From a lurker…

The old:

Interesting Medications from the past

Bayer’s Heroin

A bottle of Bayer’s heroin. Between 1890 and 1910 heroin was sold as a non-addictive substitute for morphine. It was also used to treat children with strong cough.

Coca Wine

Metcalf Coca Wine was one of a huge variety of wines with cocaine on the market. Everybody used to say that it would make you happy and it would also work as a medicinal treatment.

Mariani wine

Mariani wine (1875) was the most famous Coca wine of its time. Pope Leo XIII used to carry one bottle with him all the time. He awarded Angelo Mariani (the producer) with a Vatican gold medal.

Maltine

Produced by Maltine Manufacturing Company of New York . It was suggested that you should take a full glass with or after every meal. Children should take half a glass.

A paper weight

A paper weight promoting C.F. Boehringer & Soehne ( Mannheim , Germany ). They were proud of being the biggest producers in the world of products containing Quinine and Cocaine.

Opium for Asthma

Cocaine tablets (1900)

All stage actors, singers teachers and preachers had to have them for a maximum performance. Great to “smooth” the voice.

Cocaine drops for toothache

Very popular for children in 1885. Not only they relieved the pain, they made the children happy!

Opium for new-borns

I’m sure this would make them sleep well (not only the Opium, but 46% alcohol!!!!!)

and now for the new medicine:

Ill take the Yeyo, the A-Bomb and the booze thanks.

Ali P pumps her foot on the grindstone with her cutlass oiled and becoming more sharp by the second:

Tories consider splitting DCSF
“Sector leaders” have expressed alarm at the potential break-up of the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) under a Tory government after it emerged the shadow children’s secretary was in favour of an independent education department.

Michael Gove said “schools have lost their principal purpose and been saddled with a host of supplementary roles since the creation of the DCSF”. He added: “What we do not have – and what we desperately need – is a department at the heart of government championing the cause of education.”

Schools, he claimed, have become “less places of learning and more community hubs from which a host of services can be delivered”.

Naturally the vultures don’t like it as they’ve got fat on failed Labour policies. But the money is running out, thanks to that nasty big economic crisis, and cuts glorious cuts are coming.

But Kim Bromley-Derry, president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, warned that central government must reflect councils’ integrated approach to children’s services. He said joined-up policy-making is vital to improving outcomes for children. “Services will always have the greatest impact when they are delivered coherently, consistently and through the pursuit of shared priorities identified at the highest level,” he said.

Some of us don’t share these “priorities”, of course.

Andrew Cozens, strategic adviser for children, adults and health services at the Improvement and Development Agency, said dismantling the DCSF would be a “backward step”. “There is interplay between so many aspects of children’s lives,” he said. “It’s very difficult to separate their needs at school from their wider family life.”

Children’s most basic needs at school (if parents send them there) are secondary to keeping the big monster machine running for its own benefit. Bullying us endemic and so is denial. And we all managed incredibly well without an Improvement and Development Agency in the past. Who needs it?

And wait up, here’s our very own Select Committee chairman, Labour MP Barry Sheerman, with a predictable view on the matter

“The principle behind the DCSF is a good one. I would just like to see a government that doesn’t change departments or ministers so often.”

Deferred gratification is overrated. I’d like to see Gordon’s anti family army thrown out now and not have to wait until May.

http://www.home-education.biz/forum/media/8822-tories-consider-splitting-dcsf.html

“I would just like to see a government that doesn’t change departments or ministers so often.” You mean like a one party state, with a ‘president’ for life?

What a telling statement.

It is not the proper role of government to provide schools for people. Period. When ‘Kim Bromley-Derry’ talks about an ‘integrated approach’ to ‘children’s services’ what he is talking about is the replacement of the parent by the state and nothing less.

All of the quangos, departments and apparatus swarming around the provision of ‘services’ to children should be abolished. Lets just look at two:

The ‘Improvement and Development Agency’ does this:

The IDeA supports improvement and innovation in local government, focusing on the issues that are important to councils and using tried and tested ways of working.

We work with councils in developing good practice, supporting them in their partnerships. We do this through networks, online communities of practice and web resources, and through the support and challenge provided by councillor and officer peers.

We also help develop councillors in key positions through our leadership programmes. Regional Associates work closely with councils in their areas and support the regional improvement and efficiency partnerships (RIEPs).

Unbelievable. I wonder what the budget of this department is? Whatever it is, the money for it was stolen.

Now for ‘The Department for Children, Schools and Families’.

There is no need for a government department that deals specifically with children. Children are the responsibility of parents, not the state. Even if it were the responsibility of the state in some dystopian parallel universe, it would be far more efficient to distribute the responsibility (it’s called DELEGATION) to all the people who are the ‘biological initiators of the nation’s youth’. But that is another story.

There is no need for a government department responsible for families. The family is an entirely private arrangement between individuals who are either married or not, who decide to have children or not and none of it, how they are married, under what terms or how they breed, is the business of the state. Mormons choose polygamy. Others monogamy. Some people share their children, others do not. There are as many ways to organise a family as there are people, but they all have one aspect in common; they are PRIVATE associations that have nothing to do with the state.

There is no need for a government department that is responsible for schools. Parents who pool resources to provide an education for their children in a single place (a school) are not the concern of the state. And that is how schools should be provided for. The state should not be in the business of setting curricula, or any standard of any kind when it comes to education. Education is not a right, it is a good, and it is not the business of government.

Those are only two of the many absurdly named and money sapping state feeders that bleed the public dry whilst violating their rights and literally destroying the country by unleashing an army of uneducated monsters on the land, brainwashing the unfortunate children trapped in state schools with their state mandated pseudo religious programming…. and actually poisoning and killing them with noxious, needless ‘medicines’.

But you know this.

Once the Tories split the DCSF, it will be easier to close its broken down parts… if that is even an issue in the future.

Ali P is correct about the economic crisis. A perfect storm is brewing; you can feel the low pressure and the winds picking up. Several elements are going to combine to wipe out this totalitarian state. People are beyond the end of their tolerance and any single outrage could trigger a significant event; the expenses ‘scandal’ is a good example, and if it were not for the widely anticipated and expected total death of Labour, the streets would already have been taken. The Tories are for sure coming in at the next election and will completely wipe out Labour. The biggest driver of this cataclysmic storm however, will be the destruction of the dollar and the death of the pound (which is backed by the dollar).

As this slow motion train wreck starts to happen, all of these arguments and positions will cease to be the important things. Everyone will be scrambling around to preserve their savings and to keep food on the table.

This is the best possible thing that could happen. There will be a wiping out of the system; a cleaning of the slate. It will take them decades to return to this level of police statism, if at all.

The question will then be who controls the money, and this is absolutely crucial to our liberty. If the replacement for the pound is anything other than a 100% gold sterling standard, where the population holds the physical coins, then future governments will be able to print the new money and finance a new legion of departments, quangos and vendor driven police state apparatus to enslave everyone.

By all means, read about it yourself.

This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. It is also a once in a generation event, like the Bolshevik revolution, or the fall of the Soviet Union, or the… $insert_world_changing_event.

Whether it is by choice or by force, the Tories are going to be at the helm dismantling the apparatus very shortly.

Finally, the Tories have been pinned down and have made the correct announcement:

Tory plans to cut ‘surveillance’

The Conservatives have set out plans to reverse what they describe as “the rise of the surveillance state”.

They have pledged to scrap two new databases – the ID card register and ContactPoint – and strengthen powers of the Information Commissioner.

The Conservatives say they want to restore public trust in the use of personal data by the state.

Their proposals come after a series of security breaches and concern about the amount of information that is held.

The National Identity register – which underpins the ID card scheme – would be scrapped, as would the ContactPoint database, which holds details of 11m children and young people.

Other proposals include ensuring that government departments are routinely audited by the Information Commissioner, who would be required to report to Parliament.

The Tories are also planning to restrict the storage of DNA records of innocent people, after a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights.

The government has consulted on its own DNA reforms, and is due to publish the results shortly.

Home Secretary Alan Johnson said: “The cases of criminals like Kensley Larrier and Abdul Azad demonstrate that we need to retain information on the DNA database.”

Kensley Larrier is a rapist from the North of England who was convicted in 2005 on the strength of a DNA sample taken from him three years earlier when he was arrested for possession of an offensive weapon.

Abdul Azad was convicted of a rape committed in Stafford on the strength of DNA evidence taken from him a year earlier in Birmingham when he was arrested for violent disorder.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8258043.stm

Before we get to the meat in the sandwich, Alan Johnson, the brainless ex postman is a totally clueless moron. Keeping the DNA of rapists is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT to keeping the DNA of people who HAVE NOT BEEN CONVICTED OF ANY CRIME.

What a completely idiotic pea brained DORK.

Now that we have that nastiness out of the way…

NIR – SCRAPPED
ID CARDS – SCRAPPED
ContactPoint – SCRAPPED

This is good news. The Badman recommendations will not be implementable (or at least will be far more difficult to implement) without ContactPoint… that is if the Tories do not scrap them or reverse them should they become law.

The Tories had been making noises about scrapping ID Cards for some time, but never mentioned the NIR; now they have made the connection and have pledged to junk it.

It is pretty clear that they will need to also get rid of the ‘Anti Terror Laws’ that have been routinely used for everything BUT ‘terrorism’ (like spying on parents who want to get their children into good schools).

They will ABSOLUTELY need to scrap the ISA, which everyone has now woken up to and with which everyone is quite rightly sickened.

The Tories have an unprecedented opportunity to not only seize power but to unleash the British people so that the country that was the love of millions can be restored. It will mean making a heroic effort to undo all the evil of Bliar and his criminal cabal of murderous monsters. They have made a good start. All they need is a comprehensive shopping list of things that need to be undone – like the smoking legislation – which stick in the craw of every decent person.

In the meantime, it is vitally important that everyone EVERYWHERE refuse to register with the NIR, refuse to register with the ISA and essentially, refuse to enroll with or cooperate with ANY of the fascist apparatus that Neu Liebour have put in place. This will not only make it easier to dismantle in the short term, but it will also send a very strong signal that the era of Soviet Britain is at an end. This needs to be done just in case the Tories ‘lose their bottle’ and decide that all these juicy tools of totalitarianism are just too nifty to get rid of.

Hmmmm where to start?!

All ‘no smoking’ signs – DOWN

etc etc…

After a long dark night menaced by cannibal zombies, FINALLY a sliver of light on the horizon.

A while back we wrote a piece about Gavin Webb, who wrote about Home Education. Gavin Webb was a Liberal Democrat councillor at Stoke on Trent. He called himself a ‘Libertarian Liberal Democrat‘, which of course, makes no sense at all:

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

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1901

We wrote. Now, Mr Webb has dumped the Liberal Democrats and joined the Libertarian Party. This is significant because:

“Whilst we have a number of Parish and Town Councillors, Gavin is the first City Councillor that has crossed the floor to a truly Radical Party, one that wants to change the relationship between State and the Individual to the point where the State is subordinate to the will of the people, not the people subordinate to the will of the State.

And here is the full announcement:

PRESS RELEASE COUNCILLOR GAVIN WEBB OF STOKE ON TRENT CITY COUNCIL RESIGNS FROM THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS AND JOINS THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY (LPUK)

Gavin Webb, who was selected as the Liberal Democrat prospective parliamentary candidate for Burton in 2008 and elected as a Lib Dem councillor on Stoke-on-Trent City Council in 2007, has today announced that he has resigned from the Liberal Democrats.

He says: “I have made a good many friends in my fourteen years of activism in the Liberal Democrats and I hope that those friendships will continue, but regretfully I have decided to resign from the Liberal Democrats.

“The party, like the Conservative and Labour parties, has become a party of the establishment. It has unfortunately firmly wedded itself to the belief that there are primarily government solutions to the problems facing our country, and in the process, they are adopting policies that undermine our rights and freedoms as individuals.

“As far as I can see, most political parties in the UK appear to trust individuals when it comes to voting for councillors, MPs and MEPs, but once comfortably in power they are reluctant to trust individuals when it comes to them making choices about their own lives.

“There is however one political party – the Libertarian Party – that believes in giving responsibility back to individuals over their own lives and their own finances; and it is this party that I have now decided to join.

“We are on the road of authoritarianism, where government is our ruler rather than us being the ruler of our government. It is time for each and every single one of us to make a stand against government and those who feed off it, and demand the reduction of its size and scope.

“From what I’ve seen from many Lib Dem parliamentarians and councillors I don’t believe the Liberal Democrat Party has the inclination to argue for smaller government in defence of our individual rights.

“Though there are some good classical liberal and libertarian types in the party, with whom I hope to continue to have a good relationship, their voices are crowded out by people who believe it perfectly okay to dictate to people how they should live their lives. I don’t wish any longer to be a part of that.

[…]

http://bastardoldholborn.blogspot.com/

All good.

And for the record:

[…]

There is another vital tactical reason for cleaving to pure principle. It is true that day-to-day social and political events are the resultants of many pressures, the often unsatisfactory outcome of the push-and-pull of conflicting ideologies and interests. But if only for that reason, it is all the more important for the libertarian to keep upping the ante. The call for a two percent tax reduction may achieve only the slight moderation of a projected tax increase; a call for a drastic tax cut may indeed achieve a substantial reduction. And, over the years, it is precisely the strategic role of the “extremist” to keep pushing the matrix of day-to-day action further and further in his direction. The socialists have been particularly adept at this strategy. If we look at the socialist program advanced sixty, or even thirty years ago, it will be evident that measures considered dangerously socialistic a generation or two ago are now considered an indispensable part of the “mainstream” of the American heritage. In this way, the day-to-day compromises of supposedly “practical” politics get pulled inexorably in the collectivist direction. There is no reason why the libertarian cannot accomplish the same result. In fact, one of the reasons that the conservative opposition to collectivism has been so weak is that conservatism, by its very nature, offers not a consistent political philosophy but only a “practical” defense of the existing status quo, enshrined as embodiments of the American “tradition.” Yet, as statism grows and accretes, it becomes, by definition, increasingly entrenched and therefore “traditional”; conservatism can then find no intellectual weapons to accomplish its overthrow.

Cleaving to principle means something more than holding high and not contradicting the ultimate libertarian ideal. It also means striving to achieve that ultimate goal as rapidly as is physically possible. In short, the libertarian must never advocate or prefer a gradual, as opposed to an immediate and rapid, approach to his goal. For by doing so, he undercuts the overriding importance of his own goals and principles. And if he himself values his own goals so lightly, how highly will others value them?

In short, to really pursue the goal of liberty, the libertarian must desire it attained by the most effective and speediest means available. It was in this spirit that the classical liberal Leonard E. Read, advocating immediate and total abolition of price and wage controls after World War II, declared in a speech, “If there were a button on this rostrum, the pressing of which would release all wage and price controls instantaneously, I would put my finger on it and push!”2

The libertarian, then, should be a person who would push the button, if it existed, for the instantaneous abolition of all invasions of liberty. Of course, he knows, too, that such a magic button does not exist, but his fundamental preference colors and shapes his entire strategic perspective.

2 Leonard E. Read, I’d Push the Button (New York: Joseph D. McGuire, 1946), p. 3.

[…]

Murray Rothbard For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto

Oh dear me. Before I had ever heard of any of these people, I declared that I would push the button.

So many times, in front of so many people, and for so many different things!

There are people out there who ‘do not like Libertarians’. For certain, Mr Webb will encounter these people. What needs to be done is that the proper name needs to be given to them when they are discussed or confronted; they are VIOLENT PEOPLE.

Collectivists are VIOLENT PEOPLE who advocate using VIOLENCE on others so that their philosophy is followed. No doubt these not so insightful people will strongly deny they are violent, but the fact remains the same; behind every one of their policies lies the threat of violence that will be done to those who do not obey.

That is the reality behind the well meaning ideas and eloquent words of these people; brutal, immoral and unjustifiable VIOLENCE.

Mimi Magick points us to a new blog, which if this first post is anything to go by, will be something to watch carefully:

[…]

“Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamities are heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer…”

From Common Sense by Thomas Paine, who died 200 years ago this year, and who argued that people are born with a set of natural rights and that any society that violates those rights is flawed and should be changed..

Now, it is quite clear that today's Germans have absolutely nothing to do with their country's Nazi past and as one German commentator recently remarked; the Germans were probably the most pacific country in Europe. Yet their government has gone to some considerable length to get a square peg into a round hole and ensure their ban on EHE remains law. This is very problematic for the rest of us and should be challenged because the logic they have used would be persuasive if you are ignorant of, and thus fearful, and so hostile to EHE and its place in society. It would be even more problematic if Germany believed its own logic and was pushing for a Europe wide ban. Or if one's government thought that schools can deliver equality.

One of our problems is that the British government are wrongly associating equality with a some sort of good that can be distributed. Neither equality nor education are goods that can be divvied up. They are instead dynamic, the function of processes and relationships. Related to their confusion about equality and distribution is their conflation of equality with standardisation. If equality or education were things you could distribute then giving out the same thing repeatedly might make some sense, but since neither are static in this way, the standardisation agenda is not only misconceived, it is counterproductive. Giving everyone the same experience is not giving them an equal experience because people are different in such complex and irreducible ways. A real concern for equality would recognise that very different approaches, experiences and outcomes can have equal worth within a society.

[…]

http://tompainesdaughter.blogspot.com/

From out of the woodwork comes a legion of people who were willing to go along with almost anything, as long as there is a minimum amount of liberty. Now that that minimum is being taken away, everyone, on both sides of the atlantic, are up in arms and are simply not going to take it.

It starts with polite discourse and ends with the restoration of balance.

Its about time.

Two clips from Unschooling: The Movie.

These are the sorts of people who are the great threat. Clear speaking, clear thinking, highly educated people who do not conform. This is the sort of young woman that the governments of Germany, Sweden and now the UK want to completely destroy and prevent from coming into being. They reflexively challenge and parse every piece of nonsense that is thrown at them. They are self confident, secure, self reliant and solid as a rock. They do not have a fear centered mentality; the absolute key to the kind of totalitarianized, brainwashed population that the monsters want to produce in their factories.

The unschoolers and autonomous learner young adults that I have met have all been polite, bright eyed, engaging, well spoken and grounded. They shake your hand firmly, look you straight in the eye when they speak to you and exude the sort of confidence that any parent would surely be proud of.

Liberal Complaints
Left-liberal intellectuals are often a wondrous group to behold. In the last three or four decades, not a very long time in human history, they have, like whirling dervishes, let loose a series of angry complaints against free-market capitalism. The curious thing is that each of these complaints has been contradictory to one or more of their predecessors. But contradictory complaints by liberal intellectuals do not seem to faze them or serve to abate their petulance — even though it is often the very same intellectuals who are reversing themselves so rapidly. And these reversals seem to make no dent whatever in their self-righteousness or in the self-confidence of their position. Let us consider the record of recent decades:

1. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the liberal intellectuals came to the conclusion that capitalism was suffering from inevitable “secular stagnation,” a stagnation imposed by the slowing down of population growth, the end of the old Western frontier, and by the supposed fact that no further inventions were possible. All this spelled eternal stagnation, permanent mass unemployment, and therefore the need for socialism, or thoroughgoing State planning, to replace free-market capitalism. This on the threshold of the greatest boom in American history!
2. During the 1950s, despite the great boom in postwar America, the [p. 243] liberal intellectuals kept raising their sights; the cult of “economic growth” now entered the scene. To be sure, capitalism was growing, but it was not growing fast enough. Therefore free-market capitalism must be abandoned, and socialism or government intervention must step in and force-feed the economy, must build investments and compel greater saving in order to maximize the rate of growth, even if we don’t want to grow that fast. Conservative economists such as Colin Clark attacked this liberal program as “growthmanship.”
3. Suddenly, John Kenneth Galbraith entered the liberal scene with his best-selling The Affluent Society in 1958. And just as suddenly, the liberal intellectuals reversed their indictments. The trouble with capitalism, it now appeared, was that it had grown too much; we were no longer stagnant, but too well off, and man had lost his spirituality amidst supermarkets and automobile tail fins. What was necessary, then, was for government to step in, either in massive intervention or as socialism, and tax the consumers heavily in order to reduce their bloated affluence.
4. The cult of excess affluence had its day, to be superseded by a contradictory worry about poverty, stimulated by Michael Harrington’s The Other America in 1962. Suddenly, the problem with America was not excessive affluence, but increasing and grinding poverty — and, once again, the solution was for the government to step in, plan mightily, and tax the wealthy in order to lift up the poor. And so we had the War on Poverty for several years.
5. Stagnation; deficient growth; overaffluence; overpoverty; the intellectual fashions changed like ladies’ hemlines. Then, in 1964, the happily short-lived Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution issued its then-famous manifesto, which brought us and the liberal intellectuals full circle. For two or three frenetic years we were regaled with the idea that America’s problem was not stagnation but the exact reverse: in a few short years all of America’s production facilities would be automated and cybernated, incomes and production would be enormous and superabundant, but everyone would be automated out of a job. Once again, free-market capitalism would lead to permanent mass unemployment, which could only be remedied — you guessed it! — by massive State intervention or by outright socialism. For several years, in the mid-1960s, we thus suffered from what was justly named the “Automation Hysteria.”
6. By the late 1960s it was clear to everyone that the automation hysterics had been dead wrong, that automation was proceeding at no faster a pace than old-fashioned “mechanization,” and indeed that the 1969 recession was causing a falling off in the rate of increase of productivity. One hears no more about automation dangers nowadays; we are now in the seventh phase of liberal economic flip-flops.
7. Affluence is again excessive, and, in the name of conservation, ecology, and the increasing scarcity of resources, free-market capitalism is growing much too fast. State planning, or socialism, must, of course, step in to abolish all growth and bring about a zero-growth society and economy — in order to avoid negative growth, or retrogression, sometime in the future! We are now back to a super-Galbraithian position, to which has been added scientific jargon about effluents, ecology, and “spaceship earth,” as well as a bitter assault on technology itself as being an evil polluter. Capitalism has brought about technology, growth — including population growth, industry, and pollution — and government is supposed to step in and eradicate these evils.

It is not at all unusual, in fact, to find the same people now holding a contradictory blend of positions 5 and 7 and maintaining at one and the same time that (a) we are living in a “post-scarcity” age where we no longer need private property, capitalism, or material incentives to production; and (b) that capitalist greed is depleting our resources and bringing about imminent worldwide scarcity. The liberal answer to both, or indeed to all, of these problems turns out, of course, to be the same: socialism or state planning to replace free-market capitalism. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter put the whole shoddy performance of liberal intellectuals into a nutshell a generation ago: “Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear; the only success victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment.”2 And so, the charges, the indictments, may change and contradict previous charges — but the answer is always and wearily the same.

The Attack on Technology and Growth
The fashionable attack on growth and affluence is palpably an attack by comfortable, contented upper-class liberals. Enjoying a material contentment [p. 245] and a living standard undreamt of by even the wealthiest men of the past, it is easy for upper-class liberals to sneer at “materialism,” and to call for a freeze on all further economic advance.1 For the mass of the world’s population still living in squalor such a cry for the cessation of growth is truly obscene; but even in the United States, there is little evidence of satiety and superabundance. Even the upper-class liberals themselves have not been conspicuous for making a bonfire of their salary checks as a contribution to their war on “materialism” and affluence.

The widespread attack on technology is even more irresponsible. If technology were to be rolled back to the “tribe” and to the preindustrial era, the result would be mass starvation and death on a universal scale. The vast majority of the world’s population is dependent for its very survival on modern technology and industry. The North American continent was able to accommodate approximately one million Indians in the days before Columbus, all living on a subsistence level. It is now able to accommodate several hundred million people, all living at an infinitely higher living standard — and the reason is modern technology and industry. Abolish the latter and we will abolish the people as well. For all one knows, to our fanatical antipopulationists this “solution” to the population question may be a good thing, but for the great majority of us, this would be a draconian “final solution” indeed.

The irresponsible attack on technology is another liberal flip-flop: it comes from the same liberal intellectuals who, thirty-odd years ago, were denouncing capitalism for not putting modern technology to full use in the service of State planning and were calling for absolute rule by a modern “technocratic” elite. Yet now the very same intellectuals who not so long ago were yearning for a technocratic dictatorship over [p. 246] all of our lives are now trying to deprive us of the vital fruits of technology itself.

Yet the various contradictory phases of liberal thought never completely die; and many of the same antitechnologists, in a 180-degree reversal of the automation hysteria, are also confidently forecasting technological stagnation from now on. They cheerily predict a gloomy future for mankind by assuming that technology will stagnate, and not continue to improve and accelerate. This is the technique of pseudoscientific forecasting of the widely touted antigrowth Club of Rome Report. As Passell, Roberts, and Ross write in their critique of the report, “If the telephone company were restricted to turn-of-the-century technology 20 million operators would be needed to handle today’s volume of calls. Or, as British editor Norman Macrae has observed, “an extrapolation of the trends of the i88os would show today’s cities buried under horse manure.” Or, further:

While the team’s [Club of Rome’s] model hypothesizes exponential growth for industrial and agricultural needs, it places arbitrary, nonexponential, limits on the technical progress that might accommodate these needs . . . .
The Rev. Thomas Malthus made a similar point two centuries ago without benefit of computer printouts . . . . Malthus argued that people tend to multiply exponentially, while the food supply at best increases at a constant rate. He expected that starvation and war would periodically redress the balance . . . .
But there is no particular criterion beyond myopia on which to base that speculation. Malthus was wrong; food capacity has kept up with population. While no one knows for certain, technical progress shows no sign of slowing down. The best econometric estimates suggest that it is indeed growing exponentially.

What we need is more economic growth, not less; more and better technology, and not the impossible and absurd attempt to scrap technology and return to the primitive tribe. Improved technology and greater capital investment will lead to higher living standards for all and provide greater material comforts, as well as the leisure to pursue and enjoy the “spiritual” side of life. There is precious little culture or civilization available for people who must work long hours to eke out a subsistence living. The real problem is that productive capital investment is being siphoned off by taxes, restrictions, and government contracts for unproductive and wasteful government expenditures, including military and space boondoggling. Furthermore, the precious technical resource of scientists and engineers is being ever more intensively diverted to government, instead of to “civilian” consumer production. What we need is for government to get out of the way, remove its incubus of taxation and expenditures from the economy, and allow productive and technical resources once again to devote themselves fully to increasing the well-being of the mass of consumers. We need growth, higher living standards, and a technology and capital equipment that meet consumer wants and demands; but we can only achieve these by removing the incubus of statism and allowing the energies of all of the population to express themselves in the free-market economy. We need an economic and technological growth that emerges freely, as Jane Jacobs has shown, from the free-market economy, and not the distortions and wastes imposed upon the world economy from the liberal force-feeding of the 19508. We need, in short, a truly free-market, libertarian economy.

[…]

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

Doesn’t all of this sound VERY familiar?

If you read any book this year, it should be For A New Liberty The Libertarian Manifesto by Murray Rothbard.

Its clarity of thinking, its unassailable logic and perfect moral balance is simply breathtaking. And beautiful. And inspiring.

"Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love…” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 1958

“There comes a time when silence is betrayal…” Dr. King, 1967

I remember back in the good ol’ days of 2005 and 2006 when being against the wars was not only politically correct, but it was very popular. I remember receiving dozens of awards, uncountable accolades and even was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Those were the halcyon days of the anti-war movement before the Democrats took over the government (off of the backs of the anti-war movement) and it became anathema to be against the wars and I became unpopular on all sides. I guess at that point, I could have gone with the flow and pretended to support the violence so I could remain popular, but I think I have to fiercely hold on to my core values whether I am “liked” or not.

Killing is wrong no matter if it is state-sanction murder or otherwise. Period. Not too much more to say on that subject, except what I quote above from Dr. King.

However, while the so-called left is obsessed over supporting a very crappy Democratic health care plan, people in far away countries are being deprived of their health and very lives by the Obama Regime’s continuation of Bush’s ruinous foreign policy.

I was never dismayed when the so-called right attacked me and called me names for protesting Bush. However, something inside me gets a little sick when I hear people who claim to be peace activists supporting the Obama Administration’s foreign policy, a policy that is not like Bush’s in the fact that it’s much worse.

I have been called a “racist” from the so-called left. In these people’s opinion, I was totally justified in protesting Bush, but I am a racist for protesting the same policies under Obama. When I opposed Bush’s policies, I was called traitor, anti-American, anti-Semitic, and other names I cannot print. Name-calling is a great way to shut down critical thinking and discussion. And, not to mention, I think the murder of innocent life in the Iraq-Af-Pak regions is racist and morally corrupt.

There are many people in this country who oppose Obama because they’re racist, but I am not one of them. I oppose Obama’s policies because they are wrong…again, period!

One cannot obfuscate when innocent lives are being destroyed, here and abroad. We cannot allow “political reality” to get in the way of morality. Human sacrifice is not worth the political reality. Violence, killing, war and more war are NEVER the solution to any problem. Period.

If Obama has violent shadow forces around him pulling him in the direction of violence, which begets more violence and more resistance; then we, especially people in the peace or anti-war movements need to gather and organize to pull him in the direction towards peaceful conflict resolution and solutions that aren’t based on exploiting people’s fears, anxieties or ignorance.

I am going to Martha’s Vineyard because we have the moral high ground. The war supporters aren’t going to protest Obama’s wars. They are strangely silent over his foreign policy, unless they are praising it.

I am going to Martha’s Vineyard because someone has to speak for the babies of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan that do not deserve the horrible fate that has been handed to them by the US Military Industrial Complex. The voiceless need a voice, and even if I am called every name in the book by all sides, I will speak up for them.

I am going to Martha’s Vineyard because so many people have been blinded to the fact that the system has momentum that rolls on and over and around no matter who is the titular head of the system.

Let's just pretend that elections are fair in this country and my candidate, Cynthia McKinney, won for president. If she wasn’t able to rein in the systemic violence, then I would be going wherever she vacationed to protest her policies, too. I guess at that point, I would not only be called “racist,” but I would be called a “self-hating female.”

In a recent conversation someone was trying to convince me that I should not be so stridently opposed to Obama’s policies and I responded that today 75 people were killed and 300 people were wounded in a bomb blast in Iraq and 26 mostly women and children were killed in a wedding party in Afghanistan this week and she said: “Oh, that wouldn’t be acceptable if it happened here.”

And that ‘s the problem: it’s not acceptable if it happens anywhere, to anybody, no matter who is President of the USA.

Not only is the death toll mounting for innocent civilians but also is once again climbing for our troops.

While the “festivities” are occurring on Martha’s Vineyard next week, there are families all over the world who will never again be able to fully feel festive. Ahhhh…. everyone should just stand down, relax and sip an Obamarita on the beach…Hope reigns once again in The Empire.

And, yes, we are going to Martha’s Vineyard to get attention. We vehemently want to call attention to all of the points I have made above.

Even though there is a small anti-war, peace movement in this country, there still is one and this movement has the moral high ground and punditry, personal attacks, glitzy marketing, or “political realities won’t drown us out.

Members of Dr. King's own caucus tried to convince him not to publicly speak out against the Vietnam war, and that's when he delivered his brilliant Beyond Vietnam speech at the Riverside Church in NYC exactly one year before he was assassinated. That speech was in response to the critics. Dr. King took the moral high ground when he said: "There comes a time when silence is betrayal."

That time has now come, once again. By our silence we are betraying humanity.

Love the President or hate him, or anywhere in between, but we must speak out loudly and without any timidity against the institutional violence of the US Empire.

Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox

[…]

All true. And we agree.

Chairman
Home School Legal Defense Association

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the English Legal System Works

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is what he left out:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Incomplete Comparison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oklahoma law provides:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Badman Interrogation Program: A Violation of Human Rights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Article 29 Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Education Act provides in Section 9:

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

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

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

Conclusion

The Badman Report:

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

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

Endnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Per Bylund

From Lew Rockwell.com

An Anonymous Coward at BBQ writes with great sadness:

The Tories have written to five firms bidding to supply ID cards warning them not to sign any long-term contracts.

In the letter, shadow home secretary Chris Grayling says one of his party’s first acts, if it wins the next general election, would be to scrap the scheme.

He said he was urging the firms against large investments that may be wasted.

The government says ID cards, being trialled in Manchester from this autumn, will combat fraud, terrorism and organised crime.

You see how the scumbag BBC promotes the lies about ID Cards by repeating without analysis lines directly from Neu Liebour? The BBC reporters are, and have been throughout all of this, the ultimate total human garbage.

‘Substantial bill’

They want a nationwide roll-out of the scheme by 2012 but with a general election due within a year, the Conservatives say they intend to scrap it.

Mr Grayling’s predecessor as shadow home secretary, David Davis, issued a similar warning to firms in February 2007 and gave Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell formal notice of the party’s intention not to continue with the scheme.

The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats oppose the scheme, estimated at costing about £5bn, and some Labour MPs have expressed doubts.

ID Cards do not work, are socially corrosive, are un-British and only collectivist vermin like the BBC support them.

ID CARD TIMETABLE
2009: Workers at Manchester and London City airport
Autumn 2009: Manchester pilot
2010: Students opening bank accounts offered ID cards
2011/12: All UK passport applicants
2015: 90% foreign nationals covered
2017: Full roll-out?

I have another timetable for you:

2001 BLOGDIAL warns that ID Cards will not solve anything

2002 BLOGIAL describes how ID cards destroy societies and dehumanize people.

2003 BLOGDIAL describes how a centralized database is extremely dangerous and open to abuse.

2004 BLOGDIAL attacks the imbecile David Bkunkett

2005 BLOGDIAL attacks the proposed ID Cards bill.

2006 The Frances Stonor Saunders letter AKA ‘the anonymous email‘ widely circulated and published.

snip!

2010 ID Cards plans permanently abandoned. ID Card contractors lose billions. ContactPoint scrapped. NIR scrapped.

Mr Grayling told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he was concerned about “a number of signals” recently suggesting “quite big penalty costs” were being built into contracts which will leave a “substantial bill” for the taxpayer.

“I want companies to be cautious and recognise that if they invest large amounts of money preparing for this business, it may not happen,” he said.

“There’s a danger the government will build more poisoned pills into the contracts that will simply make it more difficult to scrap.”

Asked whether the Tories were trying to paralyse government plans, he said: “I would be delighted if this slows down progress with the ID project because I think it’s the wrong thing to do.”

This is music to the ears of everyone in Britain.

Later this year, airside workers at London City and Manchester airports will be issued with ID cards.

They are all going to refuse them you jackass.

‘Conditioning’ public

And, from the autumn, people in Manchester will be able to voluntarily sign up for a card as part of a pilot project.

It is the beginning of the main phase of the scheme which ministers say will result in cards being available nationwide by 2012.

Within the next three years, the Identity and Passport Service plans to issue “significant volumes” of ID cards alongside British passports – but people will be able to opt out of having a card if they do not want one.

Earlier retired law lord Lord Steyn accused the Home Office of introducing the cards in stages as a way of “conditioning” and “softening up” public opinion.

He added: “The Home Office now proudly asserts that comprehensive surveillance has become routine. If that is true, the resemblance to the world of Kafka is no longer so very distant.”

The government believes that the public support the scheme – former home secretary Jacqui Smith said she was regularly approached by people who said they did not want to wait several years to register for an ID card.

It has been reported that Alan Johnson, who replaced Jacqui Smith as home secretary in the recent cabinet reshuffle, might be considering a U-turn on ID cards, after ordering a review of the scheme.

But in a statement Mr Johnson said: “In my very first interview as home secretary I made clear that identity cards was a manifesto commitment and that legislation governing their introduction was passed in 2006.

“We remain on progress to bring in what we believe has widespread public support.”

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8104481.stm

What does ‘remain on progress’ mean? Who cares. ID Cards in the UK are TOAST, millions will not accept them, the Tories are going to scrap them; from both sides, the pressure will be so great that it will be impossible for this insane nonsense to work.

The only people who are weeping about this are the corrupt monsters like the wife of former Downing Street policy adviser Lord Birt who was set to land £2 billion ID card contract who will now be getting precisely nothing.

It appears that the Swedish film censor is to be shut down and replaced by an ‘advisory body’ similar to the BBFC. However the interesting thing is that, unlike in the UK, submissions to the new board may be voluntary and so the cash-cow of vetting all movies is domesticated:

The inquiry also proposes that film companies be allowed to submit their films for review by the new agency voluntarily. However, films not reviewed by the new agency would automatically be classified as only appropriate for viewers 15 years and older.

This is a reasonably good thing as it means only films aimed at children will need to be classified, an improvement would be to make classifications advisory so that parents can decide what films they allow their children to see.
Unclassified films for adults are then free from restrictions and interventions (excepting real harm and exploitation which would be subject to existing laws anyway), this seems like a good thing!

Additionally just as health and safety standards can be applied without state intervention, so too can film classification.

Like we have been saying for years, all you have to do to completely derail the state is refuse to obey and there is nothing that they can do about it. The pilots have won their fight against being made the test subjects for ID Cards and there has not been the slightest sign of this climb-down from the state. That may be because we are witnessing the ignominious and long overdue end to fascist New Liebour but whatever the reason for the silent u-turn, it happened, and it happened because the pilots refused to obey.

June 4, 2009
The Home Office has made a “very quiet U-turn” over its plans to make airport ID cards compulsory for all airside workers, Public Servant Daily reports.

An initial roll-out of the controversial cards – which the Unite union said had “insulted” its members – was due to take place at London City and Manchester airports.

But with the British Airline Pilots Association (BALPA) threatening legal action over the move, the government appears to have backtracked on its plans.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who announced her resignation from the cabinet yesterday, approved the early-adopter scheme for Manchester workers in May.

It has now emerged, however, that buried within the fine print of her statement was the revelation that the 18-month scheme will apply solely to new starters.

A BALPA spokesman told Public Servant Daily that it was unclear what had prompted the revision. He welcomed the apparent U-turn, but reiterated that once the scheme is rolled out nationally “pilots who refuse to have the card will lose their job”.

The Home Office responded by confirming that its long-term plans have not changed.

“We have previously said that identity cards will be mandatory for all airside workers, just as other pre-employment checks are today, so that the benefits from the scheme can be realised across the aviation sector,” a spokesperson told the website.

Airport workers have steadfastly opposed the introduction of ID cards, insisting that extensive vetting procedures already in place make them redundant.

[…]

Cheapflights

The disgusting fascist queen of the aparatchicks, the witch Jacqui Smith, now resigned, caved to pressure from the brave members of BALPA.

The thinking of the witch and her minions must have gone like this:

“we are determined to roll this out. This trial is not really needed; we can iron out the bugs with a wider sample user base. If we antagonize pilots, who have a high status in society as eminently sensible and inherently trustworthy people, the public will pay attention to the details of their complaints, which could seriously derail the project. When the public realizes that pilots are willing to strike over this matter, all eyes will be on the details of what we are planning and the jig will be up. Let us quietly drop the pilots trial. No one will notice, the schedule will not be affected and damaging information about the system’s flaws will not be amplified by a very public pilots strike and its inevitable disruption.”

Of course, what they fail to understand is that the resistance of the pilots is only a single instance of a much wider resolve to absolutely refuse ID Cards that will not go away, and that will become more and more ferocious as time goes on.

All of this can be avoided by a Tory government putting an end to it once and for all. If they do not do this, it will be the Poll Tax all over again, and they will throw away the massive swing and good will they are going to be given.

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

Academics are taking exactly this stance within their own field:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is not the job of teachers.

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

‘Pernicious’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now this is the most sickening part.

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

There are two possibilities:

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

or

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

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

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

Spotted today:

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

Scary, huh?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

Brilliant, concise, and absolutely true. Well done.

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

There are several reasons why the state will not succeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s do it:

PARENTS’ DECLARATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Human Rights Act 1998)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snarfed from Renegade Parent.

UPDATE

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

Airline pilots are to become the first group to refuse to take part in the national identity scheme when compulsory trials start at Manchester and London City airports this autumn.

The British Airline Pilots’ Association (Balpa), which represents more than 80% of commercial airline pilots, is to mount a legal challenge to Home Office plans to use “critical” airside workers as the first compulsory “guinea pigs” for the scheme.

MPs are shortly to be asked to approve the powers to compel the pilots and other airside workers at the two airports to register for the national ID card scheme as part of their “pre-employment” checks. The £30 fee is to be waived as an incentive for them to sign up.

The pilots’ union has protested to ministers that the £18m scheme cannot be regarded as voluntary when they are being told they will not qualify for an “airside pass” without them: “ID cards will have absolutely no value as far as security is concerned. This is nothing other than coercion and promises that ID cards would be voluntary have been broken,” Jim McAuslan, Balpa general secretary, has told ministers. “We will resist.”

These behind the scenes preparations and the recent signing of two 10-year contracts worth £650m to get the ID cards programme under way undermine recent speculation that the cabinet is considering axing the scheme as part of the general Whitehall spending squeeze. The speculation took off when a suggestion by David Blunkett, the former home secretary, that the ID card programme should be repackaged as a biometric passport scheme to reassure the public was misintepreted as him turning against the idea.

But the details of the two contracts awarded in the last few weeks show just how far the ID cards scheme has become embedded in the introduction of “biometric” passports. For 80% of British citizens their identity card will be their passport.

The Home Office describes the two contracts as “bringing the large scale deployment of ID cards a step closer”. The first contract, worth £385m and awarded to a US computer company, CSC, will cover processing applications for passports and ID cards and dealing with any subsequent changes in personal details . The second contract, awarded to IBM, and worth £265m, is to build and run the database that will store the digital fingerprints and facial images for the ID scheme and the new generation of passports.

The decision to combine what the Home Office calls the core elements of the ID cards programme and the modernisation of the passports means it will be difficult for any incoming government after the general election to cancel the ID scheme separately.

Two further contracts will be awarded this year for the design and production of identity cards and the next generation of passports to be introduced from 2011.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/may/04/identity-cards-airline-pilots

So, IBM is at it again:

During the rise of Nazi Germany and the onset of World War II, IBM had relationships and contracts with the German military/industrial technocracy. IBM’s punch card machines were used by Germany to keep track of people who were to be subjected to the Holocaust.[7]

[…]

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

and

IBM and the Holocaust is the stunning story of IBM’s strategic alliance with Nazi Germany — beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing well into World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.

[…]

http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/

Google it for yourself.

I’m surprised that no one is pulling up these companies, especially IBM for participating in this absolutely appalling and fascist scheme and of course, there are no companies in the UK who are capable of pulling off this nefarious project.

The grauniad betrays its secret pro ID card stance (not surprising, since they are pure statists in every other way) with this paragraph:

The decision to combine what the Home Office calls the core elements of the ID cards programme and the modernisation of the passports means it will be difficult for any incoming government after the general election to cancel the ID scheme separately.

This is a lie.

Lets try it this way:

“The decision to combine what the Home Office calls the core elements of the ID cards programme and the mandatory barcode tattooing of the British public means it will be difficult for any incoming government after the general election to cancel the ID scheme separately.”

It doesn’t work does it? And it doesn’t matter how much money they have spent, or how the system has been designed; it can be dismantled, and WILL be dismantled. The money they have spent on this project will be written off, and the companies will get compensation for the cancellation of the contracts. GAME OVER.

We have just seen the climbdown on keeping the DNA profiles and samples of innocent people, resulting in the destruction of the information on 800,000 completely innocent people, including children. Do not think for one second that the ID Card system can not be dismantled completely and sanity restored.

The only people who write like that, saying that it will be a fait accompli are those who want to carry these noxious and purely evil documents. It is not an excuse for Alan Travis to say that he is “merely reporting” when he writes this, because it is a lie to say that it cannot be, or will be ‘difficult’ to, “cancel the ID scheme separately”. Difficult by whose measure? Who said this? And if, as it is, it is not the case, why is there no counter argument saying that it is in fact not ‘difficult’ at all to cancel the project…just expensive, which when we are talking about human lives and dignity, means nothing. ‘Expensive’ itself is a relative term; Number 11 can just push the speed of their printing press up to 10.5 from 10 for an hour to pay off IBM and CSC….but I digress.

As for MPs asking for “powers to compel the pilots and other airside workers at the two airports to register” they are just going to further solidify the resolve of the people who they have chosen to attack first. Everyone in the country will get behind them; there is no way that the government can possibly win.

They have already threatened to strike. I hope that the other airport staff are also ready to come out on strike at the same time. Both airports should be completely shut down until the government announces that the scheme is permanently cancelled.