Archive for the 'Remember' Category

Matt Cogger “Neuropolitique”

Friday, December 26th, 2014

Matt Cogger “Neuropolitique”

Matt Cogger “Neuropolitique”

I am very sad to hear that Matt Cogger, “Neuropolitique” has passed away.

Matt was a very talented man; the works he produced were very powerful, musical, and his individual signature, qualities and sensibility run through them all. Matt had impeccable taste, was a skiled programmer, and knew exactly what he wanted to hear when he made a recording, and how to achieve it. He could also DJ, and his Monster Music show1 is a fine example of this. He was sensitive to music; it came across in all the work he did, and even the way he spoke about it.

Matt could be left alone to record his work entirely unsupervised, without a producer or an engineer, and it was guaranteed that his work would be exceptional, and the technical recording quality of the higest calibre. That is how all the works he made for Irdial were produced in our Soho Studio; they are all 100% unfiltered Matt Cogger2. Anyone who worked with recording studios and artists knows that this was a “dream artist”. He went in with his machines, and the tape with genius laid down3 came out4.

I met Matt through Fat Cat records; we was one of the “Crawley Contingent”. He let me listen to a demo cassette tape in a street in Soho of some music he had made, and asked me if we would release his music on Irdial. It was “that good”. We pressed several astonishing and superb 12″ records and an LP/CD, upon which there was not a single filler track. Those works are as exiting and interesting now as they were when they were first recorded and released. The longevity of Matt Cogger’s works is a testament to his genius.

“Performance perfect, is perfect performance”.


1/ Monster Music 3 “Cosmat Selection” 1
2/ Neuropolitique “Ad Nauseum” 2
3/ Neuropolitique “Menage a Trois” 3
4/ Neuropolitique “Report”4

FatCat Presents Monster Music 3, Matt Cogger’s “Cosmat Selection”

Wednesday, February 20th, 2013

Our friends over at FatCat records have posted one of our Monster Music Shows from 1992. Dave Cawley remembers the label from those days:

It’s a real honour to share this podcast with you, created by Neuropolitique (Matt Cogger) for Irdial Discs‘ Monster Music radio shows in 1992. I had this mix on cassette and have lovingly held onto it ever since. To think that it’s 21 years since this was first broadcast – and the music on here still floors me.

Irdial Discs were a huge inspiration to me and i know many others who felt the same. They played by their own rules, followed no one and forged a path that left me speechless. If you want to know how to run a “real” record label then go and investigate just what they achieved, from records to books, software to radio shows. There was an attitude too that is so lacking these days, statements of intent. “In Your Hearts Not The Charts…”….”We Suffer To Bring You Beautiful Music..”..

When I read this, it felt like a call to arms and I knew whose banner I wanted to stand by. I always said to myself if we can get to be a tenth as good as them then I would be happy.

Dave Cawley

FatCat Records

The FatCat shop in the West End of London, originating in Monmouth Street were very important hubs of the music scene. They helped many people who were running independent labels, were open eared and open minded, friendly and non intimidating and were not afraid to expose anything that we brought in to the people who shopped there. Compared to many other retailers in London, who would not stock Irdial releases, FatCat was an island of open mindedness.

For example, there were some record shops that put their staff, literally, on a pedestal  standing over the punters, handing down vinyl to insiders as if it was a sacrament. These unfriendly, closed record shops were hostile to buyers and only a fool would attempt to bring in a 12 inch that they pressed themselves  without knowing the high priests behind the long pulpit.

All of these shops are now gone, and FatCat remains. This goes to show that nice guys finish last, which in business, is a good thing.

And here is our description of this edition of Monster Music:

During the summer of 1992 we decided to do some radio shows, since what we were hearing over the pirate airwaves was very similar station to station, and there seemed to be a need for something out of place. This was especially true on a late Sunday morning, after being completely exhausted by high energy music, a different mood on the radio was an idea just waiting to happen, so we made it happen.

Monster Music was transmitted on ten Sunday mornings, around 11:00.

Approaching the licensed radio stations to do this was of course, absolutely out of the question. They were, as they are now, like cold tombs overrun by the living dead and their stiff, lifeless sounds.

Pirate radio on the other hand was free and alive; you could do literally whatever you wanted, and we proved that this was actually true with Monster Music. No one was vetting our shows, looking over our shoulders or telling us what to do or how to do it. To make this happen all we had to do was call up the station hotline of Touchdown FM, talk to someone and they said “yes” to us.

This is exactly how a free world would work. There would be no licenses to operate a radio station, just as there is no license to run a record label, website or publish a book. There would have been dozens of cool stations out there, all operating together, pumping the music scene. Now of course, there is no need at all for radio, as the internet takes care of all your music needs, from discovery of new sounds to the distribution of them. Anyone can do any part of it, and that is a change that you could not have described to anyone in 1992.

Monster Music’s aim was to be different to anything out there on the pirate air, and having access to some of the best people, it was a simple matter of putting two and two together. I invited Matt Cogger, the genius behind “Neuropolitique”, to construct a show in our studio, which was the third in the series.

The hour of Monster Music Number 3, “Cosmat Selection”, is made up of deftly mixed and sensitively chosen “Techno” tracks, of the kind that drove us all absolutely crazy, and which today, still make the hairs on the back of my neck straighten out and stand up. And that really is something. At the half way mark, there is the exclusive, unreleased, “Theme for Rambo” by Derrick May. One can only imagine what it would have been like if this piece had actually been used in the titles of a Rambo film; machine guns firing in sync with the arpeggiated notes, the backward “shoops” punctuating Viet Vet flashbacks, Stallone’s twisted mouth screaming, attack helicopters raining bullets…

But exposures like that were not to be; it was and is “underground music”.

What are we doing now?

We have been running a blog since 2001 and we have been developing some software projects.

We are re-releasing The Conet Project in a new 5 CD edition, that we are crowd funding right now. If you would like to have your name inscribed in the booklet that accompanies this release, you need to pledge right now.

And we are working on some new and exiting software projects that should be released early in 2013.

And here’s Cosmat Selection…

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/79928187″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”false” /]

The Conet Project: Like Something Out of a Spy Movie

Friday, November 16th, 2012

About 20 years ago, Akin Fernandez discovered mysterious sounds and voices being transmitted over shortwave radio stations called “Numbers Stations” that weren’t documented anywhere. With more research, Fernandez realized that these stations had been used during the Cold War to transmit secret messages from intelligence agencies to their spies … but they were still being actively used though the war was long over.

Such began The Conet Project, which was first popularized when Wilco used a portion of one of the recordings, a woman saying “yankee hotel foxtrot,” in their song Poor Places and as their album title and were later sued for copyright infringement.

Here, we asked Fernandez to write out a description of the project that carries such a mystery with it. Have a listen to a portion of the project in the above clip.

Where did you first get the idea for a project about shortwave numbers station recordings?

In the early 1990s I discovered that you can receive weather maps and satellite images by shortwave radio with a simple receiver and an inexpensive demodulator that attaches to your computer. I put it all together and started to decode weather satellite images from all over the world.

Whilst trying to tune into stations that were transmitting these satellite weather maps and photos, I kept coming across stations that were transmitting strange voices reading out strings of numbers and letters. In one of the frequency guides I owned, there were entries for some of these stations, listed simply as “Numbers Station,” with no other information.

In order to understand why this is odd, you need to understand how shortwave radio transmitters are licensed and how they behave when they are legally operated. Each licensed radio station on the air is given permission to operate by a government. If it is not, it is a pirate station operating illegally. Each station has call letters, an address, and when they transmit, they announce who owns the station, where it is on the globe and the schedule of transmission times and frequencies. If you write to them with a reception report, they will send a “QSL” card back to you to say thank you.

The only people who do not conform to these standards are pirates, or people using shortwave for their licensed private use, like ships at sea, and in those cases, you sometimes hear people having conversations with each other.

Numbers Stations had none of this. They did not identify themselves as a licensed station should. They were clearly not pirates, because there were too many of them, transmitting all over the dial in many different forms, and their signals were way too powerful for a man in his garage to be operating. They clearly were not two-way radio telephone calls. These were something different, and the scant information that you could find about them in the 1990s bore this out.

To my astonishment, there were no good sources of information about Numbers Stations. There were a few small books printed by enthusiasts (normally printed very cheaply and bound with staples) filled only with facts you could glean for yourself if you listened to a shortwave.

This was a real live mystery, taking place on a global basis, unreported, scantily documented and passing though the bodies of billions of people every day. Everyone I asked about Numbers Stations didn’t know anything about them. The British Library didn’t have any recordings of them in its collection. There were even some shortwave radio listeners who were huffy and defensive about them, describing them as “nonsense.”

It was about that time that I lost my mind and had to know everything about Numbers Stations that I could find. I couldn’t stand the idea that this was going on and no one knew about it.

Here was something that had been going on for decades, that had never been reported on in a newspaper, that was inexplicably missing from the plotlines of every James Bond and spy movie ever made, and that was going on unabated after the end of the Cold War. This is something that had never been documented in the National Sound Archive in the country that built Alan Turing’s ENIGMA breaking computer, or indeed that is mentioned anywhere by the people curating the espionage relics of war.

Surely, this could not be real, but it was, and it fell right into my lap.

It was at this point and with all this scant information and the red rag to a bull of Numbers Stations in my face and ears that I decided to stop decoding satellite weather photos and start recording and logging Numbers Stations.

Some might think that this is all a bit odd. For certain, people who take that position have not ever heard a Numbers Station. These are not just plain white noises or unedifying, characterless transmissions likethe UK’s “Speaking Clock.” These stations are very VERY weird; they are so weird that they sometimes exceed the emotional thrust of the inspired compositions of Avant-Garde music composers.

These stations, if you are interested in the sort of music that moves me, are a high form of musical expression, fueled by accident and chance, unique, unrepeatable, mysterious and deeply profound. Their lyrics are meaningful and meaningless. They are spoken by men, women, machine women and machine men. They are clearly designed by very creative, thoughtful, anonymous people. Add into this mix the distortions, reverberations and chance elements that the ionosphere superimposes on these “works” and the true nature of their purpose, and you get an art form, available worldwide, without precedent in human history.

This is why I released The Conet Project. It took me three years to compile it, and I destroyed my record label, and myself, to produce it.

Where does the name Conet Project come from?

It comes from the words spoken by one of the Numbers Stations which ended with the words “Konek.”

Some of the tracks actually sound like songs (i.e. “Gong Station Chimes”). Were you surprised by the musical nature of some of these?

Very. Not only is “The Gong Station” musical, but for example the Station XPH, which is not explicitly musical, has a mournful slow introduction, and its main body has a phrasing and tempo like a synthesized bagpipe piece. Many stations use music as identifiers, either recordings of pop songs or sets of tones repeating to notify the recipient. Or not. We do not know why these tones were used, because no one who was responsible for these stations has come forward to explain the reasoning behind the design of the transmissions.

Can you tell us a brief history of Irdial Recordings? How does a company gain a vision to put out a project like this?

Irdial-Discs started in 1987. I had some friends that were making wonderful music but who could not find a label to release their work, and I had some of my own work that I wanted to release that no one would release, so it became obvious that I should run my own label.

Irdial originally was designed to be a blend of Factory, Touch and New York Electro labels like Cutting as a starting point. I took all the things I loved about those labels, mixed them with the works of the people that I knew, and made something that was different to everything else out there in every way, from the sleeves to the sounds and the way we mastered recordings.

The most important thing for me is to not compromise. I hate compromise and accommodating the tastes and ideas of other people. And it has worked. It was clear to me that some of the people who were running record labels at the time that I launched Irdial were not really interested in what they were doing as an act of art. They were trying to balance breaking something new against the tastes of the audience, and they were frightened of taking risks.

Take for example, InSync’s 12-inch “Storm.” This track was mastered onto a cassette. It was rejected by several labels, simply because it was on a cassette. When I was offered it, I immediately mastered direct from the cassette and released it.

I tell this story because it demonstrates how people can’t think for themselves and can have something wonderful given to them on a plate but will reject it simply because they are not familiar with it, or because it comes in a format they mistakenly believe is “bad.”

Can you imagine what the answer would have been, had I turned up in a record label’s A&R department with the idea for a quadruple CD of Numbers Stations, with an 80-page booklet? The only way great things like this can come to light is if someone takes the risk and refuses to follow the herd. That is why I run Irdial-Discs.

You release your recordings under the Free Music Philosophy, but here you’ve gone the direct-to-fan route. Can you talk about your choices here in terms of getting the recordings out there to your audience?

Back in 1999, we had been on the Internet for two years. Irdial was one of the first record labels on the Internet. It was clear to me, after spending years in the BBS scene and watching the Internet grow, that it made sense to spread your music everywhere rather than keep it bottled up. This is why The Conet Project has now been downloaded over one million times and is on computers, iPods and devices all over the world.

It would have been very difficult to do this without the Internet, and of course today, it’s not unusual to see tens of millions of views of pieces of music on YouTube. Giving away music makes sense; superdistribution is the future. The question is, is there a place for record labels anymore, what is the nature of that role if there is one, and how can artists that make music make enough money to allow them to spend all their time honing their art?

I think an answer is coming soon, and certainly an aggregating platform like PledgeMusic is going to be at the center of this new activity, where the owners of it are curators, filtering in (rather than out) the highest art so that people can find who is making the interesting work.

Since the Internet is essentially an infinite space, everyone can coalesce into their own communities so that no sound maker is left out, and rejection from one curator does not mean death, like it used to before the independent label and the Internet.

People need music in the same way they need food. Music makers have been kept away from their public by the scarcity imposed by physical sound carriers. Now that this has changed, it’s a matter of organizing these forces of nature with software and new contracts to increase the availability of art and get the right sounds to the right people, whilst making sure the sound makers can eat.

It’s an exciting time to be working in music, no doubt about it.

Police Undercover Snatch Squads and Agents Provocateurs

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

The unintelligent, inexperienced and completely deluded students are out again in force, to be kettled, sheared, abused and used as fodder to provide the police with much needed overtime money.

What is interesting here is that we may be seeing the seed of the idea that all the video cameras that everyone has by default could be used for something useful, active and defensive, instead of just a child’s toy.

From BLOGDIAL, “The answer comes before the question” January 13th, 2009

Imagine this scenario. Someone somewhere sets up a Web 2.0 site that features photos of bad police and other officials, or those mysterious agent provocateurs that have been plaguing the useless demonstrations around the world. Imagine that the software behind this site (which could be connected to iPhoto 09) identifies all the bad people and exposes them to the public, nullifying all acts of political infiltration over night. Anyone setting up any sort of anti-state gathering or demonstration or action could, with a gauntlet of workers armed with iphones, vet every demonstrator as they turned up to weed out all the infiltrators, collaborators and provocateurs.

I guarantee you that this will happen, and not only that, but that someone is going to put into a copy of iPhoto 09, a huge archive of photos from demonstrations and political meetings going back decades to pick out the bad guys.

This explosion and convergence of technologies is a double edged sword, and since there are more of us than there are of them, it will be the case that all this technology and the networks that join them together will result in something totally unexpected; the tools may turn around and bite the state in the ass in an unexpected way. The very nature of networks says that this will happen; the population by virtue of its vast networked numbers can overpower any government in a scenario where the network is the power.

We are not powerless like the slaves in the Soviet Union were. We have fantastic tools, all of them free, right in our hands. Those tools, by the act of using them, change the game entirely, and the more the state pushes against the mass, the more dense and impenetrable it becomes.

This is a war that they cannot ever win.

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1517

[…]

Now look at this video, uploaded to YouTube by noshockdoc on Nov 11, 2011:

If these people had any sense, they would have already set up this web service as I described in 2009.

Using Augmented Reality ID:

They could check each ‘protestor’ against the online database of Agent Provocateurs and police officers to make sure that they had not been infiltrated.

Of course, anyone who is that smart is not interested in demonstrating in the first place, but we will leave that aside for now.

The point is, these young and very foolish people are behaving as if it is 1960 and not the end of 2011. As I have said before, again and again, the age of demonstrations is over. The shape of them, how they play out, move, surge and flow is well understood. There can be no surprises with them. Nothing comes of them, no matter how large they are, as we saw with the StopWar demonstrations before the destruction of Iraq.

The problem these people have is that if they were intelligent enough to know this, they would not be demonstrating, and would be well on the way to formulating a strategy that would actually give them what they want. Their problem, clearly, is a toxic mix of a lack of intelligence and experience.

They do not know exactly what they hope to achieve with these acts, they have no discrete goals or deliverables, they have no means of creating a new strategy because they lack the mental capacity to formulate one; in other words, they are a completely lost cause.

One thing that is coming out of this is interesting however.

Because everyone has a camera at these demonstrations, it might come to pass that the light bulb switches on over the head of some computer science student as she realises that it should be possible to create what I describe in the post above.

There are literally dozens of cameras in this clip; surely someone somewhere must be thinking that there is a use that can be put to the footage to help weed out the provocateurs. Who knows?

What we can say with a high level of certainty is that these students are going to achieve nothing by marching in the street. Everything they are planning, even if it is not known about in advance by surveillance is easily counter-able because marching and demonstrating is a ‘dead tactic’ that the State has a perfect understanding of.

All of this is a complete distraction of course; even this very post has distracted me from doing something else productive. Unless by chance it spurs the creation of the system I have been writing about.

Once again, demonstrations are ‘Yellow Ribbon Thinking’:

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1152

they divert energy from useful acts and thinking, and prevent or delay permanent solutions from emerging. You should not participate in them; instead, you should be working only on things that have discreet goals and that has metrics that you can measure directly so that you can know if you are being successful or not.

The clear divisions on Bitcoin

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

It is now clear where the lines dividing freedom minded people on the issue of Bitcoin are drawn.

On the one side, you have mostly older computer illiterates who are out of their comfort zone, and on the other, you have younger computer literate people who are comfortable with both free market ideas, sound economics and computers.

The former camp, the computer illiterates, all use the same form of argumentation and fallacious reasoning to attack Bitcoin, including straw men. Here is a good example:

Approximately 2,000 years ago, Aristotle said good money must be:

  • Durable
  • Portable
  • Divisible and consistent
  • Have intrinsic value

The astute reader will immediately realize that Bitcoin does not possess any of those characteristics and was subject to trouble from the getgo — not to mention the security issues that immediately arise with anything computer– and Internet related. A computer generated currency is not durable, as the recent hack demonstrates. And it’s certainly not portable. Can you imagine bringing your computer to the door to pay for your next Chinese food delivery? You get the idea for the remaining characteristics.

[…]

http://howestreet.com/2011/06/grim-decade-employment/

The straw man here is the line about Chinese food delivery. There is no reason of course, why you could not pay for your Chinese food in advance by Bitcoin. Its like saying, “imagine ordering books by computer from a company, lets call it ‘Amazon’. Imagine the delivery man having to keep change for all the sales! Its a security nightmare. IT WILL NEVER CATCH ON!”

The astute reader recognises faulty reasoning when he sees it, and is not persuaded by straw men.

As for the Aristotelian qualities that money must have, lets go through them for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is durable. In fact, because it is not a physical good but is instead, an idea fixed in media, it can last for an indefinite time as long as it is copied to another medium. You can keep backups of it, which of course, you cannot do with physical money. Once again, the fact that you can have two copies of your money and cannot spend it twice is the breakthrough of Bitcoin.

Anyone who says Bitcoin is not portable, is not thinking clearly. Bitcoin is the most portable ‘money’ ever created. It can be sent anywhere in the world in an instant. There is no other money like it in the world in this respect.

Bitcoin is divisible. Each coin can be divided into one million equal parts. Bitcoin is consistent in value, if we accept that the value of a commodity is related to its supply.

The only test Bitcoin fails, some would argue, is that it has no intrinsic value. Lets go to the dictionaries to be absolutely sure:

What Does Intrinsic Value Mean?
1. The actual value of a company or an asset based on an underlying perception of its true value including all aspects of the business, in terms of both tangible and intangible factors. This value may or may not be the same as the current market value. Value investors use a variety of analytical techniques in order to estimate the intrinsic value of securities in hopes of finding investments where the true value of the investment exceeds its current market value.

[…]

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/intrinsicvalue.asp#ixzz1PzdrOzEy

In finance, intrinsic value refers to the value of a security which is intrinsic to or contained in the security itself. It is also frequently called fundamental value. It is ordinarily calculated by summing the future income generated by the asset, and discounting it to the present value. Simply put, it is the actual value of a security as opposed to the market or book value.

[…]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_value_(finance)

An intrinsic property is an essential or inherent property of a system or of a material itself or within. It is independent of how much of the material is present and is independent of the form the material, e.g., one large piece or a collection of smaller pieces.

[…]

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

I think the last one puts the nail in the coffin of the argument that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value.

Bitcoin has intrinsic value, by definition, because the system has value to the people who use it. It also has intrinsic value, by definition, because the amount of material in a thing is not relevant to wether or not a thing has intrinsic value; Bitcoins are immaterial, and they are part of a system that has value.

The fact that a single exchange, MTGox was hacked does not demonstrate that ‘A computer generated currency is not durable’; this is another instance of fallacious thinking. For fun, can you pick the correct one?

Once again all of these fallacious arguments are being made on the internet, and the irony of this appears to be lost on the people making them.

Even if Bitcoin is only used by one one hundredth of the entire internet population regularly, the number of people using it will be enough. More than enough. “For what?” I hear you ask… anything we need.

The people who build the systems that change the world do not need luddites, computer illiterates and sticklers to urge them to do what they do. The internet was built by a small number of people, and it has spread everywhere. Bitcoin was devised by one person, and it has already changed everything.

While we are at it, there is another prediction that has gone out of the window, the lone wolf inventor was declared extinct a few years ago, the claim being that the research and development costs involved in creating new things meant that unshaven men in their garages would not be able to produce world changing technologies.

How wrong they were. Bitcoin and Bittorrent are only two examples.

This is true for Bitcoin and the systems that are going to come after it. You need only look at at a widely adopted system like Skype, which is a decedent of ideas behind Gnutella, which itself was a decedent of Napster.

This is another problem that afflicts the discussion of Bitcoin; not only do very few people have a knowledge of how software works in general, but even fewer know about the recent history of some of the amazing tools we now take for granted.

Take a look at Nautilus, the file browser. Did you know that a company raised 11 million dollars to develop it? The company was called Eazel, and now we all benefit from that massive investment whenever we use the file browser in our Linux desktops, since Nautilus is now free and open source. Before this company, file browsers on Linux were not so user friendly. The people who invested in Eazel might not have made a profit, but that is not the point. The point here is that a world class piece of software was released that made something that was hard much more easy. The same dynamic can happen with the Bitcoin client, and when it does, we are going to experience massive, permanent disruptive change.

When thinkers like Mark Shuttleworth or Justin Frankel or a consortium of developers with many millions of dollars in the bank decides to fork and polish Bitcoin, you are going to see the emergence of a new version of the Bitcoin client, which will be as usable as the Skype client, that will sit on top of the existing Bitcoin network. Adoption will then go exponential, and all the short sighted people who claimed that it will never catch on will be forced to eat their words.

This new Bitcoin client will not only address all of the problems of the present client, but it will introduce new features that will make the adoption of Bitcoin accelerate; like being able to print out your Bitcoins so you can spend them like paper money.

Thinking is hard. Reading and understanding technical specifications is not easy; you have to spend many hours cross referencing different documents, each of which is liable to cause you to have to read other difficult to digest documents.

If you are not willing to do this, its not a problem; the world will go on without you. Thats why all these people are able to send out email newsletters, publish websites and make Skype calls without knowing how it all works or the history of the tools they are using.

What you cannot do however, is claim that something, in this case Bitcoin, cannot work when you are not capable of understanding it or even worse, are unwilling to make the effort to research it properly, and then expect people to take you seriously.

Something as important, significant and world-changing deserves proper attention and analysis, not flippant twaddle masquerading as insight.

Universal Credit will cause the introduction of ID Cards

Thursday, November 11th, 2010

Here we go again.

Ian Duncan Smith and his Tories are set to reintroduce ID Cards.

How do we know this? They are attempting to scrap the byzantine system of ‘benefits’ in favour of a single ‘Universal Credit’ that will be able to take into account what your circumstances are on a month to month basis.

Has an alarm bell rung in your head yet?

The Workers Revolutionary Party website (of all the people) reveals the crucial details:

Defend benefits! down with ‘universal credit’!
THE announcement yesterday that the work and pensions minister, Iain Duncan Smith, had won his battle with the treasury over bringing in a single ‘universal credit’ has rightly been described as the ‘bonfire of the benefits’.

Under his scheme, every single benefit available to the unemployed, elderly, low paid or incapacitated – about 50 benefits in all – will be scrapped overnight and replaced with a single universal credit.

Due for the chop are housing benefit, incapacity benefit, the tax credit system for low-paid workers and single mothers as well as the job seekers allowance.

According to Smith, bringing all these benefits together is now possible due to computer technology that would even enable benefits to be varied from month to month depending on changes to a claimant’s circumstances.

This means that there will need to be an ID Card, tied into a system that Ian Liddle-Grainger MP hinted at, ‘real time taxation’, which translates to ‘total realtime financial surveillance’.

[…]
Nobody in their right mind will believe the nonsense being put about by Smith that these huge amounts can be obtained through efficiencies being made by collapsing the 50-odd benefits into one single universal credit, that can be varied according to changed circumstances.

Efficiency savings have never been made on this vast a scale by any government.

This is true. The system that IDS and Liddle-Graiinger are describing would be bigger, more complex and intrusive than the doomed UK ID Card system, and of course would be even more immoral and unethical, quite apart from being undoable as all UK government IT systems have proven to be.

On every level none of this should be considered seriously. And remember, this job will be contracted out to Lockheed Martin, Capita or some other company, that will have access to all private and company bank accounts in the country.

The very idea is beyond absurd.

In truth, these savings can only be achieved through savage cuts in benefits, by repeated means testing, and by a constant state policing of the former benefit holders, with punishment for those who do not report changed circumstances.

The means testing will be built in comrades; they would have real-time access to your bank account, cash would be outlawed, and they would adjust your ‘benefits’ by a series of programmed break points that are automatically triggered by the amount of money flowing into your account. Theoretically.

[…]
These proposals are not about efficiency, cutting out so-called ‘benefit fraud’ or targeting the really needy, they are simply about smashing all benefits, in order to prop up the bankrupt capitalist system and its bankrupt bosses and bankers.

I just cut out all the nauseating socialist Santa Claus Money Thinking. This section is factually correct however; this is about slashing ‘benefits’, that is true, but it is also about setting up a system whereby not a single penny of money that you earn or spend is outside the scrutiny of the state.

This is about propping up the system of crony capitalism (NOT capitalism, perfect examples of crony capitalists being Lockheed Martin and Capita) and the people who benefit from it; and I use the word ‘benefit’ deliberately in this context, because crony capitalists receive benefits from the state in the same way that the so called scroungers do. They are no different from each other save in the scale of their theft.

[…]
And what is the significance of the title ‘universal credit’ in place of ‘benefit’. A benefit, of course, is something that a person is entitled to by right. A ‘credit’ is basically a loan for which one has to beg, and which must be repaid at some time in the future.

No doubt we will be clarified shortly concerning the issue of repayment.

The TUC must not allow current benefit holders to be turned into beggars. The coalition must be told that any attempt to abolish benefits in favour of a credit will be met with a general strike to bring them down.

http://www.wrp.org.uk/news/5696

Very perceptive comrade. Of course, the state cannot create rights any more than it can create jobs. I would say also, that the word ‘universal’ is used in the literal sense; everyone in Britain will be ‘entitled’ to this credit; you will receive an amount ranging from a negative number (taxation, which is theft) to a positive one (‘benefit’, which is redistribution of the stolen money). Of course, you will not be able to opt out of this system, the taxation part being the real-time taxation system hinted at by Ian Liddle-Grainger.

Clearly the only way that such a system can be implemented is with a compulsory ID Card for every economically active person, without which it will be illegal to operate a bank account.

Each ID Card will be linked to your account number, and the state will be able to check a list of your transactions remotely through realtime backdoor access.

It will be forbidden for you to make any cash transaction over an arbitrary limit, to stop the emergence of an underground economy of the size and scope that Russia Greece Spain Italy have for example.

Of course, the ID Card will have all the other side effects and secondary uses that we have been writing about since 2001.

There are no two ways about this. Either they introduce an ID Card for all economically active UK persons (and that means everybody if cash is severely constrained) or they drop the idea of real-time taxation and Universal Benefit in its nascent incarnation.

Finally, Labour are for the idea of a Universal Credit. That should tell you all you need to know about these ideas.

They know it means the introduction of the ID Card and the creation of a system of invasive police state socialism, where once they become the government again, they will have complete control of all the people and everything they do. It will mean the completion of the New Labour project that came to a halt because they ran out of other people’s money and patience with the nanny state.

If you think that life was bad under New Labour, wait till they take the reigns again once this system of complete control is in place. The thirteen years of Blair and Brown will seem like a picnic in the sun.

Obviously, none of this is a done deal, and there are infinitely better ways to secure the social safety net that do not rely on crony capitalists, immorality, faulty economic models and violence.

Hopefully, if the United States turns 180° and returns to its roots, this will cause a huge brain drain from the UK and Europe, causing them to think again.

Already, some of ‘Britain’s’ biggest companies are getting out of dodge for fairer climes. You can expect this trend to continue, especially in the internet business, where moving a company is as simple as running rsync, changing your DNS settings and buying hosting in another jurisdiction.

Britain boasts an internet economy of £100 billion per year. This will shrivel up should the tories introduce this invasive police state system. No one will host here, no one will develop here, no one will use transaction services based here; they will all flee to a restored USA, and other jurisdictions where Libertarianism flourishes.

Mark my words.

UPDATE

We have had some mail…

This is what you need to consider; if all benefits are going to be replaced by a single Universal Credit, in a monolithic system, that takes into account your circumstances automagically, they are going to need to following at a minimum:

  • A database with every British person in it, each citizen having a unique ID (National Identity Register)
  • Each child that is born would need to be in this database, with their relation to their parent or guardian, to calculate the Child Benefit component of the new Universal Credit (ContactPoint)
  • A connection to the medical database so that the disability benefit component of the new Universal Credit can be calculated (NHS Spine)
    A new Universal Credit system (database and business logic) that is integrated into all bank accounts and which, PayPal style, can pay and withdraw monies from your bank account.

That is what is required at a minimum, to pull off what IDS is proposing, and of course, none of it can possibly be optional. It is not possible to do what they are thinking about without tying everything together into a single system that has the citizens unique identifier as the key.

As we say above, this is much worse than the original ID Card, and of course, when we say ID Card, we really mean NIR. This proposal brings together all the worst elements of the database state, and unifies them into a system of total control and surveillance.

London Pirates Archive

Thursday, October 28th, 2010

As often happens with ‘teh internets’ you get to something wonderful via a circuitous route.

I checked the logs to see who was linking to us, and found that someone has transmitted the Monster Music shows on the radio. In their announcement post there was a link to London Pirates a website documenting the London Pirate radio scene from 1989 to 2002.

They have some wonderful photos, and more importantly, they have some off air recordings:

Dream FM UK Pirate Radio 1994 – Side A by user9315653

Dream FM UK Pirate Radio 1994 – Side B by user9315653

The second one is a ‘Happy Hardcore’ set, of the kind you used to hear… in 1994.

It still sounds outrageous, insane, ridiculous, hilarious, intense, far out, ‘mad’… and completely original, unique, imaginative, rule breaking, off the charts… Its worth playing these files in a way that re-creates the bass. Really.

The Price is Right

Friday, June 25th, 2010

The Prices, the prizes, the colors (yes ‘colors’)…. unbelievable.

After reading “Everything you love comes from capitalism” the character of and feeling you get from The Price is Right changes dramatically. Any apprehension you may have had about it from decades of anti-capitalist brainwashing is blown away, and you see that show for what it really was; an incredible exposition of the abundance produced by the free market, even as practiced under the severe duress of the state.











Watch it for yourself:

https://thepiratebay.org/tag/The+Price+Is+Right

And the music is to die for.

KILLIAN IS LYING TO YOU!

Incomplete excision!

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

It’s not perfect. In fact it is FAIL, this expulsion of the foetal police state. Two articles demonstrating some of the limited progress, bearing in mind that the sinister, racist, apartheid style ID Cards are still… on the cards. It’s a catalogue of FAIL, with each measure leaving just enough cancer behind so that it can return one day to kill the body.

Face-to-face passport interviews catch only eight fraudsters

A multi-million pound scheme to tackle passport fraud has been branded a failure after it was revealed that only eight people have been caught as a result of the project.

Since 2007, first-time applicants for passports have been required to attend face-to-face interviews with officials from the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) in an attempt to spot fraudsters.

Out of half a million people interviewed so far, just eight have been refused passports on the basis of the evidence obtained, according to official figures.

Although 4,000 fraud investigations have been triggered as a result of the interviews, not one has led to a prosecution or conviction.

Yet the government has admitted that on its own estimate, 4,400 fraudulent applicants per year are still managing to slip through the net and obtain passports.

Phil Booth, of campaign group NO2ID, said: “This expensive project was an attempt to introduce a network by stealth for the national identity card scheme. These figures show it has failed to have any significantly effect on passport fraud.”

The system of face-to-face interviews cost £93 million to set up, with £30 million a year running costs on top. It has helped push the price of a standard passport up from £28 in 2001 to £77.50 today.

Mr Booth added: “Now the ID card scheme has been binned and we have seen off, for the time being at least, proposals to fingerprint for passports, will this network be closed and will the cost of a passport be cut by this Government?”

Under the new system, applicants for passports aged 16 or over, who have never held a UK passport before, must first pass a background check and are then told to arrange an interview at one of 69 offices across the country.

[…]

While the interviews appear to have make little impact on levels of fraud, traditional paper checks continue to detect thousands of bogus applicants a year.

In 2006/7, 6,100 applicants were identified as fraudulent by the existing safeguards and prevented from obtaining British passports.

In the same year, according to an official government estimate, 9,700 slipped through the net and obtained passports to which they were not entitled.

By 2008/9, the most recent year for which data are available, the number identified as fraudulent and stopped through paper checks had risen to 9,200, while the number estimated to have slipped through the net had fallen to 4,400.

[…]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/7823456/Face-to-face-passport-interviews-catch-only-eight-fraudsters.html

Remember, this is 9,700 out of an undisclosed number of passports that are issued or renewed every year. Without the number of passports that are issued correctly, this number is meaningless. If the total number of passports renewed or issued for the first time is 9,701 then the problem is huge. If the number of passports renewed or issued for the first time is 1,000,000 then the problem is very small, and the vast majority should not be penalised. Also, if this 9,700 number is correct, it shows that the state is able to detect these passports and intercept them in order to make a count, rendering the number of carriers of bad passports at any one time very small indeed compared to the tens of millions of people who are British passport holders.

Like the pathetic and paranoia, vendor snake oil fuelled US VISIT system, this absurd face to face interview system is a total waste of time.

The vast majority of passports are correctly issued. Even the ones that are correctly issued can be misused at will by criminals and murderers, especially now that cloning them is meade simple by the RFID chip in each passport. That is why, by the way, you should hammer the chip page in your biometric passport if you are unfortunate enough to have one.

When it is proposed that a working system is altered to accommodate a problem caused by a statistically small number of cases, that is a good indication that the proposed changes are wrong and should be rejected.

See our other posts on this subject:

The Times on Biometric Passports: Do they FINALLY understand?

Fingerprints as ID – good, bad, ugly?

What about the Children?

and one from 2005 etc etc.

And now, on to the insanely stupid ‘vetting and barring scheme’:

Ministers slammed the brakes last night on Labour’s controversial scheme to force millions of parents to undergo anti-paedophile and criminal records checks.

Home Secretary Theresa May pledged to change ‘fundamentally’ the deeply unpopular Vetting and Barring Scheme which was due to expand dramatically from next month – but she stopped short of scrapping it entirely.

The plans for new registrations from July 26 have been scrapped and Home Office officials are working out how the scheme will be scaled down.

Nine million adults were due to undergo intrusive checks by a new government agency, the Independent Safeguarding Authority.

But there was outrage after it emerged parents taking their children to Scouts or sports events could face fines of up to £5,000 if they failed to comply.

The scheme, which was designed to protect children and vulnerable adults, prompted major civil liberties concerns over its size and intrusion into private lives.

Last night Mrs May said checks on vulnerable groups should be ‘proportionate and sensible’.

She said: ‘The safety of children and vulnerable adults is of paramount importance to the new Government.

‘However it is also vital that we take a measured approach in these matters. We’ve listened to the criticisms and will respond with a scheme that has been fundamentally remodelled.

‘Vulnerable groups must be properly protected in a way that is proportionate and sensible.

‘This redrawing of the VBS will ensure this happens.’

Civil liberties groups welcomed the move, but urged Mrs May to abolish the scheme entirely.

Dylan Sharpe, campaign director of Big Brother Watch, said: ‘A review is not a solution.

‘The vetting and barring scheme should be scrapped and the Independent Safeguarding Authority should go with it.’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1286639/Vetting-plans-parents-scaled-ministers.html

You cannot be a little bit pregnant. This scheme, like the foul ID Card and NIR must be entirely abolished forever. Absolutely appalling that they are even considering keeping it, especially when they have the perfect storm of pretexts for getting rid of it.

I had a chance to watch this again. What struck me about it was how it highlights the complete reversal of right and wrong, normal and abnormal that we are suffering today.

In the 1960’s its clear that the ideas of mistrust by default, preemptive war, attack as the best defence was the line that the purely evil, venal, greedy villain took, whilst peace, patience, negotiation, understanding, empathy for strangers (and in this case, VERY strange strangers) was the position of the absolute hero, the ideal and model human being, the normal, decent and true spirit of man.

This episode is startling, because it reminds anyone who watches is that the world really was a very different and better place even with all the unpleasant things that were happening at that time.

There is absolutely no reason why the better nature of human beings should not re assert itself in the 21st century. All decent people refuse to go along with the anti human Zero Trust Society, the economic slavery, the systematic silencing of anyone who does not go along with the group think.

It looks to me that thanks to the internet, it is now nearly impossible for a lie to have a long life. This means that means that all lies that are used to reshape the world now cannot do so, since reshaping the world with a lie takes time. If the truth is told all the time everywhere, then the end result must be more liberty and not less. This is why it is vitally important for people to retransmit the truth; it is more important than demonstrating, violence or any of the the 20th century ways of making things that are wrong, right.

And while we are talking about the truth, do take the time to watch all of the documentary ‘Free to Choose‘. The facts that make up the science of Economics are not a matters of opinion. It is up to you to make yourself familiar with the truth, to face it, embrace it and spread it.

For great justice!

What is a ‘public servant’?

Friday, October 30th, 2009

What a servant is and is not is central to understanding the proper role of government.

When the creatures who run this government and the apparatchiks who operate under them say they are public servants, they lie; it is the same perversion of language that permeates all of their speech. When they say they want to ‘strengthen Home Education’ they really mean they want to cripple and destroy it. When they say that they are ‘public servants’ what they really mean is that they are your masters. This is the way they behave, the posture they adopt when they respond to you and it is evidenced in everything they do.

Servants have characteristics:

  • They are deferential
  • They do not lie
  • They follow proper etiquette when addressing their masters
  • They do not command anyone other than other servants
  • They obey their masters absolutely
  • They cannot instantiate new servant classes
  • They are under tight control and audit

The proper posture of a servant can be seen in the behaviour of the people who sweep the streets with brooms in London. When you pass by them, they accept your rubbish into their wheeled bins. They get out of your way when you are walking down the street.

Those people are acting as true servants – they defer to you; they respond to you by making sure they are not interfering with you, and they take your garbage from you without you having to drop it for them to then sweep up.

A street sweeper who is not adopting the posture of a servant would, when you offer him your garbage, ask you to drop it first, so that he may sweep it up, as he is a street sweeper, and not a garbage collector.

Any public servant adopting a posture other than that of an obedient street sweeper or other true servant is not a public servant.

Servants who are serving correctly do not lie to their masters. If a china cup is broken in the household, the proper servant says, “I broke it by accident ma’am”. If accidents like this happen rarely, it is forgiven, forgotten and life goes on. If however, the servant lies and says that she found it broken, then this servant is a liar, and must be sacked. This is the servant who will steal a spoon, who will steal money and do all other sorts of things; this is a servant who cannot be trusted. You would not be able to leave your house with that servant in place, and in the case of Parliament, you cannot leave the power to legislate and declare war in the hands of people who cannot be trusted; you will end up with bad laws and many wars and your money stolen.

Public servants follow proper etiquette when addressing their masters. When a properly behaving servant is asked, “why are my shirts not ironed and folded Isabel?” she does not say, “Please take this matter up with the ironing lady”. She will instead, apologise, then run down to the ironing lady and ask why the DEVIL the master’s shirts are not ironed and in place.

If a servant speaks out of place on a matter, she is apologetic and grateful for correction. She does not raise her hackles, huff and puff, suck her teeth and say, “well if you don’t like it, then lump it”. A true servant who behaved in this way would indeed, be told to ‘lump it’ and be dismissed on the spot.

True servants do not command anyone but other servants. The public servant in charge of street sweepers has the power to command the army of street sweepers that he is in charge of and that is all. He has no power to mandate anything or control anyone or any other aspect of garbage. He cannot, for example, tell you, the master, how to pack your rubbish bin; if he can do that, then he is your master and you are his servant.

Servants who are behaving in their proper role always obey their masters in all matters. If the venal liars who claim to be public servants were actual servants, they could never have illegally invaded Iraq, since the masters did not want this to happen. Each consultation that came up with a result that meant new legislation was not capable of being brought to debate, so total was its rejection by the public, would be obeyed absolutely and without question.

Servants do not act in the best interests of their masters against their masters wishes. No matter what the servant believes is best, the master is to be obeyed in all things at all times, without exception.

The final characteristic of servants that differentiates them from masters is that a servant cannot instantiate another class of servant. Only a master can create a new class of servant. A street sweeper or housemaid cannot hire on their own initiative, and neither can they create a new position in the household.

This demonstrates that, for example, the multitude of Czars that are being created are all illegitimate, since no servant can create a new role for filling by another servant.

In fact, servants cannot create or demand anything that will cause the master to expend money without his permission. When the stable master needs saddle soap, he takes it out of the budget allocated to the stables, which is regularly audited by the master. He cannot order replacement horses, or saddles or anything above a certain price without the express permission of the master. In this respect, servants exhibit another characteristic; they are under control.

Finally, in this equation there is another consistent factor; the behaviour of the master. In all cases, the master must behave like a master, and not a servant.

  • When he asks a question, he expects an immediate, truthful and direct answer.
  • He does not tolerate breaches of etiquette (insolence).
  • He does not tolerate breaches of the instantiation rule.
  • He sacks for deliberate misallocation of his monies.
  • He sacks for disobedience.

If you do not treat a public servant like a servant, the servant is sent the wrong signals and she begins to behave in ways that are above her station.

Scullery maids are low in the hierarchy of the household, but they obey the mistress of the house in all things instantaneously. They do not owe a greater duty of obedience to the head housekeeper; this is precisely what the appointees of ministers are doing today; their loyalty is not to you, the master, but to the person who appointed them, who they consider to be their true master. You are nothing to them; you are a serf who is taxed to pay their wages. You are to be spied upon, numbered, vilified and squeezed for the pleasure of the true master; a servant running wild.

If there is to be any long term solution to the problem of bad behaviour of public servants, it is absolutely essential that everyone when dealing with these people treat them in the manner that they should be treated.

No master ever begs his servant, or behaves in a deferential way towards them. Masters give orders and make demands of their servants on penalty of the sack should they fail to obey or function properly.

Being a master does not give you license to abuse a good servant. Good servants are like good dogs; you pet them, treat them and treasure them. ‘Please’, ‘thank you’ and all other forms of courtesy are due to servants; being a servant is not the same as being a slave. This distinction is the crucial block that prevents servants from committing immoral acts against others on the orders of their masters. Slaves are compelled to murder on the word of their master, free men who are servants are not. That being said, a servant who is not acting as a servant can never be tolerated, and must be sacked, not only to protect yourself and your household, but as a warning to other servants that should they not behave correctly, the sack is a word away.

No one forces people to become public servants. If they are not willing to behave as proper servants, obeying absolutely the points that are listed above, then they should not enter into public service at all, and should work for companies (where by the way, they will be under a modern version of the sort of discipline that you find in a good household with servants).

Without competent masters who understand their position in all of this, public servants, like untrained dogs, will ride roughshod over you as if they were your masters, and we have all started to see what that looks like.

The Liberal Democrat’s mansion tax: the unintended consequences

Monday, September 28th, 2009

The Liberal Democrats have proposed what is now being called ‘The Mansion Tax’, where each household that is valued at one million pounds or over will be taxed at .5% annually.

As is true with all taxes, there will be unintended consequences to this idea. Lets go through some of them.

This tax, should it ever be passed, will create a virtual city of limbo houses that no one wants to buy, no one wants to repair and which will fall into dilapidation.

Anyone who is going to buy a house and has a budget of one million will opt for a house that is less than that amount. Any owner of a house with a value of one million will find that property harder to sell. Even though one million pounds is ‘alot of money’, most people do not lay out cash, but instead, get a mortgage. The .5% tax will be enough of a disincentive to getting one of these houses; why go for a house that costs 1M when you can get one for .950k and avoid an annual bill of £5,000?

Anyone owning a house that is worth almost 1M will have no incentive to do any sort of repair or improvement on it. Anything they do that might increase the value of the property will immediately put it in the new category, which will mean that not only will they instantly be liable for this new tax, but the prospects of selling the house in the future will be significantly decreased.

Anyone owning a house that is currently worth 1M will have an incentive to devalue the property. They will demolish a garage, remove a glass extension, pull out insulation – do anything they can that will reduce the value of the house whilst not making it uninhabitable.

The building trade will be affected by this tax. All work to improve houses that have the potential to approach 1M in value should repairs or improvements be done on them will be cancelled permanently. This lost work will probably offset the money that the LibDems want to raise with this tax.

No architect will design a house believing that its price will fall on or near 1M. Houses that are much bigger than 1M will continue to built, houses that cannot by improvement ever reach 1M will continue to be built, but that ‘sour spot’ (as opposed to sweet spot) will not be built in. This tax will exert an aesthetic pressure that will distort the building and architecture trades. There will be more sub 1M houses, more ‘big’ houses, and a gap where all the 1M houses used to be.

These are just a few of the unintended consequences of this idea. It is a bad idea. It has been put forward by people who have clearly never read or heard about the parable of the broken window. The money that they raise from this will simply be diverted and not ‘raised’, while causing widespread destruction as people deliberately destroy their property in order to get in under the wire.

There are many properties in London that bear the scars of this sort of ‘thinking’. In the 1680s a ‘window tax’ was imposed on all properties. To get away from it, property owners bricked up windows on their homes to lessen the tax burden. They had to have light and air, and so they could not brick them all up; look at all of these properties, and imagine the amount of light that would have entered at each place a window is lost.

The Liberal Democrats have a limitless capacity to drink from the well of stupidity. They consistently propose policies that are out of line with reality, economic laws and the public mood (no matter what the polls say), and in the case of this millionaire tax, they demonstrate once again that they do not know anything about economics.

2007 Guidelines for Local Authorities on Elective Home Education

Sunday, September 27th, 2009

Memory Holed by the without explanation. The probability that they were deliberately removed divided by the probability that they were deleted accidentally is one.

Do the math.

The 2007 Guidelines for Local Authorities on Elective Home Education

And for those who do not know:

Memory hole

The memory hole generally refers to the alteration or outright disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts, or other records, such as from a web site or other archive. The term is the name of one website, The Memory Hole, whose goal is to preserve those documents which are in danger of being lost, and there are a number of other websites with similar goals.[1]

Origins of term

The memory hole, as in the phrase “Going down the memory hole,” is a phrase in Newspeak which refers to a small chute leading to a large incinerator used for censorship in George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four:[2]

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.(pp. 34-35)

In the novel, the memory hole is a slot into which government officials deposit politically inconvenient documents and records to be destroyed. Nineteen Eighty-Four’s protagonist Winston Smith, who works in the Ministry of Truth, is routinely assigned the task of revising old newspaper articles in order to serve the propaganda interests of the government. For example, if the government had pledged that the chocolate ration would not fall below the current 30 grams per week, but in fact the ration is reduced to 20 grams per week, the historical record (e.g., an article from a back issue of the Times newspaper) is revised to contain an announcement that a reduction to 20 grams might soon prove necessary, or that the ration, then 15 grams, would soon be increased to that number. The original copies of the historical record are deposited into the memory hole. A document placed in the memory hole is supposedly transported to an incinerator from which “not even the ash remains” However not all things tossed in make it to the incinerator. A picture Winston threw into one is produced during the torture session, if only to be thrown back in an instant later.

[…]

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

Iran in secret bases shock

Friday, September 25th, 2009

We now hear that Iran has some ‘secret bases’ where they are developing technology… in secret.

Last time I checked, developing weapons in secrete (yes ‘secrete’) is not illegal, and of course, other countries have secret underground labs where they are doing things so incredible that no one would believe them if they were told flat out.

Of course, people who do not believe these things are DUMB.

Here is an old post from the old BLOGDIAL about Iran and the constant threat against them:

the difference is barely there.

The difference is in the history. Murder Inc. and its wholly pwned subsidiary has a long history of invading, pillaging and disturbing these people. They have no history of disturbing the west…. Until now.

aQ telling MI that when it gets out of the affairs of the middle east everything will stop is not propaganda. Propaganda is:

…a specific type of message presentation aimed at serving an agenda. At its root, the denotation of propaganda is ‘to propagate (actively spread) a philosophy or point of view’. The most common use of the term (historically) is in political contexts; in particular to refer to certain efforts sponsored by governments or political groups.

Purpose of propaganda

The aim of propaganda is to influence people’s opinions actively, rather than to merely communicate the facts about something. For example, propaganda might be used to garner either support or disapproval of a certain position, rather than to simply present the position. […] http://www.answers.com/

What aQ do when they make their statements is initiating negotiation. They are laying out the terms for a cease fire; “get out of our affairs and we will cease all activities” is the opening bid. What MI do when they speak about what is happening is pure propaganda. They use language to distort the true situation; calling this a ‘war on terror’, a ‘clash of cultures’, the beliefs of the ‘enemy’ an ‘evil ideology’, claiming that the attacks have nothing to do with the illegal invasion of Iraq, re-writing history…and so on and so on. This is the essential difference between what comes out of the mouths of OBL and Bliar/USUK/Murder Inc.

I know under which rule I would rather live. I have said this before. What is true however, is that the side of right is on one side only in this case, and the people who are responsible will not back down and put an end to this absolute nonsense.

The “Plan for Iran” is coming into focus. To its eternal shame, even Canada is getting in on this plot to attack Tehran. I mention this due to the lines below talking about how MI could ease our dependence on oil if only the monies were diverted from nonsense to science.

The same has to be said about Iran. That place is soaked in sunshine. These people have no imagination whatsoever, and they are completely infuriating in this respect. Imagine if Tehran had spent the BILLIONS that they have wasted on nuclear technology on making their universities the greatest on earth; the place where every physics student is desperate to study. And yes, they really have spent that much money and probably more:

By 1975, The US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, had signed National Security Decision Memorandum 292, titled “U.S.-Iran Nuclear Cooperation,” which laid out the details of the sale of nuclear energy equipment to Iran projected to bring U.S. corporations more than $6 billion in revenue. At the time, Iran was pumping as much as 6 million barrels (950,000 m³) of oil a day, compared with an average of about 4 million barrels (640,000 m³) daily today.

President Gerald R. Ford even signed a directive in 1976 offering Tehran the chance to buy and operate a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel. The deal was for a complete “nuclear fuel cycle”.

The shah, who referred to oil as “noble fuel,” said it was too valuable to waste on daily energy needs. The Ford strategy paper said the “introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran’s economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals.”[1] […]

not only would they have an R&D programme that was the envy of the world, but they would be well on the road to having a clean energy economy, the technology for which they would be able to export to everyone that is too stupid to spend money on R&D and universities. Rather than wasting the ignoble fule on daily energy needs by servicing that demand with nuclear power, they would have saved the same amount of oil with clean energy technology. No waste problems. No threat to any other country. They would also be proving that an Islamic republic was able to compete with every other country on an equal footing, instead of being places that are backwards, crippled and broken and perpetually the pitiful underdogs of the world. They have had the billions to do the job. They had the enthusiastic populations to pull it off. They even have some brilliant scientists to put it all together. Instead, they spent (and continue to spend) money on nuclear power plants, the albatross technology that everyone in the west wants to be rid of – its almost as if they live in the same paralell universe that Bliar does, where no matter what is happening in another country, they will simply continue as they have been doing, no matter what the cost.

These people need(ed) to recognise Israel, put all their oil money into education, universities and R&D and put all their energy into becoming….like Japan, who without the ‘blessing’ of oil or any cash cow, have managed to do very well since they have been forced to turn away from wasting money on pointless technology.

In the late 1970s Iran had the Japanese example to take inspiration from; “turn away from the war machine, and dominate“, but you need to have an imagination to be able to see yourself in the future with a high tech economy ruling the roost with your brains and ingenuity alone. Now they will pay the price for their lack of vision. And so will we, as they retaliate and everything spirals into this, “If someone had told me this in the 80’s I would have laughed out loud” future, which is beyond a nightmare.

[…]

BLOGDIAL August 2005

Clearly the Iranians do not play chess. Or they need to play chess more. They also need to understand money. If they played chess and understood money, they would be more safe from attack.

If they understood what money really is they would abandon their own bankrupt fiat currency system and go to an all gold system, financed by their oil revenues. That does not mean that they only accept gold for their oil instead of dollars; that would be ‘aggressive’. Instead they should take dollars, and immediately convert them into gold, which would then be used to replace their fiat currency incrementally. Sound money is the foundation of freedom and prosperity; with a sound currency, their population would thrive economically, and Iran could become one of the great financial centres of the world.

Adopting an all gold currency would force them to stop spending on insane boondoggles like Nuclear anything. They currently print their money to finance these operations, stealing the value of the people’s money through inflation. Gold money would install fiscal discipline on the government there, so that they wold not be able to engage in nonsense like Nuclear power which is a waste of money.

Nuclear weapons are not only a waste of money, but are a threat to the existence of Iran, wether they have a moral right to them or not. In chess you play to win, and building those weapons means they are going to LOSE. They are running to queen some pawns but they will not get there, because the whole board is going to be thrown onto the floor by the great satan.

If they had given up this nonsense, recognised Israel and put away the toys, no one would be able to say anything about them. These are all purely strategic moves to ensure that they survive and prosper; and it is not hard to beat the great satan and their slobbering followers, who are so violent, corrupt and insane that they are going to fall on their own swords very shortly.

Here is how it is done:

[Event "Human versus GNU Chess"]
[Date "2009.08.31"]
[Round "?"]
[White "White"]
[Black "GNU Chess"]
[Result "1-0"]
[BlackAI "GNU Chess"]

1. e4 e5
2. Nf3 Nc6
3. d4 Nf6
4. d5 Nb4
5. Bc4 Bc5
6. a3 Na6
7. b4 Bb6
8. Nxe5 Nxe4
9. O-O Qf6 
10. Ng4 Qxa1 
11. Nd2 Qd4 
12. Qe1 h5 
13. Ne3 O-O 
14. Nf5 Nxd2
15. Qxd2 Qxc4 
16. Ne7+ Kh8 
17. Bb2 d6 
18. Qh6# 1-0

The great satan is about to run out of money. He is going to bring down all of his allies with him. The population living under him has had enough and they are sharpening their pitchforks to tilt against his. Had Iran showed some common sense and imagination, they would be sitting on the sidelines, watching it all collapse with gold money in their pockets, a completely sound economy and everyone running to them as the new centre of the reshaped world.

But no.

They are going to be wiped out and their culture along with them, their country transformed into a basket case like Iraq… and for what? For precisely NOTHING.

SYWWBY

The All-Purpose Bedtime Story

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

In which we generalise commentary on ‘that report on government spending’ and find that it sticks; courtesy of The Guardian.

There is not enough money for what has already been promised. We need a serious review – we’re not going to get it

The row refuses to lie down, however hard the government tries. Growing public unease is now compounded by the leaks from the report into procurement. In sum the author has pointed out that successive governments have been ordering programmes and operations they couldn’t or wouldn’t fund adequately.
This has been going on for years, as experienced insiders and senior staff have been telling me. And in fairness, they too have been telling me this for years. Here is just a sample; three salient lines that have been leaked so far from the report.

How can it be that it takes 20 years to procure a contract?
Why does it always seem to cost at least twice what was thought?
At the end of the wait, why does it never do what it supposed to do?

We have nowhere near the money in the allocated budget to pay for the equipment ordered; there are only funds today to pay for a fraction of what has been ordered for the next 20 years. This gap is so big according to some calculations that a 10-15% increase in tax revenues would not even cover it.
The seriousness of the situation has been underlined by two sobering pieces of comment this week. The first makes the point that it is the combination of lack of political will to replace defective or exhausted equipment, lack of realistic funding and internecine rivalry in the departments that has brought the present crisis, which is now probably the worst since 1945. The second observes that too much money has been spent on useless and very expensive kit in high profile projects and little elsewhere.
Because there is not enough money to pay for what has been ordered, the government, and the Treasury in particular, have indulged in a peculiar Through The Looking Glass mechanism of delay. This is hugely expensive, with extra fees for keeping the projects alive and managing them with large numbers of civil servants. Two multi-billion pound programmes have been put back five years – which means they could cost twice the original tender price. The delay mechanism means billions are being wasted each year.
One of the most spectacular delays was in the order over a decade ago at the market value. Additional software would have cost an extra 20%. The department decided instead to make its own software, which has never worked. The additional cost now of putting this order right is as much as the original cost. Investigating this story over the years, I have never been able to establish who took the decisions over the procurement. The civil servants blame front-line staff, and the politicians blame vague and unnamed committees.

SOMETHING HAS TO GIVE.

So what should give here in the UK? The civil service, roughly three times the number doing the same job in the second world war, needs to be cut.
A new agency should be set up on commercial lines to take charge of all contracts. They should look at all of the programmes and devolve as much as possible.
There should also be a reduction of scope and state funding every year. The last UK review was years ago, and the programme it laid down was never properly accounted for by the Treasury. Instead we have been promised a review after the next general election, and that it will be “policy and security driven” which sounds awfully like a cop-out from the painful decisions the author has made plain for all to see.
The civil servants, managers and politicians will have to face up to serious cuts in personnel and programmes – to say nothing of British policy claims and ambitions. To do otherwise is to court disaster, and real political defeat. But will it happen? I doubt it. For too many of those involved it would be like turkeys voting for Christmas.

What Soviet Medicine Teaches Us

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009

Mises Daily by

The system had many decades to work, but widespread apathy and low quality of work paralyzed the healthcare system. In the depths of the socialist experiment, healthcare institutions in Russia were at least a hundred years behind the average US level. Moreover, the filth, odors, cats roaming the halls, drunken medical personnel, and absence of soap and cleaning supplies added to an overall impression of hopelessness and frustration that paralyzed the system. According to official Russian estimates, 78 percent of all AIDS victims in Russia contracted the virus through dirty needles or HIV-tainted blood in the state-run hospitals.

Irresponsibility, expressed by the popular Russian saying “They pretend they are paying us and we pretend we are working,” resulted in appalling quality of service, widespread corruption, and extensive loss of life. My friend, a famous neurosurgeon in today’s Russia, received a monthly salary of 150 rubles — one third of the average bus driver’s salary.

In order to receive minimal attention by doctors and nursing personnel, patients had to pay bribes. I even witnessed a case of a “nonpaying” patient who died trying to reach a lavatory at the end of the long corridor after brain surgery. Anesthesia was usually “not available” for abortions or minor ear, nose, throat, and skin surgeries. This was used as a means of extortion by unscrupulous medical bureaucrats.

To improve the statistics concerning the numbers of people dying within the system, patients were routinely shoved out the door before taking their last breath.

Being a People’s Deputy in the Moscow region from 1987 to 1989, I received many complaints about criminal negligence, bribes taken by medical apparatchiks, drunken ambulance crews, and food poisoning in hospitals and child-care facilities. I recall the case of a fourteen-year-old girl from my district who died of acute nephritis in a Moscow hospital. She died because a doctor decided that it was better to save “precious” X-ray film (imported by the Soviets for hard currency) instead of double-checking his diagnosis. These X-rays would have disproven his diagnosis of neuropathic pain.

Instead, the doctor treated the teenager with a heat compress, which killed her almost instantly. There was no legal remedy for the girl’s parents and grandparents. By definition, a single-payer system cannot allow any such remedy. The girl’s grandparents could not cope with this loss and they both died within six months. The doctor received no official reprimand.

Not surprisingly, government bureaucrats and Communist Party officials, as early as 1921 (three years after Lenin’s socialization of medicine), realized that the egalitarian system of healthcare was good only for their personal interest as providers, managers, and rationers — but not as private users of the system.

So, as in all countries with socialized medicine, a two-tier system was created: one for the “gray masses” and the other, with a completely different level of service, for the bureaucrats and their intellectual servants. In the USSR, it was often the case that while workers and peasants were dying in the state hospitals, the medicine and equipment that could save their lives was sitting unused in the nomenklatura system.

At the end of the socialist experiment, the official infant-mortality rate in Russia was more than 2.5 times as high as in the United States and more than five times that of Japan. The rate of 24.5 deaths per 1,000 live births was questioned recently by several deputies to the Russian Parliament, who claim that it is seven times higher than in the United States. This would make the Russian death rate 55 compared to the US rate of 8.1 per 1,000 live births.

Having said that, I should make it clear that the United States has one of the highest rates of the industrialized world only because it counts all dead infants, including premature babies, which is where most of the fatalities occur.

Most countries do not count premature-infant deaths. Some don’t count any deaths that occur in the first 72 hours. Some countries don’t even count any deaths from the first two weeks of life. In Cuba, which boasts a very low infant-mortality rate, infants are only registered when they are several months old, thereby leaving out of the official statistics all infant deaths that take place within the first several months of life.

In the rural regions of Karakalpakia, Sakha, Chechnya, Kalmykia, and Ingushetia, the infant mortality rate is close to 100 per 1,000 births, putting these regions in the same category as Angola, Chad, and Bangladesh. Tens of thousands of infants fall victim to influenza every year, and the proportion of children dying from pneumonia and tuberculosis is on the increase. Rickets, caused by a lack of vitamin D, and unknown in the rest of the modern world, is killing many young people.

Uterine damage is widespread, thanks to the 7.3 abortions the average Russian woman undergoes during childbearing years. Keeping in mind that many women avoid abortions altogether, the 7.3 average means that many women have a dozen or more abortions in their lifetime.

Even today, according to the State Statistics Committee, the average life expectancy for Russian men is less than 59 years — 58 years and 11 months — while that for Russian women is 72 years. The combined figure is 65 years and three months.[1] By comparison, the average life span for men in the United States is 73 years and for women 79 years. In the United States, life expectancy at birth for the total population has reached an all-time American high of 77.5 years, up from 49.2 years just a century ago. The Russian life expectancy at birth is 12 years lower.[2]

After seventy years of socialism, 57 percent of all Russian hospitals did not have running hot water, and 36 percent of hospitals located in rural areas of Russia did not have water or sewage at all. Isn’t it amazing that socialist government, while developing space exploration and sophisticated weapons, would completely ignore the basic human needs of its citizens?

The appalling quality of service is not simply characteristic of “barbarous” Russia and other Eastern European nations: it is a direct result of the government monopoly on healthcare and it can happen in any country. In “civilized” England, for example, the waiting list for surgeries is nearly 800,000 out of a population of 55 million. State-of-the-art equipment is nonexistent in most British hospitals. In England, only 10 percent of the healthcare spending is derived from private sources.

Britain pioneered in developing kidney-dialysis technology, and yet the country has one of the lowest dialysis rates in the world. The Brookings Institution (hardly a supporter of free markets) found that every year 7,000 Britons in need of hip replacements, between 4,000 and 20,000 in need of coronary bypass surgery, and some 10,000 to 15,000 in need of cancer chemotherapy are denied medical attention in Britain.

Age discrimination is particularly apparent in all government-run or heavily regulated systems of healthcare. In Russia, patients over 60 are considered worthless parasites and those over 70 are often denied even elementary forms of healthcare.

In the United Kingdom, in the treatment of chronic kidney failure, those who are 55 years old are refused treatment at 35 percent of dialysis centers. Forty-five percent of 65-year-old patients at the centers are denied treatment, while patients 75 or older rarely receive any medical attention at these centers.

In Canada, the population is divided into three age groups in terms of their access to healthcare: those below 45, those 45–65, and those over 65. Needless to say, the first group, who could be called the “active taxpayers,” enjoys priority treatment.

Advocates of socialized medicine in the United States use Soviet propaganda tactics to achieve their goals. Michael Moore is one of the most prominent and effective socialist propagandists in America. In his movie, Sicko, he unfairly and unfavorably compares health care for older patients in the United States with complex and incurable diseases to healthcare in France and Canada for young women having routine babies. Had he done the reverse — i.e., compared healthcare for young women in the United States having babies to older patients with complex and incurable diseases in socialized healthcare systems — the movie would have been the same, except that the US healthcare system would look ideal, and the UK, Canada, and France would look barbaric.

[…]

http://mises.org/story/3650

Frances Stonor Saunders vindicated again

Friday, July 10th, 2009

More lies, deception and this time, maybe a slip up from the liars at totalitarian central known as Neu Liebour:

A Big Brother row erupted last night after the minister in charge of ID cards expressed a desire to load them with sensitive personal information such as medical records.

The Home Office insists the microchip contained on the controversial cards will store only basic details such as name, date of birth, a facial scan and fingerprints.

But Home Office Minister Alan Campbell has told MPs that a ‘future Government’ may want ‘to bring forward proposals to add to the amount of data held on a card’.

In a late-night Commons debate on Monday night he added: ‘Some people, including me, would quite like additional data on an identity card.

‘I am personally persuaded that if there were an ID card and it had scope for further information-some of that information, for my personal circumstances, would be a good thing.’

Opposition MPs accused the minister of inadvertently revealing the Government’s true agenda to store medical and even criminal records on the chip.

LibDem home affairs spokesman Tom Brake said: ‘As soon as this unnecessary scheme is rolled out, the Government will seek to store more and more information on it in the dubious name of security and personal benefit. This illiberal, unworkable and unforgivably expensive scheme must be scrapped immediately.’

Last month Home Secretary Alan Johnson announced the £5billion ID cards scheme would no longer be compulsory.

A plan to force airport workers to carry them was dumped, along with a long-term commitment to legislate to make the cards universal once 80 per cent of the population has one.

But anybody applying for a passport will still have to sign up to the National Identity Register and could be fined up to £1,000 if they do not keep their records up to date.

Ministers insist people will be keen to carry the cards as they will make life more convenient and make it easier to open bank accounts.

Last night the Home Office denied Mr Campbell had revealed a secret agenda.

A spokesman for the Identity and Passport Service said: ‘When we issue ID cards later this year there will be no spare capacity to hold information beyond that already laid out in legislation.’

[…]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1198673/Minister-wants-medical-records-ID-cards.html

Imagine a world where, as is the case with your drivers license in the UK, you can get points on your license to exist: your ID Card.

The police put points on your card because you dropped litter accidentally… actually, it will be a CCTV camera connected to a computer that will scan your face and then put points on your ID Card automagically.

This is what the future is going to be like if ID Cards and the NIR are not utterly and completely abandoned.

Once again, Frances Stonor Saunders is prescient on this:

[…]

There will be spaces on this database for your religion, residence status, and many other private and personal facts about you. There is unlimited space for every other details of your life on the NIR database, which can be expanded by the Government with or without further Acts of Parliament.

[…]

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1207

That is from famous ‘Anonymous Email’ that we love to quote at BLOGDIAL, and that fascist Andy Burnham said was ‘ridiculous’.

Not so ridiculous now is it?

Of course, what the Anonymous Email says about this insanely evil scheme is true; there is literally unlimited space for extra details to be stored, and when the vicious totalitarian lie machine Alan Campbell says, “there will be no spare capacity to hold information beyond that already laid out in legislation” he knows he is lying. Even if the card had no electronics in it at all, the NIR has the potential to have all the space they need to hold everything about your life from the day you are born to the day you die.

When they swipe your card, your records will come up, including all your medical records, your ‘criminal’ convictions, your bank transactions, the names of your spouse and children, your travel records… EVERYTHING you have EVER done, EVERYWHERE you have ever been, EVERYTHING you have ever bought, and if you use email, write on a blog etc, EVERYTHING you have ever written.

And that is ALL BOMB BAD.

What a German auto manufacturer has to do to get 5,000 tires for his cars

Friday, July 10th, 2009

This is from an article by Lew Rockwell.

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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