsense, from the insanity of Keynsian economics to the environmentalism religion and everything that flows from them. I live for the day when collectivism is dead and buried, where socialism and all of its masks are consigned to the garbage bin of history. There is a more than good chance that I am going to get my wish.

Neslon Mandela, president of South Africa. ANC in total control.
Barack Obama, for all his many fatal flaws, faults and failings, President of the United States of America.
The Dollar about to go the way of the hyperinflation Deutchmark.
The Internets…
Neodymium Magnets…
Cloned pets…
Cloned humans…

Oh yes, ANYTHING is possible, more than we expect.

Tough question! we really need to try and think about it because we are not part of the ignorant mass and we can go beyond some small propaganda.

I agree. Thinking about it is crucial. In order to do it, to think, we need to hear all of the evidence, not just the evidence that we like. We need to understand and apply the scientific method, and adhere to it strictly. We need to be mindful of the state, and its lust for power and absolute control over the individual and every aspect of life. Science is not propaganda, and neither is the truth. There are people out there who do not want anyone to have access to the facts. We must be suspicious of these people, and make sure that we really have all the facts to hand in spite of what they want. That is the only way that we can come to any sort of correct judgment, and think correctly.

Being rational thinking people, we are rightfully outraged that Monkton was not allowed to speak at the eleventh hour after having been invited to give evidence; what is Al Gore afraid of? That his hoax film would be exposed for the nonsense that it is? Thankfully, due to the internet that he invented, it is impossible to herd people anymore. Whatever the truth is about AGW, it will out.

What is more galling is that Gore and his religious fanatics are appealing to the legislature to enshrine their religion in the law. If they are making an appeal to the legislature, which ostensibly represents all of us equally, it is absolutely outrageous that a person offering scientific data that counters AGW was prevented from speaking. Quite apart from the debate surrounding AGW, this is an attack on Democracy and openness in government. People who believe in those two things are disgusted by this action.

If this were simply an academic debate, it would not be so important, but this is about the creation of law and the use of force on the population in order to carry out the environmentalist agenda. That evidence exists that Al Gore and his gang are dead wrong, and that this evidence is deliberately suppressed when evidence is about to be presented for the record is inexcusable.

Anyone who is reasonable, as you and I are, cannot be for such a suppression of facts.

It is only by the seeking of truth that we have had the technological means to manage our future placed into our hands. It is only through the seeking of truth that we will overcome all the myriad and very real problems that face us.

Suppressing truth, giving into irrational fear and running to the state is not going to solve anything; instead, it is going to make everything much worse, in every aspect.